The Friday Letter / No. 493 / May 20, 2022
To understand why Democrats need to keep “racism” at the core of their every political demand and claim, we must know some history of their relationship with blacks in America. But we start with the 2020 election.
Trump increased his black vote by a third from 2016, from about 6 percent to 8 percent, according to AP Vote Cast. Washington Post exit interviews and telephone surveys say Trump did much better, 19 percent of black men and 9 percent of black women.
More alarming to the left, the Post estimates that Trump won 36 percent of Latino men and 30 percent of Latino women. Absent continued ballot fraud, the Democrat Party can't win future national elections if these trends continue. Democrats are painfully aware of this.
These numbers are not difficult to understand. By culling onerous, job-killing regulations, cutting taxes, opening the energy pipelines, and shutting down illegal immigration, Trump and his Republican Congress created a healthy, robust economy that benefited all American demographics, most notably Latinos, blacks, and working class whites.
While ignoring the mayhem and killings of 2020 in Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, and other cities, the left and its news propaganda partners lie-in-wait for any opportunity to blame any act by a nutbag fanatic on white supremacy. Leftists see white supremacy and “racism” as their only hope of winning elections. Winning the debate is out of the question, and they know it.
Crass as this sounds, the slaughter in Buffalo last weekend plays right into the hands of the gun control lobby/Democrat party, whose bigger goal is control. I was queasy about saying it, so I'll let someone else have the honors:
“Biden and the Democrats aren’t upset by the tragedy in Buffalo,” Drew Allen writes at American Greatness. “They’re ecstatic. At last, there is a travesty they can exploit to promote their 'all Republicans are white supremacists' lie. There is no low to which the Democrats are unwilling to sink in order to maintain power and at our country’s expense.”
The accused killer in Buffalo will likely be diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder – a psychopath. Democrats have to find a crazed psychopath in order to label all Republicans as white supremacist killers.
Their only hope is to keep this lie alive, that a Republican boogeyman awaits under every bed to lynch them. Without that, the black vote growing, say, to 20 percent, dooms them. They know this.
They want you to believe that Republicans are to blame for keeping blacks “in their place.” Well, let's take a walk down Memory Lane, as Reagan liked to say.
Indisputable is that the Democrat Party has been behind every segregationist, bigoted campaign to deny blacks their constitutional guarantee that all men are created equal. It starts with Democrat Andrew Johnson's presidency.
Our 17th president, Johnson was Lincoln's VP but a Southern pro-war Democrat, put on the 1864 ticket “only in an effort to bring about greater national unity during the Civil War,” William J. Bennett writes in the first volume of America: the Last Best Hope. Johnson hated blacks, as did Democrat Woodrow Wilson, our 28th president.
Johnson tried to obstruct the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which gave black men the vote. Bennett quotes a passage from the diary of Johnson's military aide, Col. William G. Moore, that “the president has at times exhibited morbid distress and feeling against the Negroes.”
It only gets worse from there. The all-Democrat South produced the Ku Klux Klan. Its first grand dragon was former Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former slave trader whose men, Bennett says, “could cold-bloodedly shoot black prisoners at Fort Pillow.” Though the Klan was mostly gone by the 1960s, and try as the media and left-produced history text books to deny it, the Democrat Party could never shake its role as the Klan's incubator.
It was the Republican president who followed Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, who signed the Ku Klux Klan Act which gave the federal government the power that eventually put the Klan out of business.
Woodrow Wilson's racial attitudes are best illustrated by this quote from a PBS publication on Jim Crow laws when his head of Internal Revenue in Georgia fired every black employee with the explanation that “There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro's place in the corn field.”
Wilson fired 15 of the 17 black supervisors who had been previously appointed to federal jobs and replaced them with whites. He segregated other federal departments and the military.
He was aided by congressional Democrats, who controlled both houses for the first six of Wilson's 8-year presidency.
“This progressive icon – a legendary advocate for expanding all sorts of rights and an inspiration to the world after the Great War – was backwards and bigoted when it came to race,” Randy Dotinga wrote in a 2015 Christian Science Monitor piece. Wilson was a professed Christian who rejected the evangelical Christian belief that blacks are equal to whites “as fellow children of God.”
Now consideer the two important civil rights acts of the 20th century, 1957 and 1964. These votes leave Democrats completely without any standing to claim that they are the party of minorities.
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 prohibits intimidating, coercing or otherwise interfering with the rights of persons to vote for the President and Members of Congress. The Senate passed the bill 72-18, and every Senator voting against it was a Democrat.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 enforces the constitutional right to vote and prohibits discrimination in public accommodations. The Senate vote was 73-27 in favor. Democrats controlled the Senate 66-34, but only 46 of them voted Yea., while 21 voted Nay. It took the vote of 27 Republicans to pass. Only six Republicans voted Nay.
And we can't leave out the late Robert C. Byrd, a Democrat U.S. Senator for 51 years and a former Exalted Cyclops of the KKK. He filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act for 14 hours.
In a 1944 letter to Sen. Theodore Bilbo, Byrd promised that “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side. . . Rather I should die a thousand times and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
Do you see a pattern here?
This is the Democrat Party's shame. It can't win on the issues and so it won't discuss them. Its only weapon is character assassination. Desperate to keep the black vote, Democrats have become a caricature of themselves, flailing around in frustration with no real plan. The race card is the only one left in their hand.
For more evidence that sheds the leftist lie about civil rights and equal justice under the law, see Carol Swaim's Prager U video. She is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.
Great moments in statesmanship
Democrat Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois knows who is responsible for the murder of 10 people in Buffalo last weekend – Tucker Carlson. That's why he sponsored a bill to “prevent domestic terrorism,” as if laws will stop a psychopath from committing mayhem.
Schneider admits that he can't prevent Carlson from supporting Martin Luther King’s call for a colorblind society, that we judge people by their character and not by their race – yet. He and his party are working on that and, they are pleased to say, making real progress.
“We in Congress can’t stop the likes of Tucker Carlson from spewing hateful, dangerous replacement theory ideology across the airwaves,” Schneider said in a story quoted at Just the News. “Congress hasn't been able to ban the sale of assault weapons. The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act is what Congress can do this week to try to prevent future Buffalo shootings.”
Our overworked, underpaid staff hasn't yet read this bill that all Democrats and one lone Republican voted for, Democrat sympathizer Adam Kinzinger. It must have language to the effect that a psychopathic killer must get permission from Mother Biden and register his street-sweeper “assault” rifle with authorities before launching his killing spree. That will certainly make us safer.
The breakdown of our language
Andrea Greenbaum, with whom I once had a passing acquaintance involving a piece I wrote for an academic journal, is the author of The Emancipatory Movements: The Rhetoric of Possibility (State University of New York Press, 2002). A professor of English at Barry University, she argues that the main purpose of freshman composition is not to teach writing in Standard Written English (SWE) but to empower women. She is a tenured Ph.D in case you ask.
Like other well-known and widely-published academics I have interviewed in this field such as Patricia Bizzell and Pat Sullivan, Prof. Greenbaum is a pleasant person with whom it is possible to have a respectful conversation, not always found in the academy these days.
But what some of them are teaching would make normal parents hide their checkbooks if they only knew what goes on in many college classrooms today. No longer are even economics, engineering, and science immune from the indoctrination programs you support with your tax and tuition dollars.
The result is an abomination of our language across the media spectrum. Here is an excerpt from a story in last Friday's Daily Mail, supposedly written in the language we brought from the Motherland:
"The trans Old Dominion professor who was forced to resign after they defended pedophiles by saying society should refer to them as 'Minor Attracted Persons' has been hired by Johns Hopkins University.
"Allyn Walker, 34, will start work as a postdoctoral fellow for the Baltimore school on May 24 - at a center aimed at preventing child sexual abuse - according to the college. . .
"Walker, who uses they/them pronouns, was forced out of Virginia's Old Dominion last November, after more than 15,000 outraged onlookers signed a petition to have them removed for the contentious remarks made by the professor that were expanded on in the 2021 book 'Long Dark Shadow: Minor Attracted People.'" (emphasis added)
The purpose of language is to communicate ideas and information with words. We are the only species possessing this capability. Now it is true that a newspaper article can add clarity using photos. The Mail story does have a photo of the professor, but it adds no clarity from where we sit.
We conducted a broad-based scientific poll of everyone in our house last Friday, including my wife, daughter-in-law, granddaughter, and Roberto, the contractor who is rebuilding one of the bathrooms. The question was “Is this a girl or a boy?” Girl by a vote of 4-0.
The confusion comes in because we think that Allyn Walker considers herself a male, but we can't be sure. Boys – males – are referred to as he and him in Standard English, as are people whose sex is unknown, to wit: “Everyone in the conference room forgot to set his watch to Daylight Savings Time.” The room could have men and women; it doesn't matter. Masculine gender is not the same as the male sex. We use the masculine gender in language when the sex isn't known or doesn't matter. We would still say that “Every Girl Scout should bring her scarf for the ceremony.” (Or maybe not; who knows in today's environment?)
We don't want to pick on Allyn Walker. People are free to identify as whatever they want, though it's a bit strange that a pedophilia advocate would be hired to run a child sex abuse program. The point is that whether he/she/they is a male or female has some relevance in this story, and the wordsmiths who wrote it didn't add any clarity.
Short takes on the news
Why it pays to stay in school. Four hapless criminals are suspected of cutting class on the day the “Quit while you're ahead” lesson was taught in Burglary School. Just outside Auburn, Ind., they returned to burglarize a home where a day earlier they had stolen the homeowner's cash. This time, WPTA-21 reports, the unidentified homeowner met Dylan Morefield and Rameica Moore with a shotgun blast, bringing a sudden end to their criminal careers. He held the other two, Tabitha L. Johnson and Shaun T. Kruse, both 42, for police. Under Indiana law they were charged with murder and felony burglary. Said Tom Davis, a neighbor, “You come in (to this neighborhood) and you're caught, you're not walking out.”
Recommended reading
“Is Biden's 'success' our mess?” by Victor Davis Hanson
Hanson wonders what else Biden and his handlers could have done to destroy the country. Writing at American Greatness, he poses a question: “If an administration deliberately wished to cause havoc on the border, to ensure fuel was nearly unaffordable, to create a crime wave, to spark 1970s hyperinflation, and to rekindle racial tensions, what would it have done differently than what Joe Biden has done?”
Hanson further wonders if it's incompetence, malice, or ideology that drives Biden.
“When pressed about inflation and fuel price hikes, Biden either blames someone or something else, gets mad at the questioner, or claims Donald Trump did it,” he writes.
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How can there be a decent discussion about race in America when three prominent Black men, Obama, Gates and Sharpton, with the support of The New York Times, refuse to accept the truth about the death of Trayvon Martin? ¹
Blatant fraud was committed by the camera-lovin' lawyer for the Trayvon Martin family. Historically, the Summer of 2020 with its turbulent events are behind us, but the lies that led up to those events are not.
It was fraud that launched Black Lives Matter. “Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer.” ²
¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/learning/film-club-trayvon-martin-is-still-making-america-confront-its-original-sin.html
² https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/