Category Archives: Franz Strasser

Invasive Species

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Every now and then, someone will sneer at me, demanding to know why I, a United Statesian, am so concerned about the BBC, a foreign broadcasting organization. I usually bang out a quick diatribe about various issues, but now there’s a very clear example of why I see the BBC as a problem for people in the US to be concerned about.

Last year, the BBC hired a young German immigrant, Franz Strasser, to produce various “bespoke” video magazine pieces about, mostly, racial issues in the US. First he did a dishonest series about immigration. The US division head also had several Beeboids produce a series of videos about – again, mostly racial – issues in the US in the year leading up to the 2012 election entitled, “Altered States”. One of the installments by Strasser found him making a dishonest race-baiting story about a “racial divide” in St. Louis, MO.

I discussed it at the time here.  Please read the whole thing before returning to this post. In summary, my point was that Strasser and his editor deliberately left out the real key to the situation in St. Louis: absolute control of the city for decades by Democrats. Furthermore, nearly half the Aldermen (the equivalent of a city council, the real decision makers on city policy) are African-American. It was 13 out of 28 last year when Strasser did his initial race-baiting report, and there are 12 now. All but one of the 28 people who essentially run the daily business of the city of St. Louis are Democrats.

Why do I care? Because apparently Stasser’s story went viral, and got the attention of racial justice activists and politicians who knew a good angle when they saw it. Strasser’s report became a big hit, got lots of attention, and now there’s a renewed racial dialogue of some kind. What will this change? Not a damn thing. As I explained in my initial post, it’s the Democrat policies which have caused the situation. I submit that it’s simply not possible for a truly racially divided city where the rich white man is keeping the black man down to have 12 Aldermen. Additionally, I say that, if we’re to take the story seriously that white politicians in St. Louis have kept the black man down, this also puts the lie to Jonny Dymond’s and the BBC’s contention that the Republican Party is the racist one, because the city has been ruled by white (and black) Democrats for decades.

This new racial dialogue which will ignore the elephant donkey in the room will only worsen racial animosity in the city. It will increase the anger, the sense of victimization among the African-American community. One only has to listen to the locals in this latest video report to see the obvious. What’s most appalling is that the African-American community really has been victimized for decades: by the Democrat Party and the African-American leaders who have willingly contributed to the destruction of their own people’s futures.

Yet the BBC doesn’t care about that. They see only race, and refuse to admit that Democrat – Left wing – policies might be part of the problem. Now the city of St. Louis is going to be come more polarized, all thanks to the intrusion of a foreign broadcasting organization, one which is actually the official state broadcaster of the UK. And the BBC is clearly proud of what they accomplished here. After all, their report garnered lots of attention, and started a “dialogue” on the very issue they were pushing. Never mind that it’s dishonest and biased. The BBC will tell me that it’s no such thing, of course, and that they got it about right.

Imagine the outcry if Fox News set up shop in Britain and started sending reporters around to try to achieve change, to engage in a bit of social engineering, to highlight issues US natives who work for Fox News thought were important, and reported it all from a right-wing perspective. Yet defenders of the indefensible and worshipers of the BBC have no problem with the reverse situation. The BBC is spending more and more money, and doing more and more to increase their footprint in the US, in pursuit of both filthy profits in the form of advertizing revenue and – more importantly – as Jeremy Paxman put it, to “spread influence”. This is beyond their remit as laid out in the Charter, yet the BBC continues to grow and spread influence unchecked. Everybody’s worried about some silly management culture when the real problem is the attitude of the people making the broadcasts.

The BBC is now having a real effect on US politics. It is an invasive species, a malignant foreign body invading my country. Next time somebody tries to ridicule me for caring what a foreign media outlet gets up to, I’ll point them to this story and leave it at that.

Immigration Games

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(UPDATE: See my comment below) I was going to comment about this in the open thread, but in the light of today’s noise about the housing benefit shuffle in Newham causing “social cleansing” and allegedly inspiring right-wing extremism, I thought it was worth a full post. I’m talking about the BBC’s revelation that immigration from Mexico into the US is being reversed.

Mexico-US migration slips after 40 years of growth

The rate of Mexican immigration to the US has stalled or maybe even gone into reverse, an analysis shows, ending a four-decade-long trend.

Not may, it has. The Pew figures (NB: pdf file automatic download) quoted by the BBC pretty much show that. The reason I’m bringing it up is because of the illegal factor. It’s important to remember that the BBC has generally taken the activists’ line and used their language in reporting on the issue in the US. Remember Mark Mardell’s jaunt to the Arizona border (page 4 of the open thread) and the other reports trying to tell you it was all about racism against people with brown skin and a Mexican accent? Then there are the other reports siding with illegals and playing the race game. The fact that these people are in the US illegally is somehow not their fault, but the fault of unfair laws which magically make them illegal ex post facto or something. The real objection wasn’t, of course, about immigration of non-whites, but about illegal immigration.

Activists – mostly Hispanic – always play that qualifier down, if not wipe it from the discussion entirely. And the BBC played right along. So it must have come as something of a shock to the BBC News Online producer who had to skim through the Pew report and discover that last year there were more illegal Mexicans in the US than legal ones: 6.1 million to 5.8 million. So why didn’t the BBC ever discuss that disparity last year when they were freaking out about the Arizona law and all those other states trying to stem the tide of illegals? The rest of us knew the problem was about illegals, and said so at the time. Yet the BBC tried to play it as racism anyway. When Mark Mardell tries to whip up a little anger by shoving in your face Pat Buchanan’s racialist diatribe about losing “white America” to the Mexicans, it’s all part of this Narrative. Forget about the illegal issue and focus on race. It ends the debate before it begins. But the BBC approves when Hispanics vote for their own kind based solely on ethnicity.

It must also come as a shock to those who rely on the BBC for the news on US issues to learn that the first black President has in fact been deporting record numbers of illegals with brown skin back to Mexico. How can that be racism, BBC? Is He a puppet or something on this issue? I’d love to know how they square this with their belief in Him. I remember when Mardell was actually for a moment trying to defend the President (page 8 of the open thread) against charges that He wasn’t protecting the border properly. Obviously He wasn’t, since there were more illegals than legals last year. Mardell is silent, of course.

It’s important to make this distinction when reporting on the US issue of immigration law, because, as the Newham article doesn’t show, the problem in Britain is about mostly quite legal immigration. There’s a huge difference in the cause and effect in the UK from what’s been happening in the US.  Which is why it’s wrong for the BBC to conflate the two situations and play racialist games.

If xenophobia is (I’m speaking hypothetically for the moment) a primary factor in British objection to seemingly unlimited legal immigration of third-world Mohammedans, this still has nothing to do with US objection to illegal immigration of Mexicans. There is a world of difference between the two. Why has the BBC been unable to make this distinction? I say it’s because they’re viscerally opposed to restrictions on immigration simply out of reflexive fealty to the abstract notions of diversity and multiculturalism, as well as a reflexive opposition to any nominally conservative policy.

I’ve previously mentioned how the BBC hired German immigrant Franz Strasser (middle of page 4 of the open thread) to tour the country reporting on immigration in the US in all its various colors. The reason I criticized every single report in that series was because he and his editor dishonestly censored the word “illegal” (middle of page 7) out of the whole picture. Even when he was doing reports from two different “Sanctuary Cities” (middle of page 4 of that same thread), which deliberately flouted US immigration law to harbor illegals. He acted as if this didn’t exist. The whole series was conceived and design to whitewash (see what I did there) the illegal issue so that you’d all think any objection to immigration had to be based in racism. Now here are hard figures to show that there really has been a problem with illegal immigration.

The BBC article about the Pew study notes that “immigration” is going to be a big issue in this election year, but still cannot bring themselves to add the “illegal” qualifier, which is actually what it’s all about. The situation is not the same, yet they still pretend it is.

Now that illegal immigration is down, even seeing a negative trend, one has to suspect that the policies have been working. Too bad Britain doesn’t even have the level of sovereignty that Arizona does. Oh, and I guess this means that Global Warming won’t be driving all of them into the US after all.

Still, it’s nice to see the BBC at last revealing even the tiniest bit of truth about what’s been going on over here. But it’s a shame that they don’t make an effort to correct the false impression they’ve been creating about the concern over illegal immigration in the US.

 

 

The BBC’s ‘Altered States’ – Painting A Picture

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The BBC continues its ‘Altered States’ series of reports to convince you that the US has somehow become more divided and racist since the election of a black President in 2008. It wouldn’t be called ‘Altered’ if it wasn’t somehow different from before, right? The last installment also featured race and pushed a “Racist US” Narrative. I won’t go so far as to say the reference to the movie was deliberate because of the ugly, base, primitive nature of the proto-human to which the star reverted, and the BBC is making a subtle accusation that whites who will vote for the eventual Republican candidate want to turn back the clock to the days of Jim Crow laws, lynching, and real oppression of minorities. I’m sure the BBC editor in charge just thought it was a cute turn of phrase. But you can all draw your own conclusions.

The latest installment by digital media Beeboid Franz Strasser uses the racially divided city of St. Louis, Missouri to help paint that picture. The rich whites get the south side, while the devastated blacks suffer and are left to rot in the north. This selectively-portrayed microcosm is supposed to reinforce the notion that the US is racially divided, laying the groundwork for the idea that opposition to a black President is based on racism, rather than genuine, honest opposition to His policies. The city is clearly racially divided, and I don’t mean to denigrate the plight of African-Americans in this obviously failed city. I’m concerned here only about the biased reporting.

Strasser has previous on dishonest reporting for the BBC. His first series of reports were about immigration in the US (middle of pg. 4 of the open thread). The dishonesty lay in the fact that the word “illegal” was censored from every single report, even while he was reporting from two ‘Sanctuary Cities’, which openly flout immigration law and harbor illegals. It was especially dishonest to omit the term because this report was conceived and produced when the illegal immigration issue was at the top of the news cycle. This latest report for the ‘Altered States’ series is no different.

Spot the Missing Political Party.
The Democratic Party has dominated St. Louis for more than 60 years. There hasn’t been a Republican mayor since 1949. All the policies which have contributed to the current sad state of affairs in the city have been enacted by Democrats. Yet Strasser fails to mention the political scene. If this had been a Republican-controlled city, you know the BBC would have made sure to point that out.

The first black Alderman (the Board of Aldermen is the equivalent of the City Council in other cities) was elected in 1943. Today, no fewer than 13 of the 28 Aldermen are African-American, including the Board President. Now, does this sound like a city where whites oppress blacks and keep them down? It sounds more like Democrats and Democrat policies failing them than anything else. Yet the BBC doesn’t want you to know any of this, as it doesn’t help the “Divided, Racist US/Racist Republicans” Narrative they want to create in your minds in this re-election year.

(Coincidentally, another Democrat-controlled city and home base of the Community-Organizer-in-Chief, Chicago, also has the Alderman system. Funny how that works, no?)

As it happens, the Tea Party movement, which the BBC often portrayed as racist, and US President editor Mark Mardell believes to be driven by crypto-racism, began in St. Louis, when a white woman started her own little protest against high taxes forced on the region by Democrats. This was weeks before Rick Santelli’s famous rant which gave the movement its name. Strasser missed an opportunity for race-baiting there because he, like all of his ill-informed colleagues at the BBC, simply didn’t know. Of course, everyone here knows of the BBC’s ignorance on the Tea Party movement.

In any case, there’s something else Strasser left out of his sad tale of one city divided. While showing you street after street of empty, boarded-up houses and dead commercial blocks, he deliberately left out the fact that those buildings are empty because the African-American population has been leaving the area in search of better schools. They left to seek out a better life for themselves and for their children, because the Democrat-controlled city has failed them repeatedly for decades. Instead, you’re left with a racially-charged story without a single mention of the politics which led to the situation, with no information whatsoever given to help you understand it.

As always, don’t trust the BBC on US issues. Especially, it seems, when it comes to one of their themed series of reports.

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