My article from the August 14, 2015 issue of FrontPageMag:
Salon: Mouthpiece of the Racist Left
By Matthew Vadum
The racist Left has found a home at the radical commentary website, Salon, which routinely and viciously attacks conservatives and other patriotic Americans for their beliefs while promoting racist causes like the Black Lives Matter movement.
Salon is the voice of the violent mob in the street; at times it makes the small-c communist Nation magazine seem like a bastion of common sense. Its contributors claim white people, especially conservatives, emerge from the womb hating black people. To reinforce this ugly lie, Salon tries to silence those who threaten the Left and the racial-grievance industry. Salon was so desperate to slime the highly effective conservative investigative journalist James O’Keefe in 2010 that it published a sophomoric error-strewn hit piece by pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal. Even the left-wing Columbia Journalism Review slapped down Salon and Blumenthal.
Nowadays Salon publishes morally reprehensible full-throated defenses of the increasingly violent Black Lives Matter movement whose supporters now openly endorse murdering cops and waging “war” against America. Salon cheered on the rioters in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., accepting as gospel the idea that blacks like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin were murdered by racist white people running wild. Black violence is routinely dismissed at Salon because it doesn’t fit the Left’s narrative. Black people are always victims and white people are always evildoers.
David Palumbo-Liu is just one of many Salon writers who spends his time emulating Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Like Farrakhan, Palumbo-Liu seems to embrace genocide against whites.
After two hard-left Democratic presidential candidates were booed at a radical left-wing activists’ convention for not toeing the Black Lives Matter line, Palumbo-Liu castigated the politicians for daring to assert that all lives, not just black lives, matter, accusing them of belonging to an evil “cult.” He attacked “the disgraceful performances of Mike [sic; read Martin] O’Malley and Bernie Sanders at last week’s Netroots Nation (#NN15) event in Phoenix.”
After Black Alliance for Just Immigration national coordinator Tia Oso and Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors occupied the stage where O’Malley was speaking, Cullors said she had to intervene. “We are in a state of emergency. If you do not feel that emergency, then you are not human.” De-humanizing opponents is a tactic of a genocidal, totalitarian movement, not of those legitimately advocating for civil rights.
To this political stunt worthy of the Third Reich’s Sturmabteilung, O’Malley responded in a restrained and perfectly decent way. He said “of course” black lives matter, just as white lives and “all lives matter.”
Palumbo-Liu rejects this line of thinking because it deviates from the now fashionable leftist view that black lives matter more, much more, than the lives of everyone else. O’Malley’s sin lay in “effectively erasing the specific ways black lives in particular are targeted by both structural and informal racist violence in all shapes and forms.”
After Sandra Bland, a troubled young black woman arrested after exhibiting erratic behavior during a traffic stop, tragically committed suicide in a Texas jail, Salon writers attacked the police for detaining her.
“[W]e believe it was murder,” Darlene Kriesel wrote, ignoring the fundamentals of criminal law. “If not murder in her jail cell, a murder that began at the site of her questionable arrest by a cop who pulled her over on a long stretch of Texas highway.”
This apparent supporter of genocide claims that “All Lives Matters” somehow implies that black lives don’t. In a rancid puddle of post-modernist-sounding drivel, Kriesel treats the interaction between the male cop and Bland as a weird race- and sex-based version of class struggle:
“All Lives Matter” is the mantra used by those who say Sandra Bland should have kept her mouth shut, like her words were a gun against the officer’s head … They say she should have done as she was told by the police, as if her body belonged to him, relieving him from any responsibility to treat her with human dignity …
According to Salon, those who don’t think “the Civil War was fought over slavery” are “idiots.” Of course, the notion that the war was fought over freeing black slaves alone may be the prevailing view in some quarters today, but this wasn’t always the case.
When I went to college, my professor, a rabid left-wing historian who specialized in the labor movement and who ended his final lecture in the course by saying “No justice! No peace!” said there were many factors. Slavery was important in the scheme of things, he taught, but other factors played a role such as economic and social differences between the North and the South, tariffs, and Southern fears of modernization and modernity. Instead of looking at the big picture, Salon prefers to insult its readers in order to keep them from thinking thoughts that differ from the politically correct line.
Ignoring the fact that black Americans are the most racist people in the country and that they commit violent crimes far out of proportion to their numbers, Terrell Jermaine Starr argues at Salon that this phony left-wing construct called “white supremacy” makes blacks’ lives unbearable and drives them to insanity. “Whether you’re a teen at a pool party or a parent just trying to make ends meet, America is a hostile place to live,” he claims. “Racism, in all of its forms, takes a heavy toll on black people’s mental health … racism can literally make black people ill.” Starr quotes some dubious expert who opines that:
“While racism comes in various forms, be it through personal experience or media portrayals, black people tend to feel hopeless and give up mentally, often feeling as if they are not good enough … there is constant portrayal of racial injustice (forms of microaggressions, ongoing discrimination, unarmed black people killed by law enforcement) [that] can lead to chronic feelings of despair.
On Salon, Jay Driskell attacks his fellow leftists for not being radical enough on race-related issues. FDR’s New Deal, he claims, discriminated against black Americans, and confiscatory taxation enacted to forcibly redistribute wealth isn’t enough, he argues.
It is perfectly possible to address economic inequality while at the same time preserving white supremacy. White supremacy and a robust welfare state are not incompatible. Indeed, they’ve been complimentary through much of U.S. history.
What Driskell calls “white supremacist liberalism” has “a long pedigree in the United States.” That it exists “should serve neither as a justification to dismantle what remains of the New Deal nor as an excuse to continue the contemporary assault on the public school system. Rather, it is to insist that our freedom dreams be broadly inclusive and not built on the backs of the excluded.”
Then there is Arthur Chu’s psychotic nonsense about the similarities between events in Ferguson, Iraq, and the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought World War II to a conclusion.
“Americans have always valued their own lives above any other — except when their fellow Americans are the ‘other,'” he claims in a Salon piece. Chu condemns O’Malley for his “incredibly unfortunate response to #BlackLivesMatter activists at Netroots Nation.”
Invoking “‘All Lives Matter’ is, at best, insensitive and, at worst, an active attempt to derail activism and deny reality,” Chu writes. “The charitable interpretation is that #AllLivesMatter folks … conceive of our justice and law enforcement system as a basically decent system that basically works the way it should where any instances of police brutality or unjust killings are unfortunate exceptions to the rule.”
Award-winning ignoramus D. Watkins makes the patently absurd argument that white supremacist Dylann Storm Roof’s murder of nine defenseless black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., is somehow “a textbook example of White Privilege.” It’s unfair, in Watkins’ view, that police didn’t gun down Roof, a young white man who seems destined to receive the death penalty, as soon as they found him.
The cops gave him a nice bulletproof vest to assure that he wouldn’t receive any damage on his way to the station and genteelly guided him out to the squad car. When the cameras flashed, he was clean and spotless, with every hair of his Lloyd from “Dumb and Dumber” cut in place.
Watkins doesn’t point out that Roof received a bulletproof vest from police because many Americans of all races would like to shoot him. Law enforcement personnel are required to keep Roof alive so he can be delivered to a judge and jury so they can decide his fate. Cops do the same with any widely despised accused person regardless of race.
Watkins claims that Michael Brown, the crazed, hulking black thug who grabbed for white cop Darren Wilson’s gun, was merely “an unarmed black teenager who was on his way to college before he was murdered by a white police officer.” The grand jury, of course, quite properly disagreed with this characterization and refused to indict Wilson who killed Brown in self-defense.
Salon is on the front lines defending the unconscionable, illegal, dead baby parts trafficking operation of Planned Parenthood, a group founded by black-hating, Ku Klux Klan-supporting white eugenicist and progressive Margaret Sanger. Its writers call the video sting operation orchestrated by the Center for Medical Progress a “hoax” that proves “[r]ight-wing extremists have no qualms about destroying peoples’ lives” and falsely claim that the videos exposing the butchery aimed largely at unborn African-Americans for profit were selectively edited. One attacked former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) for the refreshing, at least plausible statement that the U.S. government spends too much on “women’s health issues.”
Salon promotes breathtakingly obtuse, racist opinions like those of editor-at-large Joan Walsh, an aging, self-hating white woman, who claims that the “Planned Parenthood sting backfired on Republicans” even though anyone with eyes can see the left-wing abortion provider is now fighting for its life. Republicans are always the racists and Democrats are always the virtuous, noble crusaders for truth and justice in Walsh’s world.
She accuses conservative champion Ted Cruz of “McCarthyism” and says the Republican Party is “still race baiting” and “still stuck in the 1980s.” On MSNBC last year Walsh compared Republicans to rapists for daring to criticize President Obama. She said “journalists don’t call them out on their extremism and instead blame Democrats for somehow provoking it by wearing short skirts.”
According to Salon, it’s not okay even for blacks to criticize other blacks.
The title and teaser of one of Mychal Denzel Smith’s articles from last year says it all: “Chris Rock’s poisonous legacy: How to get rich and exalted chastising ‘bad blacks.’ Respectability politics isn’t new. But with Charles Barkley and Bill Cosby now joining in, here’s why it’s so toxic.”
If a dysfunctional community can’t even begin to have an honest discussion in order to identify what’s going wrong among its members, it is surely doomed. In this case, that troubled community, stirred to violence by President Obama and his minions, threatens to drag the whole country down with it.
And that’s just fine by Joan Walsh and her fellow leftists because in their view America’s had it coming for a really, really long time.