By way of an assault on the John Birch Society, the Southern Poverty Law Center has taken a shot at yours truly.\u00a0 Upon reading Don Terry\u2019s, \u201cBringing Back Birch,\u201d it became painfully obvious that the Center\u2019s reputation for lousy marksmanship is richly deserved.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Equally obvious is that it is the ease with which it smears those who reject its far left ideology that accounts for why, despite its name, it has done nothing to help the poor.\u00a0 After all, before the SPLC can hope to ameliorate the poverty of others, it must first address its own intellectual and moral poverty.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Regardless of what Don Terry suggests, I am not now, nor have I ever been, <\/em>a member of the John Birch Society.\u00a0 Not unlike that of\u00a0 Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and others, my work appears in the JBS publication, The New American, <\/em>when it coincides with the magazine\u2019s conservative and libertarian thrusts.\u00a0 Had Terry done his due diligence, he would have discovered that I write for various publications.\u00a0<\/p>\n This, though, is neither here nor there.\u00a0 What matters most is Terry\u2019s treatment of my article, \u201c\u2018Root Causes\u2019 and Mass Murderer Adam Lanza,\u201d a piece that appeared in The New American <\/em>(and elsewhere) in the days following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut.<\/p>\n According to Terry, in this essay I \u201cbemoaned the fact that the absence of meaningful gun control was widely discussed in the aftermath of the mass shootings [sic?]\u201d while \u201cthe \u2018root causes\u2019 of too many abortions and too few executions in the United States\u201d wasn\u2019t discussed at all.\u00a0 This is bad enough, Terry thinks, but just when it didn\u2019t seem that things could get any worse, \u201cKerwick turned to Lanza\u2019s race and gender.\u201d<\/p>\n Terry quotes the following lines from my article: \u201cFrom \u2018affirmative action\u2019 to massive Third World immigration, from media depictions of white men as either ignoramuses or crazed \u2018racists\u2019 to the incessant barrage of giddy proclamations of an ever-diminishing white America, the assault on white men is comprehensive.\u201d<\/p>\n He continues quoting me: \u201cIs it impossible to believe that a young white man such as Lanza, who has been exposed to this systematic abuse his entire life, may not have been consumed with both self-hatred and rage?\u00a0 For that matter, may not his cultural animus toward whites have figured in Lanza\u2019s choice to leave a trail (judging from news photos) of mostly white bodies?\u201d<\/p>\n Terry contends that if the JBS continues to publish pieces like mine, it will once \u201cagain be nudged towards the basement\u201d\u2014i.e. irrelevancy.\u00a0 And even though he admits that near the end the article \u201cKerwick swears he\u2019s being facetious,\u201d he dismisses this as \u201ca lame attempt\u201d on my part \u201cthat sounds painfully like the old John Birch Society.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s pain here alright, but it stems from the spectacle of Terry\u2019s cognitive and ethical limitations conspiring to render insurmountable to him the task of following a simple train of thought ranging over a meager 800 words or so.\u00a0<\/p>\n For starters, anyone who looks at just the headline<\/em> of my article for more than ten seconds should suspect that I am not really interested in identifying \u201cthe root causes\u201d of Lanza\u2019s killing spree (or anything else for that matter).\u00a0 Not only do I place \u201croot causes\u201d in quotation marks. By referring to Lanza as a \u201cmass murderer,\u201d I call him out for the agent of evil that he was.\u00a0 And these specifics of the title set the tone for what follows. \u00a0<\/p>\n The application of the concept of \u201croot causes\u201d to any moral <\/em>phenomenon arises from a confusion of categories.\u00a0 Causes<\/em> act upon matter\u2014inert, mindless matter.\u00a0 Scientists study causes.\u00a0 Moral agents, in contrast, act on reasons. <\/em>There are no causes when life is considered under the aspect of morality. Because a mass shooting is a morally significant act, it is wholly inappropriate, and offensive, really, to analyze it in terms of \u201croot causes.\u201d To exploit for it political gain by linking it to a \u201croot cause\u201d\u2014like the alleged lack of \u201cgun control\u201d\u2014that isn\u2019t remotely connected with it is unconscionable.<\/p>\n I never<\/em> \u201cbemoaned\u201d the fact that the \u201croot cause\u201d of the \u201cabsence of meaningful gun control was widely discussed\u201d while \u201cthe root causes\u201d of \u201ctoo many abortions and too few executions\u201d were not, as Terry says. If I can be said to have bemoaned anything, it is that there was talk\u2014incessant talk\u2014in the aftermath of Sandy Hook about \u201croot causes\u201d at all.<\/p>\n Yet it is true that I also wanted to expose the sheer hypocrisy of the left.<\/p>\n By now it should be a foregone conclusion to anyone who knows the leftist that on any given issue, his search for \u201croot causes\u201d always ends up exactly where he begins: the only \u201croot causes\u201d that exist are those determined by his ideological prejudices.\u00a0 It is only <\/em>for the sake of establishing this point that I mentioned \u201cthe root causes\u201d of \u201ctoo many abortions,\u201d \u201ctoo few executions,\u201d and the race and gender oppression that I mockingly insinuated accounts for Adam Lanza\u2019s murderous rampage. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Not to give Terry more credit than he deserves, but it is hard to believe that he doesn\u2019t know that I really was<\/em> being facetious.\u00a0 That it is more dishonesty than density of the intellect of which he is guilty is born out by Terry\u2019s omission of a paragraph in my piece in which I identify Lanza\u2019s Italian ethnicity <\/em>as a possible \u201croot cause\u201d of his actions.\u00a0 I write:<\/p>\n \u201cThen there is the matter of Lanza\u2019s ethnicity.\u00a0 <\/em>\u2018Lanza\u2019 is an Italian surname, and Italians and Italian-Americans are routinely portrayed as Mafioso and other violent thugs in the popular media.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe Lanza incorporated this image into his own self-understanding. Maybe this is why he chose to go on a shooting spree.\u201d<\/p>\n No one\u2014including Don Terry\u2014believes that an Italian-American brought up reading Mario Puzo novels and watching Martin Scorcese gangster films is going to be prompted to shoot down a bunch of young innocent kids.\u00a0 This stuff happens neither in real life nor <\/em>in the gangster genre.<\/p>\n Incidentally, I mention the rise of atheism <\/em>as a potential \u201croot cause.\u201d\u00a0 I suppose it is because this doesn\u2019t fit in too nicely with Terry\u2019s spin that he omits this as well.<\/p>\n In any event, most distressing about reading the SPLC\u2019s hit piece is being reminded that the vices of which it is guilty transcend political differences.\u00a0<\/p>\n Terry quotes a former editor of The New American <\/em>who was fired from his post back in 2006.\u00a0 According to Terry, William Grigg \u201cbecame so angry that Kerwick\u2019s commentary appeared\u201d in his old magazine.\u00a0 Grigg is reported to have said: \u201cIt is incomprehensible to me\u2026that JBS would run such a specimen of ethnic grievance-mongering anytime\u2014let alone in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity at Sandy Hook Elementary.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This has been my point: far from engaging in \u201cethnic grievance-mongering,\u201d in ridiculing \u201croot causes,\u201d including and especially the \u201croot cause\u201d of race, I sought to undermine <\/em>it.<\/p>\n Let me close here with the final paragraphs from the essay that has Terry and Grigg waxing indignant.\u00a0 There is a reason that it wasn\u2019t included in the SPLC\u2019s brief against the Birchers: had Terry quoted it his case against me would\u2019ve collapsed.<\/p>\n \u201cNow for the punchline: I don\u2019t for a moment believe that any of the foregoing \u2018root causes\u2019 are in the least relevant to Adam Lanza\u2019s decision to gun down 20 little kids and six adults.\u00a0 Yet they have at least as much to do with it as does the lack of \u2018gun control\u2019 on which scores of leftists rushed to hang this abomination.<\/p>\n \u201cLanza was an evil man responsible for perpetrating an evil deed.\u00a0 As long as there are evil people in the world, evil will be with us.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe it is to the \u2018root causes\u2019 of why our generation fails to come to terms with this timeless fact to which we need to turn our attention.\u201d<\/p>\n And maybe Terry, Grigg, and everyone else at the Southern Poverty Law Center should delve into the root causes of why they can\u2019t seem to grasp any of this.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By way of an assault on the John Birch Society, the Southern Poverty Law Center has taken a shot at yours truly.\u00a0 Upon reading Don Terry\u2019s, \u201cBringing Back Birch,\u201d it became painfully obvious that the Center\u2019s reputation for lousy marksmanship is richly deserved.\u00a0 Equally obvious is that it is the ease with which it smears…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n