Kwanzaa: Fake Holiday Created by a Felon

By Paul Mulshine
The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ)
December 26, 2012


A Kwanzaa sign sits alongside a nativity display on Woodbridge town grounds.

(Brian Amaral/NJ.com)
 

It's that time of year again. You know what time I mean - the time when the media promote that fake holiday created by a crazed california felon who wanted to create racial discord.

That's right - Kwanzaa.

Do a news search and you'll find hundreds of articles about wonderful Kwanzaa celebrations held all over America. Good luck finding a single one that mentions the sorry fact that the holiday's creator was imprisoned for torturing a couple of African-American women.

You'll have to go here to my original article on Kwanzaa to find that. The article originally ran in FrontPage Magazine back in 1998. It's easily found on the Internet by any journalist willing to do the tiniest bit of research into Kwanzaa. I like to run it this time every year as a corrective to all of the dreadful journalism that occurs in every report of Kwanzaa.

If the media told the truth about Kwanzaa in these articles, then every right-thinking American would realize it's a fraud. Instead we get the same silly endorsement of this "African" feast that has nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with California in the 1960s.

If you don't have the time to read that long expose then you can read the column I wrote on the subject back in 1998. Here it is in full:

One of my alert readers called me the other day to inform me that the public schools in New Jersey aren't allowed to celebrate Christmas but are celebrating Kwanzaa.

This is intriguing. Christmas celebrates the legacy of Christ who, by all accounts, was a nonviolent man who believed that people of all types could learn to live in peace. Kwanzaa celebrates the legacy of an extremely violent man from California who has dedicated his life to spreading dissension among the races.

More on that later. First let's deal with the question of why schools can propagate a belief in Kwanzaa but not Christmas or Chanukah. For an answer, I called Ed Martone of the American Civil Liberties Union.

''Kwanzaa isn't a religious holiday," said Martone. "It's a cultural holiday. It doesn't have the same restrictions as Chanukah or Christmas."

I'll grant that there is a certain logic to the view. After all, once the government gets involved in religion, the potential conflicts among Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and atheists are so complex that perhaps we are better off avoiding them altogether.

But by that same logic, the public schools should not be pushing certain cultural practices. And the schools especially shouldn't be endorsing cultural practices created by a character with the beliefs and the background of Ron Karenga.

It is not easy to get a hold of the facts about the background of the creator of Kwanzaa. In fact, it is nearly impossible. The history of the founder of Kwanzaa has disappeared into an Orwellian time warp. If you look up the name "Ron Karenga" on any of the many newspaper data bases that are available these days, you will read a glowing account of a deep-thinking philosopher who comes across as a sort of jolly Father Christmas for African-Americans.

You won't find any reference to murder or torture. Yet murder was a specialty of US, the paramilitary organization that Karenga ran in Los Angeles in the late 1960s.

As for torture, Karenga took that more personally. The accounts of his personal role in a particularly sadistic episode of brutality have been largely lost to history. The episode seems to exist only on a few microfilmed pages of the Los Angeles Times. It took two days of research and phone calls to track them down. Here is an excerpt from an article headlined "Woman describes two days of torture" on the May 1971 trial of Karenga for torturing two dissident members of his group:

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

Karenga was convicted and served more than three years in a state prison.

This was not an isolated incident. In 1967, Karenga was accused of having his thugs beat up a student who asked him an impertinent question at a college forum. In 1969, US got involved in a struggle with the Black Panthers for control of the black studies program at UCLA. All involved carried guns on campus. The US guys were quicker on the draw; they killed two Panthers in a shootout at the student center.

It would be nice to say that after Karenga got out of jail in 1975 he repented, saw the error of his ways and invented Kwanzaa as a means of atoning for his past. Nice, but untrue. Karenga has never atoned for his thuggery, probably because no one ever asked him to. And his sole concession to repentance was his 1975 conversion to Marxism. For him, this was considered to be a sign that he had moderated his views.

Karenga invented Kwanzaa at the height of his gang days, in 1966. And he made it up not to bring peace among the races but to divide them. That's why he placed this alleged "harvest festival" in competition with Christmas, which he derided because of its ties to the hated capitalist system.

It may be true that Kwanzaa has evolved into a ceremony that has importance to a great number of well-intentioned people, people who have no knowledge of its creator's questionable history. But Karenga himself continues to champion the holiday as an example of what he terms "cultural nationalism." This is the view that black people are a separate "nation" within a hostile country. During a visit to Newark in 1987, Karenga defined America as "an insane, socially decaying society." "We need a value system and a support system . . . because the world is organized against your Africanism," he told Newark residents.

Karenga remains a leading spokesman for the multicultural movement, a movement based on the idea that Americans should emphasize their differences rather than their similarities. The idea of Kwanzaa fits firmly within multiculturalism. And however you feel about multiculturalism, you must admit that it is a political movement and therefore one that should not be supported with tax dollars.

As for Karenga himself, he should be given all the respect due a convicted torturer. Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I believe that once a man inserts a hot soldering iron into a woman's mouth, he should be excluded from public discourse for eternity. I may be wrong, however. Certainly, the people in California don't seem to share this view. Karenga is now a professor at California State University in Long Beach.

That's California for you. By that standard, there's a university presidency waiting somewhere for Charles Manson when he finally gets out.

The DOJ/Media Matters Conspiracy

By Hans A. Von Spakovsky
http:// www.nationalreview.com/corner
September 21, 2012

It’s an odd feeling to see your name on the list of individuals targeted by the Justice Department. Especially when you used to work there.

The DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs appears to have enlisted Media Matters to serve as its unofficial PR wing — the one responsible for running smear campaigns too dirty for the Department to risk leaving fingerprints.

Media Matters is, of course, a far-left advocacy group that masquerades as a nonpartisan truth-teller and media watchdog. I am not sure whether to feel honored that my critical reporting on the Justice Department’s misdeeds and rank politicalization attracted such attention, or upset that my taxpayer dollars have been used to attack me personally and professionally. But there is no question that taxpayers and Congress should be upset over unethical conduct by Justice Department employees who use government resources to abuse private citizens and journalists guilty only of reporting on the department’s malfeasance.

Matthew Boyle of The Daily Caller discovered the smoking gun through a Freedom of Information Act request for DOJ emails. The department, of course, dragged its feet, taking nine months to respond to the request, even though the law requires a response within 20 days. But it was worth the wait.

The recovered e-mails document communications between Tracy Schmaler, the director of the DOJ Office of Public Affairs, and “reporters” at Media Matters. In dozens of emails, Schmaler enlists Media Matters and provides information “to attack reporters covering DOJ scandals,” in Boyle’s words. In addition to me, Schmaler solicited attacks on other former Justice Department lawyers such as J. Christian Adams, NRO contributor Andy McCarthy, and Christopher Coates; bloggers and journalists such as Mike Vanderboegh and William LaJeunesse of Fox News; and even members of Congress such as Darrell Issa. Schmaler also sought an article from Media Matters attacking Judson Phillips, one of the founders of Tea Party Nation.

All of this conduct is reprehensible. But the attacks that Schmaler engineered on Christopher Coates were particularly unethical and unprofessional. At the time, Coates was a DOJ employee, detailed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Carolina to prosecute criminal cases. Coates was a career lawyer, the former chief of the Voting Section and an experienced civil-rights attorney.

But Coates had upset DOJ’s political hacks when he complied with a lawfully issued subpoena for his testimony from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Political appointees at DOJ had instructed him to defy the law and not comply with the subpoena. His testimony before the Commission was crucial to explaining DOJ’s unjustified dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case and the Obama administration’s implementation of a policy against race-neutral enforcement of the law. Coates testified that he was told that the law would not be enforced against minority defendants, no matter how egregious their conduct.

Thus, the e-mails reveal that the DOJ Office of Public Affairs was directing attacks by an outside group on one of its own employees. Schmaler was clandestinely providing false information to her chosen media source to attack him while he was prosecuting cases for DOJ. This is the kind of behavior one expects from dictatorships and banana republics, not from the chief law-enforcement agency of the U.S. government.

Schmaler was also potentially violating the federal law that bars retaliation against whistleblowers like Adams and Coates. She should resign, and the inspector general should investigate her flagrant misbehavior
.
If she does not resign or is not terminated, it will be a sign that Eric Holder approves of such abuses and sees nothing wrong with using government resources to attack his own employees as well as reporters, ordinary citizens, and others doing their jobs or exercising their right to report or criticize the conduct (and misconduct) of the Justice Department.

The Five-Alarm Firebell Falls Silent

He never let the bastards get him down.

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com
March 2, 2012

Andrew Breitbart’s heart was too big to fail, but it did anyway.

If you don’t know who Breitbart was, you haven’t been paying attention. A conservative activist, entrepreneur, author, muckraker, media pioneer, and performance artist of sorts, in his heart he was a radical.

His friends saw him as a fearless truth-teller and provocateur. (The word “fearless” will have to be retired from overuse when all of his obituaries have been written.) His enemies, and they are legion even in death, saw him as the most vile creature who ever slithered upon the earth.

Within hours of the news, Twitter lit up with repugnant and ghoulish statements from left-wingers celebrating the premature death of a man with four small children. I won’t repeat them because the printable ones aren’t representative, and the representative ones aren’t printable.

Andrew relished such attacks, truly, because they proved to him that he was having great effect in his work and that his opponents had run out of serious arguments.

This is not to say that Andrew was beyond criticism. He made mistakes. He took full swings at some pitches he should have just let go. He overstated some things that needed to be said, and said some things that didn’t need to be said at all. He was a human run-on sentence who showed deference to no punctuation mark save the exclamation point, a conservative Tasmanian Devil from the Bugs Bunny cartoons we both grew up on, whirling and whizzing through anything in his path. Giving him a dose of Ritalin to treat his hyperactivity would be like throwing a glass of water on a five-alarm fire.

But the hatred his enemies had for him overshot his faults like a dart thrown past the board and over the moon. Others will talk of his accomplishments: working for the Drudge Report in its infancy, creating websites and businesses, pioneering new forms of media, and exploiting the inherent weaknesses and pieties of the old media. And many who knew him will talk of his personal kindness: how the only times he slowed down were when he needed to lend an ear, do a favor, or talk about how much he loved his family.

Those things matter more than the politics, but they are not what made him a public figure. If being kind and loving your family made you famous, countless plumbers, carpenters, and accountants would be famous too.

No, what made him a public figure is what drove him to leap into battle day after day. Andrew had profound contempt for those on the left who claimed a birthright to a monopoly on virtue and tolerance.

He rejected in the marrow of his bones the idea that conservatives needed to apologize for being conservative or that liberals had any special authority to pronounce on the political decency and honesty of others.

Indeed, when liberals called him (or his heroes) racist, Andrew paid them the compliment of taking them seriously. He truly felt that to call someone a racist was as profound an insult as could be leveled. To do so without evidence or logic was a sin.

He believed, rightly, that much of establishment liberalism hurls such charges as a way to bully opponents into silence, and he would not be bullied. That was why, for instance, he offered a reward of $100,000 (payable to the United Negro College Fund) to anybody who could prove tea partiers hurled racial epithets over and over at black congressmen walking past them to vote on Obamacare, as several alleged. No one got paid because the charge — recycled over and over by the media — was a lie.

The Internet was a boon to Andrew because it exposed liberalism’s undeserved monopoly on the “narrative” — one of his favorite words.

60 Minutes won awards for hidden cameras, but when he used the same technique to embarrass liberals, such tactics were suddenly proclaimed ethically beyond the pale. The joke was on the scolds because they had to cover the stories anyway. And the stories got results. Congress defunded ACORN. Heads rolled at NPR. Andrew understood that news and arguments change politics if you can get the news and arguments to the people — and if you don’t let those who don’t like what you say define you.

Whatever his faults, that was my friend’s great and remarkable strength: He never let the bastards get him down. That took away his enemies’ greatest power, and they hated him all the more for it.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the forthcoming book The Tyranny of Clichés. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO.


The Breitbart Experience

Hanging out with the man who led a New Media revolution.

By Robert Stacy McCain
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
March 2, 2012

Last Friday, at 10:30 p.m., Andrew Breitbart sent me a two-word text message: "Where y'at?"

We were both in Troy, Michigan, that night. He was scheduled to speak at the next day's Americans for Prosperity forum. I was in town to cover the Republican presidential primary campaign. Knowing he would be in town, I'd called him earlier, to find out where he would be hanging out, and when he texted me, I called again and learned he was at Morton's steakhouse, down the road from the Marriott Hotel where the AFP conferees were staying. Soon I joined him at Morton's, where we talked a while. He said he had become bored with the GOP presidential race. Instead, he was focused on new angles of attack on the Left. We went over to the Marriott, where Breitbart joined a dozen or so people hanging out in the lobby bar.

Hanging out with Breitbart was an experience that hundreds of his friends and allies had the pleasure of sharing over the years and, when the shocking news of his death came Thursday morning, those people began sharing their stories of a man destined to endure as a legend in the history of the conservative movement. His high-profile public life as a daring provocateur -- who exposed the dirty secrets of the Left and then leveraged his own celebrity to pour the gasoline of publicity on the fires he kindled -- was the tip of a massive iceberg of hard work, generosity, and inimitable genius.

Breitbart was a man of impressive intelligence, possessed of a deep and intuitive understanding of news, politics, and culture. Some of the most talented and experienced journalists of my acquaintance were awed by Breitbart's genius. Long before he'd gained nationwide fame for his work in exposing ACORN and the Anthony Weiner sex scandal, Breitbart was already admired by those who knew of his pioneering work in the development of online New Media, as the former sidekick to Matt Drudge who subsequently helped Arianna Huffington develop the Huffington Post.

The first time I met him was at the 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference. It was near midnight when he came through the hotel lobby with conservative journalist Joel Mowbray. They were on their way up to their hotel room to have a few beers, and I tagged along. Soon, Breitbart was regaling us with tales of his online adventures including the time he spotted police examining a suspicious vehicle parked near a home that was hosting a Hillary Clinton fund-raiser in his Brentwood neighborhood. He posted a brief headline at the Drudge Report, then went into his kitchen to get a snack. As he was walking past his TV on his way back to his computer, he saw that CNN had added the bomb-scare headline to the "crawl" across the bottom of the screen. Such was the impact of this new online medium, and harnessing the power of the Internet to influence news coverage was Breitbart's obsession.

"Changing the narrative," as he often described it, was what Breitbart was all about, and he had studied the habits of the news industry so long and so intensely that he knew exactly how they would react when he began striking back at what he called the "Democrat Media Complex." In the case of the ACORN exposé -- with James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles using hidden cameras to catch officials of the left-wing group agreeing to abet a prostitution operation -- Breitbart first released one video. When ACORN officials insisted that this incident was anomalous, Breitbart then released a second video recorded by O'Keefe and Giles at an ACORN office in another city, where officials were similarly willing to assist plans to pimp out teen hookers. More denials from ACORN ensued, but then Breitbart released another video, and then another and another and another. Reporters who at first had accepted ACORN's denials at face value were eventually forced to acknowledge that Breitbart's young protégés had indeed exposed a willingness of the "community organizing" group to turn a blind eye to criminality. The negative publicity forced ACORN to declare bankruptcy, although the organization lives on in altered form, with various local chapters reconstituting themselves under new names.

The key to the success of that sting was Breitbart's deep understanding of how the news business works, and how people in the industry think and behave. He employed that understanding to powerful effect, and helped others understand it, too. Yet there was only one Breitbart, and his unexpected death at age 43 leaves a huge vacuum in the world of conservative New Media that he did so much to build. By the time of his death, he had become a hero to millions, an inspirational leader. Breitbart was a popular speaker at Tea Party rallies and other conservative gatherings, and always spoke extemporaneously, without a text or notes to guide him.

The last time I saw him, at the AFP Michigan event Saturday, he arrived at the last minute, unshaven and with his hair uncombed, having stayed until the wee hours hanging out in the Marriott lobby. Without any preparation at all, however, he gave a speech that stirred the audience, telling the Tea Party activists that their victory in the 2010 mid-term elections "freaked the living daylights" out of the Left. He talked at length about the Occupy movement, and its strong ties to left-wing organizations -- including labor unions -- that made it "Barack Obama's army." Referring to the fight for the 2012 Republican nomination, he urged his listeners not to focus their attention on the candidates because, he said: "You are needed more than the candidates."

Breitbart was a powerful voice, who always sought to empower others and encourage them to join his fight against the forces of the Left, which he saw as attempting to destroy the America he loved. He will be long remembered by those who had the pleasure of sharing the Breitbart experience.

"Where y'at?" he asked in that text message a week ago.

We're still here, Andrew, still hanging out. But it's just not the same without you.

- Robert Stacy McCain is co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party (Nelson Current). He blogs at The Other McCain.

The New Blacklist

by Patrick J. Buchanan

http://www.humanevents.com/

02/17/2012

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"

A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it "exists to strengthen Black America's political voice," claimed that my book espouses a "white supremacist ideology." Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, "The End of White America."

Media Matters parroted the party line: He has blasphemed!

A Human Rights Campaign that bills itself as America's leading voice for lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered people said that Buchanan's "extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LBGT people around the world."

Their rage was triggered by a remark to NPR's Diane Rehm -- that I believe homosexual acts to be "unnatural and immoral."

On Nov. 2, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on.

"Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite," said Foxman. Buchanan "bemoans the destruction of white Christian America" and says America's shrinking Jewish population is due to the "collective decision of Jews themselves."

Well, yes, I do bemoan what Newsweek's 2009 cover called "The Decline and Fall of Christian America" and editor Jon Meacham described as "The End of Christian America." After all, I am a Christian.

And what else explains the shrinkage of the U.S. Jewish population by 6 percent in the 1990s and its projected decline by another 50 percent by 2050, if not the "collective decision of Jews themselves"?

Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson, "so long as reason is left free to combat it." What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American.

Consider what it is these people are saying.

They are saying that a respected publisher, St. Martin's, colluded with me to produce a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic book, and CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Fox Business News and the 150 radio shows on which I appeared failed to detect its evil and helped to promote a moral atrocity.

If my book is racist and anti-Semitic, how did Sean Hannity, Erin Burnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Lou Dobbs and Ralph Nader miss that? How did Charles Payne, African-American host on Fox radio, who has interviewed me three times, fail to detect its racism?

How did Michael Medved miss its anti-Semitism?

In a 2009 cover story in the Atlantic, "The End of White America?" from which my chapter title was taken, professor Hua Hsu revels in the passing of America's white majority. At Portland State, President Clinton got a huge ovation when he told students that white Americans will be a minority in 2050.

Is this writer alone forbidden to broach the subject?

That homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral has been doctrine in the Catholic Church for 2,000 years.

Is it now hate speech to restate traditional Catholic beliefs?

Documented in the 488 pages and 1,500 footnotes of "Suicide of a Superpower" is my thesis that America is Balkanizing, breaking down along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, culture and ideology, and that Western peoples are facing demographic death by century's end.

Are such subjects taboo? Are they unfit for national debate?

So it would seem. MSNBC President Phil Griffin told reporters, "I don't think the ideas that (Buchanan) put forth (in his book) are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC."

In the 10 years I have been at MSNBC, the network has taken heat for what I have written, and faithfully honored our contract.

Yet my four-months' absence from MSNBC and now my departure represent an undeniable victory for the blacklisters.

The modus operandi of these thought police at Color of Change and ADL is to brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate.

All the while prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment, they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent.

Without a hearing, they smear and stigmatize as racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic any who contradict what George Orwell once called their "smelly little orthodoxies." They then demand that the heretic recant, grovel, apologize, and pledge to go forth and sin no more.

Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers.

I know these blacklisters. They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.


- Patrick J. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, The Death of the West, The Great Betrayal, A Republic, Not an Empire,Where the Right Went Wrong, and most recently Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

You can also follow Mr. Buchanan and Human Events on FACEBOOK.