January 16, 2008
In November, I heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hold forth before a full auditorium at Kenyon College. RFK Jr. appears to rank second only to Al Gore in rabid environmentalist enthusiasm. It was he who last summer iterated what all of us knew already: that those who disagree with the environmental lobby on the topic of global warming are “traitors” who need to be treated as such. But when I heard him speak, Mr. Kennedy’s most interesting claim came when he insisted that our media establishment exhibits a extreme right-wing bias, an ideological bent that is most apparent on that talk radio airwaves. Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck all stand for a foul rightist insanity that is far more hegemonic than anything the left is able to generate. After announcing this, Mr. Kennedy did a wonderful impression of a man too stupid to detect anything left-of-center about the garbled victimology and “rights” talk that accounts for 90% of our daily political conversation. When asked to characterize National Public Radio’s position on a political spectrum, he innocently replied, “They simply report the news.”
On the long drive home to Pennsylvania for my winter break, I decided to listen to some of the evil Nazi-Republican radio jockeys in order to hear some really treasonous stuff. Within five minutes of turning the dial to Rush Limbaugh’s flatulent program, the pill-popping oaf took a call from an honest-sounding gentleman who attempted to start a conversation about Barack Obama‘s fiercely ethnocentric church in Chicago and what political meaning this relationship might have. If I were a dumber college student and more prone to the cascades of unchallenged left-wing pap that circulate on my campus, I would have braced myself at that moment for the unbridled racism that such a call was sure to trigger in Limbaugh’s extremist brain.
Instead, I heard the response I expected from a sensitized slightly right-of-center social democrat. Limbaugh, striking some button or flipping some switch with one of his porky digits, ended the call and announced that his show was above the caller’s sordid question. He would not be discussing “such matters,” he said, and he did not much like the idea that people were discussing them at all, on his show or anywhere else. Clearly Limbaugh did not want to upset the established image as racists of those who would discuss Obama’s obvious and direct links to an aggressive black nationalism. Lucky are we to have a corps of Republican loudmouths like Rush who help us understand that discussion of racism and ethnocentrism on the Left is totally verboten.
Meanwhile the Left is at liberty to bring nukes to this knife fight, presenting as sterling journalism its imaginings about Ron Paul’s “Nazi troubles” and alleged racist ties (the “journalist” in question having to be bitch-slapped into place by attentive readers). In the latest instance, a New Republic author has asserted that judging from some nasty old newsletter, the avuncular liberty-loving Paul is a man “filled with hate.” Such slanders are examples of the “anti-fascist” fury that Paul Gottfried routinely illuminates on this website. This “anti-extremist” obsession has taken over servile minds like those belonging to poor Virginia Heffernan and James Kirchick. This obsession dictates that those who throw up serious opposition to globalist foreign policy or a multiculturalist culture are by definition pathological racists whose political views represent a backwards slide toward a horrifying Nazi past. That Heffernan and Kirchick are obviously stupid, mean-spirited swine is beside the point. More important is the unchallenged strength of left-minded intellectuals in our current political configuration. When any journalist speaks of the “racist ties” belonging to anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton (or any white person, for that matter), we are all expected know in our bones that such ties must exist. Yet no crime committed by any individual left-oriented, however hateful, will ever bring shame to the neocon/liberal establishment. And no amount of reaching out by Republican mouthpieces will ever earn them recognition for the enthusiastic pluralism they wear flamboyantly on their sleeves.
Rush is careful to avoid letting people know about Obama’s black nationalist congregation, which holds a “non-negotiable commitment to Africa“ and obsesses over something called “black liberation theology“”apparently Jesus is a highly motivated partisan of the black lobby and a committed anti-racist, especially when it comes to his own religion. There seems to be little real cost for a Democratic candidate whose church pledges allegiance to Africa and works to eradicate those signs of America’s bourgeois European basis. It is much harder for Huckabee and Romney to pretend to be serious Christians in an older, more traditionally American pattern. Both candidates are continually running through a series of PC hoops in an attempt to “reach out” and apologize for the racist sins of their religions” pasts. Were a talk show host to ask Obama a question that was half as aggressive and hostile as those faced by this pair of grinning Republicans, the VDARE.com blog would celebrate a major victory. Such dubious and occasional consolation prizes are pretty much all that is left for right-minded folks to enjoy.
