by Jon Rappoport

“The true job of a reporter is using facts to overturn reality. Things are already upside down, and his job is to show that. In his work, he has to be relentless. This inevitably leads him to publishing his own words, on his own, because entrenched press outlets are in the business of propping up the very reality he aims to expose. He can’t go to them for publication. Once he learns that, he’s launched, and his life is never the same. It improves exponentially.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

There was the time a newspaper publisher inserted his own paragraph at the top of my story, under my name, as if I wrote it. He didn’t tell me. I found out later when the paper came out. I called him up. He was clueless. To him, his intrusion meant nothing. It was my story, but it was his newspaper. I learned something. If you want your own words, and only your words, to stand, publish them yourself.

There was the time I wrote a story about a dubious drug/supplement people were selling under the counter at health food stores. I took the supplement for a week and folded my experiences into the article, which was mainly about the unfounded “scientific background” in the package insert. The editor couldn’t fathom how a story could contain “two separate threads.” He axed half my story. I learned something. If you want your own words to stand, publish them yourself.

There was the time I wrote a piece about widespread fraud in psychiatric diagnosis. The editor claimed I had employed “too much logic” and not enough “expert opinion.” He said “original research” was “out.” To no avail, I pointed out that logic was in the public domain, and therefore my “original research” could be checked. I learned something. If you want your own words to stand, publish them yourself.

An editor once told me an article I’d written criticizing a senator wouldn’t be published. My harsh criticism was valid, he said, but readers might infer that the newspaper was turning against the senator’s political party. I learned something. If you want your own words to stand, publish them yourself.

Once my career as a reporter was launched, magazine editors began contacting me with all sorts of proposed assignments. The subjects of the stories were boring, to say the least. I soon realized the editors were using those stories to fill out their no-context version of reality. I learned something. If you don’t want your words to be published, don’t submit them.

A newspaper editor once told me (paraphrasing from memory): “This story you wrote…part of the reason we don’t want to publish it is we don’t want to give it the contagion factor. If we publish it, other news outlets will pick up on it. We’re in an echo chamber. We ricochet stories back and forth. We all use the same experts to bolster our stories. So we take your controversial story and publish it, and then when the roar gets loud enough in the echo chamber, people are going to object. And we’ll be the ones they blame because we started it.”

These and other similar encounters convinced me, 25 years ago, to step away from the news business. “Somebody else” is always running things. Their quirks and agendas are corrosive. They’ve gained their positions through compromise. They know that and accept it. And then they set about forgetting it.

Now, in the “information age,” these mainstream professionals are howling about fake news; they’re burying, even deeper, their knowledge that they are the prime fakers.

“I fake it, I bury my fakery deeper and deeper, and then I scream at other people for faking it.”

These are the actions of a temperamental child. And indeed, these people are angry little children in adult bodies. Luckily, they’ve found a business that honors that grotesque configuration. They’ve found a home.

(Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed, Exit From The Matrix, and Power Outside The Matrix).

by Walter E. Williams

Just when we thought colleges could not spout loonier ideas, we have a new one from American University. They hired a professor to teach other professors to grade students based on their “labor” rather than their writing ability. The professor that American University hired to teach that nonsense is Asao B. Inoue, who is a professor at the University of Washington in Tacoma in interdisciplinary arts and sciences. He is also the director of the university’s writing center. Inoue believes that a person’s writing ability should not be assessed, in order to promote “anti-racist” objectives. Inoue taught American University’s faculty members that their previous practices of grading writing promoted white language supremacy. Inoue thinks that students should be graded on the effort they put into a project.

The idea to bring such a professor to American University, where parents and students fork over $48,459 a year in tuition charges, could not have been something thought up by saner members of its academic community. Instead, it was probably the result of deep thinking by the university’s diversity and campus life officials. Inoue’s views are not simply extreme but possibly hostile to the academic mission of most universities. Forgiving and ignoring a students’ writing ability would mostly affect black students. White students’ speaking and writing would be judged against the King’s English, defined as standard, pure or correct English grammar.

Professor Noam Chomsky, called the father of modern linguistics, formulated the generative theory of language. According to his theory, the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that is universal for all humans and that underlies the grammar of all human languages. We analyze and interpret our environment with words and sentences in a structured language. Oral and written language provides a set of rules that enables us to organize thoughts and construct logical meaning with our thoughts.

Not holding students accountable to proper grammar does a disservice to those students who overall show poor writing abilities. When or if these students graduate from college, they are not going to be evaluated in their careers by Inoue’s tailored standards. They will be judged according to their objective abilities, and it probably follows that if they fail to meet those objective standards, the standards themselves will be labeled as racist.

There’s another very dangerous bit of academic nonsense happening, this time at the K-12 level of education. One America News Network anchor interviewed Mary Clare Amselem, education specialist at the Heritage Foundation, about the California Department of Education’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum. The proposed ethnic studies curriculum would teach children that capitalism and father figures are racist.

The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum also includes gross anti-Israel bias and teaches about a Palestinian-led anti-Israel initiative called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The curriculum also has students study issues of police brutality and asks teachers to find incidents of bias by police in their own communities. According to an article by Shelby Talcott in The Stream, California’s proposed curriculum called for students to study lawmakers such as Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, both of whom have supported the BDS movement and have been accused of anti-Semitic rhetoric.

The proposed ethnic studies proposal has been removed from the California Department of Education website. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said, “While I am relieved that California made the obvious decision to revisit this wholly misguided proposal, we need to know why and how a blatantly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, factually inaccurate curriculum made its way through the ranks of California’s Department of Education.” He added, “This was not simply an oversight — the California Department of Education’s attempt to institutionalize anti-Semitism is not only discriminatory and intolerant, it’s dangerous.”

Brainwashing our youngsters is a serious matter. The people responsible for the California Department of Education’s proposal ought to be summarily fired.

(Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University).