By Eugene Gant
01/03/2024
So the Associated Press rode half-cocked into battle against Christopher Rufo, who is partly responsible for revealing the plagiarism that ended Claudine Gray’s presidency at Harvard. AP claimed that Rufo wrongly used “scalped” to describe his victory in removing the anti-white racial grievance peddler. Scalping was, AP reporters Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit strongly implied, another baleful atrocity of the white man, proving once again that most of the reporters in the communist Mainstream Media are, as history goes, ignoramuses. AP’s dispatch was serendipitous. I’m reading Thomas Goodrich’s Scalp Dance: Indian Warfare On The High Plains, 1865-1879.
This is not hard, folks. Scalping was a Native American Indian custom which dates back before Columbus, as shown by pre-Columbian victim skulls. It’s also, obviously, something you can do with a stone knife. European steel swords and axes took off heads. https://t.co/NiJJQTTPMx https://t.co/GkRaG60MIN pic.twitter.com/cu9yDoUWpr
— VDARE (@vdare) January 3, 2024
The original story:
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort against Gay, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.
Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage, January 3, 2024
But that link takes readers to the stealth-edited story that added a few words to the second sentence of that paragraph: “and also used by some tribes against their enemies” [AP Stealth Edits Story, Acknowledges White Colonists Weren’t Only Ones Scalping People, by Lisa Moore, The Daily Caller, January 3, 2024].
As VDARE.com noted on X, Indians were scalping each for centuries before the white man arrived not only to find Indians scalping each other, but also in the West Indies, roasting and eating babies.
For the edification of AP’s writers, who know nothing about Indians, here is Goodrich, quoting Colonel Henry Carrington, commander at Fort Phil Kearny, on the Fetterman Massacre, as recorded in wife Margaret’s Absaraka: Home of the Crows. Indian butchery went way beyond scalping:
Eyes torn out and laid on the rock; noses cut off; ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out; joints of fingers; brains taken out and placed on the rocks with other members of the body; entrails taken out and exposed; hands cut off; feet cut off; arms taken out from sockets; private parts severed and indecently placed on the person; eyes, ears, mouth, and arms penetrated with spear-heads, sticks, and arrows; ribs slashed to separation with knives; skulls severed in every form, from chin to crown; muscles of calves, thighs, stomach, breast, back, arms and cheek taken out. Punctures upon every sensitive part of the body, even to the soles of the feet and the palms of the hand. All this only approximates to the whole truth.
After the Battle of Platte Bridge in Kansas, a young lieutenant was found with “his hands and feet cut off, throat cut, heart taken out, scalped, and one hundred arrows in him,” a newspaperman reported.
Stories about white women captives are horrifying.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but here is the corpse of Sergeant Frederick Wyllyams of the 7th Cavalry after a skirmish with Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne in June 1867.
Pro-tip for AP writers: Read a book once in a while.
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