From the files of Ben Wetmore: "Center-right Moral Crusades: 'Get mad, get mad dog mad'"

NJO: "Benjamin Wetmore: A mentor of mine; a genius", said James O'Keefe in an interview in September 2009. So let's take a look at some of the wisdom of this certifiably mentorial influence on James' life.

Today, from November 2008, "Center-right Moral Crusades: 'Get mad, get mad dog mad'":

Too often those on the right are content to give charts, statistics and pristine figures for our arguments. We let the other side roll out fake grandmothers, women lying about recycling cans for food, fake claims of hate crimes and wonder why, even when these incidents are proven wrong time and time again, we keep losing to people. 
 
Only when one confronts a leftist who is screaming about the tragic death of Matthew Shepherd and points out that it had nothing to do with his homosexuality and everything to do with a drug deal gone wrong, does one understand the mentality of the other side. When they learn the truth they simply don't care, they keep screaming about hate crimes. 

So this isn't a claim to become as irrational as the other side, or merely to parrot back opposing moral outrage to our issues somewhat artificially. No, we ought to set our own real priorities, examine how the proposals on our side and theirs affect real people, and then apply real instances that have a strong emotional appeal for those who are not well educated on our topics. 

The emotional appeals can become a hook from which they learn the facts and the figures and statistics that show that our side is truthful and honest about these problems, but we can't forget that crucial middle point of attracting people in the first place through emotional appeals to become interested in our topics and solutions.

- issue - normal appeal - emotional appeal - leftist rebuttal - addressing their rebuttals Affirmative Action "fairness" and "merit" Whites are pushed out; all races are taught to look down to blacks; blacks are set up to fail in jobs or in colleges they aren't ready for minorities suffered through slavery, and now suffer through unequal access to advancement slavery is about controlling someone's destiny, and now we have the state controlling and managing people's destinies due to race Abortion "Rights" of the unborn The girl who survived an abortion: Gianna Jennssen Back-alley abortions Gianna survived a back-alley abortion, what does that make her? Bureaucracy Inefficiency the the the Business Regulation "Overregulation" the the the Christian Assaults "Freedom" Attacks on nuns, hurting nuns "Separation of Church and State" The state is busy separating the Church from the people, hurting nuns and suing nuns Taxation "Individual rights" and "Capitalism" Business owners who can't afford daycare Poor people need our help If poor people had jobs, they wouldn't be poor, and would be taxpayers Environmentalism High regulatory costs Suffocation of new industry and the creation of new jobs for immigrants, minorities, the uninsured and poor people the the Foreign Wars Usually a mind-numbing pro-war, pro-bombing mentality that does us no good. National bankruptcy; military deaths that will only lead to more future conflicts and, sadly, more deaths Body bags These wars come about because of Democrat policies, and Democrat weakening of the military Immigration "Border Security" Crimes by immigrants, victims of border insecurity, sex crimes Javier who "does the jobs white people won't take" and is just trying to earn money to send back home to Tijuana the Healthcare "Socialism" Deaths due to bureaucracy; elderly deaths due to rationing; denial of care The "Uninsured" the Tuition Needless bureaucratic growth Tuition slavery as undergraduates spend ten years paying off debt Student "services" the

topics we ought to be worked up over: Abortion Abortion activism Abortion healing Academic standards Alternative media Courtship Homosexual therapy Marriage Tuition Unionism and we should develop ways to do grassroots organizing around these topics leftists organize around: Domestic violence Racism Sexism

Inside the Mind of the Rutgers Professor, Part VI: Equality

Equality

The decline of the Rutgers man (“man” being used to denote male or female human). There is no such thing as a “Rutgers Man” anymore. There is no such thing as a renaissance man. Rutgers does not produce gentlemen as well as scholars, does not shape students anymore, at least not in the way it should. While professors play the role of brainwashers, the administration promotes a form of sensitive homogeneity, using academic methods like “creative ambiguity,” where both sides strongly disagree but come to mutual agreement. The administration’s focus is primarily on skin color, ethnicity and non-western religions. The colorblind demands of the civil rights movement have mutated into the color consciousness of today. Since professors believe that all civilization and culture come directly from race and we are all created equal, the Rutgers anthropologist believes all civilizations and cultures are created equal. The Professor has become so obsessed with race, he will often ignore an argument, instead making ad hominem attacks on the basis of the arguer’s race or social status only. Professor James Livingston of the Rutgers History Department, a self-described “Marxist, Socialist, Feminist and Pragmatic Postmodernist,” made such attacks against the editors of The Centurion last fall, accusing the paper of “White Hysteria.” (Professor James Livingston is a white man who makes around 100,000 dollars a year).

Statewide Affirmative Action mandates demanding quotas on race have produced a segregated campus. Livingston College for blacks and Hispanics. Rutgers College for whites. White students are contemptuous of black students and athletes with lower admissions standards and doubt their merits, even though they deny doing so. Attempts to level the playing field bring standards down. English Professor William Dowling has spoken of the decline of academic standards and demanded the university return to its traditional, historical roots. Dr. Dowling has also published a list of works that are considered the great English Classics. In an August 25, 2003 article in Sports Illustrated, he pointed to a football player named Nate Robinson who was accepted into Rutgers with a combined SAT score of 800.

The University wanted none of it.

The “Academic Oversight Committee” demonized Dowling in a Targum column later in September, where they accused Dowling of calling football players “morons.” One student, then Rutgers College sophomore John Little, resorted to an ad hominem attack and accused Dowling of being a “racist.” His April 24th, 2001 quote (for Dowling’s 2003 article was not the first in which he questioned the University’s acquisition of sports players) about Dowling embodies much of the Marxist philosophy: “Professor Dowling only recognizes one style of learning. One leftover from the days when only the wealthy could attend college. Not all students can achieve academically in a typical classroom setting, thus making athletics, drama or art a valuable tool in the teaching process. The lessons that these activities teach students are numerous and every bit as valuable as anything is that can by learned in the classroom.”

The white Rutgers students, faculty and Administration feel uncomfortable talking about campus segregation between the colleges. They do not like it because it does not fit in their prevailing view that all the races get along and their university has become fully integrated, when in fact is has not.

What results is a barrage of aesthetic “diversity” reassurance and sensitivity training. There are dozens of caucuses, programs and councils to beat the importance of skin color and multicultural sensitivity into the segregated students minds. Diversityweb.rutgers.edu says all Rutgers students needs to be welcomed, valued and respected,” but the administration’s plans to emphasize distinct “cultures” (races) only promotes hostility between them. Heck, there is even an Institute for Executive Leadership and Diversity (http://diversity.rutgers.edu) at Rutgers University. At an “Algeria” award conference for Rutgers College student organizations on May 3rd, 2005, more than half of the awards were for cultural organizations, lauding skin color and little else. The Centurion was peculiarly absent from the “Excellence in Student Media” award ceremony.

NJO: Originally printed in the September 2005 issue of The Centurion.

Dear Freshmen, ahem... "First-Year-Students"

A year ago, this publication did not exist. Since then we have violated 37 copyrights in our satire of The New York Times, done a review of the most decorated liberal professor doors, investigated the rampant fiscal and electoral corruption of NJPIRG, documented our speech code, and investigated faculty contributions to political parties to find out professors gave 104 times more money to John F. Kerry than George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. We have exposed the Stalinism of Rutgers favorite son, Paul Robeson, and printed the appropriate forms to relinquish your United States Citizenship if you are ashamed of your American identity. Additionally, we have filed a “bias incident report form” on one student who wrote “Die” all over one of our issues. We sent Valentines to NJPIRG requesting our money be refunded while documenting threats made to us by our old faculty advisor who told us “not to f*** with him.” We investigated our bureaucracy to find over 33 distinct offices, committees, programs, projects, caucuses and councils that advance nothing but diversity of skin color. As a response to Campus Censorship of the Grease Trucks' sandwiches, we attempted to ban Lucky Charms from the dining halls in a form of satirical protest. We, tragically, succeeded. And we got it on tape. We interviewed Bret Schundler for Governor and confronted a Professor who chased a student out of his classroom because he disagreed with the professor’s worldviews. We responded to the "Vagina Monologues" with the “Penis Monologues.” At Tent State, we counter-protested with patriotic country music and an affirmative action bake sale where we sold brownies for less money to minority customers. Students signed our petition to ban water. Anarchist ninjas assaulted us when we told them about the state scandals. Professors have tried to expel us when we exposed their lies, and the administration has disavowed us when we printed the truth. We have been assaulted, betrayed, and, at times, ignored. But we will never surrender in our pursuit to challenge the academic monopoly of thought. We will never surrender at trying to get students to look at both sides of an issue. We will never surrender in upholding our motto, Veritas vos Liberabit.

Read on.      - THE EDITORS

NJO: Originally printed in the September 2005 issue of The Centurion.

Affirmative Action Bake Sale

Uploaded on Aug 27, 2009

So, at our annual Affirmative Action bake sale, we came across an inner city teacher visiting Rutgers with her class. Naturally, a discussion ensued about the merits of Affirmative Action. Who do you think won?

Uploaded on May 3, 2009

Inner city teacher loses debate to conservatives over the workings of Affirmative Action.

NJO: Videos and captions from the RUCenturion YouTube channel.

Original caption from rucenturion.com: 

Inner-city teacher shows children how to debate a conservative and lose.

Some photos of said conservatives at their bake sale table:

Additional information at these links:
Feel-good complacency or direct action? The lessons of Tent State Rutgers
Homophobic vigilantes chased from TSU Rutgers

The Conservative Manifesto - Part III

A spectre is haunting Rutgers — the spectre of conservatism. All of the powers of the ivory tower (Rutgers) have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: “diversity” proponents, speech-code advocates, multiculturalists, feminist radicals, and your professors.

Where is the student that has not been decried as “conservative” by the liberals in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of conservatism, against the more advanced liberal ideology at Rutgers, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Conservatism is already acknowledged by Rutgers to be itself a power.
II. It is time that Conservatives should openly, in the face of all their professors, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of conservatism with a manifesto of the ideology itself.

To this end, I have assembled the following manifesto, to be published in THE CENTURION:

A conservative believes in natural rights. A conservative believes in natural rights; those rights endowed to human beings by their creator. They believe in a system of government ordained around truths that are self-evident. Furthermore, he does not believe “No culture’s way of life is better than another,” as anthropologist Theodosious Dobzhansky has argued. Allan Bloom claims in his book The Closing of the American Mind that America promises, “the untrammeled freedom to reason,” and
therefore the highest achievement of truth and self-actualization. Conservatives are guilty of the sin of pride. We are proud of our nation and its values. We would rather study the political philosophies of freedom, justice, and liberty by John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Hobbes which have inspired generations of prosperity. We choose not to buy into the political philosophies of conflict theory and revolution by Marx or Mao which have inspired only genocide. A conservative is not afraid to tell the multiculturalists and western intellectuals that ridding the world of genital mutilation, infanticide, religious discrimination, patriarchy, cannibalism, forced abortions and corrupt dictators is not “culturally imperialistic,” or “ethnocentric.” It is rather our civic duty to our fellow man.

A conservative believes in objective truth. A conservative professes external order. He is firmly opposed to relativism's claims that truth is relative to the eye of the beholder, or claims that it is contextually constructed. He defends his view that there exists an outside truth by pointing out that disagreement doesn’t entail interminability, that there are undeniable facts like “the world is round,” and if there was no ethical or moral truth, then there would be no distinction in virtue between Mother Theresa and Adolf Hitler. A conservative believes strongly in virtue: pursuing the good life for man for its own sake. He also beliefs in family and the traditions ordained in the family. Discipline, faith, self-confidence, personal responsibility and conviction are essential in all of man’s pursuits.

A conservative believes in limited government. “Government is not the solution to the problem, it is the problem” (Ronald Reagan). While law enforcement, basic education and maintenance of infrastructure are all necessary, the government does not have a good track record in succeeding at what it sets out to do. He knows this for two reasons. One, government is not some distinct, almighty, independent moral entity; rather it is comprised of human beings with all the innate characteristics and corrupt susceptibilities that affect those “evil” corporations and masses of ignorant citizens it attempts to govern. Second, government operated programs fail economically, because unlike profit, there is no measurable end to determine the level of achievement. The conservative prefers the alternative of privatization; private ownership of the means of production. Privatization is more successful that its government counterpart because it is vastly more efficient, self-regulating, and cost-effective. Examples of successful areas of privatization the conservative points to include health care, social security, mail delivery, prison operation, etc. While Norwegian president accused the United States government of being “stingy” with the tsunami relief effort and other charitable contributions, private United States companies had already donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the effort as well as to other charities worldwide.

Prosperity, incentive, free market, growth, human fulfillment and the pursuit of happiness are created from the bottom up, not the government down. He believes that a free-market will lead towards human prosperity and happiness. While doomsdayers and naysayers warn that overpopulation is due to prosperity, the exact opposite is true. The most industrialized places on earth have a birth rate far below what is needed to maintain their population.

Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success — only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free, and only then can human beings achieve happiness. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development.

A conservative is Politically Incorrect. A conservative reveals the facts regardless of whose feelings get hurt. He acknowledges there are differences between the sexes. He knows what a statistical bell curve is, and understands that an outlier or exception cannot disprove a rule, sin qua non. He is against language reform and other futile and aesthetic attempts to soften reality by calling toilet paper “bathroom tissue,” freshmen “first-year-students,” and more recently Christmas trees “trees of giving.” A conservative does his best to act rather than talk and does his best not to get caught up in names, labels, and terminologies. Buzzwords like “inclusion,” “tolerance,” and “diversity” are racist, hypocritical, and exclusive to, as Leo Strauss said, “those who have stated clearly and forcefully there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.”

A conservative believes in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. That being said, he is strongly opposed to racism. He recognizes there are many human beings who lack opportunities. But current programs that institutionalize racial consciousness, like affirmative action, must be reformed on the ground that they encourage racial identity, promote suspicion of minority success, and violate civil rights by putting skin color before character. Racism is most prevalent in college admissions where skin color alone determines how one acts and thinks. In some cases, race is all that matters. “Diversity” becomes nothing but skin tone. One’s desires, intellect and even background become irrelevant. The postmodernists, whose philosophy is founded upon fragmentation, assume skin color alone can determine how one acts and thinks, therefore bringing a range of perspectives. Conservatives suggest an alternative program based solely on socioeconomic need. Such an alternative would bring diversity of economic backgroun and benefit minorities because, as the left itself confesses, a disproportionate amount are “socioeconomically disadvantaged.” A conservative is against “identity politics” and racial pride movements on the grounds that they too identify and polarize skin color. The conservative recognizes that since the 1960’s, activists have shifted their cause from civil rights to racial identity, a cause which will serve as an impediment to racial equality.

- James O'Keefe

NJO: Originally published in The Daily Targum in 2004 and later printed in Issue 3 of The Centurion in February 2005.

A Dose of Conservative Thought

Where is the truth?

Certainly it is not in some obscure interpretation of Marx's Capital or in the works of Trotsky or Spinoza or Friedrich Engels, Clement Atlee, Julius Nyerere or Noam Chomsky. Maybe it lies within the graves of the human beings slaughtered throughout the 20th century coerced into being equal by a government of armed thugs they didn't have a choice but to trust. Complete state ownership and collective ownership have both lead themselves down a path of good intentions to a hell so barbaric it's amazing rationalizations for their existence still exist. Especially given the empirical evidence. Your professors make the death list a cliché, a footnote and in some cases, even an impediment. Mao Zedong's butchering of 65 million people. 25 million in Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia slaughtered. Cambodia. Africa. Eastern Europe. Latin America. Your professors can hide behind textbooks and theories – even the promise of a socialist utopia – call the atrocities anti-socialist. (I could call racism anti-American and anti constitutional.) The Problem lies in their belief in this mysterious utopia which has never manifested itself ever. A belief which makes them more religious than Pat Robertson. In order to succeed, even in theory, they must confront arguments made by F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises about the inevitable failure of a controlled market. Have professors had their students read objections to socialism by Aron, Popper, Oakeshott, Sowell, Strauss, Blool, Kirk or Friedman? Absolutely not. Are your professors constituting a breach in academic responsibility by not offering you these extremely legitimate and historically proven objections to socialism? You betcha.

Have arguments been raised against these "utopian" paradises that currently exist on the planet earth anywhere at in the Academy? What about Sweden? Is this place heaven on earth or what? "Highest Standard of Living," they say. This tidbit seems to be based on wealth redistribution and median income. Not factored in are GNP, innovation or exchange rate. Neither is unemployment in the private sector (which has been close to 12%). Recent reports by the Swedish Institute of Trade indicate median income in Sweden is $26,900, compared to $39,400 in the United States. This is before taxes, and in Sweden taxes are everything. You're education and health care are certainly not "free." There is a national income tax of 55% not to mention a 22.5% sales tax on all items sold. Their socialized health care is on the verge of economic collapse, due to a funding dependency on a 30% private ownership of the means of production that is shrinking. Canada is facing similar problems. Meeting the costs of such welfare policies are barely possible in countries with 10 million people. Then how are they possible in America, with almost 300 million people?

I have seen students at the "Death of Humanity" rally as well as the extremist left-leaning conferences held throughout the month at Rutgers not address any of these objections. Should it be the responsibility of a couple of undergraduate students at THE CENTURION to challenge them? No. It should be the responsibility of Rutgers University. Professors should openly discuss both sides of the ideological coin as well as the benefits of electing both candidates for a presidential election (Especially if Students fees are sponsoring such conferences). In addition, our administration should pursue academic, conservative intellectuals to come speak who can pose defenses for our market structure, instead of conservative talking heads like Ann Coulter. It is the least they can do, if as our study indicates, the partisan ratio at Rutgers is a high as 13 Democrats to every 1 Republican.

Our Journal of conservative thought focuses upon the Rutgers Community and seeking balance within it as well as taking a stab at the current events. We recommend for students who want a conservative perspective devoted exclusively to current events read the impeccable prose of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or the columns of the National Review. Perhaps read one of the books we occasionally suggest. The differences between us and these other journals is our distinction of having the luxury of covering things that happen on our campus. By virtue of our firm belief in individualism, morality, and tradition our main goal is to challenge the students to see things through a different perspective.

Contrary to the sentiments of the angry and reactionary academic left, we are not on a coalition against benevolent causes like supporting of the environment and the need for racial equality. Our logic dictates that affirmative action programs should be based on socioeconomic need, not skin color. The majority of our student fees allocated from us towards NJPIRG, if collected from us without our informed consent, should go directly towards environmental causes. They should not go towards liberal lobbyists who pursue things other than the environment. We will attempt place needed scrutiny upon policies such as these because others seem not to for fear of some politically correct reprisal. Why call these arguments "racist" or "pro-pollution" when they could actually increase opportunity and decrease pollution, based on an increase in efficiency?

So you may very easily reject our humble attempts at introducing you to new perspectives. Laugh at us. Mock us. Call us "clueless." Our own faculty advisor did so in his December 1st entry of his weblog listed in the margin below. But in doing so, you'd just be rejecting yourself. Because our paper is not just a collection of legitimate or illegitimate points about particular political issues, rather it is the embodiment of the spirit of marginalized and isolated conservative students whose beliefs have much in common with the majority of citizens in the United States of America. Rutgers has an unchallenged partisan majority as witnessed in our study of campaign contributions. This threatens the impressionable youth who will soon depart the ivory gates of unregulated intellectualism into a real world, where contrary to the teachings of their sociology professors, anything is possible.

There is a world out there where is punishment for people who do bad things and there is no such thing as a free lunch. There is a world out there where your theories will be governed by consequences, your hard work rewarded by success and your destiny contingent upon your actions. Because that section of the world we live in is America, our potential as human beings is infinite.

And that is the truth.

James O'Keefe

NJO: Originally printed in the December 2004 issue of The Centurion (Issue 2) and also posted on the Centurion website.