Comedian Gabriel Iglesias Hits Back After NYT Columnist Says Cartoon Mouse ‘Speedy Gonzalez’ Stereotypes Mexicans

Speedy Gonzalez, along with several other cartoon characters, came under scrutiny on Wednesday after Charles Blow, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote a defense of those businesses and groups that have canceled six books by Theodor Seuss Geisel, known as Dr. Seuss, over allegations of racism. Blow included in his column a handful of cartoons and other shows that he claimed pushed toxic culture. As Blow writes:

Some of the first cartoons I can remember included Pepé Le Pew, who normalized rape culture; Speedy Gonzales, whose friends helped popularize the corrosive stereotype of the drunk and lethargic Mexicans; and Mammy Two Shoes, a heavyset Black maid who spoke in a heavy accent.

Reruns were a fixture in the pre-cable days, so I watched children’s shows like Tarzan, about a half-naked white man in the middle of an African jungle who conquers and tames it and outwits the Black people there, who are all portrayed as primitive, if not savage. I watched the old “Our Gang” (“Little Rascals”) shorts in which the Buckwheat character summoned all the stereotypes of the pickaninny.

And of course, I watched westerns that regularly depicted Native Americans as aggressive, bloodthirsty savages against whom valiant white men were forced to fight.

Blow’s column sparked backlash in defense of the cartoons that millions of Americans grew up watching. Many spoke out in defense of Pepé Le Pew, a cartoon skunk famous for his numerous failed attempts to woo a black and white cat.

“[Right wing] blogs are mad [because] I said Pepe Le Pew added to rape culture,” Blow tweeted on Saturday. “Let’s see. 1. He grabs/kisses a girl/stranger, repeatedly, [without] consent and against her will. 2. She struggles mightily to get away from him, but he won’t release her 3. He locks a door to prevent her from escaping.”

“This helped teach boys that ‘no’ didn’t really mean no, that it was a part of ‘the game’, the starting line of a power struggle,” argued Blow. “It taught overcoming a woman’s strenuous, even physical objections, was normal, adorable, funny. They didn’t even give the woman the ability to SPEAK.”

Keep reading

Cuomo #MeToo Hoax Distracts From Real COVID-19 Nursing Home Deaths Scandal

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is in the process of getting #metoo’d, and it may be the best thing that has ever happened to him.

Before a bunch of female accusers came out with accusations of impropriety in a seemingly coordinated fashion, Cuomo was under fire for his murderous policies of housing COVID-19 patients in nursing homes with the elderly, vulnerable and infirmed.

Big League Politics has reported on the Cuomo genocide in New York as the scandal has unfolded:

Trending: Anonymous Federal Informant Testifies Against ‘Boogaloo Boys’ Implicated in Whitmer Kidnapping Plot

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo hid data on the impact of his nursing home quarantine policy to avert scrutiny from federal investigators. Cuomo had forced New York nursing homes to admit patients who were COVID-positive, in a medical disaster since determined to have unnecessarily cost the lives of thousands of senior citizens in the state.

The New York Post reported that a Cuomo aide admitted as such as Democratic New York state legislators on Thursday. Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa admitted that resarch related to the nursing home policy was spiked directly in response to criticism of the policy on the part of President Donald Trump.

“He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa said of Trump, referencing presidential tweets questioning the nursing home policy in August. “He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.”

“Then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation.”

A Queens Democrat assemblyman described DeRosa’s remarks as no less than revealing an attempt to avert federal scrutiny, preventing New York’s policy makers from learning of the deadly ramifications of the nursing home policy in the process.

“[it’s] like they admitted that they were trying to dodge having any incriminating evidence that might put the administration or the [Health Department] in further trouble with the Department of Justice,” said Ron Kim.

It’s all but impossible the Department of Justice will investigate the nursing home policy now that Joe Biden is President. Some have speculated that the policy cost New York as many as 10,000 lives, nearly half the deaths in the state with the most COVID-19 deaths in the nation.

After this scandal broke, these women – in fashion similar to Brett Kavanaugh and other #metoo hoaxes – emerged at the same time to get the focus off of Cuomo’s killings and put it onto his alleged sexual lasciviousness. This is very convenient, and those other Democrat governors who implemented similar policies may be breathing a sigh of relief as a result.

Keep reading

New York Times Columnist Suggests Canceling Speedy Gonzales, Pepé Le Pew

Charles Blow, a left-wing columnist for the New York Times, has suggested canceling the popular Looney Tunes cartoon characters Speedy Gonzales and Pepé Le Pew — the former because it is “racist,” the latter for contributing to “rape culture.”

Blow made the suggestions in a column applauding the removal of several Dr. Seuss books from circulation for allegedly racist caricatures. In the column, titled, “Six Seuss Books Bore a Bias,” Blow argued: “Racism must be exorcised from culture, including, or maybe especially, from children’s culture.”

He wrote:

As a child, I was led to believe that Blackness was inferior. And I was not alone. The Black society into which I was born was riddled with these beliefs.

It wasn’t something that most if any would articulate in that way, let alone knowingly propagate. Rather, it was in the air, in the culture. We had been trained in it, bathed in it, acculturated to hate ourselves.

It happened for children in the most inconspicuous of ways: It was relayed through toys and dolls, cartoons and children’s shows, fairy tales and children’s books.

…

Some of the first cartoons I can remember included Pepé Le Pew, who normalized rape culture; Speedy Gonzales, whose friends helped popularize the corrosive stereotype of the drunk and lethargic Mexicans; and Mammy Two Shoes, a heavyset Black maid who spoke in a heavy accent.

Keep reading

There Is No Such Thing as “White” Math

Mathematics allowed a young Sergiu, who came of age in Ceausescu’s Romania, to escape to a world where right and wrong couldn’t be fudged, and, ultimately, to a life of freedom in the United States. Without math, his life quite literally would not have been possible.

In the piece below he explains how activists are destroying his discipline in the name of progress. Worse, they are robbing poor children of the opportunity to raise themselves up by mastering it — with untold effects on all of us.

Math, with its seemingly unbiased tools — 2 + 2 always equals 4 — has presented a problem for an ideological movement that sees any inequality of outcome as evidence of systemic bias. The problem cannot be that some kids are better at math, or that some teachers are better at teaching it. Like so much else, the basic woke argument against math is that it is inherently racist and needs to be made antiracist. That is accomplished by undermining the notion of right and wrong answers, by getting rid of the expectation that students show their work, by referring to mathematical testing tools as racist, and by doing away with accelerated math classes.

If that sounds like a caricature, I urge you to read this whole document, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which Sergiu writes about below. As the linguist John McWhorter put it in a powerful piece published yesterday: “to distrust this document is not to be against social justice, but against racism.”

Sergiu wrote me in an email that the situation in his field reminds him of this line from Thomas Sowell: “Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”

Keep reading

Cops Forced to Create Crime in Quota Scheme of 4 Tickets Per Hour or Face Discipline

Most people reading this article know what it is like to have the blue and red lights pop up in your rear view mirror. The last thing going through your mind at this point is the feeling of ‘being protected.’ This feeling comes from the fact that the overwhelming majority of the time a driver sees police lights in their mirror is because they have been targeted for revenue collection—often the result of a quota system—and they are about to be given a ticket, or worse.

Police, we are told, are here to keep us safe and protect us from the bad guys. However, public safety all too often takes a back seat to revenue collection. Time and time again, the Free Thought Project has exposed quota schemes in which officers were punished for not writing enough tickets or making enough arrests.

The most recent ticket writing scheme to be exposed comes out of Hawaii and it implicates the Federal Government in the driving force behind it. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) holds “traffic safety” grants throughout the year, which essentially require departments to meet certain numbers or they get no grant.

Though quotas are illegal in many states, they are just fine in Hawaii and the department has no problem implementing them to receive their federal handout.

Keep reading