GOP Rent-A-Negro

I have been waiting a bit too long to get this post started. My apologies. What I want to do is comprehensively address the POV of many critics who have posted here and elsewhere with incredulity about the role of blackfolks in Republicanism and Conservatism. The popular idea floating around is that basically, the only reason blackfolks are 'drinking the koolaid' of the Republican party is because they are getting PAID. It's a myth, and so long as I don't debunk it, it grows in power and remains a convenient way for the incredulous people to be morally dismissive. I hope to debunk that myth so that it can then be called what I think it is, a lazy excuse and a lie.

There are two ways to address this. The first is to go after the premise of drinking the koolaid. That's difficult to do primarily because most blackfolks who are antagonistic towards the GOP are pitifully ignorant of it. They don't distinguish between the various factions within the Party, they don't know the differences between Bush & Reagan, they don't know the difference between Fiscal and Social conservatives, they don't distinguish between Neocons and Paleocons, and they inclined to believe that any garbage that sticks to Donald Rumsfeld for example, sticks to every black Republican. So instead of them listening to what it is we're actually saying, they're pitching whatever garbage they can dream up and saying 'what about this?'. In other words they have been educated by gibberish and they believe it enough to consider their antagonism logical and proper. Most of the time it is broadly prejudicial, flatly ignorant and quite frankly embarrassing. People who don't bother to consider the intellectual distinctions between blackfolks are pains. Likewise more often then not I am likely to ignore such people, or tell them they are full of dookie. To which they generally respond that their dookie doesn't stink as much as my dookie, the problem being they have no idea which dookie I claim, to what extent, to what ends and for what motivation. So basically, I'm not going to chase down that monkey business because it's like arguing with people who think all rap sounds the same. They're never going to get it, so to hell with them. My message to you is learn to speak in politically coherent terms and you'll get real feedback, in the meantime all of your questions sound like stupid questions to me.

The second way to address this is to refute and/or quantify what little they do understand about the business of political advocacy vis a vis the GOP's 'Message to the Black Man' as it were. This is a bit easier to do, since it generally focuses on nameable individuals, and the vicissitudes of selling out. Still there are problems. Despite that, I'll press forward on this tack - basically if and how much is the GOP in the Rent a Negro business.

Part of my predicament is that I don't know whom I'm talking to. So the first thing I would ask in this vein is, how much money do you think is a lot of money? Some people think, for example, that $10,000 is a lot of money. Others would say that's something, but not much. It really depends on one's perspective. So what I'm going to do is suggest a relative measure of influence and a somewhat false equivalence for the sake of making my point and putting things in perspective.

Let us imagine, then, that you believe that everything black conservatives & Republicans say to black America and America in general is complete and utter degenerate dog vomit. I will then conversely say that the very same is true of the entire genre of Hiphop music. In the end we will thus try to determine who gets paid more for saying what and the net effect of that verbiage on black American behavior, etc. And so we begin.

Before we get into that, let me qualify what I've set out to do in the Conservative Brotherhood. Part of the problem here is that some blackfolks are looking for a political messiah, and that I'm trying to be one. Hardly. I'm here to take care of one set of particularly troubling statistics - here from Booker Rising:

ABOUT BLACK AMERICANS - POLITICS
2004 Black Entertainment Television/CBS poll, 2002 JCPES survey, June 2003 BAMPAC poll, U.S. Census Bureau

Self-identification:
33% liberal, 40% moderate, 27% conservative

Overall party affiliation:
63% Democratic, 10% Republican, 24% independent

OK? 24% of blackfolks are not engaged in the political engines of the nation, and over half the conservative blacks out there are not affiliated with the conservative party. I happen to believe that a lot of those folks think like I do and that because of the lies out there (like this one I'm dealing with here) they are hesitant to get off the fence. If Colin Powell had run for President, I wouldn't have to do half of the work I'm doing. At the very least, it's a good thing that Bill Cosby showed up and mouthed off when he did.

So I'm not really out trying to seduce to a majority of blackfolks, and I don't care to. I'm happy to just call them wrong who are. But I am working on the fence-sitters in the ordinary course of slapping around liberals, socialists and commies. Back to the issues at hand.

I'm going to use this website as the source of facts about money primarily because it is run by people who don't like Conservatives. So it's in their interests to trump up the charges as high as it goes.

I'm just going to start with Thomas Sowell, because when I polled Conservative Brotherhood folks they said he was the most influential pundit among them. All I see here is about 72k over the past few years. That ain't much, but I'm sure he gets more from his books and from whatever stipend he gets from The Hoover Institute.

Somewhere I've read, but not in a cache available on this particular PC, that Sowell has banked a half a million or so over the past few years from Hoover and other sponsors. I think that's a reasonable figure. It ain't NBA money, but it's money.

So let's see if we can get LaShawn Barber to disclose how much money she's getting as a blogger. If she's incorporated, there's a public record somewhere. If she's not, everybody's out of luck. But I'm not going to try to lead that kind of crusade, and I don't really think any of the critics I've engaged really merit a reciprocal investigation. In otherwords, this isn't the pot calling the kettle black, this is the thimble calling the barrell full of it - the hateration of also-rans who couldn't bear the scrutiny themselves.

So far I see 72 grand. Anybody got any more facts they care to share?