This argument has arisen each year since at least the 1990s. It is what the Japanese call a 水掛け論 (pronounced mizukakeron) or “endless debate”.
You’ve heard much of this before, so I’ll be brief.
The Native American experience with white settlers was not a monolithic one.
Some Native American tribes were fierce. In 1813, a large force of Creek Indians slaughtered over five hundred white civilians and militiamen near present-day Mobile, Alabama. This became known as the Fort Mims massacre.
The Comanche were cruel to both other Native American tribes and white settlers alike. The Plains Indians were also formidable fighters.
Longtime readers may know that I attended two universities here in the Cincinnati area: Northern Kentucky University (NKU) and the University of Cincinnati (UC).
I have pleasant memories of both of them, but I especially enjoyed my time at NKU. I was a student there during the 1986-1987 academic year. The university had been founded the year I was born (1968). NKU felt like a dynamic academic institution that was rapidly growing.
Oh, what a difference 39 years can make. NKU is now suffering from a budget shortfall and declining enrollment. The university recently announced that it will eliminate 1% of its existing workforce. An unspecified number of vacant positions will also be eliminated.
I saw the news on Facebook, where the rule of thumb is: Don’t read the comments. But of course I did. There were plenty of people blaming both Donald Trump and “woke” professors. Continue reading “NKU staffing cuts, and my college days”
She’s a former biker chick, and was once a drummer in a heavy metal band. From 1987 to 1989, she lived in the USA, where she was a congressional fellow for Democrat Pat Schroeder. (My guess is that this was an apolitical cross-cultural exchange program, rather than anything partisan.)
Never a boring moment in 2025. President Trump has ordered federal troops to Portland, Oregon. Their mission is to protect immigration enforcement officers (ICE) from Antifa-provoked violence. The troops will also be charged with protecting federal buildings and facilities from those who throw rocks, bricks, and flaming objects in the name of Antifa.
This has once again stirred up the debate about what Antifa is, exactly, and what it is not.
Is Antifa truly “anti-fascist”? Are Antifa like the Weather Underground? Or are they the French Resistance? Is Antifa an organization, or a mere set of ideas?
No one really expected that Joan Baez, an octogenarian symbol of the 1960s counterculture, would be a fan of Donald Trump. In a recent interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, Baez expounded on her Trump loathing for about 40 minutes.
Baez, to her credit, seems remarkably alert for 84 years of age. Baez makes me feel my own 57 years less, when I consider that she released her ninth studio album the year I was born. Continue reading “Joan Baez and Nicolle Wallace”
Before his assassination on September 10, Charlie Kirk was barely on my radar. I was aware of him, of course. But at my age, I was far outside his target demographic. (I am also somewhat resistant to taking moral and political instruction from anyone born when I was already an adult. I was 25 years old when Charlie Kirk was born on October 14, 1993. Call that my old man’s bias, if you wish.)
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February, US Vice President JD Vance ruffled some feathers with the following words:
“Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not, and thank God they lost the Cold War.
They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.
As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. And we believe those things are certainly connected.
And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.
I look to Brussels, where EU commiss- — commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be, quote, “hateful content.”
Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of, quote, “combating misogyny on the Internet, a day of action.”
I look to Sweden, where, two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant — and I’m quoting — “a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.
And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.”
Vance’s speech was not greeted with much enthusiasm among the Eurocrats in attendance. The Munich Security Conference was supposed to be an extended Two Minutes Hate against Russia and Vladimir Putin. Vice President Vance suggested that many so-called democracies in NATO and the European Union ought to reexamine their own commitments to liberty on the home front instead. Continue reading “The Graham Linehan arrest: Was JD Vance right about Europe? Is Keir Starmer England’s Putin?”
In this book, you’ll learn about the honey trap in which Alexander Hamilton was ensnared in 1797. Women and sex, it turns out, were among Hamilton’s principal weaknesses.
There are the requisite chapters about Warren G. Harding and the Nan Britton affair. Also Eisenhower’s unconsummated sexual liaisons with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. (Apparently, Ike was impotent by the time he became involved with the much younger, statuesque Summersby.)
Needless to say, the chapter on John F. Kennedy is among the most lurid. There are the expected entries about Marilyn Monroe, and the two White House secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle. But there are also some surprises.
According to this book, JFK was into partner-swapping mini-orgies involving other men, too (Note: not with any male-male contact, though). And of course, threesomes with two women. (What man isn’t, after all?)
JFK
While most of JFK’s conquests were on the younger side, not all of them were. When German actress Marlene Dietrich visited the White House shortly before JFK’s death, Kennedy decided that he had to have her, too.
Dietrich, born in 1901, was sixteen years older than Kennedy. She was then already in her sixties. Dietrich quickly decided, though, that she would not turn down a chance to romp with America’s youthful, charismatic commander-in-chief.
But there was one caveat: “I was an old woman by then,” she later recounted, “and damn if I was going to be on top.”
Dietrich also reported that the encounter did not last long. JFK was fast out of the gate. That assessment conformed to other reports about our 35th president.
Marlene Dietrich
Speaking of age: JFK died at 46, when he was still in his prime. He is frozen in amber as a youngish, good-looking man.
For as long as he lived, JFK was largely attractive to women. But even during his lifetime, he showed signs of what would now be called predatory behavior. He often manipulated women into sex, and occasionally plied them with alcohol and drugs.
And speaking of age again: Some of his partners were far too young for a grown man in a position of power, even by the standards of that era.
What if JFK had not been martyred at the age of 46? What if he had served out a presumable second term and died of old age? A normal lifespan would have placed Kennedy’s death sometime in the 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. (He would have turned 100 in 2017.)
We can assume that at a certain point—probably not far into the 1970s— the women would no longer have been quite so willing, and JFK would have met with more resistance. For JFK, sex was more than a mere biological drive. He was clearly compulsive about his conquests, and regarded sex as an extension of his power.
It is therefore not difficult to imagine JFK, had he lived, being embroiled in a sordid late-life sexual harassment scandal, not unlike those that befell both Trump and Biden. (Joe Biden was accused of sexual harassment, too, both by Senate staffer Tara Reade, and seven other women. But the mainstream media chose not to dwell on these accusations. Make of that what you will.)
Like many Americans who are too young to remember JFK in office (he died five years before I was born), I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a mythic figure. I attended Catholic schools, and a portrait of JFK hung in at least two of my K-12 classrooms, right beside portraits of the Pope and several of the saints.
But keep in mind: had he not been martyred in 1963, JFK would have been just another former president in his golden years.
I might also note that Donald Trump had no shortage of willing female partners in his 30s and 40s. In those days, Trump was not a controversial septuagenarian politician, but a glamorous tabloid billionaire. Many women wanted to be with him.
Time and age are the enemies of sex appeal. The difference between a celebrated ladies’ man and a reviled lecher is often a matter of a few years and a few wrong presumptions. Just ask Donald Trump.
Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division, penned a 1994 letter to the Harvard Crimson, stating that African Americans have “superior physical and mental abilities”.At the time, Clarke was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the president of the university’s Black Students Association.
Clarke based her letter on…race science.
Here are some excerpts from the letter:
“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.
“Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.
“Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].
“Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”
Obviously, this is complete hooey, dressed up in the sort of pseudo-scientific language that passes for erudition at places like Harvard.
Obviously, the mainstream media would be shrieking, Twitter would be exploding, if a white nominee to any senior federal government post had made similar claims about whites, based on “race science”.
Nevertheless, I’m of two minds on this one.
Clarke’s age is not available online, but her Wikipedia entry states that she graduated Harvard in 1997. Backing into the numbers, this would mean that she was about 19 years old when she wrote the above words.
Kristen Clarke
Most people don’t reach full adulthood until they are about halfway through their twenties. (This is why I would be in favor of raising the voting age, rather than lowering it, but that’s another discussion.)
This doesn’t mean you should get a blank check for everything you do when you’re young, of course. But there is a case to be made that all of us say and think things during our formative years that will make us cringe when we look back on them from a more mature perspective.
This is certainly true for me. I was 19 years old in 1987. I am not the same person now that I was then—both for better and for worse.
Secondly, let’s acknowledge environmental factors. Being a student at Harvard is likely to temporarily handicap any young person’s judgement and intellectual maturity. Even in 1994, Harvard University was a hotbed of pointy-headed progressivism and insular identity politics.
Clarke was also involved in the Black Students Association. There was a Black Students Association at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergrad there during the late 1980s. Members of UC’s BSA were known to write whacko letters like the one above. Most of them, though, were nice enough people when you actually talked to them in person. They just got a little carried away when sniffing their own farts in the little office that the university had allocated for BSA use.
What I’m saying is: I’m willing to take into account that 1994 was a long time ago. A single letter from a 19-year-old, quoting pseudo-academic race claptrap, shouldn’t be a permanent blight on the record of a 47-year-old. And I would say the same if Kristen Clarke were white, and had taken a very different spin on “race science”.
We all need to stop being so touchy about racial issues, and so preoccupied with them. That goes for whites as well as blacks, and vice versa.
I’m willing to give Clarke a fair hearing, then. But I’m skeptical. Her 1994 Harvard letter isn’t an automatic disqualifier; but it’s a question that needs to be answered.
I’m also skeptical of Biden. Biden may be a feeble old man; he may be a crook. He is not particularly “woke” at a personal level. In fact, some of his former positions on busing and crime suggest that he’s anything but “woke” on matters of race.
Yet Biden is now head of a Democratic Party that is obsessed with race. This means that Biden may try to overcompensate, by filling his government with race radicals. This recent selection supports that concern.
Given the time that has elapsed between the present and 1994, given Kristen Clarke’s age at the time, I want to hear what she has to say in 2021 before I outright condemn her as a hater or a looney. But this recent personnel selection doesn’t make me optimistic about the ideological tilt of the incoming Biden administration.
