Wednesday, June 10, 2026

In Praise of Bill Broyles

 



 Everyone wants to praise Texas’s dead literary titans like Larry McMurtry but how about a few words for the living? McMurtry was kind of a shit and a racist but he was successful. That is why in a place like Texas where, as you may know from television and filmsnot so much from booksright and wrong don’t matter, only success. Even in the literary world. Especially in the literary world. 

So, like, for once, how about mentioning someone who did the right thing and was successful and is still writing? That’s William Broyles, Jr., the first editor of Texas Monthly. The magazine which just had its 50th birthday a year or two ago is kind of a bump on the Lone Star highway now—whitebread and unoriginal despite last week’s Pulitzer for coverage of the Kerrville floods, an award which was, for once, deserved—but you can’t underestimate how groundbreaking it was at birth, founded by Dallasite and Wharton School graduate Mike Levy. 

Before getting into Broyles’ bio, Levy’s is also pertinent. Wiki says Levy's father was a plumber, and Mike himself worked as a taxi driver and a jail guard before putting together the financing for a magazine, headquartered in Austin but not of Austin, and designed to be the Texas version of the New Yorker which like TM has always been whitebread but is increasingly unoriginal.

        Before being picked by Levy as the first editor of the magazine, Broyles had famously been a Marine in Vietnam (he said that he decided at the last minute that deploying maybe was not such a great idea but his wife told him that he had to go) and, like Gatsby, attended Oxford University, although he was a Rice University grad like many of TM’s early folks who in fact were all on the student newspaper together. He taught at West Point. He was like Gatsby in one other respect. That smile, when he looked at you and gave you the treatment there was just no saying no. 

But unlike Gatsby he was real and his achievements were real. From Wikipedia again: He created the television series China Beach, and Six, and wrote such films as Apollo 13, Cast Away, Planet of the Apes, Unfaithful, the Polar Express, Jarhead, and Flags of Our Fathers. You don't have to be a fan of the movies to respect his run. In today's media-centric world, it's faint praise to say this but Bill Broyles is a good guy. And like his publisher Mike Levy, he knew something about the world beyond the written word. Which you can’t often say about journalists today.

Broyles had a poor run as Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek with the fictitious “Hitler Diaries,” that's true, but he picked himself, dusted off his backside and moved to Hollywood. He has had courage through his career, not the manly-Marine Corps kind of courage although he had that too, but as a writer. And at TM as an editor. This is the point where someone talking about Bill would mention his first meeting with his subject.

The year was 1981 and me working as a cop reporter at the now-defunct Houston Post where owner Oveta Hobby had decreed that everyone who met a violent death in the Bayou City merited a couple of paragraphs in the newspaper. Which meant writing a lot of shorts because, then as now, a lot of people get capped in Houston. But, wanting to spread my wings, and writing a letter to Broyles, asking if he would like to hire “a hip young black reporter”? No lie. 

        There was a call a few days later inviting me to an interview in Austin, just Broyles and then-executive editor Greg Curtis, another member of the Rice mafia. They offered me the job, at a very good salary. The trick is that Broyles had hired an African American woman, Gwen Craddock, as his assistant. 

She opened the letter, she told me later, and put it under his nose. Like a lot of great men, Broyles knew what he didn’t know. He didn’t consider himself the white expert on black people either, a white savior in other words, who are so common in today's journalism. He was also ex-military, who actually tend to be a lot more race-friendly than are may liberal whites because blacks and Latinos are not abstract concepts to other soldiers but instead people who they have worked with and died alongside. Contrast Broyles with one of his Monthly successors, the great lib Jake Silverstein who did not publish a single black writer during six years in the big chair in Austin and who, as editor of the New York Times Magazine, criticized and forced out a young black female writer who had the temerity to sign a petition calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Anyway in Austin, at the Monthly, Broyles also put Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan on the cover, wearing a crown, the kind of praise for a black woman—not involved  in sports or entertainment—that was unheard of at the time and still mostly unheard of now.

You also have to mention when you saw the guy last. It was twenty or twenty-five years ago, at Deep Eddy in Austin. A lot of people in River City are swimmers and that's where you tend to run into them, doing laps at a pool. Bill still had that Gatsby smile. He still looked good. In retrospect, as a man, he still looks good now.

Prosemitism & the New York Times

 





    Note to readers: This piece has been censored at the insistence of Google/Blogger.



Today in the premier newsroom in the world—the NYT—blacks and Latinos are both far below their percentages in the population while Jews who represent 3% of the US are, according to some estimates, ten-fold too highly represented among the White Lady’s ranks. What’s up with that? The Times doesn’t track its Jewish percentage or at least doesn’t publicize it but historically the major editors, columnists and investigative types, to say nothing of the publisher—which is the Sulzberger family, actually—have been Jewish. With a sprinkling of WASPs. 

The peculiar position of the Sulzbergers is that the same diversity standard pushed in its reportage on industry & government has not applied to its own hires. This is actually not news but is instead something that we see every day among the higher ranks of American journalism. Reporters at the Washington Post, National Public Radio, ProPublica, the New Yorker el al want to complain about the decline of diversity due to the Trump administration—ICE attacks or what have you, erosion of affirmative action on college campuses and in the hallways of government—but the journalists doing the complaining are almost invariably white, disproportionately Jewish—the so-called “white saviors” who are so common among reporters in recent years. On-air correspondents of the various networks appear more representative, actually, even at Fox News, because a lack of diversity is clear on a screen. While the most discriminatory practices in hiring are radio and the purveyors of print media. Nowhere is that more true than the New York Times, aka the White Lady. And includes her reportage which operates under a well-defined double standard. 

“Making our journalists know that we will stand up for them in the moments when they come under attack,” Executive Editor Joseph Kahn said last year in an interview with the news site Semafor, “that the institution is behind them, their safety but also their integrity, is a very important thing to do and also allows us to communicate with readers about the actual facts of a story.” Mr. Kahn’s comments were in the context of a question about Elon Musk’s criticism of the White Lady but are also pertinent to the newspaper’s sins against minorities which are related to condescension, theft of narrative and false narratives that unduly attribute black liberation in America to the efforts of Jews. But before going there—and yes we will go there, despite the risk of being labeled antisemitic—a few details. 

The Kahn interview was by Semafor’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith who was previously the White Lady’s main media critic, who worked for Joe Kahn in other words, which is a pretty glaring conflict of interest itself for the interviewer but was merely the subject of a joking exchange between the two men before the first softball questions were asked. Smith like Kahn also identifies as Jewish, btw, and that is important. The interview as it turned out was a blowjob which is the journalistic term for a story that is so positive that the person or entity that is the subject of the piece couldn’t have written anything more positive him or herself. 

There’s no one to call bullshit on the NYT in other words. Joe Kahn says everything about how the newspaper of record deals with criticism except what happens when the criticism is accurate, because the White Lady admits few inaccuracies. Mostly just her occasional correction notes about misspellings and wrong dates in stories. But what if the whole piece is a crock, like the false reporting that led to the War in Iraq and eventually led to a White Lady white paper, a mea culpa from the newspaper of record, promising to do better in the future? 

Which was actually followed by the Times getting rid of its ombudsman entirely, and more recently by editorial page leadership forgetting about Iraq and pushing a war against Iran, once again at the urging of the "the world's most moral army," per Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israelis. The White Lady is in the strange position of condemning our attack on Tehran but having pushed for the war, predominantly but not solely by Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist who was previously editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post. He is perhaps best known for an eugenics-themed piece suggesting that ashkenazi Jews, an ethnicity that includes him and about half of Israel, is a superior form of humanity. (Stephens' recent column titles in the Times related to the Iran War include, “For Once, We Fight with an Equal Ally,” meaning Israel, “Yes, This is Your War Too,” “The War is Going Better Than You Think”, and “The Iranian Advantage Is an Illusion.”) But on to race in America, which is our subject here. 

The Times’ credibility problem with black people just manifested itself twice in ugly and wholly discriminatory ways, first with coverage of the death of civil rights icon and former presidential candidate the Reverend Jesse Jackson of Chicago. To set the scene. Over the course of three days the Times published some 20 pieces on Jackson’s death, 17 of which were written by whites, overwhelmingly Jews, including the main story by Peter Applebome who is a former White Lady columnist and Atlanta (“the Black Mecca”) bureau chief, a self-promoting Caucasian expert on African Americans who chose as the first person to quote in his story—about this Negro civil rights icon—a Jewish political organizer from Chicago named Rose. 

A more accurate and far shorter take on Jesse Jackson’s racial trajectory will be presented below but it’s useful to note first that the center of the Jewish universe can be viewed as the New York Times, not Israel. The pages of the so-called White Lady have constituted the cultural homeland of the modern Jewish peep, even more so in recent years than before. Israel has the land, and wants more, but the Times has the readers, and wants more. As a consequence the view of other peoples/ethnicities by the White Lady's staff is not as sophisticated as you might think. 

Beliefs about black people for example are often based upon ignorance and upon a delusional view by some American Jews that they are somehow owners of the black narrative in this country. Wrong, bro. Just because you read it in the newspaper of record, for instance, doesn’t mean it’s true. As Elon Musk, who is also Jewish, has complained. Suffice it to say that white people don’t “know” us—black people—despite protestations to the contrary, any more than anyone from any race or culture knows any other race or culture. 

That’s ordinary humanism although cultural humility often clashes with the Times editors' belief that African American culture is part of the Jewish field of expertise, even to the exclusion from that field of blacks ourselves. Jews are tourists in the hood, really, just as American black people are when, for example, we visit the beach at Tel Aviv. But you can’t tell the Times that, or the New Yorker for that matter where Editor-in-Chief David Remnick, who is Jewish and has been accused by his own editorial staff of racism in hiring, nonetheless considers himself another expert on the black peep, having published four books—depending on your count—on the American Negro, including a biography of Barack Obama. And which leads to the second incident to be discussed, after the Jackson obit, another recent story by a poorly-informed White Lady which actually spotlights an unethical practice common to the New Yorker as well. 

In which mainstream liberal media are caught running a game, just like a bad boy in the hood, in order to downplay Jewish affronts to blacks and instead stress the White Lady/New Yorker’s complaints of antisemitism. To set the scene. 

Interestingly, just a year or two ago black intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates said—while mentioning his desire to write about Palestine and the Palis’ struggle with the Israelis? He said he was warned off and told that he didn’t have the knowledge base to question Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. That hasn’t stopped Jewish “experts” at the Times or New Yorker, bro, who are more than willing to opine on African Americans whom they apparently know very little about. A recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography Jonathan Eig, a Jewish sportswriter from Dallas who is now the white press’s go-to foremost authority on Martin Luther King Jr.? 

Mr. Eig also has a series of children’s books written in the person of a little black girl. This certainly has nothing to do with cultural appropriation or any wish on Eig’s part to exploit the black narrative for his own profit. God forbid. How do we know that? Because the principal Times book reviewer Dwight Garner wrote in his very positive commentary on Eig’s MLK biography that the tome is now “the authoritative biography” of Martin Luther King Jr. 

Without actually explaining how the white guy Garner is in a position to make that judgment about the white guy Eig on the subject of the black leader MLK. What Eig's work does do—his children's books for example—is keep a black author from getting a contract from a publisher to write about black people. 

Just as the Times' plethora of white “experts" on blacks and race in America, like Peter Applebome, late of the the White Lady’s Atlanta bureau, keep African Americans and Latinos from being hired in the White Lady’s newsroom. Some might call that exploitation or theft of narrative, actually. The Times has frequent coverage of blacks, the stories are just not often by blacks ourselves. Accuracy of the narrative can be just a detail to the White Lady in other words. The black peep are merely on the page to increase subscriptions and make the newspaper of record appear more inclusive than it is. 

Doubly interesting is that Mr. Coates was at The Atlantic, where the editor-in-chief is former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg. Who is a very likely source of those opinions that blacks shouldn’t write about Palestinians/Jews. (Coates now writes for Vanity Fair.) 

And speaking of conflict of interest in journalism—and the primacy of one cultural narrative over everyone else’s—in a recent broadcast of PBS’s Washington Week in Review convened to discuss the American-Israeli attack on Iran—in a roundtable chaired by none other than Jeffrey Goldberg, formerly of the Israeli Defense Forces—three of four of the guests were Jewish journalists with ties to Israel, including the White Lady’s Peter Baker and the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. Who are husband and wife, actually, not that there's anything wrong with that but maybe it should have been mentioned at the start of the commentary? 

No need for a Muslim, for example, to join a roundtable to discuss a war with a Muslim nation. Jewish journalists can do it all, just as is true in any discussion of African Americans, like Reverend Jackson. Enough said, except there has been another complaint that blacks should not write about Jewish affairs and the Palis. Directly from the White Lady herself, actually. 

The work that Coates eventually produced called The Message pointed to what he saw as similarities between the Palestinian experience under Israeli rule and what blacks have experienced in America. This was a Jim Crow-like analogy that the White Lady objected to, however. The Times reviewer of Coates’ book was Jennifer Szalai who is the newspaper’s chief white-expert on black nonfiction and has previously written that it is “banal” to think that black people are more knowledgeable on our own history than are whites. No shit. 

In the review she dissed Coates’ work for lack of a traditional factual basis: “He is using his position of prominence and moral authority to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians. Having lived the life of the famous Black writer in mostly white professional spaces, someone who has been both venerated and vilified, he finds in his new community ‘the warmth of solidarity.’” There’s nothing wrong with solidarity, actually, in the authentic black view. It’s what freed black people in the U.S., according to our view of our history. But we're not the experts, according to this particular White Lady. 

Ms. Szalai also leans heavily into two racist tropes in her review. One being that blacks “feel” but don’t use facts, which is something often heard in white academic circles—black people emote, while whites reason. And that a successful black writer owes his success to the aforesaid white professional spaces. Gee, isn’t that kind of demeaning and/or patronizing? Not in the pages of the Times where it can be pretty standard fare.  


The factual discussion that Jennifer Szalai prefers would have to include the fact that American Jews love nothing better than to recall their efforts to help African Americans during the civil rights era, including two Jewish Freedom Riders who got their tickets cancelled in Mississippi alongside countless blacks. But Jewish historians and journalists somehow ignore those hundreds of black G.I.s who died in Europe during World War Two while liberating concentration camps. The Tuskegee Airmen for example were not flying over Mississippi, bro, although those missions might have been useful.

Instead they were flying and dying over Germany, in order to free Jews. It’s remarkable that a people like our Jewish brothers and sisters—who have promised never to forget the past—are so quick to ignore what has been done for them but not to them. That is how the White Lady’s reportage works as well. And there’s actually a trick involved in her coverage—a sleight of journalistic hand you might say—that is being employed.

So, like, on the third day of Times reporting on Reverend Jackson’s death, the subject finally became something that black people might have found more meaty. In a piece by the Jewish journalist Jonathan Mahler who is another of the Times’ white experts on black people, the story was called “How a Stray Quote of Jesse Jackson’s Led to a Rupture Between Black and Jewish Voters,” did you read that? 

During his 1984 run for the presidency Jackson infamously referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York City as “Hymietown.” Which was clearly inappropriate (brought to light by a black Washington Post reporter, fyi) but was also indicative of African American dissatisfaction with the Jewish narrative of blacks in this country. Which includes the proposition that any disagreement with Jews is unacceptable. It wasn't actually a stray quote, in other words. It spoke to black frustration. 

Our Jewish friends spend a lot of time in our business—telling us what to do and what to think, to say nothing of what is “best” for us—without being invited. Part of the reason is financial. Once we accept contributions, whether of the political variety or to our educational institutions, the camel’s nose is under the tent. But whither, exactly, the hymie epithet? It’s part of history, too, and long before "Hymietown." 

In the 1960s and 1970s Jews were forced out of some civil rights organizations—by angry black activists—for being patronizing and attempting to run black groups. That is what led to the expulsion of Jews, for example, from SNCC (popularly called “snick”) the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of which Jesse Jackson was once a member and which began to criticize Israel during another preemptive attack on Muslim nations, the Six Day War. (In 1967, bro, when President Johnson refused the Israeli request to join an attack on Egypt, does that sound familiar?) Which the Times did not mention in its exploration of Jesse Jackson’s sins, even though Jackson was openly suspicious of the prominent Jewish role in black civil rights. 

The Mahler piece continued, as background: “A natural alliance between two largely liberal minority groups, each with a history of discrimination, had come under pressure from the country’s changing political dynamics. In New York City, a 1968 struggle over the control of public schools in largely Black neighborhoods prompted the firing of a group of predominantly Jewish teachers — spurring a citywide strike led by the Jewish head of the teachers union.” One point of contention is that African Americans are arguably not that liberal. We believe in fairness but also in many of the same traditional values as conservatives, including faith and family, and we are less and less attached to what is called, in the black podcast world, “the Democratic plantation.” 

And forgive one for wondering why Jewish teachers were in charge of black instruction in the first place? Why didn’t black teachers have those jobs? Why the Jim Crow treatment in a northern city? And why was it so disconcerting that black teachers wanted the task of educating black children

What’s also interesting about the Mahler piece is that any break in black-Jewish relations can be solely attributed to actions by black people, never errors by Jews. Who are only victims in this perspective. Let’s see if that’s true. The Times has, almost singlehandedly, just ignominiously ended the mayoralty of an African American in New York’s City Hall, who got too close to Muslim Turkey, and Jews contributed significantly to the recent reelection losses of two black Democratic members of Congress who had the temerity to criticize Israel. And the Times has blacklisted at least one African American journalist for supporting Palestinian liberation. 

But if blacks who are such a key demographic of the Democratic Party—as we are reminded endlessly by the White Lady—if we question or criticize Jewish politics/action—we automatically become antisemites. Or we’re “ungrateful.” Or we are confrontational. Very often it’s just a scam, b.s. in other words, a way of trying to bring independent black thought to heel. And here again the White Lady offers a very good example. 

Late last year the newspaper of record ran an “investigative” piece on the newest Supreme Court Justice, Katanji Brown Jackson, saying directly that she is “confrontational” and should not strike out on her own opinions but should find consensus with the Court’s liberals, particularly Jewish jurist Elena Kagan. Literally. 

This dialectic was presented as an investigative piece in the news section detailing liberal aims and how best, according to the reporter, to achieve those. And how the African American Justice Jackson was guilty of some kind of betrayal or stepping out of line. The story was written by Jodi Kantor, perhaps the Times’ best known journalist today, half of the team that produced the influential #metoo coverage and who is now on the Supreme Court beat. To set the scene. 

Kantor who was previously in the White Lady's Washington bureau wrote that her conclusions in the Supreme Court article were the result of interviews with clerks and court-observers but it certainly seemed that Justice Kagan, who was portrayed as a long-suffering Solon-in-a-skirt, may have had more than a passing role in writing this copy. It was a crock of shit, in other words, published as unbiased investigative journalism that seemed really intended to remind a black woman of her place. Jodi Kantor’s story did not go over nearly as well as #metoo. 

A few days later Kantor was quoted in a followup behind-the-scenes explainer on the black Supreme Court justice’s failings. She pointed out the virtues of the white female judge instead: “Justice Kagan, appointed in 2010 to be a diplomat and strategist, is capable of punching hard, but she shows her frustration only in flashes.” Laying it on a little thick, no, in order to repay a source? That doesn’t seem like objective journalism, much less investigative. And betrays her personal familiarity with the Jewish justice. Like, they know each other. And this isn't even original journalistic sin, bro: NPR's Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg had a longterm non-disclosed friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg whom Totenberg wrote, after the fact, she had leaked the subjects of upcoming NPR stories to, in order to give Ginsberg a heads up, and regularly praised the judge on air—just two Jewish ladies of a certain age—like Justice Kagan and Jodi Kantor, scratching each other's backs. 

Speaking of the facts, when President Obama appointed Justice Kagan he did describe her as a consensus-builder. But he said nothing about her being a diplomat or a strategist who others on the Supreme Court must follow. Indeed it wouldn’t have mattered if he had because the eight associate justices of the court are on the bench in order to interpret and apply the Constitution, each having equal responsibility and power. When President Biden appointed Justice Jackson, for example, who is the heavy in the White Lady’s reportage—as African American officials often are in the pages of the Times when we dissent from liberals—he described her “as someone with extraordinary character, who will bring to the Supreme Court an independent mind, uncompromising integrity, and with a strong moral compass and the courage to stand up for what she thinks is right.” Somehow none of that made it into the story. 

Per Ms. Kantor: “Ever since Justice Jackson arrived in 2022, friction has been building: between her and Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, who are more aligned strategically, and between her and the rest of the court, according to more than a dozen associates of the justices, including both liberals and conservatives. They spoke on condition of anonymity, in order to share sensitive details about closely held conversations.” Oh please. Dollars to donuts, Jodi Kantor got marching orders from Elena Kagan as two women of the same background, descendants of Holocaust survivors lest we forget, sat down to devise an approach, in the newspaper of record, to go after a minority justice in order to bring her to heel. (Times’ editors refused comment when asked if Kantor met with Kagan for this piece.) Justice Kagan should have shared the byline. This is the Democratic plantation, btw, where black officials are forced to hoe a particular row, or take a whipping. 

In fact Kantor used the female version of the “threatening black male” trope—the “confrontational black woman” in this case—which Jodi Kantor is familiar with because she also went after Michelle Obama early during the Obama Administration, in a book that the President and First Lady did not much appreciate. In Kantor’s introduction to her Obama work she informs us, “This book is dedicated to Hana Kantor, who grew up poor in Poland, did not attend school beyond fifth grade, survived the Holocaust as a teenager, losing nearly everyone and everything, built a life in the United States, and is still selecting the best tomatoes and playing kalooki in Florida and the Catskills. As her granddaughter, I’ve tried to help write the happiest ending to her story, to make good on the promise of America. I never once walked up the driveway of the White House without thinking of her.” 

Ms. Kantor’s relationship to her grandmother is stirring but, actually, who gives a shit? What does any of that have to do with the Negro First Family from Chicago? Kantor also wrote in her Obama book: “Michelle Obama was the great-great-granddaughter of slaves, but she did not discuss that legacy: the closest the Obamas got was the annual Passover seder they held, the guests mostly Jews or African Americans, the holiday a rare chance to safely discuss oppression and liberation.” This is striking as a perfectly condescending and false passage in modern American journalism, all the more incredible because it came from a Times White House correspondent, in fact the main correspondent covering the Obamas. 

Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton University with a minor in African American studies and from Harvard Law School. If Ms. Kantor can look at Michelle Obama either in person, as Kantor tells the reader that she did—up close and personal—or even in a photo or news clip, and believe that the only time the First Lady had discussed her legacy as the descendant of slaves, or discussed issues of “oppression and liberation,” was during Passover while sitting seder with Jewish friends, Ms. Kantor missed her calling—which is any profession other than journalism. The Times as an institution continues to see black people through a Jewish historical lens. 

But we’re not an extension of Jews or part of the Jewish narrative. We have our own narrative. And that becomes clear when the newspaper of record needs to cut somebody loose—needs someone to throw under the proverbial bus—like Justice Jackson. Or Mayor Adams. Just as Southern whites did, actually, Times journalists come looking for us. 

And if they criticize us, remember, it is because they are smarter or more upright morally/ethically. Really? Does that include faking investigative journalism in order to score political points for a prominent Jewish judge? We do know that same standard applies in Hollywood, btw. 

During the uproar over the Gaza War as American blacks began to stand up for Palestinians—and correctly so—television star Julianna Margulies who is Jewish said we were “brainwashed.” It’s actually Jews who may have been brainwashed, in part by the White Lady herself, to believe the decades of pro-Israeli b.s., which only now is coming to light as a wide swath of the domestic public belatedly questions our lock-step support of the Jewish State. Cue the war with Iran. But enough of Gaza and the Hormuz Strait and onto Chicago, and later back to New York, the aforesaid “Hymietown.” Let a black person opine briefly on his own peeps for a change.

 Chicago was the black melting pot that has formed so many ambitious black leaders including Oprah, Michael Jordan, Reverend Jackson, Elijah Muhammad and, most famously, Barack and Michelle Obama. In this black context too the newspaper of record doesn’t know what it’s talking about. One might say, if one wished to be ghetto, which is occasionally called for, the White Lady is a lying ho. A much more credible Jesse Jackson narrative is not that difficult to recount or understand if the source has cultural competence which white people at the Times do not have on this particular story, race in America. But which doesn’t stop the newspaper of record from trying. 

The White Lady, btw, just ran an opinion piece by a black writer and two Jews that the term “African American” should be phased out, in favor of exclusive use of “black.” Now we know, because the Times has told us our role/responsibilities yet again. At least a black person had a hand in writing the column, which is not always the case in White Lady opinion pieces on race. But on to Illinois. 

My mother and father were both born in Texas but grew up in Chicago after their families migrated, part of the mass movement of blacks from the South to northern states and the Midwest during the early 20th century, in order to escape Jim Crow. They followed the train tracks north, the “Katy” line, literally. To set the scene. For example Jesse Jackson himself went north from his birthplace in South Carolina. Chicago was where so many escaping black families ended up. 

       My father used to recount being a kid in Chicago in the 1920s and watching as an expensive car pulled up in the black hood and the back door opened and sitting there was Al Capone. With a  large bank bag of coins in his lap, which he threw handfuls of at passing Negroes. Who scurried to pick up the money. Capone was insuring that if he came to trial and any blacks appeared on the jury—because unlike in the South blacks were possible on Illinois jury pools, one of the benefits of being a registered voter—they knew to vote not guilty. Mr. Gold—the political operative who the Times chose to explain black Chicago—isn’t going to tell you that. Because he doesn’t know. 

And my mother, who was a gifted observer, had a favorite saying about the Windy City where she spent her childhood. “Chicago has,” she liked to repeat, “the meanest niggers in the world.” 

What she meant by “mean nigger” is what black people often still mean today, formidable. Like Michael Jordan, or Oprah. Ambitious. Smart. Capable. But white people don’t know what a mean nigger is unless they’re told by us. Chicago has created a lot of mean niggers thru the years, actually, with and without the assistance of Jewish political operatives. What Times coverage also failed to note at the time of Reverend Jackson’s death is that Jesse Jackson was part of the generation of black people who first grew tired of Jewish efforts at control of our narrative and their occasional condescension towards us, like Ms. Margulies, or Justice Kagan of the U.S. Supreme Court. But back to New York City. 

And back, actually, to the public education realm where the Times noted that Jews feel they have been dissed by blacks in the past. But where Jews have actually been doing the dissing recently. 

So, like, a week after Reverend Jackson’s death the Times carried an astounding story. The piece centered on a videoconference regarding a New York City public school that might be shuttered. Let the White Lady tell it from here because she does a very good job, up to a point. It’s what she doesn’t say, in this case, that is highly racist and unjustifiably prosemitic. Which is the opposite of antisemitic. Has a ring to it, no? 

“As one student, who attendees said was Black, spoke out to praise her teachers and lament the potential shutting of her school, another attendee — identified as Allyson Friedman, an associate professor at Hunter College who was attending as a public school parent — cut in. “They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school,” Dr. Friedman said, according to a recording of the meeting. She was attending virtually and was unaware that her microphone was turned on, per the Times

‘If you train a Black person well enough, they’ll know to use the back,” Dr. Friedman continued. “You don’t have to tell them anymore.” According to the White Lady, “[Dr. Friedman] appeared to be referencing a comment made earlier in the meeting by the local school district’s interim acting superintendent, Reginald Higgins. He had mentioned Carter G. Woodson, the scholar known as the father of Black history, who said, ‘If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told.’” So far, so good. Or so bad, actually, but well reported nonetheless. 

The Times followed up with a piece a day or two later that Professor Friedman had been suspended by Hunter College. What was not reported in either story, and is quite telling both about the professor and the newspaper of record, is that Dr. Friedman, like the White Lady herself, is Jewish. When Jews do great things the NYT calls out culture/ethnicity, but otherwise, not so much. The newspaper of record’s attention to detail is very selective, especially when Jews fuck up. For instance as part of the coverage of Henry Kissinger’s death a few years ago, the Times was not much interested in the secret bombing campaign that Dr. Kissinger helped orchestrate that killed tens of thousands of Cambodians, but was very interested that, at one point, Kissinger was boning actress Raquel Welch. 

Jesse Jackson’s “Hymie” rhetoric is important in Reverend Jackson’s obit in the Times, but not war crimes in Dr. Kissinger’s. When it’s something as horrific as Professor Friedman’s comments there’s no mention of Judaism or the fracturing of bonds between blacks and Jews. What Professor Friedman said was actually far worse than “Hymie” or “Hymietown.” But in the newspaper of record we read about the full extent of black racism but not Allyson Friedman’s. We read about black assaults on Jews but not Jewish assaults on African American civil rights. One of which took place in my hometown, Austin, Texas, actually. Literally

Again, the White Lady falsified the account by very selective use of facts not included in the story.


So, like, during the George Floyd protests that rocked the country and coincided with the pandemic, an Army sergeant at nearby Ft. Hood, who had a side gig driving Uber, came to Austin during an anti-police demonstration. Austin cops have killed a lot of minorities through the years, many of them unarmed, and the protest was well-attended despite COVID. To set the scene. The sergeant had a plan to kill a participant of the march, which he did. 

The protestor was armed but not threatening and the sergeant’s idea, which he communicated in text messages before shooting the guy, four times, was to kill an armed protestor and claim self defense. Long story short, the soldier was convicted of murder and sentenced to up-to-life in prison but was almost immediately pardoned on the instructions of Governor Greg Abbott. 

The White Lady covered the case of the sergeant—Daniel Perry is his name—who is actually Jewish. Without ever mentioning in reportage that the attack on the Floyd protestor was committed by a Jew, although local reports had mentioned Perry’s culture/ethnicity and that information was obviously available to the newspaper of record as well. The murder trial and the dispute over Sgt. Perry’s pardon both came at the height of the Gaza War when the White Lady was running news stories and opinion pieces about the “special relationship” between blacks and Jews in this country and the subliminal question of why African Americans were criticizing Israel. 

A story about a Jew who killed a pro-civil rights protestor doesn’t go along well with the particular view of race relations favored by the NYT. Sgt. Perry texted to someone, btw, evidence from the trial showed, “I am a racist” and he described Black Lives Matter activists as “monkeys.” He’s an anti-black Jewish terrorist in other words but you won’t read that in the New York Times

You will read, however, about antisemitism by blacks and everybody else. But in the White Lady’s view, Jews are victims, not perps. The Times is a wonderful publication on many levels but its primary mission is prosemitism, that is, pushing a pro-Jewish narrative and ignoring anything that doesn’t jibe with that. 

Whether it’s Israel, Hollywood or the proverbial hood, the White Lady offers what the Times likes to call “a nuanced view” but others might call, simply, bullshit. 

One of the only on-the-mark comments in the Times coverage of Reverend Jackson's death, for example, those 20-odd stories, was by the black writer Michael Eric Dyson who recounted that among Reverend Jackson’s economic campaigns was getting CBS to desegregate and hire blacks. One likes to think that if Jackson were still alive and in his prime he would have taken on the newspaper of record too. Because, specifically, the Times has a race problem. Evidenced by its nickname “the White Lady,” used by the black intelligentsia. 

Today she finds herself in the peculiar and embarrassing position of pushing a diversity narrative on others that has not been much applied in her own newsroom. Or in the pages of the newspaper, actually.

According to the Times’ own numbers, last updated in 2024, the news staff is approximately two-thirds white in a country where Caucasians are in the lower 50s and declining. Times leadership is 70% Caucasian. This is actually an improvement because in past decades the newspaper’s white staff has been closer to 90%. Go back beyond that and the Times didn’t really hire blacks or Latinos at all, except as window dressing—like, to point out the lone black person at a typewriter in the back of the newsroom, when the mayor or another dignitary was taking a tour. 

As in “tokens,” you know? 

The White Lady’s management was also busted just a few years ago by the newspaper guild for uniformly giving lower evaluation scores, for promotion, to minority news staff. That was under then Tom-in-Chief Dean Baquet. The features of the “peculiar institution,” as slavery was known in years past, have been adopted by a different peculiar institution, American mainstream journalism, in other words the New York Times.


Tuesday, June 9, 2026

Board of Nursing versus E. Eastland, R.N.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the largest group of healthcare professionals and the most popular misconception—that R.N.s are more promiscuous than the general public—was debunked in a large European study a decade ago. Now you know the truth, your nurse is no more sexualized than your accountant. At least Polish nurses are no more promiscuous. Although the same study did find that nurses tend to be more unfaithful to partners and more likely to participate in kinky sex, the profession must nonetheless be doing something right because nursing has been voted the most trusted major occupation by the American public for decades, outpacing physicians for example.

Another view of nursing that is accurate but little known is that there’s a beehive mentality in which a consensus forms of what constitutes good behavior or good practice, while physicians for example are more independent and offer a more mixed bag of views. In nursing there are also queen bees—this has been studied and confirmed—some of whom are nurturing and some who eat their young. We won’t get into that here except to say that the voice of the hive, the collective within the collective that makes the decisions, at least in the Lone Star State, is the Board of Nursing. 

Every so often the Board issues a list of nurses who have been disciplined, for a variety of reasons, and the list is always of great interest to other R.N.s who can’t help but look for the names of former classmates or colleagues. Confirmed rule-breaking or bad practice is not confidential and serves kind of the way crucifixions did in the Roman Empire, with the body placed high and in full view in order to discourage others. Or the way public hangings did in the Old West, with whole families making a picnic of the spectacle and the condemned offering a few last words about the wages of sin, before the trap drops. A lot of nursing discipline these days regards drug diversion (an ICU nurse in a hospital in Austin, for example, went missing from his work station a few years ago and was found dead in a bathroom after consuming patient narcotics.) 

Another popular complaint that can cost a nurse his or her license is “failure to notify,” that is failing to detect a change in the condition of a patient and therefore not informing the physician accordingly. The Board, it’s important to note, does not exist as a professional association—like a union—but as a protection for the public. Surprisingly, because of the hive mentality, what is appropriate practice and what is not is mostly agreed upon by most nurses. Most but not all. There have also been some slips in the discipline administered. 

Every two years the Texas Legislature does a review of a certain number of state agencies and/or departments of government and a decade or so ago it was the turn of the Board of Nursing. In the past legislators have described the Board as the archetypically well-run state agency but as with nursing discipline, even very good performers may run afoul of the rules. The Sunset Review as it is called, found that the Board’s discipline was not always related to actions that had anything to do with a nurse’s work performance. There was also some disquiet on the part of the state reviewers, prompted by a case of discipline involving a male nurse, that some punishment decisions are arbitrary—that the catchall “unprofessional conduct” was subjective, and in one case even involved an expired inspection sticker on a R.N.’s private vehicle. This kind of complaint has been echoed in practice, actually, by men and by minorities who believe they bear the brunt of the wrist-slapping and license-revocations. 

We won’t get into that, either, because the case to be examined here involves a white woman, a demographic that has long represented the archetypical American nurse. This is said absolutely without irony or ill will but that the nurse who was disciplined in the Board’s current most controversial case is a Caucasian female is a good sign, whether she is guilty as charged or not. Minority nurses and male R.N.s want to see the Board go after everyone, or no one at all. And, btw, the issue of males in the profession seems to be resolving itself naturally, through time, actually. 

While medical schools in the U.S. now admit more women than men, the opposite trend has taken hold in nursing—a lot of guys entering the profession, many who may have served previously as military providers, for example, and a lot of minorities like African-born or Asian-born nurses who have come to nursing to make a good living (and it is good) and to help with the caregiver shortage in this country. To set the scene. 

For over a quarter of a century, from the time of Governor George W. Bush until a couple of years ago, the long-serving executive director of the Board was the ethereally-beautiful Kathy Thomas, an ex-Army nurse and pediatric nurse practitioner. Surprisingly, among women—jealousy aside—hot women often seem to rise in nursing, because beauty among women as judged by other women can be considered more than skin-deep and may be a cause for admiration in itself. Or because of girl crushes? We won’t get into that either but suffice it to say that everything you want to know about women is on display at a hospital nurses station. In any case, the BON executive director is now a woman named Kristin Benton and both of these women, Thomas and Benton, despite leading the ultimate caring profession, have ovaries of steel. Which is what the public wants, at least subliminally. 

Patients and patient families have expectations, one being that the R.N. will have the patient’s back against the healthcare facility and even, if need be, against the M.D., and that the nurse, well, cares. During what for most people is a very very difficult time, being sick and maybe afraid of the juggernaut that is American health care. Failure to uphold these traditions of patient support can lead to unwanted interest by the Board of Nursing. The “board of directors” of the Board of Nursing, btw, appointed by Governor Abbott, includes lay members but is headed by a nurse, usually the same nurse for years on end—a queen bee because queen bees live a long time—previously a nursing professor from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (my alma mater, btw) and now by another professor from a university in West Texas. More ovaries of steel, no doubt. 

These women are all, in fact, queen bees, and they have recently made a very controversial discipline decision. They may have made a good decision, in fact, but they may also have set themselves up for a bad one that will alter the public’s historically approving view of nursing, sometime down the road. 

Camp Mystic

All you have to do is say the name and people have the same thoughts. Kids. Flooding, Drownings. Poor official/governmental response. Kind of like the Uvalde matanza but flood waters instead of gunfire. The Camp Mystic floods last year along the Guadalupe River in the Hill Country bring to mind much of the same horror that one associates with the Uvalde school shootings four years ago, except that Mystic was an Act of God while the Uvalde shootings were oh-so man-made. And Mystic was more deadly. 25 drowned kids, 2 counselors and the camp owner, named Eastland, who was also father-in-law of the camp nurse suspended recently by the Board. Both Uvalde and Camp Mystic featured alleged official misconduct, literally, which so far has led to lawsuits and the retirement of a county emergency director, but no one really taking responsibility—the Texas Rangers are still investigating—except the camp nurse. Which has caused some R.N.’s to believe she is a scapegoat while the more culpable have gotten a pass. 

In Texas government it seems there is always a demand for accountability but the one held responsible may just be a fall guy, the person going to the gallows is strung up more as a deterrent than as an actual perp. Time will tell in this case. Briefly, what Nurse Eastland has been accused of are three charges. It’s critical not to pre-judge her, because a full hearing will in all likelihood be held during which the facts will be explored. A lawyer whose practice is defending nurses in administrative appeals at the Capitol in Austin notes that the temporary orders suspending a nurse, as in this case, are often made without the nurse or his/her lawyer being heard. And the Legislature, in its wisdom, has historically required the Board to follow appropriate administrative procedures in deciding discipline but left up to the Board of Nursing itself to define what good practice is. That said, the early charges against Nurse Eastland include: 

Use of medications or procedures that must be ordered by a provider, like a doctor or advanced-practice nurse, even though it was an emergency situation, in this case a flood. This is slightly reminiscent of the sequelae of the Katrina flood in New Orleans, when a doctor and two nurses were indicted for, in effect, euthanasia of patients in a hospital where flood waters were rising. Those charges were eventually dropped. Secondly, Nurse Eastland was health director of Camp Mystic yet is accused of failing to identify an escape route for kids in a camp on a river prone to flooding. The question is whether the so-called “prudent nurse” should have thought of potential evacuation. 

The third charge is the most interesting and inflammatory. During the torrential rain storm and flooding, Nurse Eastland is alleged to have gathered up her own kids and escaped, even as the other children in the camp were at risk and, in fact, drowning. 

During most hospital orientations for new employees, nurses are advised on routes of escape in case of fire and how to evacuate patients. There is an expectation of giving assistance, obviously, and the same standard presumably applies to the case of flooding. Because health care occurs in so many diverse arenas like schools, hospitals, clinics, military bases, prisons, and in the home— although the idea of evacuation may not be the first thing that occurs to a R.N. at a job site—identifying an escape route and how to assist patients in case of an emergency, in other words critical thinking, or lack thereof, may be considered fair game for discipline by the Board. But that opens the Board and nursing to a probable backlash from the public in a different emergency circumstance that is not a fire or a flood. 

During the new-nurse orientation in Texas hospitals—and probably in every other American state as well—in which flooding or fire might be discussed, the new healthcare workers are advised about another danger as well, the active shooter. And whoever is giving the in-service, whether it’s a police officer or the head of hospital security makes clear the different reality of a nurse’s duty in case of a disaster that is anything but natural. The nurse is free to run and abandon his or her patients to a killer. But not to a fire. Or flood. 

The only potential weapon for self-defense at most nurses stations is a scalpel and you may actually have to go to the supply room to find it, and it’s probably not much use against a killer armed with a firearm. But appearances are everything to the trust that nurses hold in the community. The first time a nurse abandons patients, whether under gunfire or not, trust can break down. If for example you leave to her fate the 84-year-old Ms. Smith who can’t get out of bed or, God forbid, a nursery or NICU full of sick kids, the public will eventually hear about it and may revise its good opinion of the noble nurse. You may say, oh well, that’s not going top happen. Really? 

In Norway whenever anything really bloody or bloodthirsty happens, which is not often, you know what the locals say? “That’s so Texas.” No shit. A violent hospital disaster is going to happen in the Lone Star State, because sooner or later some sick individual will discover that the ultimate pool of vulnerable victims for a shooting is in health care. And it’s particularly likely it will happen here, if history is any guide. In fact let’s do a brief review of bad shit happening in the Lone Star context, God-created or man-made: 

First, the largest single loss of life to a natural disaster in American history is the 1900 hurricane in Galveston. Between 6,000 and 12,000 dead. The single largest loss of life due to a man-made accident in American history was a few decades later and also in Galveston County, on the peninsula in Texas City, when a French-flagged freighter freshly-loaded with ammonium nitrate (which terrorists like Timothy McVeigh have preferred for bombs) spontaneously exploded and killed almost six hundred people including the entire local volunteer fire department. “One of history’s largest non-nuclear explosions,” or so we’re told. Firefighters are, btw, the profession that may be closest to displacing nurses as the most trusted in America. 

In order to quantify the man-made shooting front in Texas—the only question is how much time do you have? Just in living memory there is the “invention” of the modern mass killing in a public space, a university, the UT Tower massacre (15 dead) in 1965. There are also a couple of church-themed Texas slaughters, Sutherland Springs in 2017 (26 dead) and the Waco siege and fire of 1993 (86 dead including four federal agents). And of course the Uvalde school massacre which would be the template for a hospital attack. If armed cops hesitate to go in, as was the case in Uvalde, it may be a little unrealistic to expect the nurses to stay. There is some reason for hope, however. 

There are almost 600,000 nurses in Texas—the second largest profession in the state after teachers. About one in six are now male. And men are more violent and confrontational, as women love to tell us, and presumably there’s a better chance—not to be sexist—that the guys will stand and fight against an invader at the nurses station. Did you see the wonderful video of the antisemitic attacks at Bondi Beach in Australia last year in which a fruit-seller confronted a shooter and grabbed the rifle from his hands? That is a possibility, if not much of a probability, in a hospital. The mantra that you hear in hospital security training is that one’s options are “Run, Hide, Fight,” and it will kind of be up to the nurse which to do. 

There have already been shootings in hospitals of course, murders, but they have been more targeted, against a physician or even a patient. Indeed violence is already pretty endemic to health care. 

This is purely anecdotal but in my own work life last year there was a 300-pound otherwise mild-mannered chef among my patients, going through severe alcohol withdrawal, who had to be held down by four nurses and two cops in order to get him into leather restraints. Shit happens in a hospital, in other words. And my actual first experience of healthcare violence was a quarter-century ago, in a pediatric emergency room in Austin, when a kind of chunky twelve-year-old girl threw a nurse across an examination room and then prepared to take on the police summoned from their post in the adult ER. The little darling—who did not want a shot of antibiotics—was crying the whole time as she asked why everyone was being so mean to her? But that is the difference between isolated violence from patients or family members and someone who is really sick, and who has come to a hospital as a hunter, with an AR-15, because he knows there are vulnerable prey to be found. 

That’s why what used to be the practice of having an off-duty cop or two on hand in the ER has now morphed into armed officers patrolling hospital hallways. It’s not because something might happen, it’s because something almost certainly will happen. 

Suspending Nurse Eastland’s privilege to practice may be all well and good, but the Board should be looking at something worse down the road. Not the least because, after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to southern Louisiana, and its hospitals, the American Nurses Association noted the ethical quandary for R.N.s working along the storm-prone Gulf Coast which includes Texas, where the nurse may have to give his or her life in an emergency. The nurses’ association insisted on reminding regulators that the R.N. has an obligation to his or herself as well as to the patient. 

Interestingly, for a healthcare worker outside the workplace there is no obligation to help in case of emergency and there is immunity from civil liability (“Good Samaritan Law”) in most cases, if things go south. Still, those who question why a nurse is the only one to take a fall so far for Camp Mystic are looking thru the wrong lens or looking at the wrong context. The context for judging Nurse Eastland’s actions, as the Board will tell you, is not the banks of the Guadalupe River but the nurses station and the hive. Whether others take a fall or not for Camp Mystic, nursing keeps its own accounts. That’s why it’s a trusted profession. In fact one might argue that the Board stepping in to look at Nurse Eastland’s performance, despite others looking the other way, is a good sign.

The Board of Nursing actually has a lot on its plate these days. The spread of nurse practitioners (it’s said that there is so much demand for preceptors to train new advanced nursing providers that preceptors in Houston are now charging students $50 an hour to show the students how to do the job) and, recently, doctors of nursing practice, has helped pull American health care out of a provider hole. These new roles must be regulated and disciplined just like the bedside nurse. The Board is also responsible for nursing education, and that means auditing and certifying nursing programs across the state. 

Nursing school, whatever the level, may actually be the best venue for addressing a nurse’s obligations in case of an emergency, including an active shooter, instead of waiting for someone to make a mistake and then making an example of their mistakes. Unexpected danger in the healthcare environment is not going anywhere and, in fact, is only likely to increase. This isn’t Norway after all. It’s Texas.