#2174: John Rocker

John Rocker is a former MLB pitcher and columnist for the WND. His main qualification seems to have been once saying that he hated New York because if you rode the NY subway you might have to sit next to a “queer with AIDS,” and because of the foreigners: “The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. I’m not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get into this country?” (Rocker’s rant manages to go downward from there.) Now, Rocker did get criticized for those remarks, however, and therefore concluded – entirely predictably – that criticizing him is a violation of his right to free speech. Here is Rocker ranting about a diversity seminar put on by the USDA where the speaker, to Rocker’s horror, claims that “ ‘America was founded by outsiders, who are today’s insiders, who get very nervous about today’s outsiders.’ He claimed the pilgrims were ‘illegal aliens’ and spends the next few minutes promoting amnesty.
 The indoctrination [is] paid for by you the taxpayer.” Rocker blames the communists: Seminars that promote diversity and anti-rasism and suggesting that America was founded by people of immigrant descent are “[r]eminiscent of the re-education centers of Maoist China or Soviet Russia.” Indeed, “The United States government is apparently readying itself for a massive war against Middle America,” says Rocker, citing InfoWars.

As a columnist, Rocker has at least realized that you ought to appear smart and well-read, and one hallmark of Rocker’s columns is therefore extensive use of words and references to events he apparently doesn’t quite understand. “The mid-’60s Democratic Congress along with Lyndon Johnson orchestrated the once ‘taboo’ New Deal, which was destine to eradicate poverty forever!,” says Rocker, in a column where he tries to argue that “[w]e haven’t quite reached the level of expectable in the American mentality as it relates to the deterioration of individual responsibility and its replacement by the proverbial government crutch, but rest assured that day is just around the corner.” Here is Rocker giving financial advice. (It’s pretty funny.)

Diagnosis: It is hard to avoid concluding that Rocker is genuinely dense, and the WND should be ashamed of themselves for being so irresponsible as to give him his own column.

Hat-tip: Dispatches from the Culture Wars