<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Jack Kerwick</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/jack-kerwick/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 07:56:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>The Police Brutality &#8216;Epidemic&#8217; Lie</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-police-brutality-epidemic-lie/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-police-brutality-epidemic-lie</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-police-brutality-epidemic-lie/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 05:40:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brutality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[epidemic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nypd]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Police]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[STATISTICS]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248430</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Misinformation that kills. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Police-IMG_4105.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248432" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Police-IMG_4105-397x350.jpg" alt="Police-IMG_4105" width="330" height="291" /></a>Recently, I claimed that everyone—politicians, academics, and media commentators—who promoted the idea that police brutality is a national “epidemic,” or even a “growing concern,” as one self-styled libertarian put it, share some culpability for the murders of the two NYPD officers who were gunned down in their vehicle right before Christmas.</p>
<p>More specifically, they are responsible, obviously, not for intending or consciously encouraging the murder of police, but for creating a climate for police officers that’s even more hostile than that in which officers must spend their days and nights.  After all, we don’t need Richard Weaver to inform us that “ideas have consequences.”  Even simpletons and liars will concede this much.</p>
<p>And only simpletons and liars can deny that this idea—the idea of a “pandemic” of police brutality sweeping the nation—has the consequence of endangering police officers.</p>
<p>Yet this idea isn’t just dangerous.</p>
<p>It is also a lie.  And it is a huge lie at that.</p>
<p>“Police brutality” is an all-purpose piece of rhetoric that, as such, can mean anything and everything—and, thus, nothing at all. When anti-police misologists—a “misologist” was the word that the 18<sup>th</sup> century philosopher Immanuel Kant used when referring to an enemy of reason—sound off about “police brutality,” they are referring to the police’s unjustified use of force.</p>
<p>Now, all but anarchists concede that police are authorized to use force when necessary and when it’s proportionate to the situation in question. When, however, the force deployed is unnecessary and/or excessive, then the force is unjustified. This—the unnecessary and/or excessive use of force—is “police brutality.”</p>
<p>So, is this a growing national phenomenon, an epidemic?</p>
<p>Not even close.</p>
<p>According to the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), in 1999, of 44 million people who had face-to-face interactions with police officers, less than one-half of one percent was “threatened with or actually experienced force.”</p>
<p>Notice, the assertion here isn’t that less than one-half of one percent—it bears repeating: one-half of one percent!—was subjected to the use of unjustified force; the claim is that of 44 million, this miniscule fraction of people were either threatened with—threatened with—or subjected to the use of force per se.</p>
<p>What this in turn means is that the number of people who were “brutalized” by police is even smaller than “less than one-half of one percent.”</p>
<p>According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS), of a national population estimate of roughly 240, 000,000 comprised of people of 16 years of age or older, of those who dealt with the police in some capacity in 2002, 2005, and 2008, 1.5%, 1.6%, and 1.4%, respectively, were either threatened with or subjected to force by the police.</p>
<p>In 2008, 22% of those falling into the latter group admitted that they “argued with, cursed at, insulted, or verbally threatened the police.”  Twelve percent reported that they were “disobeying” and/or “interfering” with police.</p>
<p>Of the 84% of people who felt that the threat or use of police use force was “improper,” only 14% filed a complaint.</p>
<p>To further underscore just what a whopper of a lie is the notion that “police brutality” is a nationwide epidemic, consider this: Among those included in the class of people who have had to deal with police are those who have called on the police for assistance.  And among those who have done so, about 85 percent claimed to have been “satisfied with the police response.”  Moreover—shocker of shockers!—Hispanics (86%) and blacks (85%) were slightly more satisfied than were whites (83%). Finally, about 90 percent of people who requested police assistance said that they would do so again.</p>
<p>Only in the fevered imagination of the cop-hating ideologue is “police brutality” a national crisis, or any sort of crisis.</p>
<p>Of course, none of this is to deny that there are bad cops.  Genuinely abusive police officers, like those who abuse their power and authority anywhere, deserve to be crucified.  But there is zero justification for abstracting from these relatively few instances a rule encompassing police officers generally.</p>
<p>Numbers aside, just some rudimentary common sense—a rare commodity nowadays, and practically nonexistent among the police-hating ideologues—should determine that in this Age of the Camera—a time in which everyone and their mother is armed with surveillance apparatus—the police have no real option but to be better behaved than ever before.</p>
<p>Jeremy Bentham described the doctrine of “natural rights” as “nonsense on stilts.”  The dogma—and make no mistakes about it, for the anti-police misologists, this is nothing less than a dogma—that “police brutality” is an epidemic, a crisis, blah, blah, blah, is indeed nonsense on stilts.  But it is more than this: It is nonsense that kills.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-police-brutality-epidemic-lie/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Interracial Attacks That the Media Ignored</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/interracial-attacks-that-the-media-ignored/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=interracial-attacks-that-the-media-ignored</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/interracial-attacks-that-the-media-ignored/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2014 04:30:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240841</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Some victims are more equal than others. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-11-at-11.00.42-PM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240848" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-11-at-11.00.42-PM-330x350.png" alt="Screen Shot 2014-09-11 at 11.00.42 PM" width="275" height="291" /></a>For weeks on end, the police shooting death of a black man in Ferguson, Missouri by a white officer had managed to remain front and center on the national stage.  The usual suspects in the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC) held up this incident as proof that “black men in America are <i>under attack,” </i>or some gibberish along these lines.</p>
<p>The truth, of course, is dramatically otherwise, a fact of which no remotely aware or honest human being needs any reminding.</p>
<p>For starters, black men in America <i>are </i>under attack.  But the predators responsible are not whites, whether police officers are otherwise; rather, <i>they are other black men</i>.</p>
<p>Yet, if “racism” is the mother of all evils, a “cancer” to society, as we have been tirelessly told for decades and decades, then the exorbitant rate of black-<i>on-black</i> violence, while dreadful as far as it goes, should nevertheless register lower on our scale of priorities than the comparably obscene level of black-<i>on-white </i>violence—which, scandalously, doesn’t seem to register at all.</p>
<p>After all, if the roles were reversed and whites were attacking blacks to a fraction of the extent to which blacks currently attack whites, there is no one—and least of all no one among the captains of RIC—who would hesitate to cite this as <i>proof </i>that “racism” was alive and well.</p>
<p>Just this past week, four vicious black-on-white attacks made local news in their respective towns—while, all too predictably, being entirely neglected by the national media.</p>
<p>In Lockport, New York, two black teenage <i>girls </i>were captured on video savagely pummeling a white girl upon luring her to the location of their choice.  According to News 4, WIVB, a 12 year-old and a 15 year-old “befriended” their “victim and tricked her” into convening with them in an “alleyway” known by the residents of Lockport as “Works Place.”</p>
<p>That’s when the beating commenced.</p>
<p>Reports News 4: “The video shows the victim being pulled to the ground by her hair and being repeatedly punched and kicked in the face.”</p>
<p>But it gets worse.</p>
<p>One of the brutes “repeatedly stomps on her [the victim’s] head.”</p>
<p>And all of this happens <i>before </i>the older of the two attackers punches the victim some more.</p>
<p>In Memphis, Tennessee, a large group of black teenagers—according to witnesses, 100-125 of them—forced the owner of a pizza restaurant to close an hour earlier than usual before it stormed a 25 year-old white customer at nearby Kroger’s.  The victim was beaten to a bloody pulp.  While he lay unconscious, his assailants took turns kicking and punching him.  They even slammed a pumpkin on his head—all while he was cold-cocked.  A witness relayed that “all [that] you could see was blood and pumpkins.”</p>
<p>A black female who was videoing the event can be heard laughing away as she screeches, “they got a white dude!”</p>
<p>Two employees—at least one of whom, reportedly, was black—were also pounded into oblivion when they tried to intervene to spare the first victim from the further ravages of the wolf pack.</p>
<p>In a suburb of Kansas City, just a few days ago, <i>five </i>elderly white people—two men and three women—were murdered by a 34 year-old black man, ex-convict Brandon Howell.  George and Ann Taylor, both of whom were in their late 80’s, were <i>beaten</i> to death in their own home.  Howell then fatally gunned down 88 year-old Lorene Hurst, her 63 year-old son Darrel, and 69 year-old Susan Choucroun.</p>
<p>To top it all off, Howell then sped away in the Taylors’ car.</p>
<p>In New York City, two black women forced their way into the apartment of three white residents in an attempt to force them <i>out </i>of their apartment and out of their Brooklyn neighborhood.</p>
<p>The aggressors also robbed their victims at gunpoint while complaining that they were “tired [of] white people moving into the area.”</p>
<p>Each of these incidents occurred within just the last week or so, in towns in disparate regions of the country.</p>
<p>And yet we hear not a peep about any of it from the national media.</p>
<p>It isn’t, however, just the left-wing (misnamed) “mainstream” media that is silent on this score.  Equally silent are “mainstream” “conservatives” in the so-called “alternative” media. Fox certainly hasn’t broached this topic. Nor has “conservative” radio done so.</p>
<p>This bi-partisan silence is telling.  Had whites been the predators in the foregoing cases and blacks the prey, the left would be apoplectic, and the usual suspects would be moaning and groaning over the need for an “honest” discussion of race and “racism.”  Had the culprits been Arabic Muslims, you could bet the bank that “conservative” media would be all abuzz over it.</p>
<p>But the reality is that in contemporary America, it isn’t whites or Arabic Muslims who are the biggest purveyors of interracial violence; it is blacks who hold this ugly distinction.</p>
<p>And this is something that all those who renounce evil must have the courage to confront.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don’t miss the <strong>Glazov Gang’s</strong> special episode featuring<strong> Colin Flaherty</strong>, discussing the epidemic of black mob violence all over the country and the media’s cover-up:</em></p>
<blockquote><p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xbE4MLnAIeQ" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>. </strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/interracial-attacks-that-the-media-ignored/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>52</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The ‘Militarization’ of the Police?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-militarization-of-the-police/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-militarization-of-the-police</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-militarization-of-the-police/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Sep 2014 04:02:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[local police forces]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[militarization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Police]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240094</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The four major flaws of the libertarian/leftist position on the “militarization” of local police forces.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ferguson.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240148" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ferguson-450x300.jpg" alt="Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man" width="297" height="198" /></a>Making the rounds through libertarian (and other) circles in the wake of the police shooting death of Michael Brown is the notion that the “militarization” of local police forces is a huge problem besetting the country.</p>
<p>Though I self-identify as a conservative, I have a considerable affection for libertarianism. In fact, it is precisely because of this fondness that I am compelled to put out to pasture all of this “militarization” talk.</p>
<p><strong>(1)The mere <em>possession</em> of weaponry of a kind on the part of police is no more objectionable—no more a justification for <em>the charge</em> of “militarization”—than is the mere existence of guns or SUV’s objectionable. </strong></p>
<p>For starters, it is unclear as to what libertarians even mean in claiming that the police are “militarized.” From what I can gather—sorry, but no self-avowed libertarian writer who I have yet encountered is clear on this—it is the fact that today’s police forces are equipped with weaponry of a technologically sophisticated sort, the sort with which our soldiers are armed when confronting enemies overseas, that warrants the charge of “militarization.”</p>
<p>How the mere possession of <em>things </em>is a cause of alarm for, of all people, the libertarian, is beyond me. In personifying inanimate objects he comes perilously close to sounding like just those enemies of liberty against whom he’s tirelessly railing, those who would personify guns, wealth, and, say, SUV’s.</p>
<p>Moreover, libertarians are the first to champion the (law-abiding, adult) citizen’s constitutional, even “inalienable,” <em>right</em> to bear virtually whatever arms he prefers. How, we must ask, does it turn out to be permissible—<em>not</em> “militarized”—for the janitor next door to possess a machine gun, but somehow impermissible—“militarized”—for <em>the police </em>to do the same?</p>
<p><strong>(2) The <em>distribution </em>of arms among the police, on the one hand, and the citizenry, on the other, utterly fails to establish that the police, or <em>anyone</em>, haven’t a right to arm themselves like Rambo—i.e. it fails to supply a single warrant for the charge of “militarization.”</strong></p>
<p>If the libertarian insists that it isn’t the possession by police of weaponry as such to which he objects, but the fact that, as things currently stand, the police have access to these weapons to which other citizens are denied, then it is <em>the distribution </em>of this access, and not the access itself, that has him upset.</p>
<p>But if this is the case, then the proper complaint is not, “The police are ‘militarized’!” The proper complaint is that, “We should be allowed to be ‘militarized’ too,” or something like this.</p>
<p>In other words, the charge of “militarization” makes no sense here.</p>
<p><strong>(3) The concept of “militarization” encompasses the concepts of <em>collective purpose </em>and <em>coercion.</em> </strong></p>
<p>Government, by definition, has a monopoly on <em>force. </em>Yet, theoretically, the libertarian, unlike the anarchist, has no objections to this: the libertarian recognizes the authority of government to both enact and <em>enforce</em> laws. Since police officers are government agents, the libertarian affirms their <em>authority </em>to deploy the power at their disposal to <em>coerce </em>citizens into abiding by the laws that police are committed to safeguarding.</p>
<p>So, the sheer fact that police are endowed with the power to coerce prospective and actual violators of the law can’t be something with which the libertarian has a problem, for he has no problem with government per se.</p>
<p>In other words, that police are using force to maintain law and order—precisely what police have always done and what they’ve always been meant to do—can’t be the spring of the libertarian’s howls of “militarization.”</p>
<p>Only if government agents—whether police <em>or otherwise—</em>are coercing citizens in the service of fulfilling some grand <em>collective purpose </em>will the charge of “militarization” apply. Coercion, in and of itself, is insufficient to constitute “militarization.”</p>
<p>But this, in turn, means that <em>the actual weaponry </em>with which the police (or any other agent of the government) are endowed is <em>irrelevant </em>to determining whether the police, or any other agent of government, are “militarized.” If police were armed only with clubs, but used these clubs in order to insure that citizens were exercising three days a week for the purpose of producing “The Physically Fit Society,” say, then <em>this </em>would indeed show that the police had a “militarized” set of mind. Conversely, if the police are armed to the teeth with the stuff of soldiers but used their arms only to insure that the rule of law was preserved, to protect the life, limb, and property of citizens from those—like the rioters in Ferguson—who are intent upon undermining civilization, this would <em>fail </em>to establish that they are “militarized.”</p>
<p><strong>(4) Police brutality, dereliction of duty, abuse of power and the like are issues that should count for much for all decent people, especially the libertarian. But <em>none of these things are necessarily a function of “militarization,” much less equivalent to it. </em></strong></p>
<p>That there are police officers that abuse their authority and power is not only an empirically verified fact; it is a no-brainer to the lover of liberty who knows, along with Lord Acton, that while “absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,” even a limited degree of “power tends to corrupt.”</p>
<p>But when police <em>do </em>violate their oath to serve and protect, then we can and should call out their violations for what they are. Conflating or obscuring issues with bumper-sticker friendly misnomers like “militarization” is counterproductive.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-militarization-of-the-police/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>29</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The &#8216;Central Park Five’: Still Guilty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-central-park-five-still-guilty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-central-park-five-still-guilty</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-central-park-five-still-guilty/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Aug 2014 04:30:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Central Park Jogger Case]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Confession]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[settlement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Trisha Meili]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238071</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The facts versus the lies about the Central Park Jogger Case.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-Central-Park-Five.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238072" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-Central-Park-Five-450x316.jpg" alt="The-Central-Park-Five" width="273" height="192" /></a>Twenty-five years ago, Trisha Meili—“the Central Park jogger”—was a 28 year-old employee for a prestigious Manhattan investment banker when she was mercilessly beaten, raped, and left for dead by thugs.</p>
<p>Meili lost approximately <i>80 percent </i>of her blood.  Her skull was fractured to the point that her one eye had popped out of its socket.  On the scale of 3 to 15 that neurologists use to gauge brain functioning, Meili’s was assigned a rating of 4.  She spent nearly the next two weeks in a coma, with experts expecting her to die.</p>
<p>This crime became a racially explosive issue, for Meili was white and her assailants were not: Of the 30 or so minority youths that had been randomly terrorizing park dwellers, four blacks and one Hispanic confessed to having engaged in the attack on Meili.  Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise, and Yusef Salaam were arrested, tried, convicted, and issued prison sentences.</p>
<p>But in 2002, long after “the Central Park Five,” as documentarian and apologist for the convicts, Ken Burns has dubbed them, had done their time, and long after <i>the statute of limitations </i>on the 13 year-old crime <i>had expired</i>, convicted serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, who was already serving a life term, confessed to being Meili’s lone assailant.   DNA testing confirmed that it was Matias’ semen—and his alone—that was found on Meili’s body and around the scene of the crime.</p>
<p>Shortly afterwards, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau prevailed upon his state’s Supreme Court to “vacate” the convictions of “the Central Park Five.”  Not unsurprisingly, the latter sued the City of New York for wrongful imprisonment to the tune of <i>$250 million.  </i></p>
<p>In June, courtesy of the ever illustrious Mayor DiBlasio, “the Central Park Five” discovered that they would receive <i>$40 million</i>.</p>
<p>Not since the O.J. Simpson acquittal have we witnessed this gross a travesty of justice.  Yet it’s also a travesty of intelligence, for only a fool—or perhaps a liar—could think that “the Central Park Five” were innocent of <i>anything</i>, much less the attack on Trisha Meili.</p>
<p>For starters, no one has ever disputed that the Harlem thugs had been in Central Park that fateful evening for the sole purpose of assaulting and mugging innocents (one of whom had been bludgeoned with a pipe).  As is the wont of cowards, “the Five” set upon only those who they outnumbered, those who were weaker and more vulnerable.  This they confessed from the moment they were in police custody.</p>
<p>To the present day, they have never retracted <i>this </i>confession.</p>
<p>Yet “the Five” also proceeded immediately to implicate themselves in the assault on <i>Meili</i>.  On <i>multiple</i> occasions, while alone with the police <i>as well as </i>when they were accompanied by their adult relatives, they left no doubts about their role in this act of barbarism:</p>
<p>Antron McCray: “We charged her.  We got her on the ground.  Everybody started hitting her and stuff.  She was on the ground.  Everybody stompin’ and everything. Then we got, each—I grabbed one arm, some other kid grabbed one arm, and we grabbed her legs and stuff.  Then we all took turns getting on her, getting on top of her.”</p>
<p>Kevin Richardson: “Raymond [Santana] had her arms, and Steve [Lopez] had her legs.  He spread it out.  And Antron [McCray] got on top, took her panties off.”</p>
<p>Raymond Santana: “He was smackin’ her, he was sayin’, ‘Shut up, bitch!’ Just smackin’ her…I was grabbin’ the lady’s tits.”</p>
<p>Kharey Wise: “This was my first rape.”</p>
<p>Ann Coulter reminds us that Melody Jackson, whose brother was friends with Wise, <i>testified </i>that the latter told her by phone while he was incarcerated at Riker’s Island that even though <i>he </i>didn’t’ actually rape Meili, he <i>did </i>restrain the victim’s legs while Kevin Richardson “fucked her.”</p>
<p>Jackson, incidentally, informed the police of this exchange only because she thought that it would <i>help </i>Wise’s case.</p>
<p>Coulter also notes that one of the youths apprehended by police shortly after the attack against Meili insisted—<i>prior to being questioned</i>—that he knew “who did the <i>murder</i>.”  This is proof that, at the very least, the pummeling that Meili endured was witnessed by multiple people <i>and </i>that its severity was such that it was assumed that it was fatal.</p>
<p>Meili <i>was </i>left for dead.</p>
<p>But there is more.</p>
<p>This same punk—again, mind you, without even being asked about the attack, much less a murder—fingered none other than <i>Antron McCray </i>as “the murderer.”</p>
<p>Multiple videotaped confessions of “the Five”; the presence of semen, blood, and hair on all of the suspects; a scratch on Kevin Richardson’s neck that, <i>in the company of his father,</i> he<i> </i>admitted he received by Meili; and several witness accounts confirmed for the police that the vermin who Ken Burns would years later make into martyrs were as guilty as sin itself of initiating and facilitating an attack against Trisha Meili that nearly cost the poor woman her life.</p>
<p>Matias Reyes semen was the only attacker’s DNA found <i>on </i>Meili or at the crime scene.  However, neither this nor the word of this serial rapist and murderer that he acted alone goes any distance whatsoever toward proving the innocence of “the Central Park Five.”</p>
<p>Police have been prevented by the District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, who recommended that the convictions of “the Five” be vacated, from interrogating Reyes.</p>
<p>Linda Fairstein, the original prosecutor in this case, expressed her certainty that “the Central Park Five” are guilty.  Reyes, she believes, merely finished what they had started.  As for this notion that the NYPD “coerced” false confessions from the suspects, Mike Sheehan, one of the central detectives who investigated the crime, and who, in his own words, had spent decades taking “over 1,000 confessions, in 3,000 homicides,” has nothing but contempt. “All of this stuff about coercion really pisses me off,” Sheehan has said.  “Do you honestly think that we—detectives with more than 20 years in, family men with pensions—would risk all of that so we could put words in the mouth of a 15 year-old kid? Absolutely not.”</p>
<p>Even Morgenthau concedes that no police misconduct—like coercing the teens into admitting to a crime in which they had zero involvement—ever occurred.</p>
<p>Now “the Central Park Five” is $40 million richer.</p>
<p>But the taxpayers of New York City—including the victims of the “wilding” rampage visited upon Central Park 25 years ago—have suffered a loss far greater than this.</p>
<p>For that matter, the fortune of “the Central Park Five” is the misfortune of all decent people.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-central-park-five-still-guilty/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>41</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Another Travesty of Justice: Carr Brothers Given Leniency</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/another-travesty-of-justice-carr-brothers-given-leniency/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=another-travesty-of-justice-carr-brothers-given-leniency</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/another-travesty-of-justice-carr-brothers-given-leniency/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Jul 2014 04:00:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[black-on-white]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Carr brothers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death penalty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reversed]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[travesty]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237421</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Revisiting a gruesome black-on-white crime.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/carr+brothers.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237425" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/carr+brothers.jpg" alt="carr+brothers" width="304" height="228" /></a>In December of 2000, within the span of less than a week, two brothers, Reginald and Jonathan Carr, engaged in a series of crimes in Wichita that Kansans recognize as among the worst in their state’s history.</p>
<p>First, they abducted and robbed assistant baseball coach Andrew Schreiber. Three days later, the Carrs set their sights upon 55 year-old librarian and cellist, Ann Walenta: they shot and killed Walenta as she attempted to flee them in her automobile.</p>
<p>But it wasn’t until three days after <em>this </em>murder that the Carrs’ campaign of evil reached its horrifying climax.</p>
<p>On the night of December 14, the Carrs broke into the residence of Brad Heyka, Aaron Sander, and Jason Befort. Heyka was a financial analyst, Sander a seminary student preparing for the priesthood, and Befort a high school science teacher and coach. Also in the home that evening were Heather Muller, Sander’s former girlfriend and a graduate student who also happened to work as a pre-school teacher at a local church, and a young woman named “H.G.”—a school teacher to whom Befort was about to propose and who would be the sole survivor of the grisly events that were about to unfold over the next few hours.</p>
<p>Armed with guns, the Carrs made their victims perform sexual acts on <em>one another</em>. The women were forced to penetrate each other’s vaginas orally and digitally, and the men were forced to have sex with the women. Yet when the Carrs discovered that Befort and “H.G.” were romantically involved, they <em>prevented</em> them from having sexual intercourse with one another, choosing instead to force Befort watch as they coerced his friends to essentially rape his fiancée to be.</p>
<p>At one point, when Aaron Sander couldn’t get an erection, the Carrs put a gun to his head and threatened to shoot him lest his momentary dysfunction resolve itself within the two minute time frame that they allotted him. When the time expired, the Carrs returned Sander to the closet in which they corralled their prey with “H.G.” and retrieved Befort and Heyka, both of whom were then forced to sexually assault Heather Muller, whose pain-racked groans, “H.G.” later testified, were all too audible from the next room.</p>
<p>The sexual degradation that the Carrs inflicted upon their victims was punctured by episodic beatings that the Carrs gave the men—beatings that appear to have involved the use of golf clubs. It was also interrupted by drives to ATM machines where the Carrs had their victims withdraw funds.</p>
<p>Yet the Carr brothers themselves also repeatedly raped, vaginally and orally, the two women.</p>
<p>About three hours into this nightmare, the Carrs drove their victims to a snow-covered field. The men were stuffed into the trunk of Sander’s Honda Accord that Jonathan Carr drove while Reginald drove Befort’s truck. Being less than 20 degrees, the air was frigid—and yet their captors permitted Befort, Heyka, and Sander to wear not a single article of clothing, while permitting Muller and “H.G.” to wear only a sweater.</p>
<p>Once they arrived at their destination, the Carrs commanded their prey to kneel in the snow and ice. As the five begged for their lives, their tormentors shot them each in the backs of their heads. Then, they drove over their bodies with Befort’s truck.</p>
<p>Miraculously, courtesy of a metal <em>hairclip, </em>“H.G.” survived. She didn’t even lose consciousness. Instead, she tried to help her boyfriend, from whom “blood was squirting everywhere”—including from his eyes—by wrapping around his head her sweater, the only article of clothing, mind you, that she was wearing.</p>
<p>Naked, she walked over a mile in the freezing cold to a stranger’s home in search of help for herself and her friends—for whom, sadly, it was already too late.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Carrs would return to their victims’ home to pillage it. While there, they encountered Nikki, the dog that belonged to “H.G.” The Carrs pummeled the poor animal with a golf club before driving an ice pick through it.</p>
<p>The Carrs were arrested and went to trial. “H.G.” took the stand, explaining that she constantly awakes in “cold sweats” from her “nightmares,” that “every morning” she must “carefully blow-dry” her hair to “cover up the spot that,” as result of being shot, “can no longer grow hair,” and that she has “the scars” on her knees from the rapes to which these “two soulless monsters” subjected her.</p>
<p>“H.G.” also testified that she has a sexually-transmitted disease courtesy of one of her rapists.</p>
<p>That a jury of their peers convicted the Carrs of capital murder and sentenced them to death suggests that they agreed with “H.G.” that her attackers <em>are </em>“soulless monsters.” Yet on Friday, July 25, by a 6-1 decision, the Kansas Supreme Court, citing <em>procedural </em>problems, maintained the convictions while <em>overturning</em> the Carrs’ death sentences.</p>
<p>According to <em>The Topeka Capital-Journal, </em>Republican members of the GOP-controlled Legislature have complained about the “‘activist’ streak” of the justices while noting that Kansas hasn’t had an execution since 1965. But while an anti-death penalty sentiment may account for this outrage, that racial considerations may be in play is also a possibility not to be overlooked.</p>
<p>The brothers Carr, you see, are <em>black</em>. <em>All </em>of their victims are <em>white</em>.</p>
<p>Can there be any doubt that had the racial roles here been reversed that everything from the coverage of this case—which, nationally speaking, has been virtually zilch—to this latest travesty of justice would be different?</p>
<p>In any event, Reginald and Jonathan Carr are as guilty as sin itself of raw savagery.</p>
<p>There can be no conceivable justification for nominating judges who allow their racial preoccupations and other political predilections to prevail over their duty to rule justly.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/another-travesty-of-justice-carr-brothers-given-leniency/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>52</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Jesus, Today’s Church, and ‘Inequality’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/jesus-todays-church-and-inequality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jesus-todays-church-and-inequality</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/jesus-todays-church-and-inequality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2014 04:20:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bible]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jesus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237204</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What Jesus really said (and didn’t say) about the poor, the rich, and inequality.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pl.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-237236" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pl.jpg" alt="pl" width="245" height="300" /></a>That Jesus commanded His disciples—of which I am one—to love “the poor” is beyond dispute. Equally beyond dispute, however, is that, regardless of what growing legions of left-leaning clerics would have us believe, Jesus <em>never—</em>never <em>ever—</em>addressed the issue of “inequality.”</p>
<p>The head of my church and the most visible religious leader on the world stage today, Pope Francis, is as guilty a culprit as is anyone on this score. The Pope made headlines on more than a few occasions since his tenure began when His Holiness condemned “inequality” generally, and the traditional American economic system in particular, with a bluntness that would have made Barack Hussein Obama blush.</p>
<p>Ours is “an economy of exclusion and inequality,” Pope Francis insisted. Our system of “inequality” both results from and encourages “laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.” Thus, “masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”</p>
<p>Worse, the Pope informs us, our “capitalist” system with its “inequality” violates the divine injunction against “killing,” for “such an economy <em>kills</em>” (emphasis added).</p>
<p>Pope Francis may be the most well known Christian leader to conflate Jesus’ teachings on the proper treatment of <em>the poor </em>with the issue of income and wealth “inequalities.” But he speaks for countless lesser known representatives of Christianity.</p>
<p>Take Norma Cook Everist, a professor of church and ministry. In an article that she penned for <em>The Lutheran, </em>Everist insists that things haven’t changed a lick since Martin Luther said that “the poor” are routinely “defrauded” by “the rich.”</p>
<p>“Inequality,” Everist remarks, divides the world into “makers” and “takers” while fostering the godless fiction that some people, and even “some children,” are “worth more” than others, and that some, “the poor,” are of “‘of no worth’[.]”</p>
<p>The project of reducing the Gospel to an activist’s manual on addressing “inequality” is fraught with difficulties.</p>
<p>First, as already noted, it is simply <em>dishonest: </em>there is no basis, Biblical or otherwise, for equating an obligation to care for the poor with an obligation to endorse political policies ostensibly aimed at reducing “inequalities” in income and wealth. Decent minded people of all faiths and no faith have long recognized the need to care for those in poverty, and Christians specifically have always been acutely aware of this as a moral imperative.</p>
<p>But it hasn’t been until the emergence of large, centralized governments, immensely affluent, industrialized societies, and the dominance of secular, egalitarian ideologies—i.e. phenomena that don’t appear until relatively late in Christian history—that anyone, much less any Christian cleric, has thought to identify compassion for the poor with the amelioration of “inequalities.”</p>
<p>Second, even the tireless emphasis that pastors place upon Jesus’ relationship with “the poor” is less than fully honest, for it is grounded in a selective reading of the New Testament.</p>
<p>“The poor” is as ambiguous as it is emotionally-charged a term. Most of the people among whom Jesus spent His time were certainly not rich by the standards of their day, and some of them did indeed live in grinding poverty. While it’s true that there was no “middle class,” it’s equally true that just because the tax collectors, farmers, fishermen, carpenters and so forth with whom He appears to have fraternized were not rich, neither were they all impoverished.</p>
<p>That today’s clerics fail to make these discriminations between those to whom Jesus ministered by referring to them all as “the poor” reflects their awareness of the emotional <em>and </em>moral appeal of this moniker. After all, “the poor” are, well, poor: only the heartless could fail to feel for them. And “the poor” also lends those so designated moral authority, for being the <em>victims</em> of their circumstances, “the poor” are always <em>blameless</em>.</p>
<p>Third, this <em>exclusive stress</em> on Jesus’ fondness for “the poor,” whether by accident or design, conveys the impression that He was <em>exclusively fond</em> of “the poor,” a respecter of persons by virtue of their socio-economic condition—exactly what the Bible insists God <em>is not. </em></p>
<p>This notion, in turn, further underscores a sense of moral superiority among “the poor” by fueling it with the fiction that their poverty is a saving grace. “The poor,” in other words, can too easily think that it is <em>they, </em>not “<em>the rich,” </em>that count for more in God’s eyes.</p>
<p>Some observers, like the 19<sup>th</sup> century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, thought that this, in fact, was the whole purpose behind Christianity. In referring to it as a “slave morality,” Nietzsche’s point is that it serves, and was always meant to serve, the psychological and emotional interests of the poor masses, namely their interest in exacting a sort of imaginary vengeance against the wealthy by demonizing them while insisting upon their own “blessedness.”</p>
<p>Admittedly, Nietzsche was an enemy of Christianity. But he <em>became </em>an enemy <em>after </em>having been raised Christian by his Lutheran minister father. In any event, one needn’t accept Nietzsche’s reading of Christianity—I do not—in order to see that those Christian leaders who use their pulpits to blast “inequality” lend it considerable plausibility.</p>
<p>Finally, Jesus excoriated “the rich,” yes; but He was no less hard on “the poor,” including and particularly His closest followers. Conversely, sometimes Jesus lavished praise upon “the rich.”</p>
<p>For 2,000 years, whether rightly or wrongly, Christendom’s worst villain has been, not the rich and famous Herod, Pilate, or Nero, but Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’ closest disciples and a “poor” man who relinquished what possessions he may have had in order to follow Him. Moreover, Jesus regularly castigated his “poor” disciples for their lack of faith, and, sometimes, compared them unfavorably with wealthy Gentiles, like the Roman Centurion whose <em>servant </em>Jesus healed.</p>
<p>Moreover, it is worth noting that besides Himself, the greatest example of Christian charity that Jesus extolled is that of the Good Samaritan, a <em>rich </em>man who deployed some of his ample resources to help a stranger in need.</p>
<p>We also shouldn’t forget that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were rich members of the priestly class with whom Jesus must’ve been particularly close, for not only did they attempt to prevail upon their fellow Pharisees to refrain from turning Jesus over to the Romans. Following Jesus’ crucifixion, both prepared His body for burial in the tomb that Joseph secured for Him.</p>
<p>All of this can be found easily enough in the four canonical Gospels which are read in Christian churches throughout the world every Sunday. That these points are neglected by so many ministers is due, I submit, to their obsession with combating, not poverty, but “inequalities” in income and wealth—a topic, this Christian has been at pains to show, having nothing to do with either the whole of the Bible or The New Testament.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/jesus-todays-church-and-inequality/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>47</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Honest Questions for Eric Holder</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/honest-questions-for-eric-holder/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=honest-questions-for-eric-holder</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/honest-questions-for-eric-holder/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jul 2014 04:45:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ABC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Holder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[racial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236470</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Putting the Attorney General on the defensive.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/eric-holder1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236473" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/eric-holder1-450x350.jpg" alt="eric-holder" width="271" height="211" /></a>While being interviewed recently by ABC News’ Pierre Thomas, Attorney General Eric Holder expressed his belief that he and Barack Obama have been subjected to a measure of “vehemence” unlike that with which other public figures have had to reckon.</p>
<p>Anyone who’s been alive for more than a few years doesn’t need this spelled out for them, but Holder couldn’t resist the impulse to make explicit the point at which he’s always driving: For Obama’s and Holder’s critics who are always “talking about taking their country back,” there is “a certain racial component,” “a racial animus,” that animates them.</p>
<p>To put it more bluntly, Holder is accusing his opponents of being a bunch of “<i>racists.</i>”<i> </i></p>
<p>Of course, no one should be in the least bit surprised by this.  Holder, like his boss, has always been a “Johnny One-Note” when it comes to the issue of race.  But rather than go on the defensive, as whites generally and white conservatives always do, let us instead pose some questions to the AG.</p>
<p>First, by “racial animus” you presumably mean “racism.” But what does <i>this </i>mean, Mr. Holder?  In spite of—or maybe because of—the ease with this term is hurled about, “racism” has come to mean all things to all people: Adolph Hitler, Nazis, Klansmen, Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, John Wayne, Southerners, Germans, American police officers and military personnel, slave masters and abolitionists, the Union and the Confederacy, America’s Founders, elderly whites, middle class whites, our judicial system, our political arrangements, academia, Hollywood, “the media,” and so forth and so on, have all been accused of “racism.”</p>
<p>However, as we say, if everyone is “racist,” then no one is “racist.” Or, if you will, if “racism” means anything and everything, then it means nothing.</p>
<p>Yet maybe, Mr. Holder, by “racist” you have in mind simply someone who dislikes black people, like yourself and the President, simply and solely because they are black. Given the context of your comments, I suspect that this is probably your meaning.</p>
<p>The unanimously acknowledged “father” of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes, identified as an axiom of reason the proposition that “something can’t come from nothing.” And since, sir, you and those of your ilk are forever looking for “root causes” whenever it comes to accounting for the dysfunctional conduct of which America’s “ghettoes” are ridden, I am inclined to think that you too believe it is self-evident that from nothing, nothing comes.</p>
<p>So, <i>if, </i>as you’re so certain, your critics dislike you and Mr. Obama only because you both are black, answer me this: From whence springs this sentiment of theirs?  Why would anyone, white or otherwise, dislike black people?  In other words, what are the “root causes” of white “racism?”</p>
<p>Bear in mind, sir, that the stock replies—“That’s just how white ‘racists’ were raised;” “Whites entertain ‘racist’ stereotypes about blacks,” etc.—are alike viciously question-begging (to say nothing of sounding “stereotypical” themselves).  Each in its own way simply rephrases the claim that whites are “racist.”</p>
<p>And if you resolve, Mr. Attorney General, to concede that some of these negative “stereotypes” about blacks do indeed have a basis in reality but are nevertheless a “legacy” of white “racism,” please note that, once more, you beg the question by restating your original assertion: whites are/were “racist.”</p>
<p>It’s ok, though, if you can’t answer this query Mr. Holder.  If I was a betting man I’d bet my house that never, ever have you had to give it any thought at all.   Of real logical axioms like that identified by Descartes’ I’m sure you couldn’t care less.  What you <i>do </i>care about, however, and care about more than anything else, is the proposition that whites are “racists” and blacks are unqualified victims.  <i>This </i>you treat as a first principle of reason.</p>
<p>And this brings me to my next question: It’s true, isn’t it Mr. Holder, that you <i>like </i>crying “racism” precisely <i>because </i>blacks are widely portrayed (by people like yourself) as victims?</p>
<p>Contrary to what many of your critics claim, I for one most definitely do <i>not </i>believe that you charge them with “racism” simply and solely for the purpose of immunizing yourself and the President against criticism (though this certainly is <i>a </i>consideration some of the time).  I believe that you work long and hard at convincing <i>yourself</i> that the two of you—the two most powerful human beings on the planet, mind you—really <i>are</i> victims of “racism.”</p>
<p>To put it another way, your charges of “racism” are not just politically motivated, are they?  Ideologically and even psychologically, you and Mr. Obama—children of “privilege,” the two of you—<i>need </i>to believe that you are both “authentically black”—i.e. “oppressed”—and “down with the struggle”—i.e. “oppressed.”</p>
<p>Your interests are served well by the perception that you and Mr. Obama are unpopular because of your skin pigmentation, aren’t they Mr. Holder?</p>
<p>The problem, however, is that this lie in which you and Obama have invested your whole being is a great <i>disservice</i> to the interests of the rest of us—regardless of our skin color.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/honest-questions-for-eric-holder/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>60</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Joan Rivers and the Humorless Generation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/joan-rivers-and-the-humorless-generation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=joan-rivers-and-the-humorless-generation</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/joan-rivers-and-the-humorless-generation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2014 04:40:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CNN]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comedy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fredericka Whitfield]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[humor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joan Rivers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politically correct]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[walk off]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236192</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the politically correct culture is killing comedy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ddec5eecb389a90215687b9ef2d7017e.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236193" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ddec5eecb389a90215687b9ef2d7017e.jpg" alt="ddec5eecb389a90215687b9ef2d7017e" width="294" height="228" /></a>Joan Rivers made news recently when she walked off of a CNN set during an interview with Fredericka Whitfield.</p>
<p>When Whitfield suggested that Rivers could be “mean,” the latter informed the former that under no circumstances should she be interviewing someone, like Rivers, for whom comedy is a calling.</p>
<p>Whatever else may be said of Joan Rivers—I, for one, have never had much to say about her at all—this much seems certain: The woman knows that of which she speaks when it comes to her craft.</p>
<p>That is to say, she is acutely aware of the purpose, the <i>invaluable </i>purpose, served by humor. Far from being “mean,” the value of the joke lay precisely in its ability to <i>neutralize </i>life’s sting, to siphon off some of the tragedy of the circumstances into which Earthly existence seems hell-bent upon thrusting us.</p>
<p>Maybe, just maybe, this is the point.</p>
<p>As Jesus said of Hell, in it there will be constant “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Hell is a laugh-free zone, a boiling cauldron of tears.  Heaven, on the other hand, may also admit of tears.  But the tears of Heaven are the fruits of joy, and the laughter that it calls forth promises to be as hearty as it is irresistible, for the inhabitants of Heaven will at long last recognize the seriousness with which we treated our lives on Earth for the folly—<i>the joke</i>—that is has always been.</p>
<p>And here we may be getting to the heart of comedy’s import.</p>
<p><i>This</i> world of ours is an uneasy mix of dust and divinity, evil and good, suffering and delighting.  In short, it is an endless supply of intimations of both <i>Hell</i> and <i>Heaven</i>.  Humor, I believe, is a hint of Heaven, an <i>emblem </i>of <i>eternity.</i></p>
<p>Humor is every bit as much of a divine gift as any other, and an even greater gift than some. <i>The Joke</i> permits us to come as close as possible, in this life, to arresting the relentless flow of time by transforming a situation that would otherwise paralyze those who are at its mercy into an object of ridicule.  It permits us, in other words, to defang and declaw the demons that haunt us, and to do so effortlessly, with a laugh.</p>
<p>The Joke makes the humorous into <i>caricaturists</i>.  But while caricaturists select for their portraits specific <i>individuals, </i>the humorous, in contrast, focus their attention not just on individuals, but upon whole sets of circumstances—including and especially that most peculiar set of circumstances that we know as the human condition itself.</p>
<p>However, as Fredericka Whitfield revealed in her exchange with Joan Rivers, all of this has been lost upon this most humor<i>less</i> generation.  For certain, much of life demands seriousness, but our culture’s prevailing <i>zeitgeist</i>—what we commonly refer to as “Political Correctness” (PC)—demands not seriousness, but <i>deadly </i>seriousness.</p>
<p>In no place and at no time has the Joke been more needed than it is needed in a culturally, ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse society like the United States.  Yet it is just such places—contemporary, incorrigibly PC, Western societies—that have essentially banned it.</p>
<p>The Joke diffuses intergroup tensions.  Whitfield couldn’t have been further of the mark in suggesting that Rivers’ jokes foster mean-spiritedness.  Just the opposite is the case: it is precisely in the Joke’s almost unique power to <i>deflate </i>mean-spiritedness that its value is to be found.</p>
<p>Contrary to the conventional wisdom, racial, ethnic, and religious “stereotypes” are most decidedly <i>not </i>fictions sprung from thin air.  They reflect enduring patterns among a significant number of a group’s members—even if (as is almost always the case) it is only a significant <i>minority.  </i>When these stereotypes reflect positively on a group, all is good.  When they are negative, though, there is no end to the inter-group conflict that they can so easily fuel.</p>
<p>The Joke extinguishes the match before it reaches the fuse.  It fumigates the air, so to speak, by allowing us to laugh at, rather than hate, one other. There was a time, not all that long ago, when people, particularly Americans, took this fact for granted.</p>
<p>Times, sadly, have changed.  Still, what has <i>not</i> changed is that peaceful inter-group co-existence is much better served by the Joan Rivers than the Fredericka Whitfields of our world.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/joan-rivers-and-the-humorless-generation/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>82</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Activism: The Ideal of a ‘Liberal Arts Education&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/activism-the-ideal-of-a-liberal-arts-education/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=activism-the-ideal-of-a-liberal-arts-education</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/activism-the-ideal-of-a-liberal-arts-education/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:40:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[activism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[College]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal arts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[University]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235484</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An ideal that’s bad for the academy and bad for the world.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/6231486313_489935fc2e_b.sm_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235485" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/6231486313_489935fc2e_b.sm_.jpg" alt="6231486313_489935fc2e_b.sm" width="278" height="226" /></a>Dinesh D’Souza’s latest documentary, <i>America: Imagine a World without Her, </i>features interviews with such leftist academic rock stars as Howard Zinn. However, it’s crucial for Americans, and particularly those American who are parents, to realize that the contemporary academic world is chock full of lesser known Zinns.</p>
<p>The traditional academic ideal of the disinterested pursuit and dissemination of knowledge has fallen on hard times.  Professors in the humanities and social sciences have spent no small portion of the 20<sup>th</sup> century lambasting it as, at best, incorrigibly naïve.  Usually, though, they’ve gone further, rejecting the traditional ideal as a noxious, indeed, an <i>oppressive,</i> fiction.</p>
<p>In its stead, academics have replaced it with a new ideal, one more suited to their own ideological agenda: the purpose of academia, it is now widely held, is to promote the pursuit of “<i>social justice.” </i></p>
<p>In other words, a “liberal arts education” should have as its aim the production of, <i>not </i>“well rounded” individuals, as had been traditionally thought, but <i>social activists—</i>i.e. committed leftists.<i> </i></p>
<p>A more disastrous turn of events couldn’t have been imagined for academia.  For centuries, it was recognized that the academic world’s contribution to the preservation and enrichment of Western civilization lay precisely in the fact that, unlike most of our activities, <i>its</i> activities were most decidedly not <i>utilitarian </i>or <i>practical.  </i>Vocational schools, for example, are utilitarian in that students are <i>trained</i> for the sake of accomplishing some predetermined <i>goal: </i>mastery in one’s vocation and the monetary benefits that are expected to accrue from this.</p>
<p>College and university students, in stark contrast, are supposed to receive, not training, but an <i>education.  </i>This education, in turn, is no more oriented toward some goal over and above itself than is friendship so oriented.  The education is <i>its own reward</i>: learning for learning’s sake—not the sake of money, fame, fortune, or any other extrinsic goal.</p>
<p>Given this vision of academia, even the traditional ideal of the disinterested <i>pursuit</i> of <i>truth</i> is problematic, for it suggests that the raison d’ entre of university learning is some transcendent purpose—the acquisitions of knowledge—that can be attained only <i>after </i>students acquire an encyclopedic collection of “facts” or “propositions.”</p>
<p>But if the traditional ideal is problematic, the activist ideal is ruinous.  It isn’t just that, in its current manifestation, the latter is enlisted in the service of a <i>leftist </i>political agenda.  The primary problem is that it promotes a <i>political </i>agenda of any sort.</p>
<p>The activist ideal transforms academia into a political institution.  Education is now “politicized,” as we say, but say confusingly, for a “politicized education” is a contradiction in terms.   <i>Education</i> has been jettisoned in favor of <i>training</i>.  Only the training in question is not training in a vocation, but in an <i>ideology, </i>and in the methods and ways by which this ideology can be spread to the four corners of the Earth. <i> </i></p>
<p>“Education” has now been rendered a thoroughly <i>practical </i>or <i>utilitarian </i>matter like any other political endeavor.</p>
<p>This being so, it promises to cultivate in students intellectual and moral habits that are anything but virtues.</p>
<p>The political activist is forever focused on <i>the future.  </i>The past—specifically the past of Western civilization—is treated as a history of unmitigated oppression. The present is considered to be either an impediment to a brighter tomorrow or the means by which the promised land of the activist’s imaginings will be brought to fruition.</p>
<p>But it is from exactly <i>this</i> temporal orientation—this future-centered vision—that a liberal arts education is meant to <i>emancipate </i>students.</p>
<p>For one, a training in social activism renders students ignorant of their inheritance by essentially severing them from their past and immunizing them against delighting in the nuances of the present.  That is, when it isn’t tempered with an understanding of the past and an appreciation for the present—a knowledge of its location in the time continuum—this eagerness for the future embodies a shallowness that impoverishes the imagination.</p>
<p>This in turn breeds arrogance—an invincible arrogance—insofar as it nourishes the belief that humanity’s liberation from the darkness in which it remains mired will only be achieved once this present generation drags the rest of us—kicking and screaming, if need be—to our salvation.</p>
<p>And this brings us to another critical point: Because every utopia requires for its realization an activist <i>government, </i>the activist ideal encourages in students a partiality toward coercion over persuasion, a disposition—no, a <i>determination</i>—to use <i>force </i>rather than engage in <i>dialogue.  </i></p>
<p>Simply put, the activist ideal inculcates <i>bellicosity. </i></p>
<p>D’ Souza’s film features footage in which Howard Zinn unabashedly declares that his scholarship and teaching is driven by a desire to <i>change the world</i>.  In doing so, he expresses the activist ideal of the contemporary academy.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the ideal is bad for academia and bad for the world.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/activism-the-ideal-of-a-liberal-arts-education/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>12</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8216;Diversity&#8217;: The Idol of Academia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/diversity-the-idol-of-academia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=diversity-the-idol-of-academia</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/diversity-the-idol-of-academia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Jun 2014 04:35:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234869</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Exposing “diversity” for the political fiction that it is.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/DictDiversity.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234935" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/DictDiversity.jpg" alt="DictDiversity" width="277" height="184" /></a>“Diversity” is not just a good in the academic world. It is the <em>supreme</em> good, the one good before which all other considerations must yield.</p>
<p>Recently, a colleague expressed a preference for a certain Northeastern city university over a certain Midwestern Christian college because, he said, the former has more “diversity” than the latter.</p>
<p>All that this means, though, is that because this big city university in the Northeast is a racial, ethnic, and socio-economic polyglot and its Midwestern Christian counterpart is just too white, the former is preferable as an educational institution to the latter.</p>
<p>That this god of “diversity” is as educationally invidious as it is false can be seen easily enough.</p>
<p>First, the only diversity that should be of any concern at an institution of higher learning is <em>intellectual </em>diversity.   “Diversity” of the sort—what we may call “cultural diversity”—that is all too typical at places like that big city university for which my colleague pines, need not and, in fact, <em>does not </em>give rise to any more intellectual diversity than can be found at less culturally heterogeneous institutions.</p>
<p>This brings us to the next point: “cultural diversity” not only doesn’t correspond to a rise in intellectual diversity; it invariably corresponds to a rise in <em>political uniformity. </em>This is crucial, for the promotion of “cultural diversity” is nothing more or less than the promotion of a left-wing ideological agenda.</p>
<p>While academics, like my colleague, look upon predominantly white colleges as insufficiently “diverse,” they wouldn’t even think to level this same criticism against “historically <em>black</em> colleges.” They cannot, however, have it both ways: if a predominantly white Christian school is educationally inferior because of <em>its</em> mono-racial character, then, <em>mutatis mutandis</em>, black schools must also be educationally inferior because of <em>their</em> racially homogenous character.</p>
<p>Moreover, for all of their clamoring over the need for greater “diversity,” academics don’t want things so diverse that politically <em>incorrect</em> perspectives are permitted a hearing on campus. Representation of fundamentalist Christians, moral traditionalists, conservatives, libertarians, anarchists, is not only never in demand; its anathema.</p>
<p>Thirdly, the idea that a predominantly, or even exclusively, white student body somehow militates against a quality education is offensive. But it’s offensive only because the history of Western civilization exposes just how patently absurd is the idea that racial homogeneity precludes intellectual richness.</p>
<p>The ideas that have composed the West’s consciousness from at least the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans over 2500 years ago through to the present day have derived, overwhelmingly, from white men. It isn’t that others haven’t made lasting contributions, of course. But even and especially in the eyes of its staunchest <em>critics, </em>Western civilization has always been identified with the civilization of <em>European</em>—i.e. Caucasian—peoples.</p>
<p>This is fact. It is equally a fact that it is only either a paralyzing ignorance of reality or incorrigible dishonesty that could prompt anyone to deny with a straight face that the Western tradition is the most intellectually heterogeneous—the most philosophically and theologically <em>diverse—</em>tradition in all of human history. The contemporary academic fiction that Western civilization, by virtue of the “dead white males” that historically shaped it, is somehow an intellectually stagnant monolith is worse than nonsense; to borrow a line from one of those dead white males, the 18<sup>th</sup> century English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, it is “nonsense on stilts.”</p>
<p>A profound sense of individuality spawned both the passion and daring of those legions of dead white males from throughout the last nearly three millennia to whom we owe our civilization. That “diversity”—or, more accurately, “Diversity”—has become the new deity of, of all places, academia, is among the most sobering, most tragic, of commentaries on our age, for it proves that if the spirit of the Western mind hasn’t evaporated, it is beyond the academic world that it is to be found.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/diversity-the-idol-of-academia/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>19</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8216;White Privilege&#8217; Exposed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/white-privilege-exposed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=white-privilege-exposed</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/white-privilege-exposed/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 May 2014 04:15:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fannie Gumbinger]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[theory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[white privilege]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226522</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Spelling out the absurd implications of an absurd theory.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/white-privelage.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-226523 alignleft" alt="white-privelage" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/white-privelage-450x287.jpg" width="315" height="201" /></a>The idea of “white privilege” has made the news recently. The truth, though, is that it has been a fetish of leftist academics for quite some time.</span></p>
<p>“White privilege,” as one sage puts it, “is a form of racism” that’s “predicated on preserving the privileges”—by which he means the “social and economic benefits”—of whites.  Because “white privilege” is maintained via “hegemonic structures, practices, and ideologies,” individual whites “do not necessarily intend to hurt people of color,” even though “they inevitably do.”</p>
<p>So, white privilege is all about “preserving the privileges of white people” by way of those white privilege-producing things that “reproduce whites’ privileged status.”</p>
<p>That the definition of “white privilege” is rigged from the outset to paint all whites as victimizers and all non-whites (particularly blacks) as victims can be seen by its viciously circular reasoning.  But it is also, necessarily, highly abstract.  Once we make concrete its implications, however, its ridiculousness is exposed.</p>
<p>Statistically, blacks, say, have far higher rates of criminality than do whites.  This, it is held, is a legacy of “racism” or “white privilege.”  Of course, raw numbers in and of themselves go <i>zero</i> distance in establishing anything.  Inter-racial statistical disparities no more signify <i>injustice </i>than does the fact that there are statistical disparities between the rates at which men and women are struck by lightning indicate injustice.</p>
<p>Back in 2000, Reginald and Jonathan Carr, two black brothers, beat, tortured, sexually humiliated, and robbed five white victims: Jason Befort, Brad Heyka, Aaron Sander, Heather Muller, and a woman known only as H.G.  The Carrs repeatedly raped the women before shooting all five of their prey in the backs of their heads and driving over their bodies in a stolen pick-up truck. H.G. was the lone survivor.</p>
<p>If the theory of “white privilege” is true, then the Carrs are the real victims and those whose lives they destroyed are the victimizers, for in the absence of “white privilege,” the Carrs would have been decent, law-abiding citizens.</p>
<p>In 2007, in Nashville, Tennessee, a young white couple, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, were out on a date.  They were carjacked, abducted, raped, and murdered by five blacks.  Newsom was sodomized and shot.  His body was wrapped and set on fire.  Christian was raped anally, orally, and vaginally.  She was forced to ingest bleach to remove traces of her assailants’ DNA and stuffed alive in garbage bags.  Over the span of hours, she gradually suffocated to death.</p>
<p>If the theory of “white privilege” is true, these black criminals are the real victims and those whites whose lives they destroyed were actually the victimizers, for in the absence of “white privilege,” these black rapist murderers would have been decent, law-abiding citizens.</p>
<p>Last summer, Delby “Shorty” Benton, an 89-year-old white World War II veteran, was jumped and beaten to death by two black teenagers in Seattle.</p>
<p>If the theory of “white privilege” is true, then Benton’s murderers are the real victims and this WWII hero was the victimizer, for in the absence of “white privilege,” these thugs would’ve been decent, law-abiding citizens. <i> </i></p>
<p>On Christmas Eve 2010, in Houston, a 12-year-old white boy, Jonathan Foster, was kidnapped, bound, and killed by way of a <i>blowtorch </i>courtesy of a 44-year-old black woman, Mona Nelson.  His remains were discarded in a ditch along the side of a road.</p>
<p>If the theory of “white privilege” is true, then Nelson was the real victim and young Foster was the victimizer, for in the absence of “white privilege,” Nelson would’ve been a decent, law-abiding citizen. <i> </i></p>
<p>Last year, a 99-year-old white woman, Fannie Gumbinger, was greeted by a 20-year-old black male intruder in her Poughkeepsie, New York home.  Gumbinger was subsequently murdered. Police say she died of “multiple injuries.”</p>
<p>If the theory of “white privilege” is true, then the black man who beat Gumbinger to death was the real victim and Gumbinger was the victimizer, for in the absence of “white privilege,” this robber and murderer would’ve been a decent, law-abiding citizen.<i> </i></p>
<p>In my hometown of Trenton, New Jersey, back in 1992, black career criminal Ambrose Harris carjacked Kristin Huggins, a young white female.  Harris carjacked Huggins, and while she pleaded with him not to deprive her of her virginity, he sodomized her.  While begging for her life, Harris put a bullet in the back of Huggins’ head and left her body in a shallow grave.</p>
<p>If the theory of “white privilege” is true, then Harris is the real victim and Huggins is the victimizer, for in the absence of “white privilege,” Harris would’ve been a decent, law-abiding citizen.</p>
<p>The 18<sup>th</sup> century philosopher David Hume remarked that many an absurd theory has taken refuge behind high levels of abstraction.</p>
<p>To this list we can add the theory of “white privilege,” surely one of the most absurd positions of them all. <i> </i></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/white-privilege-exposed/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>136</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>‘The Point’ of an Honest Discussion of Race</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-point-of-an-honest-discussion-of-race/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-point-of-an-honest-discussion-of-race</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-point-of-an-honest-discussion-of-race/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 23 May 2014 04:20:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Africa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christianity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colonialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[honest discussion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Slavery]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226004</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why learn the true history of slavery? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/not-for-sale-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-226005" alt="not-for-sale-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/not-for-sale-1-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>In reply to a recent article in which I disclosed some neglected facts concerning race and slavery, a reader inquired as to the point in unveiling them.  Before answering, let’s review some of the tidbits that I shared in the interest of that “honest discussion” of race that the Eric Holders of the world continually charge the rest of us with deferring: </span></p>
<p>(1) For centuries, <i>millions </i>of <i>white </i>European <i>Christians</i> were enslaved by <i>Asian </i>and <i>African Muslims</i>;</p>
<p>(2) The first <i>slaves </i>in Colonial America were <i>white;</i></p>
<p>(3) Blacks were in America <i>prior </i>to slavery;</p>
<p>(4) A significant portion of African blacks who eventually became slaves in America were <i>already </i>Christian;</p>
<p>(5) These black slaves had been converted by the <i>African blacks </i>who <i>sold them </i>into bondage;</p>
<p>(6) During the antebellum period, there existed several <i>thousand </i>slave <i>owners </i>who were <i>black;</i></p>
<p>(7) The <i>first</i> slave <i>master</i> in America<i> </i>was <i>a black man, </i>Anthony Johnson, an Angolan who had originally been sold into slavery by his fellow Africans to Arabs and who owned black <i>and white </i>servants.</p>
<p>There is still other historical “trivia” that defy the conventional narrative on race and slavery.</p>
<p>The civilized world, justly, expresses outrage over the abduction and enslavement of hundreds of young Nigerian schoolgirls at the hands of the African Islamic terrorist organization, Boko Haram.  But the stone-cold truth of the matter is that this sort of thing has been transpiring in Africa from time immemorial.  For millennia upon millennia, black Africans have seized upon and enslaved other black Africans.  And, as notes famed Islamic scholar, Bernard Lewis, among others, from the dawn of Islam, Muslims have abducted and enslaved non-Muslims—both black <i>and white</i>.</p>
<p>It is estimated that well over <i>100 million</i> black Africans died over the span of 14 centuries as they were marched across the scalding hot sands of the Sahara Desert by those Arab raiders and traders intent upon reducing them to a life of bondage in foreign lands.</p>
<p>In spite of the tremendous number of blacks transported to the Middle East, the latter consists of relatively few blacks today. Why?  For one, African <i>boys</i> were frequently forced to undergo <i>castration, </i>a practice so barbaric that but a tiny percentage survived it.  Those who did, however, fetched a purchasing price several times that of their peers who were not made into eunuchs.</p>
<p>Another consideration accounting for the miniscule black population in the contemporary Middle East is that African <i>girls </i>were sold as concubines and into sex slavery to Arab masters.  This reflected the Islamic belief—most recently articulated by the leader of Boko Haram but first stated in the Koran and practiced by Muhammad—that girls can and should become wives once they are <i>nine years of age</i>.  Upon begetting their masters’ offspring, many eventually became assimilated into their families.</p>
<p>But, thirdly, the tragic fact is that many slaves were simply worked to death.</p>
<p>What follows are some other fascinating truths that are a “must” for any truly honest discussion of race and slavery:</p>
<p>While whites were by no means unique in practicing slavery, they <i>were</i> indeed unique insofar as they were the first people in all of history to have developed a <i>moral</i> revulsion against this age-old institution.  No one <i>liked</i> being abducted and enslaved by others.  But many of these same unfortunates wouldn’t have hesitated to do the same to others if the opportunity had arisen.  Whites, more specifically, English white Christians, personified and led by the conservative William Wilberforce, succeeded in prevailing upon the British Empire—the most economically and militarily powerful presence on the planet at that time—to abolish slavery, not just in England or even within the Empire, but in every area of the globe over which Britain could hope to exercise any of its influence.</p>
<p>More scandalously, the British met with much <i>resistance</i> from Arabs, Asians, and Africans.  Bernard Lewis relays an exchange between a British Consul General in Morocco and the Sultan of that land that typifies precisely the challenges to its campaign against slavery that the English had to surmount.  When the Sultan was asked what he had done to relegate to the dustbin of history the trade in human flesh, he “replied, in a letter expressing evident astonishment, that ‘the traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam…up to this day.’”  The Sultan added that slavery’s permissibility was “manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”</p>
<p>Incidentally, England’s success was a long time coming, for in some parts of the non-European world, places like India and Saudi Arabia, slavery didn’t become illegal until the 1940s and 1960s, respectively.</p>
<p>My reader who inquired as to the “point” in raising these facts at no time denies any of them.  Thus, he confirms what some of us have long suspected: in their tireless promotion of the conventional orthodoxy on race and slavery in America, neither he nor his ilk has ever been in the least bit interested in history for its own sake.  Rather, there has always been a “point” to their campaign, the advancement of a political agenda involving fictions concerning perpetual black suffering, white oppression, and white guilt.</p>
<p>The facts to which I allude here frustrate that agenda.</p>
<p>And this, by the way, is “the point” of mentioning them.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-point-of-an-honest-discussion-of-race/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>145</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Inconvenient Truths about Race &amp; Slavery</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/inconvenient-truths-about-race-slavery/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=inconvenient-truths-about-race-slavery</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/inconvenient-truths-about-race-slavery/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 May 2014 04:20:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[African]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Slav]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Slavery]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225521</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Where an "honest discussion" about race should start. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/201102_108_Slavery_art.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225522" alt="201102_108_Slavery_art" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/201102_108_Slavery_art.jpg" width="280" height="244" /></a>“The truth is harsh.”</span></p>
<p>So spoke the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, back in the 19<sup>th</sup> century.</p>
<p>On no topic is the truth harsher than on that of race.</p>
<p>The Eric Holders of the world incessantly bemoan the absence of an “honest discussion of race” in America.  But such a discussion, beginning, as it must, with a discussion of slavery, is actually the last thing that they could afford to have, for such a discussion would include facts that would undermine much of the ideologically-invaluable conventional wisdom concerning this topic.</p>
<p>For instance, the very word “slave” stems from “Slav,” i.e. a reference to the experience of millions of (white) <i>Slavish </i>people who endured centuries of slavery at the hands of <i>African </i>Muslims.   This, of course, is a most inconvenient truth, for it is a most Politically Incorrect truth.  But it <i>is</i> the truth.</p>
<p>Yet the Slavish aren’t the only whites who spent centuries in captivity: Europeans of various backgrounds were enslaved by African Muslims as well.  All of this is heavily documented in such neglected pieces of scholarship as Robert Davis’s <i>Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 </i>and Paul Baepler’s <i>White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives. </i></p>
<p>Nor is it just that millions of whites <i>in Europe </i>were made to toil in bondage for hundreds of years.  Don Jordan’s <i>White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America </i>and Michael Hoffman’s <i>They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America </i>impeccably establish that whites were enslaved in colonial America as well.   Moreover, these brave authors show that the conditions that whites, including, most tragically, white <i>children, </i>had to endure both en route to the colonies as well as once they arrived were at least as dreadful as those experienced by Africans.</p>
<p>This last point would as well be included in an honest discussion of slavery.  The word “kidnapping” that is so often, but erroneously, used to describe the circumstances that allegedly resulted in the transportation of Africans to the New World derives from the fact that British children—<i>kids</i>—were regularly “nabbed’ off of the streets of England and sold into slavery in America. <i> </i></p>
<p>An honest discussion of race would mention what no less a figure than black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates recently discovered: free blacks were in America <i>before </i>slavery.  While researching the book and documentary <i>The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, </i>Gates admits to having been shocked to discover that blacks freely came to America, to Florida, as early as 1513—<i>over 100 years earlier </i>than the standard date of 1619.  And the one black man whose name is now known was a <i>conquistador</i> who came in search of the Fountain of Youth with Ponce de Leon.</p>
<p>Gates also notes that it is simply not true that blacks didn’t become aware of Christianity until they were enslaved by Europeans.  Many Africans who were eventually sold to Europeans—at least one out of four—came from the Kingdom of Angola, where they had been converted to Roman Catholicism as early on as the 15<sup>th</sup> century.</p>
<p>Gates delivers a double whammy to the orthodox line on race and slavery in America when he reveals both that it was the “African elites” who “converted” the African masses to Christianity <i>and </i>that it was these same elites—not European abductors—who sold their fellow black Africans into slavery across the Atlantic.</p>
<p>Of the <i>12.5 million</i> Africans sold during the era of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Gates further observes, only about <i>388,000</i> were shipped to America.</p>
<p>An honest discussion of race in America would include the fact that whites were slaves, for sure, but it would also have to accommodate the obscene truth that as many as <i>4,000</i> free black families <i>owned </i>slaves in the antebellum South<i>. </i>More stunning still is that, arguably, the first slave master in early America was a black man<i>.</i></p>
<p>Anthony Johnson—a name, doubtless, of which few people today, black or white, would have heard—was an Angolan who was first sold by Africans to Arabs before winding up as an indentured servant in Virginia. There, he attained his freedom, became a planter, and acquired his own indentured servants. One of the latter, John Casor, a black man, served his mandatory seven years—but Johnson refused to set him free. Through a long, windy series of court battles, Johnson succeeded in prevailing upon the courts to declare Casor Johnson’s servant for life<i>.  </i>Slavery was born, as this was the very first time in the colonies when it was legally determined that a person who had committed no crime had to spend the rest of his remaining existence in bondage.</p>
<p>We are a long ways off from having a truly honest discussion of race.  Now we see why.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/inconvenient-truths-about-race-slavery/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>348</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Rice, Rutgers and Academia Today</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/rice-rutgers-and-academia-today/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rice-rutgers-and-academia-today</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/rice-rutgers-and-academia-today/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 08 May 2014 04:48:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cancelation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Condoleeza Rice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[graduation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rutgers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224981</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Losing the battle between civility and barbarism on our campuses. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Condoleezza-Rice-Pentagon.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224982" alt="Condoleezza-Rice-Pentagon" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Condoleezza-Rice-Pentagon-450x300.jpg" width="288" height="192" /></a>Condi Rice will not be this year’s commencement speaker at Rutgers University after all.</span></p>
<p>Due to the controversy generated by some students and faculty over Rutgers’ decision to invite the former Secretary of State, Rice decided to back out, explaining that she didn’t want to be “a distraction” at a college graduation.</p>
<p>This whole ugly affair is revealing, not just of the atmosphere of this one institution of higher learning, but of the atmosphere of the contemporary academic world.</p>
<p>It’s true that President Robert Barchi did not succumb to the students’ and faculty’s demands that the school disinvite Rice due to her involvement in the Iraq War. But neither did he utter a syllable’s worth of <i>condemnation </i>of their tactics<i>, </i>proving that, as always, the lion’s share of grease always goes to the leftist squeaky wheel in the world of higher education.</p>
<p>Beyond this, Barchi passed the buck, and actually encouraged the notion that the anti-Rice forces were in the right.  Barchi insisted that he hadn’t “the power” to rescind the invitation to Rice—implying, of course, that <i>had </i>he the power, he would’ve done so. Only the Board of Governors, Barchi continued, has that power.  “If you want to discuss ways of how we can (choose a commencement speaker) going forward, where we can guarantee that the Board has more input when they arrive at the discussion,” he told protestors, then “I think we can do that.”</p>
<p>Translation: We won’t make the mistake of inviting a Republican ever again.</p>
<p>The notion that, as Barchi suggests, the controversy over Rice reveals that the Rutgers community welcomes a marketplace of ideas, a vigorous exchange over contentious issues, is more than a fiction; it is a <i>lie. </i></p>
<p>And that is the real scandal that the Rice affair unveils, the dirty secret that academia, the one place in American life where it <i>should </i>be possible to discuss, genuinely discuss, all manner of disputable topics, is nothing of the kind.</p>
<p>The faculty and students of Rutgers didn’t <i>disagree</i> with their school’s decision to invite Rice.  They <i>refused </i>it.  Between the one and the other lies the difference between civilization and barbarism.</p>
<p>There was no spirited discussion over the administration’s selection of Rice for commencement speaker. Rather, the invitee’s enemies employed the kinds of strong-arm tactics for which leftist student and faculty activists have become known.  To see that this is so, we need only consult those of Rutgers’ students who <i>wanted </i>for Rice to speak at Rutgers.</p>
<p>The Rutgers College Republicans, the Eagleton Undergraduate Associates, and Greek Life at Rutgers University were among those student groups that petitioned Barchi to denounce the anti-Rice forces for having engendered a “hostile campus environment” on campus.  Speaking on their behalf, Donald Coughlan, chairman of the New Jersey College Republicans, wrote that all it took was a “small minority of the student body and intolerant faculty members” to frustrate the desires of an “overwhelming” majority of students that had looked forward to hearing Rice speak.</p>
<p>Not only had Rice’s detractors “protested loudly” from the time that it was announced that she would be the commencement speaker.  Not only did dozens of them hold a “sit in” at Barchi’s office.  Disgruntled faculty fired off an email to all students urging them to participate in a “teach-in” to rally against Rice.</p>
<p>Coughlan notes that “most students…who do not share the opinions of” these professors and who know them well were “intimidated” by the emails.</p>
<p>A college education is, or is supposed to be, an education into the best of what students’ civilization has to offer, an inheritance, comprised as it is of millennia worth of achievements both intellectual and moral, at once encourages and requires for its appreciation the cultivation of the virtues of head and heart, mind and character.</p>
<p>As the situation at Rutgers clarifies for all with eyes to see, this civilizing mission has been radically turned on its head.  Coercion and intimidation, after all, are the tried and true methods of choice of the savage, the barbarian.  Infinitely worse, though, is that it is <i>faculty</i>—those entrusted with taming the beast that is the next generation—that have instructed their students in the art of wielding these weapons as they crusade for one cause after the other.</p>
<p>And university administrators cower.</p>
<p>This is the academic world today.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/rice-rutgers-and-academia-today/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>138</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Why the Left Will Never Abandon &#8216;Global Warming’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/why-the-left-will-never-abandon-global-warming/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-the-left-will-never-abandon-global-warming</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/why-the-left-will-never-abandon-global-warming/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Apr 2014 04:40:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[agenda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Big Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intergovernmental panel on climate change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224033</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A look at the mother of all issues for the lovers of Big Government.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ClimateChange.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224037" alt="ClimateChange" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ClimateChange-450x318.jpg" width="315" height="223" /></a>It won’t surprise readers of this column to learn that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCG) insists that unless “global warming” is addressed, the planet promises to suffer all manner of evil.   Courtesy of “coastal flooding” and “storm surges,” “urban populations” especially are susceptible to “the risk of death, injury, and disrupted livelihoods [.]”</p>
<p>To a <i>far </i>greater extent than any other issue, that of Global Warming reveals what makes the leftist mind tick.</p>
<p>That the leftist aches from the very marrow of his being for the consolidation of power and authority in a central government is a no-brainer.  While there are <i>ways</i> in which governments <i>use</i> their power to which he objects, the leftist has never known a limit on <i>the amount</i> of power at a government’s disposal with which he could rest comfortably.</p>
<p>So, the leftist has always wanted Big Government.  And this insatiable lust for unlimited government is inseparable from his disdain for the nation-state and its concomitant “nationalism”: national boundaries impose a <i>limit </i>on the extent to which government can expand.  The logic of Big Government has a life all of its own, pointing beyond the nations in which it takes root toward the rest of the planet.  It is self-perpetuating, much like a disease that can’t desist from moving from host to host until it dies.</p>
<p>There is no issue short of a conflict with an extraterrestrial race that better serves the global aspirations of Big Government than that of Global Warming.</p>
<p>The conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott contrasts two fundamentally different models of a modern (“nation”) state.  On the one hand, modern states have been looked upon as “civil associations,” associations of human beings doing their own thing and bound together by nothing more or less than the law.  The latter, in turn, doesn’t tell associates <i>what </i>they must do, but only <i>how </i>they must do, or refrain from doing, whatever it is that they <i>choose </i>to do.  Since laws are not policies designed to bring to fruition some grand master plan or vision for the nation, government, from this perspective, is not visionary or activist.</p>
<p>Rather, government serves the function of an umpire or a referee: it exists solely to ensure that the rules (laws) of the association are observed by all of its members.</p>
<p>Modern states have also been thought of as “<i>enterprise</i> associations.”  The government of an enterprise association is visionary, activist.  It <i>leads</i> by <i>policy; </i>it doesn’t <i>rule </i>by <i>law.  </i>The members of an enterprise association are not related to one another as one law-abider to another, but as “joint-enterprisers,” comrades-in-arms, fellow-travelers.</p>
<p>“Global Warming” is made for the idea of the state-as-enterprise association.</p>
<p>Even <i>war</i>, the stuff of which collectivist dreams are made, isn’t quite as amenable to the lover of Big Government as is Global Warming.  War insures the centralization of power and the transformation of government into an agent of activism.  However, from the perspective of the leftist, the zealot of Big Government, war—because it always pits one actor <i>against</i> another—exacerbates “nationalism” and, thus, actually <i>limits </i>the growth of government.</p>
<p>Global Warming is another proposition altogether.  The term “Global Warming,” far from being descriptive, is chock-full of imagery of death and destruction of epic proportions.  The term is what logicians since Aristotle have referred to as an “appeal to force,” a rhetorical device designed to at once circumvent rational argumentation and <i>coerce</i> people into bending to the will of its apologists.  It is the secular equivalent of Hell or Armageddon in both the images that it calls to mind as well as the uses (i.e. the instillation of fear and the consolidation of power) to which it is put.  Like Hell or Armageddon, there is no one that is safe from its clutches—unless they turn to, not Almighty <i>God, </i>but Almighty <i>Government. </i></p>
<p>And since Global Warming is, well, global, it provides the golden opportunity for the governments of the world to either join forces or synthesize with one another.</p>
<p>In the process, national sovereignty and individual liberty will be relegated to the dustbin of history.</p>
<p>Global Warming is the gift that keeps on giving to the leftist.  This is why he will never give it up.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/why-the-left-will-never-abandon-global-warming/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>87</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>‘Academic Justice’: Inside the Abyss of the Academy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/academic-justice-inside-the-abyss-of-the-academy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=academic-justice-inside-the-abyss-of-the-academy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/academic-justice-inside-the-abyss-of-the-academy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:25:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[academic justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harvard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harvey Mansfield]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Herrnstein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sandra Korn]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219805</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The mentality behind a Harvard student's call to abolish campus free speech and thought. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/sandra-korn-300x234.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-219820" alt="sandra-korn-300x234" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/sandra-korn-300x234.jpg" width="300" height="234" /></a>Sandra Korn is a Harvard University undergraduate student and a writer for <em>The Harvard Crimson</em>.  In a recent edition of the school’s paper, she argues for abandoning the traditional value of “academic freedom” in favor of what she calls, “academic justice.”</span></p>
<p>Korn may still be but a student, but both the lines along which she thinks as well as the ease with which she articulates her thoughts reveals to all with eyes to see the character of the academic environment in which she’s been reared:  those whom she wishes to deprive of academic freedom are just those academics who refuse to endorse the leftist ideology of Korn and her professors.</p>
<p>Korn singles out as instances of teacher-scholars who should have been stripped of their academic freedom just and only those figures who are noted for their penchant for smashing the sacred cows of the left.</p>
<p>Richard J. Herrnstein is one such example.  Herrnstein is probably most distinguished for having co-authored, along with Charles Murray, the now famous, <em>The Bell Curve</em>. However, the thesis that IQ differences vary with race and that, to at least some extent, these differences are genetic, is one that he defended two decades earlier, back in 1971.  Because of this position of his, militant student activists disrupted Herrnstein’s classes and demanded that, along with sociologist Christopher Jencks (another thought criminal), he be fired.</p>
<p>Quoting Herrnstein, Korn relays that while claiming to have not been “bothered…personally” by the attacks against him, Herrnstein admitted that he was deeply troubled by the fact it was now “hazardous for a professor to teach certain kinds of views” at Harvard.  Korn replies that this was precisely the point of “the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] activists—they wanted to make the ‘certain kinds of views’ they deemed racist and classist unwelcome on Harvard’s campus.”</p>
<p>Harvey Mansfield is another person upon whom Korn sets her sights.  She charges Mansfield with “publishing…sexist commentary under the authority of a Harvard faculty position” and avows that she “would happily organize with other feminists on campus to stop him” from continuing to do so.</p>
<p>Korn admits that while it could very well be the case that student activists are guilty of infringing upon the academic freedom of the Herrnsteins and Mansfields of the world, this “obsession with the doctrine of ‘academic freedom’ often seems to bump against something [that] I think [is] much more important: ‘academic justice.’”</p>
<p>The “obsession” with academic freedom Korn thinks is “misplaced,” for “no academic question is ever ‘free’ from [such] political realities” as “racism, sexism, and heterosexism.”  After all, since “our university community opposes” such things, “it should ensure that this research…promoting or justifying oppression…does not continue.”  This is in keeping with the demands of “academic justice.”</p>
<p>So too does the craving for “academic justice” account for the decision of the American Studies Association at Harvard to boycott “Israeli academic institutions until Israel ends its occupation of Palestine.”  The ASA, Korn explains, are interested, not in resorting to “the ‘freedom’ game” of “those on the right,” but in achieving “social justice.” Thus, they “take the moral upper hand.”</p>
<p>Korn concludes by reiterating the central thesis of her essay that our “obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom” prevents us from considering “more thoughtfully what is just.”</p>
<p>In a sane world, a world that hasn’t been subverted by decades of leftism, it would be viewed as nothing less than a scandal that any college student, let alone a student at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, would hold Korn’s views, to say nothing of publishing them. Traditionally, the university had been regarded as among the premiere civilizing institutions, the place where students were educated in just those intellectual and moral habits that would enable them to formulate, articulate, and defend their own convictions while treating those of their opponents with respect and even charity.</p>
<p>The academic world inhabited by the Korns of our world is a radically different kind of place.  Views with which one disagrees are not to be refuted, but condemned, and their proponents demonized.  The university exists not for the sake of acquiring and conveying truth and knowledge, but for the sake of “social justice”—i.e. a totalizing leftist ideology that is to be imposed, “by whichever means necessary,” upon both students and faculty alike.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/academic-justice-inside-the-abyss-of-the-academy/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>50</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Democratic Party and Karl Marx</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-democratic-party-and-karl-marx/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-democratic-party-and-karl-marx</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-democratic-party-and-karl-marx/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:30:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chuck Schumer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[unemployed]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218752</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Unveiling the roots of Democrats' logic. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/karl_marx.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-218818" alt="karl_marx" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/karl_marx-252x350.jpg" width="252" height="350" /></a>New York Senator Chuck Schumer thinks that it is a good thing, an affirmation of “family values” and “freedom,” that nearly 3 million people are expected to stop working in order to be able to qualify for Obamacare subsidies.</p>
<p>While on “Meet the Press” this past weekend, Schumer was blunt: The “bottom line,” he said, “is very simple.  What [the] CBO [Congressional Budget Office] said is that many American workers would have freedom.  Now that’s a good word,” Schumer continued, for it means that Americans would now have the “freedom to do things that they couldn’t [previously] do.”</p>
<p>That Obamacare promises to discourage people from looking for work is also a boost for “family values.” Schumer explained: “The single mom who’s raising three kids [and] has to keep a job because of healthcare, can now spend some time raising those kids. That’s a family value.”</p>
<p>Schumer’s fellow partisans, both in Washington <i>and </i>the media, are seconding his sentiments.</p>
<p>And make no mistakes about it: Schumer, Barack Obama, and all leftists who have been aching for national healthcare for a century truly believe, to the very marrow of their bones, that work or labor is something from which most people need <i>liberation</i>.</p>
<p>This is but another way of saying that some of the more salient concepts of the philosophy of Karl Marx, if not his entire philosophy, live on in the contemporary Democratic Party.</p>
<p>This is not hyperbole.  That Schumer and Obama may not subscribe to Marx’s “dialectical materialism,” say, is neither here nor there.  The fact is that, like Marx, leftist Democrats are convinced that “capitalism,” i.e. the private sector, “alienates” workers from their “labor.”</p>
<p>Marx contrasted “the human world” with “the world of things.”  He writes: “The <i>devaluation </i>of the human world increases in direct relation with the <i>increase in value </i>of the world of things” (emphases original).  A worker’s labor reduces the worker to “a commodity [.]”</p>
<p>That is, workers are related to their work “as to an <i>alien </i>object” (emphasis original). What this means is that the laborer “becomes a slave of the object,” the “thing” or the “commodity,” that he produces.  “The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force,” “an autonomous power” that now “exists independently” of its author.</p>
<p>Marx’s idea seems to be something like this: Human beings produce goods in exchange for the wages of their labor.  This, though, results in the human becoming <i>dependent </i>upon the fruits of his labor, for his need for “subsistence” demands that he continue producing.  The creature now stands over and above the creator.  But it isn’t just the product of his labor to which the laborer is now enslaved: he is enslaved as well to his labor itself.</p>
<p>Since a person who works is related to “his own activity as something alien and not belonging to him,” his “activity” becomes “suffering (passivity),” his “strength” is rendered “powerlessness,” and his “creation” is his “emasculation [.]”   In other words, “the personal physical and mental energy of the worker, his personal life,” is “an activity which is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him.”</p>
<p>And because of the human being’s “alienation” from both his labor and that which it produces, each worker is now “alienated” from other human beings: “man becomes alienated from other men.”</p>
<p>Schumer, Obama, and all leftist Democrats who claim to think that Americans’ emancipation from work is some kind of historical achievement believe what they say.  This is what their opponents <i>must </i>understand.  We must also understand that <i>this</i> belief of Schumer’s, Obama’s, and Marx’s is inseparable from another: <i>Private property</i> is both cause and effect of the misery, the “alienation,” brought about by work.</p>
<p>Of course, no contemporary Democrat will think to say this aloud, but their actions speak loudly enough, revealing for all who will but listen that they are of one mind with Marx when the latter laments how private property, being both “the product of alienate labor” <i>and</i> “the means by which labor is alienated,” “has made us so stupid and partial [.]”</p>
<p>Doubtless, there are legions of Democrats—and, for that matter, Republicans—who will genuinely regard this analysis as over the top.  They are mistaken.  Both the policies for which we argue, as well as the arguments that we offer on their behalf, possess their own logic.</p>
<p>And the logic of leftist Democrats like Schumer and Obama is the logic of Marx.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-democratic-party-and-karl-marx/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>40</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Nightmare of the Egalitarian’s Dream</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-nightmare-of-the-egalitarians-dream/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-nightmare-of-the-egalitarians-dream</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-nightmare-of-the-egalitarians-dream/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2014 05:20:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egalitarian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Equality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[leftist fantasies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217535</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama’s leftist fantasies lead to a hell on Earth for the lover of liberty.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/soc.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217545" alt="PUBLIC DM ORIGINALS 31/05/2003 (P43) 1933 STALIN SLAVE LABOUR CAMP" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/soc.jpg" width="380" height="275" /></a>So President Obama and his fellow travelers want to eradicate, or at least ameliorate, “income inequality.” What else is new?</p>
<p>But why stop there?  An intellectually and morally consistent egalitarian knows that if inequality in the prices of <i>labor</i> (i.e. income) is an injustice deserving of rectification, then so too is inequality in the prices of <i>all </i>other “commodities” an injustice deserving of the same.</p>
<p>The price of an Apple computer and that of a pencil are radically “unequal.”  So too are there massive “disparities” between the respective prices of a Mercedes Benz and a tricycle; a package of underwear from Walmart and a Gucci Coach Bag; a necklace from Tiffany’s and graphic novel from Barnes and Noble; admission to a movie matinee and reservations aboard a two week vacation on a Cruise ship.</p>
<p>If the government is obligated to “close the gap” between “the rich” and “the poor,” then is as well obligated to close all of these “gaps” as well.</p>
<p>A consistent leftist egalitarian would recognize that there is no principled ground for <i>not </i>taxing every red cent of either the wealthiest “one percent” or, for that matter, of that earned by anyone else. There may be <i>prudential </i>reasons for drawing an <i>arbitrary</i> line at some tax rate or other.  In <i>principle, </i>however, if it is morally permissible for the government to tax (confiscate) <i>some</i> of the legitimately acquired assets of citizens, then it must be just as permissible for the government to tax (confiscate) <i>all </i>of their resources.</p>
<p>To acknowledge this, though, our consistent egalitarian would then have to acknowledge that the idea of self-ownership is nothing more or less than a “capitalist” or “bourgeoisie” fiction, for if a person is not entitled to refuse the government any of his resources, then he does not <i>own </i>those resources.  And if he doesn’t own the resources in his labor, time, energy, and money, then he doesn’t own <i>himself.  </i></p>
<p>Rather, it is <i>the government</i> that owns <i>all. </i></p>
<p>Monetary inequalities aren’t the only inequalities to which the true egalitarian will object.  Inequalities in physical attractiveness and ability are just as undeserved, just as <i>unfair, </i>as any other.</p>
<p>In order to compensate the ugly for their accident of birth, the real champion of equality knows that the government should, say, compel the beautiful to at least date, for a specified period of time, the less beautiful. To the objectors, the egalitarian’s reply is simple: such a policy is nothing more or less than another species of <i>integration </i>designed to combat but another species of discrimination based on physical appearance.</p>
<p>Nor is it fair that some people are endowed with more physical strength and musculature than others.  So as to “close the gap” between the fit and the unfit, the strong and the weak, he should implore government to, among other things, require <i>all </i>remotely able-bodied Americans to sign up with a government-approved gym at which they will be required to exercise for, say, at least an hour at a time three days a week.  As for those Americans who already exercise regularly, they will be permitted to continue doing so—<i>unless</i> they already satisfy the government’s standard for “fit and strong.” These Americans will be “asked” of their government to “invest” their time more in other activities and less in the gym while the unfit and weak seek to become the fit and strong.</p>
<p>A consistent egalitarian, given his disdain toward “racism,” will insist that the government integrate what were, or what would’ve otherwise been, racially “segregated” families and homes. Many inequalities—and certainly those with which contemporary egalitarians, like Obama, are mostly concerned—are racial in character. Well, if racial segregation in “public accommodations” was a great evil because it gave rise to gross racial inequalities that persist to the present day, then racial “segregation” in families must be at least as great of an evil, for it too is racially discriminatory.  In fact, who can seriously doubt that a person’s family promises to exert a far greater influence over the formation of his character than does, say, a stranger who refused to allow him to eat with strangers of another race in a restaurant nearly a half-of-a-century ago?</p>
<p>A truly devoted egalitarian wouldn’t rest until mono-racial families were <i>desegregated, </i>their members “redistributed” to other families and homes. At the same time, those who aspire to marry and procreate intra-racially would be prevented from doing so via reverse miscegenation laws. <i>  </i></p>
<p>Of course, neither Obama nor any other left-wing egalitarian would openly countenance any of these measures.  But here’s the point: given their ideology, they have absolutely no grounds for <i>not </i>endorsing them, and every ground for doing so.</p>
<p>The dream of the egalitarian is a world that can only be characterized as the liberty-lover’s worst nightmare.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-nightmare-of-the-egalitarians-dream/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>11</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Left Versus the Realities of Race</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-left-versus-the-realities-of-race/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-left-versus-the-realities-of-race</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-left-versus-the-realities-of-race/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2014 05:05:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Couric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[knock-out game]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[racial fiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216571</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[From slavery to “the knock out game,” the Left substitutes ideological fictions for reality.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/katie.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-216574" alt="katie" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/katie.png" width="280" height="210" /></a>In almost every instance of the so-called “knock out game,” perpetrators have been black and their victims mostly white (and/or) Asian. There is <i>one</i>—and <i>only </i>one—case in which the racial dynamics of this violence reversed course, an incident from Texas involving a white predator and a black prey.  Not unsurprisingly, this is the only instance of “the game” that Barack Obama’s Department of Justice is choosing to pursue as a “hate crime.”</p>
<p>And it is the one and only incident regarding which Katie Couric unreservedly disclosed the respective races of the perpetrator and victim on her daily television show.  As for the phenomenon generally, Couric was careful to convey the impression that it was racially-neutral, an activity in which “kids” of all races routinely engaged.</p>
<p>Couric’s take was all too predictable.</p>
<p>It is also a lie, a lie of omission, for like that of all of her colleagues in the left-leaning media, it is painfully clear that Couric’s objective is to manipulate the public into thinking that this phenomenon is something that it isn’t.</p>
<p>In reality, though, Couric is simply doing with this racial issue what leftists have been doing with the issue of race for a long, long time.</p>
<p>Consider slavery, <i>the </i>lynchpin of the narrative underwriting racial politics in America.</p>
<p>To know only the conventional account of slavery is to know worse than nothing. It is to know <i>next to</i> nothing—just enough truth, however miniscule, to make one think that one knows the whole truth.</p>
<p>According to the conventional narrative, whites originally kidnapped blacks from some idyllic African paradise for the sake of reducing them to a lifetime of servitude in America.</p>
<p>In other words, only white Americans were slave masters and only blacks were slaves.</p>
<p>In reality, slavery is an institution that is as old, and as universal, as humanity itself.  People of all races have both enslaved and been enslaved.  Tellingly, the word “slave” derives from the experience of the <i>Slavish, </i>an Eastern European—i.e. white—ethnic group whose members were enslaved <i>en masse </i>by North African Muslims for a period of nearly two centuries.</p>
<p>Those poor souls who were made to endure the unfathomable evils of the notorious “Middle Passage” were <i>sold </i>by other black Africans, slave traders who were doing nothing other than engaging in one of Africa’s oldest, and most lucrative, practices.  To this day, long after Europeans employed their economic and military might to <i>force</i>, not just Africans, but other “people of color” in Asia and the Middle East, to abolish this abominable industry, slavery continues in parts of “the Dark continent.”</p>
<p>The reader may also be unaware of the fact that in early America, the sight of <i>white</i> slaves—not indentured <i>servants</i>, but <i>slaves—</i>was not an uncommon one at the slave ports. And in the antebellum South, as late as 1860, there were as many as <i>three thousand </i>black slave <i>masters. </i></p>
<p>Another inconvenient tidbit that the ideologically approved tale of slavery omits is that<i>, </i>long before whites discovered the New World, slavery had been ubiquitous among the indigenous peoples of what would become the Americas.</p>
<p>So, while whites most certainly did participate in slavery, to know only this is to know next to nothing, for it suggests that there is something uniquely wicked about whites. But if there is anything at all unique about whites with respect to this issue it is that whites—and white English Christians to boot!—were the first (and only) people in all of human history to spearhead a moral revolt against this perennial trade in human bondage.  As Thomas Sowell and others have long documented, during the apex of the British Empire, the English deployed their immense power, against considerable resistance on the part of Africans and others, to stamp out slavery throughout the world.</p>
<p>Just the slightest acquaintance with real history brings into focus a dramatically different picture of slavery than that advanced by the politically useful racial fiction of opportunists and activists.</p>
<p>Similarly, a dramatically distorted picture of “the knock out game” emerges after Katie Couric and company have left the reality on their editing room floors.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-left-versus-the-realities-of-race/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>61</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Parents: The Glue Holding Our Civilization Together</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/parents-the-glue-holding-our-civilization-together/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=parents-the-glue-holding-our-civilization-together</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/parents-the-glue-holding-our-civilization-together/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 31 Dec 2013 05:05:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andy Tobias]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[civilization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fund]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[parents]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214248</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How supporting families supports civilization.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/at.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214252" alt="at" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/at-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>“Thank you for your service.”</p>
<p>Whenever these words are uttered, it is always—<i>always</i>—a soldier to whom they are directed. And while police officers aren’t typically singled out for random expressions of gratitude, they too are held in particularly high esteem, for like soldiers, police officers are seen as constituting the line between civilization and savagery.</p>
<p>That this popular view is true as far it is goes is undeniable. Equally undeniable, however, is that it only goes so far.  And it doesn’t go very far at that.</p>
<p>The reality is that, first and foremost, it is upon the shoulders of <i>the parent </i>that civilization depends.</p>
<p>More so than anyone else, conservatives know that this is the case.  Soldiers and police officers are <i>government </i>actors.  Yet government is and can only be as good as the citizenry over which it presides.  In other words, in spite of what Big Government ideologues would have us think, governments do not create civilizations. Governments <i>cannot </i>create civilizations.</p>
<p>Fundamentally, a civilization is a composition, authored, as it were, over the span of many thousands of years and by countless numbers of people, of a complex of refined <i>manners</i> or <i>habits.</i></p>
<p>To put it more simply, a civilization is not <i>natural.  </i>It is even <i>un</i>natural.  Rather, civilizations are like works of arts: they are hard won achievements.</p>
<p>What this means is that no one is born a civilized person.  The civilized are not born at all. Savages are born—each and every time a human being comes into the world. The civilized, though, are <i>made. </i></p>
<p>And they are made by their mothers and fathers.</p>
<p>Nature brings individual <i>homo sapiens</i> into the world. But parents cultivate <i>persons.  </i>Through a mostly informal education in the habits of its civilization, parents domesticate the wild animal that is the child.  Through sacrifices small and large, the parent labors tirelessly for years to slay the savage to which they gave birth.</p>
<p>Of course, both father and mother are equally essential to the creation and sustenance of civilization. But fathers are especially important, for not only is the father the protector of his family, in many respects it is the father who teaches both son and daughter what it means to be <i>a man.  </i>As the renowned cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said, “Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention.”  She also remarked that “Fathers are biological necessities but social accidents.”</p>
<p>The family transforms males into men and men into fathers. A preponderance of fatherless homes does not bode well for a civilization.</p>
<p>Sometimes homes are rendered fatherless through <i>choice.  </i>Other times, as in the case of the family of Andrew “Andy” Tobias, there is no choice.</p>
<p>I haven’t seen or spoken to Andy Tobias in well over 20 years.  We met when we were in the first grade together, and then several years later in high school. But the woman with whom he would eventually fall in love and form a family, Laura—also an old classmate of mine—would occasionally touch base with me on Facebook.</p>
<p>This past Christmas, just hours before their children would be up ripping open the presents that Santa would bring them, Andy died of a massive heart attack. He was just 41 years old.</p>
<p>Andy was a plumber and Laura had been a stay-at-home mother. Given that, by all accounts, Andy had been in good health, his death obviously came as a great shock. For Laura and her three children, an old friend of the family has set up a fund—“<a href="http://www.giveforward.com/fundraisers?query=The+Andy+Tobias+Family+Fund">The Andy Tobias Family Fund</a>”—at <a href="http://www.giveforward.com/">giveforward.com</a>.</p>
<p>To the readers of this column, Andy’s and Laura’s are but two arbitrarily selected names from an infinite sea of the tragedy-stricken. Still, <i>I </i>make this plea on their behalf because I know their circumstances.  I know that Andy and Laura are two people who valued <i>family </i>above all. It is this that accounts for why Andy became a father to, not just the two year-old girl he shared with Laura, but the two children the latter had from a previous marriage. It is their abiding love for family that explains why the two did their best to insure that Laura could be a stay-at-home mom.</p>
<p>Now, Laura and her children need help.</p>
<p>As I write this, the terrorist attacks that have just been visited upon Russia at this time leading up to the Winter Olympics remind us of just how precarious is civilization.  Parents, mothers and fathers, are the glue holding it together.</p>
<p>Andy and Laura tried to do right by their family and their civilization.  Please pray for them now and, if able, do your best to help Laura and her children by contributing to <a href="http://www.giveforward.com/fundraisers?query=The+Andy+Tobias+Family+Fund">The Andy Tobias Family Fund</a> at <a href="http://www.giveforward.com/">giveforward.com</a>.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/parents-the-glue-holding-our-civilization-together/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>7</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 1362/1380 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 08:47:01 by W3 Total Cache -->