I stand with the Santa Barbara News-Press. How about you?
The newspaper is under fire for refusing to kowtow to left-wing word police and militant propagandists who demand unfettered illegal immigration. Last week, in the wake of angry protests against the publication, vandals threw paint bombs and spray-painted graffiti on its offices.
So, what exactly is the News-Press' unforgivable crime? Calling illegal aliens "illegals" in a headline for a story about illegal aliens descending on California DMVs. A new law went into effect last Friday allowing illegal aliens to obtain driver's licenses without proof of lawful residence. The article featured interviews with ecstatic illegal aliens, including one who has been in the country illegally for "22 years."
Latina magazine called the News-Press headline -- "Illegals line up for driver's licenses" -- the "most offensive headline against undocumented immigrants ever." Hyperbole much? Ethnic agitators from a group called "People Organized for the Defense and Equal Rights of Santa Barbara Youth (PODER)" condemned the paper as "blatantly racist," demanding that the paper adhere to the slanted guidelines of the Associated Press or face a boycott.
The blatantly biased AP rules advise journalists to abandon the concise terms "illegal," "illegal alien" or "illegal immigrant" in favor of the wordy, whitewashed "'living in' or 'entering a country illegally' or 'without legal permission.'" Illegal aliens with Obama amnesty cards are now people with "temporary resident status" -- blatantly blurring the distinction between legal foreign visitors who legally applied for and received legal temporary status and illegal border-crossers, illegal deportation evaders and illegal visa overstayers who successfully won the political illegal alien amnesty lottery by playing the waiting game.
Because references to the rule of law are considered oppressively racist/colonialist/imperialist, social justice mobsters are pushing the term "undocumented" on media coddlers. But it is patently absurd to force a newspaper in the name of "accuracy" and "objectivity" to call illegal aliens queuing up for government-issued documents "undocumented."
These "undocumented" aliens, now eligible for state driver's licenses, federal work authorization permits, in-state college discounts, bank accounts, taxpayer identification numbers and birth certificates issued by Mexican consular offices on government soil, are the (SET ITAL) most (END ITAL) documented aliens in American history.
News-Press publisher Wendy McCaw told me this week that the free speech-stifling thugs "have threatened to return on January 19 to deliver a petition and stage another protest against us if we do not offer a retraction by 3 p.m. that day." McCaw vows she will not bend to the ultimatum or any other -- and she has a track record to prove her toughness.
McCaw has defied the progressive forces of political correctness for years in previous First Amendment battles over whom she should hire and how she should run her newspaper. Radical elements in her community and industry have long held a grudge against her and her paper for resisting union pressure and refusing to conform to left-wing orthodoxy.
And boy, do these people know how to hold grudges.
In addition to the paint bombs, unhinged mau-mau-ers spray-painted a radical Reconquista slogan on the News-Press building: "The border is illegal, not the people who cross it."
Yes, they're still trying to re-fight the Mexican-American War of 1848 and re-litigate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. No surprise. Santa Barbara has been a longstanding hotbed of tribal grievance politics. In the late 1960s, liberal Latinos at the University of California at Santa Barbara unveiled El Plan de Aztlan, which states:
"We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent. Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner 'gabacho' who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture."
The Aztlan plan birthed Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) -- an identity politics indoctrination machine on publicly subsidized college and high school campuses nationwide whose members have rioted in Los Angeles and editorialized that federal immigration "pigs should be killed, every single one" in San Diego.
As I've reported previously, the MEChA Constitution calls on members to "promote Chicanismo within the community, politicizing our Raza (race) with an emphasis on indigenous consciousness to continue the struggle for the self-determination of the Chicano people for the purpose of liberating Aztlan." "Aztlan" is the group's term for the vast southwestern U.S. expanse, from parts of Washington and Oregon down to California and Arizona and over to Texas, which MEChA claims to be a mythical homeland and seeks to reconquer for Mexico.
MEChA's symbol is an eagle clutching a dynamite stick and a machete-like weapon in its claws; its motto is "Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada." Translation: For the Race, everything. For those outside the Race, nothing."
Tell me who the racists are again.
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