Pepperdine Chaplain Sara Barton Writes Poem For Freedom Wall Denouncing the Freedom Wall

Barton's poem, posted to the Freedom Wall at Pepperdine, critiques personal freedom as a zero-sum economy and compares free speech she doesn't like to slavery.

2015 In Review: The Problematic Influence of Kendrick Lamar

This being the second part of a year-end recap of the best and worst music that 2015 imparted to us.  As always, links to other sections are appended at the bottom.

This should come as no surprise, but the #1 album of the year is Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly.

Psycheth!  Every clickbait internet writer worth his salt knows you have to start from the bottom of the list and count up it, not down.  And why would I tie it up with an album as lame as To Pimp a Butterfly?

I’m just kidding again.  To Pimp a Butterfly isn’t completely lame as an album; only 12 of its 16 songs/interludes/interviews with a dead guy are lame.  The other four (King Kunta, These Walls, Blacker the Berry, and i) are perfectly listenable and sometimes even entertaining.  That’s approximately 18.5 minutes out of an exhausting 79.  So why have no fewer than 11 magazines or websites dubbed it the best album of a year that’s witnessed many impressive albums?  Who do these critics think they’re fooling, and what is it about mediocrity they find so alluring?

Just a few of Kendrick's tools.

If they’re simply looking to peddle safe, noncontroversial, and retweetable listicles to gullible Kendrick fanboys in college who can’t think for themselves and unquestioningly buy into the latest hip-hop craze so as to appear cool and up to speed, they’ve certainly succeeded in that.  Around eight months ago, Kendrick Lamar was basically the hottest musical act at Beatissima, second only to Taylor Swift.  I still remember the first time I listened through To Pimp A Butterfly in the lowermost den of a six-suite dormitory while playing a DC fighting game with two other residents of “The A Hole” who were also curious to know the object of all this media-generated buzz.  Around the passing of the fifth track, one of us gushingly remarked that this was the Blackest Album of All Time, a label Kendrick and his supporters would probably claim as a badge of honor.  Don’t take my word for it, though.  In Pitchfork’s yearly countdown of its best and/or most snob-appealing albums, “kris ex” proclaimed:

[To Pimp A Butterfly is] also Black as f***.  “Blackness” is a concept that remains fluid and intangible, but so solid that one can feel it when it’s present.  And it was all over Butterfly.  From the opening notes… to the closing—a fabricated conversation with Tupac Shakur—the album is packed with Blackness… Nowhere is Blackness more front and center than on the album’s second single, “The Blacker the Berry”.  It was the song that most clearly announced Kendrick's lack of f***s about the comfort of his white audience…

All of this Blackness is important.  Important because sometimes white people need to take a metaphorical seat—to sit down, shut up, and listen to conversations in which they are a cultural object, not the center.  This is not an easy task.  White people have been way too comfortable for way too long in this country, in this world.  Way too comfortable with the way they choose to see reality solely through their own gaze, way too comfortable with their sense of entitlement over the planet and its resources, way too comfortable with their appropriation of culture in ways large and small… But Kendrick was willing to discomfort the comfortable.  He took all of the acclaim he had received as a critical darling from his major label debut… and doubled down on his Blackness, not for the entertainment of white people, but in near-total disregard for their experience of his conversation… It’s an album by the greatest rapper of his generation… the voice of a moment in time.

I let him prattle on a while there, but all of this Pitchforkian prattling is important, even more important in terms of defining the cultural malaise of 2015 than the abundant Blackness you encounter on Kendrick’s record.  Kris’ orgasmic adulation of Kendrick’s racial politics, eventually spiraling into an exasperated plea for evil white-skinned people to shut up and silently take an overdue verbal drumming from some rapper who’s been metaphorically oppressed by a rigged system that’s enabled him to sell nearly a million copies of a barely tolerable album, epitomizes the collapse of modern art criticism into just another form of ideological propaganda, indistinguishable from the op-ed page in a newspaper you’d pick up for free at a hotel.  I wish I could say that Kendrick’s fanboys are just the edgier, grown-up versions of T.Swift, One Direction, or Justin Bieber listeners (assuming grown-ups don’t listen to the Biebs or 1D, which they sadly do), but their infatuation with their own rock star is based on something much more distressing and, ahem, Problematic.  The most vocal Kendrick scholars think they’ve stumbled onto a sage, poetic, and deeply necessary piece of social commentary that transcends the general parameters of art and fully earns the title of genius.

Kendrick scholarship is certainly transcendent, transcendent of intelligence, transcendent of reality, transcendent of its own interests and the interests of anyone else on the receiving end of Kendrick’s “lead showers”.  The entire critical breakdown of Kendrick’s magnum opus, typified by the likes of Pitchfork, high school teacher Brian Mooney, and Barack Hussein Obama himself, emphasizes not the beauty of its composition, writing, or delivery but the opinion that the work is fighting some deeply rooted social cancer that needs immediate addressing.  Simply, To Pimp A Butterfly isn’t the greatest album of the year because of its superior artistry but because its “importance” or relevance to current affairs effectively overrules all its competition.

Social importance, of course, cannot be used as an objective measure for criticsm, as every individual ascribes a different level of importance to things based on his frame of mind.  Serious presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has publically avowed that Global Warming is the greatest security threat to the United States – despite data from the pro-Global Warming NOAA showing a ten-year decline in U.S. temperatures and weather disasters – and also “directly related” it to international terrorism, but only 3% of respondents in Gallup’s most recent survey on the matter dared to label “environment/pollution” as the most important problem facing the country.  Racism also trends very low in this same poll, fluctuating mostly between 1 and 4% over the last 24 months, with peaks at 9 and 13% during months when the media was pumping Killer Cop stories around the clock.  Even from November to December, when fake racism seemed to reach crisis levels at universities around America, not excepting Beatissima (more on that later), public concern about race relations on this scale only rose from 3 to 4%.

At the very least this exposes a vast disconnect between what the commoner and the critical elite desire to see in music.  By extension, the universal acclaim for the identity politics of To Pimp A Butterfly has signified the almost absolute demise of valuable insight in critical American writing, now called “reviews”. Who’s to say which person’s taste is better, the culture writer’s or the consumer’s?  When one idiot thinks the purpose of art is to make him feel guilty for being born a rich white child and another idiot thinks the purpose of art is just to set a scene for heavy grinding on the dance floor, there’s no established criterion to definitively say that one creator’s art is better than another’s.  Straight Outta Compton and Amadeus must be esteemed each other’s equals in cinematic worth; hell, the bars of Ice Cube, Eazy-E, and Dr. Dre are just as essential as the symphonies, operas, and piano concertos of Mozart.  Both have been groundbreaking and “important” artists to different people in different times, but how much more important are the N.W.A. to the youth of today than that stuffy, old, orchestral classical music?  By the undemanding standards of Kendrick’s sycophantic groupies, Dre trumps Mozart in artistic merit for almost every demographic except babies watching VHS tapes and college music professors.  Does Mozart speak to the urban-born son of a single mother, beset by gangs and the po-po and institutional racism in the grocery store, or whatever?  To the son(s) of an immigrant who want(s) to be the president of the United States?  “To the victims of welfare, living in Hell here”, and so and so forth?  Who does Mozart speak to other than old, dead, white European males?  None of this whiteness is important!

I wish I could say that Kendrick has only just now driven the final nail into the coffin of musical analysis, of the days when the purpose of art was merely to be art, and not to force a political message endorsed by the critic.  The bitter truth is that those days have long since passed.  One of the six or seven books I read this year, an otherwise ordinary rundown on Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular by Rust Hills, traces this dysfunction in the critic’s expectations all the way back to 1897.  Hills argues,

“[The myth of the Great American Novel] leads eventually into the same blind alley Tolstoi went to the very end of in What Is Art?, where he deduced that since what’s virtuous in human acts are those which promote the brotherhood of man, then that art is best which most promotes the brotherhood of man – hence he concludes with the greatness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  This is what comes of asking art to be something other than art.”

I don’t believe the Great American Novel is a myth, nor do I deplore Uncle Tom’s Cabin as much as many literary critics, but it isn’t hard to imagine Harriet Beacher Stowe filling the same American Idol shoes that Kendrick’s walking in today.  All of Uncle Tom’s blackness is Important, raves kris ex for Pitchfork Media, whether or not it meets the highest standards of literature.  All of Imitation Game’s gayness is Important, whether or not the finer details are historically accurate or well told.  All of Lean In’s woman-ness is Important, whether or not it has anything useful to say to anybody.  All of Al Gore’s end-of-days alarmism is Important, whether or not it has any solid, scientific evidence backing it up.  All of Amy Schumer’s sexism is Important, whether or not it’s, well, sexist.

How did greatest Importance become tantamount to greatest quality in the verdict of people who are supposed to look above intentions and simply judge on execution?  To pose such a question is to presume objectivity from people who are not remotely committed to it.  Reviewers – I mean critics – are journalists, after all, and when have journalists ever allowed their ideology to get in the way of the truth?  Of the 2013 film Fruitvale Station, Wesley Morris wrote, “Sometimes what’s wrong with a movie suddenly no longer matters.  The rickety construction of a story, the awkward shift in dramatic tone, the acutely earnest attempt to find the right wattage for a martyr’s halo: They’re beside the point.  Sometimes a movie just needs to show us the light.  Sometimes it just needs us to see it.”  Who cares if Fruitvale Station is a really shoddy, even corny TV movie, weakly shot and written, manipulative at the expense of the truth, and completely pointless up until the last 5 minutes?  If it hits its viewers in the feels and propels misguided vendettas against The Racists, The Assault Weapons, or The Prison System, then Team Wesley Morris thinks it’s cool.  Three quarters of To Pimp A Butterfly can be disposed of without detracting from the record, but Alright is now the anthem of all jobless Black Lives Matter grumblers, so kris ex and the leftist hipster punching bag of the internet extol the album as a work of genius.

One of my friends facetiously told me that Kendrick Lamar is the closest thing we have to a modern-day Antichrist, but I don’t think that Kendrick’s purposely trying to be the Antichrist.  I don’t hate Kendrick Lamar, nor would I go so far as to say that he sucks, even if it would get you to click on this article.  It’s not his fault he accidentally reminds us all of the stupidity that’s infested our agenda-driven media, so desperate to anoint the Most Important Fiction of the Year they forget the reason for criticizing fiction in the first place.

Is To Pimp A Butterfly the album of the year?  Absoeffinlutely.  And I think that Kendrick’s laughing all the way to the bank.  Thug life, indeed.

Fast travel to other parts:
Part 1 – Not Worth The Effort 2015
Part 3 – Top 10 Part 1 and Honorables
Part 4 – Top 10 Part 2 and the Inadvertent Individualism of Grimes

Five Non-homo Reasons You Shouldn't Stand With Kim Davis That Have Nothing To Do With Race

The latest topic of conservative political fodder is the arrest and detainment of a certain Kentucky-based ex-clerk Kim Davis, who has allegedly been unfairly persecuted and harangued for expressing her profound, “religious” conviction that marriage is a holy union between a man and a woman.  Davis has risen to a sort of stardom among conservatives and especially among such presidential backrunners as Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Mike Huckabee, the last of whom called her evidence of the “criminalization of Christianity in our country”, but Davis is not a conservative, nor do I think she’s a very good Christian.  Has conservatism entered such a rut of cultural influence that its proponents must resort to idolizing fake conservatives and creating pat, imitatively cutsey pound signs like #ImWithKim and #IStandWithKimDavis in order to stay relevant?

Unlike Huckabee and Cruz and so many others, I don’t pound sign stand with Kim Davis, not because I’m not a conservative, but because I abide by conservatism in its most essential, undiluted form.  More than just a philosophical or legislative doctrine consisting of various policy positions, real conservatism is a way of life, a behavioral disposition that governs all its adherents’ actions and statements.  Part of being a conservative is taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions, reaping both the good and bad fruits of your labor, which is why we conservatives don’t like the welfare state, crony capitalism, or socialism in general.  True conservatives don’t have to take the fall for their mistakes that often because true conservatives know exactly what they want, why they want it, and what it will effect.  True conservatives don’t need a cabinet of advisors or spokeskids to make their choices and speeches for them because they have common sense and logical reasoning and can usually deduce what’s best for themselves.  True conservatives don’t really need to look at the R or the D label on the voting guide, although they’re often helpful, because they’ll already be well acquainted with each candidate’s intentions and know which one is most suited (or least destructive) to the proper ends of government.

Kim Davis is not a true conservative, and she’s certainly not given to researching a politician’s values before she gives him her moral support.  In so far as she considers herself a woman of God dedicated to protecting real marriage, she’s not a very pious Christian either.  Kim Davis is a member of the Democrat party – see the photo above –, and as such she only has herself to blame, not merely for the country’s current marriage debacle, but for our broader epidemic of amorality, which spans racial segregation, subjugation of religious liberty to imagined “compelling needs”, tens of millions of dismembered babies, and, most recently, the eradication of traditional, scientific conceptions of sexuality in support of a radical electioneering agenda.  By virtue of her identification with the Democrats, Davis has aligned herself with and condoned a noble lineage of godly people including Jonathan Edwards, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Woodrow Wilson, Robert Byrd, Barney Frank, and so on and so forth.  What was she expecting to happen when she threw in her vote for Barack Hussein Obama, possibly twice?  Surely she didn’t think that empowering such an ideologue, who gets most of his moral positions from his daughters at the dinner table and who uses every mass shooting perpetrated by a Muslim to sing the praises of the peaceful faith of Islam, would render the American political landscape more friendly to religious independence and practice? Did she somehow believe that electing Obama would lead to a more conservative, constitutionally reverent Supreme Court?  Was she blind when filling out her ballot?  Did she really care at all about who would occupy potentially the most powerful office of the land?

So why have all the Republican candidates excepting Trump and Fiorina and Carson and Rand flocked to the defense of this “heroic” woman, who obviously isn’t one of their own, being a low-information voter, isn’t a martyr in any meaningful sense of the word, and represents the most obnoxious form of insubordination by a public worker?  Davis epitomizes every disrespectable trait a conservative should aspire not to exercise: she’s irrational, ideologically inconsistent, and strikingly indifferent towards the rule of law.  Assuming for the sake of argument that the Supreme Court has the constitutional authority to “legalize” homosexual marriage in all fifty states (it does not), Davis cannot pick and choose which “laws” she follows, nor can she claim a religious exemption because she’s already sold her soul to be a worker for the government.  She bases her refusal to sign the documents on the sincere belief that homosexual unions are “not of God”, but are opposite-sex marriage documents filled out by her office any more of God?  A marriage license issued by the government has nothing to do with God; it’s a piece of paper denoting a secular, legal status bestowed by potentially godless people upon other potentially godless people in a transaction that has no religious implications and can be revoked at any time.

One of the few Bible stories generally known by anyone who hasn’t read the Bible is Jesus telling the Pharisees and Herodians, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s.”  This was a really clever retort, firstly because it stumped the enemies of Jesus who were seeking to ensnare him and secondly because it illustrated a distinction between civil goods and dues, which are owed to Caesar, and spiritual goods, which are owed to God.  The denarius in our time is the marriage license (ponder that language for a moment, that a homosexual marriage document is no more transcendent or spiritual than a license to drive), and Anthony Kennedy is Caesar, but to listen to Kim Davis, one would think she’s filling out a job application for the heavenly kingdom.  Davis’ empty, vain, and self-indulgent protest is not the fulfillment of the 1st amendment because there isn’t any cause or sense behind it.  It’s just protest for the sake of protesting, serving also to fool less perceptive people into thinking she had nothing to do with societal ills she herself has continually helped to instigate.

Should Kim Davis have been placed behind bars on taxpayer support simply for not doling out printed certificates of “marriage” to people who want the satisfaction of hearing that they’re married from someone else’s mouth?  No.  Hurting someone’s dignity or feelings is just a really petty warrant to waste a lot of money incarcerating someone who has posed no tangible, quantifiable burden to the rest of society.  At the same time, couldn’t one say that she is getting exactly the treatment she deserves, poetic justice of sorts for voting in the fascist circus freaks she did?  Did she ask for anything less?

But Kim Davis isn’t the problem with the American democratic system, nor does her imprisonment mark the first and most perturbing breach of religious liberty in our nation’s 400-year history.  The problem with American democracy is all the robotic, brainless politicians who should know better than to make a saint or hero of Kim Davis but victimize her anyway because certain talking points are so programmed into their dialect they see no other safe and viable way of addressing such a hot button issue.  The problem with American democracy is that we continually focus on distractions like Kim Davis instead of things that really matter, e.g. the record number of unemployed people in this country, the freaking Hillary Clinton email scandal, or the ongoing exposé of a dystopian human-harvesting project being waged by a recipient of some half a billion dollars in government aid.

None of those are of the Lord, but none of those have raised the slightest indignation from Miss Davis.

Horror Movie Roundup: "Shaun of the Dead" Is Scientifically Unfunny

Also making the case that Michael Haneke's Caché is one of worst films ever made.

Why Does(n’t) Everybody Hate John Green?

The following invective is based loosely on an unpublished letter to the prestigious Beatissima Garbage. It’s also the last invective the Author plans on writing for some time because they’re really quite taxing to prepare and it seems like every other post on these Files is an invective of some public idiot whose moral squalor should be abundantly clear to anybody with a brain.

There was a new movie in town this last weekend that you may have heard of if not for a news story about some guy shooting some people at a showing of the new Amy Schumer comedy.  The shooting in question should never have happened, firstly because private citizens have no business owning guns unless they’re part of The Militia and secondly because the theater had an explicit policy forbidding guns on its premises, but somehow the gunman managed to bring a gun into the theater and use it on people who didn’t have guns while racist white killer cops rushed to stop the violence.  The media saw an opportunity to bring up old, emotional attacks on gun rights while simultaneously pimping Amy Schumer for yet another week, and so Paper Towns was condemned, as all of its author’s works, to smolder in the fires of neglect and obscurity and effective censorship due to… lack of free support from American press and schools.

And that’s a real shame, because according to John Green, it would seem like the whole world has it out to suppress and mock and ban his manifold artistic masterpieces, which he claims at the same time have spoken deeply to millions of readers.  From Looking Alaska to The Fault In Our Stars to his latest movie starring a lesbian supermodel and some dreamy Nice Guy, Green has faced staggering adversity and bumps in the road to becoming a multi-millionaire YA writer, teenage idol, and internet celebrity, so much so that the incessant barrage of hate and ignorance has forced him to rethink his activities on social media and officially declare he’s neither a pornographer nor a pedophile.  He’s such a poor guy, okay?  Okay? Okay?  Okay?  Okay???

Where do I even start to document the torrent of cyberbullying and misdirected parental fury that’s been levied towards the downtrodden rebel visionary Mr. Green?  I could look at the incredulous reaction of Depew High School parents in 2008 to the news that Green’s Looking For Alaska would be “taught” to 11th graders in the government school’s English curriculum.  Certain of these religious fascists objected to the explicit descriptions of oral sex and foul language contained in Green’s novel, particularly in light of the school’s (probably 100% symbolic) prohibition on students using obscenities. I too would sympathize with these parents, not because I think 16-year-olds shouldn’t read about sex or swear words under any circumstances, but because I think there’s something incredibly depressing about a taxpayer-funded, supposedly educational institution willfully, knowingly presenting twaddle to teenagers as great literature.*  I agree with their petition even more in light of the petty hissy fit Green subsequently threw on his Youtube channel (more on that later), excoriating the parents for trying to tell other kids what they can read (for school credit), which, in point of fact, no one was trying to do.  By Green’s purely libertarian, freedom-minded reasoning, the very state of being on the mandatory reading list at one time not only grants him an entitlement to stay on and consequently profit from that reading list for the rest of his career, but also irrevocably establishes his work as an incontrovertible, great American novel that all kids must be exposed to for their literary benefit.

I could look at John Green’s snippy, melodramatic swipe at the Riverside school district for deciding to remove The Fault In Our Stars from middle-school libraries.

People who don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump often believe that Rush and Trump are arrogant and dismissive of their rivals in the business, but many of these same people would adore and lean on the word of a man who unironically boasted that teens would never learn of death or grieving without entering the golden gateway of knowledge that is his weepy fiction aimed at fragile teenagers.  Green essentially laid claim to charting thematic territory that’s never been covered in three thousand years of literature, and no one batted an eye at his arrogance.  Does he know that the school which judiciously removed his bestseller (unavoidable in bookstores and public libraries everywhere) carries scads of other, eminently better books also dealing with death, including The Giver, Bridge to Terabithia, and Tuck Everlasting?

Does John Green even care to read any books not written by John Green, and is that why he holds such an inflated view of his own importance to the social, moral, and mental development of teenagers?  Green has repeatedly derided overprotective parents for “condescending to teens” and wrongly assuming they lack the means of reading critically, but how much more condescending is it to suggest that young adults should only read books tailor-written for their age group and can’t extend their search for truth into works that were actually written for grown-ups by grown-ups who didn’t bother with leading fan clubs or forming shallow connections with their readers?  Are high-schoolers so stupid that they can only be pressured to think about the world through government schools prodding them to read John Green, Twilight, Divergent, and so on?  Have their mental faculties deteriorated so much that the only literature they can handle is such that one could compress the entire book into a cutesy Buzzfeed listical of “19 profound John Green quotes that will inspire you”?

Some John Green profundities.  Left & right drawings by Christina Luna for Buzzfeed.

To be fair, Green’s not the only one to blame for this debacle; he’s just a symptom of a larger failure on the part of educators to focus on the truly excellent in favor of popular material (cough Kendrick cough) that “engages” reluctant readers and doesn’t require much thoughtful commentary from the teacher.  The state of public education notwithstanding, though, the only one condescending to teenagers is John Green, who says he doesn’t foresee himself writing any adult-oriented novels because they wouldn’t be as “useful” as the YA garbage he’s cranking out.*  So too does Green condescend to taxpayers by pretending that access to his products is a vital societal need that must be subsidized under some made-up “right to read”. How many copies of Fault does the author deem the library must purchase in order to avert his accusations of censoring beloved material?  If half the school’s students want to read his novel and the library only has enough copies to accommodate a quarter of the body, are administrators suppressing Green’s ‘ideas’ by forcing children to go to another public library or – heaven forbid – fork over $10 at a bookseller for their own paperback copy?  Does the school have a compelling obligation to make any book available for anybody at any time, let alone a book as prevalent and ingrained in contemporary pop culture as A Fault In Our Stars? Wouldn’t the school’s funds be better spent acquiring texts that have been reviewed and studied for longer than two years and have outlasted transient, media-manufactured hype?

Instead of dedicating his intellect – given that he possesses one – to penning genuinely worthy art, John Green wastes countless hours tweeting, instagramming, and building a vapid, intelligence-numbing social media empire on such high-brow creative outlets as Youtube and Tumblr.  If you don’t know what Tumblr is, you can watch the amusing illustrated video below, but it’s essentially a blogging-Facebook hybrid with hastag functionality optimized for emotionally distraught social justice warriors who are too lazy to make a real blog, a la The Author’s Files.

One could argue that Green’s rigid attachment to every one of these networks is highly unusual, even childish behavior when practiced by a 37-year-old married author.  In fact, some anonymous and completely irrelevant person did argue just that about a month ago, using the very online outlet embraced by Green to ridicule him for his systematic takeover of the internet.  Quoth the eloquent tumblrer:

Nothing in this little rant was factually incorrect or unjustified, as John Green has in fact made a business of pandering to teenage girls and has cultivated a following that is undeniably similar to, if not indicative of a cult.  Green’s army of self-professed nerdfighters, united under the banner of nerdfighteria, have their own hip vocabulary (decreasing worldsuck), study their own holy texts, celebrate their own (probably well-intentioned) holiday, think they’re “made entirely out of awesome”, and revere their leaders John and Hank, who made a gimmick of addressing Youtube video-logs (think Avatar) to each other so as to give people the impression that they knew the brothers on a personal level.  The extent to which Green goes to convince girls that he’s their friend and fellow nerd-in-fighting can definitely be seen as creepy or unfitting of a grown-up father, and he shows no signs of relenting from that habit in the future.

Instead of acting like an adult and facing up to the reality that the internet will always facilitate rude and negative comments about celebrities (especially ones who are vastly overexposed), John Green immediately set out to prove the tumblr writer’s point, taking to the internet to complain about how painful and difficult it is being a multi-millionaire author who gets bullied and misportrayed by hate-filled meanies on the web.

But John Green was never accused of sexual abuse or pedophilia, i.e. attraction to prepubescent kids, who clearly aren’t the audience for Green’s books or video series.  In most areas of the world and many American states, the kind of girls Green sucks up to are fair game legally, but that doesn’t mean his obsession with pleasing them is healthy or right, which is all the internet person was trying to say through an obviously sarcastic, hyperbolic post.  We don’t arrest people for being creepy, but being creepy has never been a really honorable character trait.  Still, Green’s too pathetic and insecure to suffer a joke at his expense, so he resorts to inventing straw man allegations which makes him look like much more of a victim than he really is.  He goes on to sermonize about the “complicated dopamine rush” that fuels his detractors and squeeze some false humility into his defense (“my various shortcomings, which are legion”) before vaguely pouting about how the bully has made him unable to continue blogging in the same way he has been for the last four years.

“I just need some distance for my well-being,” he closes.  One does not get any more pitiful than this. Green has essentially embodied America’s 21st-century entitlement state, loudly and impishly tattle-telling on anyone who hurts his delicate nerdfeels.  Whether he’s appealing to the defenders of Free Speech or to the defenders of Humanizing, Social Justice Language – that is, Not Free Speech – depends only on whoever’s pissing him off on any given day.

This is an official poster tagline.

Do I think that Mr. Green is unintelligent, nay, an imbecilic jackass?  Maybe.  He once compared capitalism to a pizza, says that protecting religious liberty means women will no longer be able to buy cars, and smugly perpetuates the delusion that Islam is a religious of peace… because Muslims sects spend so much time fighting each other and no one interprets the Koran quite the same way.  But in so far as John Green’s goal in life is to make money and feel like he’s filling an important role in people’s lives, he’s very good at manipulating young skulls full of mush into loving him.  He gives shout-outs to his “hardcore badass feminist mom”, consistently speaks the language of his fans, comically rubs his forehead like a cartoon character whenever he gets upset, says sex before marriage is cool, and even uses one of his characters to lecture to progressive, conscious readers on why they should never call anybody a faggot (far be it from me to speculate why he hates that word particularly, even though I just did).

Green does an excellent job overall of appearing to stand for everything that nerdfighteria stands for while actually standing for nothing.  He calls himself a Christian to mollify Christian readers, except when being a Christian means standing by convictions that Millennials find “discriminatory”.  He considers himself a capitalist, except when being a capitalist means opposing the minimum wage, nationalized health care, or carbon taxes to reduce nonexistent Global Warming.  He peppers his teens’ dialogue with the word “retarded” out of realism, until someone tells him that is ugly and wrong, at which point he has a radical change of heart and apologizes for his “dehumanizing language”.  I don’t think Harper Lee ever apologized for using the n-word in To Kill A Mockingbird because it hurt the feelings of some bozo who doesn’t understand the concept of a book.  Harper Lee, ironically, had more balls as an author than misunderstood pajama boy John Green ever had.  The latter’s greatest condescension to his readership is giving them exactly what they want to hear and nothing else, then having the gall to label himself a martyr for the status quo.

Ever the philosopher, John Green can be credited for at least one profundity.  “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities,” quips Hazel Whatever in A Fault In Our Stars.  If John Green’s infatuation with his uselessness counts as an infinity, then that must make him the biggest infinity of them all.

*Here’s an interesting piece on the dilemma of grown adults gobbling up books written for kids.

Stuff I missed the first time through

* John Green saying that his made-up cancer-stricken lovebirds parallel Anne Frank because she too “just died of illness like most people.”

* John Green ‘accidentally’ appropriating a 13-year-old Tumblr user’s adorable, deep quote, passing it off as a line from Paper Towns, and selling a crapton of merchandise based on the words to gullible nerd fighters.

* John Green denouncing the philosophy of Objectivism as “repugnant” and extolling his noncommercial, “idea-sharing, consciousness-expanding, storytelling business” as a ”persistent and direct opposition to the ideas put forth in Atlas Shrugged”.  “We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul laboring in isolation.  We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature… so f*** Ayn Rand and f*** any company that profits from peddling the lie of mere individualism.  We built this together and we're going to keep building it together.”

No, John Green.  &#^! you and your You Didn’t Build That mentality.

We "Study" Rap Music In Public School Now. America!

Brian Mooney is an “English Arts Teacher” at High Tech, New Jersey who claims to “explore the intersections of hip-hop, spoken word, literacy, and urban education”.  One of those things, of course, has nothing to do with the others, but Brian Mooney has never been in the business of speaking truths.  He’s Christie’s fool.  Under ordinary circumstances we would simply pass this guy off as another miniscule, relatively powerless symptom of declining educational rigor in facilities run by the state, but Mooney’s rising celebrity status makes him a special case.  As the foremost champion of a burgeoning alternative to actual learning called “hip-hop education”, Mooney has swept up gushing praise from The New York Slimes, The Rolling Stoned, and other disreputable clickbaiters for developing socially conscious “English” studies that are funner, cooler and somehow more literary for incorporating contemporary rap songs by “poets” like Kendrick Lamar.  (We’re making an editorial decision to dispense with the sarcasm quotation marks around education-related words from this point onward because they’d get really annoying really fast.)

In the words of Rush Limbaugh, this is the kind of joke we would have laughed at twenty years ago, thinking it would never happen in a nation with at least a modicum of sanity, but now we’ve waded into such a quagmire of literary and intellectual malaise that the stupid, mostly childless masses believe teaching rap music alongside the Great Books is actually a serious proposal.  Progressives like Mooney rationalize the induction of To Pimp A Butterfly into classrooms by saying rap music “engages [students] in a pivotal conversation on race”, opens eyes to “internalized oppression”, and recognizes the “diversity” of increasingly stratified student bodies, but none of them are able to articulate a cogent theory for its literary value without reverting to non-literary pleas for extra blackness in the schools’ reading curriculum.

Of course, if anybody really cared about spotlighting strong black voices that students haven’t been exposed to on their own, Kendrick’s latest record would rank very low on the scales of historical significance and excellence in English.  As Mooney points out many times in a blog post that’s hilariously riddled with logical contradictions, “hip-hop has become a worldwide phenomenon, reaching every corner of the globe and shaping the identities of a whole generation of young people”, to the point that “demonizing” the music genre – or culture, as he often labels it with no cynicism – would be a grave and “symbolically violent” insult to the hipster groupie lowlifes who consider Kendrick Lamar’s dope beats to be an integral “part of their identity”.  Assuming as our apologetic white poet-teacher does that high-school students are already committed to hip-hop and worship Kendrick, J. Cole, and Lupe Fiasco as political and musical idols, what educational value does one derive from pimping their albums over infinitely more distinguished and eloquent writers students haven’t yet encountered?

Only in Mooney’s warped and fickle view of “cultural relevancy” does contemporary rap music deserve a higher pedestal of “literate-ness”, beauty, and nobility than the texts of Fredrick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, Thomas Sowell, and a host of actual poets I read in high-school and willfully forgot about soon after because of my deep-set disdain for poetry.  One certainly doesn’t need to cheapen standards of good literature in order to analyze black authors, but the truth is that Progressive reformers like Mooney don’t really give a damn about analyzing or understanding the work of black Americans; they only care about the work of black Americans who seem to sponsor their political agenda.  Even granting that increasing representation of African-American art always fulfills a noble, compelling educational purpose (it doesn’t), hip-hop “education” has nothing to do with illuminating alternate perspectives, urban strife, or evolving style in the written word, and footage from the High Tech school proves that Mooney’s favorite rappers were already bona-fide superstars among Gen-Zers without the advertising bonus of a class applauding their artistic genius.  At its core, hip-hop education is just another poorly masked excuse to spread alternate-history versions of the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin shootings while brainwashing kids into denying every blessing implied by the American Dream.

This is why the media orgasms over a famous Compton rapper’s visit to a school of future voters, not because Mr. Mooney and Kendrick Lamar are teaching teenagers how to think for themselves, but because they’re teaching teenagers what to think ‘for themselves’ and doing so through an ostensibly educational framework that’s highly manipulative and entertaining and probably never feels like real work to students involved.  By supplanting true classics of fiction with A-list talent and platinum-selling albums, Mooney hopes to sell a dated, largely fraudulent form of racism under the guise of spearheading a socially conscious, holistic look at protest writing from the 60s up to now.  And if the responses by his students and supporters are any sign, he’s been doing a pretty bang-up job.

Some of Mooney's students on To Pimp A Butterfly.

The customary defense of hip-hop education usually boils down to a smear campaign, ridiculing anyone who disputes the material’s educational merit as close-minded, prudish, or somehow fearful of black people, whom Mooney perhaps erroneously presumes have a monopoly on the hip-hop “art form”.  Have you heard of Eminem, Mr. Mooney?  Beastie Boys?  The Dirty Heads, Pitbull, Everlast and House of Pain, Marky Mark Wahlberg, Kid Rock, Riff Raff, Iggy, Die Antwoord?  Even freaking Sublime to some extent? You may argue that a lot of these performers are terrible, but then again the majority of rap music is pretty objectively terrible. You yourself acknowledge this when you write that “commercial hip-hop is often sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, and violent”.  Four paragraphs later, you say that we should include “[this kind] of rap music in our classrooms if we want to have really meaningful, well-rounded discussions.” What I’m trying to ask is: what the hell is wrong with you?

Further, why do you assume that people who don’t like rap music don’t like “black music” or people in general, as if rap music is the very greatest and very blackest accomplishment from their heritage?  Have you ever listened to Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, or Michael Jackson?  Are those artists not “black” or intelligent or literate enough for you, and do you really suspect that Kendrick’s music will outlast any of theirs?  Are black voices the only ones who are qualified enough to speak about the highs and lows of being a black American?  Must we disregard The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, To Kill A Mockingbird, etc. etc. just because their authors were all “privileged” white people? Why are cultural and historical ignoramuses like you paid to steward the youth of this country?

I digress.  Let the record show that Mr. Mooney vastly overstates everything he knows about his favorite subject and likes to roundly dismiss skeptics of that subject as stupid or uninformed or racist, even though, in the case of Kendrick Lamar, those skeptic’s doubts are 100% affirmed.  Mooney says that “hip-hop is still the subject of intense, misdirected hatred and discrimination in schools” by “parents that object to profanity, even when it’s being used for a noble, just, and artistic cause”, and that he “finds it problematic [along with much else surely] to call an album like this ‘dirty’”.  But To Pimp a Butterfly is gloriously, unapologetically dirty, and was never intended to be consumed or exhaustively deconstructed by high-school freshmen.  Trying to filter the numerous f-bombs, n____ers, and sexual references out of the album for interpretation by a class of 15-year-olds just validates the distaste that a lot of these repressive, bigoted parents have for rap music, especially rap music foisted upon their children in a sham of an English class supported by Uncle Sam himself.  If it wasn’t profane or potentially offensive, then there wouldn’t be a need to edit it.  That the album is profane and controversial doesn’t automatically make it bad (or good), but it does shift the burden of proof onto Mooney to demonstrate it has a worthy purpose in a school curriculum, let alone a class purporting to study the finest, most significant works of writing craft.

But Mooney isn’t able to justify it any way other than repeating the pressing need for blacker, more diverse study lists and the social “importance” of music that sticks it to the white man for “murdering” Trayvon, Mike Brown, and the Pound Sign I Can’t Breathe guy.  Education isn’t about telling kids what to think politically, nor is it about ensuring the equal appreciation of different races’ commercial products.  Mooney whines about “Eurocentric” schools that classify “white” novels like Slaugherhouse-Five as “high art”, assigning Vonnegut as summer reading while branding “black” hip-hop with a stigma of vulgarity and baseness.  The problem with this outrage is that Slaughterhouse (soon to be reviewed at these Files) is actually a book that people are meant to read, whereas hip-hop is a musical genre mostly created by uneducated slackers who are too lazy or stupid to write or read a book, let alone their own “art”, which is usually slapped together by an army of co-songwriters and producers.  Celebrating To Pimp A Butterfly in the same category as classic literature is an insult not only to the “old, dead, white men” Mooney derides but also to the slaves and civil rights leaders who used their great minds to become moving essayists, authors, and orators.

For those who’ve read this far, I’ll just throw it out there that I quite enjoy Kendrick Lamar’s music, particularly Section.80 and much of Butterfly, which is to say that all the wisearse, tolerant rap music fans who are silently ridiculing me for my ignorance really have no moral superiority for thinking Kendrick should be taught in government schools.  As opposed to many acts, Kendrick’s beats actually incorporate live instrumentation, and his lyrics on “Keisha’s Song” (about a prostitute in despair who’s raped and murdered in the street) or “These Walls” combine with dark, sonic atmospheres to reveal an artist who actually cares about storytelling and isn’t simply settling for making a catchy tune.  But education isn’t about exposing me to art or ideas I already like.  If the only writing, or rapping in this case, I ever had to study was stuff I already liked, I wouldn’t be learning much of anything, and education traditionally used to be all about learning things – things that show one how to live and how to live in accordance with beauty and virtue.

It’s also true that Kendrick is one of the most overrated and absurdly idolized figures in American musical culture.  He wields racial slurs liberally whether or not the narrative or character he’s portraying calls for it, and the song from Butterfly he specifically chose to perform for High Tech revolves around a vapid hook that just repeats, “Nigger, we’re gonna be alright” over and over for no reason.  No one, not even Pitchfork’s staff, listens to Kendrick for his ornate or literary language; they listen to him because he unites a dream team of producers and is very good at venting anger on issues that make others really angry.  Indeed, the media’s unanimous infatuation with “the incredible Kendrick Lamar” as “a poet, lyrical genius, and positive icon” (this is Ellen Degenerate speaking) has begotten a series of running gay jokes in my own Beatissima dorm hinging on the latent desire of Kendrick fanatics, who have no frame of musical reference and consequently glorify the current fad as a masterwork, to orally pleasure the Grammy-winning man, the myth, the legend. Even The Daily Beast has picked up on this phenomenon, describing it as a “critical circle jerk” – a mutual admiration society that Mooney has ironically hijacked to teach kids… the value of thinking for oneself and forming independent, critical views of media.  Forcibly cramming Kendrick or any working musician into a classroom at the peak of his career is the total opposite of encouraging independent truth-seeking.  Instead of that, Mooney is merely condoning hero-worship while perpetuating the mythology that Kendrick, like Pixar, Apple, Netflix, Starbucks, and any other cult establishment, can do no wrong, when in fact his latest music video is just a slickly produced screed against the white-skinned po-lice that prioritizes style over substance.

A screenshot from Kendrick's latest PSA.

If there’s any hope to be found in this embarrassing debacle, it’s that students are probably wasting a lot less time talking about The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a powerful rape simulator concerning a black girl who goes to the movies and wishes to look more like a white movie star, which incidentally is the same thing white girls do when they go to the movies or read a magazine.  I personally find it deeply sobering and humbling knowing I never had to put up with this nonsense as a homeschooler.  Without the Brian Mooneys of the world – educators, scholars, and poets who don’t even know what the word “ironic” means – how could we truly appreciate the great teachers who’ve mentored us personally and professionally?

So thank you, Mr. Perry, for trying your darndest to make a bunch of reluctant teenagers care about the Venerable Bede, Dante Alighieri, and a lot of college-level, Eurocentric Inklings texts we could barely understand.  Thank you, Dr. McM, for working through the multi-layered symbolism of Moby Dick with me even though I moaped and groaned about it being the dullest, most insufferable novel I’d ever read. Thank you, Dr. Gose, for leading your pupils in the dialectic instead of in the “cypher” and for challenging me to write an academic paper though I had no idea what the hell that was.  I must confess I never read the Funeral Games, but I’m sure the Prince of Darkness already figured that much out.  Thank you, Mrs. Justiniano, for never scheduling a field trip to Knotts Berry Farm or Disneyland under the pretense of observing science.  Thank you, Professor Larry, for being honest enough to tell me that you’re professing things instead of teaching them.  Thank you, Mrs. Weitz, for teaching me how to write and to distinguish beauty from dreck.  Thank you all for not asking me to “close-read/listen to King Kunta”, or to make a poetry anthology, or to write a reflection paper on some rapper guy’s visit to my school, or to answer either of these essay prompts.

Thank you for having the decency not to treat my education like a giant joke.

Now to write about America’s homosexual Supreme Court and homosexual corporations.

The Blood On Sara Bareilles' Hands

Well, it took me many dozens of hours to get all the cuts in the right place, and I’m still having second thoughts on the syncing of certain shots with the audio, but I finally finished editing this music video for a game I have not played set to a song I no longer want to hear.  By and large I think it looks pretty good, though I leave it with a complicated mix of feelings encompassing pride and relief and a lot of sorrow, sorrow that so much beauty can be so tainted by such a bounty of violence and ugliness.  And I’m not talking about the Teen-rated video game.

There was a time about a year ago when Sara Bareilles was one of my favorite musicians of the ten I paid any attention to whatsoever. This was long before I sold my soul to become a hipster and listen to real music, but I suppose I’d still really like Bareilles’ albums if I forced myself to consciously, deliberately listen through them as I once did before.  She’s the rare, radio-friendly artist in today’s world who not only writes, plays, and sings all her own songs but also performs just as impressively live all by herself as on a record accompanied by a dozen producers and engineers.  Each of her three studio albums has a flavor distinct from the last, with Little Voice sounding kind of retro and jazzy in a way I more than tolerate as a hater of all things jazz (except the nighttime sections of ODST), Kaleidoscope Heart going in fun, doo-wopey and piano-driven pop directions, and The Blessed Unrest nicely overhauling her traditional style with ambient electronic hums, beats, and even some country influences.  All are excellent albums in their own right, and it should be clear to anyone who’s read this blog for a while that her wide-ranging lyrics have deeply influenced my editorial philosophy.  Bareilles is just as precise a lyricist as she is a vocalist, and songs such as Brave, Chasing the Sun, Islands, King of Anything, and Love Song are arrayed with profundities on the individual and barely restrained F.U.s to the figures and machines that think they know what’s best for everybody else.

So too did I appreciate the way Bareilles molded her public image, which was simply not to try to make an image by any means available.  Bareilles didn’t rely on a bunch of outrageous concert/awards show stunts, smutty fashion shoots, extravagant personas, or accessory boyfriends to sell her art; she just let the music speak for itself and people flocked to it.  She wasn’t what some people – not myself, mind you, but other more misogynistic, Christian, Focks News-watching bigot people – might call a “whorebag”, and she mostly just focused on crafting exceptional music rooted in strong traditions.  In addition to singing variable and emotional renditions of her own music, she also covered classics by Elton, U2, and Otis Redding, which demonstrated an understanding of her historical position and respect for the greats who preceded her.

Nor was she that much of a political stooge for the Left compared to pop music peers Katy Perry, Beyonce, Adam Levine, John Legend, and, well, basically all the rest.  Sure, Brave as written was intended to be one of the gayest songs of all time, but that didn’t preclude dangerous, independent, unregulated journalists like your own Author from finding inspiration in its lyrics.  Regardless, one has to applaud a mainstream artist for having the audacity to write a mainstream song that has a line like, “Show me how big your brave is.”  I thought it was kind of silly the way she tried to shoehorn a very stereotypically homosexual couple into her not-at-all-political music video for I Choose You, but that song sucked anyway and it wasn’t like she straight-up called me a bigot, so it didn’t offend me much.  I realize that if I were to draw my moral line in the sand at some creator’s support for homosexuality, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy much entertainment media at all.  As of Friday last week, I’d also have quite a bit of difficulty going shopping, using my credit card, making a phone call, logging into social media, turning on my computer in the first place, eating fast food, traveling by air, or engaging in any other activity that defines our modern life, but that’s a blog post for another time in the near future.  The point is that Sara Bareilles’ loyalty to the Democrat agenda wasn’t always fervent or forceful enough to deter me from enjoying her music, which is more than I can say of a heap of filmmakers, “artists”, and comedians who routinely run their mouths on matters they don’t understand.

Then this picture happened in October 2014.  This smiley, happy, irresistibly optimistic ode to infanticide, sexual perversion, fiscal dependency, and chronic corruption.  It was the kind of strikingly asinine, blissfully ignorant portrait a validation-hungry, relativistic college idiot would upload for the sake of showing off how much more virtuous and “courageous” he is than the world he’s so tirelessly “fighting” to reform.  But Sara Bareilles isn’t an idealistic, self-enamored student happening to live in the digital era; she’s a 35-year-old, accomplished grown-up who should by this point have developed a tenable, philosophically consistent moral conscience.  The picture doesn’t simply argue to the contrary; it argues that Bareilles is devoid of any moral judgment whatsoever and shows just how meaningless her facades of compassion and love for all people really are.

Now whenever I listen to Sara Bareilles’ music, I can only think about the unborn, the unwanted, the innocent millions who’ve been crushed, poisoned, decapitated, ripped apart and vacuumed from the uterus.  I think about Planned Parenthood’s flagrant disregard of parents’ rights to raise their children as they see fit, their systematic facilitation of murder without parental consent or knowledge, and their unabashed promotion of deviant sexual practices to minors.  I think about Planned Parenthood giving advice and promising help to whistleblowers posing as sex traffickers of underage girls, and I think about their repeated failure to report rape and sexual abuse disclosed by young and vulnerable clients, both proving that they care markedly less about the wellbeing of “the women they serve” than about their own sustainability as a business dependent on misfortune.  I think about Planned Parenthood’s eugenicist founder Margaret Sanger and her endorsement of birth control and forced sterilization as a methodology for gradually eliminating the lesser, feebler-minded races – a woman for whom “reproductive freedom” didn’t mean the freedom to reproduce so much as freedom from reproductive capability.  I think about the millions of confused, weak, or desperate women Planned Parenthood has taken advantage of for profit, sometimes at the cost of the mother’s own life.  I think about Planned Parenthood’s propensity for lying about its expenses to paint itself as a “health care provider” instead of a taxpayer-funded slaughterhouse that butchers hundreds of thousands of infants every year, with the holy blessing of the president of the United States of America.

Sara ♥ Planned Parenthood

I think about all these things and think I’ll never be able to listen to that inhuman, odious hag Sara Bareilles again until she’s rolled over and gone the route of child predator Michael Jackson, another, all but indisputably better pop genius whose music I might have considered boycotting in his life but I now indulge and relish if only because he’s no longer a threat to anybody and has safely vacated the sphere of this our world.  Gone to heaven, hell, Valhalla.  Passed on to that great recording studio in the sky. Croaked his final swan song.  Shall we say, aborted?

There’s a lot of blood on the floor, but none of it was spilt by Michael Jackson.

Stuff that Larry Twicken Says

Larry Twicken is an active, taxpayer-funded promulgator of political science theories at Saddleback College. He’s been “professing” things to students for more than ten years, but has never yet lost his charming personality, love for his students, or yearning to fix Christopher Columbus’ America.  The following is a highlights reel of sorts intended to share Mr. Twicken’s wit and wisdom with the rest of the world.  The quotations, which were transcribed by natural observation in the classroom environment, are an attempt to recapture as nearly as possible the brilliance of Mr. Twicken’s elucidation.

On those old white Republicans:

“I’m just going to throw my ideology right out there… Pat Boone is one of those people I hate – is hate the right word? … Yes. – I hate Pat Boone… He took this black artist’s song and recorded it the way a white person would, you know?  [does his best black and white singer impression]”

“Social conservatives, they’re just from another era.  The way they talk about gay marriage and LGBT rights… [shakes his head]”

On his educational philosophy:

“Don’t try to go into the quiz without reading, thinking you can bull$#*! your way through it, because nothing pisses me off more when all I get is bull$#*!, bull$#*!, and more bull$#*!.  Just don’t bull$#*! me.”

“You may think you know a lot about politics, but you don’t know $#*! about politics.  Your parents have probably talked to you about politics and government, but they don’t know $#*! about government either.”

“Most college teachers are doing it all wrong because they try to teach you things.  I’m a professor.  I profess things.”'

 “I’m hoping we can have open discussion in this class.  I want you all to be respectful towards each other – no name calling.  But I will show little respect for your views.  I will mess with you.  And when you guys try to argue with me, it really pisses me off, like you’re getting up in my car grill and yelling, “F____ you, Mr. Larry!”

On constitutional government:

“What does democracy mean?  [Much argument ensues]  Majority Rules, thank you.  America’s democracy means that majority rules.”

 “But the majority of people weren’t even represented in America’s early years, only the majority of 20%!  The United States’ democracy was kind of a mockery – we could even say a mythology [read like it’s a big word] – of democracy.”

On his marginalized black wife and children:

“Racism is an attitude, the attitude of thinking your race is superior.  Now it’s possible for those in a minority race to be racists, but only if they have the power to oppress another race.  Otherwise they’re just bigots…”

 “Do any of you know about the Minutemen… they were a group who tried to stop illegal immigrants from crossing the border and recruited a lot of African-Americans to do that because illegal immigration is against African-Americans’ interests…” [never finishes his point or ties it back into racism]

 “In a way, by not sending my daughter to the San Juan Hills “Latino School” [because of its lower academic rating and probability of sending graduates on to better colleges], I would be contributing to institutionalized racism.”

“White people use just as many drugs as black people.  We have this racist mindset about blacks on drugs.”

“Other runners accuse my daughter of winning just because she’s black, like she’s got some special bone in her body.”

 “Don’t f____ with my girl.”

 “We have stereotypes like ‘white people can’t jump’.  When we maintain these institutions as long as we do, white people start to believe they can’t compete, they can’t do these things.”  [because it’s mainly those racist Caucasians who are always making victims of themselves]

On a noncontextual, hypothetical kid getting yelled at by his instructor:

“He’s crying, and I tell you, next race this kid is going to run his f_____ing ass off.”

On Rush Limbaugh:

 “There are ideas you probably hear a lot on talk radio.  Finish this sentence: ‘Muslims hate…’  [America?]  No.  [The West?]  Not my tempo.  [Christians?]  That too, but I’m actually thinking of… [Jews???]  Yes, thank you.  ‘Muslims hate Jews.’”

“Does anyone in here listen to talk radio?  Listening to too much talk radio lowers your IQ.  [Someone challenges that.]  Listening to top 40 radio won’t do a lot for your IQ, but it won’t hurt it either.”

“But in medieval Spain, it was Catholics who hated the Jews.”

On Christopher Columbus:

“So he lands and he immediately sees them as savage, childlike, inferior.  He says that he’s checking out these girls, 12, 13 years old!”

 “How does the Bible say that man has dominion over the animals?  He has the power to name them, right?  So Columbus starts calling them Indians!”

 “Columbus brings back only the strongest as slaves, and suddenly everybody thinks that all the ‘Indians’ are super-strong.”

“Columbus goes back, and it’s all about race now.” 

“Racism started with Christopher Columbus.”

On Jimmy Snyder:

“Whether you believe it or not, with a mic shoved in your face, what’s the right answer [to the important question of whether there should be more black coaches in the NFL]?  [Awkward, non-obliging silence]  Come on what’s the right answer?  YES.”

On teaching his son the truth:

“My son brings back this book from school, the traditional story of Christopher Columbus.  I look through it, the last sentence: ‘And then Christopher Columbus made friends with the Indians.’”

“I give him this radical book, A People’s History of the United States – by this crazy left-wing socialist named Howard Zinn – and I say, ‘Son, you’re taking this to school,’ and he says, ‘Dad, no.’ and I say…” 

“This college text… the true story of Christopher Columbus…”

“I tried to give my son – and you all too – an alternative, more accurate education.”

“My son took the WISC test, which, 80-90 you’re OK, below that you’re f____ed up.”

“The question asked him who Christopher Columbus was, so I asked him, ‘What did you write?’ and he said, ‘I wrote that Christopher Columbus was an explorer who killed a bunch of Indians.’ … I gave him a high-five for that.”

“It turns out he got one point for the first part but not the part about killing Indians, so I had a good talk with them and they said it was because that wasn’t in their book.  Your IQ is punished for repeating the true story of Christopher Columbus.” 

 “I’ve been fighting this for years.”

On other stuff:

“You can look at feudalism as a form of slavery.”

 “The Industrial Revolution was based on the oppression of Indian communities.”

 “If you want the best Fatburger, don’t go to Orange County – they f____ it up.”

 “♪ Killing me softly with his song ♪… I wish I could be a black woman just so I could sing that.”

On himself and the lecture he’s supposed to be giving:

“Who’s more charismatic than me?”

“This lecture is my way of stating how I’m going to be approaching race, gender, LGBT, community issues – not this sort of mythical majority which never really existed.”

“Imagine all this in 15 minutes – so f____ing incredible.” 

To the administration of Saddleback College, please nominate Larry Twicken for lecturer of the month.  This took him 12 years to make.  Then fire the bastard.


Fast-travel to other parts:
More Stuff That Larry Twicken Says
Even More Stuff That Larry Twicken Says