The Racial Politics of Paul Ryan

A few weeks ago, Paul Ryan attracted attention to himself by proposing that black men in the Inner City don’t want to work. “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

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I actually live in one and have had a different experience. This was a black neighborhood until bank scams put the homes of black residents in foreclosure including that of a couple who were veterans of Desert Storm. I wrote about the husband in Playboy. Some thugs shot a Korean American neighbor which sent him fleeing down the block. The husband sheltered him and threatened the thugs with lethal retaliation. His home was foreclosed after which it was vacant for nearly a year. This man was not lazy, nor were the McClures who lived next door. I’d get up at four to get the newspaper and Mrs. McClure’s car would be gone. She worked at the post office for decades.Her husband, David, worked in the Navy yard. All of their children are achievers. When her son David died, the executives at the business where he worked flew up to attend the funeral. They commented about his hard work. I’ve also observed workers in the underground economy. They work in nineteenth century conditions. There are no coffee breaks, vacation time, security, and no forty-hour weeks or nine to five limits, or limits on the use of child labor. They work around the clock. If Paul Ryan and his colleagues spent as much time passing legislation instead of going on golf junkets financed by their bosses, The Kochs and others, or visiting sex workers, or refusing to cooperate with a president out of spite, we’d have a golden age. Instead of doing the work, they try to attract attention to themselves with cheap shots against people who don’t have the media power to fight back.  He made his remarks about black inferiority on Bill Bennett’s show, who when drug Czar, blamed drug use on blacks and when education head blamed the country’s failures at math and reading on blacks. He got the show because CNN producers liked his comment that if black children weren’t born the crime rate would decrease, yet he spends a lot his time in a town built by gangsters. He said, “I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” CNN, which was saved by the O.J. trial, found that shaming blacks is big business; so they hired Bennett. (Since whites commit most of the countries crimes, what would be the crime rate if you were to abort white babies?)

Now, Ryan is hanging out with Charles Murray, whose quackery has been exposed by a number of scholars, but whose notions of black inferiority have been accepted by the mainstream.

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Even by Gay rights advocate, Andrew Sullivan. While Ryan is ignorant and ham-fisted in his bashing of blacks, Murray rooter Sullivan ‘s attack has more subtlety. He said on the Bill Maher show, when discussing the merit of S.A.T. tests, that “some cultures are doing better than other cultures,” and “why are liberals afraid to point this out?” Why didn’t Ryan think of that? Why doesn’t Sullivan offer tutoring services for demagogues like Ryan so that their codes will be even finer than the ones recommended in Lee Atwater’s handbook.  He came to prominence by bashing blacks in The New York Times Magazine section, which is prone to depict blacks as cannibals, harking back to the penny press of the 1800s. For his part, Murray might be the most influential sociologist in the country. He is an advisor to the Wisconsin welfare program. Let’s examine again where Murray got money for his research. This time from The Southern Poverty Law Center:

“Started in 1937 by textile magnate Wickliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund’s original mandate was to pursue ‘race betterment’ by promoting the genetic stock of those ‘deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.’ Today, it still funds studies of race and intelligence, as well as eugenics, the ‘science’ of breeding superior human beings that was discredited by various Nazi atrocities.” Does Paul Ryan know that his buddy Charles Murray used money from a Hitler admirer to do his “The Bell Curve?”

In August 1935, Draper traveled to Berlin to attend the International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems. Presiding over the conference was Wilhelm Frick, the Reichminister of the Interior. (Frick was hanged in 1946 for his crimes against humanity.) At the conference, Draper’s travel companion Dr. Clarence Campbell delivered an oration that concluded with the words: “The difference between the Jew and the Aryan is as unsurmountable [sic] as that between black and white…Germany has set a pattern which other nations must follow… To that great leader, Adolf Hitler!” Three years later, when Draper paid to print and disseminate a book titled White America, a personal copy was delivered to Reichminister Frick.

Now on March 20, on MSNBC, Chris Matthews and his guests Vanity Fair writer Kurt Eichenwald and MSNBC ‘s Jonathan Alter warned once again about making analogies to Nazi Germany. That you lose when you do so and that what happened in Germany, the state’s conducting genocide against minorities and others was unique and nothing like it has happened before or since. Rachel Maddow endorses the same prohibition. No analogies should be made to the Nazi state.

I don’t know, the Pioneer Fund‘s philosophy of race seems consistent with that of the Nazis. Also where does that put “Bell Curve” fan Andrew Sullivan? What kind of embrace would Wickliffe and his buddies give to a Gay person like Sullivan? Is Sullivan a victim of self-loathing?

Do you think that members of the Congressional Black Caucus will hip Ryan to the guys with whom he is palling around when he meets with them? Will the black pundits?

On the 15th of March, Jonathan Capehart, your typical muzzled black TV pundit had an opportunity to cite Ryan’s buddy, Charles Murray’s relationship with the Pioneer Fund, but maybe he doesn’t know. Or maybe he doesn’t want Drudge to force Comcast to make him apologize for reverse racism. Like Comcast feminist, Mrs. Harris-Perry, who gets enthusiastic when taking it to the brothers but when she took on a powerful alpha white man like Romney, his buddies who run Comcast made her apologize. Tearfully!

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Capehart is a Jesuit-trained black pundit, part of a clique of Cardinal Dolan enablers at MSNBC; he was brought into trash Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but gave Cardinal Dolan a pass. There Dolan was on “Meet The Press,” knocking down the usual softball questions aimed at the powerful by Imus alumni David Gregory. Dolan had the gall to comment on how the Vatican was dealing with the pedophilia scandal. Neither Gregory nor Capehart brought up the July,23, 2013 Times editorial about the Cardinal “Tragic as the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church has been, it is shocking to discover that Cardinal Timothy Dolan, while archbishop of Milwaukee, moved $57 million off the archdiocesan books into a cemetery trust fund six years ago in order to protect the money from damage suits by victims of abuse by priests. NY Times Maybe the pundits are indifferent to Cardinal Dolan’s scandalous behavior, as indifferent as the leading black and Jewish organizations to a possible candidate for president admiring Charles Murray, or his rival Rand Paul associating with John Wilkes Booth admirers, and hiring someone who calls himself “the southern avenger.” I don’t know which one is admired more by progressives. Putin or Paul.

Comcast feminist Melissa Harris-Perry’s guest on Sunday April 6 was white feminist Micki Mcelya. Instead of dwelling on the evil bucks behind Ryan’s hero Charles Murray, Micki Mcelya, and Mrs.Harris-Perry wanted to know why Ryan concentrated on the idleness of black men instead of addressing the needs of black women. Black feminists have accused white feminists of not participating in the struggle against welfare reform, and proposition 209,which eliminated Affirmative Action, even though Affirmative Action benefitted white women the most, but feminists like Micki Mcelya have found a easy way to express their solidarity with academic black feminists and TV pundits by proposing that black men have it better than black women. Within the last two weeks, white progressive women appearing on KPFA complained that the Trayvon Martin’s death received more attention than Renisha McBride who was shot by Theodore Paul Wafer as she sought aide after being involved in a car crash. Even when it comes to death, these white feminists wish to pit black men against black women.

For their part, you’d think that Jewish and Black organizations would renew the alliance that began in the early 1900s over the issue of police brutality perpetrated against both groups the notorious NYPD, since such thinking as that promoted by Charles Murray and his backers threaten both groups. But no. Like Paul Ryan, an Irish American, who wants to obtain his Aryan props by using the traditional route, taking a dump on black Americans, with the kind of commentary that was once aimed at his group, some Jewish intellectuals are his traveling companions. Murray’s book received raves in Commentary, where new Aryans like Norman Podhoretz and his spouse Midge Decter hang out. They’ve made a career of scolding black teenagers about their sexual habits when Ted Solotaroff (October 9, 1928 – August 8, 2008) revealed that they were party animals in the 1950s.Some Jews who believe that they have assimilated into whiteness, a mistake that was made in Germany; They must not read the kind of far right literature that I have read. Literature that has led some to store weapons and to act upon some of the ideas carried in this literature. In the American far rights ideal world, both blacks and Jews are eliminated.

I’m perhaps the only individual who remembers David Duke’s final press conference as a presidential candidate. Few reporters attended. This KKK leader was very bitter. He said that his campaign about “a growing black underclass ”had been co-opted. By Bill Ciinton?

(Tom Metzger, another Nazi said that he disagreed with Duke about a “growing black underclass.” He told Larry King that the average welfare recipient at the time was “ a white woman whose husband has left her). Duke should have waited it out. If he had stuck around, Paul Ryan might be quoting him.

Have Charles Murray’s Nazi funded ideas entered the mainstream? Now you can’t get more mainstream than NBC. On March 13, Tamron Hall, a black newscaster, who is fast on her feet, got into a testy exchange with NBC’s Kasie Hunt.

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Ms. Hunt said that she thought that Paul Ryan’s comments about lazy black people who don’t want to work were “positive.” Paul Ryan said that black men have hated work for generations. Maybe, eating watermelon, while reclining in hammocks, they used telekinesis to harvest a crop that made the south the richest economy.

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In the latest NYPD public relations stunt parading as entertainment, “Blue Bloods,” script written and produced by right wing actor Tom Selleck, the Irish are consigned to their usual shit role, which the late Bob Callahan, a great writer and intellectual, and author of Big Book of Irish- America Culture, called a stereotype. That of keeping the riff raff, Latinos and blacks, out of the hair of the one percent. Paul Ryan, an Irish American, plays the same role. So does Charles Murray. So did William F.Buckley, who was prone to making racist and anti-Semitic remarks,*** yet, who was slobbered over by progressives when he bit the dust. lord do they miss him. Their kind of conservative. Someone who played the Harpsichord and talked like Lord Mountbatten. They miss Daniel Moynihan, too. When columnists like Nick Kristof run out of ideas they fall back on waving the Moynihan report into the faces of blacks, without noting that Moynihan said that black women were on the way to creating a new species.* Yet Kristof assures us that Moynihan so desperate for his Anglo bona fides, wasn’t a racist.

Another fucking bill that you have to pay as a black American is that Paul Ryan, Bill Bennett, Charles Murray, and Andrew Sullivan believe that they are smarter than you. Now from time to time you’ll hear a pundit remark about how conservatives in Europe would be considered progressive in this country or in Canada where conservatives endorse Universal Health Insurance. It is also noted that Hitler’s rise to power was opposed by both German communists and conservatives. That’s because the conservatives in the United States are conservatives in name only. They’re peddling something else and it stinks! Writing in Time magazine about Glenn Cross who shot Christians thinking that they were Jews, David Von Drehle, said that Cross “nursed the idea that genes divide us.” Well, don’t Ryan, Sullivan, Murray, whose Scots-Irish group was underclassed by Kevin D. Williamson in an article titled “The White Ghetto,” believe the same thing? As this crackpot was driven away he shouted “Heil Hitler,” a fact noted by Rachel Maddow,who has been warning us about making analogies between events in the United States and those that took place in Nazi germany.

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Ishmael Reed is the publisher of Konch.  His information is at IshmaelReed.org.

Notes.

*Johann HariThe Strange, Strange Story of the Gay Fascists” October 21,2008

** www.independent.co.uk/…/peter-pringles-america-moy…‎

Aug 1, 1994 DANIEL Patrick Moynihan, New York’s senator, professor, philosopher and former dockworker, has at least two characteristics that make him stand out from his colleagues in the US Congress. He always wears bow ties, and when he speaks about the social problems of America he is uncannily insightful. The problem is the way he talks. It makes people mad.

It happened again the other day. In discussing the epidemic of children born to unmarried mothers, Moynihan said so many teenagers are having babies that ‘if you were a biologist, you could find yourself talking about speciation’.

As an intellectual, he was clearly tickled by the idea that he had stumbled upon a possible scientific explanation for the social phenomenon. In the biological sense, ‘speciation’ means the creation of a new species that cannot be interbred with the one from which it evolved.

***William F. Buckley, Rest in Praise Glowing obits obscure an ugly record By Steve Rendall

…opposed civil rights legislation and once declared that ‘the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail.’”A 1957 editorial written by Buckley, “Why the South Must Prevail” (National Review, 8/24/57), cited the “cultural superiority of white over Negro” in explaining why whites were “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where [they do] not predominate numerically.” Appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air in 1989 (rebroadcast 2/28/08), he stood by the passage. “Well, I think that’s absolutely correct,” Buckley told host Terry Gross when she read it back to him.

Just months before the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, Buckley warned in his syndicated column (2/18/65) that “chaos” and “mobocratic rule” might follow if “the entire Negro population in the South were suddenly given the vote.” In his 1969 column “On Negro Inferiority” (4/8/69), Buckley heralded as “massive” and “apparently authoritative” academic racist Arthur Jensen’s findings that blacks are less intelligent than whites and Asians.

(Esquire, 9/69), Buckley charged that Jews, moved by the “political myth” that “Hitler was the embodiment of the ultra-Right” and by the fact that Communists opposed him, “emotionally feel a kind of toleration for Communist excesses in this country.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ishmael Reed’s latest play is “The Conductor.”