C.U. Teacher Benjamin Whitmer Wishes That "Westword" Editor Patricia Calhoun Would Be "Fucked with a Wood Rasp"!

Picture credit is a dead link now.

Benjamin Whitmer, an English teacher at the University of Colorado, defends disgraced Professor Ward Churchill on his blog.

Mr. Whitmer recently struck a mock-heroic pose and opined in a C.U. student paper:

"There is a duty to speak out about [free speech] issues...The first duty is to the students, and they deserve all sides of a story. They deserve to be treated with the respect of telling them the truth. They deserve professors who engage them, who challenge the status quo, who care more about making them think than about getting them to regurgitate the same crap they learned to regurgitate in high school." [Hat tip Mr. Martin]

Actually, Whitmer is rabidly intolerant of different views, because he wrote on his blog that he wished that Patricia Calhoun, the editor of a Colorado magazine called Westword, should be "fucked with a wood rasp." [Hat tip Mr. Martin]

Whitmer also displayed his intolerance of differing perspectives when he wrote this about Vincent Carroll, the editor of the Rocky Mountain News:

"Fuck Vince Carroll...Fuck him with every ghastly medieval torture device known to humankind.... Had we our way, we'd stake his lower intestine to the ground and make the motherfucker take a half-mile walk." [Westword 1-18-07]

Ward Churchill was investigated by his peers---other scholars--- for academic misconduct. The scholars discovered that Churchill had mischaracterized and falsified what the scholars he cited actually wrote in their articles and books. In many cases, all the investigating scholars had to do was look up Churchill's footnotes.

Mr. Whitmer says that professors should show all sides of an argument, but Churchill didn't show all sides. He distorted and mischaracterized the other side.

I wrote in 2003 that Churchill had appropriated the story of the Osage Indian murders and used it as the subtext for his apocryphal account of alleged FBI-backed death squads that killed 342 Indians at Pine Ridge.

That's what Churchill does: he appropriates and distorts what others have written. Mr. Whitmer's free speech argument is specious because Churchill doesn't believe in free speech at all. He tries to re-write what others have written.

The Indian scholar and lawyer Professor John Lavelle complained about Churchill's dishonesty ten years ago, but C.U. didn't listen.

Ward Churchill's Indian sister-in-law, Rhonda Kelly, complained that Churchill wrote inaccurate information about her family and tribe, abused his late wife Leah, and tried to push Leah out of a moving car. Churchill himself has admitted that he threw her into a wall.

Professor Thomas Brown has demonstrated that Churchill mischaracterized what other scholars wrote when he claimed that the U. S. Army deliberately infected the Mandan Indians with smallpox. Brown concluded that "falsification and fabrication are habitual with Churchill."

The Rocky Mountain News did a series that exposed Ward Churchill's dishonest scholarship. The stories are indexed here.

Ward Churchill critic Mr. Paine has cataloged Churchill's history of dishonesty on Pirate Ballerina.

It is ironic to read that Ben Whitmer, of all people, chatters away about the possibility that college students might "regurgitate the same crap that they learned to regurgitate in high school" instead of the "truth" according to Churchill and Whitmer.

In my opinion, it is Benjamin Whitmer himself who laps up and regurgitates Ward Churchill's mendacious "crap."

Respected scholars have studied Churchill's writings and footnotes. They have demonstrated that it is Churchill's practice to brazenly misrepresent the very people he supposedly "quotes" in his own footnotes.

Churchill "quotes" respected scholars to give himself and his views credibility, but any researcher who checks out the footnoted sources can see that Churchill attributes to these cited scholars views that they simply don't hold.

The "scholar" Whitmer fails to rebut the specific arguments of Churchill's critics at all. Instead, he denigrates other people's sanity and intellectual abilities, labels them with red-flag epithets, or fantasizes about raping them with a stick.

Whitmer accuses the media of smearing him, but it is his own arrogant words and judgements about others that discredit him.

Whitmer demonstrates his intellectual arrogance when he suggests that American high school teachers are ignorant pedants who can't teach students to think for themselves. Many high school teachers have just as much education as Whitmer, and very few of them are as credulous.

I know lots of high school teachers who are smarter than Whitmer and Churchill. And I am quite certain that a high school teacher can nose-out transparent, puerile, plagiarisms faster than C.U. If Whitmer can't see that Churchill is a plagarist, he is unqualified to be a teacher.

According to Whitmer, high school students are parrots; and their college-educated teachers only train their students how to regurgitate "crap." Whitmer even denigrates his clients, C.U. college students, by suggesting that they are gullible morons who can't sort out the truth without mentoring from a charlatan like Churchill. Ben Whitmer is a "teacher" who wishes that he could rape people who don't share his views with a big stick.

It is Benjamin Whitmer who was duped by Churchill, but he won't admit it.

In my opinion, Whitmer is a dishonest scholar who uncritically regurgitates the hate-filled, propagandistic lies his teacher Ward Churchill feeds him. I note that Benjamin Whitmer is not a high school student, and Ward Churchill is not a high school teacher.

Is "Wood Rasp" Whitmer Going the Way of the Wardo?

Adjunct Junked?

Well, I am sitting on pins and needles!

According to PirateBallerina (a site that monitors the tenured Plagiarist of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill), C. U. Instructor and Ward Churchill apologist Benjamin "Wood Rasp" Whitmer may not be teaching this summer.

Mr. Paine wonders (3-16-07):

Could it be that Benjamin Whitmer, understudy to Ward Churchill and proud publisher of try-works, is not teaching any classes at CU this summer (pdf, page 10)? If this is true...then it looks like Whitmer will have mucho time to split between try-works and updating his c.v. Say, here's a great time-saver, "Professor" Whitmer: Use try-works as your c.v. What college hiring committee could fail to be impressed (impressed!) with the quality of writing, vocabulary, and just damn good critical thinking try-works showcases?

Picture credit: wood rasps

Benjamin Whitmer, who used his blog to champion Ward Churchill's right to free speech and who minimized the University of Colorado's documentation of Churchill's research misconduct, threatened Colorado writers with lethal tortures: disembowelment or rape with a wood rasp.

I don't think a man with such violent, thuggish, sexual fantasies should be trusted around young college students.

Whitmer wrote this about Vincent Carroll, the editor of the Rocky Mountain News:

"Fuck Vince Carroll...Fuck him with every ghastly medieval torture device known to humankind.... Had we our way, we'd stake his lower intestine to the ground and make the motherfucker take a half-mile walk." [Westword 1-18-07]

Whitmer wrote on his blog that that Patricia Calhoun, the editor of a Colorado magazine called Westword, should be "fucked with a wood rasp." I wrote about this here.

Picture credit and Rocky Mountain News story about the death of Ward Churchill's third wife, Leah Kelly

Benjamin Whitmer also helped Ward Churchill discredit his late wife's sister, Rhonda Kelly, as a loony. Rhonda Kelly has reportedly said that Ward Churchill abused her late sister Leah and even tried to push her out of a moving car.

Churchill himself admits that he assaulted his wife, Leah: "I broke and slammed [my wife] back against our bedroom wall, telling her that if she kept it up, she’d be apt to land in a hospital."

Churchill claims Leah was mentally ill and alcoholic because of her family background. Really, I think this young woman became ill because Ward Churchill was an abusive husband.

Ben Whitmer "Holds Court" on His Blog: The World Ends at Midnight!

"Constitutional rights ain’t contingent on what some shitheel judge says. That goes for the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and every amendment thereafter. We have rights which ain’t bound by any pig, judge or otherwise."--Ben "Wood Rasp" Whitmer

"They ought to give a medal for throwing Snapple over a fence. Or off a building. Or down a flight of stairs."--Ben "Wood Rasp" Whitmer, 5-21-08

"We can't stop chuckling at that wacky Snapple. Here's hoping he manages to break his neck sharpening a pencil one of these days."--posted on Ben "Wood Rasp" Whitmer's deleted blog

The Denver Post (8-6-08) reports on the DNC security trial:

A federal judge [U.S. District Judge Marcia Krieger] has ruled [on July 29, 2008] that the city and county of Denver and the U.S. Secret Service do not have to alter their security plans for the Pepsi Center portion of the Democratic National Convention.

Advocacy groups and the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado filed a lawsuit against the government challenging security restrictions during the DNC and arguing that their free-speech rights were going to be infringed upon.

"The defendants have shown that the restrictions are content-neutral, that they are narrowly tailored to serve important governmental interests and that there are adequate alternative channels by which the plaintiffs can communicate their messages," U.S. District Judge Marcia Krieger wrote in her 71-page opinion. "Thus, the plaintiffs have not shown that their First Amendment rights will be infringed nor that they are entitled to any injunctive relief."

The demonstrators wanted the public-protest area moved closer to the delegates coming in and out of the Pepsi Center, and they wanted parade routes to end closer to the venue.

Law-enforcement officials and Denver representatives argued during a one-day trial that there has been a robust effort made to allow groups of all backgrounds to demonstrate and that security concerns superceded the demonstrators' need to be closer to the delegates...

On the day of the trial, a Colorado publication called Westword (7-29-08) reported that a blogger-anarchist named Ben "Wood Rasp" Whitmer [scroll down here] has toiled clandestinely on the website of an "advocacy group" called Recreate 68:

The courtroom of U.S. District Judge Marcia Krieger was packed on July 29 for the all-day trial over whether the Democratic National Convention security arrangements being planned by the city and the Secret Service pass the Constitutional smell test. The lawsuit was originally filed in May by the ACLU on behalf of numerous groups that wish to hold events and demonstrations during convention week, such as Recreate 68 and Escuela Tlatelolco...

Recreate 68 organizer and spokesman Mark Cohen asserted that R-68 has made it clear from the beginning that they are committed to non-violent civil disobedience and any perception to the contrary is the result of misinformation from and misquotes by the press.

The defense presented Cohen with an e-booklet pulled from the R-68 website called “Bodyhammer: Tactics and Self-defense for the Modern Protester” that explains how to create shields, improvised body armor and special techniques for charging police lines. Cohen testified that the website is run by R-68 members Glenn Spagnuolo and Tryworks blogger Benjamin Whitmer. [Hat Tip Mr. Martin--see his article here]

"Wood Rasp" Whitmer has a history of threatening Denver journalists. He once wrote this about Vincent Carroll, the editor of the Rocky Mountain News:

Fuck Vince Carroll...Fuck him with every ghastly medieval torture device known to humankind.... Had we our way, we'd stake his lower intestine to the ground and make the motherfucker take a half-mile walk. [Westword 1-18-07]

Whitmer wrote on his blog that that Patricia Calhoun, the editor of Westword, should be "fucked with a wood rasp." I wrote about this here.

Ben "Wood Rasp" Whitmer has now issued a "legal rebuttal" (8-6-08) to U.S. District Judge Marcia Krieger's July 29, 2008 ruling in favor of the city and county of Denver and the U.S. Secret Service that manages to be Ben's usual banal amalgam of ignorance, illiteracy, and profanity:

Constitutional rights ain’t contingent on what some shitheel judge says. That goes for the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and every amendment thereafter. We have rights which ain’t bound by any pig, judge or otherwise.

It evidently has never occurred to Ben that not everyone settles his problems by brandishing a wood rasp or "holding court" on his blog. We have courts, judges, and constitutional lawyers for a reason: They interpret the laws–including “the law of the land,” the Constitution.

Professor Larry Tribe, a famous Harvard Constitutional lawyer, would probably explain it to his students this way:

The Constitution is short; it cannot and does not attempt to cover every eventuality. Even when it seems it is clear, there can be conflicting rights, conflicting spheres of power. When disputes arise, it comes time for people, and most importantly judges of the Judicial Branch, to interpret the Constitution.

Obviously, if Recreate 68 had peaceful intentions, they would not have called themselves Recreate 68 because their name stands for recreating the riots that occured at the DNC in Chicago in 1968; they would not have a website run by Ben "Wood Rasp" Whitmer; and they would not be posting a manual called “Bodyhammer: Tactics and Self-defense for the Modern Protester," which--to quote Westword (8-29-08)--"explains how to create shields, improvised body armor and special techniques for charging police lines."

The UnChutchables! "Wood Rasp" Whitmer Disses Burritoists Worldwide and Natsu Saito Steps into a Car with Ward Churchill!

The Drunkablog reports that he attended the Ward Churchill Teach-In on Tuesday, March 6, 2007.

C.U. teacher Benjamin Whitmer (pictured above), spoke.

"Wood Rasp" Whitmer, who has disparaged businessman Peter Fotopoulos as a "burrito vendor," evidently prodded this pesky Fotopoulos, who was in attendance, to stop videotaping the Teach-In.

But it doesn't matter, because yours truly descended from the Grassy Knoll and live-blogged the entire 16 hours [video]!

Grant Crowell and PB eat your heart out!!

Madame Wardo was great! After all, she is the wife of (former)
Chairman Wardo, and she went to Yale! [audio]

This public event to "educate" the public about the disgraced Plagiarist of Ethnic studies, Ward Churchill, was marred by one slight hitch: "Wood Rasp"---not exactly the sharpest knife in the Ethnic Studies drawer---inadvertently mistook this Burritoist talent scout for a spy!

Poor "Wood Rasp"! I wonder if Wardo will ever be able to forgive him? And the Maoist MIM will probably get all lathered up again, too!

Harrassing the Burritoist Fotopoulos showed incredibly poor judgement on Whitmer's part. Whitmer may soon be trying to match his skill sets with a suitable position in the food service industry too [video], so it is really pretty bad judgement on his part to be dissing Burritoist Roaders while hanging out on the World Wide Web.

Whitmer's impolitic habit of threatening to rape people with a wood rasp has undoubtedly now disqualifed him from that coveted sinecure set aside for UnChutchables at Casa Bonita: impersonating Chiquita the angry gorilla! (Wardo has first dibs, of course). On the plus side, Whitmer's creation of that swaggering Internet persona "Moredock" demonstrates that he has "the right stuff" to be cast for one of the pirate positions (Not to be confused with this pirate, however!). I sure hope young "Wood Rasp" hasn't blown his big showbiz break by accusing the Burritoist talent scout of being a spy!


Drunkablog noted that Ward Churchill's fourth wife, Natsu Saito (seen in this undated photo on the left, seated next to Ward Churchill), also spoke; but Drunka failed to do justice to her performance [reprise of 16-hour video]...

Saito, who has unfortunately contracted an embarrassing, contagious, and possibly terminal case of spy mania, warned everyone that Crowellians in the audience were audiotaping the public Teach-In and predicted that her Wardo will be kaput in the next couple of months.

Actually, what happened at the Teach-In was far worse than Drunkablog indicated. Far worse...And now I've got the documentation, the picture (above), to prove it. So next time, when I iterate it, it's going to be a much sharper finding: After the event, Natsu Saito got into a car with Ward Churchill!

Bizness Leak reports that in the event that Casa Bonita expands its performances to the parking lot, managment might decide to work N. Saito (whose cv until recently noted that she had a perfect 800 on her LSAT) into the UnChutchables act, too! (Hat Tip Pirate Ballerina 3-9-07)

Surprise! Benjamin Whitmer Uncritically Accepts Ward Churchill's Word that Rhonda Kelly Is a "Loony"!

Photo of the Kelly family; Rhonda is standing on right
Picture credit and Rocky Mountain News Article (6-8-05)

"Hell, [Canadian Indian Rhonda Kelly] might’ve said it, but that doesn’t mean anything. She’s a loony..."----Professor Benjamin Whitmer, University of Colorado, Boulder

Commenter Grant Crowell, who researches CU Boulder's disgraced professor Ward Churchill, alleged on the pro-Churchill blog Tryworks that Professor Ward Churchill tried to push two former wives out of a moving car on separate occasions:

"Rhonda Kelly...mentioned that Ward Churchill tried to push her sister and Ward’s deceased wife, Leah Kelly, from a moving car. Rhonda also claimed that Ward did this to his first wife as well." ["Grant Crowell" 1-10-07 comment to "Stepping off the Deep End"]

Tryworks moderator and Ward Churchill apologist, Benjamin Whitmer, responded to "Grant Crowell's" accusation dismissively:

"Hell, [Rhonda Kelly] might’ve said it, but that doesn’t mean anything. She’s a loony in-law who hates Churchill.....there’s no corroboration, just her word?" ["Stepping off the Deep End," 1-8-07].

Mr. Whitmer says there is no corroboration except Rhonda Kelly's word, but he uncritically accepts Professor Churchill's uncorroborated word that Rhonda is "loony." That is called bias, not scholarship.

Mr. Whitmer might be skeptical if the testimony of Churchill's "loony" Indian relatives were indeed uncorroborated, but an honest, unbiased scholar who wanted to uncover the truth could ask Churchill's first wife, Dora Lee Larson, if he tried to push her out of a moving car, and he could see if there is a court record. When she divorced Churchill, Larson asked that her address be secret because of "violence and threats" from Churchill.

And then there there is the best corroboration of all: the written, published evidence from Churchill himself admitting that he assaulted his wife, Leah: "I broke and slammed [my wife] back against our bedroom wall, telling her that if she kept it up, she’d be apt to land in a hospital." [Churchill claims she was attacking him.]

Leah Kelly died on May 31, 2000, when she was run over by a car near her home. Leah Kelly had a blood-alcohol content of 0.35 percent when the driver ran over her. According to the Denver Post, "the driver said she was lying in the road and he had no time to stop." [A fuller discussion of Leah's life and death can be found here.]

In his published writing, Churchill has also "jokingly" advocated inter-familial violence as a means of saving the earth.

If Mr. Whitmer were a real scholar of Ethnic Studies who tried to make sure Indian voices were heard instead of a despicable apologist for a white con-man who exploits, threatens, and muzzles Indians, he would not falsely disparage Rhonda Kelly's testimony as "uncorroborated."

Mr. Whitmer has Internet access to Churchill's creepy published testimony about how he "broke" and threw his wife into a wall.

The thuggish Professor Churchill once even made a sick "joke" in I Am Indigenist: Notes on the Ideology of the Fourth World about "snuffing" American children and their yuppie mothers:

"Every yuppie born counts as much as another seventy Chinese...Lay that one on the next soccer mom who approaches you with a baby stroller and an outraged look, demanding that you to put your cigarette out, eh? It is plainly absurd for any American to complain about smoking when you consider the context of the damage done by overall U.S. consumption patterns. Tell ’em you’ll put the butt out when they snuff the kid and not a moment before. Better yet, tell ’em they should snuff themselves, as well as the kid, and do the planet a real favor. Just “kidding” (heh-heh)."

C.U. Boulder's Professor of Ethnic Cleansing "Wansee" Whitmer Celebrates "Cyanide Cocktails" for Kids

"How's about we feed a cyanide cocktail to your kids?"

[This comment from a demonstrator at the Newmont Mining protest in Denver was allegedly overheard and then repeated with approval by C.U. Boulder's Professor of Ethnic Cleansing "Wansee" Whitmer.

Ward Churchill and his crew claim that he was the target of an assassination but that the law enforcement authorities didn't warn him.

For some reason, this alleged assassination never came off, even though Ward Churchill claims that "at least 342 AIM members and supporters were killed by roving death squads aligned with and supported by the FBI...This was between 1973 and 1976 alone."

This article from Spring 2004 claims that the Tenured Plagiarist of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill was "a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) security team at the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota in the early 1970's."

If there really were FBI-sponsored death squads, one wonders why they didn't murder Ward Churchill in the 1970s, since he claims that he was a member of an AIM security team on Pine Ridge.

I think the truth is that there never were any FBI-sponsored death squads. I think Ward Churchill invented FBI-backed death squads because that got him published in a peer-reviewed professional journal, that KGB mouthpiece, Covert Action Information Bulletin. [See also here.]

Ward Churchill and his supporters have a double standard: they openly advocate and celebrate the murder of their fellow citizens, yet they expect to be protected from killers.

On August 31, 2007, the University of Colorado's Professor of Ethnic Cleansing "Wansee" Whitmer celebrated and disseminated these "overheard" terroristic threats against Americans deemed "Little Eichmanns"---a mine operator, a former government official, and children.

Why didn't Wardo's Quisling, Professor of Ethnic Cleansing "Wansee" Whitmer, report the people whom he reportedly overheard making these death threats to the police instead of celebrating their threats on his blog?

Attention Denver Police and FBI! Here are three death threats that the C.U. Professor of Ethnic Cleansing Benjamin Whitmer claims he overheard at the demonstration against Newmont Mining:

“How’s about we throw Wayne Murdy off a bridge?"

"How’s about we throw Madeleine Albright off an even bigger bridge?”

“How’s about we feed a cyanide cocktail to your kids?”

That last threat reminded me that the Nazi Aldolf Eichmann, who coined the term "final solution," used the cyanide compound Zyclon-B to exterminate the Jews. Here is an article about how children were fed the "cyanide cocktail" Zyclon-B at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in case the Professor of Ethnic Cleansing "Wansee" Whitmer and his crew want to do it right like the Big Eichmann and extract gold without going through that dirty business of mining:

"Eichmann helped Heydrich organize the Wannsee Conference in Berlin during which Heydrich and Eichmann along with 15 Nazi bureaucrats planned the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe and the Soviet Union...Eichmann took a keen interest in Auschwitz from its founding and visited there on numerous occasions. He helped Höss select the site for the gas chambers, approved the use of Zyklon-B, and witnessed the extermination process. [full text]

Glenn Spagnuolo's "Anti-War" Rally and March to the DNC Site

Photo of Recreate 68 founder Glenn "Defend Denver" Spagnuolo

Not too many people showed up today for Glenn Spagnuolo's Recreate 68 "anti war" rally and march to the DNC convention site in Denver. Today's march is the first of perhaps five Recreate 68 events in Denver during the DNC.

Today's (8-24-08) Drunkablog carries pictures of Glenn Spagnuolo, a professional revolutionary. A story or update may follow later. Drunka often covers Spagnuolo's antics and sometimes calls Spagnuolo "Spagz" or "Spags," if you do a search.

I also saw the drama-queen Glenn on FOX News wearing his black "Defend Denver" T-shirt with the machine gun emblazoned on his chest.

Glenn, who recently lost his "free speech" case in federal court, got covert help on his Recreate 68 Internet site from another member of Ward Churchill's brain trust, Ben Whitmer.

Recreate 68 claims it is non-violent, but Westword (7-29-08) reports that during the "DNC Security Trial":

The defense presented [Recreate 68 organizer and spokesman Mark Cohen] with an e-booklet pulled from the R-68 website called “Bodyhammer: Tactics and Self-defense for the Modern Protester” that explains how to create shields, improvised body armor and special techniques for charging police lines. Cohen testified that the website is run by R-68 members Glenn Spagnuolo and Tryworks blogger Benjamin Whitmer.

Drunkablog (8-1-08) has also reported on Ben Whitmer's hush-hush role in the Recreate 68 organization.

Ben is known for babbling complete nonsense such as:

Constitutional rights ain’t contingent on what some shitheel judge says. That goes for the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and every amendment thereafter. We have rights which ain’t bound by any pig, judge or otherwise.

If we lived in the People's Republic of Whitmer instead of the real world, we could just go to Ben Whitmer and dump federal court in the ashcan of history. We wouldn't need to teach Constitutional Law. We wouldn't need Constitutional lawyers or federal judges, either. We would just go to Ben Whitmer's blog. He is such an idiot!

In my opinion, the main goal of Recreate 68's leaders is to instigate violence along the lines of the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968. They aren't really "peace activists" at all; they are communist revolutionaries whose goal is to make government and law enforcement look repressive. Peace is just one of their rope-a-dope slogans.

A FOX TV reporter tried to ask the demonstrators their views, but they mostly used their free speech to scream profanity. Perhaps the demonstrators were disappointed that the promised cast of tens of thousands didn't show up. Or perhaps they are just a mob of losers who think politics is made in the street instead of at the ballot box.

FOX News reports (8-24-08):

About 1,000 anti-war protesters marched toward the site of the Democratic National Convention Sunday in Denver, in the first of at least five such rallies planned this week by the group Recreate 68.

The rally began with just a couple hundred demonstrators Sunday morning outside the Colorado State Capitol building, but swiftly grew as they began their trek toward the Pepsi Center, which is under heavy security with the convention set to begin Monday.

...Though demonstrators joined under the common cause of ending the war, they also spoke out in favor of abortion rights and against torture, imperialism and the election process.

“I think [the Re-create 68 events are] going to get everyone together and feeling the same thing,” [Colorado Springs demonstrator Bryan] Ostren said.

Meanwhile, police officers in riot gear patrolled on bicycles and foot along the route.

The protesters marched as thousands of delegates, reporters and politicians descended on the Western city.

C.U. Instructor Ben Whitmer Denigrates the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

Picture credit for Washington D.C. National Museum of the American Indian

"The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) works in collaboration with the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere and Hawai‘i to protect and foster indigenous cultures, reaffirm traditions and beliefs, encourage contemporary artistic expression, and provide a forum for Native voices."---NMAI’s Community and Constituent Services department

Ben Whitmer, an instructor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, recently criticized Washington's National Museum of the American Indian on his blog.

Whitmer writes:

"One of my favorite examples of Holocaust denial is The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. It’s sort of an anti-museum, with no correlation whatsoever to the historical realities one might expect to be at issue."

This museum, which is actually three museums, owes its existence to a collector named George Gustav Heye.

Linda Poolaw (Delaware/Kiowa), Deleware Grand Chief, says:

“If Gustav Heye hadn’t collected those things back then, we would not have them today to look at. Now, over 100 years later, my people can see what we had, and it is not lost.”

Whitmer is a supporter of the discredited ex-professor and plagiarist Ward Churchill, who is a propagandist for the Colorado American Indian Movement (CO-AIM). Churchill also admits that he abused his young Indian wife, the late Leah Kelly, a student at the University of Colorado
in Boulder. He denigrated her as a drunk and blamed white opression for her alcoholism, although her family says she didn't have an alcohol problem until she married Ward, a white man. [Search Leah on this blog.]

Ward Churchill admits:

"I broke and slammed [my wife] back against our bedroom wall, telling her that if she kept it up, she’d be apt to land in a hospital."

AIM pretends to advocate for Indians, but really they reportedly have a criminal history of vandalizing, stealing, and selling stolen Indian art. Ward Churchill even plagiarizes other people's art and then sells it for money. He plagiarized a painting by the artist Thomas Mails called "Winter Attack." When reporters found out, Wardo attacked the reporters.

In February 1973, AIM vandals attacked the Indian town of Wounded Knee. This is what John Burrows reports that AIM did to people's homes and to their small museum in the name of "liberation":

"[O]ne hundred to two hundred Indians led by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), swarmed into Wounded Knee and wrecked Clive Gildersleeve's museum. They knocked the old man down and spat on him. They smashed and overturned glass display cases and slashed hide paintings and pictures. Then they left, these self-proclaimed AIM "warriors," taking with them whatever artifacts they had not destroyed. Altogether they stole, destroyed or damaged $50,000 worth of irreplaceable Sioux treasures. Many of these items were later sold to white collectors. "The reason for that destruction," AIM "leader" Clyde Bellecourt said, "was that the owner, even though he was married to an Oglala Sioux, was white.....The AIM people destroyed the homes of Indian residents. They stole valuables and burnt furniture. They shot pets, dogs and cats, and smashed children's tricycles. They defecated and urinated on floors—after having "purified" themselves in "sweat" rituals. Sanitation does not obtain in the Indian movement." [Full story]

I wrote about how AIM attacked Wounded Knee in an earlier post. That post shows how the criminals who attacked Wounded Knee camoflaged their violence, vandalism, and theft with hypocritical accounts of their "bravery."

Really, Ben Whitmer and Colorado AIM don't want American Indians to have success. They want Indians to be oppressed because that is the only way that Indians are useful to anti-American radicals.

Any day now a book will be published by a retired FBI official named Joe Trimbach. His soon-to-be-published book, American Indian Mafia, "exposes myths and falsehoods, as well as never-before-published secrets of AIM."

While we wait for the skeletons in AIM's closet to be revealed in Mr. Trimbach's book, we can read some books based on the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of notes transcribed from the secret archives of the KGB's foreign intelligence and smuggled to the West:

"According to the FBI, Mitrokhin’s documents are 'the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source.' Perhaps the most significant prize for the Western intelligence community are the documents that contain the real names and identities of thousands of foreign agents the KGB recruited and kept under deep cover abroad—a rosetta stone for the spy world...Many of the documents remain classified.” [Stromberg, Stephen W. "Documenting the KGB". Oxonian Review of Books. Winter 2005]

Meet CU Boulder's "Bobok"--Benjamin Whitmer!

Picture credit

"Depravity in such a place, depravity of the last aspirations, depravity of sodden and rotten corpses - and not even sparing the last moments of consciousness! Those moments have been granted, vouchsafed to them, and ... and, worst of all, in such a place!"--the narrator of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's short story "Bobok"

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's surreal short story "Bobkok" ("Little Bean") is about an unstable, failed writer who visits a cemetery and "hears" the voices of recently buried people talking to each other.

Although these people have already died, it seems that they might have a brief time even after death to consider their souls; but the deceased are full of stupidity and pettiness even beyond the grave. They have no thought at all for their souls, even though they have just died!

When I read Benjamin Whitmer's nasty blog Tryworks, the posters remind me of the voices that Dostoyevsky's narrator "hears" from beyond the grave.

Whitmer has now been exposed as the nasty poster known as "Moredock" on the Tryworks. But he still is nasty. He isn't a bit ashamed to be the toadie for a con-man like Ward Churchill. Whitmer is still croaking, "bobok, bobok, bobok."

As the narrator of "Bobok" remarks, "To begin with the smell."

The Stars Align: Two Views

An Ethnic Studies instructor at C.U. Boulder named Ben Whitmer has a blog called Try-Works where he supports the tenured Plagiarist of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill.

In the comments to a recent post, Mr. Whitmer wrote this comment to me about a retired FBI agent named Joseph Trimbach, whom I have written about on my blog:

[T]hanks for the heads up on Trimbach, Snapple. I knew he was a shiteating moron and a killer, I didn’t know he was a fucking loon. I’ll make sure to highlight your love affair on the main page soonly. It’s exactly the kind of star-aligned convergence of dribbling idiots that makes my black little heart go pitter-pat.

The remainder of this post is my response to Mr. Whitmer, which I also posted in his comments:

Dear Mr. Whitmer,

You need to pay better attention to what is going on here.
If former SAC Joseph Trimbach were “a shiteating moron,” a “killer,” and a “fucking loon,” I doubt that he would be honored by being invited announce the extradition of Anna Mae Aquash’s killer in “News from Indian Country.”

The editor Mr. DeMain has followed the investigation of Aquash’s murder for many, many years, and he must think that Trimbach’s views make a valuable contribution to the story of this Canadian citizen’s brutal murder.

Mr. DeMain will probably take note of how C.U. Ethnic Studies characterizes law enforcement people who are invited to give their views in an Indian publication that has pursued the truth about Aquash’s murder for so many years.

It is hard for Indians to see C.U. Ethnic Studies professors as advocates for better justice for Indian people when they disparage this honored guest writer and law enforcement official as a “killer.”

Trimbach’s article in “News from Indian Country” was how I first I learned the good news that John Graham was going to be extradited for murdering the Canadian citizen Anna Mae Aquash.

You and Ward Churchill didn’t write anything. Former FBI SAC Trimbach did, and for some reason, “News from Indian Country” chose him to make that announcement.

Mr Trimbach wrote:

"June 26, 2007: The Supreme Court of British Columbia orders the extradition of John Graham to the United States. He is the alleged trigger man who carried out the executioner’s mandate against Anna Mae."

June 26, 1975 is also the day that the two FBI agents were murdered. The date was probably chosen for the murder of the agents because June 25-26, 1876 is the anniversary of Little Bighorn.

I think it is a pretty interesting “coincidence” that the Canadians chose that day to make their announcement.

June 26, 2006 is also the day that Phil DeStefano recommended that Churchill be fired.

Is the “coincidence” of these events what C.U. Ethnic Studies characterizes as a “star-aligned convergence of dribbling idiots”?

Now you brought up Jonbenet Ramsey. She was killed on December 26, 1996. Mao’s birthday.

Ward Churchill's Late Wife, Leah Kelly

Picture credit and Rocky Mountain News (6-8-05) story about the late Leah Kelly, the third wife of Professor Ward Churchill.

Here is an interview that researcher Grant Crowell did with Leah's sister, Rhonda Kelly. The Kelly family are Indians from Canada.

Here is Professor Ward Churchill's self-serving rationalization about why he abused his wife Leah.

Here is a Denver Post (2-13-05) account of Leah's death.

Professor Benjamin Whitmer of the University of Colorado at Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies disparages Leah's sister Rhonda as a "loony" because she said that Ward Churchill tried to push her sister Leah out of a moving car. Rhonda also said that Churchill tried to push his first wife out of a moving car." I think that Whitmer's remarks are nothing but prejudice; they certainly aren't backed up by any research.

Whitmer has no basis for calling Rhonda Kelly a loony. I think that Professor Whitmer just parrots what the disgraced Plargarist of Ethnic Studies, Ward Churchill, says. Probably Churchill hired him, and he is afraid of losing his job if Churchill is fired.

It seems to me that these white, leftist, CU Ethnic Studies professors aren't happy if they can't script what Indian women say. Their behavior reminds me a lot of the party line taken my the Maoist organization MIM, which tirelessly defends Ward Churchill:

"MIM would only see importance in ...a struggle to resuscitate [First Nations] culture if it opposed imperialism........A national struggle that advances the fight against imperialism is positive. Preserving culture for its own sake is not part of the Marxist agenda. Whatever resources the tribes can wrest away from imperialism they should take." ["Resolutions on Cross-Cultural Breeding" 2004]

Does Ben Whitmer Have a New Hairdo?

Today it was reported by the Rocky Mountain News that yesterday (8-24-08) Ward Churchill's security roughed up a FOX News reporter named Griff Jenkins after Jenkins allegedly "put his hands" on the discredited ex-professor Ward Churchill.

Video shows that Jenkins was only trying to interview Ward Churchill.

Glenn Spagnuolo, a leader of Recreate 68, told the Rocky Mountain News (8-24-08):

"Our security pushed him away from (Churchill) because nobody touches Ward while he's here...As soon as he put his hands on him, security moved him away."

The video I have seen only shows Churchill's security roughing up Jenkins.

UPDATE: See a later post and video of Churchill grabbing Jenkin's hand and shoving his microphone as Jenkins approaches Churchill for an interview.

I looked at the picture of Churchill flanked by his security detail (above H/T Drunkablog) and noticed the tattoo on the left lower arm of the man on Ward Churchill's right side.

That tattoo is a lot like the tattoo that Ward Churchill's acolyte Ben Whitmer (shown above in a picture from Westword, 1-18-07) also sports on his left arm! Drunkablog commenter Fred noticed the similar tattoos.

Is this tattooed He-Man in the first picture Ben Whitmer with hair and a beard? Enquiring minds want to know!

The alleged incident with the FOX reporter is a lot like an incident that happened when a reporter named Heath Urie tried to attend a lecture Ward Churchill was giving at the University of Colorado.

Here is video from yesterday that reportedly followed the alleged "touching" of Wardo's person.

UPDATE: Here is a second video [Same thing here] of FOX News reporter Griff Jenkins trying to interview Churchill. I don't see him touching Churchill.

According to the Rocky Mountain News (8-24-08):

Security at an anti-war rally outside the state Capitol this morning allegedly had to break up a confrontation between a Fox News reporter and Ward Churchill...

Churchill...was hounded by the persistent reporter, who allegedly put his hands on Churchill, organizer Glenn Spagnuolo said.

The reporter, Griff Jenkins, could not be immediately reached for comment.

In video footage of the incident, demonstrators surrounded Jenkins after the alleged confrontation between the reporter and Churchill.

"We're not going to stand for your lies," a demonstrator yells.

Spagnuolo said the reporter put his hands on Churchill.

The reporter "decided he wanted to be part of the news instead of reporting the news and wanted to mix it up with Ward Churchill for some reason," Spagnuolo said.

Spagnuolo said the reporter got out of hand.

"Our security pushed him away from (Churchill) because nobody touches Ward while he's here," Spagnuolo said. "As soon as he put his hands on him, security moved him away."

As I mentioned above, this whole alleged incident reminds me a lot of an earlier close encounter that involved Ben Whitmer, Josh Dillabaugh, Ward Churchill and the Boulder Daily Camera reporter Heath Urie.

C.U. Instructor Ben Whitmer Mischaracterizes Charles C. Mann's Research

“No consensus has emerged, but a growing number of researchers believe that the New World was occupied by a single small group that crossed the Bering Strait, got stuck on the Alaska side, and straggled to the rest of the Americas in two or three separate groups, with the ancestors of most modern Indians making up the second group”---Charles C. Man in 1491 (p. 16-17).

Ben Whitmer, an instructor at the University of Colorado, is mischaracterizing the research of Charles C. Mann, the Author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I have written previously about this book here.

Mr. Whitmer writes:

"I finished 1491 not too long ago. Not a great book, but what it does well is to lay out, in a broad and very shallow fashion, the many arguments that’ve been punching massive holes in most everything those in the scientific and historical communities have thought they’ve known about Indians for the last several centuries.

The idea of an unpopulated, or underpopulated continent, gone. Hunter/gatherers barely eking out a living, gone. Primitive peoples with no concept of agriculture, gone. The entire concept of “virgin” forest, or an unmodified continent containing naught by vast wilderness, gone. The Bering Strait land bridge theory, way, way, fucking gone.

Not that all of this hasn’t been covered at great length for the last thirty years, of course.

You can find it all in the works of, say, Vine Deloria and Ward Churchill."

Mr. Whitmer is attempting to "piggyback" on Charles C. Mann's excellent book. He is attempting to coopt 1491 for the Churchill cause: One notes that this is exactly what Churchill did when he "cited" the Stearns to support his claim that the American Army deliberately infected the Mandan with smallpox.

Mr. Whitmer incorrectly states that the book contends that the Bering Strait land bridge theory is “way, way, fucking gone.” Mann doesn’t say that at all! Mann actually says:

“No consensus has emerged, but a growing number of researchers believe that the New World was occupied by a single small group that crossed the Bering Strait, got stuck on the Alaska side, and straggled to the rest of the Americas in two or three separate groups, with the ancestors of most modern Indians making up the second group. Researchers differ on the details; some scientists have theorized that the Americas may have been hit with as many as five waves of settlement before Columbus, with the earliest occurring as much as fifty thousand years ago. In most versions, though, today's Indians are seen as relative latecomers.”

Indian activists dislike this line of reasoning. "I can't tell you how many white people have told me that 'science' shows that Indians were just a bunch of interlopers," Vine Deloria Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said to me. DeLoria is the author of many books, including Red Earth White Lies, a critique of mainstream of archaeology. The book's general tenor is signaled by its index; under "science," the entries include "corruption and fraud and," "Indian explanations ignored by," and "lack of proof for theories of," "myth of objectivity of," and "racism of." In Deloria's opinion, archaeology is mainly about easing white guilt. Determining that Indians superseded other people fits neatly into this plan. "If we're only thieves who stole our land from someone else," Deloria said, "then they can say, 'Well, we're just the same. We're all immigrants here, aren't we?"

The moral logic of the we're-all-immigrants argument that Deloria cites is difficult to parse; it seems to be claiming that two wrongs make a right. Moreover, there's no evidence that the first "wrong" was a wrong---nothing is known about the contacts among the various waves of paleo-Indian migration. But in any case whether most of today's Native Americans actually arrived first or second is irrelevant to an assessment of their cultural achievements. In every imaginable scenario, they left Eurasia before the first whisper of the Neolithic Revolution.

The Neolithic Revolution is the invention of farming...Native Americans, who left Asia long before agriculture, missed out on the bounty, "They had to do everything on their own," [A.W.] Crosby said to me. Remarkably, they succeeded (16-17).

There are just a number of different theories joining this old theory about the Indians arriving by crossing the Bering strait, which is being refined by new evidence. Some information is on pages 16-17, including the mildly dismissive comments about Vine DeLoria's perspective (above). Ward Churchill is dismissed on page 131, and two specimens of Churchill's mocking style can be found on pages 131 and 362.

There is a map on page 159 that shows that paleo-Indians may have arrived through an ice-free corridor route as well as along a costal route. On page 17 Mann writes that Indians may have arrived earlier, that they may have travelled by boat, or that they may have arrived via Australia. These are presented as scientific theories, not established facts.

Mann says that “Indians’ closest genetic relatives are indigenous Siberians” (105). Mann says the ancestors of the Indians “left Eurasia” (17) and that “at the time of Columbus’ arrival the great majority of Indians were South of the Rio Grande” (15).

I think 1491 is a very interesting book that presents the evolving scientific theories about how the ancestors of the Indians arrived in the Americas and the cultures they developed, but the author doesn't feature Ward Churchill an expert on pre-Columbian America.

My first post on this subject has two links to an interesting article by Mann that originally appeared in the March 2002 issue of the Atlantic.

Mann quotes Ward Churchill twice:

"Did they [Europeans] recoil in horror and say, "Wait a minute, we've got to halt the process, or at least slow it down until we get a handle on how to prevent these effects" [the spread of European diseases]? Nope. Their response pretty much across-the-board was to accelerate their rate of arrival, and to spread out as much as was humanly possible" (131).

Mann comments about Churchill's remarks:

"[T]his...overstates the case. Neither European nor Indian had a secular understanding of disease. "Sickness was the physical manifestation of the will of God," Robert Crease, a philosopher of science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, told me. "You could pass it on to someone, but doing that was like passing on evil, or bad luck, or a bad spirit---the transmission also reflected God's will..." (131)

"The Mexica agreed. In all the indigenous accounts of the conquest and its aftermath, the anthropologist J.
Jorge Klor de Alva observed, the Mexica lament their losses, but, 'the Spaniards are rarely judged in moral terms, and Cortez is only sporadically considered a villain. It seems to be commonly understood...that the Spaniards did what any other group would have done or would have been expected to do if the opportunity had existed'" (131-2).