Kwanzaa

Published December 26, 2024January 23, 2025 by Papa Giorgio

(Don’t have a lot of time to read? Here is a quick take.) Kwanzaa is a complete fabrication. A make-believe holiday invented by an ex-convict, Ron N. Everett, who is known today as Dr. Maulana Karenga. In addition to having a nasty penchant for torture, Karenga was described by a prison psychiatrist as “both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations.” Not exactly Santa Claus, eh?

QUICK NOTES:

The creator of Kwanzaa is Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga, a 77-year-old professor of Africana studies at California State University, Long Beach. His real name is Ronald Everett. He was born in rural Maryland, the fourteenth child of a sharecropping Baptist minister.
Karenga was convicted in 1971 for brutally torturing two naked women. The weapons of torture included a soldering iron, a vise and, of course, a toaster.
Karenga concocted Kwanzaa in 1966 as a secular, “nonreligious” pan-African holiday. At the time, he was a twenty-something graduate student living in Los Angeles.
Members of Karenga’s US Organization murdered two Black Panthers in cold blood. The murders occurred in 1969 when the US Organization and the Black Panthers were fighting over which group would control the then-new Afro-American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Karenga spent just four years in prison. He received a sentence of between one and 10 years for felonious assault and false imprisonment in 1971, related to the torture of Deborah Jones and Gail Davis.
The name change. At some point in the 1960s, Karenga decided he didn’t want to be Ron Everett any longer. Instead, he gave himself the name “Maulana,” which is Swahili for “master teacher.” Karenga means “keeper of tradition” in Swahili.

(Originally posted here Dec 25, 2010 at 06:21)

[What’s The Bottom Line?] This holiday season, spend your time celebrating real holidays like Christmas or Hanukkah, not a fake holiday invented by a Marxist, racist, violent criminal.

Kwanzaa: Racism in Disguise

Preface

This was a “clarification letter” written to my son’s fifth-grade teacher. The in-class activity was to break the kids up into groups and learn about the various holidays, so I politely asked that my son sit in on the Hanukah or Christmas table, as he had been assigned to the Kwanzaa table. I gave some reasoning behind this decision – as I often do about most decisions I make (my wife would beg to differ).

The reason I felt it necessary to clarify the original letter was because the teacher gave the original letter over to the Principle, and I heard through the grape-vine that the Principle called the letter, ergo me, racist. While I sympathized with the Principle a bit… because, well, I “look” like a racist (shaved head and all)… I just couldn’t let this pass by. I am sure that this sixties – Berkley attending – gentleman had gotten away with such a canard before, he unfortunately hadn’t researched his statement in my particular case enough.

First of all, while I look like a racist, I in fact have a wonderful black grandmother. Not only do I have a black grandmother, I also grew up in Detroit, where white kids at the public school and in my neighborhood were a minority. I didn’t just “have a black friend,” I, in fact, had very few white friends… my friends in other words had “a white friend.” Not only did the cultural and geographic peoples and places have an impact on me, but so to did theology. You see, I am a young earth creationist. Young earther’s believe that Adam and Eve were the originators of the human population and that from these first persons came the darker (say, Ethiopians) and person’s like myself (Irish). The Hebrew word for “Adam” is rooted in the word meaning “red-clay.” In fact, out of the 220-or-so stories of a world-wide flood from various cultures (Australian, southern/central/northern Native-Americans, Chinese, Russian, Welsch/British, etc., etc.) about half have a creation story of the first man being made as being red in color.

Not only did this principle not know my history or theology, he apparently didn’t realize that I quoted mainly from either black authors as well as from the L. A. Times for the letter. In fact, after having a sit down meeting with my son’s fifth-grade principle, I realized that he had not even read the original paper, he just assumed that any person who spoke out against Kwanzaa (whether rationally or illogically) was a bigot.

Unfortunately this old-school “sweeping-under-the-carpet” argument that I’m sure guided this gentlemen through many a brushing off of a parent just didn’t work in this case.

I made sure he read this second letter.

Enjoy, Papa Giorgio

Kwanzaa ~ Not Just Another Holiday!

A Letter from a Concerned Parent

(Fifth-Grade/2002 ~ updated 11-11-05)

Who Created Kwanzaa?

Kwanzaa was invented by Ron Kerenga in 1966 as a means to foster and help the Black Nationalist movement in their goal to segregate and separate the races. Ron Kerenga, thus, views people of Jewish decent, much like the Nation of Islam, as “devils,” to be stamped out like weeds. His views towards whites are very similar ~ racist, in-other-words. Let’s look at some of this history.

Kerenga founded and led the United Slaves, a Black Nationalist organization, which got into gun battles with the Black Panthers on occasion with people murdered as a result.

The biggest dispute between the United Slaves and the Panthers was for the leadership of the new African Studies Department at UCLA, with each group backing a different candidate. Panthers John Jerome Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter verbally attacked Karenga at the meeting, which infuriated Karenga’s followers. After the meeting ended, two United Slaves members, George and Larry Stiner, reportedly confronted Huggins and Carter in a hallway, shooting and killing them.^{[1] [2]}

In 1970, Kerenga and two of his followers were arrested by authorities for the torture of two of his female followers, Debra Jones and Gail Davis. Kerenga did time in prison for disrobing these two women at gunpoint and having them beaten severely. Kerenga told them that “Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what we know,” whereupon he forced a hot soldering iron into the mouth of one while the other had a toe squeezed in a vice.

The Los Angeles Times described the events:

“Deborah Jones, who once was given the title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electric cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes at gunpoint. 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 vice. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.” ^[1]

Karenga was sentenced to one-to-ten years in prison on counts of felonious assault and false imprisonment. At his trial, the question arose as to Karenga’s sanity. The psychiatrist’s report stated:

“This man now represents a picture which can be considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and illusions, inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the environment.” The psychiatrist reportedly observed that Karenga talked to his blanket and imaginary persons, and he believed he’d been attacked by dive-bombers.

Eight years later, California State University Long Beach named Karenga the head of its Black Studies Department. By this time, Karenga had “repented” of his black nationalism and had become just a harmless garden variety Marxist. This must be our esteemed university system’s idea of repentance!^[3]

How terrifying for these two women! According to the July 27, 1971 Los Angeles Times, a psychological profile of Kerenga described him “as a danger to society who is in need of prolonged custodial treatment in prison.” The profile noted that Kerenga, while legally sane, was “confused and not in contact with reality.”

The “seven principles” of Kwanzaa that Kerenga created as part of the Nguzo Saba are little more than Marxism transposed into afrocentric key.^[4] Therefore, the Kwanzaa celebration, unlike – for instance – the Martin Luther King holiday, celebrates separatism and Black Nationalism. It would be the same as the school teaching and celebrating a holiday created by the Ku Klux Klan, or an offshoot thereof. (I would just as vehemently speak out against this as well, for when the school sets its seal of approval on a celebration, you teach all its goals and aims ~ whether religious or political.)

Created Equal

My point is that I teach my children that all men are created equal and that all men are equal in the eyes of God. This is what Christmas is all about! Jesus came to save the world (John 3:16-17), God’s Word has always stated that He has “made of one blood [i.e. from one man, Adam] all nations of men” (Acts 17:26, cf. 1 Cor. 15:45). Kerenga created Kwanzaa to shun the world and display racism as their main goal for the holiday season, in place of Christmas. In fact, when asked why he designed Kwanzaa to take place around Christmas, Karenga explained, “People think it’s African, but it’s not. I came up with Kwanzaa because black people wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods would be partying.” Great values!

Again, trying to tie in African culture and beliefs with this holiday celebration is a stretch, to say the least. Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by a revolutionary Marxist and racist man – Kerenga – who took here and there from the African culture as well as the Menorah from Judaism^[5], and created a new celebration with socialist/Marxist overtones.

I have long-standing family friends who are native-born Africans (Kenyans), who have given their entire life to the mission field. They vehemently oppose this holiday because it creates subversion between the races when love is needed most. Neither do they find a connection with it and African culture. Mason Weaver points out the bottom line:

Professor Ron Karenga made up Kwanzaa in 1961 to counter the Western celebration of Christmas. Dr. Karenga made up a word, made up its definitions and then made up the elements we recognize today as “traditions.” First, “Kwanzaa” does not spell “first fruits” in Swahili or any other language. When I interviewed Dr. Karenga a few years ago, he admitted that the word was changed from the Swahili word “Kwanza” to “Kwanzaa” because he needed seven letters to represent his seven children. Because I spoke Swahili (and he apparently did not) Dr. Karenga was forced to admit that the word “Kwanza” was a Swahili adverb for “first,” and he added the extra “a” and “fruits” because it fit his story. And for all of you who wish to celebrate “first fruits,” the proper Swahili noun would be “Limbuko,” which would have given Dr. Karenga his seven letters for his children had he understood the language. (from Chapter 7 of It’s Okay to Leave the Plantation)

(Updated quote) Ann Coulter, likewise, points out the bottom line:

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga — a.k.a. Dr. Maulana Karenga — founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. He was also a dupe of the FBI.

In what was ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better.

By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

[….]

United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named “Jamal” are currently in prison?)

It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” which he based on the philosophy of “Mein Kampf” — and clueless public school teachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday.

Origins vs. Current Beliefs

Do the millions of black Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa think of it as the ritualization of socialism? Doubtful. Do they object to the mainstreaming of Kwanzaa symbols and products? Probably not. Do they know anything about Karenga and his past? It doesn’t seem so. When Karenga spoke at the Million-Man March, he went virtually unnoticed. However, the holiday’s origins in a terrible time and with a terrible person are certainly relevant to its legitimacy.

Neutrality?

I do not mind if the school teaches my son true history, which includes the history of Africa, as well as other Continents. However, having said this, I do not pay my hard earned tax dollars for the school to meet some need of trying to teach and include all the cultural holidays of the world, which apparently must include racist holidays founded right here in California’s radical [recent] past. That is not the schools job; it is mine, if I so choose!

This is why this subject is so “political,” you have in a sense undermined my family’s values and put it upon yourselves to teach my son “multi-culturalism” in a “politically-correct” fashion. This, then, requires the school to make value judgments on how to teach this to my child. Which is why I pointed out that by doing so, you have strayed from being neutral to taking a position on how to present other peoples cultural mores (which now includes racism as mainstream) to my child (in rejection of America’s cultural mores… which is Christmas and Hanukah, i.e., Judeo-Christian).

Back to the Original Premise!

So again, I restate my three points in the original letter^[6]on why I asked to have my son join either the Christmas table or Hanukah table in class; in contradistinction to Kwanzaa or the Chinese New Year:

It [Kwanzaa] promotes and supports ethnic separation and segregation. For instance, Hallmark Cards and Giant Foods have a policy of any items related to Kwanzaa be produced and sold only by blacks (William A. Henry III, “The Politics of Separation,” Time Magazine [fall 1993]: 75).

This was also the intent of the founder of Kwanzaa, Dr. Maulana Kerenga, separation, not healing. Christmas promotes the latter.

It is not practiced equally with the traditional (Judeo-Christian) practices. For example: one public schools students and parents were asked to come in and share with the class about Kwanzaa, and other religious holiday practices of their Buddhist faith and Muslim faith as well as the traditions and practices of Hanukkah. When one parent attempted to share the true meaning Christmas, using a Nativity scene as a visual aid, the presentation was prohibited. (Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us from Evil: Restoring the Soul in a Disintegrating Culture, p. 57).

It takes a political and moral stance. This type of multi-cultural “politically-correct” inclusive teaching takes a moral and political stance that requires value judgments to be made that are at variance with my (and many others) particular political and moral stance on afro-centric history and teaching… as well as putting one set of moral pre-suppositions (Marxism, racism, segregation) above others. Thus, taking a non-neutral position.

Notes

[1] “Kwanzaa — Racist Holiday from Hell” By Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson; FrontPageMagazine.com | December 29, 2004 –

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16474

[2] Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson (a black-American) is the Founder and President of BOND (the Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, www.bondinfo.org). He is also the author of the book SCAM: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America. For more information, please call 1-800-411-BOND (2663), or e-mail bond@bondinfo.org.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Afrocentrism is a political movement that believes Greek culture was borrowed from Black Africans. Among others on the Afrocentrist side is Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern History Martin Bernal who wrote Black Athena. Among others opposing him is Mary Lefkowitz, classical scholar and author of Not Out of Africa who denies the Greeks stole culture from Black Egyptians. There are some moderate positions, but the whole Afrocentrism controversy is based on concepts of race and racism, and is therefore very difficult to discuss without enraging someone.

From: http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/afrocentrism/g/afrocentrism.htm

[5] Kerenga believes that the black race are the real Jewish peoples, much like Christian Identity – the religious movement of the KKK – believes the white race to be the true Jewish peoples. The bottom line is this: both views are founded in racist ideology!

[6] Carlotta Morrow, the main author I quoted from heavily in my first letter to the school, (a black-American woman) began her research on Kwanzaa in the early 1980’s after her sister, who was a member of Dr. Karenga’s black activist group called the United Slaves (US) Organization, denounced her faith in Christ, claiming that Christianity was a white man’s religion.

Determined to find out the teachings that persuaded her sister’s complete change in faith, she went with her sister to “the Center” to hear what was being taught. She was deeply disturbed at the “us””white man” against the attitude that seeped through the meetings, and especially at the negativity directed toward the Christian and Jewish religions.

Seeing the spiritual and racial harm being subtly encouraged, Carlotta began her trek in learning, researching and exposing the real truth and spiritual seductiveness of the principles behind Kwanzaa.

She has had articles on Kwanzaa appear in the Southern California Christian Times, the Twin City Christian Magazine of Minnesota, Tout Timoun Nou Yo also of Minnesota, (a quarterly for families with children adopted from Haiti) and has been a guest on radio talk shows in the Southern California area which included an on-air discussion with Dr. Karenga on the Mason Weaver Show of KPRZ in San Diego, where the author resides.

In case you have never seen or heard Mason Weaver, he has a website called The Mason Weaver Show, as well as writing a book entitled It’s Okay To Leave the Plantation. Carlotta’s site is below.

Her site is: http://christocentric.com/Kwanzaa/

* Following are some highly recommended resources for the historian/sociologist at heart:

1) Tunde Adeleke, The Case Against Afrocentrism (Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2009);

2) Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (New York, NY: Verso, 1999);

3) Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out Of Africa: How “Afrocentrism” Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History (New York, NY: Basic Books);

4) An audio chapter from Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

5) Race and Culture: A Worldview (This is really part of a trilogy). Dr. Sowell’s page at Amazon can be found here;

6) Video of the American Black History videos:

http://videorow.blogspot.com/2010/08/amercias-racial-history-in-black-and.html;

7) Many, many links to much more here.

UPDATE

(Updated via GATEWAY PUNDIT)

Kwanzaa was created in 1966 as a holiday celebration of African culture and heritage but there’s more to the story. See below.

The Hill reported:

Obamas extend Kwanzaa greetings

President Obama and first lady extended their “warmest wishes” to those celebrating Kwanzaa, the week-long holiday as it began Saturday.

“Today begins a week-long celebration of African-American heritage and culture through family and community festivities,” the couple said in a statement.

“Kwanzaa’s seven principles – unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith – are also shared values that bind us as Americans.”

Ann Coulter recently wrote about the origins of Kwanzaa at Townhall:

Happy Kwanzaa! The Holiday Brought to You by the FBI

I will not be shooting any Black Panthers this week because I am Kwanza-reform, and we are not that observant. Kwanzaa, celebrated exclusively by white liberals, is a fake holiday invented in 1966 by black radical/FBI stooge Ron Everett — aka Dr. Maulana Karenga, founder of United Slaves, the violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

In what was ultimately a foolish gambit, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better. By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. Although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers, they did not seek armed revolution.

Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves. The United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names.

And hasn’t that been a huge help to the black community?

THE LID has a good post on Kwanzaa: “Kwanzaa: A Fraud Holiday With A Racist Goal, Created By Criminal Madman”

Those who are around my age woke up one December and discovered that the “holiday season” of Christmas and New Year’s became a trio, with the addition of something called Kwanzaa. Oh, sure there were rumblings of a new holiday. But strangely in this country where political correctness is on overload, a day invented in 1966 by a rapist who ran a Black separatist group is considered by some as a holiday on par with Christmas, or New Year’s. Kwanzaa is exclusively an American holiday and is not celebrated in any other part of the world (including Africa). The name Kwanzaa comes from a phrase of Swahili origin, “Matunda Ya Kwanza”, and translates as “First Fruits of the Harvest.” That’s right it’s supposed to be spelled with only one “a,” the very name of this supposed holiday is a typo.

Kwanzaa runs from December 26th-January 1st. It’s supposed to be a week-long holiday honoring African culture and traditions but is tainted by its founder and original purpose.

The man who created the holiday, Maulana Karenga was convicted in 1971 of torturing two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult he had founded. A May 14, 1971, article in the Los Angeles Times related the testimony of one of the women:

“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.”

Karanga was convinced that the women were trying to poison him. He and three members of his cult had tortured the women in an attempt to find some nonexistent “crystals” of poison. Karenga thought his enemies were out to get him.

Now I am not a doctor, nor have I ever played one on television, but this Karenga guy sounds like a paranoid psycho.

Somehow I cannot see rational people wanting to observe a holiday created by such a sick violent man (but then again, Al Sharpton led two anti-Semitic pogroms and he is considered a civil rights leader). Especially this year when sexual assault of women has been in the headlines almost consistently for months, why would anybody want to celebrate a holiday invented by a man who tortured women?

Perhaps Kwanzaa is observed because this part of the Kwanzaa story is rarely mentioned by the mainstream media.

When he invented the holiday, Karenga said his goal was to

“give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”

Arguably, this holiday raised by some to the level of Christmas has the totally opposite purpose. While Christmas is meant to unify, Kwanzaa is meant to divide. Or as the then 16-year-old Rev. Al Sharpton explained the feast would perform the valuable service of “de-whitizing” Christmas.

Heck even the scam’s creator, Maulana Karenga admitted it was a fraud. In 1978 he told the Washington Post’s Hollie West:

“I created Kwanzaa,” laughed Ron Karenga like a teenager who’s just divulged a deeply held, precious secret. “People think it’s African. But it’s not. I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own. So I came up with Kwanzaa. I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods (blacks) would be partying!”

The late Tony Snow laid out what was so wrong about the holiday 33 years after it was founded:

There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings have Swahili names — such as “ujima” for “collective work and responsibility” or “muhindi,” which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.

Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.

To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing “God Save the Queen” in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.

Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don’t necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term “ujima,” which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.

Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.

The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.

(…) Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.

So what is Kwanzaa? It’s the ultimate fraud. It is a holiday created by a man responsible for violently torturing two women–and it has a fascist goal of separating the races……..

(THE REST IS WORTH READING)

THE FEDERALIST as well opined in 2020:

Spanning from Dec. 26 to the first of January is Kwanzaa, the invented African American holiday celebrated solely by white liberals and clueless public school teachers. Overblown by leftist claiming the holiday has immense cultural significance, a survey by the National Retail Foundation discovered only 1.6 percent of Americans celebrate Kwanzaa.

The “holiday” was created in 1966 by Ron Karenga, who renamed himself Maulana. Karenga, the founder of the United Slaves, a violent rival organization to the Black Panthers, created the holiday for black Americans and derived the name “Kwanzaa” from the Swahili phrase “matunda y kwanza,” meaning “first fruits of the harvest.” That’s about the extent of the deep African roots the official Kwanzaa website claims.

The history of the holiday and Karenga has been seamlessly suppressed by leftists who find the facts inconvenient. Since few know its origins, the current definitions of the celebration are usually nonsensical and made up, much like the holiday itself.

The Guardian asserts Kwanzaa is simply an “opportunity [for black people] to celebrate themselves and their history rather than indulge in the customary traditions of a white Christmas.” The Los Angeles Times says it is “a way to honor African heritage and bring Black families and communities together.”

FrontPage Magazine’s Paul Mulshine writes that “the history of the founder of Kwanzaa has disappeared into an Orwellian time warp.” Indeed, CNN informs readers that Kwanzaa’s violent, racist founder was “a black nationalist and professor of Pan-African studies at California State University at Long Beach,” omitting his criminal and misogynistic past.

Kwanzaa, the “African feast,” really has “nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with California in the 1960s,” writes Mulshine. He contends it was made up to divide Americans, not unite them.

Mulshine explains that the paramilitary organization Karenga ran in Los Angeles in the late 1960s was involved in murder and torture: “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, [United Slaves] 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.”

Karenga himself is a convicted torturer. Here is an excerpt from an article about the May 1971 trial of Karenga for torturing two 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 [United Slaves], also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.

Karenga served only four to five years in a state prison.

Karenga is currently a black studies professor at California State University, Long Beach where the administration is apparently untroubled by the fact that this radical racist is also a convicted torturer of women. Despite the troubling past of Kwanzaa’s founder, leftists continue to shove this fake holiday down America’s throat every Christmas.

Woke liberals preach that Christmas in the classroom is intolerant and isolates students who don’t celebrate it. Yet Kwanzaa is permitted because the left argue it is a “cultural” holiday. Tons of teacher aids on the web provide elementary instructors with Kwanzaa coloring prints, songs, games, and crafts. But Kwanzaa isn’t actually a cultural holiday. It is best described as a political product of the 1960s, which should qualify it as inappropriate to impose on young and impressionable students.

The seven pillars of Kwanzaa (unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith), said College Fix editor Jennifer Kabbany, “reads like a communist manifesto.”

Patrick S. Poole also noted that the pillars’ claimed “cooperative economics” is an obvious Marxist reference. Poole noted the principle of “collective work and responsibility” is “why Masai and Zulu tribesmen still live in grass huts, wear animal skins and must walk everywhere.”

“It is a good thing that today we do not have to grow our food, build our houses and tend to our own lands,” wrote Poole. “Division of labor and specialization has fueled the prosperity and progress in the West that all Africans envy. And yet it is the express denial of these important economic tools that Kwanzaa lauds.”

“Karenga said [Kwanzaa] practitioners believe one’s racial identity ‘determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding,’” wrote Ann Coulter.

Incoming Vice President Kamala Harris recently shared a “Happy Kwanzaa” video in which she says her favorite Kwanzaa pillar is self-determination, or “kujichagulia.” Harris says kujichagulia means “be, be and do. Be the person you want to be and do the things you want to do and do the things that need to be done” — whatever that means.

[….]

This holiday season, spend your time celebrating real holidays like Christmas or Hanukkah, not a fake holiday invented by a Marxist, racist, violent criminal.

Native American History In Public School (Howard Zinn Refuted)

Published June 4, 2023January 23, 2025 by Papa Giorgio

Indians vs. Settlers – Letter from a Concerned Parent

An in-class (6th-grade) supplement from the desk of SeanG

(Updated 6/2023 and 11/2015 | Published here 7/2010 | Originally published 4/2007 | Letter written to school in 2004)

First and foremost, the reason behind this paper is not, let me repeat, is not to incite parents to call the school and complain about what our kid’s are being taught. We must keep in mind that the teachers only teach what they are told to teach. The purpose of this paper is meant as a supplement for those who wish to deepen their conversation of history with their son or daughter that reveals both sides of the historical coin.^[1] I do not wish this paper to be viewed as an apologetic^[2]for the atrocities that some in the name of religion or greed inflicted on the New World. We hear of these all the time, however, this truth can be twisted and misrepresented in a way that is a tool for special interest groups as well as being a means towards a political goal, which, in California, is par for the course.

I was somewhat troubled when I was going over my child’s in class social studies notes and homework. His notes were gleaned from an in class video^[3]and discussion (the social studies book^[4] does a decent job at staying neutral on the subject, so this critique deals primarily with the in class discussion and video). Below (fig. 1) is an exact reproduction of my son’s notes (cannot reproduce for this posting).

At first glance, to some, this may sound standard, and some may even believe that the European man was this horrible, and that the Native-American is angelic and at “one with nature.” This assumption that one is indoctrinated with needs a critical look however. And afterwords, you, the parent, can decide what is relevant to discuss with your kids, as I have done.

The first two columns on the Native-American and Explorers side will take some time to deal with. The Native-American certainly did believe that the land was a gift from their Creator^[5]; however, the litany of tribal elders in the video speaking of the land as not being “owned” is merely semantics. Most tribes did – I repeat – did fight for territorial rights and hunting grounds. Some tribes, after depleting an area of its natural resources^[6] (dealt with more in-depth later) would pack up and move, only to battle for more resources elsewhere. They may not have set up picket fences, but they sure did act as if this land was theirs. The video also portrayed contradictory statements by the elders of the various tribes, in one quote it was said that the Native-American did not own the land, and in another, we are told that the Comanche owned 600 million acres.

This comparison of the Native-Americans respecting nature so much that they thought it immoral to “own land,” (column #2) compared with the column to its right mentioning that the explorers “own[ed] humans,” is another play on words. Not only a play on words, but devoid of important information that could balance the times in which these two peoples tried to co-exist. The video makes it seem like slavery was the invention of the European settler, and only he was vile enough to practice such. The video showcased Native-Americans expressing their distaste for the white-man^[7] in a virulent manner. For example (and bear in mind this quote – directly from the video – can be applied to this entire thesis):

“The white-man has always had the philosophy that they are thee dominant race. That it is their manifest destiny to take over the world, so to speak. Indians did not accept this idea. They were here as stewards of the land. They were here to take care of it while they were here, but they never owned it.”^[8](Emphasis added)

The video is conveniently silent on the matter of Native-Americans owning slaves, and not only that, but treating them horribly (e.g., separating other Native-American couples and forcefully taking the women as wives [rape], murder, etc). Choctaws, Chicasaws, Cherokee, Creeks and Seminoles^[9] are just a few examples of tribes that owned slaves. To be fair, the social studies book did mention that the Aztecs, at least, owned slaves (p. 67).

There were, to be sure, peaceful tribes in the pre-Columbian America, like the Hopis of the Southwest and the Slaves (not to be confused with slaves) of sub-artic Canada. Most Native-American tribes, however, were familiar, long before Columbus, with the kinds of wickedness that had beclouded European (and the Asian and African continents) history for centuries: aggression, warfare, torture, persecution, bigotry, slavery, and tyranny,^[10]just to name a few. This isn’t pointing fingers; it is merely a comment on the nature of man. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., comments,

“Cruelty and destruction are not the monopoly of any single continent or race or culture.”^[11]

Not only did they own slaves prior to the European settlers coming to the New World, when West Africans were introduced to the Americas, the Native-Americans even took (acquired in raids, trading, or simply bought) them as slaves. Yes, you heard me; Native-Americans owned other Indians and Blacks as slaves, even some Whites after raids. The Seminoles were somewhat tolerant, and in the nineteenth century an Afro-Indian community, via intermarriage, in the state of Florida was generated (a gorgeous mix by the way, Seminole/African-American).

KEY: So we see that the Native-Americans, contrary to my child’s in-class video, did believe in “owning” people… pre-Columbus and post-Columbus. (Native Americans had enslaved each other for millennia!)

…when the Europeans took over the American West just in time to save the Hopi Indians from genocide at the hands of the Navajo (a fact that explains why maps of Arizona show the Hopi reservation as a tiny dot in the middle of the vast Navajo reservation).

Wilfred Reilly, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2019), 35.

warfare that was common to kinship-based societies. Pueblo warfare was not, however, limited to blood feuds. Living in and near the densely populated but resource-poor Rio Grande valley, Pueblo tribes such as the Hopis, Zunis, Piros, and Tewas fought with one another to secure control of the region’s limited supply of arable land. Such economically and territorially motivated warfare led the Pueblo Indians to make their adobe towns—called pueblos—powerful defensive fortifications. They did so by building their settlements atop steep mesas, by constructing their multistory buildings around a central plaza to form sheer exterior walls, and by limiting access to the main square to a single, narrow, easily defended passageway. Navajo and Apache raiding parties consequently found the Pueblo Indians’ settlements to be tempting but formidable targets.

(ENCYCLOPEDIA.COM)

The significance of warfare varied tremendously among the hundreds of pre‐Columbian Native American societies, and its meanings and implications changed dramatically for all of them after European contact. Among the more densely populated Eastern Woodland cultures, warfare often served as a means of coping with grief and depopulation. Such conflict, commonly known as a “mourning war,” usually began at the behest of women who had lost a son or husband and desired the group’s male warriors to capture individuals from other groups who could replace those they had lost. Captives might help maintain a stable population or appease the grief of bereaved relatives: if the women of the tribe so demanded, captives would be ritually tortured, sometimes to death if the captive was deemed unfit for adoption into the tribe. Because the aim in warfare was to acquire captives, quick raids, as opposed to pitched battles, predominated. Warfare in Eastern Woodland cultures also allowed young males to acquire prestige or status through the demonstration of martial skill and courage. Conflicts among these groups thus stemmed as much from internal social reasons as from external relations with neighbors. Territory and commerce provided little impetus to fight.

[….]

On the Western Plains, pre‐Columbian warfare—before the introduction of horses and guns—pitted tribes against one another for control of territory and its resources, as well as for captives and honor. Indian forces marched on foot to attack rival tribes who sometimes resided in palisaded villages. Before the arrival of the horse and gun, battles could last days, and casualties could number in the hundreds; thereafter, both Plains Indian culture and the character and meaning of war changed dramatically. The horse facilitated quick, long‐distance raids to acquire goods. Warfare became more individualistic and less bloody: an opportunity for adolescent males to acquire prestige through demonstrations of courage. It became more honorable for a warrior to touch his enemy (to count “coup”) or steal his horse than to kill him.

Although the arrival of the horse may have moderated Plains warfare, its stakes remained high. Bands of Lakota Sioux moved westward from the Eastern Woodlands and waged war against Plains residents to secure access to buffalo for subsistence and trade with Euro‐Americans. Lakota Sioux populations, unlike most Indian groups, increased in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; this expansion required greater access to buffalo and thus more territory.

(OXFORD REFERENCE)

The column under that (#3a, and b) deals specifically with the Christian faith. Now, mind you, the video did mention that the explorers committed horrible acts against the Aztecs only after witnessing their ghastly sacrifices of other people (it didn’t mention that this included babies). After this the European explorers went about destroying those who wouldn’t become Christians – that is, rejecting their horrible religion that included human/baby sacrifice.

Although the video mentioned this in passing, it made the explorers seem worse than they were.^[12] I am all for discussing the blight of Western-man and his religion, but in all fairness, this should slice both ways. From what I can tell from my child’s notes, and after viewing the video for myself, the in-class work chose “to focus on the Native Americans as the ‘victims’ because they lost their lives and culture as a result of European progress. In doing so… [it]… completely ignores a large portion of history in which both Native Americans and Europeans ‘matched atrocity for atrocity’.”^[13] This is an important distinction that was made in my sons fifth-grade class, that is: a moral position was chosen and advanced, rather than history being taught as just that, history.

The last blurb in the “Explorers” side of the column (row 4, side b) reflects as well the videos hatred for the European settler, and again, the video is very sure in its quoting Native-Americans who are vehemently “anti-white-man.” We want to take over the world still, or so the video seems to say. What can you do? The last column (Row 5, side a) on the “Native-American” side mentions, “They were stewards of the land.” This is another long one, and mind you, I will list some web sites to visit for some short commentary as well.

This is similar to an old VHS video my son’s 5th grade class watched regarding American Indian and Settler relations. This video excerpt is from the video “American History for Children Video Series: Native American Life,” Narrated by Irene Bedard (Schlessinger Video Productions, 1996). Like I said, I viewed a similar VHS tape when I checked out the video in 2004 from my son’s elementary school.

We, of course, have all heard of the Native-Americans using every part of the buffalo, not wasting, caring for Mother Nature and the like. However, the whole story is conveniently left out.^[14]The entire buffalo was only used in times of want. In times of plenty, some tribes would run entire herds of buffalo off of cliffs, killing hundreds to thousands at a time just for their tongues. Some tribes would burn entire forests killing many species and sometimes, entire herds of buffalo. A commentary^[15] does well to expand on this theme:

From James Fenimore Cooper to Dances with Wolves and Disney’s Pocahontas, American Indians have been mythologized as noble beings with a “spiritual, sacred attitude towards land and animals, not a practical utilitarian one.”^[16]Small children are taught that the Plains Indians never wasted any part of the buffalo. They grow up certain that the Indians lived as one with nature, and that white European settlers were the rapists who destroyed it.

In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown University, strips away the myth to show that American Indians behaved pretty much like everyone else. When times were bad they used the whole buffalo. When times were good, “whole herds” of buffalo might be killed only for their tongues or their fetuses.^[17] Although American Indians adapted to their environment and were intimately familiar with it, they had no qualms about shaping it to their needs.

Indians set fires to promote the growth of grasses and make land more productive for the game and plants that they preferred. Sometimes fire was used carefully. Sometimes it was not. Along with the evidence that Indians used fire to improve habitat are abundant descriptions of carelessly started fires that destroyed all plant life and entire buffalo herds.^[18]

Nor were American Indians particularly interested in conserving resources for the future. In the East, they practiced slash and burn agriculture. When soils became infertile, wood for fuel was exhausted, and game depleted, whole villages moved.^[19] The Cherokee, along with the other Indians who participated in the Southern deerskin trade, helped decimate white-tailed deer populations.^[20]Cherokee mythology believed that deer that were killed in a hunt were reanimated.

In all, contemporary accounts suggest that many Indians treated game as an inexhaustible resource. Despite vague hints in the historical records that some Crees may have tried to conserve beaver populations by allocating hunting territories and sparing young animals, Krech concludes that it was “market forces in combination with the Hudchild’s Bay Company policies [which actively promoted conservation]” that “led to the eventual recovery of beaver populations.”^[21]

Those who blame European settlers for genocide because they introduced microbes that ravaged native populations might as well call the Mongols genocidal for creating the plague reservoirs that led to the Black Death in Europe.^[22] Microbes travel with their hosts. Trade, desired by Indians as well as whites, created the pathways for disease.

Another interesting item that came up in the video was that of the “white man” bringing his diseases, as mentioned above and in the video. However, little is ever said about the normal lifespan of the Native-American, which was around 35 at the time due to the already present poor health, disease, dysentery and hygiene, or, lack thereof. The photo’s we have all seen of the Native-Americans during Civil War times are older mainly due to the introduction of medicine and hygiene by the European settler. New information in a paper written by Richard Steckel, a professor of economics and anthropology at Ohio State University, and published in the journal Science, has shown that the health of the Native-American was in drastic decline prior to the settler coming to the New World.^[23]

Footnotes

[1] There is some adult material herein (e.g., descriptions of violence and the like), so edit accordingly.

[2] apologetic: “defending by speech or writing.” (Definition #2) Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, CD-ROM (1999).

[3] Schlessinger Video Productions, Indians of North America, Video Collection II; Bala Cynwyd: PA (1995); in the school library.

[4] A New Nation: Adventures in Time and Place, National Geographic Society/McGraw Hill Pub; New York: NY (2000)

[5] The video was very religiously entwined; I only wish that such positive representations of other faiths were allowed equal time in the classroom. Say, like, Christianity.

[6] e.g., game (animals), wood, healthy top-soil, ran species into extinction (like certain sea turtles and the like), etc.

[7] The distasteful manner in which the video represents and uses the term “white-man” (a quote) is quite inappropriate.

[8] Veronica Valarde Tiller – a Jicarilla Apapche. Quote from the in-class video.

[9] Dinesh D’ Souza, The End of Racism, The Free Press; New York: N.Y. (1995), p. 75.

[10] Paul F. Boller, Jr., Not So! Popular Myths About America from Columbus to Clinton, Oxford Univ. Press; New York: NY (1995), p. 7. (This book is a fun, interestingly invigorating read! I highly recommend it)

[11] Ibid., p. 12. Quoted from: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Was America a Mistake?,”Atlantic Monthly (September 1992), p. 22.

[12] This is a side note for those who are of the Christian faith:

The Bible does not teach the horrible practices that some have committed in its name. It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the details it produces evil because the individual people [“Christians”] are actually living in rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it [religion] can produce evil, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism (non-religious practices) actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. For example: the Inquisitions, Crusades, Salem Witch Trials killed about 40,000 persons combined (World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana). A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religious criminals have committed); the Chinese regime of Mao Tse Tung, 60 million [+] dead (1945-1965), Stalin and Khrushchev, 66 million dead (USSR 1917-1959), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia 1975-1979) and Pol Pot, one-third of the populations dead, etc, etc. The difference here is that these non-God movements are merely living out their worldview, the struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that, no natural law is being violated in other words (as atheists reduce everything to natural law – materialism). However, when people have misused the Christian religion for personal gain, they are in direct violation to what Christ taught, as well as Natural Law.

[13] “Shades of Truth,” by Jeff Bricker, found at: http://parallel.park.uga.edu/~tengles/102m/bricker.html (I highly recommend this paper as it will add to the reasons and logic behind the different historical “takes” on this issue. UPDATE: (these links are since gone) I was contacted by the author who has become more left-leaning in his later days and he asked me to remove this portion as he has excised all his previous works. I refused on the grounds that he must prove to me that what he said is untrue, after which I would remove his older work. “A True Story,” by Katie Patel, found at: http://parallel.park.uga.edu/~tengles/102m/pa##l.html (another high recommend.) UPDATE: Another dead end – keep in mind when I wrote this my oldest son was in sixth-grade. He is now a Marine.

You should see: http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/03/the-peoples-historian

[14] “The Ecological Indian: Myth and History,” by Terry L. Anderson, from the Detroit News, reviewing a book of the same name by Shepard Krech III, October 4, 1999. Can be found at:

http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Environment/ecological_indian.htm

[15] Buffaloed: The Myth and Reality of Bison in America (12-01-2002) by Larry Schweikart:

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/buffaloed-the-myth-and-reality-of-bison-in-america#axzz2duIIx5vW

[16] Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, W.W. Norton & Company; New York: NY (1999), p. 22.

[17] Ibid., p. 135.

[18] Ibid., p. 119.

[19] Ibid., p. 76.

[20] Ibid., p. 171.

[21] Ibid., p. 188.

[22] For a discussion of the effect of the Mongol invasions and their effect on European epidemiology see, William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Doubleday; New York: NY (1977).

[23] “Health Of American Indians On Decline Before Columbus Arrived In New World,” This study involved 12,500 Indian skeletal remains from 65 different sites. Can be found at:

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/humhelth.html

CHALLENGING THE “GENOCIDE” CHARGE

…and, THE “STOLEN LAND” CHARGE

Are Americans living on stolen land acquired by nefarious means? Jeff Fynn-Paul, professor of economic and social history at Leiden University and author of Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, dispels this misleading and destructive myth.

Example of the BRAINWASHING in the classroom:

Shocking Excerpts from A Book Used w/Third Graders Up

MRCTV intros the video thus:

…. As Moonbat Tracker writes: “These outrageous and toxic books teach kids that the United States is an institutionally racist system filled with “bloodsucking capitalists” and Anglos who “rape Hispanic culture.”

Here are a couple of quotes from the books in which the lady recites:

“Hard drugs and drug culture is an invention of the gringo because he has no culture.”
“We have to destroy capitalism and we have to help 5/6 of the world to destroy capitalism in order to equal all peoples’
“The Declaration of Independence states that we the people have the right to revolution…the right to overrule the government…”
“Any country based on capitalism is based on greed…”

Warning: There is some adult language within the video….

This is from 2011… a decade before other parents in masse, due to lockdowns, became aware of the indoctrination foisted on their children. This is a Tucson United School District (TUSD) board meeting. A parent reads from a book authorized for use from third-grade up.

Election of Bush Irks My Son’s Art Teacher

Published August 30, 2017August 11, 2020 by Papa Giorgio

This is imported from my old blog [11-13-2006]

for inclusion in my .com’s posting (posted here February 2011)

(added some updates at the bottom)

INTRODUCTION

This paper is in response to a conversation about voting in my son’s VISUAL ARTS CLASS that climaxed with the teacher saying “that the only reason that President Bush won the 2000 election in Florida was that he had a brother as governor and that some votes were not counted.” (I am assuming that because the teacher mentioned the two together – that is, disenfranchisement and Governor Jeb Bush – that she believes in a conspiracy through all levels of the Florida government and Supreme Court to make sure that then Governor George W. Bush would win the election. This is the clear implication of what was said in the classroom.) The Military vote, point-in-fact, is the only provable vote that was withheld.

I wish to say here that any teacher has the right to own her or his opinion. We all have that right, you, me, anyone. However, one cannot own his or her own facts. And this is where the teacher may have crossed the line when she said (mind you I am going off what my son told me, as I was not there in the classroom at the time), “the only reason Bush won…”, you see, this goes beyond opinion within the realm of impressionable seventh-graders. Unchallenged in this environment, teachers in many classrooms in this valley and elsewhere get away with bringing a point of view that is unfounded by the facts of a reasonable investigation of “what did happen” in Florida. It isn’t nearly as infamous as the teacher put it.

I will use a partial excerpt from a paper I wrote to my son’s sixth-grade computer teacher (who was really a parent volunteer). Obviously this incomplete outlook on the election is widespread enough for me to respond to it almost every year since. I will explain some of the reasoning behind this apparent acceptance of something so easily explained away once the panorama of facts about the Florida recount are brought together rather than isolated, such as in Fahrenheit 911.

RECOUNT ~ THE SKINNY

Eight counties were recounting ballots in Florida. All eight counties were using different standards to determine which ballots were to be allocated to Gore and which were to be allocated to Bush. First and foremost, all eight counties were Democratic counties, they had Democrats who were in charge of that counties election, and democrats devised the ballots themselves years before. Republicans were in the minority in these districts. This is rarely addressed. This aside, what would have been the outcome if the counts were allowed to continue? I want to answer this with an example (used in a prior letter to a teacher) from a poli-sci class I took at C.O.C.:

… last week I went to visit the professor at C.O.C. to give him a paper I wrote for his amusement, when I walked in the classroom the students were discussing the fact that President Bush went before the 911 Commission with Dick Cheney, one girl asked if Cheney had to hold Bush’s hand – sarcastically of course. Another student mentioned that Bush was not under oath or in a public setting for his hearing. I asked to interject; the professor gave me the green light, so I mentioned that President Clinton was not under oath, nor was his hearing public, and that he took along Bruce Lindsey and Sandy Burger. I then turned to the girl and asked if Bruce had one hand while Sandy had the other – sarcastically of course. Laughs abounded again.

Another student blurted out that Bush stole the election in the Florida debacle – so called. I responded simply to him that the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and four Florida newspapers: the Orlando Sentinel, the Palm Beach Post, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times all recounted the votes multiple times, and each time Bush came out the winner. (In fact, they recounted the votes for the entire state eight-times and Bush won all eight-times. They did it eight-times so they could try each of the different counting “techniques” that each of the eight counties were using in their recounting efforts due to Gore bringing the matter into our courts.)^[1] This is not including the military vote that Gore successfully withheld a part of, which would have even widened Bush’s lead considerably. This student had never heard a good response to this objection that he had been blurting out for four years to conservative classmates, friends and family…

This answers one aspect of the problem in regards to what would have happened. However, I want to explain why Florida was so “close.” I have a documentary that shows the actual graphics displayed by ABC, NBC, etc, during the original counting of the Florida ballots, what did their numbers show? At no time during the entire period of ballot counting in Florida was Bush ever behind in actual hard votes cast! One vote tally showed a 100,000-vote lead, another showed 150,000 lead prior to its drop.

TIME ZONES

The real problem lies in Florida being in two time zones. So when the polls closed in the eastern side of the state, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and the like (except FOXNews), all said the polls had closed in Florida. Then CBS called Florida for Gore even though the hard tally count said otherwise, the other media moguls followed. The voters in the western part of Florida turned away from the polls in droves.

These voters who were told that Florida had already been called for Gore, and that the polls were closed, lived in a part of the state that is predominately Republican. Three groups did separate investigations into what type of voters decided not to go to the polls. All three came to the separate conclusion that anywhere between 5,000 to 10,000 Republican votes over the “disparaged” total [which included voters from both parties] were lost to this miscall by the media. So, if one were to add the military vote kept out by Gore and the lost votes from the western part of Florida, the gap in Bush’s lead would have been beyond the state recount minimum.

In fact, no news organization put Florida back into Bush’s column until after the polls closed across the country. The media outlets up to this point all mentioned that without Florida, Bush would lose the election, even FOX. The amount of Republicans deciding it useless to go to the polls in other time zones has not been calculated. I believe, though, it would mirror the three separate organizations that tallied western Florida’s disparaged voters, but on a grander scale. In fact, I believe that the popular vote would also be in Bush’s hands in 2000 if the media had not so egregiously miscalled the state of Florida. (Keep in mind this is my “opinion” based on the voters reactions, both Democratic and Republican, tallied by scientific means from three organizations investigations in western Florida. You see, this is opinion based on logic and science, not un-founded paranoia and suppositions alluded to by my son’s teacher.)

Again, though, even with all the above put aside, Bush won all the recounts, and the New York Times simply states that if the recount was allowed to continue by the U. S. Supreme Court that Bush would have been the clear winner.

WHY THE BAD CALL?

Part of the miscall in the 2000 election can be tied directly to the early miscall in the 2004 election, in way of example. “Exit Polling” is the main culprit in this aspect of the problem. MSNBC and FOXNews had computer models of who was winning this time around that included the Exit Polling information. This skewed the election as going strongly to John Kerry. In fact, Kerry was gearing his thinking to a win. However, when MSNBC, FOXNews, ABC, CBS, and the like, dropped the Exit Polling info from their computer models half-way through the day, Bush surged about 5-percentage points.

These statistics were even worse during the 2000 election, allowing for the early and thus incorrect call for Florida. Let me state once again unequivocally, in the hard tallying of actual votes minus Exit Polling data, both in the 2004 election as a whole, and specifically in the 2000 debacle, Bush was never behind in the count.

5 TO 4, OR 7 TO 9

Some are under the impression that the U.S. Supreme Court was split on the final decision along party divisions that had the five “conservative” Judges voting along demagogic lines for Bush, and the four “liberal” Judges for Gore. This is in fact untrue. On the heart of the case (that is, equal protection for the voter as well as for Bush and Gore) the U.S. Supreme Court was almost unanimous. A seven/two split! The most liberal Supreme Court Judge agreeing that the eight differing standards in what is and is not acceptable for a Gore/Bush ballot allocation shouldn’t be allowed to continue.

These seven Judges took into consideration the Constitutional aspects of the problem, as well as the Florida Constitution’s limitations to time in regards to a recount. All seven agreed that there was insufficient time to bring a fair and homologous procedure to all these eight (and possibly more) counties.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

So why all the “hub bub, bub?” Partisan politics, period! I can speak from experience, using in fact, an example from my own past. When Clinton became president, there were documentaries released by the “right” that had all kinds of conspiracy theories as to all the “misdealings” within the history of the Clintons political road to the Whitehouse. The most popular of them being The Clinton Chronicles. This montage of clippings, newspaper headlines, testimonies, and video shown in this documentary is quite convincing at first glance. And I was convinced. However, as I am one to poke and prod (which is why my home library has ballooned to over 3,000 books and hundreds of video/DVD documentaries), the conspiracies revolving around the Clintons have been shown quite baseless. What are, if any, the equivalent to the Clinton based documentaries? Michael Moore!

FAHRENHEIT 911

While space here is limited to the subject at hand, that is, the Florida recount, I am open to discussion about any “fact” thought to be authoritative that was presented in any of Moore’s documentaries.^[2]

Near the beginning of Fahrenheit 911 we are shown a newspaper headline that states Gore won one of the recounts in Florida. Yes, an actual photo of a newspaper headline, or so we are led to believe. What isn’t shown is the original article. In fact, this wasn’t an article at all!

What it was, was a letter to the editor from a reader of a newspaper who wrote in responding to the recounts all going Bush’s way. This person was a private citizen whose letter was placed in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the opinion part of the newspaper. What Moore did was take this column-and-a-half letter to the editor, expand and enlarge the headline to stretch across the entire top of the “page,” even going so far as changing the font, and then spreading out and enlarging the letter portion to more columns, thus making it look like a newspaper headline. In other words, Michael Moore used deception to tweak information to legitimize his view that Gore won the election. Which ALL investigations have shown to be false.

And I do mean all. For instance, all the examples of people being stopped from voting by force in Florida have proven vacuous. One example:

POLICE ROADBLOCKS

One story still mentioned by partisans today, and mentioned by Moore is that of a roadblock by police officers stopping black voters from making it to the polls. When a civil rights group went down to Florida and held hearings on this (and other) matter[s], they found that there was a robbery nearby, and the police were setting up a perimeter to catch the suspect.

In fact, the possible^[3]irony of all this is that most likely, taking into consideration the racial population in the area where this crime was committed, and that a disproportionate number of crimes committed by said racial group that populates this area of Florida all point to the disenfranchisement of these minority voters by a fellow minority resident. Irony at its best… if proven true that is.

TO CONCLUDE

So the point of this long, drawn-out response to a statement made as a fact in my son’s seventh-grade Visual Arts class, is this:

When statements like these are made as de-facto-truth – de-facto because when the teacher is in a position of authority over these malleable young minds and are given the benefit of the doubt by the students thinking that these adults have researched what they state as fact within the realm of the classroom in a fashion deserving that of an adult mind – when in fact they are easily dismissed as “other-than,” then we as parents must not allow such misstatements to be made without challenge.

The matter of who won the Florida recount has been put to rest, almost four years ago. Partisan politics keeps it alive however. And to engender students to look upon their President, no matter what political affiliation that President finds himself or herself to be aligned with, with suspicion is a serious matter. This is not the place for a teacher to steer their students towards unfounded opinions based on unsupported suspicions that would cause or call into question the respect due a President in the classroom setting.

While a parent has the right to engender whatever they wish with their own children, the teacher must be diligent to keep such misgivings about such matters to themselves and their own children, teachers lounge, or wherever such opinions are relevant or warranted. I am not angered by such an opinion stated within the classroom, in fact, I have come to expect it. I only wish that the teacher[s] understand that when they speak on such matters, that they do so in a manner that engenders our sons and daughters understanding of government, rather than the political opinions of said teacher[s].

I hope to hear back from the school on this matter. I also invite those teachers on the Heart Team who enjoy political discussion as much as I do to feel free to open up lines of communication with me. I don’t bite. Sometimes within the limited time people have and the demographic they find themselves in, their opinions are passed unchallenged or without taking into consideration another point of view. I understand this.

“Thank You! ~ Much Thought, Sean G”

Thank you for you patience in reading this parent’s rebuttal and concern about something said in the classroom. I hope this letter will engender positive discussion among the teachers on my son’s team, and a greater understanding of an excitable topic.

Footnotes

[1] In fact, there is no newspaper headline in the entire United States that showed Gore ahead in any of the recounts. I will deal with the only headline produced that showed gore ahead, it can be found in Michael Moore’s movie, Fahrenheit 911.

[2] My e-mail address is at the top of the page. I will discuss these matters as I have here: in a calm, logical manner that takes the sociological extremisms (e.g., The Clinton Chronicles on one side versus Fahrenheit 911 on the other) from both sides into consideration. For instance: in a recent poll, 29% of Democrats polled believe Bush stole the 2004 election. No evidence of foul play, just paranoia that any sociologist could do a doctoral thesis on.

[3] I am only guessing here and do not know all the parameters of the case – more of a thought experiment.

UPDATES

This first addendum comes from NEWSBUSTERS: (May 2008)

….The lead of an April 4, 2001 USA Today story headlined, “Newspapers’ recount shows Bush prevailed,” by reporter Dennis Cauchon:

George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida’s disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used, the first full study of the ballots reveals. Bush would have won by 1,665 votes — more than triple his official 537-vote margin — if every dimple, hanging chad and mark on the ballots had been counted as votes, a USA TODAY/Miami Herald/Knight Ridder study shows. The study is the first comprehensive review of the 61,195 “undervote” ballots that were at the center of Florida’s disputed presidential election….

That look was followed in November by an analysis by a consortium of media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN and AP. It determined that George W. Bush still would have won under either legally possible recount scenario which could have occurred: The Florida Supreme Court ordered recount of undervotes statewide or Gore’s request for a recount in certain counties. The New York Times led its November 12, 2001 front page article, “Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” by reporters Ford Fessenden and John M. Broder:

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year’s presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.

Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court’s order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.

Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff — filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations….

This from PBS NEWS HOUR (April 2001):

In the first full study of Florida’s ballots since the election ended, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled “undervotes” — ballots the voter has noticeably indented but had not punched all the way through — to be counted.

The study, conducted by the accounting firm of BDO Seidman, counted over 60,000 votes in Florida’s 67 counties, tabulating separate vote totals in several standards categories.

While the USA Today report focused on what would have happened had the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount not been halted by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Herald pointed to one scenario under which Gore could have scored a narrow victory — a fresh recount in all counties using the most generous standards.

In their reports, the newspapers assumed counts already completed when the court-ordered recount was stopped would have been included in any official count. Thus, they allowed numbers from seven counties — Palm Beach, Volusia, Broward, Hamilton, Manatee, Escambia and Madison — to stand, but applied the most inclusive standards to votes in the rest of the state. If those numbers did not stand, the Herald reported, a more generous hypothetical revisited recount would have scored the White House for Gore — but with only a 393-vote margin.

Under most other scenarios, the papers reported, Bush would have retained his lead…..

HEH, here is a VERY recent update via PJ-MEDIA (August 2017):

Al Gore told Bill Maher on his HBO “Real Time” show that he thinks he carried Florida in the 2000 election.

Gore also believes that rising temperatures will doom mankind to extinction unless we revert economically to the Middle Ages. Which ignorant belief is dumber?

[…..]

Anyone not named Al Gore (or apparently, Bill Maher) knows that two independent studies by media organizations proved that Bush won the 2000 race in Florida and hence, the election.

The most comprehensive review was done by a consortium of media companies, including:

The [New York]Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and CNN. The group hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in January to examine the ballots.

The consortium examined the 43,000 ballots that remained to be counted when the Supreme Court stopped the process. They determined:

Another media group headed up by USA Today and the Miami Herald also conducted an extensive study and came to the same conclusion:

A USA Today/Miami Herald/Knight Ridder study after the election concluded in May 2001 that Bush would have won a hand count of Florida’s disputed ballots, called “hanging chads,” if a standard advocated by Gore had been used.

“Bush would have won by 1,665 votes — more than triple his official 537-vote margin — if every dimple, hanging chad and mark on the ballots had been counted as votes,” the study concluded.

But liberals hate it if they’re not being seen as suffering under the yoke of oppression. The election was stolen! Gore should have been president!

We’re seeing the exact same effort to delegitimize Trump. Hillary didn’t lose the election. Trump colluded with the Russians and stole it! Outrage! Call for a special counsel. Start the impeachment!

Democrats never change…..

“Racism” Invoked in the Classroom

Published December 6, 2012June 3, 2023 by Papa Giorgio

Here is the viewable or downloadable version of the letter replicated below in PDF FORM

This is a quick intro [in the green box] of this long letter I sent to both the principle and the teacher. (Other letters went to students in sealed envelopes to give to their parents.)

This is in response to a Saugus teacher verbally announcing that a position taken by my son, or by multiple people in the classroom (which included my son), was racist. This is my response.

A quick note from a concerned parent,

During conversation on hot topic issues, which I do not mind in the least, the conversation of immigration came up in the classroom. I wish to address this particular point of the interaction between my son and the teacher, not to bemoan the teacher — although this is worthy of it — but to inspire more fruitful response in the future and better class management.

Firstly, before the “operation” (often which are painful), I wish to administer some anesthesia.

I realize first and foremost that the teacher (in the broad sense) is only human, and may have some days that are not “on the mark” and others where they have had a day “gone perfectly.” Life in and outside the classroom can be demanding. Mistakes will be made and there should be understanding in regards to this. I expect missteps from the people that work for me, and I expect I will misstep in my duties at my job. The challenge is — of course — to learn from them.

Likewise, when a seventeen-year-old talks about immigration, it is a subject they most likely know little about, and in-between homework, XBOX, and eating/sleeping, and friendships as well as family events, this 17-year old may pick up bits and pieces of his older brother and I talking about these macro issues. And in his adolescent mind latch onto (wrongly or rightly) a portion and “run with it,” mischaracterizing the issue. It happens with 17-year olds. (I do wish to note that I realize my son can be strongly argumentative, and taking a position strongly with the barest of knowledge. I acknowledge this and only wish the best for the teachers that encounter this aspect of my son. I tell him often he should become a lawyer.)

So when his brother and I discuss, say, that Hispanic/Latino groups who themselves stand against illegal immigration and write about the deleterious effects on their pay rate and the lowered standard of living they face by illegal immigration by standing in line and following all the rules in order to get into this great nation to better their lives and their families lives. My youngest son may have heard his brother and I talk about past immigrants (an older generation) who tell stories about how they or their parents came to the country not being able to speak a lick of English but teaching themselves quickly in order to succeed in the country. They speak of not being able to read in their native tongue and so “forced” to enculturate^[1] themselves into the American culture, which is summed up on our coins, ” E Pluribus Unum.” Roughly,” out of many, one.”

Now, I am sure my youngest son would agree with the above positions. But I have a feeling he latched onto the part about listening to immigrants themselves talk about this generation of immigrants talking about how by learning the English language and all the interactions it took to do so, they were enculturated. You know, maybe we should take a break here and I will share my interpretation a bit about that word, “encuturate,” by me sharing some definitions offered in my seminary classes, taken from a paper or two I wrote. Bear with me a bit… I only write this much for clarity’s sake.

a. – Cultural Anthropology in “missionology” is very important to understand. One author hints at a definition when he says it is “attention to systems of ideas and symbols”,^[2] it helps the missionary to “understand the purposes of and differences in the various cultures of the world”^[3]in assisting the missionary in understand what the process of cultural differences is about. This process or study of culture is what is called “cultural anthropology.”^[4] A refusal to implement this cross-cultural study can cause a failure in the Gospel being communicated successfully by trying to impose one’s own culture on another culture.^[5]

[….]

Enculturation “is the process whereby an established culture teaches an individual by repetition its accepted norms and values, so that the individual can become an accepted member of the society and find his or her suitable role. Most importantly, it establishes a context of boundaries and correctness that dictates what is and is not permissible within that society’s framework.” This is the best definition I have found yet.^[6]

[….]

Acculturation is key for the missionary to approach a different culture “as a child”^[7] in order to learn (become accultured) become accepted by the culture the missionary has gone to.

[….]

In the West not self-disclosing parts of your inner-self seems unhealthy. But some cultures do not view self-disclosure as all that healthy. The missionary needs to be able to respond to these differences and understand them. Also, self-disclosure is usually precipitated by friendship, not weekly meetings.

self-disclosure n. the act of revealing information about one’s self, especially one’s PRIVATE SELF, to other people. In psychotherapy, the revelation and expression by the client of personal, innermost feelings, fantasies, experiences, and aspirations is believed by many to be a requisite for therapeutic change and personal growth. In addition, pertinent revelation by the therapist of his or her personal details to the client can—if used with discretion—be a valuable tool to increase rapport and earn the trust of the client.^[8]

[….]

“A bicultural approach simply extends the range of potential situations that can serve as behavior settings for the target skills being taught.”^[9] The idea of the “bridge” is the ability of the missionary to somewhat leave his first culture to be able to communicate well in the second culture. It is a “set of relationships between people from two culture[s]… [making in a sense] a new culture.”^[10] Mainly it is setting up a community through relationships where the mature missionary can connect on a cultural level.

So you can see, for conversation sake, that I know a bit more about cultural differences and similarities and how to merge the two into a working society than many parents (maybe) from Saugus. This is not to toot my horn, but as we transition to the tougher topics, I wanted you both (or whomever is reading this) to understand a bit of where I come from.

Okay, “they were enculturated,” picking back up where we left off. These same people with personal stories from their parents or themselves, talked about how they were forced into our culture. Nowadays, with emphasis on “from many, many” (“E pluribus, pluribus,” celebrating every cultural difference and teaching a distorted view of multi-culturalism [I have taken some accelerated courses for a master’s in education for a friend, I know that which I speak]) we find Classrooms geared towards the native tongue, ballots and signs and other ways of communicating in the native languages of the peoples homeland that slow this enculturation process down. You have now, for instance, a whole generation that both a) cannot speak in our cultures tongue, or b) they do not feel the need to. This is sad. This is a “value” of Europe,” and not ours, historically speaking. Ballots, road signs, and more were always in English, and in order to vote well one had to learn the language which also thrust the new voter into the culture of America. He took that or another topic and in a small sound-bite in a classroom environment probably did not express what he believed well.

Or discussions in our home of the very provable impact on the health system from this very large population that raises health costs and options on legal immigrants and their families.

Now, as I discuss these issues with my boys, I realize that they will take away from these brief interactions aspects that they either misunderstood, miss-emphasized, and the like. Even though I may have clearly annunciated my viewpoint, these are still young minds I am dealing with. Whatever the conversation in the classroom is that stems from the home environment, know that a young person will probably not explain it as well as I would or the teacher might, or the student wished he had.

Which brings me to my main issue. As a teacher, after having such a conversation where kids may have not presented what they thought or have learned from home well (again: XBOX, eating, sleeping homework, friends, and the like), they should not hear from their teacher that these positions are racist. Even in jest. BECAUSE, being that a classroom is full of these “muddled” minds, some may take this as a queue from their teacher that someone in the classroom IS racist or holds to racist positions. Again, because of our recent political election and how the word is thrown around in common vernacular, let us look into what this word means. And it is interesting because I just received a review copy of the book from North Carolina University Press, Chapill Hill, the book, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This book, among the many others I have read over the years, goes to great lengths to properly define racism. A word too often thrown around.

Webster’s says this: a. belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

So we see that Webster’s main definition (and the one’s that follow) are based on a belief in a genetic superiority of one ethnicity (falsely called race) over another. A more in-depth definition comes from Safire’s Political Dictionary, and reads (in-part):

racism Originally, an assumption that an individual’s abilities and potential were determined by his biological race, and that some races were inherently superior to others; now, a political-diplomatic accusation of harboring or practicing such theories.

“This word [racism],” wrote Harvard Professor J. Anton De Haas in November 1938, “has come into use the last six months, both in Europe and this country… Since so much has been said about conflicting isms, it is only natural that a form was chosen which suggested some kind of undesirable character.” In fact, racism came into use two years earlier, in his 1936 book The Coming American Fascism, Lawrence Dennis wrote, “If … it be assumed that one of our values should be a type of racism which excludes certain races from citizenship, then the plan of execution should provide for the annihilation, deportation, or sterilization of the excluded races.”

Racism, a shortening of racialism, was at first directed against Jews. In the nineteenth century, anti-Semites who foresaw a secular age in which religion might not be such a popular rallying force against Jews put forward the idea of Jewishness being less a religion than a race. Adolf Hitler, with his “master race” ideology, turned theory into savage practice….

Note also that the above started to get into what Hitler thought. Evolutionary thinking at the time was that mankind evolved in three separate groups, in differing local on our planet. The Caucasoid, the Negroid, and the Mongoloid “races.” This teaching (espoused from higher learning to high-schools) went a long way in fortifying this thinking:

“The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law [natural selection] did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all…. If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.”^[11]

I think a better word to use (but I do not even think this word applicable to the conversation), since very few today are racists — i.e., believe in the genetic superiority of one race over another — would be “prejudice.”

which Webster’s defines as: an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.

Now, my son has heard the mainstream meaning and response to our immigration issue from me, from immigrants, and from conservative leaders like Marco Rubio. But these are only in passing. So, while he may even have seemed prejudiced in his repeating of what he latched onto (rightly or wrongly), he was merely being a teenager. As such, should get the grace and understanding that is involved in being such. Maybe even a verbal reinforcement that they may not be addressing the issue as well as they would wish, leading to good in class management.

[SIDE-NOTE: even if presented with a truly racist event in the classroom, much like certain t-shirts not being allowed on campus do to the inflammatory nature that can cause young people to react to it emotionally… so to is it the teachers responsibility to diffuse the situation so that outside the classroom there is less of a chance that issues will be dealt with by young, emotionally driven persons versus reasoning adults. In this case I think the opposite happened.]

Being a person of faith, I will share my personal beliefs and history to make clear my position before going further. I was born and raised in Detroit. the neighborhood I grew up in was almost all black. I was the proverbial “white friend.” All my friends and buddies were black. I have a black grandmother and (obviously then) cousins and the like. So my background is full of people I love from a differing ethnicity.

Also, my theology informs me as well.

In Numbers, chapter 12, we read about Moses marrying a “Cushite” woman (Cushite’s were the early tribal members that founded Ethiopia). So a Hebrew was marrying an Ethiopian. Miriam, Moses sister, spoke out against this interracial marriage and she was struck with a form of disease that turned her skin “ashen.” God only took that curse away till she repented of her sin and recognized what God had already blessed.

I would also be called a “fundamentalist,” in that my personal belief is of a young age of the earth. Now, you may not agree with this position, that is more than understandable. But holding to a position one agrees with or disagrees with does not say anything about whether or not such a position has in it positive or negative societal aspects. So, for instance, what is not often realized about “young earthers” by those who do not study worldviews is that we hold to an aspect of mankind that is the least racial. In other words, the Bible says in Acts 17:26 states: “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” We view Genesis and the Hebrew word for “clay” that God used to make man from to mean “red earth” (literally, “red clay” in the Hebrew), which supports the many creations stories from all over the world that mentions the first man and woman being “red” in color. And that much like the genetics in eye-color, the genes turning on and off our cells that produce color/melatonin give us our small differences. Fundamentalists believe that over time culture and familiarity caused people to seek after “like minded” [culture] or “looking” [familiarity] persons. And that as we [mankind] traveled this globe, environment dictated places where one could survive and others not (darker ethnicities by the equator, lighter away from).

So, while I am sure some scoff at the “fundamentalist” ideals I hold to, and talk over with my kids, You can see that from my history and faith I would be the least racial (as well as my kids) in a situation that required a teacher to say “that is enough of the racist comments” in class, after my son struggled to make his point.

Now we enter into an example of a modern day racist to make the point (a non-important point really, but one I feel needs to be hashed out). This is from a recent conversation challenging the use of the word “racist” in dialogue with friends and family in this very political environment. This was in response to a friend saying Karl Rove was racist. And while he [Rove] is not part of the conversation, my response is… because if the teacher is a Democrat that has very liberal biases and see’s her classroom as a place to express these views, then she needs to answer me about the following…

… and let me say something. I have lived a full life, from a drop-out from Bowman Nights at Saugus, to a three-time felon, to a father and husband to a degreed “theologian.” I have accumulated over 5,000 books in my home library, have written a book, and have passions in regards to comparative religious views and philosophies (current and past). I study history, science, philosophy, economics, current affairs, political science, theology, education, world religions, cults and the occult, and more.

I hate racism, and talk to people a lot about changing their life from this muddled thinking to one that is on a firm foundation. What is below should scare the normal individual who would surely be the harbinger of such warnings if a Republican held to these beliefs (as would I). But if one dismisses the following, then that merely speaks to his or her dogmatic views viewed through their rose colored lenses.

[…..]

… our current President went to a church for twenty years that sold anti-Semitic/racist sermons in their bookstore by Louise Farrakhan during the entire time he attended. Farrakhan believes in the genetic superiority of the black race over others. They put him [Farrakhan] on the cover of the church’s magazine (that is mailed to about 20,000 people’s homes) three times and invited him INTO church to award him a “lifetime achievement award.” A man who teaches that the white man was created 6,600 years ago on the Island of Cyprus, thus bringing all evil into the world (via the white man).

Side-Note: They also put on the cover once Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam… who said:

“…they are a prey in the hands of the white race, the world’s archdeceivers (the real devils in person). You are made to believe that you worship the true God, but you do not! God is unknown to you in that which the white race teaches you (a mystery God). The great archdeceivers (the white race) were taught by their father, Yakub, 6,000 years ago, how to teach that God is a spirit (spook) and not a man. In the grafting of his people (the white race), Mr. Yakub taught his people to contend with us over the reality of God by asking us of the whereabouts of that first One (God) who created the heavens and the earth, and that, Yakub said, we cannot do.”

Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman In America, p. 9

In that same bookstore books like this were sold for the entirety of Obama’s membership. This author in another book wrote this:

“White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality.” quoted from James Cone’s book, A Black Theology of Liberation, page 64.

This is eerily similar to Hitlers own writing:

“The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew” ~ Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf

This author was regularly pushed by Reverend Wright (who himself was a former Nation of Islam minister) on TV appearances, like this one: YOUTUBE (link set to start at main-point)

Pictures of Michelle Obama hanging out with Farrakhan’s wife, also a racist anti-Semite.

Not to mention that recently “A former top deputy to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan tells Newsmax that Barack Obama’s ties to the black nationalist movement in Chicago run deep, and that for many years the two men have had “an open line between them” to discuss policy and strategy, either directly or through intermediaries.”

Yet you feel it necessary to forgo the righteous indignation of these facts and say that (out of the blue) Rove is racist? Why is he? Did he attend a racist church for twenty years? If Bush attended a church like that (with roles reversed, inviting in “David Dukes” for awards and the like — Christian Identity teaches that the Jew was created when Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden… having sexual relations with the serpent [the Devil] and birthing out the “evil” Jews… not too dissimilar to Obama’s buddy), heck, I would lock arms with you on getting this guy out of office, assuming the media would even allow him into office in the first place.

Apply to your side what you would expect others to apply to theirs.

Thank you for your time and patience, SeanG

FOOTNOTES

[1] A definition for conversational clarity is coming up.

[2] Paul G. Hierbert, Anthropological Insights for Missionaries (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1985), 21.

[3] Ray Arnold, The Missionary In Culture (Tacoma, WA: Faith Seminary Publishing House, 1995), 2.

[4] Idid.

[5] Ralph D. Winter & Steven C. Hawthorn, eds., Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader (Pasedena, CA: William Carey Library, 1981) 517.

[6] WIKIPEDIA (last accessed 7-18-08), cf., enculturation.

[7] Ray Arnold, The Missionary In Culture (Tacoma, WA: Faith Seminary Publishing House, 1995), 6.

[8] Gary R. VandenBos, ed., APA Dictionary of Psychology (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007), cf. self-disclosure, 829.

[9] Adrian Furnham & Stephen Bochner, Culture Shock: Psychological Reactions to Unfamiliar Environments (New York, NY: Methuen & Co., 1986), 240-241.

[10] Ralph D. Winter & Steven C. Hawthorn, eds., Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader (Pasedena, CA: William Carey Library, 1981) 381.

[11] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translator/annotator, James Murphy [New York: Hurst and Blackett, 1942], pp. 161-162.

BONUS MATERIALS

An important documentary about this in higher education can be found here on this very same topic:

IndoctrinateU (makes a great present):

Religio-Political Talk (RPT)

"I never discuss anything except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss." ~ G.K. Chesterton

SeanG Letter

Kwanzaa

Back to the Original Premise!

Native American History In Public School (Howard Zinn Refuted)

Election of Bush Irks My Son’s Art Teacher

“Racism” Invoked in the Classroom