IMUS'S DEMISE COULD HURT YOUR FREEDOM

I think he's got the talent of a rock and the ego of a monster. It amazes me that he is on the air anywhere, much less in such a prominent position. I could do twice the radio show he does, but then, so could my dog or a potted plant.

But he's getting railroaded. His career is about to go down in flames in an exercise of political and racial intimidation. He's being suspended for two weeks and I'll be shocked if he comes back.

You've no doubt heard the story. He and some flunky were talking about the NCAA women's basketball championship game – which scores a zero on the interesting scale – when the flunky described the losing team as “hos” and Don Imus added that they were “nappy-headed hos.”

That makes reference to their hair. Many of the players were black. “Nappy-headed” refers to the typically kinky hair of African-Americans.

Which is rude and shocking. In my book, “jigaboo” is the same as “nigger.” Long ago, in my youth, if you heard a white person say “jigaboo,” they meant it in a bigoted and mocking way, the same way they meant “nigger.” Though I have not personally heard either word used seriously by a white person in about 30 years, when last I did, they were equivalents and nothing has changed in my mind to alter that perception.

And Al Sharpton wants him fired. Ditto for Jesse Jackson. Even Barak Obama came out against him, saying those who broadcast on the public airwaves have an obligation to speak in a certain way. At a time when the Democrats are trying to outlaw or takeover talk radio, Don Imus has turned into the poster boy for the liberal assault on the medium.

Or, from another perspective, he has turned into the poster boy for the disappearing right of free speech. The orthodoxy of political correctness is so nearly complete that Don Imus, in three seconds of a 40-year-career, has destroyed himself.

Though, actually, he hasn't destroyed himself. That's being done for him in a power play whereby race activists will show how much they can terrify giant radio and television networks. Forty years of profitability and popularity – and a Hall of Fame berth thrown in for good measure – will mean nothing as corporate execs run scared in the face of an Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson attack.

They both will be looking to demonstrate their power by demanding Don Imus's head. With their colleagues the Democrats newly empowered in Congress, and eager to bring back and expand the speech-stifling “Fairness Doctrine,” their clout is significant. No network wants to go into inevitable congressional hearings on broadcasting companies with a supposed racist on staff.

And you shouldn't be surprised if, for good measure, some Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson businesses or charities end up with generous contracts or grants from CBS radio and NBC television.

Hopefully, though, people will be able to remember the First Amendment and the American spirit of free speech. Don Imus is about to become a casualty in the ongoing war to chain speech. Increasingly in America, people are afraid to say what they think for fear of being branded insensitive, inappropriate or worse. That is no accident. It is the intended objective of the political correctness movement, to so stigmatize non-liberal speech as to make it worse than illegal. The kiss of professional death is attached to not just words but ideas, and not just about race, but about other protected groups and about politically incorrect ideas. An entire philosophy – conservatism – is slowly being pushed out of public discourse through the intimidation of political correctness and the poisonous accusations of racism or intolerance.

I'm not that bothered by “nappy-headed,” the phrase is used often and with some pride and fondness in current African-American writing. If you doubt my word, Google it. I wouldn't use the word or the phrase, but I'm not that bothered by it.

“Jigaboo,” however, is something that elicits a gasp of shock. It is just not a word used by decent people.

And the free market includes the right to reap the consequences of saying such things. Instead of the intimidation of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, it should be listeners and advertisers who decide if they are comfortable with Don Imus's vocabulary. If they're not, they are free to go elsewhere and his already laughable ratings will get even worse.

But this game of racial gotcha must end. CBS radio and NBC television must stand up to the shake-down artists. It's not likely they will, but unless they want to unleash a cascading attack on the media of American discourse and thought, they better stand by Don Imus.

NBC television and CBS radio must not turn over the running of their companies to race activists who have been playing the same incendiary game their entire careers.

I know a little bit about this. I lost a year of my career – and was almost bankrupted – by race-activist liers in wait. I discovered that it doesn't matter what you say, it matters how insistent the reverends are and how cowardly the bosses are. And in this day and age, the reverends are neverendingly insistent and the bosses are neverendingly cowardly.

They've suspended him for two weeks, thinking that will appease those who've called for his neck. My bosses made the same mistake. But instead of buying peace, it emboldened and empowered the attack. And that is what it will do with Don Imus's attackers.

Unless NBC and CBS can buy them off with contracts, scholarships, grants or radio shows.

But I love freedom. And Americans must be free to speak their minds. Even if those minds are occasionaly boorish and bigoted. There is an effort afoot to silence talk radio. Don Imus sadly played right into that.

Because to enslave you they must control what you think. And the first step to controlling what you think is controlling what you say.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others

George Orwell.

The 'authoritarian personality' is not to be interpreted primarily as a handbook for the conduct of warfare against prejudice as such, but as a handbook for psychological warfare against the American male for the purpose of rendering him unwilling to defend traditional and formerly held beliefs and values. In other words, the purpose would be to emasculate him. (emphasis supplied).

Dr. Atkinson

Imus is an equal opportunity traducer. He routinely features a character actor/comedian who satirizes Reverend Falwell. As a Protestant Christian I am offended by this. His producer routinely presents a satire making Cardinal Egan look ridiculous. Catholic Christians equally have a right to be offended. But in neither instance is NBC or CBS offended. They husband their indignation only to react to vilification of female African-American basketball players. .

Who was the reactor in chief? That charlatan, the Reverend Al Sharpton! I find Reverend Al's very existence offensive and I certainly find his mendacious behavior in the Tawana Brawley caper to be a vilification of white people. The powers that control the airwaves, private profit making companies, have not reacted in indignation against the buffoonery and malicious anti-white vilifications of Reverend Al, rather they have actually given him his own radio program.

Do I care? Personally, no. After all, I hold Reverend Al in such contempt that it is impossible for him to insult me, impossible for him to get under my skin. Likewise, the contrived slanders against Reverend Falwell or other Christians committed routinely on Don Imus' program fail to arouse me, perhaps because I'm of an age and upbringing which considers these sorts of things to be part of the chaff of our modern world. But on a political and policy level, I care very deeply because the Reverend Al Sharpton, and his fellow travelers at CBS and NBC, are setting a standard which ultimately will shift political power away from me and to the likes of the Reverend Al Sharpton. And that is a prospect that arouses me fully.

Political correctness, multiculturalism, laws against hate crimes, and other legal, quasi legal, and extralegal restrictions on freedom of thought and freedom of expression are not the natural and haphazard expressions of a leftist political philosophy, rather they are a calculated attempt to move the fulcrum of political power to the left by changing the rules under which we live. As a white, male, Christian, I don't have the same standing to complain as a black buffoon and notorious liar. As a white, male animal, I have been defined into an animal who has fewer rights than other animals who are "more equal."

Dr. Atkinson has written a series of articles and given a series of lectures, some of them at the Naval Academy, in which he contends that all this political correctness is not an accident of history but, dare I say it, the product of a conscious conspiracy to exploit the doctrines of cultural Marxism in order to convert our society to the socialist model:

Most Americans do not yet realize that they are being led by social revolutionaries who think in terms of the destruction of the existing social order in order to create a new social order in the world. These revolutionaries are the New Age elite Boomers, the New Totalitarians [26]. They now control every public institution in the United States of America. Their 'quiet' revolution, beginning with the counter-culture revolution of their youth, is nearly complete. It was based on the intellectual foundation of the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School. Its completion depends on keeping the American male in his psychic 'iron cage.'

...history identifies a small group of German intellectuals who devised concepts, processes, and action plans which conform very closely to what Americans presently observe every day in their culture. Observations, such as those made at the beginning of this piece, can be directly traced to the work of this core group of intellectuals. They were members of the Frankfurt School, formed in Germany in 1923. They were the forebears of what some proclaim as 'cultural Marxism,' a radical social movement that has transformed American culture.

'Cultural Marxism' and 'critical theory' are concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute, modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as the Frankfurt School.7 In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States. While here, they migrated to major U.S. universities (Columbia, Princeton, and California at Berkeley). These intellectual Marxists included Herbert Marcuse, who coined the phrase, 'make love, not war,' during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

By promoting the dialectic of 'negative' criticism, that is, pointing out the rational contradictions in a society's belief system, the Frankfurt School 'revolutionaries' dreamed of a utopia where their rules governed.

If you're interested, you can find a full explanation of Dr. Atkinson thesis here:

http://www.newtotalitarians.com/PsychicIronCagePartII.html

Meanwhile, we have a better understanding of why Don Imus, who has made a career of being naughty, must now go to the woodshed for doing what he has been doing for decades.

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