The documentary examines the rise of the Tea Party movement and various right-wing militias that have formed in the wake of the 2008 election of President Obama.
Chris Matthews takes a break from Obama and the Gulf spill to offer a documentary history lesson on the new American right–and shows how little daylight there is between polite Washington conservatives and those on the fringe.
The White House can breathe a sigh of relief–at least for one night. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, host of Hardball, took leave from his recentassault on the Obama administration’s handling of the Gulf oil spill to return to a more familiar pastime: taking shots at the American right. [ READ MORE ]
You-Tuber Godlesspanther: If ignorance really is bliss then the Texas SBOE members must be in a state of profound eternal orgasm. There is nothing more repugnant than those who are so proud of their stupidity. We all have an obligation as citizens to subject these board members to ridicule and humiliation. I am thoroughly outraged.
HuffingtonPost: AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas State Board of Education adopted a social studies and history curriculum Friday that amends or waters down the teaching of religious freedoms, America’s relationship with the U.N. and hundreds of other items. The ideological debate over the guidelines, which drew intense scrutiny beyond Texas, will be used to determine what important political events and figures some 4.8 million students will learn about for the next decade. [ READ MORE ]
Textbook changes to school curriculum will follow, and since Texas is the largest purchaser of school books in the country, the state therefore has financial clout in the publishing business — and is set to influence the rest of the country — in propagating right-wing racism and mis-information.
Picture:The girl pictured below, was one of the ‘Little Rock Nine‘ — a group of African-American students who were enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The ensuing ‘Little Rock Crisis‘, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, and then attended after the intervention of President Eisenhower, is considered to be one of the most important events in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. On their first day of school, guards at the school would not let them in and they were followed by mobs bearing threats to be lynched.
———————————————————————— Highlights of the prejudiced and racist right-wing changes are:
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1. Public students in Texas will now be required to “evaluate” efforts by global organizations such as the United Nations to “undermine U.S. sovereignty.” The UN’s funding for international humanitarian relief and environmental initiatives will now be portrayed as threats to individual freedom and U.S. sovereignty.
2. The board will require students to explain the roles of “Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.” — Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly is racist conservative political activist and constitutional attorney known for her opposition to feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment. The Heritage Foundation is racist right-wing “think-tank,” established by Joseph Coors in 1974. Heritage is infested with anti-semite, pro-nazi, Aryan supremacists who seek to abolish civil rights laws, minimum wage laws, affirmative action, rights for the handicapped, arms control — and to deport every single non-white immigrant from the United States!. Joseph Coors was the grandson of Adolph Coors and president of Coors Brewing Company. I have always had serious misgivings about skunky “coors light” beer, never tasted it before — now I know why!
The Moral Majority — The Moral Majority was a political organization which had an agenda of evangelical Christian-oriented political lobbying. It was founded in 1979 and dissolved in the late 1980s. It’s origins can be traced to 1976 when Jerry Falwell embarked on a series of “I Love America” rallies across the country to raise awareness of social issues important to Falwell. These rallies were an extension of Falwell’s decision to go against the traditional Baptist principle of separating religion and politics, a change of heart Falwell says he had when he perceived the decay of the nation’s morality. Through hosting these rallies, Falwell was able to gauge national support for a formal organization and also raise his profile as a leader. Having already been a part of a well-established network of ministers and ministries, within a few years Falwell was favorably positioned to launch the Moral Majority. [ READ MORE ]
The Contract with America was a document released by the United States Republican Party during the 1994 Congressional election campaign. Written by Larry Hunter, who was aided by Newt Gingrich, Robert Walker, Richard Armey, Bill Paxon, Tom DeLay, John Boehner and Jim Nussle, and in part using text from former President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union Address, the Contract detailed the actions the Republicans promised to take if they became the majority party in the United States House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Many of the Contract’s policy ideas originated at The Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank.
Republicans were elected to a majority of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1953, and several parts of the Contract were enacted. Some elements did not pass in Congress, while others were vetoed by, or substantially altered in negotiations with President Bill Clinton, who would later sarcastically refer to it as the “Contract on America.”
The leader of the group, Newt Gingrich — ended up being kicked out of the speaker’s chair, and has never held any elective office since, but has maintained a high profile — lying frequently while applauding the current political stunts that House Republicans have been engaging in.
Gingrich is a serial-womanizer, a hardcore racist and shameless liar — as documented variously on this blog. The bum has a split personality — part racist bomb thrower, part statesman, and part tea-bagger.
The National Rifle Association is the custodian of “gun-sucking” bigot America, who hysterically oppose controls that are indistinguishable from those they readily accept as applied to automobiles. Lunatics who anticipate a “future” race war — with blacks and browns, I suppose. Don B. Kates, Jr. demolishes their bigoted rationale in his article: Bigotry, Symbolism and Ideology in the Battle over Gun Control.
3.The whitewashing of slavery in textbooks: The board renamed “Slavery” — “Atlantic Triangular Trade,” Whitewashing the genocidal, disgusting and perverted practice and leveling the trade of people to rum and sugar, says the DC Skeptics blog.
4. Ronald Reagan, the greatest PR swindle in the history of mankind, has been added to a list of “great Americans,” while country music, but not hip hop, can be described as an important cultural movement. The board’s five Democrats objected to the Republican call to include President Barack Obama’s second name of Hussein — obviously a stealth attempt to de-legitimize him as an un-American Muslim!
5.Note: Last year, conservatives on the board changed the science curriculum to downplay the teaching of evolution and the Big Bang theory.
Two Right-Wing Idiots (Kirk Cameron & Ray Comfort) Try To Convince You That God Created a Banana! LOL!
…And Here The Two Thieves “Debunk” Darwin’s Theory of Evolution For The Benefit of Their Pockets
…or even better — exorcise them brother …afriqueonline!
6. Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt in the 1950s, will be watered down. Joe McCarthy was a scumbag for the ages. Much like “Tea-Partyism,” McCarthyism was the political action of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence; Reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries — exactly what the current tea-baggers are doing to the Obama administration.
Essentially, young American students will learn more about the virtues of free enterprise, Biblical values and the Confederacy’s RACIST cause, and less about slavery and civil rights. They will learn less about how brutal, barbaric criminal Anglos nearly wiped out indigenous Indians, stole half of Mexico and viciously used free African labor to sustain a plantation economy in the south.
They want the Saturday market-place lynchings of Africans be erased off the history books. These racist Republican goons are determined to deny future generations of young Americans the knowledge of America’s bloody and sordid past — hence mold them into mindless Republican sheep and racist goon-bags, like Sarah Palin and Rand Paul — hungry and ready to lynch again without the “heavy burden” of their forefather’s despicable deeds!
On the television in his living room, Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor’s house, at his son’s auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate’s background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
“It’s like you’re hearing about two different men with nothing in common,” Peterman said. “It makes it impossible to figure out what’s true, or what you can believe.”
“I think Obama would be a disaster, and there’s a lot of reasons,” said Pollard, explaining the rumors he had heard about the candidate from friends he goes camping with. “I understand he’s from Africa, and that the first thing he’s going to do if he gets into office is bring his family over here, illegally. He’s got that racist [pastor] who practically raised him, and then there’s the Muslim thing. He’s just not presidential!” …..[MORE >>]
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly: Feagin’s voluminous, relentless book testifies to both the strengths and the flaws of applying a sociological approach to the intricate issues of racism in America. Most social scientists, according to this sociologist at the University of Florida (White Racism, etc.) and president of the American Sociological Association, see racism “as something tacked on to an otherwise healthy American society.”
But Feagin contends that the system embeds racism at the core, from the Constitution to the legacy of slavery and segregation in retarding black economic advancement. He argues aptly that color-blind ideology “provides a veneer of liberality” for those unwilling to recognize how race has shaped America, while those who lump blacks with white immigrant groups ignore the effects of racial discrimination. But Feagin’s approach surely sacrifices complexity.
Are “racist pressures against interracial marriage” solely the product of white racism? If achievement tests are so biased toward the white middle class, then why do some Asian immigrants do well on them? Feagin calls for a large-scale educational campaign to move whites to confront “the reality of the pain that their system of racism has caused” and a new constitutional convention to incorporate “the group interests and rights of all Americans of color.”
He also calls for individual and group reparations for blacks. (But how exactly would a “black community” be determined?) Feagin doesn’t engage those who argue that class-based remedies may be better than race-based onesAanother flaw in a book full of strong yet poorly articulated arguments.
From Kirkus Reviews: A sometimes searing indictment of American racial practices.
Sociologist Feagin (White Racism, not reviewed) traces the development of American racism to its roots in Europe.
Ideologically, race was not a major consideration in human endeavors until the beginning of the European slave trade in the 1400s, Feagin tells us. But some 300 years later, it had grown full-blown and become a major cornerstone of intellectual thought–dominated by such thinkers as Locke, Kant, and Hegel, and by the Frenchman Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. All of these harbored anti-black views to varying degrees, including the curious natural-law notion that blacks somehow were born to be slaves.
Much of this 18th-century twaddle was absorbed by our Founding Fathers, especially by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison. Feagin also examines Reconstruction, the lynchings of the late–19th and early–20th centuries, the Civil Rights era, and the post–Civil Rights period.
As we enter a point in the new millennium where the white population is beginning to shrink, Feagin points out that less than half the population of America’s four largest cities (New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago) is white.
This and other factors lead Feagin to call for an international view of civil rights (i.e., one in which all are entitled to equal concern because all are human beings and not members of this or that state or tribe). Feagin, who is avowedly influenced by Franz Fanon and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), is at his overwrought best when he is in historical pursuit of the roots of racism.
Perhaps because it is something not readily fresh on the mind, it is a matter of more than idle curiosity what Benjamin Franklin and James Madison thought about whiteness.
On the other hand, matters such as affirmative action and reparations are too widely discussed and familiar to make Feagin’s discussion of them very interesting or fresh.
A useful study, even for those who are not guilt-ridden.
