Note: To avoid any confusion, let me say up front I’m not calling for anyone to be fired. Like calling for boycotts, anything involving joining, or saving the environment — calling for people to be fired is something I don’t do.
From what I understand of the situation involving disgraced cooking queen Paula Deen, after being robbed three decades ago, she privately used the N-word. Deen has admitted to this. In depositions, she also admitted to telling jokes about gays, blacks, Jews, and “rednecks.” Everything else is hearsay involving a lawsuit and media interpretations of what is being said in the actual depositions.
So what we know is that during or after a robbery in the mid-eighties Deen said the N-word, that she tells jokes about everyone (including her own people: “rednecks”), and that the consequence of this involved two weeks of a full-blown media pile-on that resulted in her being fired by the Food Network and losing top sponsors.
Fair enough. I don’t set the rules, and I’m not defending Deen.
But if them’s the rules, them’s the rules.
Except… those aren’t the rules.
They can’t be the rules because three people probably and objectively guilty of the same or worse are still on my television almost every day of the week. Take for instance…
NBC’s Al Sharpton. If the rules are that using racial slurs in private during the Reagan years means you are hauled before the media for two weeks of public humiliation and stripped of everything you have built, what about publicly hurling anti-gay and racial slurs (“chinamen, cracker”) before a church crowd?
That is exactly what Sharpton is guilty of.
Reverend Al is on tape in 1994 saying, “White folks was in caves while we was building empires…. We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”
Sharpton also uses the N-word to describe David Dinkins.
Here is video of Al Sharpton physically threatening a “punk faggot” sometime in the eighties.
In 1991, Sharpton ginned up a mob during the Crown Height riots, attacking Jews as “diamond merchants” and saying, ” All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no coffee klatsch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’.”
That same night a mob murdered an innocent Jewish tourist.
And yet, for committing provable sins objectively worse than anything we know about Paula Deen, Al Sharpton is an NBC News anchor in good standing enjoying the prestige of a primetime weekday show on MSNBC.
Now to Alec Baldwin, the current name and face of Capitol One. If you watch television for more than an hour, you are almost guaranteed to spot one of Baldwin’s Capitol One commercials — despite reports of his hurling of racial slurs and homophobic threats as recently as this year.
In February of 2013, the New York Post reported that Baldwin was under investigation with the NYPD for a hate crime after a black Post photographer claimed she had recorded the actor calling her a “coon,” “crackhead,” and “drug dealer.” The tape ended up clearing Baldwin of that, but soon after the incident, Baldwin took to his verified Twitter account and repeatedly attacked the black photographer with the racially-tinged term “crackhead.”
Baldwin’s history of homophobia is even worse.
In 1992, about six years after Deen’s admitted use of the N-word, Baldwin called a New York horse-drawn carriage driver a “faggot.”
In 2012, the Academy Award-less actor attacked the editor-in-chief of the Daily News as a “queen.”
This year, and just days after Deen’s two-week kangaroo court before the media finally came to an end, Baldwin took to Twitter to openly threaten a gay reporter with homophobic slurs:
…tweeting that the reporter was “a toxic little queen.” Baldwin continued, “If (sic) put my foot up your f***ing ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much.”
Baldwin then called the reporter a “f***ing little bitch” several times and then just plain threatened, “I’m gonna f**k you up.”
Baldwin also called for the public to track down the reporter.
As far as I’m concerned, however, what CNN’s Nancy Grace did was far worse, because the face and star of HLN was allowed to do it on her primetime show.
Just a couple of weeks ago, about, oh, thirty-years after Deen’s private use of the N-word, Nancy Grace took to the airwaves to ridicule the Hispanic George Zimmerman as someone who enjoys a life of “driving through Taco Bell every night … having a churro”
Grace is still on the air; and as far as I know, has not been disciplined or even apologized.
Meanwhile, as Nancy Grace, Al Sharpton, and Alec Baldwin enjoy the rarefied air of facing no consequence for open, public, and provable bigotry — Deen has lost almost everything and is now an American punchline who will always be remembered as a racist.
So why was Obama-supporter Deen singled out for destruction by the media?
Well, that’s another tale of bigotry. Out of the four, Deen is the only Southerner with a Southern accent. This made it ridiculously easy for the bigoted, elite Eastern media to twist her into a caricature.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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