Who Is Jerome Corsi?

Saturday evening, June 15, 2019:

I’ll be 85 late this coming summer.  I was born curious to a fault some friends might say.   I was a child born into the Great Depression,  into a limited income but new St. Paul Minnesota neighborhood of God fearing Judeo-Christian citizens who practiced in life what was preached on Sundays.   By my second grade of schooling I could read all about the World War our America had entered in newspapers, but had trouble handling school books.   I got a world atlas and world globe and a  handful of lead soldiers for Christmas in 1941 to help me understand the war effort better.

Most of my very best teachers until college were old maids, super well educated,  and blessed by loving the subjects of their domain, both students and topics of study.

Thank God I could read maps and encyclopedias.  By third grade I could draw a map of the United States with all 48 states by memory.   I knew our state and the world capitals too.  I loved learning about the world…..but, I could never learn to read novels.

My first career was teaching Russian and Social Studies to high schoolers from 1960 to 1972.  Minneapolis School Superintendent, Harvard’s John Davis, and Assistant Superintendent,  Yale’s Nathaniel Ober    fired me in 1971 allegedly for “not filling out a form properly”.   I was required to ignore the guns certain colored boys age 13 and 14 were bringing to school to stir up trouble bullying and robbing.

Nevertheless, I own hundreds of books and more hundreds of pamphlets; history from the Greeks, Romans, and Aztecs to today,  school readers from the 1870s,  biographies, and have often traveled  to Europe and twice to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics……the place where fascist socialist  Democrat candidate, Bernie Sanders, spent his Communist honeymoon…..the guy who is selling himself as a typical American Democrat Presidential candidate.

I have been a landscape gardener since I was about ten.   I created and still manage a half an acre of a beautiful landscape garden where I have lived the past 45 years.   We in Minnesota had a rough snowy wet winter and spring just passed.   Floods!  I have spent six weeks, around 250 hours, mulching,  struggling to salvage and repair the damage done.   A light drizzle returned early afternoon and sent me indoors to relax with something television,  and found a Jerome Corsi lecturing on CSpan 2.

He had written a volume called:  “SILENT NO MORE:  How I Became A Political Prisoner of Mueller’s Witch Hunts!”

He had been a victim of zombie FBI and CIA innuendo lefty man, the devious Robert Mueller, in similar fashion as had President Donald J. Trump.

I’ve kept abreast of the lies and fascistic attacks today’s Dems have thrust upon President Trump.   Jerome Corsi appeared to be a very  literate, persuasive,  articulate, seemingly honest in his self defense.  He had recently published a book about the Mueller “Deep State” attacks he personally had to handle.

Why hadn’t I heard of him until now?  He was so articulate and rational!   I turned to the Leftist controlled internet  and found the following fascistic advertisement:

“Jerome Corsi (1946–) is a nutty right-wing political commentator, currently serving as the head of the InfoWars branch in Washington D.C. He was formerly a senior columnist for WorldNutDaily.

Despite getting a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard,^[1] his modus operandi is to cash in on the fringe wingnut conspiracy theory du jour by giving it a veneer of legitimacy. Some of his more infamous works include:

• Unfit for Command with John O’Neill — Swiftboating John Kerry.^[2]
• Black Gold Stranglehold with Craig R. Smith — Abiotic oil.^[3]
• The Late Great USA — North American Union, NAFTA Superhighway, and Amero conspiracy theories.^[4]
• The Obama Nation — “an innuendo-filled, mistake-riddled biography”^[5]
• Where’s the Birth Certificate? — Birtherism, obviously.^[6]

Corsi is also the author of the novel The Shroud Codex, about the Shroud of Turin.^[7] It’s full of blatant errors that make it look like it was never proof-read after he finished writing it. He also declared that Barack Obama was married to his male Pakistani roommate(!) before he married Michelle, which must set some record for combined unsubstantiated wingnuttery and homophobia in a single conspiracy theory.^[8] And just like most conspiracy memes of this kind, the gauntlet got picked up by at least one fellow nutter (Scott Lively, no less) who was also dumb enough to think that it was a perfectly valid argument.^[9] Most recently he has appeared on King-of-The-Crazies Alex Jones‘ Infowars program and claimed that Hillary Clinton was in a secret-M00slim–Lesbian relationship with her aide Huma Abedin.^[10]

Corsi is also convinced that proof of Obama’s Kenyan citizenship can be demonstrated by the fact that there was a photo of him on a Kenyan calendar from 2005 when Obama was still a Senator from Illinois.^[11] With standards of evidence like that, there’s every indication that he’s in a competition with Joe Arpaio for the 2012 Booby Prize in late-period Birther silliness.

Basically, Corsi is useful as a benchmark or barometer for current fashions of conspiracy theory and crankery. If Corsi writes on it, it’s hot on the fringe. Think of him as a device powered by crank magnetism.

In 2018, Corsi was subpoenaed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump-Russia connection, apparently in regard to Corsi’s association with Roger Stone.^[12] On January 25, 2019, Stone was arrested and charged by Mueller’s team with obstruction of proceedings, making false statements, and witness tampering.^[13] That same day, Corsi and Randy Credico, another Stone associate, indicated a willingness to testify against Stone in court.^[14]”

I’ll buy the book this coming Monday!  ghr

OBERLIN: Where Feminist Fascists Run Amok!

WILL OBERLIN LEARN ITS LESSON?

by  Steven Hayward  at PowerLine:

Short answer: No, they won’t.

Longer answer: Check out the dean of students (and also assistant to the president for equity, diversity, and inclusion!) Meredith Raimondo, who was near the center of the Gibson’s Bakery case for collaborating with students to harass Gibson’s Bakery.

Raimondo came to the deanship from Oberlin’s department of “Comparative American Studies,” which, Oberlin’s website informs us, was “newly formed” around 2003. I’ll bet it was “newly formed.” That ought to be the first red flag. What is comparative American studies? I suspect at Oberlin it means comparing the United States to Nazi Germany and finding the U.S. coming out the worse. Here’s part of the description from the department’s website:

The department invites students to consider the relationship of different communities to both the nation-state and to each other, ranging from issues of settler colonialism and empire building to social justice movements. Courses investigate power and agency through analysis of intersecting structures of race, gender, class, sexuality, ability and citizenship.

Here’s a list of four “sample courses” from the department’s website:

Sorry—I should have warned readers that it was more of a stool sample of courses.

I tried to see if I could find any syllabi from Raimondo’s courses online, but had no luck. Her Oberlin bio merely states, “She has taught courses spanning the themes of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity studies, social justice, and HIV/AIDS.”

According to a 2016 report in The Tower, Raimondo appears to traffic in the anti-Semitism fashionable at places like Oberlin these days:

According to several online syllabi, Raimondo’s classes feature readings from academics including Joseph Massad, Lisa Duggan, Judith Butler, and Jasbir Puar. As Andrew Pessin indicated in The Algemeiner, all of these academics have previously been accused of espousing views that are intolerant of Israel and Jews. . .

The syllabus [note: this link is dead] for Raimondo’s 2013 seminar on “Transnational Sexualities” included a paper by Puar titled “Citation and Censorship: The Politics of Talking About the Sexual Politics of Israel.” Puar’s piece, which she presented at a German university in 2010, calls Israel a “not only racist, but also, apartheid state,” and features critiques of what she calls Israel’s practice of “pinkwashing,” its ostensible efforts to distract from “its repressive actions toward Palestine” by emphasizing its progressive policies towards LGBTQ individuals. The paper concludes with a reflection on “the ways in which accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ function in academic and activist contexts to suppress critiques of the implicit nationalism within Israeli sexual politics.”

But wait! There’s more!

As co-chairwoman of a task force charged with revamping Oberlin’s Sexual Offense Resource Guide, Raimondo helped draft an extensive, non-mandatory policy in 2014 that called on faculty use trigger warnings in their lessons.

“Anything could be a trigger—a smell, song, scene, phrase, place, person, and so on,” the guide read. “Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might cause trauma. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism and other issues of privilege and oppression.” It also instructed professors to “Remove triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals.”

As long as this kind of ideological pedagogy permeates the Oberlin curriculum, they won’t learn a thing. Make them pay every penny of the punitive damages. Then set up a table selling donuts just off campus.

UPDATE: One of our favorite Saturday TWiP meme suppliers sends this.

Training America’s Future Begin’s at Home

Conservative Californian, Lisa Rich, sent the following notice: