Category: American Power

The Anti-‘Anti-Racist’ Professor

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Donald Douglas has been a professor of history and political science at California’s Long Beach City College for 20 years, and for the past decade or so he has been besieged by leftist trolls because he is a conservative who blogs at American Power. Under the terms of identity politics, Professor Douglas counts toward his campus’s “diversity” calculus as a POC (“person of color”), and he also contributes to the kind of diversity that colleges really need — intellectual diversity. If he is not the only Republican on the LBCC faculty, he is certainly the most outspoken, and this has made him the object of hassles with LBCC’s administration.

Like all good Americans, Professor Douglas hates Communists, which certainly makes him a rarity in academia nowadays. Professor Douglas has agreed to participate in a campus discussion about Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Anti-Racist, and suggests that his point of view will be how to be an anti-“anti-racist.” I think an interesting point to bring up in this discussion would be the ironic fact that Kendi is an alumnus of Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas, Virginia.

That is to say, having made a career railing against “white supremacy,” Kendi nonetheless owes his education to institutions historically associated with a social order he wishes to destroy. Furthermore, Kendi got his undergraduate degree at Florida A&M University, a historically black institution whose existence originated in Jim Crow segregation.

Adapting to the conditions of an integrated society, where racial equality has been mandated by federal law since 1964, has been one of the greatest challenges in American history. Every citizen has a duty to maintain the peace and prosperity of our country, and nothing would be so fatal to this peace and prosperity as the kind of ethnic hostility that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, and produced genocide in Rwanda.

Last month, before the election, I wrote an American Spectator column entitled, “Are Americans Tired of Being Called ‘Racist’ Yet?” My belief is that spurious accusations of racism — “RAAAAACISM” with five A’s — tend to increase racial hostility, rather than to reduce it.

On the one hand, such accusations encourage a sense of paranoia among racial minorities, while on the other hand, these accusations are taking by white people as insults: “How dare you accuse me of unfairness?” When Americans hear the word “equality,” they always think of it in terms of basic fairness — treating others impartially, according to the Golden Rule. To accuse someone of racism is, in this sense, to accuse them of breaking the basic moral norms of our society. The frequency with which accusations of racism are flung around nowadays — more than half a century after the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement, at a time when minorities enjoy greater opportunities in America than at any previous time in our history — is counter-productive, to say the least.

Let’s hope that Professor Douglas is able to get his academic colleagues to listen to the voice of reason, before it’s too late.




 

The Pro-Hamas Mob in L.A.

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Two weeks ago, Professor Donald Douglas of American Power covered a Communist anti-police rally in Anaheim. Today, Donald took his camera to the streets of downtown Los Angeles, where the same crew — the Stalinist splinter sect known as A.N.S.W.E.R. — helped organize an anti-Israel march and rally that was full of vile and hateful sentiments expressed by vile and hateful people.

The news from Israel today is good: Having destroyed most of the tunnels used by Hamas terrorists, the IDF is preparing to withdraw from Gaza. Peace through complete victory.

As soon as Professor Douglas gets home, I’m sure he’ll start posting more photos, videos and commentary at his American Power blog.

Good work, Donald!

 

Commies in Anaheim?

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ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) is a front for the Marxist revolutionary Workers World Party. This is simply a fact, but a fact routinely omitted from media coverage of ANSWER protests. This was the case in California, where the local CBS affiliate deliberated ignored the communist orientation of this weekend’s “march against police brutality” in Anaheim:

Reporter Art Barron ignored the radical, anarcho-communist protesters, many of whom wore shirts and held signs calling for death to the Anaheim Police Department. Even worse, the back bloc anarchists are shown at the video without even a 10-second description or explanation of the real and violent ideological program.

That’s from Donald Douglas, who covered the protests and has compiled a series of reports on the event at American Power:

Cowardly #ANSWER Communists
Violently Harass ‘American Power’
at Anaheim Police Brutality Protest!

– – –

Responses to ‘Cowardly #ANSWER Communists’

– – –

Hey, Leftists: You’re Gonna Need a Bigger
Collectivist Army to Shut Down ‘American Power’!

Notice the red flags? I became familiar with ANSWER when they organized “peace” protests in D.C. during the Iraq War. Of course, commies don’t want peace. They want to destroy America.

 

If @TaraDublinRocks Didn’t Exist, Would @AmPowerBlog Have to Invent Her?

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My friend Donald Douglas may not be the most right-wing professor in California, but he’d certainly be in contention for the prize. In fact, I’m reasonably sure that a majority of university administrators in California would outlaw Professor Douglas’s American Power blog as a “hate crime,” if they could. (“Damn that First Amendment!”)

After Professor Douglas called out the “Tolerance Gestapo” — and some poor fool’s attempt to play ball with the the Gay Mafia shakedown — he found himself in a bizarre Twitter battle with somebody named Tara Dublin. She started out by claiming that Donald was trying to “bait” her, and next thing you know, she went off on a rant that is a classic example of the Last Word Syndrome typical of liberals who presume themselves to be our intellectual and moral superiors.

Of course, I had to throw some gasoline on the burning witch:

 

Check out the whole thing at American Power: “Gay Rights Thought-Enforcer Tara Dublin Can’t Handle the Truth.”

 

Portrait of a Stalker Troll: @Repsac3, Also Known as Walter James Casper III

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Professor Donald Douglas has spent years fighting one particularly obsessed troll, Walter James Casper III, who might actually out-rank Bill Schmalfeldt in the Stalker Hall of Shame, because Casper has been cyberstalking Douglas for more than five years.

Among the significant characteristics of cyberstalkers is the disproportionality of their obsessions. Professor Douglas is not an academic celebrity or influential media personality. He’s a professor of political science at Long Beach City College in California. It is not as if he’s at Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Yale or some other big-money “prestige” school, and yet the fact that Professor Douglas is (a) conservative and (b) a blogger is sufficient to justify in Casper’s sick mind the most insane forms of stalking behavior.

Another characteristic of cyberstalkers is their resort to psychological projection: They are not obsessed with you — no! — you are obsessed with them, and don’t you dare accuse them of harassing you — of course not! — you are instead harassing them.

This kind of “accuse the accusers” tactic serves two purposes for the troll: First, it is a psychological rationalization by which he justifies his behavior and, second, it serves to obfuscate the situation in the eyes of law enforcement or other authorities.

Something else: The conflict between Casper and Professor Douglas is not about politics, nor is it about Professor Douglas.

That is to say, Casper’s espousal of left-wing political ideas is not the reason for his behavior, but simply a pretext, and if he weren’t harassing Professor Douglas, he’d be harassing some other target, selected more or less at random. There is, of course, a specific history to the conflict between them, but it is ultimately irrelevant. There are plenty of people every bit as left-wing as Casper who are not obsessive stalkers, and there are other conservative bloggers who might just as easily become targets for stalking, if ever they attracted the attention of such a grotesquely deformed personality as Casper.

Walter James Casper III has spent years smearing and harassing Professor Douglas, trying to get him fired from his job. This could (and in fact, often does) happen to any blogger who has a day job.

To get an idea of the pathetic nature of Casper’s obsession, he has devoted an entire blog, called “American Nihilist,” to his anti-Douglas jihad. In the past six months, that stalker site has attracted an average of about 15 visitors a day. By contrast, Professor Douglas’s blog has averaged nearly 2,000 visitors daily.

In other words, the readership for Casper’s anti-Douglas rantings is less than 1% of the readership of Professor Douglas’s blog and yet, despite such clear evidence that no one else shares his obsession, Casper continues doing what he does, apparently with no other purpose except to annoy the target of his weird fixation.

Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. Stalkers gotta stalk.

 


Even in Deep-Blue California, ObamaCare Still Inspires Deep Doubts, Poll Finds

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Donald Douglas points out that President Obama got nearly 60 percent of the vote in California last year, but the president’s signature health-care program is still widely unpopular there:

Sixty-five percent of respondents said people wouldn’t be able to afford the health insurance they’ll be required to have under the law’s individual mandate. Forty percent think the program will have a negative effect on what they pay for coverage, compared with 21% who expect a positive outcome.
According to the survey, 46% of registered voters expect the Affordable Care Act to be a drag on the overall economy and 34% see an economic boost. Nearly 60% think the law’s new requirements will raise healthcare costs and keep businesses from hiring more workers.

Read the whole thing.

 

Did SiteMeter Commit Suicide?
UPDATE: It’s Working Again, But Unfortunately, My Traffic Sucks

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As of right now, it’s dead. Donald Douglas at American Power and Doug Ross at Director Blue both report that the best, easiest-to-use traffic analytics site failed to renew its domain registration, an error that would require a special kind of stupidity.

Let’s all say a prayer that they can get it fixed, because without SiteMeter, I feel like I’m blogging blind.

People talk about other analytic software as being technologically superior, but here’s the thing: SiteMeter allowed sites to make their traffic data public in real-time. This permitted apples-to-apples comparisons between sites, which was especially helpful information for entry-level bloggers trying to figure out how to grow their traffic.

You could not only know what your own site traffic was at any time, but you could also see who had more or less traffic, and whose links were driving traffic to other sites. Some bloggers (foolishly, IMO) set their SiteMeters to private, as if they were embarrassed to reveal their traffic data, or as if they failed to understand the value of transparency. “No shame in my game” has always been my attitude, and I simply can’t understand why anyone would attempt to conceal their traffic data as if it were a proprietary trade secret.

Constantly checking SiteMeter is a deeply ingrained habit for many of us, an addiction classified as a symptom of Blogger Mood Disorder by Professor William Jacobson,  (See also “Site Meter Envy” and “Sitemeterenfreude.”)

There was a time when Technorati was also useful as an analytic tool for bloggers, but they “improved” it until they ruined it,  and if SiteMeter has now managed to commit online seppuku, this would represent a real loss to the blogging community.

UPDATE: Linked by Ed Driscoll and Charles G. Hill and now — without explanation — SiteMeter is working again, which is depressing, because my traffic sucks so far today.

Ignorance is truly bliss sometimes . . .

 

Chick-Fil-A Not Exactly ‘Reeling From Backlash’ Against Common-Sense Attitude

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by Smitty

Let’s see if we can break this down:

  • Chick-Fil-A is a business.
  • Businesses (especially those whose owners build them on their own) rather fancy having customers.
  • Practices which don’t lead to customers (homosexuality, Origenism, beastiality, whatever) merit rejection.


Anecdotally, the local Chick-Fil-A is wall-to-wall customers all the time.

via American Power

Update: Daily Pundit links with what are, I guess, additional common-sense positions Chick-Fil-A could choose to espouse.