Obama’s Neighborhood Race-Watch Program

An article of mine from the August 14, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Obama’s Neighborhood Race-Watch Program

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama is quietly moving forward with a plan to use your tax dollars to loot American suburbs in order to help Democrats and fund their corrupt big-city political machines.

The new plan from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to use federal housing policy to uproot and change American neighborhoods is part of Obama’s effort at “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Long ago Democrats declared war on the suburbs and rural areas because, among other things, they tend to be Republican strongholds.

HUD is the right vehicle for this scheme because its bureaucracy is adept at telling people how to live and where to live. It tells cities they are racially out of balance and pressures them to change their zoning to allow more “affordable housing” so communities have the politically correct mixture of economic development and racial diversity.

HUD, by the way, ought to stand for the Department of Homewrecking and Utopian Development.

Ripping apart the suburbs and throwing them back together under the guidance of central planners and bureaucrats would be done in the name of “fairness” and “diversity,” the twin obsessions that haunt the psyche of the modern leftist. Instead of letting market forces and individual choices determine where people live, these statists want to boss people around, using the heavy hand of the government to force a perverse version of economic and racial integration onto neighborhoods.

It’s not fair that some people live in nicer, safer, wealthier neighborhoods than other people, whines HUD’s far-left secretary, Shaun Donovan.

He claims there is a huge divide in the nation that could be termed “the tyranny of the ZIP code.” This specious doctrine holds that if you live in the right ZIP code, you have greater access to opportunities, and greater chances of success. Individual initiative, drive, and ingenuity don’t count, according to this line of thinking,

VIDEO: Vadum on the stupid Obama-masked rodeo clown controversy

It's beyond silly but that's the American Left nowadays. Obama zombies are freaking out over a rodeo clown wearing an Obama mask at a show at the Missouri state fair.

Here I am on Sun News Network (Canada) yesterday talking about this phony controversy:

Paul Ingrassia vs. The Green Inquisition

My article from the Aug. 2, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Paul Ingrassia vs. The Green Inquisition

By Matthew Vadum

As interest in the alleged warming of the planet wanes, the global warming inquisition is hoping to make an example of a heretical reporter whose only sin is healthy skepticism.

The enviro-Left is busy attempting to subject London-based Paul Ingrassia, an American journalist brought in by Reuters to beef up its worldwide news operation, to a digital auto-da-fé for insisting that the 2,800 journalists at the news agency at least try to provide fair and balanced accounts of the events of the day.

Ingrassia, by the way, won a Pulitzer Prize and a Gerald Loeb Award in 1993 for his news coverage of management turmoil at General Motors.

This newfound interest in objectivity at Reuters, where the word militant is still preferred over terrorist, appears to mean the agency is running fewer stories about climate change.

That’s fewer, not none. Reuters still diligently covers climate-related issues.

But that’s not good enough for those who embrace the increasingly shaky theory of anthropogenic global warming with religious zeal.

“It is just not responsible in our opinion to be cutting back on an issue that is having such a profound impact on every sector of the economy,” emoted Mindy Lubber, who runs the Ceres sustainable business network, which represents companies and investors worth more than $11 trillion in assets. 

“This is a financial risk that needs to be looked at and addressed.”

Murder and Double Standards

My article from the July 31, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Murder and Double Standards

By Matthew Vadum

Few Americans outside of Knoxville, Tenn., know about the case of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, two young people who were kidnapped, savagely assaulted, raped, and murdered by people of a different race.

If Christian and Newsom had been black, and they had been raped, tortured, and murdered by a group of white people, the victims’ names would be painfully seared into the national psyche by the media’s saturation coverage of the atrocities and their aftermath.

The reason the case attracted so little media attention was because Christian and Newsom were white. All of their attackers were black. Somehow investigators concluded that racial hostility was not a factor in the crimes.

“If this wasn’t a hate crime, then I don’t know how you would define a hate crime,” said Newsom’s mother Mary. “It may have started out as a carjacking, but what it developed into was blacks hating whites. To do the things they did, they would have to hate them to do that.”

It’s worth looking back at this case now to see what we can learn from it. Two weeks after so-called white Hispanic George Zimmerman was found not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, there is still no end in sight to the self-righteous pontifications of leftists, politicians, race industry profiteers, and the mainstream media.

They all want us to have a national conversation on race. They’ve been pushing this notion for decades, even though race is discussed all the time everywhere in American society. Even though incidents of race-based discrimination have become almost as rare as four-leaf clovers in recent decades, we are constantly told minorities are little better off now than they were during the era of Jim Crow.

Violent crimes involving persons of different races or ethnic backgrounds tend to become national news only when the victim is a member of a minority group. This is because the radical left-wingers who serve as cultural gatekeepers don’t like to give oxygen to stories that challenge their preconceived, politically correct notions of how society works.