Jack is a commentator on multiple websites, and (unlike myself) is allowed to post on the GOP Establishment forum Townhall.com. As I read over his pieces there, I sometimes gape in disbelief. Jack is one of the few commentators on Townhall who pushes the anti-PC envelope. (Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter do too, but both of these celebrities are far better connected than Jack—and no doubt harder to get rid of).
Not surprisingly, not all of Jack’s pieces are accepted by Townhall or by the neoconservative FrontpageMag, which is also one of his outlets. Those of his commentaries that seem (to use his term) “too insensitive” for Conservatism, Inc. go on to his BeliefNet page, and from there at least some of them have found their way into The American Offensive.
Jack covers lots of topics, including theology (he is a traditional, practicing Catholic); the growing epidemic of PC on American campuses; and the “reality” of race. Jack rarely discusses the media, the two institutionalized parties and his fellow academics without going for the jugular. He is tough-as-nails on the anti-white rage of “civil rights spokespersons” (What else would one expect from a white Catholic ethnic from Trenton, N.J.?). But reserves his harshest invective for whites who excuse blacks for their astronomic crime rates.
One truly fascinating commentary is his analysis of “blackism” as the recognizable worldview of our president. In contrast to the representatives of Conservatism, Inc., Jack does not view Obama as first and foremost a “socialist” without a foreign policy. Rather he sees him as a blackist who “affirms an explicitly—and thoroughly—racial conception of history.” Bam’s socialism does not drive his ideology.
As a “proponent of blackism,” Obama embraces socialism, because he believes, rightly or wrongly, that it will benefit his race. Blackists further believe, Kerwick says, that
…white racism is endemic…Whatever gains black Americans and formerly colonized peoples of color in other parts of the world have made over the decades, white racism remains as formidable, and destructive, a force as it has ever been.
Blackism also requires from “all of its adherents in good standing” that they “express some measure of indignation or rage regarding the historical injustice suffered by blacks and the persistent omnipresence of—what else?—white racism.” Blackists “unabashedly heed the call for ‘social’ or ‘racial justice’” for this means, in effect that ”a robust and activist government…will possess the power necessary to compensate blacks for the past harms that had been visited upon them by white racism.”
Finally in what Jack describes as “the Cliff’s Note” of blackist ideology, obviously absorbed by President Obama and his black supporters, “is the idea of ‘racial authenticity.’ Racial authenticity can be achieved, it promises, by way of the very simple act of affirming blackism!”
Jack quotes Malcolm X on the cultural implications of blackism, particularly the exhibition of revulsion for Christianity as the religion of white colonists and the association of America’s founding with anti-black racism. In the words of Malcolm X, blacks “didn’t land on Plymouth Rock” but “Plymouth Rock landed” on blacks.
Jack acknowledges that Obama, who in the last election won 38% of the white vote, has had to cloak his blackism. But he cites Obama’s speeches and comments to show that the same ideology and resentments that were found in Malcolm X periodically surface in the current occupant of the Oval Office.
Jack argues that it’s perfectly compatible with “blackism” that Obama, in his National Prayer Breakfast reminder of Christian iniquities in what was supposed to be a criticism of ISIS violence, turned his remarks in a blackist direction: “In one and the same breath he speaks of both a white segregationist’s refusal to associate with blacks and an Islamic fanatic’s refusal to grant mercy to a person he cages and eventually burns to death.”
It is not just Obama’s “historical illiteracy” and “moral idiocy” that account for these rhetorical eccentricities. There is an anti-white, anti-Western ideology that drives it. Thus when “he talks of ‘we’ in implying moral parity between Islamic violence and the violence perpetrated by Christians in the past,” “what he is really saying is that you—all of you white Christians—must not shed any of that white guilt that’s paid off so well for the Barack Obamas of the world.”
Jack is even tougher on those white scribblers who seem to be truckling to “blackists,” particularly faux conservatives whom he takes apart with obvious delectation. For example, in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting, Kevin Williamson of National Review took to his high horse to complain about the “militarized police” in Ferguson, ,Missouri and across the US. This for Jack exemplifies his charge that when the Left complains about racism, Conservatism, Inc. respectfully dissents, but also puts itself at a safe distance from the real Right.
As further evidence of this, Jack cites National Review’s Reihan Salaam, who also writes regularly for the left-wing publication Slate, on the outrage of “intra-racial dating.” Salaam expresses shock that so many people (presumably it’s the white ones he’s talking about) manifest strong“same-race preferences” on dating sites like OKCupid. “One assumes”, Salaam opines, “that many people who do have such preferences would either choose not to disclose them publicly or choose to skip the question entirely.” [Is It Racist to Date Only People of Your Own Race? Yes., Slate, April 22 2014] Jack shows that Salaam, and at least implicitly his employer, believes that there is a positive duty to miscegenate.
Although Salaam would probably be pleased to use government to bring this about, such a project (alas) does not seem feasible. He therefore urges for starters that all social and educational institutions encourage interracial dining. Not one to deny deserved credit, Salaam insists: “The rural white Southerner who dines with nonwhites as a matter of course is doing more to tackle stigma than the urbane white hipster who hardly ever does the same.”
Jack ends his comments on Salaam’s homily by observing that what should be treated as a bad college freshman essay has been “published in a widely-read venue (however much of a rag).” And this “is a truly scandalous commentary on the intellectual and moral state of our culture.”
But Jack has barely scratched the surface of the kind of leftist claptrap that “conservative” publications now fill their pages with. Thus he quotes the longtime, nationally syndicated “conservative” columnist Paul Greenberg waxing orgasmic “over President Obama’s decision to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.” Like Obama (and AEI- fixture Linda Chavez), Greenberg insists that not legalizing illegals is incompatible “with the America we know and still want to believe in.”
Apparently the America that Greenberg and other neoconservatives wish us “to believe in” bears a striking similarity to President Obama’s.
Jack Kerwick’s America does not.
Paul Gottfried [ email him ] is a retired Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, PA. He is the author of After Liberalism, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt and The Strange Death of Marxism His most recent book is Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America.
