Rush’s Conversation with The Breakfast Club was a Waste of Time

In what I would call a surprise move, Rush Limbaugh informed his audience today that he had pretaped a conversation with the popular Radio Show, The Breakfast Club. Of course the killing of George Floyd in the annals of popular outrage over police killings of unarmed Black men is an unusual one in that unlike most others, there is only one side.  This isn’t a Michael Brown situation, in which the details of the killing were disagreed with.  With Floyd, everyone knows what happened, no one is arguing about the details, no one is arguing that Floyd asked for it, and everyone agrees that it was horrible and deserves justice.

So naturally the country had the worst rioting in years.

What to make of a situation in which the country is united, yet also tearing itself apart?  Given the odd unity of the country on George Floyd, and Rush’s own disgust with the crime as expressed on his show last week, he took the initiative to reach out to the show with the largest Black radio audience to…what?  Seek common ground?  Honestly I don’t know what he hoped to accomplish but it did make for fascinating radio.  The full transcript is here, but I do have a few comments on some of the points that were gone over.

First a general observation; The Breakfast Club maintained a low level of hostility towards Rush throughout the interview while Rush clearly was trying to reach out with a “come let us reason together” type of attitude.  However there seemed to be no reciprocation of that.  Just a hat tip for negotiators, the person who reaches out puts themselves in a position of weakness.  Here is a good example:

DJ ENVY: You talk about peacefully protest, right? And you were very opinionated about Colin Kaepernick when he was peacefully protesting, right? And now people are saying, “Oh, they’re not peacefully protesting.” This is the same thing Colin Kaepernick was kneeling for that the world was so upset about and the world said he’s taking it too far and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is exactly the reason why he was kneeling and protesting…

RUSH: Look, I – (crosstalk)

DJ ENVY: And looked at us like, yeah, I’m doing it and what?

RUSH: Guys, I’m trying to tell you, I’m all with you, I’m a thousand percent with you on this. This is why I wanted to talk to you because I know that there are — you know, we all have preconceptions that we live under and biases that we live under, and I wanted to reach out to you guys specifically, you were the ones that I was told to speak to, that this is intolerable. Now — but — (crosstalk)

I have to admit, Rush didn’t come out looking good in this exchange, particularly with the easy bait of Kaepernick dangling before him.  Anyone who had actually listened to Kaepernick knew that his “taking a knee” was about rejection of the country, not any particular list of social justice grievances.  He said it himself, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color…”  For Kaepernick, it was always about America (or Amerikkka as he might spell it).

The other, and in my opinion more troubling issue was the total lack of similar vocabulary.

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: I have a question for you. I want to know. How are you gonna use your privilege as a white male to combat this prejudice. You got a direct line to Donald Trump. (crosstalk)

RUSH: No, wait a minute, I don’t buy into the notion of white privilege. See, I think that’s a liberal —

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: You’re being —

RUSH: That’s a liberal — (crosstalk)

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: You’re being delusional.

RUSH: — political construct right along the lines of political correctness. It’s designed to intimidate and get people to shut up and admit they’re guilty of doing things they haven’t done. I don’t have any white privilege — (crosstalk)

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Do you know what white privilege is? White privilege is that what happened to George Floyd would not have happened to a white man.

RUSH: If what happened to George Floyd had happened to a white man we probably wouldn’t have even heard about it.

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Huh?

DJ ENVY: We definitely would have heard about it. You definitely —

RUSH: You think so? If George Floyd — if George — if George — (crosstalk)

DJ ENVY: — be killed by –(crosstalk)

ANGELA YEE: Yeah, I would like to — (crosstalk)

RUSH: I don’t think — if George Floyd — (crosstalk)

ANGELA YEE: Rush, there’s a lot of instances where this does happen and we don’t hear about it. There’s a lot of times that there’s no video that exists and then people are — police officers lie and they say this is what happened, just like we’ve seen it happen so many different times where fortunately there was video. There’s a lot of cases that won’t make it.

RUSH: I think – (crosstalk)

ANGELA YEE: That don’t go viral. (crosstalk)

CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: Never hear about it, that never make it to TV, that never make it to social media because there is no phones, there is — (crosstalk)

RUSH: I think you misunderstood what I said, guys. I said if George Floyd were white, we wouldn’t have heard of this. And if the same thing had happened to him, we wouldn’t have heard about it, it wouldn’t be — you know, we — (crosstalk)

It’s clear The Breakfast Club cannot conceive of a situation in which an unarmed white person is killed by the police and it go unremarked, “White privilege is that what happened to George Floyd would not have happened to a white man.” 

But what does actual data reveal?

The Washington Post has a database of police shootings and it reveals data that goes against the narrative.  For example:

In 2019, 9 unarmed black people were killed by the police.

In 2019, 19 unarmed white people were killed by the police

Does anyone know any of their names?  Yet I’m sure if you presented those figures to Charlemagne Tha God, he simply wouldn’t believe you, so his entire definition of White Privilege, based on this radio interview, is false.

Even if Rush had confronted The Breakfast Club on the actual data, I don’t think it would matter.  In fact, I can’t remember the last time real data or facts have mattered, but it definitely doesn’t matter if you don’t even bother to bring it up.   Rush needn’t have bothered.  There was never going to be any dialogue.  The Breakfast Club would have been happy to accept Rush’s surrender, but they weren’t interested in having a conversation.

 

Caitlin Jenner and Rachel Dolezal’s differing Delusions

“She[Bruce Jenner] is, in that sense, transitioning from a Jenner to a full-blown Kardashian” – Mark Steyn

 

I wasn’t sure I was even going to write about Bruce Jenner “transitioning” to a woman.  I mean, sorry folks, but he’s not actually a woman.  A person’s sex is not a social construct; it’s a biological reality, unchanged by hash tags or E Television.   You can’t just change your sex with hormones, surgery, or a new twitter account. The fact that people are buying into his delusion is frightening.  In the old days, if a person thought they were Napoleon we threw them in a lunatic asylum.  Now I guess we would make him emperor of France.  We’re even allowing him to take his delusion to medical extremes.  Doctor’s are allowed to pump a man full of female hormones, regardless of the damage to his body, so he can pretend to be a woman, but won’t pump male hormones into a male for the purpose of enhancing athletic performance.

I’m not mad at the guy, just the opposite.  I feel bad for the suffering he’s enduring with this psychological disorder.  Although we’ve made enormous advances in medicine, it seems in some ways when it comes to psychiatric and psychological disorders, we’re still in the dark ages, applying leeches. But the outing of Jenner’s disorder does explain a lot of things, such as his marriage to Kris Kardashian. If I’m mad at anything, it’s the media’s reaction.  Their praise for his “courage,” and the use of female pronouns when referring to Jenner seems to justify his delusion.  Apparently style books in newsrooms have totally gone crazy.  But…. given that there isn’t much in the way of real treatment for disorders like Jenner’s, if prancing around in a dress make him feel better, than he should do it. But after reading that Jenner’s son Brody has a girlfriend named Kaitlynn, I recommend Bruce continue with a lot of therapy.  It sounds like he needs it.

But when is a delusion a fraud?  Or….did the fraud come first, and then the delusion?  I’m referring to Rachel Dolezal, leader of the Spokane NAACP and self proclaimed African American. In a way, I’m surprised we don’t have more Rachels.  A white liberal, from a white liberal family; so identifies with victimhood and victimization that she wants to be that victim.  Despising her white privileged skin, she adopts a different personal, pulls a Soul Man and gets a scholarship to attend Howard University and basically lived with it for years; successfully too.  Faking being Black, getting a scholarship meant for a Black person…if that doesn’t define White Privilege; I don’t know what does.

She became the leader of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington.  Whether the NAACP knew she was white or that’s a chapter filled with the biggest collection of dummies ever.  In any case, they’re supporting her.   How long they will I don’t know.  I don’t see how this ends other than her losing her teaching gig of “Africana Studies” at Eastern Washington University and resigning from her leadership position in the NAACP.

At some point in the future, after all of this is over, an interview with Dolezal about why she wanted to leave her position of “privilege” as a White woman to pick up the mantel of oppression as a Black woman might really be revealing.  However it’s unlikely that she’ll ever give an honest interview.  Why start now?

So Jenner wants to be a chick, Dolezal wants to be Black…hey if there are any Black women who would like to be White men, apparently the door is wide open.

 

Quickie Fall Reviews: Black-ish

Black-ish is the latest attempt to sell an ethnic sitcom to the wider, non ethnic audience.  Unlike the Cosby Show, in which a Black upper middle class family has the same concerns as any non Black upper middle class, and being Black was not a prominent part of the show, Black-ish is about nothing else but being Black.  It’s about upper middle class Black people who are concerned about being Black, ruminating what it means to be Black, embracing Black culture, maintaining Black culture, what is Black Culture… in short, it’s all Black, all the time.

Or at least that’s the case for the main character, Heathcliff Huxtable…err I mean Andre Johnson.  Anthony Anderson plays the Bill Cosby character in this Cosby show with guilt that can’t seem to stop thinking about race and its effect on virtually every aspect of his life.  I literally could not keep track of the number of stereotypes that this show…not skewered like you would think, but embraced. The main character is desperate to get his family playing basketball, eating fried chicken, you name it.

The lesson here is that assimilation to middle class values is bad, and “keeping it real” is good.  But maybe that’s just my white privilege talking.  Could this really be a positive uplifting show that I can’t see because of my privilege?  If so, how do I “check my privilege” in order to understand the true intent?

After typing into Google, “Am I racist for thinking the new show Black-ish is racist?”  I did find there was an actual Change.org petition requesting the show be dropped from the fall schedule because…it’s racist.  So I’m not alone on that.  But being racist isn’t even the worst sin this show commits.

It’s not funny.

Based on the pilot episode, the laughs were pretty sparse, and by sparse, I mean I didn’t laugh once, although maybe I missed something since I was constantly checking the clock.  If the show had been racist and funny, this would have been a totally different review. Some of the stuff that white people like is Black comedians playing up Black stereotypes.  Oh, how white people like that!  But for a show in which the main character wants to base his life on a racist parody of Black life you would think there would be laughs.

So I cannot give this show my much coveted thumbs up. There might be a Black audience for this show, and maybe it could find a second life on BET, but I don’t think that ABC is going to be keeping this.

 

The Real White Privilege

Representative Charlie Rangel, joined noted Zimmerman trial witness Rachel “Dee-Dee” Jeantel, in bringing racial slurs to the forefront of American consciousness once again.  Of course they’re not the only ones, but the term “Cracker” is getting quite the workout lately in the American media.  In discussing the Tea Party, Rangel said:

Rangel (Photo credit: Georgetown Voice)

“It is the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police. They didn’t care about how they looked,” 

Leaving the Tea Party aspect of it aside, I’m fascinated that the word cracker is getting so much of a recent work out in recent public statements.  It’s generated a great deal of online commentary, revolving around is it a racial slur, is it a good racial slur, and should white people be offended by that racial slur?

When it comes to racial slurs, there is still a disparate impact between the use of what is now euphemistically referred to as the “N Word,” and virtually every other attempted racial slur.  For Paula Deen, the use of the N Word 30 years ago effectively ended her career.  For Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper, he’s removed himself from the team and is now seeking counseling.  Yes that’s right, counseling.

Of course there are a few outliers.  Tim Allen recently gave an interview in which he argued that as a comedian, he should be allowed to say the N Word.  At least so far, there seem to be little major reaction.  Allen’s TV show, Last Man Standing, was renewed for another season.  No Michael Richards treatment for him.

Rangel or anyone using the term cracker is just something I cannot seem to get worked up about.  The truth is, there are not any good racial insults for white people.  Oh there is quite a list of different terms, but they have all of the effectiveness of a wet firecracker.  Oops, there’s that word cracker again.  I was born in Georgia, and that was practically a State nickname.  My father called me a Georgia Cracker when I was growing up there, and has yet to appear on the Today Show to give a sobbing an incoherent apology for it.

I think when it comes to derogatory racial slurs for whites; this is an area in which black people just cannot compete on an even playing field. As a white person, I just can’t be racially insulted. Cracker? Sorry Charlie (Rangel). I remember during the 1970’s TV sitcoms tried to tell us that honky was a racial slur, but I laughed and laughed whenever George Jefferson would call a white person honky. So call me an Ofay honky cracker if you want, I’ll just laugh.  It just sounds funny.

Rangel could have spewed the term with all the ugliness, hate and vitriol of any KKK’er, and it still would have been more funny than insulting. Calling him the N-word however, would have probably been an emotional kick in the gut to him. So it’s not a fair fight. There isn’t a racial slur from his arsenal of hate that would affect me in the slightest, other than amuse me, but he’s a powerful Congressman, and the lowliest white guy, even a hobo or prisoner in lock-up, could emotionally wreck him with a few slurs.

That’s the real white privilege.

Lefties Get It Wrong Again

My thoughts on first hearing about the Boston Marathon Bombing besides the shock of the tragedy, wasn’t on the particular motives or identifying which group the actual culprits were; my worry was on catching the culprits.  Given how long the investigation went before there were any suspects, I was worried that the terrorists had gotten away clean.  But for millions of others in the country, there was quite another worry.

For David Sirota, writing at Salon, the hope was that the Boston Bomber was a White American.  The worry was that the bombers would be anyone else.  Sirota’s argument was an extremely distorted version of White Privilege.  But the fact that the identity of the a- that-time still unidentified culprits was of vital importance to the left is as good an explanation for the divide that exists in this country as any.  On that basis, I highly recommend Sirota’s column.  If you want to know why conservatives are from Mars and liberals are from Venus, it’s all there.

So Sirota and millions of liberals can take some solace that yes, the Bombers were White, and in the case of at least one of the bombers, an American citizen.  Naturalized on 9/11; how about that.  But this isn’t the kind of white American that the readers of Salon, or liberals in general, were hoping for.   They wanted the bombers to be right wing Tea Party types.  Actually, more than hope; many of them were expecting it.

I discovered that this week online, via Twitter and on Political Message boards.  I spend a fair amount of time on political forums.  I like to see and hear other arguments and hone my own.  But I also like to be aware of the political worldview of my political opponents.  It’s hard to keep in touch with that unless you constantly immerse yourself in their ideas and arguments, which I do.  But I admit even I was surprised by the reaction of some the left leaning members of the web forums I hang out at.

Before the victims had even all been taken to the hospital, posts denouncing the bombers as right wing conservatives filled the internet.  One even made the point that April was filled with right wing violence, including the Battle of Lexington and Concord.  If the left wants to include Lexington and Concord as an example of right wing militia violence, I find myself fairly comfortable with that.  But that merely shows how the left is becoming less and less moored to our country and history.  If the first thing that comes to your mind when thinking of the founding fathers is white male slaveholder, you might be a liberal.

With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy.

But the leftist mindset of hoping for the right kind of terrorist doesn’t seem to have an equivalent on the right.  I don’t recall any sort of twitter messages or forum posts of righties hoping that the bombers were Occupy Wall Street types.  Of course, Occupy Wall Street types have committed terrorist acts, but I think most on the right just don’t consider them motivated enough to be the type of terrorists that radical Muslims are…oops!  Did I just use the “M” word?

That’s a big no no!  Here, conservatives can plead guilty.  There were many posts along the lines of, “I guess Muslim terrorists did it.”  Not hoping for it, but it just seemed likely.  And that was in fact what the Boston Marathon bombing was, a terrorist attack committed by radicalized Muslims.  But that is the sort of clear eyed reality the left avoids.  For them, it’s as if every new terrorist attack, it’s as another chance to blame Sarah Palin.  The Gabby Giffords shooting set the ugly template for the left blaming the right with zero evidence.

But trying to argue with the left on this point seems to be fruitless.  It didn’t matter on the web forums this week.  It didn’t matter that Sarah Palin was not the shooter at the Tucson shooting, when I found myself criticized by a famous science fiction author for expressing skepticism that the Tea Party had anything to apologize for when Gabby Giffords was shot, and I might as well have been Sisyphus pushing the boulder of reason up the hill of the Ft. Hood massacre  trying to explain that Major Hasan was in fact a terrorist, not someone who cracked under the constant discrimination of being a Muslim American.  In fact, for an excellent example of how unmoored from reality the left can be, check out this thread where I make the simple point that Hasan was a Muslim terrorist.

In other terrorism news, the left gets a lift.  The ricin letter writer Paul Kevin Curtis, turns out to be both White, Male, and Christian!  It’s the leftie terrorism wish list come true!  And yes, it does get even better, he’s a Southerner!  This is the most perfect news imaginable except…

…aww he’s a Democrat!

There goes that narrative.  Well, at least he’s crazy as a bedbug too.

Related articles

• The ‘Co-exist’ Bombers This must disappoint David Sirota.
• Boston Bombers: Salon Writer Sirota Gets His Wish…Sort of
• The Irresponsible Search for Bomb Scapegoats
• Oh, those nutty Leftists