04/23/2014
From: Ryan Kennedy
At the end of March, I wrote a letter about a local politician named Don Smith running for school-board who had some frank things to say about my town Anchorage’s increasingly non-white demographics and the problems this creates for our school district which is now 55% non-white.
Well the election results are in and Smith lost with about 42% of the vote. This is not bad given the hand he was playing. His incumbent opponent had an impressive resume and more importantly, he had loads on union money to spend.
It’s hard to overstate how important that is in school board races here. Each school board candidate is elected at-large by Anchorage as a whole. This is in contrast to Assembly candidates who are elected district by district. This makes it all but impossible for an energetic dissident to walk the district and win an insurgent campaign. The result is the school board is totally dominated by union-backed candidates and serves as a sort of incubator for Democratic candidates seeking to burnish their resumes with elected office positions and gain name recognition. It’s quite amazing Smith previously held a seat on the school board from 2010 to 2013.
Amazingly, Smith’s comments on refugees and increasingly non-white demographics gained national attention, fleeting though it was. The WaPo had an online story on it. [Anchorage school board candidate: Immigration is behind school problems, By Niraj Chokshi, March 28, 2014]
Wy would a brief comment from an elderly candidate for a minor local public office in a small state in a little-watched public media interview make it worthy of national attention? I have come to the conclusion that this is so because what he said is true. And everyone knows it’s true but no one running for office ever dares mention the problems this “diversity” brings with it. And when someone does, it’s literally national news. It’s truly a case of the emperor’s cloths. People are truly stunned by this kind of statement of obvious fact
Of course the usual suspects are aghast. Scathing op-eds were written and blogs and comments sections were choked with angry condemnation. Yet Smith did manage to win 42% of the vote of Alaska’s largest city. Many serious and well-funded candidates have run here in city-wide elections and not achieved this. But Smith did.
The great and the good were so mortified by this they had to hold a public rally. You see, for immigration enthusiasts and diversity-mongers winning elections is not good enough. All dissenting voices to their state-ideology must be publicly denounced and vilified lest anyone else think they can challenge state mythology.
To his credit, Smith issued no groveling apologies or “clarifications”. VDARE.com readers all know how pointless that is. It acts like blood in the water for sharks. The cultural-Marxists see these kinds of apologies for what they are: displays of fear and weakness. No, Smith gave no apologies, commendably he has re-iterated his comments and attacked his critics. It’s almost as if he reads VDARE.com! Hmmmmm
Less admirable was Mayor Sullivan’s behavior during the post-election diversity pow-wow. Of course, the main aspect of his bad behavior was that he was even there. It was really silly, they all stood behind a banner with platitudes to diversity that looked like something Steve Sailer would parody.
Following 'unfortunate rhetoric' Anchorage leaders gather to celebrate diversity, By Nathaniel Herz, Anchorage Daily News, April 4, 2014
Sullivan is there standing front and center. He looks less than happy there among people I’m sure he doesn’t see much at his victory parties when he wins elections. He is a rock-ribbed Republican with a conservative record to match. The last few years he has bravely fought public-sector unions and on the cultural-war front, vetoed an ordinance that would have banned discrimination against homosexuals (ordinarily I would have used the word “gay” but lately the usual suspects say they find the word “homosexual” offensive). After the recent election he chided a fellow conservative who just lost a bid for re-election because of his back-pedaling on his crusade against public unions. He criticized him for betraying his base for no effect.
All certainly true, but now we see him betraying not just his base, but his country by attending an event celebrating America’s transformation into the Third World mess. Essentially he does the same thing he criticized his fellow conservative for: he alienates his base while gaining himself no friends. You can see that in the comments section of the story. Bile-spewing leftists call him a phony and a “racist” who doesn’t want to admit it. My favorite comment was one calling him an “uptown Klansman” (Sullivan is from a prominent political family). The fact that he’s married to a woman of mixed ancestry (she’s from Hawaii) does him no good, they’re sure he’s rabid Klansman aching to drop his pretense.
Then why did Sullivan attend this event? Again, I think I know the answer. Sullivan is an ambitious pol who intends to run for Governor in 2017. He was likely asked to attend the event and felt he couldn’t say no lest the cultural-Marxists bay for his blood about this at every turn. In this instance Sullivan is playing out Brimelow’s paraphrasing of Trotsky, he is not very interested in immigration, but immigration is interested in him.
It’s interesting to see various phenomena described by VDARE.com over the years play out in real life as if scripted by a lesser Tom Wolfe.
See previous letters from Ryan Kennedy.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.