Category Archives: Culture

Those Damned Sick People

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In the fullness of time, this age will be described as one where the people in charge had to re-learn everything about human nature, that people had known for thousands of years, but somehow been forgotten. Maybe forgotten is not the right term. It’s as if people have un-learned things. A deliberate effort has been made to deny basic parts of reality, in an effort to prove crackpot theories about human nature and human organization. This story about health care costs in the Washington Post is a good example.

The bottom 72 percent of Illinois Medicaid recipients account for 10 percent of total program spending. Average annual expenditures in this group were about $564, virtually invisible on the chart. We can’t save much money through any incentive system aimed at the typical Medicaid recipient.

We spend too little on the bottom 80 percent to get much back from that. We probably spend too little on most of these people, anyway. For the bulk of Medicaid beneficiaries, cost control is less important than improved prevention, health maintenance and access to basic medical and dental services.

The real financial action unfolds on the right side of the graph, where expenditures are concentrated within a small and incredibly complicated patient group. The top 3.2 percent of recipients account for half of total Medicaid spending, with average expenditures exceeding $30,000 annually.

Many of these men and women face life-ending or life-threatening illnesses, as well as cognitive or psychiatric limitations. These patients cannot cover co-payments or assume financial risk. In theory, one might impose patient cost-sharing with some complicated risk-adjustment system.

In practice, that is far beyond current technologies and administrative capabilities. Even if such a system were available, we couldn’t push the burden of medical case management onto these patients or their families.

Decade of analysis has revealed the shocking truth behind medical costs. It turns out that what drives costs are sick people. No kidding. This is why the word “wonk” has become a synonym for sophist or a grifter. Harold Pollack seems like a decent fellow and his credentials suggest he may even know a few things about the medical business, but you have to wonder what he was doing before he made this discovery. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would be shocked to learn that sick people drive health costs.

People have always known that the young feel like they are indestructible, because they are healthy and vibrant. As a result, they don’t need to see the doctor, take a bunch of pills or use various health services. On the other hand, old people have all sorts of things going wrong, so they need emergency services, doctors, pills and treatments. In modern societies like ours, old people organize their lives around regular trips to the doctor. Most of it is preventative and low cost, but it adds up as the population grows older.

That’s why the basic question, regarding public health, is how to pay for the old people and the sick poor people. The former need lots of care, often more than they can afford. The latter needs less care, but they have no money. People used to know this. One option is to rely on private charity and market forces to address the problem. Another option is to have the state pay for health care. A third option is a mix, where the state operates as the insurer of last resort, but otherwise private arrangements prevail.

Look at these discussions a century ago, when the notion of the welfare state first gained traction in the West. People understood these truths. No matter what sort of system you adopt, it means some form of rationing, as all goods and services are rationed. That means some people are told they can only have so much while others get more. In some cases, the person gets nothing at all. This is in every part of life. There are no goods that are not rationed by price or by some control over supply.

Rationing is a part of life, yet somehow our rulers have decided that health care is an exception, so there must be a way to arrange things so everyone gets all the health care they want, without having to pay for it. Guys who insist on calling themselves wonks keep working on their perpetual motion machines so that one day, if we arrange things just the right way, we can have plenty. It’s a form of alchemy. Instead of turning base metals into gold, the modern alchemists seek to conjure plenty from scarcity.

Lawless

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As I’ve grown older, I have found the police to be increasingly contemptible. That’s the opposite of what’s supposed to happen. You’re supposed to become more conservative and more respectful of authority as you get older. Perhaps there is something wrong with me or I am immature when it comes to these things. On the other hand, when you see stuff like this, cynicism is the only normal reaction.

Federal ATF agents in cities across the country reportedly used rogue tactics to go after guns on the street — allegedly exploiting the mentally ill, buying up weapons for way more than they’re worth and letting minors smoke pot and drink.

This is incredible:

In Pensacola, the ATF hired a felon to run its pawnshop. The move widened the pool of potential targets, boosting arrest numbers.Even those trying to sell guns legally could be charged if they knowingly sold to a felon. The ATF’s pawnshop partner was later convicted of pointing a loaded gun at someone outside a bar. Instead of a stiff sentence typically handed down to repeat offenders in federal court, he got six months in jail — and a pat on the back from the prosecutor.

The basic tactic seems to be entrapment. They used various methods to get people to commit crimes. In this case, the crime involved guns. This is often a problem with police departments in major cities. There is pressure on cops to make busts and they cut corners. What we are seeing with the ATF is different. This stuff is coming down from the top. You’re not renting out retail space without senior level approval.

Then we have this little gem. A maniac is running around Times Square so the cops start shooting into the crowd, wounding two innocent women. Naturally, they charge the maniac with shooting the women. The argument is the maniac caused the cops to start shooting people. If that’s not enough, the cops are not facing discipline for their reckless disregard for public safety. Why should they?” They are agents of the state which means they are beyond the reach of the law. This is a Soviet level corruption and it is getting worse.

Another Celebration for the Left

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The death of Nelson Mandela will no doubt result in a sanctimonious circus for the usual suspects on the Left. These people cannot control themselves, so even at funerals they put on a show, intended to display their virtue. That’s how it goes with these things. It is a shame because Mandela’s death could be one of those moments to think about the realities of Africa, but the people who deified him really don’t care about Africa or Africans.

Instead, it will be a week of one-upsmanship on the Left, as they compete with one another to be the most worshipful of a man who was mostly a failure. Chris Mathews is a great example. He lives in one of the whitest neighborhood in America, which happens to be outside of Washington. The Baltimore-Washington area is close to majority black, so a white-only town stands out. Yet, Mathews will lecture the rest of us about race.

Mathews is emblematic of the Left’s relationship to blacks. For the Left, blacks are merely a totem. They are something one worships in the abstract because it riles the enemies of the Left. At least they think it does. In the fevered imagination of the Left, The Man hates blacks and is always trying to keep them down. Naturally, The Man is always a cartoonish version of the the WASP elite, rather than a liberal Jewish guy.

Of course, the Mandela worship has always been about the Left celebrating itself and this funeral will be another example. They love Mandela because they backed him against the bad whites, who were on the wrong side of history. If Mandela had died of a stroke before apartheid ended, he would have been forgotten. It was never about him or his cause. It was always about the narrative in which the Left is always operating.

It is a shame because Mandela really was an extraordinary leader by the standards of Africa. His coevals on the continent competed with one another to be the most maniacally murderous and destructive. Idi Amin was a cannibal, for example. No African country emerged from colonialism and then prospered, except for two. Rhodesia thrived for a time under Ian Smith. The other is South Africa, at least until now.

The fact that South Africa did not follow the same path as every other African state is due to Mandela, in no small part. That’s not to say he was a saint or even a moral person. It’s just that he was not like the typical African leader, who runs his country in the same way local drug lords runs their gang. There was a chance to make the Mandela model the minimally acceptable in Africa, but that never happened and never will now.

None of that will get much of an airing this weekend. Instead it will be the Left congratulating itself for opposing Apartheid and embracing Mandela. It will also be an excuse to revive their passion for Obama. You can be sure our African prince will be there talking about himself, not so subtly reminding the Left why they worshiped him up until last week. The only thing missing will be a wicker man full of white people to burn.

No one will dare mention the deteriorating conditions in South Africa as the black majority slip back into their natural state and set about murdering the white minority. Whatever legacy Mandela could have had will be forgotten after the Left is done with his memory this weekend. In a decade, when the white minority is fleeing South Africa, no one will look back and wonder if it was a good idea to oppose Apartheid. No one will care.

The Words of Fake Intellectuals

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Certain words and phrases take on meanings because of who uses them. For instance, the noun “moderate” in the political context always means liberal. The only people who ever use it are liberals. All of my “moderate” friends, for example, are conventional liberals, who faithfully line up for the democrat in every race. They always lament the lack of “moderate” republicans. Of course, moderate republicans are always liberal.

In the context of personal health, the word is an adjective for the pests and scolds who think they can tell us how to live. In those cases, “moderate” means self-denial. Moderate drinking means no drinking. Moderate eating means no food you like. The common thread here is that fanatics have run off with a perfectly good word and turned it into a chilling horn blast signaling the arrival of people who reminder you of your ex-wife.

The neologism “wonk” is a favorite word on the Left. They say it means policy expert, but it really means agitprop expert. Ezra Klein is a good example. He repeats the politically acceptable dogma in slightly new ways, which makes him a favorite of the people in the political class. Nothing he has ever written would require critical thinking or knowledge of the subject. He just flatters his fellow Progressives, by telling them what they want to hear.

While in theory, the word “wonk” is supposed to mean a policy expert or perhaps an expert on existing regulations, it almost always means flatterer. A wonk is someone who comes up with clever sounding ways to conform what the political class thinks about something at the moment. Not even the political class really, just the army of camp followers that make up the commentariat. To be a wonk is to never question anything.

A word that has been totally corrupted is “data.” To the people fond of using it in social commentary, the word is a synonym for signs, like the ones a shaman would see in goat entrails. You see it in that Klein piece. “HealthCare.gov is clearly working better. But is it actually working? It depends on how you read the data.” This suggest data itself is meaningless, as what matters is who is reading and, of course, their motivations.

Look at the construction. He declares this thing is better, then suggests it may not be working at all, depending on information that has not been presented. In this case, “data” means “who you ask.” To an empiricist or anyone vaguely familiar with practical mathematics, data is what your mathematical representation of reality has to include in order to meet the minimum test of validity. To Klein, data is a sign to be read.

The dilettante is “a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.” In this increasingly fraudulent age, the pseudo-intellectual is something of a dilettante, but instead of learning enough to fake it, they make up new language or corrupt the existing language, so they sound smart without having to know anything about the subject. They don’t know anything. They know about things.

Perhaps another way to put it is we live in a meta-era, in that our intellectual class does not know things or even things about things. They are meta-intellectuals, in that they know things about being an intellectual, the clothes, the verbal cues and so forth, but they are not intellectuals nor to they know any. That’s really just a nice way of saying they are fakers, which is why they like fake language. They are as phony as three dollar bills.

Predators and Prey

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Most Americans have been conditioned to think of their government as a buffer between them and the unscrupulous. The not only patrols the streets for criminals, it polices the marketplace and the workplace for unethical behavior by the powerful. he FDA makes sure the drug makers are poisoning us with bad drugs.The SEC makes sure the rich guys are not ripping off the little guys on Wall Street. The FDA makes sure the drug makers are poisoning us with bad drugs. The government is the cop on every corner.

The custodial state has evolved to infantilize us. What that means is the state treats people like children, so the people become dependent on the state. In other words, it’s not supposed to feel like a prison, but rather a daycare center. The people are not rebelling against the imposed order, because they have come to see the state as the only thing between them and the dangers of the world. The state is more than mother and father to the people. It is the religious order of the civic religion that defines the state.

To put this in perspective, think about the last time a candidate explicitly ran against the government, as happened in the 70’s and 80’s. Reagan won the White House on the argument that the state was the enemy of freedom. He promised to slash government spending. He never did it, but at least he said it. In fact he went on a wild spending spree, but no one today would dare promise to slash the state. The GOP’s core vote is retiring Boomers and the Democrat cater to a swelling anti-white welfare class.

The custodial state is a new development in this world, made possible by the technological revolution. The Nazis and Bolsheviks tried to create such a thing, but merely destroyed themselves trying to make it work. Technology lowers the cost of this type of society and the more docile population helps, but it is hard to see how it can work. The custodial state needs to ruthlessly exploit its charges, but it can only survive in the people fully trust the state to care for them. This is impossible as we see in this story.

Lotteries have been a way for local government to raise money going back to the founding the nation. A popular collector’s item are the lottery tickets sold in the colonial period signed by famous Americans. It was a voluntary way to raise money for a public project like a road or bridge. Modern lotteries are just ways to quietly rob the foolish and unscrupulous. The odds are absurdly long and the money is not spent on what is claimed by the issuing states. It’s the sort of thing gangsters operate.

If a private casino did this sort of thing, the state would close them down. The reason is the people would howl with anger over the greedy casino ripping off the customers. The state does it and the rubes line up to play the longer odds. The trouble is, this sort of thing only works for so long. The cost of supporting the custodial state exceeds the benefit to the people in charge. That means they have to find these ways to rob their charges. The trouble is this reduces the long term benefit of the system to the charges.

In other words, the people at the top of the custodial state are parasites that become more parasitic over time. The initial relationship seems mutually beneficial. At some point though, the oxpecker starts to drill into the head of the beast. The protector becomes the predator. That’s what we are seeing all around us. The state is looking more like the predators than the protectors. This is an unsustainable dynamic. At some point, the charges realize their custodians are just different predators.

Scaring the Bleep Out Of The Honkies

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Something that jumps out when reading the chapter on Weather Underground in Destructive Generation, is that a big part of the attraction of radical politics in chaotic mayhem. Early on, the Weathermen did a lot or organizing. That required the leaders to travel around the country to visit other radicals. One of them was Bernadine Dohrn, Obama’s patron in Chicago. She was the main recruiter for the group.

In one passage, Horowitz described how she and her companion at the time liked to cause mayhem on airplanes, so the passengers would think they were crazy. The point, she said, was to “scare the shit out of the mother fucking honkies!” They would engage in raunchy behavior or dress in outlandish clothes, for no other reason than to irritate the other people on the plane. Their goal was to be disruptive just to be disruptive.

This is a major feature of radical ideology. The revolution is not going to start by itself, so the vanguard needs to first destabilize the system. The proletariat needs leadership, but they also need to be freed from the shackles of the system. The way to do that is to attack the institutions of the bourgeoisie. As faith in those institutions falters, the middle-class will be forced to choose sides. Those who side with the radicals will be rewarded. Those who side with the establishment will be killed along with the ruling class.

That’s why bombing campaigns were popular with the New Left here and in Europe. If the police and courts cannot protect you from the revolution, you’re not going to support the system. The point of this form of terrorism is to reveal the rulers as illegitimate, by making it seem  like their impotence is deliberate. Instead of blaming the bombers, the people begin to turn on their rulers, opening the door for the radicals.

Now, the New Left was not a real Marxist revolutionary group. They were just spoiled middle and upper-middle class kids from good families. They liked all the good stuff of the system, they just wanted to shortcut their way to positions of power. The Marxism language and radical politics were always a pose for people like the Weathermen. They just liked causing trouble. Most of their time was spent doing drugs and fornicating.

The few sober moments were spent screaming at one another about why they have done nothing but get high and fornicate like animals. A handful of hardcore nuts did some real damage, but most were just there for the party. Those nuts, however, were attracted to the cause for the opportunity to cause mayhem. By the time Dohrn and Ayers were running things, that’s all there was as the 60’s had petered out.

The way Horowitz describes these people, the impression is that their lust for mayhem was driven but a desire to get attention. One of the founders spent a lot of time cultivating an image suggesting he came from the lower-class, when he was a rich kid. Dohrn strutted around dressed like a hooker and banging men in public. Ayers worked hard to cast himself as a lady killer. The whole list of founders is distinguished by the amount of time and effort each put into crafting an attention grabbing image.

It’s easy to understand why these people were fond of declaring that all politics is personal. For them, it was literally true. The lust for mayhem became a part of these cultivated images. All politicians are in it for personal reasons, but most are defined by things outside of politics. Radicals are only defined by their politics. They have no true self that can exist outside their current politics. It’s why they are so angry and violent. Any push-back to their program is a personal attack, as it literally is personal for them.

It reveals something about all radical politics, regardless of the age or the issue. These people define themselves by their politics, which are by nature in opposition to the normal social order. They have to both attack that normal order, trying to overturn it, but also do so in a purely personal way. The effort they invest into “being different” is not really about the thing they are pretending to be. It is about that which they are rejecting.

Radicals: Fay Stender

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I’m reading Destructive Generation by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. It is a collection of mini-biographies of the people who made up 1960’s radicalism. It was published in 1989 so it was around when he was going public with his move out of radical politics. His Wiki entry, surprisingly, does a good job summarizing his life as a public intellectual. I say it is surprising as Wiki is populated with liberal crazies, who often assault the pages of people they deem enemies of the faith. Somehow, he has escaped their wrath.

It’s funny how White and Jewish Baby Boomers have cast these long shadows over subsequent generations, but blacks have cast no shadow. The same can be said for Hispanic activists or American Indian activists. Not only have their causes been forgotten, but the people have been forgotten in many cases. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and George Jackson have left no imprint on black Americans. Even old warhorses like Alcee Hastings and Eleanor Holmes don’t mention them, despite having known them.

Jewish and white radicals from the 60’s and 70’s had no problem going mainstream after they had grown tired of radical politics. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn landed in the academy, despite living a life of crime. They were the principle backers of Barak Obama’s political career. Of course, David Horowitz stayed in radical politics through the 1970’s and then changed teams. Lots of Jewish radicals made the same journey, either through neoconservatism or some other avenue.

Anyway, the first chapter is on Fay Stender. Her Wiki is here. As you can see, she was in no small part responsible for giving us prisoner rights, a madness that remains with us to this day. She also helped create the prison gang, The Black Guerilla Family. They have probably killed thousands by this point as their reason to exist is to sell drugs and control the prison system. Stender and her cult of radicals set free dozens of these psychopaths, who went onto murder innocent people once they were released.

What jumps out to me in the 60-page description of Stender’s life is just how much sex drove radical politics. Stender was mostly driven to the prison movement because she wanted to have sex with black guys. The milquetoast Jewish boys at college could not light the fire like a black street thug. Women are wired to seek out high status males, which often leads to lusting for the bad boys. Still, the Jewish obsession with blacks, particularly in this way, is something that gets ignored for obvious reasons.

The weird part of these legal radicals like Fay Stender is they seem to act from an odd combination of self-absorption and detachment. On the one hand, they did sacrifice to help these black criminals. On the other hand, they lived lives a million miles away from the results of their work. Stender and her ilk operated as if they were never going to be touched by any of this stuff. They were visitors, experimenting on the host population for personal glory among their people. It turned into a suicide mission.

Finally, the conventional wisdom is the New Left radicals were Boomers. The truth is they were not. Stender and her crowd were born in the 1930’s. In fact, all of the leading radicals of the 1960’s were born in the thirties and early forties. Generally, we think of the boomer as having been born between 1945 and 1964, with the real end point being much earlier for the “60’s generation.”  By the time of the Summer of Love, Fay Stender was a middle-aged woman. That’s something that probably bears further examination.

Turn Off, Tune Out and Drop Out

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Timothy Leary coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” in the 1960’s. According to the Wiki entry, it was 1967 and may very well have been a marketing ploy. The Wiki entry is a little vague on that, but Leary was sort of a PT Barnum. He was good at getting people to pay attention to him and he figured out how to turn that into a business. Unlike Barnum, Leary was not offering tickets to a freak show. Leary and his camp followers were the freak show. He was all about being famous and that got him writing and speaking gigs.

Anyway, that phrase came to mind when reading this. Popular culture is for kids and pop technology is for kids too. There was a time when e-mail was for young people, but it eventually proliferated. Now e-mail is the domain of old people. Texting is for young people now, but that’s even starting to be replaced with things like Instagram. Facebook is the domain of grandparents and foreigners now. In other words, the platforms keep shifting, like all fads, but at some point the trend has to run out of road.

As the population of the West grows older, maybe the new trend will be something like the title of this post. The Boomers, who are not just hitting retirement in heavy numbers, will drop off the system entirely and enjoy their golden years in a fashion similar to their youth in old white America. It won’t be a fad, so much as a lack of interest. The whole point of social media is to collect data on people in order to sell them stuff and keep them from holding the wrong opinions. Old people are not the targets, so they will be ignored.

On the other hand, maybe the oldsters clogging up social media platforms and demanding rules that cater to them will set off a different fad. The young will get off social media entirely and instead go onto video platforms they can use on their phones. It’s not quite dropping out, but it is a return to a form of face to face interaction.  Fads are funny things, so it’s not unreasonable to think a back to basics fad could get going. Maybe dropping out will one day simply mean disconnecting from the grid like a normal person.

The Rise of Fake Black People

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Pop culture is all around us, but I notice very little of it. My television is for watching sports when time permits. Maybe I turn it on if there is a big news event. Otherwise, I would not own one. I do watch a car show from time to time, but I don’t think that qualifies as pop culture. Movies are just as foreign to me. I rented a few for the holiday weekend. All had been released last year or earlier and I know few of the actors staring in them.

When it comes to music I am completely ignorant of what is current. Last night, looking for the football game, I bumped into a show featuring a sad looking Elton John and a hideous looking woman on stage playing piano. The TV said the show was Lady Gaga & The Muppets. Poor Elton appeared to have two black eyes, so I assume they had to beat the hell out of him in order to get him on stage with the ugly woman.

When I saw this on Drudge, I had to google the name “Kanye West” in order to learn why he is famous. I’ve heard the name, but I only know he married the Armenian women with the big butt, who is the current Paris Hilton. He is a singer, most likely of hip-hop, therefore he cannot sing without electronic enhancement. His skill is pretending to be from the ghetto in a way that gets elderly Jewish men excited. That way they can sell his crap to suburban white boys, who think it is cool to be an underclass black guy.

Using Wiki, I see that Kanye is about as authentically black as I am. He was born to talented tenth parents. He was raised by a mother who was a college professor. Some portion of his childhood was spent in China. All of his childhood was around upper middle-class types you see around universities. My guess, given the background of his father, is that his parents were communists or Marxists. When that fell out of fashion they went onto other fads. Kanye West is pretty much a lyrical Barak Obama.

The point here is that West’s parents built their lives around pleasing upper class white liberals and Kanye was blessed with the same skills. Instead of black power he sells hip-hop to the little white boys and girls. It’s a weird sort of exploitation. On the one hand, he is trivializing black culture by turning it into a commodity. On the other hand, that commodity he is selling is intended to destroy white culture by injecting the worst habits of black culture like drugs, degeneracy and cultural nihilism.

This seems to be a common theme with famous black people. There are plenty of whites and Jews who start from humble beginnings and make it big in pop culture. Blacks, even in areas like hip-hop, most often come from middle-class families and middle-class lifestyles. They make their money pretending to be a type of black person in public, but live like Victorians in private, mostly surrounding themselves with whites from their class.

The fat Armenian woman he married is from a wealthy real estate family. Maybe the family money came from something else, before they got into the real estate game, but the point is they have been rich for a long time.  Kanye West  was not hooking up with a shorty from the neighborhood when he picked here from the list. Instead he went with a rich white girl, who was probably like the girls he grew up around as a kid. He probably finds typical black women to be bitching and stupid, like the rest of us.

This is nothing new. The dawn of pop culture was Jews selling black music and black culture to middle class white kids. The popular stars of the 30’s and 40’s stole much of their acts from blacks. They white-washed it so it was not obvious, but they were peddling black culture. In the 50’s and 60’s it became explicit and eventually blacks were allowed to get in on the act. The formula was the same, even when blacks got on stage doing their thing in the raw. Rich whites selling black culture to middle class white kids.

That’s the great change in the last two decades. Instead of Jews selling black culture through well-behaved blacks, the well-behaved blacks are selling black culture. In the old days, the black performers chaffed under the rules, often getting themselves in trouble by being too “authentic” which meant too black. Today, the black performers chaff at having to be too black because otherwise they would resemble something closer to a British colonial officer. That’s why Kanye West blurts out rants about Jews. To look real.

Strom Thurmon Killed JFK

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The title of this bit is from Stever Sailer. Unsurprisingly, he recognized long ago that the JFK narrative was just another instance of white on white crime. That is, northern whites (whites who identify with northern attitudes on race) against southern whites. The mythology is that northern whites are tolerant and open minded, while southern whites are uneducated bigots.

That means you can be southern white while growing up in New Hampshire, as long as you say bad things about non-whites and shop at WalMart. On the other hand, many whites in suburban Atlanta are preachy about race, loath southern culture and therefore qualify as northern white. It’s good white versus bad white. The JFK killing shows the divide quite clearly as we see in this insane NYTimes piece.

FOR 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.

It will miss yet another opportunity this year. On Nov. 22 the city, anticipating an international spotlight, will host an official commemoration ceremony. Dallas being Dallas, it will be quite the show: a jet flyover, a performance from the Naval Academy Men’s Glee Club and remarks from the historian David McCullough on Kennedy’s legacy.

But once again, spectacle is likely to trump substance: not one word will be said at this event about what exactly the city was in 1963, when the president arrived in what he called, just moments before his death, “nut country.”

In other words, bad whites killed the hero of good whites and they refuse to accept blame for it. Never mind that Kennedy hated black people and seemed to admire Hitler. His old man was a Nazi so the apple does not fall far from the tree. The fact is JFK was killed by a quintessentially good white named Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a communist who tried to defect to Russia. Oswald would have fit in with Bernadine Dorn.

Then we have the fact that a bad white pushed through Civil Rights and was quite fond of black people, going back to the 1930’s. Johnson was a lot like Woodrow Wilson, in that he went against his inclinations and his native culture in order to fit it, but he was never accepted by the good whites. These inconvenient facts are airbrushed out of the narrative, as it inconsistent with the mythology of the good whites.

There’s another way to distinguish the tribal differences. LBJ was perfectly at home rubbing elbows with blacks. He got his start in politics by helping blacks get to the polls and actually voting. Granted, they were voting for him, but it shows his natural affinity for black people. Kennedy, on the other hand, despised blacks and made sure he was never around them. He thought MLK was a threat to the nation.

But, the truth is never important in mythology.