J. Christian Adams

Michelle Obama’s Anti-Whitey Activism Finally Exposed

Posted by on March 18, 2012 at 4:08 pm. 4 Comments :

Ever since Glenn Beck announced that Barack Obama has “a deep-seated hatred of white people,” the conservative media has searched for conclusive proof that would unambiguously affirm that the President has a long standing racial bias against his own mother and her familial heritage.

Having failed to uncover any credible evidence, the race-obsessed right-wingers have proffered wildly delusional theories to advance their contention that Obama is fundamentally prejudiced against whites. The latest attempt at this characterization is the effort to smear his Harvard law professor, Derrick Bell, as a some sort of black supremacist merely because he advocated a more diverse faculty at Harvard Law School where he was the first black professor to receive tenure.

Continuing with this venture into the college history of the President, these rightist investigators have now expanded their inquiries into the past of the First Lady, Michelle Obama, who also attended Harvard. What they found is sure to blow the roof off of the White House. Apparently there is video documentation of someone that may or may not be Ms. Obama participating in a demonstration at the office of the law school’s Dean.

The video comes from the archives of WGBH, who covered the demonstration in May of 1988. It shows some students engaging in a peaceful protest to get the school to hire more minority teachers.

The discovery of this video is attributed to J. Christian Adams, a notorious race-baiter who has accused Obama of promoting a racially divisive America. Adams published his findings back on May 7, in his column at Pajamas Media where he wrote…

“A treasure trove of information is coming out regarding Barack Obama’s time in college. Over at the Breitbart sites, we are learning how Obama inserted himself into a fight to implement hiring on the basis of race at Harvard Law School. The Obama tapes also seem to show the other Obama – Michelle. […] In May 1988, Harvard Law students, borrowing from Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, and foreshadowing the Occupy movement of 2011, occupied the Harvard Law School’s dean’s office.”

Isn’t it interesting that Adams employs buzzwords like “Alinsky” and “Occupy” to describe what everyone else would recognize as garden variety protests? Adams goes on to state that one of the students in the video “appears to be Michelle Obama.” That’s right, he has no confirmation that the woman seen briefly from a distance in a 22 year old video is actually the future First Lady. Yet that doesn’t prevent him from publishing an article that not only alleges her participation, but infers that it has some meaning beyond the sort of standard campus activism that is a part of college life and a cherished freedom granted by the Constitution.

The Adams article was later picked up by the ultra-conservative DailyCaller, where they repeated the assertion that the “footage shows a young woman who appears to be Michelle Obama.” This is how the Right-Wing Noise Machine operates as they attempt to spread their derisive propaganda out to the racist audience they have so carefully cultivated. The next step should be an appearance on Fox News to discuss this bombshell.

The fact that these pseudo-journalists have no shame in disseminating false stories with nakedly prejudiced inferences should not surprise anybody. Recently the Breitbrats published an allegation that Derrick Bell had visited the White House twice in 2010 without first checking to ascertain whether it was the Harvard law professor (it wasn’t). And the right has been asserting for years that there is a mystery video of Ms. Obama using the term “whitey,” but it has never materialized.

And therein lies the harm. The object of these rightist rags is not to be accurate or honest. It is to plant seeds of hatred that they know will take root even after they have been exposed as false. There are people who currently believe that the “whitey” tapes have already been released. And as much as 30% of the Republican electorate thinks that the President is a Muslim. These distortions of reality exist because they were deliberately planned out with the knowledge that any subsequent fact-checking would not hinder their infestation into the right-wing community that is already predisposed to believe these racist lies.

Clearly there is a measure of desperation setting in amongst the right. These slanderous assertions are almost comical in their ineptness. They harken back to the Sarah Palin pronouncements that Obama was “pallin around with terrorists.” Those wild allegations came near the end of a campaign that they likely knew they were about to lose. And these new allegations are popping up now for the same reason: The right is increasingly fearful that their incompetent and unpopular candidates are headed for defeat. They also realize that their policy platform, consisting mostly of propping up oil companies and pushing down women, is alienating the electorate in a big way.

The sad thing is that we are still seven months from the election and these sort of nauseating and divisive attacks are probably going to get worse. Our only hope is for the public to express themselves and to make sure that there is a price to pay for spreading hate and lies. November cannot come soon enough.

Breitbart’s Campaign Against Obama At Harvard Is Pure Racism

Posted by on March 8, 2012 at 2:07 pm. 3 Comments :

Yesterday was the day that the video Andrew Breitbart promised of a racially divisive Barack Obama in his days as a student at Harvard was released. It was almost universally panned as a pathetic and desperate boatload of nothing. After first yammering that the video posted by Buzzfeed (scooping Breitbart) was “selectively edited,” the Breitbartians posted what they said was the “uncut” video. Their version contained about two seconds more that consisted entirely of Obama hugging Prof. Derrick Bell, whom he had just introduced at a rally.

Since the video itself was proven to have no material evidence of anything the least bit detrimental to Obama, much less the cataclysmic data that would doom his career, the Breitbartians resorted to Plan B: Demonize Prof. Bell and tie him around Obama’s neck. This was a coordinated plot that began with Breitbart editor-in-chief Joel Pollak robotically repeating the mantra that “Derrick Bell was the Jeremiah Wright of academia.” Pollak even went on CNN and admitted that the video was irrelevant, and when Soledad O’Brein asked him “Then where’s the bombshell, I don’t see it?” Pollak responded that “The bombshell is the revelation of the relationship between Barack Obama and Derrick Bell.” But that wasn’t any revelation at all.

The argument that the Breitbartians are making rests on their assertion that Bell’s writings on Critical Race Theory define him as a racial radical. In fact, CRT is an aggregation of legal concepts that bring together law, politics, economics, etc., in a broad-based study of race and power in society. It posits that there are institutional barriers to eradicating racism that must be addressed at the root level. Those barriers are evident in things like employment practices and school admissions. Another example is the judicial system that incarcerates a higher percentage of African-Americans than their representation in the population. Affirming that example is the fact that crack cocaine, used by more African-Americans than whites, is punishable by sentences ten times more severe than powder cocaine, for which you find more white offenders.

Nevertheless, the Breitbartians are deliberately misinterpreting the legal theory in order to condemn its proponents, including Bell. In this way they can assert that Obama, as a result of his having studied at Harvard, is also a racial radical. The object is to incite fear among those who are ill-informed that Obama aspires to threaten their status in society. He is coming after your jobs, your schools, your churches, all the trappings of your comfortable, privileged lives.

In the wake of the initial flop of the video’s release, the right-wing media has been redoubling its efforts to stir up a phony controversy. Fox Nation has posted multiple stories on the subject (it has been at the top of their page for two days running). Fox News has featured it on their broadcasts, notably the video “exclusive” presented by Sean Hannity. Ironically, Fox Nation posted a video of a debate about Bell between Michelle Malkin and Juan Williams, but edited out Williams entirely.

Note the edit at about 2:20 where Hannity says that Juan’s gonna disagree, but then fades to Malkin saying “No, no. no.”. What Williams said in between was…

“Well, first of all, I must say, I thought this was going to be so much more. I thought this was going to be the smoking gun, as you describe it. But it really didn’t come too much. I mean, I just don’t think that there is.”

And that’s all that Williams was permitted to say in the entire segment, but they even cut that out when they put it online. And then they have the nerve to complain, falsely, that others “selectively edited” video.

Pollak and his Breitbart colleague Ben Shapiro have been making the rounds on the lamestream media. On CNN they argued with Soledad O’Brien over the meaning of Critical Race Theory, but spoke very little about what any of it had to do with Obama, despite O’Brien’s attempts to steer them back to the topic. That’s a tactic designed to keep the focus off of substance and aimed squarely at innuendo and slander. For good measure they threw in a bashing of the media for trying to suppress the video (for what reason, they never make clear), and to silence them (even while they are speaking on the air).

For its part, the Breitbart web site has been piling on with articles that reek of racism. One article was authored by J. Christian Adams, a notorious race-baiter who has accused Eric Holder’s Justice Department of coddling civil rights violators if they happened to be black. He wrote that…

“Both Obama and Bell demanded that Harvard hire professors on the basis of race. […] The Obama-Bell connection is the latest in a pattern of Barack Obama’s associations with individuals who promoted a racially divisive America.”

That’s an open assault on affirmative action, which was not developed to produce hiring on the basis of race, but to put an end to it. Adams also repeated the lie that Obama had appeared with a member of the New Black Panther Party. In fact, Obama attended a civil rights rally that was attended by thousands of people, one of whom happened to be an NBPP member. Obama had no control over who came to a massive, public rally. Adams also characterized cases of civil rights abuse as “crackpot racial grievances.” That pretty much reveals his personal bias.

Another story posted by the Breitbartians alleged that “Obama Forced His Students To Read Bell at the University of Chicago Law School.” Their evidence was a document describing a course that Obama was teaching. The course was “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” It would be difficult to teach such a class without the textbook materials by one of this generations most respected scholars on that subject. But the allegation is made even worse by that use of the word “forced” as if it were under duress. By that measure isn’t every student forced to read something? In fact, many of the references to Bell’s writings specifically said that they were optional reading.

Meanwhile, over at NewsBusters, there was an article that alleged that the non-event video was being suppressed as part of a conspiracy orchestrated by George Soros (Isn’t it always?). The evidence of that was that Soros’ foundations had made donations to Harvard (where the video took place) and WGBH (the public TV station that owned the video). Using their logic I can surmise that the Koch brothers are behind this whole phony video scandal because they have made contributions to NewsBusters.

And, believe it or not, they even have a Plan C: It’s a Cover Up! The video was a bust. The racial attacks could backfire. So if all else fails, blame it on a massive cover up. The Breitbartians took on another black Harvard professor, Charles Ogletree, by posting a video wherein he said that “We hid this during the 2008 campaign…” He was referring to the video of Obama at Harvard. Of course there would have been no reason to do that since, if anything, the video shows Obama in a positive light. The truth is that Ogletree was joking. He even laughed immediately after, which proves that he was humorously dismissing the throw-away line. but, not surprisingly, the humor-challenged righties didn’t get, even though Ogletree’s audience did.

The absence of any substance on the video has led to a redirection by the right to their usual stance against Obama – he’s black. His associates are black. And they advocate for radical concepts like equal justice under the law. They support fairness in hiring and other social contracts. They oppose discrimination.

If anyone is advancing a racialist philosophy, it’s the right-wingers who are peddling this repulsive nonsense. And if there is anything positive to take away from this, it is that they have once again shown their true colors. It isn’t about a video of a young future president. It isn’t about health care or oil prices or deficits. It is, and always has been, about one thing for these meatheads. They just can’t accept a black man in their White House.

Fox News Slanders DOJ Attorney As A ‘Terrorist’ Lawyer

Posted by on March 5, 2012 at 1:58 pm. 1 Comments :

Once again Fox News is demonstrating their overt hostility to anything and everything in the Obama administration. It doesn’t matter if unemployment has dropped two points or that Osama Bin Laden is dead, somehow everything this administration does is tantamount to treason.

Case in point: The Department of Justice recently announced that it had promoted Tony West, the head of the Civil Division, to a new post as Associate Attorney General. This promotion was the result of his exemplary performance. In his role as the head of the Civil Division, West “recovered more than $8.8 billion in taxpayer money, the highest three-year total in department history.” Ordinarily that sort of accomplishment would be heralded by a deficit-obsessed right-winger. But we are dealing with an epidemic of Obama Derangement Syndrome, the symptoms of which are all too predictable. Here is how Fox News framed the story:

Fox News - Terrorist Lawyer

The headline on the Fox News web site declared “Terrorist Lawyer Gets Influential Justice Post.” On the air Fox News described Mr. West as a “Taliban Defender.” Both of these were deliberately designed to create the impression that West is affiliated with America’s enemies. Even worse, the story is being driven by a former DOJ attorney from the Bush administration, J. Christian Adams, who is defaming West and the entire Justice Department. Adams appeared on Fox & Friends with an all-encompassing allegation that Attorney General Eric Holder is…

“…filling [the Justice Department] with attorneys that, before they came to Justice, took on the most radical causes. And now they’re filling the Justice Department from top to bottom.”

Adams provides no support for his charge. And for someone with a record of dubious accusations that were easily debunked, Adams should be more careful with his unsubstantiated rebukes. He has previously tried to concoct DOJ conspiracies to prosecute civil rights cases against white defendants while letting black defendants off the hook – again, with no evidence to support it.

The characterization of West as a terrorist sympathizer stems from his having worked for a law firm that defended John Lindh, aka the American Taliban. That service is viewed by right-wingers as fraternizing with the enemy. American conservatives have long sought to portray themselves as the defenders of the Constitution despite the fact that they frequently show disdain for its most fundamental principles. For instance, the Sixth Amendment that guarantees a right to an attorney. That is the principle that West was patriotically upholding when he helped to represent an American citizen charged with a serious crime. But Adams expressly believes that respecting the Constitution in this manner disqualifies you from ever serving your government.

The larger condemnation that Fox is attempting to assert is that Obama and his entire administration is in cahoots with Al Qaeda. It is part of their years long effort to paint the President as a foreigner, a Muslim, and an anti-American socialist. That anyone actually believes those allegations is a testament to the success Fox has had in instilling ignorance in their audience. In the three years that Obama has been in office there have been more terrorists brought to justice (captured or killed) than in eight years of the Bush administration – and that includes Osama Bin Laden. So obviously Obama is working with Al Qaeda. It is part of their devious plot to allow him to dispose of their own members to make the American people think he isn’t one of them.

It is also notable to observe just who the right chooses to target when they make nonsense allegations like this one against West. The previous targets have included Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, Eric Holder, UN Ambassador Susan Rice – all African American advisers and cabinet members. And let’s throw in Energy Secretary Steven Chu (Asian American) and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis (Latina American). But how often do you hear right-winger complaints about Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Tom Vilsack, Shaun Donovan, Ray LaHood, or Arne Duncan – all white cabinet members? I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.