At least, it’s okay if the speaker is black and a good Democrat.
Good to know, don’t you think?
Professor Sundiata Cha-Jua, a history and African-American studies professor at the University of Illinois Urban-Champaign, referred to Republican Georgia U.S. Senate candidate as “incompetent, subliterate and coonish” in a column for The News-Gazette.
Coonish! “Coon,” dictionaries tell us, is “a contemptuous term used to refer to a Black person.” It is no better than “nigger,” it’s just avoided the publicity. Calling a black individual a “coon” is as racially denigrating as one can get; it meets the legal definition of “fighting words.” Yet the professor has not received any backlash from students at his university, nor faculty, nor administration. A white professor who made similar statements about, say, Barack Obama, would have to join witness protection.
In the same column, this esteemed prof, who teaches “antiracism,” compared a black Republican named Terence Stuber to a slave because he is running to be Champaign County Clerk against a black Democrat.
“What type of Black Republican is Stuber?,” Cha Jua wrote. “He was recruited by White Republican leadership to run against Ammons, the only African American clerk in Champaign County history… Stuber reiterates “massa” Trump’s talking points. Intimating fraud, he cast aspersions on the 2020 elections….His words and deeds indicate he’s a genuine MAGA Black White supremacist.”
That last paragraph just marks Cha Jua as an leftist, Trump-Deranged asshole, and university faculties are necessarily teeming with them. The “coon” slur, however, warrants school discipline, and if I were in charge, firing. It harms the school, impugns the judgment of leadership for hiring such a creep, and intimidates students, including black students who dare to be conservative. I find Walker to be a bottom-of-the barrel candidate, but he does not deserve to be subjected to racist slurs in public and in the media.
No competent editor would have allowed that word to remain in the column. On the plus side, now we know how much The News-Gazette can be trusted to be professional, fair and objective.
It can’t.
Still, I am seeing the silver lining in the Left’s jumping the progressive shark so disgracefully in the run-up to Tuesday. It is showing us pretty clearly that in 2022, progressives and Democrats have jettisoned ethics, standards, integrity, responsibility, patriotism, belief in the Constitution, their classic liberal foundation, all of it, just to hold power “by any means necessary.” I suspect, and I hope, that the American public will remember, and learn. The party and its allies have told us, loudly and distinctly, that they cannot be trusted, that they must not be trusted.
Ethics Alarms 
My husband, son and I are all University of Illinois alumni, and the racial slur the African-American studies professor used would have been expected in the campus newspaper (the “Daily Illini,” a/k/a the “Daily Illiterate”) — but you’d think that the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette would have toned down the prof’s language. (Unless perhaps the News-Gazette editorial staff is so ignorant that they thought the professor was just using a shorter form of the name of a forest animal, and didn’t realize the “C-word” was a racial epithet?)
As another Illinois alumnus, I wish I could’ve said I’m shocked but I’m not. I graduated in the late 1990s, and even back then the far left take over of the school was in full swing, especially in the Liberal Arts, Humanities, and other useless departments (I was STEM so we didn’t have it as bad). It truly makes me sad seeing how US academy has completely been taken over by the woke cancer and its operatives and brainwashed foot soldiers. Sadly, I don’t think US education, especially higher education is redeemable or fixable at this point without a complete tear down.
“It harms the school, impugns the judgment of leadership for hiring such a creep, and intimidates students, including black students who dare to be conservative.” The American Academy farts in your general direction, Marshallsan. The school is earning plentiful woke credits for having such a brave speaker of truth to power. And any black student who dares to even think of being sympathetic to Republicans ain’t black. Simply put, this professor is exactly what the American academy is looking for. He’ll probably get a multi-million-dollar endowed chair at BU next to Ibram X. Kendi.
A bit more than two decades ago, then still relatively new President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress to kick off the War on Terror, that would dislodge the Taliban from power that long, until Joe Biden allowed them back in, but let us not get too far afield. Speaking of this villainous opposition, he said the following:
“By sacrificing human life
to serve their radical visions–by abandoning every value
except the will to power–they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of
discarded lies.”
Well, it turns out he was wrong about the last part, although at the time he actually believed it. He was not wrong about the first part, that the Taliban sacrificed human life to pursue radical visions and threw every value except the will to power out the window in the process. They didn’t give a damn about anything except keeping themselves in absolute power, where they could do whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted and no one could hold them accountable for anything. It pays to be the king. In the process, they took a country with fairly civilized cities, gardens, markets, and universities, that women were a valued part of, and turned it into a failed state, where men who dared disagree with the ruling oligarchy could be mutilated and women could be beaten for daring to leave the house without a male relative. The place was frankly an appalling dump heap, showing the absolute worst humanity is capable of being. But, they frankly didn’t care, as long as they were at the top of the food chain and had absolute power over everyone else.
Well, the Democratic Party isn’t mutilating people or administering beatings in the street, at least not directly (although having minions like Black Lives Matter do it is quickly becoming a distinction without a difference), at least not yet. However, it has no problem with sacrificing human life to its goals, be it police officers killed because it cut off their resources and painted a target on their backs, ordinary people killed in riots that it encouraged and would not lift a finger to stop or even mitigate, or millions of unborn children killed in their mothers’ wombs, some for medical reasons, others to relieve the woman of the burden of raising a child who was the result of a crime, but the vast majority for convenience, so that the woman could avoid the consequences of her own actions.
The Democratic Party has also abandoned every single value except the will to power. You only need to look at America’s cities to see how true it is. There is not a single major American city where that party has been in power since after World War II that does not have a host of intractable problems. Democratic mayor after Democratic mayor promises to solve those problems, but, somehow, they never get solved. It doesn’t matter whether the office is term limited and the party’s handpicked successors follow one another without any change in policy or whether the office is not term limited and mayors may remain in power indefinitely, governing as de facto elected kings. The problems never go away. The light should have dawned on everyone a long time ago that the problems are never going to go away because the party does not want them to go away. The Democratic party has a vested interest in keeping these cities broken so they can maintain their voting bases and use them as either plums for party stalwarts looking to build fat pensions or springboards for ambitious party members looking to go higher. However, they have absolutely no interest in making their constituents’ lives better, or reducing crime, or trying to end the scourge of drugs, or trying to correct the problem of poverty that leads to all of the above issues.
You need also only look at the causes the party embraces and how it goes about embracing them to know how true this is. For more than a decade the party pushed gay marriage, despite the fact that 31 times referenda went against it. But, while they pushed it, it was a useful wedge issue and club to beat the other party over the head with. Finally it got pushed through by a SCOTUS that would probably have gone the other way today. Almost the next day the party moved on to transgender issues, intending to use them as a wedge issue and a club to beat the other side over the head with, despite the fact that they dealt with the results of a much smaller minority. The party of course continues to embrace abortion on demand, without apology, and in some cases right up to the moment of birth. However, although they had several chances to codify it, they chose not to do so, instead using it as a wedge issue and to gin up fear that a president from the other party might have enough appointments to the Supreme Court to overturn this all-important right.
You also need only look at the complete lack of integrity shown by party members and party allies. The same party that demands respect for women and throws its own under the bus for disrespecting women (unless they continue to be of more used to the party) has no problem with referring to women from the other party by disrespectful terms for the female genitalia that it would not tolerate directed against its own. The same party that would demand that you be fired and ostracized for using certain contemptuous terms for black or otherwise nonwhite individuals has no problem directing those same hostile and contemptuous terms against individuals like that who do not toe the party line. The same party that look the other way on and even encouraged political violence 2 years ago now acts like potential political violence by the other side is the greatest danger to this nation and must be preemptively stopped. The same party that was happy to use social media to silence the opposition is acting as though social media is suddenly a dangerous tool in the wrong hands when it no longer has complete control over it.
Yet these same people press you to give them more time and power and more power, as though absolute power is their birthright and as though they are the only ones who know best how to use power. It does not matter that their use of power has resulted in nearly every aspect of life in this country becoming diminished. It does not matter that their use of power has resulted in almost everything costing more while wages stagnate, in investments becoming worthless, in small business being decimated, and in America’s most vulnerable population, its children, having their education badly disrupted, to the point where some of them may never get back on track. That’s before we even talk about the decimation of the life experience, with all kinds of life events, from great experiences like weddings and graduations, and small but enjoyable experiences like going out to dinner being taken away, and the climate of fear which persists even to today, with some people who will wear masks until their dying day.
These very same people, who used political power to increase their own political power almost to the point of being dictatorial, are now telling the citizens of this country that the other people, the other party, who stand for none of these abuses of power, are the danger to the American system as first envisioned, and it’s the citizens’ patriotic duty to make certain they never get any power again.
I’ve said again and again that the road to tyranny is shorter than you think and less obvious than you think. However, it is also well mapped out if you bother to read history, real history, not the self-hating, white shaming tripe that the Democratic party wants to force down everyone’s throat. Where in history have we seen single party states? Where in history have we seen villainizing and demonizing of large sections of the population? Where in history have we seen elections designed not to allow the people to choose their representatives, but instead to simply validate and ratify the status quo? Where in history have we seen the use of private industry and mobs as surrogates for government action? I’ll give you two guesses about one party states, and both guesses will probably be right, because you’ll go right to Nazi Germany and the Communist USSR. There are more than a few other options, though, none of them free. I’ll give you three guesses about states that demonized and villainized, and I bet that all three guesses will be right also. My personal three would be the last two plus revolutionary France. I could probably give you five guesses for nations in which elections became a mockery just to validate the status quo, and if you add Ba’athist Iraq and ayatollah-run Iran to the last three nations we’ve been talking about, you’ll have your five. I’ll give you seven guesses for the governmental abuse of private industry and mobs, and if you tack on Fascist Italy and Chavista Venezuela you’ll have your seven.
Like it or not, this is the company the Democratic Party in this nation is keeping now. None of these places are places anyone in their right mind who has experienced this country as it normally is would want to live. Perhaps the Democratic party is right about one thing, democracy may well be on the ballot this time out, just not how they believe it is. A vote for them now could well start us down the path, or move us further down the path that leads to an unpleasant combination of the seven nations I have just spoken about. I do not want to live in a one-party state where the government controls every aspect of life and the only rights are the right to get an abortion and the right to ask permission to do anything else. You need to decide whether you want to.
Well, if that’s not a COTD I don’t know what is. Great write-up Steve. What are we doing in NJ?
I must concur. A great read…and now I’m going to read it again.
The idea that “coon” is a slur on black people still surprises me, after hearing it (on this site alone) a few times. Where I am from, ‘coon means one thing. It involves an annoying ringtailed animal that kills dogs, likes trash cans, is reasonably easily dealt with, is sneaky, tricky, and overly intelligent, and what you hope you run into when you hear noises outside at night instead of its much more agressive friend, the wolverine. I dielike sullying the word ‘coon with a new (to me) definition that indicates racial predjudice when it has a legitimate one in common parliance. Or is racoon now the only thing we can say, losing the cultural value of ‘coon skin caps, and ‘coon trickery, sneaky like a ‘coon, etc?
“its much more agressive friend, the wolverine.”
Pound for pound, the Wolverine is (IMO) the toughest critter in the known Universe.
2nd toughest (also IMO)?
The Badger.
ON WISCONSIN!!
Ooh, I dunno….honey badger?
Despite its decidedly…um…unearned cachet, the HONEY BADGER would be short work for the Mustelidae carnivoran mammal type found up our way.
Against a Wolverine? ALL_BETS_OFF!