Jim Crow's brazen return
The Friday Letter / No. 430
Americans 28 or younger may not understand how far we had progressed to become a colorblind society in the BO Era – Before Obama. Everything changed after Obama took office in 2009.
The year is now AO 13 – After Obama. The era officially began on April 6, 2008, when Obama fired the opening salvo in the Left’s war on religion, white people, and civil liberties. “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter,” Obama said in a campaign speech in which he was trying to understand why the Democrat Party was losing its grip on working-class people. “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Obama wasn’t attacking a small group of fringe extremists. He was talking about the 75 million people who 12 years later would vote for guns, religion, and colorblind society.
Like the scars of war, the scars of societal progress take time to heal. We needed about 190 years to see fruits of an ideal established in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. That’s lightning speed compared, for example, to the fact that slavery still exists today in parts of the world. And it was 1,400 years after Ptolemy postulated that the sun revolves around the earth in a perfect circle before astronomers like Nicholas Copernicus figured out that Ptolemy was wrong. That’s how progress works – fits and starts, advances and reversals, trials and errors.
Once we left the Silly Seventies, racial harmony slowly started breaking out all over the country. The South still lagged under the influence of Democrat control and the dinosaur party’s KKK affiliate, but things were moving. It was no longer odd to see blacks eating in mainstream restaurants or moving into middle-class neighborhoods. While much of the progress resulted from legislation, it was private business – this is always the case – that produced the real results. Business owners began to realize that turning away customers on the basis of their skin color was a policy of foolish stupidity.
From the end of the Civil War until 1968, state and local Jim Crow laws codified the mistreatment of blacks in employment and access to public facilities, the segregating of water fountains and railway cars, housing, schools and everything else. Civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s gradually brought an end to this state-sponsored discrimination.
Jim Crow has returned to America. Discrimination based on skin color is now legalized bigotry. While schoolchildren may still be taught Martin Luther King’s hope that his children would someday be judged on the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, the state practices the opposite, with the full backing of the news and entertainment media, academia, Big Tech, and publicly-traded corporations.
New York’s incoming schools chancellor, a woman called Meisha Ross Porter, explained in a 2018 panel discussion how Jim Crow laws work today:
“When I am selecting principals, teachers or leaders – after we make the list, we look at it and we count: How many women, how many people of color, and why. . . . I look at the makeup, and I literally count, and it’s OK for us to do that.”
Meisha’s rallying cry is “Disrupt and dismantle systemic racism.” She made $209,479 last year as executive superintendent, the Sunday New York Post reported this week. Her preferred targets appear to be white women and Jews, “especially older Caucasian women in leadership positions,” said a veteran Bronx superintendent who the Post says “claims she was demoted and pressured to leave.”
Porter, says the Post, “was known to ask superintendents at the end of meetings to cross their arms in a ‘Wakanda Forever’ salute from the movie Black Panther.” Its message is a none-too-subtle warning to whites: Don’t mess with us.
Porter was a member of NYC Mayor Bill deBlasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group, which opposes the school system’s programs for gifted and talented students. She remains under investigation for a $45,000 party to honor her birthday and promotion to executive superintendent.
What does Joe know, and when did he forget it?
President Biden’s handlers have a problem. Do they know it yet? When he claimed recently that there was no CCP coronavirus vaccine when he took office, the usual questions came up about his mental acuity. In Houston last week, he struggled to pronounce the names of Sheila Jackson Lee and Lizzie Pennill Fletcher even while reading from a teleprompter. “Shirley,” he called the second-dumbest Member of Congress (next to Maxine Waters), and “Lizzie Pannilli.”
“What am I doing here?” he finally asked rhetorically in frustration. “I am going to lose track here.”
Of course, White House stenographers at CNN and MSNBC found nothing unusual or alarming about the President of the United States being confused and probably even unaware of where he was. But you have to wonder. Isn’t Jill Biden embarrassed by any of this?
A fawning puff piece by Kevin Liptak at CNN notes that, “As he walks home along the Colonnade, he’s often seen carrying a stack of binders or manila folders under one arm. He still brings a brown leather briefcase into the office.” And Jimmy Carter carried his own garment bag walking off the airplane, to show he was a man of the people. Never mind that the garment bag was empty; it’s the optics that count.
Liptak makes only one reference to Biden’s light daily schedule, that he retires to his personal quarters at 7 p.m. and goes to bed at 9. Liptak compares Biden’s evening habit of reading briefing papers to Trump’s television watching, never acknowledging that Trump was known to work 18-hour days.
When 31 congressional Democrats signed a letter calling for Biden to lose his sole authority to launch a nuclear attack, they tried to make it sound like it had nothing to do with Biden’s obvious dementia, that no president should have such authority. The effort was awkward at best. No no no, they insisted. It is past presidents who worry them, like Trump, “who have threatened to attack other countries with nuclear weapons or exhibited behavior that caused other officials to express concern about the president’s judgment.”
Trump never made such a threat, of course. If he had, they would still be talking about it. The inconvenience of fake news matters not to them.
Dan Bongino, a former NYPD officer and Secret Service agent who served on Bush 43’s and Obama’s protection team, said in TV interviews over the last week that it’s an open secret in the White House that Biden suffers from dementia.
Bongino cited sources in his reporting network that includes people outside of law enforcement. “It gives me absolutely no joy in saying this,” he said on Sean Hannity’s program. “And I mean that. He is in real significant trouble, Joe Biden.”
“And listen to me, everyone around him, everyone knows it,” Bongino said of Biden. “Everyone knows it. This is the scandal that they’re not telling you – how bad his condition really is.”
Could a 25th Amendment watch be underway?
Months ago we wrote with just a hint of hyperbole that Biden’s handlers would let him sit at the big important Oval Office desk for a few days, invite some low-level bureaucrats in for “talks,” give him some papers to sign, and then quietly usher him out with a “job well done” pat on the head. Now we aren’t so sure.
Things are actually going well for the Politburo that we guess is led by John Kerry – his “climate” office is actually in the State Department – with Susan Rice, and now, it appears, Rahm Emanuel. Kamala Harris is no threat. If the rulers decide to ease Joe aside, they will have no trouble inserting Kammy in the chair and pulling her strings just as they do Joe’s now. We’ve got to wonder what her husband thinks of this circus. He gave up his law practice to be a full time Second Husband. Don’t you wonder what he does all day?
Short takes on the news
We note in passing that a football team formerly called the Washington Redskins has dropped its cheerleader squad to make the team more inclusive. Last year Redskins owner Dan Snyder caved to pressure from D.C. lawmakers who threatened to withhold billions of taxpayer dollars to build Dan a new stadium if he didn’t change the team’s name. Now we’re told the team will field a dance team, composed, we guess, of Chicago schoolteachers. . . .
eBay bans the sale of six Dr. Seuss books as “offensive” but continues to sell Hitler’s Mein Kampf. . . . The county prosecutor in Portland, Ore., dismisses nearly 70% of the cases against 1,000 anarchists arrested in the summer riots, while federal prosecutors toss out 31 of the 90 federal cases, including four against defendants charged with assaulting a police officer. In Washington, D.C., most of those arrested for breaking into the Capitol Building, none of them armed, are held without bail awaiting trial. . . .
Tough-guy Rep. Dan Crenshaw rips on Biden for calling Texas chief Abbott’s open-for-business order “Neanderthal thinking,” reminding Lockdown Joe of his “low cognitive capacity.” . . . Trump did not start any wars during his term. Biden pulled the trigger after 36 days, and now two Senators, Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Todd Young, introduce a bill to strip Biden of war-making powers only hours after Biden launched an airstrike in Syria without congressional approval. . . .
Kissinger urges Biden not to abandon Trump’s “brilliant” Middle East Policy: “to separate the Palestinian problem from all of the other problems so that it did not become a veto over everything else,” and “lining up the Sunni states . . . against the Shite states, which is Iran, that was developing a capacity to threaten them.” . . .
Just asking: Are we the only ones who wonder why Democrats like walls around the Capitol but not around the country? . . . YouTube suspends Right Side Broadcasting for carrying Trump’s CPAC speech. . . .
The Friday Letter is updated later Friday at The News-Guardian.