On December 19 the Huffington Post added its two cents to the
Hollywood Left’s ongoing smear and character assassination of Phil Robertson
of the “Duck Dynasty” television series by condemning him for something he
never said. The publication recruited one Cavan Sieczkowski, who writes
a “gay voices” column for them, to proclaim that Phil Robertson “claims black
people were happy pre-civil rights.” He then excoriates Robertson for
supposedly condoning Jim Crow laws.
Other media leftists have told even bolder lies about Robertson. One John
McIntyre, writing in the December 22 Baltimore Sun, falsely claimed
that Robertson told GQ magazine that “black people were
better off, and happier, as slaves.” Of course, he never said any such thing,
as McIntyre must surely know. You can apparently get away with any
falsehood, no matter how outrageous, when you are a lefty writing for a
left-wing propaganda rag like the Baltimore
Sun.
But the allegedly “damning” quote from a GQ magazine interview with
Robertson says nothing at all about civil rights, Jim Crow laws, or
discrimination. Sieczkowski made the whole thing up, then attacked Robertson
for saying something that he never said. “Jim Crow laws enforced a
system of subjugating African-Americans in the South,” he screeched ever so
indignantly, apparently oblivious to the fact that racial discrimination was
always as bad, if not worse, in places like New York, Boston, and Chicago
during that same time period. Such historical facts are always ignored
whenever the New York-based leftist media engages in yet another round of
South-bashing.
The “gay voices” columnist holds up the following quote by Robertson in GQ
magazine as his supposed “smoking gun”:
“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person.
Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for
the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because
we’re white trash. We’re going across the field . . . They’re singing
and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say “’I
tell you what: Those doggone white people’ – not a word! . . . . Pre-entitlement,
pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no
one was crying the blues” (emphasis added).
The last sentence here is the real smoking gun. What
Robertson is obviously saying is that, prior to the explosion of the American
welfare state, the black people he knew and worked with and lived around as a
child growing up in Louisiana were “godly,” hard-working people. They
had not yet been indoctrinated by the leftist “civil rights establishment” to
quit working, collect welfare, and endlessly complain and “cry the blues”
about how awful life in America was. He was making a statement about how
the welfare state has been so destructive to black families. He was
not commenting favorably on Jim Crow laws, as Sieczkowski misleadingly
implied.
Phil Robertson is not very articulate, but what he said is backed up by
decades of solid academic research. As economist Walter E. Williams has
pointed out, welfare has done to the black family what even slavery could
never do: destroy it for almost three fourths of the black population.
As Williams has often pointed out, the black “illegitimacy rate” today in the
U.S. is about 70 percent. Prior to
the expansion of the welfare state, in the early twentieth century, it was
about 10-12 percent. By focusing so much of the welfare state on the
black population, government has targeted the horrific effects of welfare
statism such that it has had a grossly disproportionate racial effect.
The white illegitimacy rate has also been climbing for decades, and for the
same reason, but it still has a long way to go to reach the devastating
levels of the black population.
Welfare eliminates the stigma that most men once had about abandoning
their children, as government becomes the new “daddy” once they
disappear. This, along with the decades-long propaganda campaign by the
state to also eliminate the stigma of single motherhood, has decimated the
black family in America.
Research by economist June O’Neil, a former director of the Congressional
Budget Office, showed that welfare dependence has horrible effects on
children, including reducing a child’s IQ by as much as 20 percent; impairing
the earnings ability of young men; promoting promiscuity and illegitimacy
among the children of the welfare dependent; tripling the behavioral and
emotional problems of welfare-dependent children; and doubling the
probability that the children of welfare dependents will become involved in
criminal activity. Welfare, concluded Dr. O’Neil, is “a form of social
toxin.”
It is doubtful that the proud, self-described “white trash” redneck Phil
Robertson is familiar with any of this research. But unlike gay
Hollywood left-wing ideologues and political hacks, he has lived alongside
black people his entire life down in Louisiana. (It is unlikely that any of
the lily-white “gay voices” who are attacking him ever hoed cotton
side-by-side with black people as Phil Robertson did as a teenager).
Robertson has simply observed the sad destruction of the black families he
grew up with and is disgusted at how so many of them have taken their cues
from the “civil rights establishment” and have become whining crybabies,
constantly begging for more and more government handouts. (It brings to
mind the explosive headlines recently about a supposedly “catastrophic”
$10/month reduction in food stamp subsidies that set off a new burst of
whining and crying by the welfare parasite class of all races).
Moreover, Robertson never said that ALL black people were “happy” in the
“pre-civil rights era,” as the Huffington Post incorrectly stated in
its headline. He was only referring to the “godly,” hard-working, black
families of his youth in a small part of Louisiana. Facts are never too
important, however, when one is in the midst of a witch hunt.
The Best of
Thomas DiLorenzo
