Gordon Hodson

At best, psychology is an inexact science, as the human brain is the most complex system in the known universe, and to try to understand what makes it tick is daunting if not impossible. But layer on top of that the possibility that the researchers themselves may harbor a bias that leads them to subconsciously steer their studies towards reaching pre-determined conclusions, and you have the makings of a sham science project … with predictable results.

Hodson’s complete study is not available for free online, so I readily admit I only know what has been made public. Apparently the researchers offered a list of questions which would measure participants’ left or right leanings based upon the answers. For example, one measure in defining “conservative” is gauging one’s level of agreement with the statement “schools should teach children to obey authority.” Then they overlaid these results with responses to questions with overtly racial overtones such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people of other races.” I guess if you answer “yes” to authority and “no” to working with others not like you, you are a conservative racist. Conversely, if you replied “fight the power, maaan” and “I want my office to look like a rainbow, my brother,” then you are a tolerant and cognitively well-adjusted liberal. Oh, if only the world were so simple.

But the world is not simple.  Even the questions I offer as examples have nuance. For instance, I was never taught by my Marine Corps dad (as conservative as they come) to unconditionally obey authority. In fact, he revered the Founding Fathers, for whom declaring our independence was an enormous thumb in the eye of the crown’s authority. I was, however, taught to respect authority. There is a subtle difference. When it comes to blindly obeying, it depends on the situation. If it involves heeding police instructions at an intersection, then by all means I do it—unless I discover that the cops are beating a man to death with night sticks and demanding I join in.  As to working with other races, that depends on the individuals. Are they college-educated or street thugs? Are they going to speak a foreign language in my presence all day, making me uncomfortable? This applies to whites as well, though. Are they respectable or trailer trash? So it is not race per se that will make me choose the complexion of my co-workers but who they are. How does one distill these textured concepts into a questionnaire that may pigeonhole me as racist if I check box A instead of B?

Speaking of complexity and texture: to me, the salient feature of this article and only real admission that this study may not be fair, or even complete, is this parenthetical afterthought: “(These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson’s work can’t speak to this ‘underground’ racism.)”

Well, I can speak to it. “Underground racism” is an antiseptic term for  “how liberals behave as opposed to what they profess.” One can insist until blue in the face that they are color-blind (and answer as such on Hodson’s study earning them a gold star), but the moment they can afford to, they will move as fast as they can to an all-white neighborhood to raise their kids. They will insist  they do not see the world through multi-colored glasses, but when a presidential candidate calls Barack Obama the “food stamp president,” immediately those whom I bet this study would label as the non-racists jump to the conclusion that such a statement is racially charged. It is not. It is a straightforward fact that more Americans of all shades have joined the food stamp rolls during Obama’s watch than ever before. One can argue the economics underscoring this trend, but only those who either consciously or subconsciously associate food stamps with blacks would see racism in such a statement where none exists. So who are the true bigots again? I refer you to Bill Maher for an illustration of the concept.

“Underground racism” comes in many forms, some of which are quite insidious, such as  paternalism of the state. Also, there is that ever-so-subtle patronizing so common in liberal arts academia and mainstream journalism. For example, some can argue that those who oppose “Black History Month” could be racist. Yet, what does promoting such an idea say about those who envision and proffer it?  As black actor Morgan Freeman once said in a moment of racial clarity that has since abandoned him, only one who views the world through the prism of color would see ‘black history’ at all and not simply American history. Freeman asked the poster-child of elitist race-pandering Mike Wallace, who also happens to be Jewish, what month is “Jewish History Month”? There is none. Does Wallace want one? Emphatically, he replied no.Yet he defends Black History Month why, exactly? I wonder how Wallace and his peers would have scored on Hodson’s study—a study in which the very definition of racism is, if not off-sides, then at least incomplete.

In a way, even well-intentioned academics could be falling victim to some odd cousin of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle with such studies. I find it somewhat unfeasible that a liberal (call it a hunch) who views conservative ideology with hostility could possibly create a study that does not have this bias seep into the methodology making truly impartial findings beyond reach. As anyone who has seen the liberal bias of  the mainstream media in action can attest (see Obama 2008 campaign), it is almost impossible to separate personal beliefs from such human nature studies far removed from the more precise physical sciences that attempt to link a political ideology to both intelligence and an ingrained, if unpleasant, human characteristic.

Another attempt to explain this human characteristic is provided by Ms. Pappas through a link to a piece about the various “isms” and their relation to societal rather than cognitive influences as studied by Georgia Tech psychologist Paul Verhaeghen. “There’s one idea that people tend to associate black people with violence, women with weakness, or older people with forgetfulness because they are prejudiced. But there’s another possibility that what’s in your head is not you, it’s the culture around you,” Verhaeghen said in a statement.

To me there is a glaring problem with Verhaeghan’s thinking at its core and reveals a pre-determined idea of what counts for an “ism” that surely influences his research. Whatever their origin, his examples  are not expressions of bias at all. They are associations based upon empirical fact, regardless of how uncomfortable or politically incorrect.

In the United States, blacks do commit an alarmingly disproportionate number of violent crimes relative to their population. It is therefore not ‘prejudiced’ to associate blacks, who though only 18% of the population commit half of all homicides, with violence more than whites, but rather a reflection of a sad reality. If I am prejudiced for saying this, then what of Jesse Jackson who admitted: “There is nothing more painful to me… than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

And it is not a stereotype to label women as physically weaker than men on the whole. If you think otherwise then you have never watched a sporting event in your life. There is a reason why we have the WNBA, women’s tennis, women’s golf, etc. Again, that is just seeing life as it is, not as one would want it to be.

Yet again, one aspect of old age for many seniors is indeed memory loss (as I am starting to discover myself, unfortunately). Yet again, one aspect of old age is indeed mem—ach, you see?

So the question really comes to mind: how can one possibly make a study of what is “prejudiced” or not when its very definition I believe to be suspect or at least  in the eye of the one running the study. What one researcher describes as a “stereotype” I would argue is just recording what your own eyes see and what the data confirms. In some circles this is known as a reality check.

And based on his faulty notion of prejudice, in the end we see a supposedly impartial researcher’s true left-wing agenda seep through in the conclusion he drws from his biased study. After deciding that what you see, hear, and read is making us bigots rather than observers, Verhaegan offers something that would make George Orwell cringe: “There’s a reason for political correctness,” he says. “At least, as studies suggest, it might be a good idea to not put stereotypes out there too clearly, because if you do, people will internalize them.” Oh yes, we need even more stifled dialogue. Maybe that will get us to racial nirvana.

Do such studies ever leave liberals holding the short intelligence straw? Actually, in May 2010, the Journal of The American Institute for Economic Enlightenment did a study trying to find clues to economic literacy which included links to political ideology. It asked eight questions about economics such as “Agree/disagree: rent control leads to housing shortages” (Disagree=economically unenlightened). The results found that the least economically enlightened defined themselves as “progressive/very liberal.” The most economically astute were “very conservative.”

So what does this pro-conservative economics survey tell us? Are liberals, in fact, economic nit-wits? Well, I’m not sure, but I know I didn’t read about it on and the ABC-affiliated Yahoo! News. And I highly doubt even if they did grudgingly report the findings, they would have led with something so damning as “As is to be expected, liberals are economically illiterate.” One thing it could mean is that such surveys involving correlations between intelligence, racism, economics and politics could be as inexact as the science of psychology itself… and as prone to bias as the researchers clamoring for relevance—and perhaps, even, also seeking a bit of reassurance that their own left-wing political beliefs stem from a superior intelligence to match their attitudes.

In the past, many famous and well-respected journalists had no formal training but honed their craft on the job, in many cases beginning their careers as copy boys/copy girls. Walter Cronkite, once cited as the most trusted man in America, was a college dropout who had a series of newspaper jobs reporting news and sports. Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley started their careers as broadcast journalists but never had journalism degrees. Dan Rather did receive a degree in journalism, and we can see how well that turned out once he decided to switch to advocacy journalism instead of the traditional who, what, when, where and how protocol of traditional journalism.

Advocacy journalism intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint for either a political or social agenda and has morphed today into nothing less than media bias and propaganda. Today the mainstream media is predominantly composed of liberal democrats, and this bias has been quite evident since the 2008 presidential race. There is also a marked difference between opinion and reportage journalism.

I have a hard time claiming to be a member of the fourth estate, although I have been writing for newspapers since 1998 as an op-ed columnist. During that time, however, I have covered news events and press conferences and submitted non-opinion articles. I never attended Journalism College, nor have I even taken one writing course. I had to drop out of college to support my mother who had had a stroke. Mark Steyn, who is a brilliant writer, never attended college at all but can write reams around many inhabiting the elitist realm of the New York Times.

Although I have little regard for Stephen Colbert as a comedian or a pundit, I must give him kudos for calling George Stephanopoulos a political operative on ABC’s “This Week.” Real journalist David Brinkley was the first host of this political news program, followed by Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. Stephanopoulos earned his political science degree at Columbia University and he has been a Democrat political lion ever since, apparently making him a desirable spokesman for the party’s agenda.

I’ll never forget the weekend before the 1992 presidential election when George H.W. Bush was rising in the polls against William Jefferson Clinton. He appeared on CNN’s Larry King show, another Democrat stooge, and when King supposedly took calls from the public, which call came in first? Why, it was from Clinton’s chief political adviser, George Stephanopoulos.  Imagine the odds of that happening. He had called to remind Bush that Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh had that day re-indicted Weinberger on one count of “false statements.” Walsh went even further, specifically implicating Bush in the scandal, though the accusation was irrelevant, but this put the nail in the coffin for Bush’s reemerging campaign.

MSNBC, a cable station claiming to be “a leader in breaking news, video and original journalism,” is anything but. It is stocked with partisan Democrat anchors and, in one instance, Morning Joe Scarborough, a former Republican RINO.  Al Sharpton? Chris Matthews? Rachel Maddow? Lawrence O’Donnell?  These are journalists?

Even as an opinion writer, I made sure I bolstered my opinion with fact and I polished my craft at the New York Sun under the tutelage of Seth Lipsky, one of the best of the old school journalists. If one of my columns presented negative material on a subject, I was told to contact that person for confirmation or denial of the piece or it wouldn’t be published.

Watching MSNBC is a chore and an exercise in frustration waiting for the other side of the story. It simply will not be presented. Instead we are treated with angry scowls and insulting language thrown at Republicans. Let’s not forget those thrills up and down Matthews’ leg.

On the other hand, CNBC has the excellent Larry Kudlow, who never fails to have opposing sides present their cogent arguments, leaving it up to the audience to decide. Fox News used to be fair and balanced until they threw Glenn Beck under the bus and brought on Karl Rove as a contributor in spite of the fact that this “genius” was a truly bad adviser for President Bush.

For anyone looking for true journalistic integrity, the only sources left are the Breitbart sites. When I was recruited to write for Big Journalism by my former Sun editor Michael Walsh, I was mandated to shore up my column with videos, documents, photos and other credible data. The truth is truly out there–here–regardless of which side is vindicated.

Like most readers, I was led by the conservative press and Matt Drudge to believe that the White House had hidden an elaborate, Halloween party with Hollywood stars from the public. The WH felt it wouldn’t be wise to show this extravagance during a recession, the right and left media told us, but the real story was left to be told by Dana Loesch of BigJournalism.com.

Seems the party was funded by the celebrities for the military and their families. So why the secrecy? Maybe it was a trap set for conservatives to rage about–only to look like fools for bashing a good deed. Who knows?

The media today is filled with “gotcha journalists” bent on reelecting the one they helped elect in 2008.  I think I’ll stick to just being called a writer. The word journalist has a distinct smell to it.

Imagine watching Fox News one night and your high school child walks into the room and proceeds to tell you that “Fox News lies!”

That happened to Nick Benson, a Californian who had two students enrolled at Barstow High School in San Bernardino County.

“How do you know that,” Benson said he asked the boy.  “My teacher told me,” was his grandson’s response.

An editorial cartoon Barstow high school students read in “World History” class

Sure enough.  His grandson’s “World History” teacher, Jim Duarte, fed a steady dose of radical left wing propaganda to his students, disguised as classroom assignments.  It was like students were receiving their news from a slightly more sophisticated source than The Daily Show.

Last week Benson provided Education Action Group with several assignments that Duarte handed out last school year, when Benson’s grandson was in his class.

The articles and editorial cartoons students were expected to review were ridiculously slanted to the Big Labor/socialist point of view, as were the leading questions on classroom worksheets.

On one such worksheet, students read an article on how Fox News supposedly “pushed” a “falsehood” that government workers make more than their private sector counterparts. Says who? Media Matters, far-left reactionary outfit that based its public/private comparison on a “study” published by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank largely funded by Big Labor.

Duarte’s efforts to sell his personal political beliefs to students are all-too-familiar. Throughout the nation, we’ve been hearing teachers union leaders openly calling for instructors to preach pro-union and anti-American philosophy to their students, some as young as preschool age.

And many teachers seem to be heeding the call. For example, hundreds of Oakland teachers signed a pledge sheet a few weeks ago to use precious class time to teach their students about the noble “Occupy” protesters and the evil corporations on Wall Street.

Propaganda presented as fact

Duarte led his students to believe that U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) wants to sacrifice Medicaid and Medicare in order to prevent tax increases for the rich. Students read an editorial cartoon of Ryan dressed as a witch doctor, with a knife raised above his head, poised to slay Medicare and Medicaid on an alter.

Needless to say, nobody was on hand to defend Ryan or explain his true positions on Medicaid and Medicare.

Students read an article about Utah legislators proposing an increase in the food sales tax while decreasing the sales tax.  Students were then expected to submit the following answers on worksheets (underlined): “Lawmakers in Utah are “digging a deeper hole” for the poor by raising the food tax, and this allows the rich to pay less in sales tax on everything else.”

On the very same work sheet, students also read an editorial cartoon of two people labeled “unions” walking a gang plank.  Student then are required to provide the following answers (underlined): “Because so many states are now in a recession, caused by corporations (banksters and Wall Street), states controlled by Republicans are going after public sector unions and collective bargaining rights.”

Another worksheet required students to fill in the following answers (underlined): “Republicans have tried to keep young people and minorities from voting, and are trying to weaken the union. … Millionaires, who could pay more in taxes and not suffer but are paying less, are hurting states and public schools.”

I’m sure you get it by now. Duarte is a dedicated union member and socialist Democrat, and he has every right to be so. But is he really being paid to share his personal political views with his students, without presenting the other side of the argument?

We may never know, because detailed messages left for the Barstow schools superintendent and principal were not answered. The same can be said for Duarte, who did not receive or chose to ignore our message seeking comment.

The district responds

When Nick Benson complained to the school, he received a written reply from the Assistant Superintendent for Educational Services, Teresa Healy, who seemed satisfied that Duarte mixed his anti-conservative tirades with actual world history lessons.

“A review of Lesson Plans for March 2, 2011 shows that the lesson included a handout that where students reviewed an article from the Huffington Post regarding misinformation in the media – specifically referring to Fox News -  and included a review of World War I ideas and relates these to World War II.”

Obviously the school administration is too politically naïve – or too politically supportive of Benson’s efforts – to do anything about him.

Healy’s written reply also contained a thinly-veiled warning for Benson:

“…the district respectfully requests that you refrain from any publication of this document or any portion thereof.  We trust you will appreciate this serious concern and avoid any potential legal ramifications that could result.”

Benson obviously wasn’t scared, because he turned the letter over to us. And why should he be scared?

He asked a public school to investigate the conduct of a public school teacher who is paid with public money, and received a response from that public school.

Why shouldn’t be able to make that response public?

This sadly will not be the last example I expose.  But the more we do, the more we can root out the indoctrination being perpetrated in our government schools.

To learn more about what is being taught in America’s government schools, purchase “Indoctrination: How ‘Useful Idiots’ Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism.”

We stand behind those calling for Chancellor Katehi’s resignation.  But not for the reasons they might think.

The events of UC Davis and the way in which the pepper-spray was handled has set a number of dangerous precedents.  In the setting of academia, the rights of the majority of students are being trampled on to appease the tyranny of a minority.  Further, the very system of law and order and its public servants instituted to protect the rights of the public at large have been undermined by incompetent leaders, unable to withstand the growing pressure of a noisy minority and the corrupt media that supports it.  Most importantly, propaganda has established a foothold that is now stronger than ever, and far more dangerous than the short-term effects of pepper spray.

Over the last week, we have seen the media pick up the UC Davis story and run with it, always highlighting the same twenty seconds of one Officer Pike, methodically pepper-spraying eleven “peaceful protesters,” as onlookers gasp and scream in horror and dismay.  The public was almost undivided in its immediate condemnation of the act.

But just as Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Perhaps in this case, it’s not so much a lie, but a lot of omissions.

We know now that the Davis 11 locked arms to block the public access way, creating both a safety hazard and barring other students and the public from gaining access to facilities beyond that point.  What the media has never explained is that the protesters were repeatedly warned to clear the path.  Video shows officer Pike, the one with the pepper spray, informing each protester one last time that they would be “subject to the use of force” if they did not voluntarily move.  The protesters acknowledge the warning and hunker down for the consequences.

The media also never provides an accurate portrayal of why the students were protesting in the first place, and what prompted them to block the access way.  In an interview with Democracy Now, UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture student Elli Pearson, one of the protesters in the blockade who was pepper sprayed, reveals the truth.

She describes that the students were there to stand in solidarity with UC Berkeley students and the Occupy Wall Street movement, and to “protest tuition hikes that are happening at public universities all across the nation.” Pearson goes on to explain: [my emphasis]

“We linked arms and we sat down peacefully to protest their [riot police] presence on our campus, and then at one point we had encircled them [police] and they were trying to leave and trying to clear a path, and so we sat down and linked arms, and said that if they were trying to clear a path they would have to go through us.”

When asked if the student protesters were given any sort of warning by police, Pearson responds:

“I believe they told maybe one student or maybe had some dialogue, but certainly not everyone could hear, it wasn’t like an announcement that was made.”

So, they intentionally encircled the police and blocked them in.  In doing so, the Davis 11 created a serious public safety hazard.  But you’d never see that from the same twenty seconds of video splashed across every media outlet.  Not until other bloggers began to delve into the story did the more complete versions of the incident begin to crop up on video.

But by then, the damage was done.

Police Chief Annette Spicuzza and two officers, including Lt. John Pike, have already been placed on administrative leave, and petitions calling for their resignation have been collected.  Videos and internet memes of the “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop” have gone viral.  The hacktivist collective Anonymous posted Pike’s information online and encouraged people to call and harass the officer.

Other law enforcement personnel have explained that pepper spray is often used as a compliance tool when necessary.  “People don’t consider what it takes to break up an unlawful assembly if the protestors refuse to disperse. It always takes some kind of force,” said one law enforcement officer we spoke with.  Police needed to remove the protesters, who’d linked arms to form a blockade.  Reaching in to manually break them apart would have required the use of physical force, while leaving the officers’ weapons vulnerable to seizure.  In that case, most procedures indicate that pepper-spray is justified and the most humane of all options.  While it creates temporary discomfort for the protestors, it enables the officers to safely contain, and in this case, arrest the protesters in order to remove them from blocking the public’s access.  Protesters have since admitted, they intentionally surrounded the police and blocked them in.  While the video footage shown on mainstream media may not appear this way, the complete footage that has since surfaced clearly backs up the officers’ claims.

Police officers are public servants, they are people too.  Where are they supposed to turn when a situation has become so politicized that they aren’t supported by their own chain of command?  At Monday’s general strike at UC Davis sister campus UC Berkeley, a statement from the university’s police officers’ union reflected this sentiment and admonished regents and UC administrators:

“[do not] ask us to enforce your policies, then refuse to stand by us when we do…It was not our decision to engage campus protesters. We are now faced with ‘managing’ the results of years of poor budget planning.”

Speaking of the chain of command, where is the same support for police from our own leaders, Vice President Biden and President Obama, as they supported police in 2010 and last month when Biden opined that rape would rise without the jobs bill?

In March, some of the very same protesters encountered similar events during the March 4^th Day of Action to Defend Public Education (video & photos), when protesters blocked a major California highway in a standoff with police that required the use of pepper-spray pellets to contain the crowd. Protesters later went on to “Occupy” buildings and classrooms at UC Davis.  One of those participants listed at the March protest was Kase Wheatley, one of the Davis 11 featured in the November 18^th video.  Clearly, Kase is no stranger to such conflict, and judging by the high-end raincoat he’s seen wearing in the video, he apparently came prepared.

Kase and other students have actually been protesting for some time, supporting labor causes like unionized teaching assistants at UC Davis and protesting union busting on behalf of AFSCME.

“The UC system has actually hired one of the premiere union busting firms in the country to basically break up the unions on campus,” Wheatley said.  “They’re all connected, it’s happening all over the world. It’s happening with riots and protests in Tunisia and Egypt, and all the way to the United States.”

With all the comparisons to Tunisia and Egypt, it’s not surprising then that media outlets like MSNBC have exalted Kase to martyr status, where he was most recently heralded by Michael Moore, who calls the UC Davis pepper spray incident an iconic moment in the Occupy movement akin to “Tiananmen Square.”

But the ramifications of the pepper spray incident reach further than the topic of the use of force.  Too many fail to realize that 200 protesters in a school of over 30,000 tuition paying students is a tiny minority, less than 1 percent.  What about the 99 percent in this case?  The 99 percent who want to go about their daily routines, be safe on their college campus, not be afraid to voice their own opinions, and want to attend the classes for which they’re paying?

There is no better example of this majority than a young woman and a young man who spoke up at a Town Hall meeting that was held with Chancellor Katehi and other administrators from UC Davis.  As the woman so eloquently stated, while it’s great that the school supports the rights of the Occupy protesters, it’s come at the expense of the other students.

“My concern is what the events of the last week have been doing to the quality of our education. I know that myself personally I’ve already had two days worth of classes canceled by the professors, I expect to have more classes canceled on Monday with the general strike and I don’t think I’m alone in this.  As was just stated, we have midterms coming up, we have finals coming up, and it’s both ironic and sad that one of the initial starting points of this movement was to defend the right to education by not making it a classist place, and I do feel as though within the last week we have had some of those rights taken away from us.  Not only are we not able to attend class because of noise, but classes are actually being canceled, we don’t have the option to go.”

This sentiment appears to be echoed by the failure of students to turn out for Monday’s general strike, as many of those interviewed emphasized that it is mid-terms week at the university and thus, they prioritized their coursework above the strike.

UC Davis maintains published policies in its Standards of Ethical Conduct by which every student and faculty member must abide. Individuals are required to sign agreements to such policies.  The Davis 11 were expected to follow these policies, and to comply with applicable laws and regulations.  They did not.  And their actions risked infringing upon the rights of others.

Let’s put this into perspective:  Whether you agree or disagree with cities’ decisions to evict Occupy encampments, the fundamental 1^st Amendment rights of the protesters are not being violated.  Protesters are still permitted to assemble, they are still permitted to speak, they simply must do so within the limits of the law – free speech is subject to time, place, and manner regulations.  Such guidelines exist in order to protect the rights of the public as a whole to safely access the same facilities in an unrestricted manner.  As was the case in the Zuccotti Park ruling, the Judge ruled that the protesters:

“had not demonstrated that they have a First Amendment right to remain in Zuccotti Park, along with their tents, structures, generators and other installations to the exclusion of the owner’s reasonable rights and duties to maintain Zuccotti Park, or to the rights to public access of others who might wish to use the space safely.”

The first amendment does not protect the right to camp out or to prohibit others from gaining access to the same spaces.

Such is the issue at UC Davis and likely soon to be at many other college campuses.  Protesters may assemble and have their voices heard – in the time, place, and manner permitted – but not to the detriment of the majority of the public, including the other students trying to attend classes.  Police responding to requests to clear encampments and access ways are enforcing existing laws and performing a much needed service to the general public.  The outcry that protesters’ rights to free speech are being violated are nothing more than opportunistic propaganda.  And the more we see the repetitive accounts exploiting the police, publishing their information as retaliation for “violating the first amendment,” the more dangerous the propaganda becomes.  One can certainly argue the merits of the appropriate numbers of police officers, the gear they wear, the procedures they follow – all of these are another conversation.

In fact, not only should Chancellor Katehi resign for her failure to show leadership, but the protesters who violated the Standards of Ethical Conduct should be expelled or punished, not given amnesty.  Pepper spray aside, they broke the rules and that has an impact on their fellow community members who chose to be responsible and play by the rules.

As the Occupy movement progresses to the next phase of its lifecycle, we must all be vigilant to keep things in perspective and to look at the entire picture before hastily drawing conclusions.  There will be those on all sides who strive to polarize the country, and wish to create and disseminate propaganda that serves a specific purpose.  Left unchecked, the propaganda itself can be more dangerous than anything like pepper spray.

PEOPLE LIKE O’KEEFE THINK THEY ARE ACTING LIKE JOURNALISTS. They think having a camera makes them a journalist. Instead, this is a cheap caricature of journalism…

No, Prof. Sreenivasan, scribes who hide behind the varnish of objectivity to sell a political agenda are what pass for cheap caricatures of journalism.

The erosion of faith in media began before O’Keefe was born, and “professors of professionalism” like Sreenivasan enable it. There is no such thing as journalistic objectivity–accuracy, yes, but objectivity, no. Objectivity is a fairy tale told to idealistic activists who want to enter journalism so they can “change things”; they already know there’s no glory in the role of an “objective observer.”

Granted, there are a few who strive for objectivity as an ideal–but they are rare, and they won’t be found under the tutelage of Sreenivasan or fellow Columbia professor Dale Maharidge.

Prof. Sreenivasan has the audacity to lecture citizen journalists–who report facts that the mainstream media leaves out for the sake of “objectivity”–simply because they have, rightfully, reclaimed journalism? Please. Go troll on Facebook and whine about it some more, “professional journalists.”

Perhaps Prof. Sreenivasan believes that citizen journalists are responsible for polling such as this:

Pew: Public opinion of media never worse

Americans See Liberal Media Bias on TV News

Distrust in U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High

The Hill Poll: Most voters see media as biased and unethical

Americans View Media Bias As Big Problem, Poll Shows

Public trust in US media eroding: Pew study – Yahoo! News

Shall I continue?

The continual decline of public trust in media is not the fault of James O’Keefe or other citizen journalists–citizen journalists were created in response to it.

People like O’Keefe have it in for professional journalists.

Could Prof. Sreenivasan be more self-exalting and misleading? Do “professional journalists” send out profanity-laden emails to people with whom they disagree? Is this what Sreenivasan calls “journalism?”

On Monday, Project Veritas released its first installment of our investigation, “To Catch a Journalist.”

Within the video, we interviewed Columbia Journalism School Associate Professor and Pultizer Prize winner Dale Maharidge.

Maharidge’s impressive background includes ten years at Stanford University as a visiting professor and bylines within The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation and Mother Jones among others.

Given his distinction within what he describes as the “Ivory Tower”  Project Veritas was surprised to receive a profanity-laced email apparently from Mr. Maharidge at 5:36 in the morning.

We contacted Dale Maharidge about the email and posting and he declined to comment.

The email simply read:

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Hey shitheads,

Check out my comments about you:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150441931443745&set=a.227490473744.164438.73520048744&type=1&theater

Fuck you, man. Bring it on.

Dale Maharidge

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Maharidge, who admittedly stayed up through the night wrote an initial post on his Facebook account (he has since attempted to revise and tone down his comments) disparaging Project Veritas and James O’Keefe.Within Maharidge’s early morning rant, he went on to state, “O’Keefe does his so-called journalism for. He is a toady of the bankers and 1 percent . . . Michael S. Williamson and I have done our work for the 99 percent.”

Maharidge then segued into a rambling macho-flash paragraph that was then deleted in a duplicate post later in the day:

“This is fun because O’Keefe is so stupid. Remember: you have to laugh. Or you cry. And this dude ain’t cryin’. Dude’s from Cleveland. . .a dying steel town. . . I’ve lived the shit. . .lots of shit. . . .I’ve walked through fire and chortled about it, have had guns pulled on me–and a lot worse. I should be dead. Two times over. Nothing scares me.”

Actually, it seems more like Maharidge has it in for O’Keefe than vice versa. Prof. Maharidge was targeted by O’Keefe because he’s a huckster; O’Keefe asked Sreenivasan for a comment on the above because he’s the Dean of Student Affairs and Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia School of Journalism. Sreenivasan comically responds by mocking citizen media.

These are people who depend upon the dwindling public trust in the theory that journalists tell the truth. They need the public to believe it, so they can sell their lies. Citizen journalists threaten their livelihood, so they work to make the practice of news distribution more exclusive. Citizen journalists are the “unwashed masses” to people like Sreenivasan; their lot simultaneously believe that they are part of the people while special among them, singular in their gift of information distribution.

It’s a racket. If the polls I have linked above are any indication, the American public has had enough. Bloggers, most of them anyway, at least have the courtesy to own their bias, both on the right and left. There is more honor in that than in pretending that bias doesn’t exist.

Kudos to the citizen journalists who bust in, cameras blazing, who reject the idea that only a select few of the same ideological mindset are fit to write the pages of tomorrow’s history.

That what the newspapers from Ohio’s three largest cities found out when the looked past the rhetoric, and focused on the facts. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Cincinnati Enquirer all agree. Ohioans should vote YES on Issue 2. And what they say pretty much mirrors what we have been telling you.

Some key quotes from The Plain Dealer:

Ohio law must not impede reform, and it won’t if it creates a level playing field for public-sector workers and their employers.

Right now, that field is tipped in favor of the unions. Recognizing that reality does not mean we oppose public-employee unions or that we do not appreciate what their members do and the sacrifices some already have made…

In schools, the emphasis has to be on the progress of children, not the comfort of adults. In city halls and county offices, the impact on those who pay the bills — and the sheer magnitude of those bills — must be paramount.

Rules that made sense in 1983 do not make sense anymore. Ohio needs a fresh start…

When they mark their ballots, Ohioans cannot worry about what is best for any political party or interest group — on either side of this debate. They need to consider what’s best for the future of their children, their communities, their state.

They need to pass Issue 2.

The Columbus Dispatch looked at the facts honestly, and they concluded:

Elected officials should be in control of public expenditures. For the nearly three decades since the advent of Ohio’s extremely lopsided collective-bargaining law, elected officials have had too little control over the overwhelming majority of their budgets: salaries and benefits for public employees. That was always poor public policy, but in better economic times, it was sustainable. It isn’t anymore…

The claims of the anti-Issue 2 campaign have been intellectually dishonest. Chief among them is the suggestion that, with some bargaining-table leverage restored to them, state agencies and local governments instantly will begin slashing positions for firefighters and police and stop buying the equipment needed to keep the public safe. What possible motivation would a politician have for decimating safety services?

In fact, the opposite is more likely. With more ability to control the escalation of salary and benefit costs, governments won’t be forced as often to impose layoffs, and might be able to afford to keep even more police and firefighters on the streets.

And most recently, The Cincinnati Enquirer put aside the nastiness of this entire campaign and looked at what Senate Bill 5 does for Ohioans.

For decades, Ohio has been on an unsustainable path of rapidly increasing public-sector benefits. SB 5 would give the people we choose to manage our money, our safety and our schools greater flexibility in benefits and work rules for public employees, bringing them closer in line with what comparable workers receive in the private sector. That could relieve the pressure to raise taxes and thus help, not hurt, middle-class Ohioans…

So we urge a “yes” vote on Issue 2.

If Issue 2 fails, the political climate may make it impossible to enact reforms for years to come, putting Ohio further behind the curve. We can’t let that happen. Vote “yes” on Issue 2.

[All emphasis above mine.]

The people we elect should have the final say on the cost of our local government services. Whether they are Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, moderates or independents, those elected officials answer to Ohio voters. Third-party arbitrators and union bosses DON’T.

Ohioans demanded change last November. Though the process hasn’t been pretty, nor perfect, Senate Bill 5 delivers the reforms that Ohio communities need. Don’t throw away this chance to balance the playing field, Ohio. Vote YES on Issue 2.

Cross-posted on Third Base Politics, an Ohio-based conservative blog.

During his presser, Obama introduced teacher Baroz into the national discussion of his “jobs bill.” Obama claimed to have met Mr. Baroz and lamented that Baroz was out of work.

I had a chance to meet a young man named Robert Baroz. He’s got two decades of teaching experience. He’s got a master’s degree. He’s got an outstanding track record of helping his students make huge gains in reading and writing. In the last few years, he’s received three pink slips because of budget cuts. Why wouldn’t we want to pass a bill that puts somebody like Robert back in the classroom teaching our kids?

The problem with this little tale of woe? Firstly President Obama did not meet teacher Baroz. Robert Baroz did attend a Rose Garden press conference last September with a few other teachers, but the closest he ever got to the president was Baroz’ front row seat during the event. The two never came face to face, never shook hands, never actually met. Baroz saw Obama up at the lectern and Obama may have noticed Baroz sitting in the audience. That hardly makes for a meeting.

Secondly, Baroz is not out of work. He actually does have a job in the public education system in Boston. According to the Boston Herald, Baroz, “now works as a literacy and data coach at the Curley K-8 School in Jamaica Plain, analyzing MCAS data and applying it to teachers’ everyday lessons.”

This is exactly the sort of out right lie that Old Media outlets usually love to make the issue of the day. In fact, this one is a perfect case for an exercise in if-Bush-Did-it. What if Bush was working hard to push a major initiative and uttered a bald faced lie like this one? Without a doubt today the media would be engaged in a feeding frenzy over the incident while ignoring the initiative part of the story.

Yet where is this story? Pretty much just centered in the Boston press. The rest of the Old Media establishment is ignoring this straight out lie.

Meanwhile, the press is also ignoring the fact that this whole “jobs bill” is likely just cynical Obama reelection campaign theater anyway. Neither Obama nor his Democrat Party are really interested in actually voting on this bill. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) tried on Thursday to bring Obama’s jobs bill to a vote and the Democrats under Reid actually went to the extent to change long-standing Senate rules to prevent a vote on the bill.

It is clear that Obama and the Democrats want all the benefit of saying they have a jobs bill but not actually getting said bill passed into law. They just want something with which to beat up Republicans. In essence, this whole debate is another lie.

There is another example of this sort of cynical political game being played by Democrats and Obama that the Old Media has refused to properly report. For at least two years Obama has been chiding Congress in general and the Republicans in particular for not passing the several free trade agreements that he claimed to want. But the truth is, Obama himself was holding the agreements in his pocket not sending them to Congress for consideration.

So, while Obama was complaining that Congress was refusing to consider the free-trade agreements, the truth is Obama never gave them the agreements to even vote on. He was holding them so that he could use them for a talking point. Sadly, instead of reporting this story as a lie perpetrated by Obama on the American people, the Old Media simply repeated Obama’s scolding of Congress as if his claim was true on its face.

This president routinely employs lies, wild stories, and hyperbole in an effort to control the narrative. Unfortunately, the Old Media not only allows him to do it, but assists him in the lies.

Rangel paints his group as the moderate, patriotic alternative to the victim-mongerers at the National Council of La Raza and other Hispanic groups.

WSJ: Juan Rangel of UNO

The truth is more complex.

UNO is the Mexican-American ACORN, founded in 1980 by radicals who were tied to the left-wing academic/activist Chicago clique that would later produce Barack Obama.

The group was known for its confrontational tactics, including an infamous episode in which UNO trapped Senator Charles Percy in a bathroom. UNO, like ACORN and other “community organizing” groups, intimidated elected officials until it got what it wanted.

Rangel tells a pleasant tale about how UNO recently worked closely with a Polish community to rename a local school after Hispanic-American war heroes. That’s not how UNO has always operated.

In the early years, it allegedly threatened a Latino school board member until he promised to put a new school in a Mexican neighborhood, then demanded the school be named for Mexicans who had died in 1847 in a war against the United States.

The interview notes that UNO was “inspired” by Saul Alinsky, but Rangel passes over the details of its Alinskyite “inspiration.” The most interesting of these is that Barack Obama got his start in Chicago working closely with UNO, extending its work into the black community.

As Stanley Kurtz writes in his history of Obama’s Chicago years, Radical-In-Chief, Obama was directly involved in UNO’s confrontations: “Obama personally helped plan one of UNO’s most confrontational actions of the eighties: a break-in meant to intimidate a coalition of local business and neighborhood leaders.”

Obama’s work with UNO, Kurtz writes, “helps make sense of the ties between Obama and Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, ACORN, and the world of left-leaning foundations that stands behind modern community organizing.” That world included convicted fraudster Robert Creamer, whose now-defunct Illinois Public Action Council launched the careers of many leftists, including Rahm Emanuel, whose mayoral campaign Rangel co-chaired.

As he began his political career, Obama was careful to cover up his connections with UNO. Kurtz notes that in Obama’s first autobiography, Dreams of My Father, he dealt with UNO “by creating a single composite organizing mentor named ‘Marty Kaufman.’” The use of fictionalized characters in his account of his Chicago career, Kurtz adds, “allows Obama to claim that he did write about UNO, when in fact he disguised it.”

It is true, as Kurtz observes, that UNO has “mellowed” since then. Yet it has not left its radical past behind entirely, and in Feith’s interview, Rangel struggles to explain why he joined a protest for immigration reform in 2006 that included Mexican nationalist symbols.

The Journal is impressed by UNO’s achievements in the charter school movement, and its rejection of bilingual education, but Rangel remains coy about UNO’s broader political beliefs and goals.

Is UNO’s new “unapologetic patriotism” heartfelt, or tactical? Is its embrace of charter schools driven by a passion for education, or, like ACORN–which once sought to create its own schools–is UNO’s real aim the control of public resources?

The “Masters of Hispanic Destiny”–the unfortunate title of the interview–ought to be individuals and families, not self-appointed “community organizers” claiming to act in their collective interest.

On Sept. 14 left-wing activist Miles Kirstan entered The Inn at 22 S. Carroll Street in Madison, Wisconsin, began to harass some GOP lawmakers patronizing the establishment, and ultimately attacked them, throwing a mug of beer on them.

The Madison Police Department confirmed to the MacIver Institute that the incident occurred and the group found that Republican State Rep. Robin Voss (Burlington) was the main target. Reps. John Nygren (Marinette) and Scott Suder (Abbotsford) were also a victim of the attack.

Kirstan is a well-known face among the extremists that have been railing against the Walker administration over the budget cuts and other legislative efforts.

He’s well enough known that some halfwitted groupies have excitedly delivered their hosannas to him online.

For instance, one young woman named Rachel gushed on tumblr:

“I personally know the guy with the microphone in this picture. His name is Miles Kristan and he is a badass motherf**ker. I feel awesome just knowing him.”

If I had fans like that I’d be ashamed.

Of course, Kirstan seems to have no shame, so I doubt he’s much worried about misleading impressionable young girls. He’s been arrested several times during his several years-long campaign as an extremist and activist. Earlier this month, for instance, Kirstan was led away by police from Representative Paul Ryan’s townhall. He was also arrested in August for a driving infraction. Last year he was arrested for trying to disrupt a speech being given by Jeb Bush.

Kirstan is not just a Walker-hater, though,. He is also an anti-war activist. It isn’t surprising that he’s dropped his anti-war business to become a member of the anti-walker brigade. Few anti-war activists are much interested in protesting wars during Obama’s presidency, after all. I mean, he has to have something to do while he waits for a Republican to take the White House, ya know?

This stepping up of Kirstan’s violence, though, is not surprising. It shows the increasing desperation of the left in Wisconsin. They went from thinking they had a sure-win issue to one by one losing every effort to destroy Gov. Walker and his party. To such extremists, it is only natural for physical violence to be the next steppingstone in their pathology.

Finally, one has to wonder why this didn’t become a national story? If it was a Tea Party guy throwing a mug of beer at a Democrat lawmaker — no matter when the incident might happen — the news would have this guys, his family, his co workers, his grade school friends, even faux psychologists, talking about the incident for a week solid.

Yet, this uncivil, left-wing troublemaker is ignored.

Gee. Don’t you wonder why that is?

After the usual Freidmanesque boilerplate about the world being interconnected/flat/insert cliché here, Bollinger explains that we must engage with it through institutions such as the university and the press, both of which, he informs us, “…are concerned with providing objective and accurate information, ideas, and analyses that we need in order to understand and act in our world” (I’ll pause here for the reader to pick himself up off the floor and rub his aching sides).  But as Bollinger surveys the global mediascape, he finds it dominated by the BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24 and China’s CCTV.  Sure, the US has CNN, but he yearns for a more authoritative – i.e. state-sponsored – American voice.  Bollinger offers the “highly respected” BBC World Service as a model of what a state-funded American global broadcast operation might look like; unfortunately, his exemplification comes as the corporation is being taken to court in the UK to force it to disclose the findings of an internal report on its anti-Israeli bias.

“Many nations,” Bollinger solemnly warns us, “actively fear an independent press and see journalism more as an instrument of governmental policy than as a source of objective information and analysis” (perhaps he’s thinking of US senator John Kerry).  But without quality journalism we are “ … dangerously uninformed about, for instance, what the Chinese are thinking, or what is driving young people in the Middle East and North Africa.”  Well luckily, we have the aforementioned CCTV and Al Jezeera to tell us what those people are thinking; in the case of the former, it’s whatever their communist overlords want them to think, and in the case of the latter it’s apparently kill the Jews.

Today, BBC World Service radio and BBC World News are nothing more than politically-correct mouthpieces of the British left-wing intelligentsia, but at least the former has a proud history, and came into being for a good reason; beginning in 1932 as the British Empire Service, its role was to bring news from home to colonial administrators and other expats around the world; as the sun eventually set on the empire, it found a new role in helping to bind a linguistically-contiguous British Commonwealth of former colonies.  In contrast, the only apparent rationale Bollinger offers for an American World Service seems to be to address a liberal internationalist laundry list of global concerns: “…the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change; the depletion of the earth’s natural resources; the degradation of the environment; the growing divide between rich and poor… . ”  He also cryptically references “… the rise of violent extremism among populations threatened by modernity”;  if he’s thinking of the same extremism I’m thinking of,  it’s been wreaking havoc since the Battle of Badr in 624 AD, but I guess it’s always modernity somewhere.

Bollinger’s penchant for more government control of American media has previously been noted at Big Journalism, but now he’s bent on world domination, like some kind of James Bond villain – er, come to think of it, almost exactly like a James Bond villain.  He’s not interested in promoting American values and principles, but rather in propagating “ … the information and ideas we need to govern effectively in an increasingly integrated world.”  This is “ … the ultimate stage of a progressive shift from the local to the national to the global”.  Bollinger acknowledges that the US can already broadcast to large areas of the world through Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio and TV Marti, which serves Cuba, and Alhurra.  The latter was established under the Bush administration to counter anti-American propaganda in the middle east being spewed by – you’ve got it – the same Al Jazeera so admired by Bollinger and other liberals.  But we didn’t hear him advocating for an Alhurra, let alone an American world service, during the Bush years, when he was instead busy inviting Mahmoud Amadinejad to speak at Columbia, (no doubt so that we could better understand what the Iranian people were thinking).  It’s only now, with a president who sees the US as just another country, that America is humble enough in Bollinger’s opinion to speak to the world, not with an authoritative, leading voice, but merely as one of many voices in an international cable news Tower of Babel.