Guilty (2 page)

This literary Munchausen syndrome produces Jewish girls trying to be black and gentiles claiming to be Jewish Holocaust survivors. So naturally, when a con artist threesome sought fame and fortune in America, they invented a young fiction author by the name of JT LeRoy, who was a cross-dressing child prostitute, drug addict, vagrant, and AIDS victim. Among the fake transgendered prostitute's celebrity entourage were Lou Reed, Courtney Love, Winona Ryder, Carrie Fisher, Tatum O'Neal, Debbie Harry, Madonna, and Liv Tyler—all of whom, when assembled under one roof, conveniently constitute a quorum for a 12-step meeting.

The con artist LeRoy explained his attraction to celebrities, saying, “Artists want to hang out with other artists because that's the language they talk”
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—which may have been the truest thing “he” said. The nonexistent LeRoy was celebrated in a glamorous write-up in
Vanity Fair,
a glowing profile in the
New York Times,
and a song, “Cherry Lips,” by Shirley Manson—a trio of honors known in the Hamptons as a “hat trick.” A fawning piece in the
Boston Globe
said of LeRoy's
hard-luck stories, the “perversity of religious fundamentalists is a near constant in American gothic writing.”
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Everything always changes, except the avant-garde, which is always the same.

But the love from Hiplandia came to a crashing halt when it was discovered that there was no JT LeRoy. The books were written by Laura Albert, a middle-class woman in her forties. Savannah Knoop, the half-sister of Albert's boyfriend, had been enlisted to play LeRoy in public. Is it possible that trendy airheads would have swooned over these con artists had they instead impersonated a brave U.S. Marine? How would a Horatio Alger type do in Hollywood these days?

Even grifters know that to be embraced by the cool people in America, you must claim to be a victim, preferably abused by religious fundamentalists.

In a related phenomenon, various half-black celebrities insist on representing themselves simply as “black”—the better to race-bait their way to success. Actress Halle Berry, singer Alicia Keys, and matinee idol Barack Obama were all abandoned by their black fathers and raised by their white mothers. But instead of seeing themselves as half-white, they prefer to see the glass as half-black. They all choose to identify with the fathers who ditched them, while insulting the women who struggled to raise them.

In 2002, Berry engaged in wild race-baiting to win her Oscar and then ate up most of the awards show with an interminable acceptance speech claiming that her award was “so much bigger than me.” People who say “it's bigger than me” always mean it's just about them. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly said the exact same thing: “This election is bigger than me.”
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Would they be able to pawn off their personal victories as transformative events for the nation if they were not claiming to be doing it for the blacks?

The mediocre-sounding, award-winning songstress Keys casually mentioned in a March 2008 interview with
Blender
magazine that the government had instigated shoot-outs between rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac “to stop another great black leader from existing.” Keys boasted of wearing a necklace made of metal from an AK-47 machine gun, the weapon of choice for drive-by shooters—“to symbolize
strength, power and killing 'em dead”—and of reading numerous biographies of “Black Panther leaders.”
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Her black father abandoned Ms. Keys's Italian-American mother, who raised Keys, sacrificed to give her classical piano lessons, but evidently isn't important enough to register in her daughter's sense of her own ethnicity. This is a strange twist on the “one drop” rule, once used by white racists to denigrate those of mixed race but now seized upon by celebrities eager to acquire Victim Chic.

The downward spiral into liberal insanity began when liberals adopted blacks as their special victims. What had started as a legitimate cause—no racial discrimination—was soon being used as a battering ram by feminists, gays, illegal aliens, and “people of color.” I reached my limit when Asians started complaining about being called “model minorities.” They were victims of other people's esteem for them!

For decades, the Democratic Party had ferociously enforced legal race discrimination. So they wanted a do-over, allowing them to cast themselves as the heroes the next time around. This is why the Left is constantly trying to gin up phony racial crises in a nation where none exist. They were finally willing to take a stand against racism at the precise moment in time when no one was for racism.

Today there are more men who are sexually aroused by women in stiletto heels crushing live frogs to death while talking erotically to the frog than there are members of the Ku Klux Klan. And that's in the entire nation—in New York City the frog fetishists probably outnumber the Klan by 500 to 1.
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(Philosophy professor Richard C. Richards of California State Polytechnic University in Pomona told the
New York Times
that there are about a thousand “crush fetishists” in the country, adding, “I think it's wrong to demonize these things.”)
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And yet students at Columbia University claim to be seized by a paralyzing terror of white supremacists. In 2007, a psychology and education professor at Columbia who specialized in racial issues was embroiled in a plagiarism investigation. The professor defended herself by claiming that the charges themselves were evidence of the “structural racism that pervades this institution,” saying that as “one of only two
tenured black women full professors at Teachers College, it pains me to conclude that I have been specifically and systematically targeted.”

In an amazing coincidence, just as the investigation was heating up, a noose was found hanging on the professor's office door. The apparent hate crime roiled the city and made national news for weeks. Eventually, the noose investigation quietly disappeared, unsolved, but the professor was fired for plagiarism the following year.
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The only shocking fact about a noose showing up on a university campus would be if an actual racist put it there. Example after example of the racism allegedly sweeping the nation's campuses keeps turning out to be a fraud. While liberals go around physically assaulting conservatives, they pretend to live in terror of jackbooted racist thugs.

In 2007, vicious anti-Muslim flyers were posted all over the George Washington University campus—by leftists, of course, including a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. When it was thought the leaflets were from the conservative group Young America's Foundation (YAF), the university president called the flyers “reprehensible” and the university demanded that YAF officers sign a statement disavowing “hate speech.” The executive vice president of the student association called for the expulsion of the culprits. But when it turned out leftists had distributed the flyers, the university dropped the matter.
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Only because of the uproar from conservatives did the university, one month later, put the liberal students on “probation” and ask them to pay a $25 fine.

In 2004, dormitory walls at the College of Wooster in Ohio were defaced with obscenity-laced racist and anti-Semitic messages, some nearly as graphic as the lyrics on the new Kanye West CD. Included among the obscenities was the message “Vote Goldwater”—which was the first clue the graffiti was written by liberals, since Goldwater died in 1998. According to the student government president, most of the campus believed the perpetrators were “drunk, white males”—or as another student put it, a “typical white male.” But eventually it emerged that the real culprits were a group of leftist students led by a black studies major.
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Also in 2004, a white, Catholic visiting professor at Claremont
McKenna College claimed her car had been vandalized with racist and anti-Semitic graffiti, with the words “Shut Up!” spray-painted on the hood of her car. This—at the very moment she was giving a talk on intolerance! It was just a little too ironic. But the suggestion that the hate crime was a hoax sent liberals into further depths of self-despair. One student angrily told the
Los Angeles Times
that anyone thinking it could be a hoax was “so sick, they are in denial. People don't want to accept that a well-educated, liberal community can have hate.”
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Classes were canceled and demonstrations swept the campus. The professor was not black or Jewish, but was converting to Judaism and was an outspoken opponent of racism—which takes guts on a college campus. Far from being “silenced,” this anonymous mountebank was given a national microphone to bore us with her race-gender-culture theories. Can you guess what happened next? Yes, the vandalism turned out to have been perpetrated by the professor herself when eyewitnesses identified her as the one who had spray-painted her own car.
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In 2002, vile racial epithets and other racist graffiti were scrawled on dorm room doors at Ole Miss, producing mass protests and a “Say No to Racism” march—just in time to counter the proposed “Say Yes to Racism” rally at Ole Miss. A university police official gravely warned that the offending parties could be prosecuted for “criminal charges, possibly a felony, or it could be a federal offense.”
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Then the school learned that the graffiti had been written by black students. No criminal charges were brought.
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In 1997, at Duke University, a black doll was found hanging by a noose from a tree at the precise spot where the Black Student Alliance planned to hold a rally against racism. Two black students later admitted they were the culprits and were immediately praised for bringing attention to the problem of racism on campus.
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Which is why I'm thinking about knocking over a liquor store to focus attention on the problem of big-city crime.

Rather than “institutional racism,” what we are witnessing is “institutional racial hoaxism” committed by liberals. Will anyone rally against that? In the future, I plan to checkmate liberals by claiming to have found a noose on my office door and wailing that I was shocked,
nauseated, appalled, dizzy. I will not be silenced! In fairness, I wasn't particularly silenced before. But what the heck—everyone else gets people to treat them nicely for a few weeks after “discovering” nooses they hung themselves.

Meanwhile, when real victims of racism and sexism appear on the very same campus, liberals lead the lynch mob against them. In 2006, a group of white Duke lacrosse players was falsely accused of gang raping a black stripper. Despite the fact that the evidence against the players quickly unraveled, the
New York Times
doggedly refused to tell the truth about the case. At the university itself, professors and administrators attacked the victims of the false accusation, both publicly and privately. In an open letter that presumed the innocent players guilty, gender and ethnic studies professors droned on about the “racism and sexism” that students “live with every day”—mostly thanks to the professors who signed that letter and never apologized, even after the players were completely exonerated. Liberals love nothing more than these constant self-righteous-athons—as if they would ever have the courage to stand up for any cause not universally supported by everyone around them.

Elizabeth Edwards acknowledged the value of being a certified victim in politics by ruefully complaining during the 2007 Democratic primary, “We can't make John black, we can't make him a woman.”
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(Well, they can't make him black.) Even if they can't be black—in fact, even if they are the opposite of black, like Jacob Weisberg—liberals love to speak for the blacks. Denouncing racism, which no one defends, allows them to borrow from blacks to portray themselves as victims. Throughout the 2008 campaign, white liberals issued dire warnings that the only thing that could prevent Obama from becoming the next president was racism. Writing in the liberal
Slate
magazine, Weisberg said that only if Obama won would children in America be able to “grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives.” But if Obama lost, “our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to.”
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Fortuitously for the liberal Weisberg, Obama also happened to be
the most left-wing person ever to run for president in the United States on a major-party ticket. If Republicans were running black Republicans Michael Steele, Ken Blackwell, or Condoleezza Rice for president, would liberals tell us that only racism could prevent them from becoming president? Say—do we need to send federal civil rights monitors into Maryland and Ohio right now, on account of the fact that Steele and Blackwell lost recent elections in those states?

Policymaking by victim status inevitably creates real victims. For openers, being a media-certified victim does not bring out the best in people. Once you are a victim, you can do anything—lord your victim-hood over others, behave abominably, tell lies, commit crimes, slander willfully—and liberals will give you a standing ovation.

This is why the O.J. murder trial was the best thing that ever happened to blacks in America. As it happens, the one thing even certified victims can't do is wildly cheer the acquittal of a double murderer. That is what finally ended the patience of ordinary people for liberal patronization of blacks.

By that point, tender liberal ministrations toward the black community had nearly destroyed it. The black illegitimacy rate was through the roof and the criminal behavior that flows from such a massive social breakdown was on full display. And yet people would still listen in rapt attention to pompous liberal blowhards at dinner parties opining that the reason blacks committed crimes was white racism. Even after decades of racial quotas and set-asides, and endless rallies, sit-ins, demonstrations, and chitchat about racism in America, white people were still so guilty about how blacks had been treated by a minority of thugs three or four decades earlier most people would respond, “Gosh, that's so profound.”