RACE CARD LOSES ITS STING
Some 60 million voters who cast ballots for President Donald Trump in 2016 are once again being kicked to the margins of society and shamed as racists, all because of Trump’s thumbs on Twitter.
Most of America knows by now that he tweeted out something absurdly crass, telling four hard-left Democratic freshman congresswomen who loathe him to “go back” from where they came.
The four are American. They are women of color. They say Trump’s tweet was racist. I think it was profoundly un-American of Trump to have told Americans to “go back” to their own country. This is their country, even if they loathe much of what America stands for.
The controversy gave license to many on the left to put Trump voters in that worn basket of deplorables. Yet the outrage marshaled by the media, in their role as Democratic handmaidens, is deeply cynical, designed to separate Trump from suburban voters in 2020.
But overuse of the race card is causing it to lose its sting. And suburbanites know Democrats are expert in using race through government to leverage power and determine who gets hired and who gets promoted, who is leveraged into elite universities, who gets the public contract, who is allowed to speak and who is shamed into silence.
Politics as outrage in the vicious game of who wins and who loses is nothing new. But what about all those other alleged Republican racists out there?
The late Sen. John McCain was vilified as a racist for how he campaigned against Obama. He dared suggest that Obama of Chicago had benefited from the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine.
In those days even inanimate objects could be condemned as racist, like those Obama Chia heads — the “Happy Obama” and “Determined Obama” — that were removed from shelves due to complaints of disrespect, which was thought a crime against Obama.
Whether the heads were racist or not didn’t matter. What mattered was fear. The offending Obama Chia heads were removed.
All this isn’t new. The use of race cards to shame people into submission and force them on the defensive has been an important arrow in the Democratic quiver for many decades now.
Judge Robert Bork, the brilliant conservative nominated for the Supreme Court, was fitted for a white hood by Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which … blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” said Kennedy.
Think of it. Kennedy painted Bork and Republicans with the Jim Crow brush. But the media loved Kennedy. Or at least the media loved the idea of a once-and-future Arthurian romance that had Kennedy shaping American culture and politics. Kennedy wasn’t held to account for his attack on Bork.
Kennedy also warned that racist Republicans would preside over a land where “schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government.”
But in schools these days, writers and artists are censored by the Thought Police of the Democratic left. A San Francisco school board decided that a mural of George Washington at a local school is to be erased. The name of Thomas Jefferson, who like Washington also owned slaves, is being stricken from celebrations in Virginia.
Budweiser beer was racist until it cut the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s sons in on the beer business in Chicago.
Rather than risk being publicly shamed, millions of Americans lapse into a sullen silence.
Trump is eager to elevate political enemies like the four congresswomen of what’s called “The Squad” so they may become the angry Mount Rushmore of the new Socialist Democratic Party. And the hard-Democratic left, with its blackclad antifa shock troops, has Trump and his followers on which to feed.
And what simmers out there in that silence is dangerous.