Mormonism's bigoted wack-job, Cliven Bundy, has finally shown his true colors. Not surprisingly (to quote the Book of Mormon), they're "white and delightsome."
Bundy recently notified reporters that he ". . . want[ed] to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro." Bundy proceeded to ramble on about driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas where, he said, "in front of that government house, the door was usually open and the older people and the kids--and there is always at least a half-a-dozen people sitting on the porch--they didn't have nothing to do. They didn't have nothing for their kids to do. They didn't have nothing for their young girls to do. And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn't get no more freedom. They got less freedom."
("Cliven Bundy: Are Black People 'Better Off As Slaves' Than 'Under Government Subsidy'?," at "Huff Post Politics," 24 April 2014; for Bundy's video-taped comments, see:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/24/cliven-bundy-racist_n_5204821.html)
You heard it right--as in right from the far-right racist's mouth (with special thanks to Bundy's right-hand racist man, W. Cleon Skousen).
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--The Bundy-Skousen Connection
Tax scofflaw and "conservative" big-gub'ment-moocher Bundy owes his far-out, bigoted views to fellow rabid Mormon theologian, Skousen--as given away by what Bundy has been carting around on his person:
"In a recent media appearance, Bundy was proudly displaying a copy of the Constitution in his shirt pocket. After searching for the distinctive cover of the document in Bundy's pocket, the publisher turned out to be the innocuously-named 'National Center for Constitutional Studies' (NCCS). However, the NCCS is not the commendable educational organization it purports to be. It began life as the 'Freemen Institute,' a vehicle for the far-right, Mormon, anti-commie, history revisionist, W. Cleon Skousen.
"Skousen taught that the Constitution was inspired by a God who intended America to be a Christian nation. He also professed the canon of white supremicism that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a lost tribe of Israel. The Southern Poverty Law Center chronicled the NCCS curriculum based on Skousen's philosophy saying that he '. . . demonized the federal regulatory agencies, arguing for the abolition of everything from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency. He wanted to repeal the minimum wage, smash unions, nullify anti-discrimination laws, sell off public lands and national parks, end the direct election of senators, kill the income tax and the estate tax, knock down state-level walls separating church and state, and, of course, raze the Federal Reserve System.'
"Sound familiar? Skousen's warped ideology . . . syncs up perfectly with the Tea Party and other purveyors of fringe fear-mongering like politi-vangelist [Mormon] Glenn Beck, who literally begged his audience to read Skousen's book, /The 5,000 Year Leap,' which Beck said was 'divinely inspired.' The conspiracy-obsessed NCCS shares with Beck and Bundy an animosity toward government that exceeds the boundaries of common sense. Along with Skousen's books, the NCCS website features anti-UN screeds ('Confronting Agenda 21'), treatises on wingnut electoral reforms ('Repeal 17 Now!'), harbingers of one-world government ('The Rise of Global Governance') and appeals for institutionalized theocracy ('America's God & Country'). No wonder Bundy was sporting a version of the Constitution that was distributed by the NCCS, an organization that advances ultra-conservative conspiracy theories and promotes anti-government hostility.
"The threatening hysteria and deception emanating from Bundy, and the armed militias that came to his defense, are emblematic of the apocalyptic doctrine of the NCCS. It is no accident that Bundy's Constitution was provided by a group whose teachings have been denounced by historians and constitutional scholars. But it does explain the extremism and advocacy of violence that Bundy et al have espoused. All of this makes it all the more inappropriate and irresponsible for Bundy to be hailed as hero by conservative media outlets like the National Review and Fox News who, just last week, compared Bundy to Gandhi in a feat of epic cognitive collapse."
("EXPOSED: The Source of Cliven Bundy's Crackpot Constitutionalism," by "News Corps" for "Media Watch," in "Daily Kos," 20 April 2014)
W. Cleon Skousen and Cliven Bundy are two racists in the same pea-brained pod.
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--Skousen's Claim That Enslaved Blacks Never Had It So Good
In his poorly- and insultingly-crafted textbook, "The Making of America" (which I eventually ditched after it was given to me by a Skousen supporter), Skousen favorably quoted a 1934 essay which paternalistically referred to the children of African-American slaves using the racially degratory term "pickaninnies":
". . . Skousen became the center of a minor controversy when state legislators in California approved the official use of another of his books, the 1982 history text, 'The Making of America.'
"Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as 'pickaninnies' and described American slave owners as the 'worst victims' of the slavery system.
"Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, 'The Making of America' explained that '[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains.'"
("Beck Guru Skousen's 'Story of Slavery' Suggests Slave Owners Were 'Worst Victims of the System,'" in "Media Matters for America," 30 September 2009)
About life in the Slave South, Skousen--a pseudo-"historian" who, in his day, peddled a revoltingly toxic brand of racist revisionism--as quoted in his book, "The Five Thousand Year Leap":
"If the pickaninnies ran naked it was generally from choice, and when the white boys had to put on shoes and go away to school they were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates."
Predictably, Skousen's bigotry-belching books have become holy bibles in the kooky congretations of the racist radical fringe:
". . . Until 2010, George Wythe University taught Skousen's work as part of its core curricula, alongside such classics as Alexis de Tocqueville's 'Democracy in America' and Tom Paine's 'Common Sense.' Freshmen were assigned 'The Five Thousand Year Leap' and 'The Making of America,' which came close to idealizing slavery . . . . "
(". . . Romney Aided Fringe Utah College Founded by Right-Wing Conspiracy Theorist," by David Co
rn and Stephanie Mencimer, "Mother Jones," 11 October 2012)
However, as one would expect, serious scholars regard Skousen as an utter and complete joke:
"In 1982, Skousen published . . . an ancestor-worshipping history text titled 'The Making of America,' and prepared a study guide for nationwide seminars based on its contents. As Alexander Zaitchik reports in his informative study of [Glenn] Beck, 'Common Nonsense,' the new book became an object of controversy in 1987, after the California Bicentennial Commission sold it as part of a fund-raising drive. Among its offenses was an account of slavery drawn from long-disgraced work by the historian Fred A. Shannon, which characterized slave children as 'pickaninnies' and suggested that the worst victims of slavery were the slaveholders themselves. The constitutional scholar, Jack Rakove, of Stanford, inspected Skousen’s book and seminars and pronounced them 'a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.'"
("Confounding Fathers:The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots," by Sean Wilentz, "The New Yorker," 18 October 2010)
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--Skousen's Incendiary Claim That Communists Were Behind Attacks on the Mormon Church's Racist Anti-Black Doctrine, Plus Other Racist Rants
In 1970, amid growing college protests against BYU sports teams for the LDS Church’s anti-Black priesthood policy, Skousen published a tabloid featuring the screaming headline, “The Communist Attack on the Mormons.”
The article asserted that:
" . . . [Professional] Communist-oriented revolutionary groups have been spearheading the wave of protests and violence directed toward Brigham Young University and the Mormon Church,” [employing] “Marxism and Maoism as their ideological base and terror tactics as their method . . .”
Skousen warned that Communists were plotting to manipulate press reports into depicting the Mormon Church as being “rich, priest-ridden, racist, super-authoritarian and conservative to the point of being archaically reactionary.”
He claimed that, in fact, the Mormon Church was one of the Communists’ “prime TARGETS FOR ATTACK” because it is “STRONGLY PRO-AMERICAN” and that the ‘Negro-priesthood issue” was being used as a “SMOKESREEN” to “further their ulterior motives.”
Citing my grandfather Ezra Taft Benson’s speech, “Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception,” Skousen warned that Communist-inspired assaults on the Mormon Church were designed to: " . . . create resentment and hatred between the races by distorting the religious tenet of the Church regarding the Negro and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions."
(“Special Report by National Research Group,” American Fork, Utah, 84003, March 1970, emphasis in original)
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--Skousen's Anti-MLK Views
Like my grandfather, Skousen declared that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was a tool in a Kremlin-concocted conspiracy to destroy America.
Writes historian D. Michael Quinn:
"After [President Ronald] Reagan signed the law for King Day, Cleon Skousen's Freemen Institute observed that this national holiday honored 'a man who courted violence and nightriding and borke the law to acheive his purposes; who found it expedient openly to collaborate with totalitarian Communism; and whose personal life was so revolting that it cannot be discussed.'"
(D. Michael Quinn, "The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power" (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1997])
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--Skousen's Incendiary Claim That Communists Were Behind Attacks on the Mormon Church's Racist Anti-Black Doctrine, Plus Other Racist Rants
In 1970, amid growing college protests against BYU sports teams for the LDS Church’s anti-Black priesthood policy, Skousen published a tabloid featuring the screaming headline, “The Communist Attack on the Mormons.”
The article asserted that:
" . . . [Professional] Communist-oriented revolutionary groups have been spearheading the wave of protests and violence directed toward Brigham Young University and the Mormon Church,” [employing] “Marxism and Maoism as their ideological base and terror tactics as their method . . .”
Skousen warned that Communists were plotting to manipulate press reports into depicting the Mormon Church as being “rich, priest-ridden, racist, super-authoritarian and conservative to the point of being archaically reactionary.”
He claimed that, in fact, the Mormon Church was one of the Communists’ “prime TARGETS FOR ATTACK” because it is “STRONGLY PRO-AMERICAN” and that the ‘Negro-priesthood issue” was being used as a “SMOKESREEN” to “further their ulterior motives.”
Citing Ezra Taft Benson’s speech, “Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception,” he warned that Communist-inspired assaults on the Mormon Church were designed to " . . . create resentment and hatred between the races by distorting the religious tenet of the Church regarding the Negro and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions."
(“Special Report by National Research Group,” American Fork, Utah, 84003, March 1970, p. 1, emphasis in original)
Like my grandfather, Skousen also declared that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was a tool in a Kremlin-concocted conspiracy to destroy America.
Writes Quinn:
"After [President Ronald] Reagan signed the law for King Day, Cleon Skousen's Freemen Institute observed that this national holiday honored 'a man who courted violence and nightriding and borke the law to acheive his purposes; who found it expedient openly to collaborate with totalitarian Communism; and whose personal life was so revolting that it cannot be discussed.'"
(Quinn, "Mormon Hierachy")
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Cliven Bundy: For Mormonism, the nightmare continues.
(related RfM threads:
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1250085,1250085#msg-1250085 and
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1250293,1250293#msg-1250293)
Edited 18 time(s). Last edit at 04/24/2014 07:05PM by steve benson.