The latest PIDOOMA scaremongering about a black-on-white 'race war'

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...I can’t understand what could have gone wrong in Littleton, Colorado. If only the parents had kept their children away from the guns, we wouldn’t have had such a tragedy. Yeah, it must have been the guns...It couldn’t have been because we place our children in day care centers where they learn their socialization skills among their peers under the law of the jungle...It couldn’t have been because our children, who historically have been seen as a blessing from God, are now being viewed as either a mistake created when contraception fails or inconveniences that parents try to raise in their spare time...It couldn’t have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.

--Rep. Tom DeLay speaking on the House floor on June 16, 1999, reading from a local newspaper letter to the editor. (Frequently this quote has been shrunken down to a forged one that nevertheless gets the message through: "The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.&quot

I came upon the (shortened) quote in Colin Woodard's new book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. And today, I decided to take a peek into the senile wingnut mind of Thomas Sowell. His latest PIDOOMA job? "A censored race war". How?

What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers the other several times over.

It may be understandable that some people want to head off such a catastrophe, either by not reporting the attacks in this race war, or not identifying the race of those attacking, or by insisting that the attacks were not racially motivated — even when the attackers themselves voice anti-white invective as they laugh at their bleeding victims.

...If and when that pressure leads to an explosion of white backlash, things could be a lot worse than if the truth had come out earlier, and steps taken by both black and white leaders to deal with the hoodlums and with those who inflame the hoodlums.

These latter would include not only race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson but also lesser known people in the media, in educational institutions and elsewhere who hype grievances and make all the problems of blacks the fault of whites.

The mob violence of summer 2011 was Sharpton's and Jackson's fault? Did Sowell just pull that theory out of thin air? I wonder how many of the perpetrators even know who Sharpton and Jackson are. Not comparable at all to the Crown Heights riot (after Sharpton made a controversial eulogy with anti-Semitic tone). The reason I put that Tom DeLay reading the stupid LTTE at the beginning was to show that Sowell is showing the same "logic" that DeLay had. "See, they're teaching evolution in public schools, that's why teens shoot up schools! See, they're teaching sociology and dare to point out racial issues in the media and higher education! That's why ghetto youth are robbing 7-Elevens!"

Furthermore, the ethics code of the Society of Professional Journalists recommends to "Tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience boldly, even when it is unpopular to do so" yet also "Avoid stereotyping by race (etc.)". It is indeed true that people of all races, sexual orientations, and classes commit acts of evil, and the media does cover such stories with due diligence to avoid stereotyping. But could you imagine the consequences for the greater black community in general if Sowell were news director for an outlet, say, CNN?

Sowell even tried to paint the media as anti-Asian:

Asian American school children in New York and Philadelphia have for years been beaten up by their black classmates. But people in the mainstream media who go ballistic if some kid says something unkind on the Internet about a homosexual classmate nevertheless hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil when Asian American youngsters are beaten up by their black classmates.

And Sowell probably is covering his ears and eyes at the NATIONWIDE anti-gay bullying while citing only two cases of anti-Asian bullying in the nation. Furthermore, Sowell only shows his bigotry and willful ignorance with his phrasing "says something unkind on the Internet"...is he not aware of Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide over his college roommate bugging his dorm during a gay intimate encounter? Or in the ABC News story I linked to earlier, a study found that after elementary school, homophobic "verbal teasing turns to violence at the middle school and high school level."

Lastly, a nostalgia for the 1950s:

Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty, discrimination and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.

Wasn't social pathology among ALL classes far lower in the '50s, a time of higher moral authority that conservatives generally favor? And of less class warfare too (91% top tax rate, for instance)? More hope for those living in the ghetto they could get a good union job and rise up to the middle class?

For someone who's the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Sowell sure knows what gets the dollars rolling in. Simple: know his audience, examine society, pick whichever facts (and pull some out of you-know-where) to fit his narrative of True American(TM) values, and feed the red meat to the salivating right-wing dogs. I'm not sure if he's aware of this, but certainly some wingnut will pick up the claims he makes (including a questionably sourced quote of a victim of violence, my google search of it returned only Sowell's column) and spread them around viral chain emails with uber-sensationalized headlines so disgusting I think you'll know what I'm talking about.

Oh, have you ever heard of the blog My Right Wing Dad? That blog rips apart right-wing viral emails (including some that quote Sowell).

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1. BTTT, shortened in case you don't have much time.