To the rescue -- 10 years later McBride, Sykes get it wrong again

A classic example of how things spread on the Internet when bloggers are in such a rush to post something that they don't read carefully.

Jessica McBride on the "thought police:"

James Harris is under attack for quoting an author who said this:

“There is only one force in this world that is capable of controlling a teenage male: his father. Women, you can either let black men rule their households as husbands and fathers or hide in your homes with doors locked as they rule the streets in roving gangs. If you don’t believe me visit any inner-city neighborhood, if you dare.”

Her source was Charlie Sykes , who wrote:

James T. Harris infuriated some state bureaucrats the other day.... actually enraged them. How?

By quoting this:

“There is only one force in this world that is capable of controlling a teenage male: his father. Women, you can either let black men rule their households as husbands and fathers or hide in your homes with doors locked as they rule the streets in roving gangs. If you don’t believe me visit any inner-city neighborhood, if you dare.”

However, if you bother to read what Harris himself wrote, you'll find this:

“There is only one force in this world that is capable of controlling a teenage male: his father. Women, you can either let black men rule their households as husbands and fathers or hide in your homes with doors locked as they rule the streets in roving gangs. If you don’t believe me visit any inner-city neighborhood, if you dare.”

I spoke these words at a black state employees’ convention. It was part of an anti-affirmative action address that I gave for a breakout session.

Yikes!

My words were not well received.

I had to be escorted to the organizer’s room. Every step of the way, from the podium to the sanctuary, was a step through anger. People were pissed off. I got the feeling that I was no longer welcome.

I wasn’t. I left.

Those words, however, were not my own. I borrowed them from the famed sociologist, George Gilder. Mr. Gilder first uttered the same words on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the mid 1980s, and it got him kicked off the show. To this day, I believe Mr. Gilder has the distinction of being the first and only person kicked off ‘The Oprah.’

Oprah apologized to her audience for inviting a racist onto the show.

Here we are a decade removed from my borrowed comments and nearly two decades from Gilder’s original utterances, and as I write this I am looking at yet another story of a little girl shot in the face because she left the safety of her home, to play in streets, ruled by angry, aimless, homicidal black teenage males.

McBride tries to rally the wingnut blogosphere:

As conservatives, we should all speak up when a fellow conservative is under attack by the politically correct thought police for supposed "offensiveness," especially when it deals with race, which is the favorite tactic of the left (cry racism) in its efforts to silence conservatives. If any of us stays silent or mutes our response for any number of reasons, we hurt the conservative cause. I wonder what would happen if Harris said this same thing on his radio show?

My only problem with the passage above is that teenage girls need fathers just as badly. Everyone needs a father. Fathers matter, despite what some cartoonists think.

I strongly support James. Don't let them get you down, James. You are exactly what this community needs.

The fact is that he's not "under attack" and was relating a 10-year-old story.

But never let the facts get in the way of some good conservative outrage over race.