Glenn Beck Awakens To The Color Of Hate Crime (But Fails To Credit Those Who Went Before)

Crime, Ethics, Glenn Beck, Morality, Race, Racism

“Oprah Winfrey, you disgust me.” Those were powerful and dramatic words—Glenn Beck’s—but they were probably the only original comments he came up with today on his radio show, during which the broadcaster finally deigned to chronicle one of the most heinous black-on-white hate crimes to have been ignored by mainstream, second-hander media and The Man himself for years.

When Beck used the words “the boyfriend was actually the lucky one,” to segue into a description of the butchering by 5 blacks of twenty-one-year-old Channon Christian, I had an idea where the material might have come from.

Those were words I lifted, last week, from my 2011 book (“Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”), for the WND column. Here’s the excerpt from “Who’s Killing Whom? Speak Up, Bill O’Reilly!”:

“Five blacks—four men and a woman—anally raped Hugh, then shot him to death, wrapped his body in bedding, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight. He was the lucky one. Channon, his fair and fragile-looking friend, was repeatedly gang raped by the four men—vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, in an effort to cleanse away DNA. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused ‘by the tearing,’ or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials would not say. She was then stuffed in a garbage can like trash.”

White trash.

For the information that he and his much-touted researchers had missed, Beck credited a nameless listener, who, if he exists, is probably an avid reader of what Peter Brimelow dubbed the Guerrilla Press.

Yes, the superb reporters at VDARE have been doing the work Beck and the Republican Lincoln idolators have hitherto refused to do. As has Michelle Malkin, the departed Larry Auster, Jack Kerwick (a much-needed, new arrival), this writer, WND reporters, and others.

Ego has no place in telling the story of, as I put it, the “racial hatred … seared into the mangled white bodies of these victims and many more like them.”

What is important is that Glenn Beck, a powerful broadcaster, may have finally awoken to the color of hate crime.

Still, I do not trust individuals who fail to cite their sources, and do not credit those on whose shoulders they stand. Neither should you. If you want the unvarnished goods on crime from the correct angle—continue to track the guerrilla press.

And—do I really have to tell you this?!—don’t trust anyone who gets behind a mass murderer.

Your mother should have told you as much. (Only the other day, my liberal father reiterated the thought to me that he did not know how anyone could exculpate, much less lionize, Honest Abe .)

UPDATED: John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius? (Part 1)

Capitalism, Celebrity, Classical Liberalism, Communism, Debt, Economy, History, Inflation, Intellectualism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media

“John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius?! (Part 1)” is the first part of my conversation with Benn Steil. Dr. Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is “The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order”:

1) ILANA MERCER: Congratulations on a beautifully written book, so carefully researched, with both archival and secondary material. Followers of the Austrian School of economics, as I believe we both are, have a reflexive disdain for John Maynard Keynes. Nevertheless, the portrait you drew of him was powerful and persuasive. For example, it is easy to sympathize with Keynes’ frustration with the American mind—so prosaic and anti-intellectual—during the critical Bretton-Woods negotiations. There is much to admire too about Keynes’ “unrelenting nationalism.” I had never before thought of Keynes as an English patriot, first. You, a Hayekian thinker, managed to humanize J. M. Keynes. How did that happen?

BENN STEIL: Thanks Ilana. I’m a great admirer of Hayek’s writing, as you know, but I’ve never been one to wear the Austrian (or any other) label. More importantly, “The Battle of Bretton Woods” is in large measure a parallel biography of Keynes and Harry Dexter White, and no biographer succeeds in engaging readers of any stripe without empathy towards his subjects. In the case of Keynes, I may not sympathize with his economics in the way that his greatest biographer, Robert Skidelsky, does, but I found it not in the least bit difficult to admire him as a gifted public intellectual and to warm to him as a human being, with all his obvious flaws and foibles. One aspect of Keynes that I tried to bring out is how fundamental his English upbringing and nationalism were to shaping both his economic and political thinking. He was a defective diplomat, no doubt, but he took to the role with ease and enthusiasm.

2) MERCER: My mistake. You were awarded the 2010 Hayek Book Prize, so I presumed you favored Austrian economics. But back to Keynes. As you reveal, he “never bothered with a [doctorate]; he hadn’t even a degree in economics,” and “he formally studied economics for a brief period” only. (page 61) His election to “a life fellowship at Kings College, Cambridge, at twenty-six” seemed to rely on familial membership in Britain’s intellectual peerage. Yet, as you contend, he amalgamated the qualities of “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher” “with a genius that no economist has ever matched.” (page 62) Guide the perplexed, please.

STEIL: It’s important to understand that in Keynes’s day, …”

Read the rest of the conversation, “John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius?! (Part 1),” on WND. Stay tuned for the conclusion, next week, of the Steil-Mercer conversation about Keynes.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE (8/15): I forewarned Benn Steil, who is the nicest gentleman—and, unlike J. M. Keynes, a jolly good sport—that our readers are hard-core. If only these readers used respectful language, but there is nothing I can do about the conduct of others.

It has to be obvious from my questions to Dr. Steil (part 2 is still to come) that I have the utmost respect for his scholarship and that I enjoyed what was an impressively researched, beautifully written book. I am not one of those tinny ideologues who’d rather miss out on an important intellectual contribution just because it doesn’t comport 100% with my philosophy. I’m too curious for that.

Benn Steil and I began communicating when I penned an irate blog about a negative review of his book in The Times Literary Supplement.

The ‘Anti-Democratic Sentiments of the Founding Fathers’

America, Constitution, Democracy, Founding Fathers, History

“A complete democracy on a wide scale was widely regarded throughout the colonies as a threat to law and order. The example of Pennsylvania, which abolished all property qualifications for voting and holding office and produced a document making a mockery of constitutional government in the eyes of some onlookers, confirmed the suspicions of many colonial leaders that an unrestrained democracy could drive good men out of public office and turn the affairs of state over to pettifoggers, bunglers, and demagogues. They wanted representation of brains, not bodies—and for a number of years the best minds in the country dominated American politics. … No doubt the Virginia Constitution and Declaration of Rights, as well as the American Constitution of 1787, would have fallen even shorter of perfection had they been written by popularly chosen assemblies of untutored and inexperienced deputies of the people at large… [The Founders] were not familiar with universal suffrage and mass democracy. … Besides, there was a abundance of historical evidence indicating that democracies tend toward mediocrity and tyranny of the majority. …”

—Constitutional scholar James McClellan, writing about the first state constitutions, 1776-1783, in Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government (pages 151-152).

One look at the country’s preening politicians, pundits and public intellectuals proves the nation’s founders right. It’s a large sample and it’s mostly and consistently drek.

UPDATED: Don’t Clown With The Clown-in-Chief

Barack Obama, Free Speech, Political Correctness, Race, Republicans, The State, The Zeitgeist

A dapper Erik Rush, my pal and colleague at WND, was on “Hannity” to unpack the crazed reaction to the rodeo clown’s “spoofing” of Obama at the Missouri State Fair. Missouri State Fair fired the poor guy. Pathetic!

Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder, a Republican, tweeted out his disgust and disapproval (or rather, was eager for his followers to witness his moral outrage). Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, a moron in her own right, puled that, “The young Missourians who witnessed this stunt learned exactly the wrong lesson about political discourse—that somehow it’s ever acceptable to, in a public event, disrespect, taunt, and joke about harming the president of our great nation.”

WRONG. The youngins learned the right lesson. Peggy Noonan enunciated the lesson, if too mildly:

… as the noted political philosopher Orson Welles once put it: “It’s the business of the American people to take the mickey out of the president.” It’s not only what we do, it’s what we should do. Welles was speaking on a talk show; it was the 1970s; he was talking about people making fun of some Republican president, Nixon or Ford. So what? They can take it. And they’re not kings.

UPDATE: “The lies that bind: Obama’s race strategy” by Erik Rush.