[Federalist] The left has mainstreamed utterly bizarre racist ideas about white people from hate groups such as the Nation of Islam, and they expect to be taken seriously.
Social media has an annoying habit of ablating any remaining desire for good intellectual hygiene, so I recently clicked on a video of Joy Reid. Since being dumped from MSNBC, Reid has been making the podcast rounds. And the 40-second clip is vintage Reid; she accuses white people writ large of not being able to invent anything, rewriting history, and caps it off with a bizarre rant about Elvis that, well, completely rewrites history:
Elvis grew up in housing projects in Memphis alongside black people, credited black artists and showed them nothing but respect throughout his career, and generally did wonders for civil rights. As for Elvis stealing “his main song” from an “overweight black woman,” Reid simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Yes, Big Mama Thornton did record “Hound Dog” a few years before Elvis, but she didn’t write the song. It was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two Jewish white guys.
Thornton had a long career, albeit one hampered by pretty serious alcoholism, and died at 57. Big Mama Thornton deserves real credit for her contributions to the blues and rock and roll, but she was no Elvis, and he didn’t steal anything from her. “Hound Dog” has been recorded more than 250 times, including by several other artists in the four years between the release of Thornton and Elvis’ versions. Suffice to say, there’s plenty of reasons besides race why Elvis sold 10 million copies of “Hound Dog,” even if the 500,000 Thornton sold was nothing to sneeze at.
Anyway, “Joy Reid is an idiot” is a long running series, and that basic observation is not what struck me about this clip. It’s that Reid is spouting the most divisive ideas of black radical leaders, rooted in broad brush anti-white racism. Which is not to say that racism didn’t exist; there’s a lot that Reid could have said that would have been both shameful and fair. For instance, Thornton claims she was paid only $500 for selling half a million copies of “Hound Dog,” a common problem for black artists of the era. Instead, Reid accuses one of America’s greatest artists, who is overwhelmingly responsible for enriching and mainstreaming black artists in the decades to come, of only being successful because he “stole” from black people. And she mangles the facts in the process.
If I wanted to explain what’s going on here, well, one of St. Felix’s old tweets offers a startling clue. At one point, she offered her opinion that, “It’s tricknological, when white people invoke the holocaust. allows them to step out of their whiteness and slip on fake oppression [sic].” Those two sentences are more pregnant with meaning, albeit mostly unintentional, than anything published in the New Yorker in years.
But let’s just zero in on the obvious. In case you were wondering, Yakub, the black scientist from Mecca who created the white race 6,000 years ago, empowered them with science of “tricknology,” which allows them to deceive, steal ideas, and hide their true history from black people in order to oppress them. At least that’s what the Nation of Islam teaches. I don’t have any idea whether St. Felix is a serious student of the Nation of Islam or is merely invoking the concept. It’s bad enough that she’s saying Jews invoking the Holocaust is fake oppression. But if she is a disciple of Louis Farrakhan, the good news is that the NOI teaches that the reign of tricknology ended in the oddly specific year of 1914, so black people are no longer under our spell.
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