JAMES WEBB is a good guy. So I’ve said for some time—ever since my correspondence with him during the dark days of the Iraq war, when I was THE ONLY antiwar writer on WND, and was cursed and threatened daily for it. Webb, of course, opposed the war. We exchanged friendly emails, which he initiated pursuant to one of many anti-war-on-Iraq columns I had written.

Citing Pat Buchanan, this courageous man has now come out against “government programs to help all ‘people of color’” as “unfair.” Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Webb argues as follows:

“After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. [A point upon which I expand in my new book.] These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived. …

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all “people of color”—especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.—moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites.”

The clearest example of today’s misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South. …

At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that “fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery.”

The Civil War devastated the South, in human and economic terms. And from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II, the region was a ravaged place, affecting black and white alike.

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt created a national commission to study what he termed ‘the long and ironic history of the despoiling of this truly American section.’ At that time, most industries in the South were owned by companies outside the region. Of the South’s 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white). The illiteracy rate was five times that of the North-Central states and more than twice that of New England and the Middle Atlantic (despite the waves of European immigrants then flowing to those regions). The total endowments of all the colleges and universities in the South were less than the endowments of Harvard and Yale alone. The average schoolchild in the South had $25 a year spent on his or her education, compared to $141 for children in New York.

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks’ average of 10.6 years”…

MORE.

The liberal worldview that saturates our society accounts for why the constructs applied to every-day moral dilemmas are perverse and perverted. Thus, to raise the perfectly proper question of the infringement on private property rights and freedom of association that is the Civil Rights Act of 1964—this is framed as racist; as an act that casts aspersions on the personality and core values of the actor.

Yet for an Hispanic advocacy group, the “Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund,” with a wink and a nod from the officials of Princeton Borough and Princeton Township, to issue illegal aliens with a document that masquerade as an official stamp of approval—this is cast, not as forgery, usurpation of authority, etc., but as a helpful “solution” to the problem of trespass.

Since this last “initiative” so obviously comes from the “Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund,” who are the liberal, local, law-enforcement to reject the Illegal Alien’s Club ID card?

“… the Princeton police departments and the Mercer County sheriff’s and prosecutor’s offices have endorsed their use.”

Fox News reported, approvingly, that law-enforcement believes it’ll help them in their law-enforcement activities. Flash a La Raza I.D. card at the cop and he’ll crack a smile and wave you by.

Arizona is also removing—horrors!—from classrooms teachers with heavily accented or ungrammatical English. In its report, Fox News applied the race construct to this welcome news, but not to the segment it aired about the wonders of St. Augustine College, the blacks-only school that fasttracks pigmentally endowed kids into Ivy universities and government positions about which WASPs can only dream.

Asking English teachers in an English-speaking country to speak properly is an act of racial supremacy; barring whites from a school in the same country—not at all.

Examining only certain stories through the prism of race is, in itself, a form of subliminal, subtle propaganda.

Gov. Jan Brewer promises to be an interesting politician to watch (unlike Sister Sarah). She is known, of course, for Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law, SB 1070. And now, Gov. Brewer has signed “a bill aimed at ending ethnic studies in Tucson schools.” The New York Times is fuming:

“Under the law signed on Tuesday, any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.

‘Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,’ Paul Senseman, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement on Thursday. … ‘The evidence is overwhelming that ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District teaches a kind of destructive ethnic chauvinism that the citizens of Tucson should no longer tolerate.’”

[SNIP]

Individualism instead of collectivism? A liberal (in the classical sense) education instead of one premised on cultural Marxism? Sounds promising.

This stuff has no place in public schools. If La Raza want to “teach students about the marginalization of different groups in the United States through history,” let them take the “curriculum” to a private school.

Sandra Bullock’s still on a hormonal high after staring in a film (did not see “Blind Side”; would never go see it) about a white family adopting a black young man, or boy, or baby. (Is there any other kind of adoption? Do affluent blacks ever adopt poor white kids, or is such charity a one-way affair?)

Bullock might be imitating art, or emulating the trend of assembling Benetton babies begun by Brangelina and the moronic Madonna. At least Bullock has not searched out exotic kids as has crazy Angie; Louis Bardo Bullock is from New Orleans.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY to homeschooling mothers for whose kids BAB and IlanaMercer.com are required reading. As one of my editors once said, “My home schooled kids receive Mercer’s Constitution-related columns as required reading.”

Sen. Scott Brown (Mass.) joined five Republicans and 57 Democrats in voting to proceed on a $15 billion, so-called jobs-creation measure, which incorporates “extensions of unemployment insurance and COBRA health benefits,” reports the WaPo.

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM weekly column, “Your kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable”:

“Don’t ask why the ‘news’ is all aflutter for Meghan McCain, but earlier in February, she issued another of her sub-intelligent messages, on a forum – ABC’s ‘The View’ – that is a fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity:

The Tea Party Movement was ‘innately racist,’ Meghan said. This was why “young people were turned off by the movement.” And , in her most grating Valley-Girl inflection: ‘I’m sorry—revolutions start with young people, not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can’t say the word vote in English.’

The rude reference was to Tom Tancredo’s observation that people ‘who cannot spell the word vote or say it in English’ are determining elections in America.

The former congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate was on to something. The Founding Founders decided in their wisdom that only propertied males would vote. To justify distaff disenfranchisement look no further than ‘Meghaan.’ As to the other limitation: The founders were not democrats; they foresaw today’s pillage politics – and they understood that, unchecked, overbearing majorities would be more malignant than monarchs. And all too well did the founder know that, granted a vote, the unpropertied masses would help themselves to the belongings of the propertied.

But what would ‘Meghaan,’ a member of the Millennial generation, know about a group of truly great revolutionaries whose average age, in 1776, was 44?

“The ‘Meghaan’ Millennials are a generation of youngsters that reveres only itself for no good reason.” Yes, ‘Meghan is a member of a studied cohort, born between 1980 and 2001.” Read more about these “needy and narcissistic dullards.”

The column is “Your kids: Dumb, Difficult & Dispensable.

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Feb. 19): To the critic hereunder: The column references “The ‘Trophy Kids’ Go to Work,” an article that distills the conclusions of a book packed with data. The method of the column: go from the particular to the general; go from one colorful case everyone knows and move to the general.

Update II: “Thomas” below is yet another instructive case study on the Millennials, their demeanor and capabilities. Note the run-on, ungrammatical, misspelled, incoherent sentences. T. has not been taught to write a simple sentence with a subject, a verb and the attendant clauses. Not his fault, I guess, but I know many self-taught individuals who’ve made up for the deficiencies of their teachers just fine.

He’s arrogant and insulting; is big on the ad hominem and the non sequiturs; but incapable of putting forth an argument. An example of a non sequiturs hereunder: I should be picking on another generation, he says. Maybe, but this column is about his generation (I presume). The the fact that another generation is problematic doesn’t invalidate a critique of the Millennials. See what I mean by a non sequituir?

My column argued that, for the most, not his but my generation has invented and is perfecting the gadgets he cannot do without, yet he repeats the following fallacy: The twitterering twits are prescient and streaks ahead of us, their parents.

In fairness to the poor creature, I have received many such letters in my career. They tend to be from younger people, but not always.

Finally, another typical sign of grandiosity: He has not read the posting policy on this blog. Since rules are not for his ilk, he does not dare limit the reader’s exposure to this word salad of his. A good teacher would have red inked this letter, and taught the young man to say what he is struggling to say in one short paragraph.

As you can imagine, there are a dozen more insulting messages demanding space on this, my private property. The insults, moreover, evince the utter absence of intellectual curiosity—T. had not read any of my writings or my bio, so has cheerily lumped me with all of Hannity’s handmaidens.

Update III (Feb. 22): Robert’s point I’m afraid is simplistic; and certainly not the thrust of my article. Hint: Most everything I direct my cultural commentary at, and this column is no exception, can be summed up thus: ORDERED LIBERTY. Ordered liberty is about hierarchy. Read “THE IMPORTANCE OF BOUNDARIES.” Perhaps the larger philosophical point of everything cultural I write will become clearer.

It’s been my perception for some time that American fathers, generally, are sexually inappropriate with their daughters. The fault lies—again, generally—not so much with the hapless dad, but with these young, assertive females, taught by pedagogues and reinforced by parents and the culture that, “I’m like a sexual being” (uttered in Meghan-McCain like tart tones). The onus is on those around the girl to let her act out her sexuality 100% of the time—or so the consensus seems.

Repulsive. Improper. Unnatural.

However, Scott Brown, the man from Massachusetts who filled Kennedy’s sacred seat in the U.S. Senate, went beyond the call of an American dad’s duty in advertising his girls’ availability during his acceptance speech.

This picture of Brown with his girls, jutting boobs and all, certainly reinforces my view of impropriety (yuckiness).

More obscene than anything discussed here, however, is Ayla Brown’s singing. No, she’s not talented. Strained, bedroom groaning is not good singing. On the other hand, I guess it has its places …

Update (Feb. 4): The comment about my hailing from a once-Christian conservative country (South Africa, RIP), and thus not acclimatizing well to the hyper-sexual American family is completely off. It demonstrate to me that even conservative-minded readers are incorrigible cultural libertines.

It used to be the most basic of things that young women were modest about their sexuality around their fathers. The father-daughter relationship is a primary one for a girl. From it will develop all her future relationships with men. This is precisely why to me the specter of fems letting it all hang out around their fathers is disturbing. And why a father should know better (and Brown has carefully crafted his public image, including the pics he has released to media), and ought to be able to tell his proudly presenting girl, “Here’s my Hawaiian shirt, sweetheart, cover up.”

When you talk about restoring the middle-class family and its values, this is it. When you talk about returning America to a healthier time when parents where parents and not potential admirers or friends or sexual coaches, this is it.

For touting a slut like Kim Karsashian as a role model for “young girls” (read: budding sluts) becasue she doesn’t drink (but films herself adoringly copulating), Sean Hannity is a libertine. Am I from Another Culture to suggest this? Cultural conservatism used to be apple-pie American. Now my so-called culturally conservative readers find me quaint.

I despair. It’s beyond repair.

Incidentally, where on the continuum of tender (or, dare I say twisted) soft porn, suggestive, father-daughter tease are our wholesome Miley and Billy Ray Cyrus situated?

I can’t say it often enough: “Homegrown retardation is far more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism in modern-day America.”

How does one cluster of severely compromised pedagogues and parents deal with the reality of aggregate IQ differences between white students, on the one hand, and blacks and Latinos, on the other?

Why, by eliminating the harder subjects with which the stupider students can’t cope. Why allow the smart student to learn science if the stupid can’t?

How do these cretins hope to help fat students? By prohibiting track-and-field meets for the fit? Ugly students, of course, can be pacified by disfiguring pretty ones. That was easy.

The adults described in “Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs,” “working” as they are to cripple clever kids and knee-cap the workforce, have clearly themselves been subjected to the kind of “education” that eliminates the gifted for the sake of the gimps.

They should be subjected to something far worse.

If you have kids in the public school system; remove them forthwith!

Update (Jan. 6): The retards, as expected, are doing the exact opposite of what that genius Thomas Jefferson instructed:

Geniuses, currently the recipients of two pennies out of every 100 educational dollars, must be “raked from the rubbish,” wrote Jefferson in “Notes on the State of Virginia.” Jefferson (he was not perfect) favored a very limited (only three years gratis) public education for Virginians. Unlike Education Secretary Rod Paige, whose most important contribution to literacy was to call the NEA (America’s largest teacher union) a “terrorist organization,” Jefferson understood that not every child can learn “Greek, Latin, Geography, and higher branches of arithmetic.” He did, however, insist that all must know “reading, writing, common arithmetic,” and history (nothing, you will note, about “social science” and “self esteem”). “History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future,” Jefferson noted.

James Ostrowski, prominent libertarian and tea party movement leader, has published his second book, Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids: What You Need to Know. The book urges parents to pull their children out of the schools to escape crime, drugs, promiscuity, political correctness, indoctrination, and academic mediocrity. “This book provides the tea party movement with a strategic roadmap to restore the Jeffersonian vision of individual liberty that is the very essence of America,” he writes.

Ostrowski was led to write the book out of anger that his own kids’ parish school closed in 2006. At the present rate, private schools are doomed as a poor economy and rising tuitions squeeze out working class parents who are already forced to pay large sums for failing government schools.

The fate of the nation is tied to the future of K-12 education, Ostrowski argues: “The grand result of our experiment with government schools is a population ill-prepared to deal with the present crisis in America. . . . they are utterly unequipped to deal with the harsh new reality that the regime is failing and the nation is in the process of economic collapse.”

Another excerpt: “Government schools are truly the foundation of big government today. They supply the funding and the troops [the teachers unions] and they drum the ideology into your children, five days a week for thirteen years. Finally, they render many children less able to survive without constant support and direction from the government. Their message is that people cannot live in freedom and they fulfill that prophecy with each graduating class.”

After reviewing 50 years of failed efforts to reform the schools through the political process, Ostrowski argues that the only feasible option is direct citizen action: a massive simultaneous withdrawal of children from the schools.

James Ostrowski is a trial and appellate lawyer in Buffalo, New York. He was on presidential candidate Ron Paul’s legal staff last year. His policy studies have been published by the Hoover Institution, the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Cato Institute. His articles have been used as course materials at numerous colleges and universities including Brown, Rutgers and Stanford. He taught a course in the Constitution at Canisius College and has been a guest lecturer at the University at Buffalo Medical School.

Presently he is an Adjunct Scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and columnist for LewRockwell.com. He is editor of the libertarian blog, PoliticalClassDismissed.com and founder and president of the Jeffersonian think tank, Free New York, Inc.

He is the author of the 2004 anthology, Political Class Dismissed, dubbed the “bible of the Upstate NY tax revolt.”

The book is for sale at Amazon.

Update: Jim Ostrowski will gladly answer any of your questions about his new book. So go ahead.

Indigenous Indians protesting Columbus Day are not nearly as ridiculous as native Americans teaching and imbibing a great deal of tripe about Christopher Columbus. And no one puts it quite like David Yeagley, the great-great-grandson of Comanche leader Bad Eagle:

“…it is the greatness of Columbus that liberals cannot abide. Being the pathological protesters they are, no great achiever is allowed recognition. (Liberals laud only empty words of people like Barry Soetoro.) And that which the world has previously considered great and honorable must now be denigrated, demeaned, and condemned. Indeed, damned as evil and wrong.

That’s what Jeffrey Kolowith is teaching his kindergarten students in Tampa, Florida. They mustn’t like Columbus. He was bad. ‘He was very, very mean, very bossy,’ says Kolowith, poisoning the little children’s minds with disdain, aversion, and hatred for the very elements of character required to achieve anything grand. Self-discipline, group management, unrelenting dedication, these are not to be found in the weak and ‘loving’ liberal. The only thing they’re devoted to is undoing what achievers achieve.

An AP story, “A darker side of Columbus” emerges in US classrooms, indicates Kolowith is determined that children despise those who have accomplished the most significant feats in history.

Author of the article, Christine Amario, has assembled a sordid array of typical, boring anti-American brainwashers. The only one distinguished among them is in fact Mr. Kolowith—and only because he’s taken the anti-Western cause to the youngest children in the American public school system: the five-year olds.

The irony of an author with an Italian name, trying to discredit the greatest Italian since the time of Jesus! Self-purgation, is it? ‘Abbe pietá di me!’ (Have mercy on me!) This is the liberal’s idea of nobility: self-loathing.”

Read “Yes, Columbus Discovered America.” (As well as the the interview Dr. Yeagley conducted with me.)