Lawsuits by losing Congressional candidates, cont’d

A former Congressional candidate in Westchester County, N.Y. is suing 16 reporters, writers, campaign officials and others for $1 million apiece, saying they unfairly portrayed him as racist. Jim Russell ran unsuccessfully in the Nineteenth Congressional District against Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), one of those named in his suit; he came under heavy criticism during the campaign over his 2001 authorship of a 16-page article in a publication called the Occidental Quarterly. [White Plains, N.Y. Journal-News] Last week we noted a lawsuit by a losing Congressional incumbent in Ohio.

9 Comments

  • Good.
    I think journalists who tar politicians they don’t like should be sued.
    In this society we give journalists special rights normal people don’t have (e.g., shield laws, etc.) an I have not seen them give back to the public, especially in the age of blogs.
    Impose a duty of honest reporting on the journalists and sue them for in-kind campaign contributions.
    .
    They want to pretend to be the ethical elite of our society, hold them to those standards.

  • PC runs deep, especially among the professional scribblers, and I’m sure their coverage of him was quite dishonest since nearly all MSM coverage of racial issues is dishonest.

    Here’s a link to his paper: http://www.toqonline.com/archives/v1n2/TOQv1n2Russell.pdf

  • It is certainly unfortunate that the nomenclature does not allow for much room on the issue of race: you are either “acceptable” or “racist”, and qualifying as “acceptable” requires you to deny any inherent group differences, save perhaps skin color and hair type.

    If you adhere to the Bell Curve notion on race and intelligence, you are indeed a “racist”, according to the media. And there is no question that The Occidental Quarterly publishes articles taking that position. (As uncomfortable as the notion is, I find it extremely difficult to disregard the data amassed showing a link between race and intelligence.)

    Yet “racist” has the most sinister hiss to it, implying “an uninformed, unintelligent person of the lowest moral character bent on the genocide of all non-whites.” Does this really describe Charles Murray, J. Philippe Rushton or Richard Lynn?

    Jared Taylor likes the term “race realist” to describe such beliefs.

    It’s also unfair that one cannot be a white racial partisan without being called a “racist” or “white supremacist”… but that a black racial partisan not only escapes those terms but is called by the media a “civil rights activist.” This is just insane.

    As American whites slip into the minority, the need for a more accurate terminology will only become more pressing. My resolution would be for candidates to settle on a term for themselves, and for journalists to respect it.

  • So the guy writes a paper expounding a racist (oh sorry, I guess you would prefer “racialist”) philospophy for a racist organization, and journalists are at fault for pointing this out?

    The author chooses to emphasize on his own another’s thought that human evolution may be over due to miscegenation. Nothing untoward there. And hey, who doesn’t believe in eugenics.

    Hard to pick the winning statement from this piece but this one is up there:
    “The many excellent Madonnas painted during this period may also indicate a racially healthy celebration of fertility.”

    (As a brief aside, Philo Farnsworth an unknown?)

  • ” a black racial partisan not only escapes those terms but is called by the media a “civil rights activist.” This is just insane.”

    Don’t be so hard on yourself, it’s not insane – you have probably just forgotten that among others louis Farrakhan, Elijah Muhammed and Reverend Wright are referred to as racists

  • But when people call Farrakhan or Wright a “racist”, nobody really takes it seriously. It just sounds like frustrated right-wingers corking off about racial double standards. It may be entirely true, of course. But it doesn’t meet the libel standard of lowering a person in the estimation of the community. Calling Al Sharpton a “racist” is like pelting him with cooked rice.

    When a white person is attacked as a “racist”, it does hit. It’s the equivalent of shooting him with big-game sized rounds. You can wound and you can kill.

  • Unfortunately we may not talk honestly about racial differences, esp. IQ differences. And to talk candidly about Jews or Israel is to risk being labeled an anti-Semite. Mr. Russell from what I have read has been unfairly maligned by the media. I hope that he wins his case.

  • As to racism charges, another difference between the African-American community and the white community is the perception within those respective communities as to the accusations. When an African-American is called “racist” it raises his or her status in that community as someone who is standing up for the interests of their own community. It is an honor in the black community to be called a racist – particularly by a white.

    In the white community it is a death knell.

    I would suggest that there are some interests in the white community for which advocates are needed. Before “racist” should be used and certainly before it sticks, the nature of the charge should be weighed.

    There are just black interests; there are just white interests. Abuse simply shuts down discussion of those interests.

    If you have a crude, hateful attack on any group that can be called racist. If not, it is simply abuse by the accuser.

  • This is just ridiculous, that the media gets to say whatever it wants. I lived in this district at the time, and it was so transparently obvious that this was just a way to distract from Lowey’s awful record.

    The media operates just as a free publicity mouthpiece for the establishment. Who cares whatever Russell wrote a decade ago, what matters are his policies now. It’s just continual ‘gotcha’ journalism against those who threaten the establishment, and never any critical inquiry into those who serve its ends.

    Even if Russell was the worst of what they said about him, that he had a divergent ‘racist’ beliefs, would it really be the end of the Republic if he’s allowed to make a rational case to the electorate and win an election? He’d be one Rep. out of 435. Don’t we pride ourselves on diversity of opinions? On testing every idea with divergent thoughts?

    Lowey supports every destructive idea to society and Russell has, at worst, antiquated intellectual positions, and this is what the media focuses on?

    In sum I guess I just hate the media and the games they continually play with elections, attacking ‘conservatives’ and those who represent real threats to the establishment.