For those of you who are bored with this topic already, my apologies in advance – and I’m hopeful this will be the last foray into the swamp of Lamar White and his accusations of bigotry, at least for a while.

But we’re making this foray because there were some developments over the weekend.

On Thursday, our readers will remember, we discovered a post White wrote on his website accusing us of bigotry…

PS: Thanks to the vapid idiot who runs the website The Hayride for inspiring this post. You and your website contribute nothing of substance to our political discourse, nothing. If anything, considering your posts about the President not having a “drop of slave blood,” you are corrosive, and often, your website is nothing more than thinly-veiled bigotry. 1951 may be comfortable, but most of us prefer to live in 2012.

We responded to that libelous bilge by noting that no posts on this site ever referenced a “drop of slave blood” – that was, in fact, something which appeared at the Louisiana Conservative blog back in 2008, prior to the inception of this site. We demanded an apology from White for his failed attribution, and we took issue with his characterization of this site as bigoted – seeing as though he offered absolutely no justification for such an attack outside of blaming us for something another site published. What we did say was that there is a cultural problem in the black community, but that culture isn’t race. More on that later.

His reaction? First, on Twitter…

Then he went on his site and offered this…

Update: Correction: The Hayride did not publish the article titled “Not a Drop of Slave Blood;” LouisianaConservative.com did. I apologize to my readers for the mistake.

Apologized to his readers, you’ll note. That’s not an accident, though on the surface it seems rather sloppy since he didn’t libel his readers.

We did two things as a result of this.

First, I took on his unsubstantiated and rather cowardly attack, in which he hides behind his “opinion” to accuse us of bigotry, by illustrating how absurd his statements are. I said this…

The problem is, there is no difference in this context whether he says we do racism here, or bigotry. What he’s trying to say is that we’re not allowed to depart from his ideological position without getting tarred for it. And he’s hiding behind saying “it’s my opinion.”

Well, OK. In my opinion, just looking at his picture, this guy could be a child molester.

See how this works? I didn’t REALLY call him a child molester, I said he looks like he could be one. And anyway it’s my opinion – I’m entitled to it. Besides, aren’t most felons Democrats? THAT I can back up with facts. He’s a Democrat, and he certainly looks sketchy enough, so you can draw your own conclusions.

For the record, I’m not accusing Lamar White of molesting children. I’m showing how easy it is to slime somebody while saying “well, that’s my opinion” without having any substance behind the slime. He attempted to construct some after the fact, and we’ll delve into that in a moment.

Anyway, the other thing we did was to have our attorney write him a friendly letter explaining to him that he would NOT be sued, but letting him know that libeling us as he did last week is beyond the pale and that we’d prefer he not do it again.

We used the term “healthy political debate” intentionally, because there is a wider issue here which flew directly over White’s head – and that’s why we’re taking another swing at this issue.

Because after he realized he’d whiffed on his attempt to back up an accusation of bigotry on our part by misattributing something from the Louisiana Conservative blog to us, he latched onto our reference to cultural problems within the black community as proof of his original statement.

Which wasn’t much of a surprise, though it’s hardly legitimate…

Our response last week, which we’ll expand upon below…

He then makes a “correction” on his website intended to inflame the situation, and then suggests that when we addressed this topic in our initial post by saying culture isn’t race and there’s a cultural problem in the black community – which is a statement such wild-eyed skinheads as Bill Cosby have consistently trumpeted as well, and oh-by-the-way some of the same cultural problems which have ravaged black America are doing the exact same thing to other ethnic communities in this country as well, which is why we’re saying it’s about culture rather than race – he latches onto that statement and calls it bigotry.

Can there be any question of alternative cultures in America producing disparate results? It would seem that’s a rather uncontroversial observation – White’s warblings notwithstanding.

There is a distinct American culture. It has a few major, pervasive elements.

• Work ethic
• Entrepreneurship
• Resourcefulness/inventiveness
• Self-improvement
• Individualism
• Religion
• The nuclear family
• A qualified respect for authority, and an unqualified respect for the law
• Conflict resolution through nonviolence, though not to the point of suicide

That culture manifests itself in film, on TV, in music, in how our politicians present themselves and innumerable other ways.

But there are alternative cultures present in this country. And one of them is the hip-hop/gangsta culture which, as we said, is ravaging the black community but is by no means limited to that community. If you combined the adherents to the gangsta culture among the non-black ethnicities in America it wouldn’t be a surprise to find there are just as many whites and Hispanics in gross numbers as blacks who are influenced by it or using it as a lifestyle in some form or fashion. This isn’t just about a certain kind of music, though gangsta rap has been the primary medium through which the larger culture has been spread.

And it has some major elements as well.

• Disrespect for the law
• Alcoholism and drug abuse as a lifestyle
• Misogyny
• Hatred of gays and certain ethnic groups – Jews and Koreans being the most notable victims
• Hostility to education
• Abandonment of fatherhood
• Conflict resolution through violence, the more extreme the better

We’re not saying all black people have chosen the gangsta culture. Far from it – there is a black middle class in this country which has risen largely because its members have rejected that culture and embraced the mainstream American culture instead. And like we mentioned, that culture has claimed people of other ethnicities, perhaps in numbers equal to or surpassing those of the black community.

But it’s clear that the highest concentrations of that culture may be found within the black community. If White wishes to, he can see evidence of it by driving through the southern parts of Dallas, where he’s in law school…

(Editor’s Note: we could have embedded videos from the southern parts of Dallas far more on point with destructive hip-hop culture than this, but couldn’t find one without a profligation of F-bombs in it.)

…but it can be found in lots of places, like Central City New Orleans, North Baton Rouge, the South Bronx, South Central Los Angeles, Chicago’s South Side, East St. Louis, Liberty City in Miami.

Is it legitimate to say that if you’re immersed in the hip-hop gangsta culture you embrace all of its attributes? No. People are capable of picking and choosing, and just because you might like rap music or wear your trousers well below the waist it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll be knocking over liquor stores or squeezing out illegitimate children. And at this point, though an exploration of it would best be attempted in another post altogether, we should note that cultural phenomena and lifestyles which have emanated out of the black community aren’t universally negative. Jazz, for example, came out of the black community a century ago and it was instrumental in shaking America out of the stodgy and oppressive Victorian culture from which Progressive idiocies like Prohibition and eugenics had spawned.

But there are certain behaviors which seem to be more prevalent in communities where the hip-hop culture is dominant – and those behaviors constitute a lower standard than what’s needed for a self-reliant, responsible existence.

Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp said it for decades, but Rick Santorum resurrected it back in January by citing a Brookings Institution study which said there were three things individuals could do to insure they’d avoid poverty in America.

Those three things?

1. Graduating from high school.

2. Waiting to get married until after 21 and not having children without being married.

3. Having a full-time job.

Brookings says if you can do those three things your chance of living in poverty is just two percent. Your chance of being middle class is 74 percent. Meaning that to follow those three rules – which I’d interpret as buying into the mainstream American culture – will make you more successful than not following them.

Ask yourself this – does the lifestyle the hip-hop culture inspires conform with those three behavioral requirements?

And is it bigotry to say that choosing the hip-hop culture, which too many in the black community have done, constitutes a choice of inferiority of result?

To White, it appears the answer is yes. From his latest post…

It was an honest mistake, though, to be clear, I take total responsibility for not double-checking the reference. The Hayride has published and promoted a series of articles that would have illustrated the same point I was making: That, in my opinion, it often promotes a corrosive agenda, that its writers are prone to promulgating far-right, radical conspiracy theories about their political foes, and that it sometimes advances a subtle but pernicious notion of cultural hegemony, which (personally) I find to be bigoted.

We’ve noted that the Left likes to accuse those with whom it disagrees of all kinds of things. And since we’ve found very little at White’s site which departs from Democrat boilerplate, we can use him as a typical example of what you’ll get when arguing with a lefty.

The favorite smear of the Left, as we all know, is to accuse those who disagree with its construct of America as a fundamentally and pervasively racist country and the condition of black Americans as unimprovable without government aid as racists and bigots. And no matter how those of us who reject that construct might mention a Bill Cosby, a J.C. Watts, an Allen West, a Thomas Sowell, a Walter Williams or a Shelby Steele – all of whom are prominent blacks who have expressed a similar critique – we’re still bigots.

White gave us a nice glimpse of the smear with a line we didn’t address initially…

1951 may be comfortable, but most of us prefer to live in 2012.

This, of course, was launched in an effort to equate the contributors of the Hayride with the proprietors of the Jim Crow South in the 1950’s and 1960’s. At least, it’s our assumption that’s what White was driving at; nothing in particular occurred in 1951 which would distinguish it from any other year in that era.

And it must be remembered that the proprietors of the Jim Crow South were not Republicans, as the contributors of this site overwhelmingly are, but Democrats like Lamar White is. After all, the Republican Party was created by people who wanted to end human bondage based on race.

In fact, it was Republicans who spearheaded the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960, over the opposition and in fact filibuster of people who were Democrats like Lamar White is. That’s also true of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was passed with overwhelming Republican support over the opposition of people who were Democrats like Lamar White is. One of those rejectionist Democrats was Lyndon Johnson, who switched sides on the issue as president and pushed the 1964 CRA through for a specific reason – namely “That’ll keep the n*ggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.”

We don’t agree with all that much that Ron Paul says, but one quote of his was exactly correct – namely, that racism is collectivism. We believe in the individual, and we believe individuals can achieve whatever they’re willing to work for.

Democrats like Lamar White is don’t seem to believe that. They went from propping up the Jim Crow South – and let’s not forget that the Ku Klux Klan was an instrument of people who were Democrats like Lamar White is to intimidate Republicans in the South going back to the 19th century but continuing into the 20th – to insisting upon foisting government-provided subsistence upon communities freed from the shackles of institutional racism. Fifty years on, we see no net decrease in poverty among those communities, but we do see a 90-percent Democrat voting record. Just like LBJ expected.

Which is why people like West call it a “Democratic Plantation” that folks who share a party affiliation with White have crafted.

These are inconvenient facts, and likely facts White isn’t interested in exploring. He’d rather just call us racists and bigots and hide behind a statement that it’s his opinion that’s what we are – no matter how he may struggle to substantiate such irresponsible and poisonous claims.

That being the case, we can dismiss him as just another left-wing hack – and hope that when he’s done with law school in Texas he stays there. The people of Louisiana have been exposed to people like White for decades and decades, and it’s clear the trend is to reject them. He should get that message.