Bo Sears shares his thoughts on cock-Asians: In our last post, we described the nut-picking Joan Walsh did in order to drive a bogus claim about what “the right wing” was saying.
In her column about the Sirota piece, Walsh referred to “conservatives’ insistence [that] the Tsarnaevs are absolutely not white.” In fact, very few people have said any such thing on any end of the spectrum.
Major conservatives have said various things which ought to be criticized or challenged. But truly, they weren’t saying that.
Essentially, Walsh invented that claim, then did some nut-picking to drive it along. How bad did her nut-picking get before she finished her column?
This bad! Walsh found the nation’s craziest man, then wasted our time with his thoughts about cock-Asians:
WALSH (4/22/13): So conservatives’ insistence the Tsarnaevs are absolutely not white is curious, to say the least.“Interesting enough,” Walsh said. If God was all-powerful and all-good, would Salon feature nonsense like this?
Coincidentally or not, this weekend I got an email from Bo Sears, the head of Resisting Defamation, a conservative organization lobbying for the rights of white Americans as a “diverse demographic affinity group,” with the subject line “No to Caucasian.” Sears wrote:
Now that the diverse white American peoples are becoming a minority in many states, counties, and cities, we wanted to let you know that we have the right to name and label ourselves. And we don’t like being called a word that sounds like “cock-Asian.”
It would be easier to take Sears’ request seriously if he wasn’t appearing to take offense at the “Asian” part of Caucasian (with the kind of juvenile reference to “cock,” which had frankly never occurred to me), and also if he wasn’t regularly complaining about an “anti-white narrative” in the mainstream media and calling me personally an anti-white racist. But I wrote him back to ask what he thought whites should be called, whether he sent his broadside against the term “Caucasian” because of the Tsarnaevs, and whether considered the Tsarnaevs “white.” He answered:
We are far too small an organization to attempt to speak affirmatively about a precise name & label for the diverse white American demographic affinity group..no, we’ve been working on the anti-Cock-Asian message in that email for a couple of weeks. Purely coincidence…based on an upsurge here and there to smother our diversity and nationality with “Cock-Asian.”...To answer your question: the only people who could say that the brothers Tsarnaev were among the diverse white American people would be the Tsarnaevs. You don’t quite understand that Resisting Defamation is not in the border-drawing, definition-making business...we merely resist the campaign of hate speech that we see coming at us.
Interesting enough. But Sears also included a long exegesis of what it meant that that Tamarlan Tsarnaev had the name of the bloody 15th century central Asian-Muslim warlord Tamerlane, which he said was akin “to naming an American child ‘Stalin-Mao-Hitler.” Which seemed to indicate he considered the Tsarnaevs more Asian, or maybe “Cock-Asian,” than good old fashioned American white.
As you can see, Sears may be the craziest person on earth. In part for that reason, he isn’t an important figure in our national discourse. Wikipedia hasn’t even heard of Brother Sears!
But when it comes to matters of race, Walsh can’t seem to help herself. She finds herself drawn to the nuttiest people to no apparent good end. In this case, she led us through one gentleman’s thoughts about the term, cock-Asian.
As Walsh went on and on with this crap, the claims of major conservative players were going unchallenged, uncriticized. On the bright side, we liberals got to learn that we’re less crazy than Sears.
(To cite the old Carol Leifer joke: How far down the evolutionary scale do we have to go to prove we're smarter than someone? Leifer referred to the practice of fooling dogs by pretending to throw a ball.)
As she pondered Sirota’s column, Walsh cited her craziest e-mails, then wasted everyone’s time quoting Sears. This is nut-picking at its worst.
Is this what we want from Salon?
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