A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
The call for reparations attracts more supporters every day. Even Disney has joined the cause, weaving the issue of monetary payments to the descendants of slaves into a storyline on the “The Proud Family” series on the company’s streaming service. But what generated the most controversy was one episode in which the show’s protagonists perform a song entitled “Slaves Built This Country” after they discover the founder of their town was a slaveholder.
Setting their frustrations over racial injustice and hardship to music, the cartoon children sing that slaves “made your families rich from the southern plantation, to the northern bankers, to the New England ship owners, the Founding Fathers, former presidents, current senators.” Catchy though the song may be, the children leave out one prominent beneficiary of slavery, one in the best position to provide the reparations called for: the Democratic Party.
One may argue for or against reparations on many different grounds. At its heart, supporters for reparations say that freed slaves never received any kind of compensation for their hardship from their owners. Thus, the descendants of slaveowners owe financial restitution to the descendants of their slaves, which would alleviate income inequality and atone for slavery, America’s “original sin.” Opponents of reparations argue one group of people, who did not commit the original wrong, should not be forced to make restitution to a group who indirectly received the wrong. From this angle, reparations seem more like “legal plunder,” a term coined by the French economist Frédéric Bastiat. Such an act “takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.”
But if the supporters of reparations are right and that some restitution must be made, it becomes obvious who should do it: the Democratic Party. Indeed, it is an objective fact that the Democratic Party is intimately tied to slavery and segregation. The Democratic Party was founded by Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, himself a slaveowner, and Martin Van Buren, a New Yorker who owned at least one slave and exploited enslaved labor. More importantly, Van Buren’s plan gained the support of southern politicians for his policies in exchange for his support of the “peculiar institution” of plantation slavery. Such politicians became so numerous they had a name: doughfaces, since their characters lacked all substance.
This pattern continued through the end of the Civil War and the early 20th century. After the Civil War, Democratic politicians in the southern U.S. supported segregationist policies that brutally infringed upon the rights and dignity of African-Americans.
As a result of this history, the Democratic Party should provide reparations, not the descendants of one class deemed politically expendable. Still, you may say, “that was the Democratic Party of the mid-19th century. So much has changed since then that the current officeholders and politicians could not possibly bear any blame for what their forebears did.” This is true, but it is also true of the American people.
Today, the American people are not directly responsible for slavery, segregation, Indian removal (also Van Buren), and a host of other injustices for which prominent Democrats ask for reparations. Moreover, the American people are being forced to pay for more spending programs, up to and including reparations. How is it any fairer to ask the American people to accept another raise in their taxes to fix a problem the progenitors of the Democratic Party started? Shouldn’t that be at least acknowledged?
They acknowledge institutionalized racism, but they entirely ignore the fact that they were the ones who institutionalized it. The Democratic Party, as a private institution, is in the best position to provide reparations for the evils of slavery and segregation they did so much to perpetuate. If the Democratic Party admitted its wrongdoing and offered financial compensation to the descendants of slaves, it would immediately remove reparations as a possible unwise and unreasonable expansion of government. Moreover, the Democratic Party, with its expansive network of donors and connections that includes local community and civic leaders, could far more effectively handle the distribution of reparations itself.
If the Democratic Party really wants to move the country past the legacies of slavery and segregation, it should acknowledge its role in promoting them. If there are any groups in the U.S. that should provide material assistance to black Americans to make amends for the injustices committed against them, it should be the institutions that committed those injustices. The Democrats, the self-proclaimed “party of the people,” and not the people of the United States themselves, should bear that cultural and financial responsibility.
Winston Brady is the Director of Curriculum and Thales Press at Thales Academy, a network of classical schools with campuses in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina. A graduate of the College of William & Mary, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Winston writes on the intersection of history, politics, and culture, as seen through the lens of classical wisdom and virtue. He lives in Wake Forest with his wife Rachel of ten years and his three boys, Hunter, Jack, and Samuel, all of whom will one day learn Latin.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is routinely the target of deranged smears from American leftists, and sadly, this week has been no exception with the return of the “Uncle Tom” attack.
On Tuesday, the Georgia Senate successfully passed SB 69, which, if approved by the state House and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, would allow for the placement of a monument of Thomas on the grounds of the state capitol. In remarks to his colleagues, bill sponsor and GOP Sen. Ben Watson spoke to Thomas’ character and praised the justice for living a life “marked by tremendous achievement,” saying:
This native son of Georgia deserves a place of honor and recognition on our Capitol grounds, a place where future generations of Georgians can learn valuable lessons from his legacy and gain inspiration and belief that their lofty dreams are obtainable too in America, regardless of the circumstances into which they are born.
Meanwhile, the upper chamber’s Democrat members couldn’t have been less enthused. Not only did every single Democrat senator vote against the bill, but several of them used the opportunity to slander the Supreme Court’s most senior justice.
While some Democrats such as Sen. Nan Orrock went after Thomas’ judicial career by calling his service on the nation’s highest court “problematic,” the comments from leftist hacks like Sen. Emanuel Jones were much more vitriolic. During his unhinged diatribe, Jones referred to Thomas, the second black American to serve on the Supreme Court, as an “Uncle Tom,” and said he betrayed “his own community.”
“I’m just trying to tell you what we have in the African American community when we talk about a person of color that goes back historically to the days of slavery and that person betraying his own community — we have a term in the black community,” Jones said. “That term that we use is called ‘Uncle Tom.’ An Uncle Tom … talks about a person who back during the days of slavery sold his soul to the slave masters.”
A Pattern of Racist Attacks
Unfortunately, Jones’ Tuesday rant is just the tip of the iceberg. Through the years, so-called “progressive” Democrats have hurled a barrage of racist and degrading attacks at Thomas for the crime of daring to think for himself.
During a 2014 interview, for instance, Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi didn’t just call Thomas an “Uncle Tom”; he also claimed the justice “doesn’t like black people” and “doesn’t like being black.”
But it’s not just Democrat politicians lobbing racist insults at Thomas. Prominent legacy media members such as MSNBC host Joy Reid have also joined in on the smear campaign in recent years. After then-President Donald Trump forecasted plans to take his 2020 election challenges to the Supreme Court shortly after the Nov. 3 contest, Reid openly questioned the legitimacy of the court and invoked the “Uncle Tom” slur by referring to Thomas as “Uncle Clarence.”
“So, I think what scares people is that if [Trump] decides to do something that legally makes no sense … but if they somehow manage to stumble into the Supreme Court, do any of you guys trust Uncle Clarence and Amy Coney Barrett and those guys to actually follow the letter of the law?” Reid asked her colleagues. “No! I mean, it’s a completely politicized Supreme Court that you can’t just trust that they’re going to do the right thing.”
In addition to Reid, actor Samuel L. Jackson is among those who has levied the “Uncle Clarence” slur against Thomas.
Unlike many of today’s social justice warriors who love to feign “oppression,” Thomas grew up in an era of real oppression. Born into abject poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, Thomas was raised by his grandparents in Savannah during the height of segregation. With his biological father missing from his life, Thomas’ grandfather assumed the role, providing his grandson with a foundation for hard work and discipline.
Despite the harsh circumstances of his beginnings, Thomas would go on to excel in academics, attending the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School. After spending years working in the legal profession, Thomas was nominated by President George H.W. Bush to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1989. Not long after in 1991, he was nominated and confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court (no thanks to Democrat partisans like then-Sen. Joe Biden), where he has faithfully served for the past 31 years.
If we lived in a world where Democrats earnestly stood by their professed belief in championing the success of non-white people, Thomas wouldn’t be getting one statue, but a hundred. His journey to success is something that shouldn’t just be celebrated but shared to inspire others to overcome adversity and chase their dreams with hard work and strong principles. Then again, leftists’ racial pandering isn’t about helping people.
For Democrats, Thomas’ devotion to the Constitution and willingness to do right by the American people stands in the way of their conquest to centralize government power in the hands of a few elites. His originalist jurisprudence is a roadblock to that goal, therefore making it perfectly acceptable in their eyes to use any tactic, no matter how grotesque, to undermine him.
Despite their best efforts, the left’s bid to slander the legacy of this great man will fail. No matter what kind of rhetorical garbage they throw at him, Clarence Thomas will be remembered as one of the greatest Supreme Court justices and public servants in U.S. history. His understanding of what it means to be a judge and adherence to the Constitution have rightly garnered him adoration from millions of Americans. And that is something the left will never be able to change.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
As much as leftists should be hated for agitating racial conflict and violence, there’s something kind of sad, in a pathetic way, in witnessing the disillusionment of true believers finding out they’ve been conned by the very movement they helped push forward.
Such has been the case in recent weeks, between Rihanna’s “sellout” half-time performance at the Super Bowl and the muted response (i.e. no deadly rioting) to the death of Tyre Nichols, leaving some of the Black Lives Matter faithful with heavy hearts.
The Washington Post’s resident race hustler Karen Attiah on Monday bemoaned Rihanna’s “selling out” by performing at the Super Bowl. The ungrateful immigrant singer had said in 2019 that she turned down a previous invitation from the NFL because, “For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler.” She was presumably referring to the league’s punishment of Colin Kaepernick and others who protested by kneeling during the national anthem on game days.
“With Rihanna’s performance and her silence on the issues she claims to have stood for, the true winner of the night was the NFL,” wrote Attiah. “She has shown them, and all racist institutions, that if they can withstand Black protest and outrage for a few years, put on some cool shows and donate to charities, then everything will be hunky-dory…”
Charles Blow wrote similarly in The New York Times last month after a national story about a young black man who died in police custody, following his attempt to flee arrest. Arrests were made of the officers involved, all of them black, and they’ve been charged with the death of Tyre Nichols. This is formerly known as “the judicial process,” but because Nichols’ death didn’t result in another round of calls for reparations and the eternal subjugation of whites, Blow was miffed.
“It was more snuff porn with Black victims, in a country becoming desensitized to the violence because of its sheer volume,” he wrote. “America — and the world — had the realization that police violence was a problem, and then it simply walked away before the work was done and the war was won. … What fell away were the evanescent allies, poll-chasing politicians and cooped-up Covid kids who had used the protests as an opportunity to congregate.”
Wait a second. You mean to tell me the 2020 summer of horror was a manufactured hysteria for political purposes and that once its goal was achieved — the unseating of Donald Trump as president — it all seemed to disappear? No way!
Cold reality is finally setting in. Santa isn’t real after all.
Blow and Attiah might be the last people in America to realize that BLM as a national entity is nothing but a scam — even in the literal sense of the word, as endless stories have come out since 2020 exposing the group’s leaders as frauds and money embezzlers using innocent donations to enrich themselves with expensive homes and private jet travel.
And celebrities like Rihanna who promoted the notion that black athletes, who are paid millions of dollars, are also victims of white supremacy aren’t serious and should never have been taken seriously. Is the NFL in any way noticeably different today than it was in 2020? Of course not. But Democrats have the bulk of the power in Washington, so that put Rihanna and others in a much better mood.
It’s too bad Blow and Attiah had to find out this way.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
This is a cautionary tale for all Americans, both white and black.
Last Sunday, a college couple, 22-year-old Adam Simjee and his 20-year-old girlfriend, Mikayla Paulus, were driving through Talladega National Forest when they were flagged down by a black woman having car trouble. If I tell you the good Samaritans may have been National Review readers, you can probably guess that one of them ended up dead.
As they were trying to fix the car, the woman, Yasmine Hider, pointed a gun at them and demanded they walk into the woods and hand over their phones and wallets. At some point, Simjee pulled out his own gun and started firing at Hider, wounding her. She shot back, killing him.
The reason I suspect the couple were National Review readers is that the “good Samaritan” ruse was one of the bullet points in John Derbyshire’s famous “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” which got him fired from National Review in 2012 — standing athwart history and mewling, “Please like me, liberals.”
Derbyshire hadn’t even published the piece in NR.
He was responding to a spate of lachrymose accounts of black parents describing “The Talk” they have to give their sons, instructing them to be super polite to police officers — smile and say, “Yes, sir” — lest the officer shoot them to death for no reason whatsoever. (Ask any police officer, and they will tell you black arrestees, to a man, are the politest people you will ever meet.)
In the piece, Derbyshire issued exhortations about treating black people with “the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen,” but then listed “some unusual circumstances,” requiring extra vigilance due to “considerations of personal safety.”
The “personal safety” rules concerned only complete strangers. His point was that when you have no other information to go on, you have to rely on statistics.
Derbyshire’s Rule 10 (h) was: “Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.” He appended links to stories like the one that began this column.
Here are a few other examples from a general Nexis search for “good Samaritan w/s shoot! or kill! w/s car”:
Feel free to look them up, but I’ll save you the trouble and tell you: All the perps were black. National Review: DO NOT WARN OUR READERS ABOUT THE “CAR TROUBLE” SCAM!
Derbyshire did warn his readers, so NR editor Rich Lowry dumped him, denouncing the piece as “nasty and indefensible.”
Not good enough! Slate magazine’s William Saletan thundered, complaining that Lowry had not attacked the “ugly,” “racist” column with sufficient ferocity. He, Saletan, would proceed to explain “what Derbyshire got wrong.” Whereupon he demonstrated that he has no idea what the words “statistical” or “averages” mean — much less the phrase “[when] you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences.”
Thus, his central complaint was: “Derbyshire thinks his data warrant his conclusions. But all his data references include the crucial term ‘mean’ or ‘average.’ They don’t tell you about the person walking toward you. They tell you what you can assess about the probability of danger when the only information you have is color.”
Yes, exactly, you complete moron. That’s the point, subtly indicated by Derbyshire stating that he was referring only to those occasions when you don’t have any other information about a person. (Do black parents giving “The Talk” remind their sons not to make assumptions about any particular cop walking toward them?)
Back in the halcyon days of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, we had one other fact to guide us: Criminals were in prison. Unfortunately for black people, a small percentage of their community commit a boatload of crime. But as long as criminals went to prison, New Yorkers could pass black men with little concern because if they were criminals, they’d most likely be locked up, not standing on a subway platform next to you.
Not anymore. Now, the criminals are out among us. There’s no possible way to evaluate a stranger, except the statistics. E.g.: Blacks, who make up about 20% of New York’s population, commit more than 70% of the shootings. In Los Angeles, blacks are only 8% of the population, but commit nearly half of the murders.
Suddenly, New Yorkers, Los Angelinos and anyone else living under Democratic control are behaving like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who once remarked that when he heard footsteps on the street behind him, he would, “look around and see it’s somebody white and feel relieved.” He made that statement in 1993 — the very year Giuliani was elected mayor, before proceeding to drive down crime rates and liberate black people from dangerous neighborhoods, as well as from suspicious looks.
This is the cautionary note for black people. The Democrats’ Free All Criminals policies have hurt black people in myriad ways — mostly by getting thousands more of them robbed, assaulted and killed each year — but also in other, more subtle ways, like this.
As Senate candidate Blake Masters of Arizona said — and the media lied about — it is blacks, frankly, who suffer the most when criminals aren’t locked up. And the Democrats don’t care.
In preparation for the close of the year’s second economic quarter, the White House Council of Economic Advisers has already started the spin: We’re not in a recession if we just redefine what a recession is.
“While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle,” the supposedly nonpartisan group said in a blog post on Thursday.
It’s doubtful the verbal smoke and mirrors will persuade the average Americans whose grocery bills keep growing as fast as their gas tanks empty. A recession is a sustained downturn in economic activity, and many Americans can feel it without knowing what the Q2 numbers are. But it’s far from the first concept the left has simply redefined to deflect the consequences of their failed policies and ideas.
One of their favorite words to redefine, apparently as “full and unchallenged political control,” is democracy. When actual democratic processes are at work — such as when an elected majority votes not to pass a pet piece of legislation, or when issues such as abortion law are left to elected representatives of the people at the state level — leftists scream their favorite catchphrase and call it a “threat to democracy.” They’ve levied that smear at everything from our bicameral legislature to the Supreme Court to the other party in our two-party system. It’s obvious they’re not really talking about democracy in any honest sense of the word. When democracy is a threat to their power, it simply gets redefined.
Another word that’s undergone a 180-degree redefinition is racism. No longer is it considered racist to treat someone differently based on his or her skin color, and not racist to value all human beings equally. Instead, if you’re not promoting theories that “remedy … past discrimination [with] present discrimination,” as critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi suggests, you are clearly a racist according to the left’s new dictionary. Do you believe in meritocracy? Racist. Think people are responsible for their own choices, and it’s neither possible nor beneficial for the government to dole out equivalent outcomes to everyone by force? Doubly racist. The new liturgy says that true equality lies in teaching some children that they’re part of a hopelessly oppressive system and other children that they’re hopelessly oppressed.
On the subject of pitting people against each other, the term “vaccine” has been ridiculously redefined to cover for the incompetence of the people who profit from them. After the shot that was promised to protect people from Covid transmission and infection failed to ward off either, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention simply changed the definition of “vaccine” to fit the narrative. “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” was quietly altered to “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” Barely a week later, Merriam-Webster followed suit by changing the definition of “anti-vaxxer” from someone who opposes vaccines to someone who doesn’t believe the government should mandate Covid shots.
Just last week, as part of the trans-crazed campaign to redefine what a woman is, Merriam-Webster added“having a gender identity that is the opposite of male” to its definition of “female.” Categories such as “men” and “women” that are based in biological reality don’t suit the agenda that seeks to abolish those realities from minds and bodies. So rather than advocate their agenda within the bounds of reality, the left simply attempts to redefine reality itself. It’s apparent in the push to call women by the objectifying terms “pregnant persons,” “menstruating people,” etc. We saw it when then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson told Congress she couldn’t define what a woman is, and it’s obvious in the attempts to put confused men in women’s prisons, shelters, and bathrooms. The reality of womanhood is in the way, so it’s being redefined out of existence.
And while abortion advocates lately have been willing to defend the act of killing a baby in the womb even with the understanding that it takes a human life, for years they’ve pushed their agenda by redefining an unborn baby as a “clump of cells” or some other dehumanizing description.
On any of those topics and more, leftists and their allies in Big Tech also persistently redefine any dissenting opinions or perspectives as disinformation,using that disingenuous label to erase opposition from channels of discourse.
Of course, many people who hear them prattle about “disinformation,” “birthing persons,” “anti-racism,” “threats to democracy,” and their host of other buzzwords know those words are nonsense. We can tell, as George Orwell wrote in 1946, that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
But, as he noted, “the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them.” The danger is in allowing these redefinitions of reality to be said, unchallenged, until enough people forget they could ever be challenged at all.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
Whether Mitch McConnell’s boneheaded distinction between African Americans and “Americans” was a misstatement or something more sinister, the fact remains: America will not benefit from federalizing its elections.
The narrative that continues to be stoked by the radical left is that states all over the country are actively denying blacks the right to vote and only the federal government can stop it. At the center of this controversy is the “oppressive” requirement that all voters be required to produce a valid ID, which will disparately affect black voters because everyone knows blacks are more likely than whites to not have an ID.
Joe Biden’s risible claims about voting rights are true to what Malcolm X described as the “trickery” of the white liberal: “The history of the white liberal has been nothing, but a series of trickery designed to make Negroes think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems.” The trickery for today’s white liberal is to manufacture racism by creating the narrative that voter ID is racist and will disproportionately harm blacks. Or that limiting the amount of early voting and other measures that increase ballot vulnerability is inherently racist because blacks won’t vote unless the federal government prods them to the polls because blacks are so dependent on the federal government.
Not only is this narrative unsupported by facts, this lie covers the truth that Democrats don’t want any election laws passed that might catch or stop from voting illegally people Democrats believe will vote Democrat—including voters who don’t want to prove they haven’t voted twice in the same election.
Every black person I know has an ID. Can any supporters of the Freedom To Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act produce black people who tried to vote but were turned away because they did not have a valid photo ID? That’s the rap on Georgia and other states’ laws requiring all prospective voters to prove who they claim to be as a protection against claims of voter fraud.
The big deal with these state legislatures tightening security measures is allegedly not that the measures are unnecessary, but that they are discriminatory, racist, and targeted to keep blacks from voting. Democrats must believe that blacks aren’t smart or interested enough to get a photo ID, the central security measure being added to state voting protocols.
For the past year, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi have been “Jim Crowing” that the Georgia law and others like it are racist since black people are more likely than their white counterparts to not have an ID and therefore be denied their vote (for Democrats—because, according to Joe Biden, you ain’t black if you don’t vote Democrat). Really?
What is it about being black that makes one less likely to have identification? Seems like a racist sentiment. Assuming that there is a black adult without identification, we are supposed to presume that black voters without IDs would be so intimidated by a requirement to present an ID that they would rather not vote than stop by the local license branch and get an ID for the cost of a Big Mac and a Coke? Most states like Indiana will waive the minimal fee if necessary.
But if Democrats are right, and requiring identification is indeed racist, why are they only making noise about required ID voting? Shouldn’t they complain about driving, which would be racist because an ID is required to drive? What about opening a bank account, credit application, or ordering a cell phone, cable and ordinary utilities?
All these would have racist implications daily rather than just on Election Day. Yet there’s not a peep about blacks not being able to get a cell phone or cable TV, because that doesn’t get the Democrat his votes.
This all leads to the Democrat solution: kill the Senate filibuster. Of course, we are reminded that the filibuster was the procedural tool used by Democrats and Republicans to oppose civil rights legislation. But the use of the tactic that may have been used against what is now viewed as popular legislation does not make the tactic itself racist in its application.
The filibuster has evolved from its initial incarnation to a procedure that provides the minority party or position the opportunity to be heard. Since both parties have often been in the minority, both parties have benefited and suffered from its deployment.
I know it might be painful for them, but perhaps Democrats should open up their playbook and remember what they did to intimidate and suppress black voters in the first half of the 20th century.
It is unnerving that the Democrat Party draws comparisons to its champions of segregation Bull Connor and George Wallace suggesting that voter ID is a discriminatory tool, the same as the poll tax or the literacy test, that actually prevented blacks from voting in a notoriously humiliating manner. Such comparisons are a disgrace to the honored memory of all who fought and won victories in securing the right to vote.
In the continued invocation of Jim Crow, the euphemism for the abhorrent laws that legally sanctioned segregation, discrimination, and brutality, Biden and his race-baiting big government aim to racialize the filibuster so that all who support its continued use are brandished racist forevermore. I hope blacks in this nation are wearing thin to the leftist patronization that denigrates the proud history of black and white patriots who fought, bled, and died for freedom, independence, and our opportunity to vote.
Curtis Hill is the former attorney general of Indiana.
Davis Joint Unified School District in Davis, California, pushed leftwing distortions of gender and critical race theory through its Office of School Climate, which taught staff that “gender is a scam” and advertises the White Privilege Conference on March 9-12, 2022. The office is “responsible for supporting district staff and recommending and piloting ways to address structural oppression and to enhance school climate, equity, diversity, and inclusion,” according to their website.
The district, which includes approximately 8,500 TK-12 students throughout 16 different schools, also recently voted to adopt an Ethnic Studies requirement, which a press release notes will “explore issues of identity, analyze systems of power” and “examine social movements.”
Distortions Of Gender
The district’s site features a number of different resources that pushed radical leftwing distortions of gender. One presentation called “Supporting LGBTQ+ Students and Staff” was given to staff members at Harper Junior High School in May 2021 by two of the school’s teachers, both of whom use “they/them” pronouns. One also uses the abbreviation “Mx.” in lieu of Mr., Ms., or Mrs.
One slide bore a pride flag with transgender colors and black and brown stripes, both of which “sought to further represent the queer and trans identities of black and brown people.” Another one linked to a video titled “Gender is a Scam,” which compels audiences to “decolonize their language,” while a linked article called “15 Things LGBTQ people of colour want you to know” tells you “Why you might be guilty of white fragility.”
The slideshow instructed staff to use the pronouns they/them until someone says his pronouns and told them that “Posters/flags that support LGBTQ+ people are just the beginning” before going on to ask, “does your curriculum center primarily white/cis/straight voices?” The same slide warns against using medical and scientifically accurate terminology in regard to gender.
Meanwhile on the office’s LGBTQIA+ Supports page, a link to the activist group Human Rights Campaign promoted “LGBTQ+ Inclusive Picture and Middle School Books,” some of which are even aimed at children in pre-k. A link to the USC Rossier School of Education’s site “Students and Gender Identity Guide for Schools” also features a “Gender Identity Glossary for Schools” with woke vocabulary terms like “deadnaming,” “gender expansive,” “polygender,” “third-gender,” and “two spirit.”
Critical Race Theory and the White Privilege Conference
The office also promotes a trove of critical race theory resources intended for students, families, staff, teachers, and administrators under the subheading “Anti-Bias and Racial Justice.” The site opens by promoting free webinars from Embrace Race, a left-wing organization aimed at young children. Their webinars bear titles like “Addressing Racial Injustice with Young Children” and “RaceTalk among White Families Post-Floyd. Now What?”
The White Privilege Conference, a project of The Privilege Institute, is also promoted to staff members. The annual conference, not to be confused with the institute’s similarly named White Privilege Symposium, intends to provide “an opportunity for participants to discuss how white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression affects daily life while giving strategies for addressing issues of privilege and oppression and advancing social and economic justice.”
Last year’s conference hosted Robin DiAngelo, who discussed the subject of her latest book “nice racism,” which condemned all white people, including the far-left white people who comprise her audience, as definitionally racist.
The conference featured myriad workshops each day, which boasted titles like “Critical Race Theory/Critical Race Feminism: Creating a Plan of Action during the Biden-Harris era,” “A Good Womyn is Hard to Find,” and “The Making & Remaking of Whiteness.” The institute also hosts the Youth Action Project, with one-day institutes geared towards middle schoolers and high school students.
The district’s office also advertises the 1619 Project curriculum alongside a site called Learning for Justice, which they note “offers excellent, teacher-developed classroom curriculum.”
‘Dismantle White Supremacy’
Included under the heading “For Teachers, Staff, and Administrators” are K-12 frameworks for anti-bias and social justice education from Learning for Justice, a project of the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center whose mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and “strengthen intersectional movements” by pushing critical race theory into schools.
One such video from The New York Times titled “A Conversation with White People on Race” features white people expressing guilt over their alleged privilege, with one person remarking “We’re all implicated in a racist system, and I play my part in it as a white person.”
The office adds that they have a library of books and videos for staff, including one titled “Cracking the Codes and Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible.”
Meanwhile, students and families are also directed to a number of critical race theory-inspired resources, including one link to a site titled “100 Race-Conscious Things You Can Say To Your Child To Advance Racial Justice,” which includes quotes of things parents have told their children when discussing race. Particularly striking is number 53, which makes the claim that “if you are White and you commit a crime … police might say ‘that was wrong, don’t do that again,’ and that’s all…but if you are Black and commit the same crime, they might arrest you and you might go to prison.” One quote under the subtitle “police violence” discusses black victims of police brutality, writing“The man who killed them didn’t like brown skin. He had white skin like us.”
The list isn’t exclusively focused on race, however, also promoting left-wing distortions of sex with quotes like“You know, some people are born with penises but feel like girls on the inside and some people are born with vaginas but feel like boys on the inside. We can’t always tell if someone is a boy or a girl just by looking at them and that’s okay.”
“Guidelines for Strong White Allies” is also included on the district’s list. Among the guidelines were requests for “resources,” “money,” and even “your body on the line.” Author Paul Kivel also told “white allies” to “understand and learn from the history of whiteness and racism” and to “assume racism is everywhere, every day.”
An anti-racist book list for children promoted by the district explains how parents can ease children into CRT by first starting “very gently” with entirely unobjectionable books that “just show kids that racial diversity exists.” The goal, however, is to eventually employ books that discuss “racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.”
The district’s previous superintendent John Bowes signaled his belief in the leftist claim that America is fundamentally racist when, after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, he sent out a message explaining that he was reminded of the need to “rid our country of the systemic bias and institutional racism that exists in all parts of our society.” He went on to explain that “public education, including DJUSD schools, are part of the solution.”
Davis Joint Unified School District’s promotion of both critical race theory and leftist distortions of sex are part of a broader leftwing push in K-12 institutions throughout the country. In California alone, other districts have lied about teaching CRT, hosted LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, paid extremist organizations to “disrupt whiteness,” and promoted material that tells students to use witchcraft against those who say “all lives matter.”
The politicized nature of California’s government schools, along with general concerns regarding quality of education, may lead some to support a recently launched bipartisan campaign to pass a school choice initiative in the golden state.
Neither Superintendent Matt Best nor Climate Coordinator Kate Snow responded to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
The woke-o-meter in public schools is about to ramp up. Parents who think they don’t have time to homeschool may soon realize that, compared to the effort involved in monitoring and countering the nonsense from leftist classrooms, homeschooling is the relaxing alternative. Not all teachers buy into the leftist narrative of race-obsessed anti-Americanism. But leftist K-12 administrators want to ensure that, eventually, all teachers will present only approved ideas and counter any wrongthink children are taught at home. Many of these educrats are now embracing a technological fix.
Trade publication Education Week recently reported that about 500 school districts around the country are rating teacher applicants according to their “cultural competency,” another code for “wokeness.” Many of these districts are contracting with a teacher-hiring company called Nimble, which uses artificial intelligence to examine applications and interview answers to determine which candidates harbor the correct political and cultural attitudes.
A central concern of Nimble and its leftist clients is mindsets about race. The goal is to hire only teachers who are “anti-racist” activists, who will reject equal treatment of all students in favor of discrimination against some (whites) for the supposed benefit of others (racial minorities). Note that under this rubric, Asian students, who as a group work hard and consequently excel, don’t qualify as an oppressed racial minority.
“Now that we’ve become a little more aware of the concept of anti-racism and maybe a little more woke as a culture, I do think that districts have started to emphasize these questions a little bit more,” Nimble CEO Lauren Dachille told EdWeek. “They might be more common, they might be more explicit.”
Anti-racism as a motivating societal force was popularized by Ibram X. Kendi, who along with other savvy race grifters is profiting handsomely from the concept. Getting points for honesty if not integrity, Kendi teaches that discrimination against white people is a positive good, and indeed necessary to establish the “equity” of equal outcomes for all regardless of intelligence or effort. This is what is meant by anti-racism: “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.”
Note the racism inherent in anti-racism. “Anti-racists” assume that black and brown children are “less than” white or Asian kids—they can’t excel in academics, they can’t follow basic rules of personal conduct. It’s necessary to change all standards to accommodate these presumed “inferior” beings. Such a theory ensures minority kids will never overcome personal obstacles because they’re told they don’t have to. This is the system that, with Nimble’s help, many schools are trying to establish and perpetuate.
EdWeek identified a Boston elementary school principal who “will tell candidates the school’s priorities around anti-racism and ask them to respond.” To make crystal clear the political attitudes expected from successful candidates, “she will ask them what they’ve done personally or professionally to be more anti-racist.” Presumably, getting arrested at a Black Lives Matter riot would be, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, a resume enhancement.
Applicants in Indianapolis may be asked “how [they would] ensure that student outcomes are not predictable by race, ethnicity, culture, gender, or sexual orientation.” Of course, there’s only one way to ensure such an outcome: manipulate it to guarantee that all students end up at the same low level. Any students who threaten the leveling by working too hard or achieving too much will have to be brought to heel—at least, if they’re the “wrong” race.
Indianapolis teaching applicants may also be asked, “Why do you think that low-income students predictably perform lower on standardized tests than their more-affluent peers?” One would be pretty safe to assume a preferred answer would be “because of systemic racism,” not “because those students, largely due to decades of misguided government policies, are more likely to come from fatherless families and grow up in a dysfunctional environment.”
Throughout the article, district officials emphasize the importance of hiring teachers who are amenable to the schools’ “priorities” and “values.” But how is it appropriate for a public institution, funded by taxpayers who hold a wide range of political opinions, to institutionalize one set of those opinions? Even worse, how is it appropriate for the institution to guarantee the propagation of those opinions by limiting hires to candidates who agree with them?
These questions illustrate the bubble mentality of the left. Leftists are so certain of the objective correctness of all their views that they cannot conceive of any person of goodwill taking a different position. In the leftist mind, anyone not willing to engage in discrimination against whites or Asians in the name of “equity” is the moral equivalent of a Klansman. And who would object to screening out Klansmen from the teacher corps?
Parents who hope the public schools are still salvageable might want to reconsider. The skyrocketing wokeness of administrators who control teacher hiring will ensure that all classrooms are increasingly devoted to indoctrination rather than education.
How exhausting it is for parents to constantly monitor what their children are being fed in every class and then try to repair the intellectual and moral damage at home. Viewed in this light, does choosing another schooling arrangement really seem so hard?
Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. In that position she crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
While documenting my former high school’s attempt to indoctrinate me with critical race theory six years ago, I remarked that now, several years later, “the situation has undoubtedly worsened.” Worsened it has. Now, Campbell Union High School District has promoted more than 100 “equity resources” to students and staff, including a document that taught students how to put a curse on those who say “all lives matter.”
Colorblindness, Cops, and Curses
The page serves as a vast library for CRT resources and features 60 different links, including a Google Drive folder with 45 different documents. The list made sure to include the full range of CRT buzzwords, with links like Raising Race Conscious Children, the infamous 1619 Project, Anti-Racism for Beginners, and Social Identities and Systems of Oppression, among others. One link takes you to an “Anti-Racism Resource List,” which teaches about “white fragility” and claims that racism can only be perpetrated by white people. One of the “resources” provided was a Trevor Noah speech labeled “Why rioting makes sense,” followed by an unhinged anti-white rantfrom Sonya Renee Taylor, demanding that white people “throw your white body” on police officers and “put their bodies on the line for the purpose of justice.”
The list also addresses white people when it says, “We are socialized into white supremacy from the moment we are born” before going on to say, “It is about completely dismantling how you see yourself and how you see the world, so that you can dismantle … white supremacy.”
Samuel Martin graduated from CUHSD’s Branham High School in 2019 and was appalled by the district’s actions. He told The Federalist, “The idea that white students must ‘dismantle themselves’ in the context of their personality is cultish. Not only is it cultish, but it is deliberate in that this school system wants its’ white students to hate themselves. Do these people honestly think that drilling racial identitarianism into childrens’ heads from a young age is going to make them less racist?”
CUHSD also links to the Black Lives Matter Resource Guide, specifically their section labeled “high school,” which itself includes 45 different texts. Amid a wide variety of CRT inspired assignments is a document that includes writing prompts on police brutality and racist violence.
One section titled “Hex” tells the reader, “Hexing people is an important way to get out anger and frustration.” It becomes increasingly deranged, suggesting that those who say, “all lives matter” or commit “microaggressions,” should be targeted. “Write your own hex poem, cursing that person,” it instructs.
When asked her thoughts on the document that instructed K-12 students to use witchcraft on political opponents, Branham teacher Meredith Allen told The Federalist she hasn’t read the documents her district recommends, so she “can’t comment,” but that she is generally “opposed to the ‘all lives matter’ message.”
Another section labeled “A World With No Police” cites police and military as “systems or institutions that … contribute to oppression.” It asks, “What would the world be like without them?” before telling the reader to write a poem discussing “a world without these institutions.”
“The Black Radical Tradition,” is a 565-page e-book that includes articles from the Communist League and Noel Ignatiev under the pen name Noel Ignatin. Ignatiev was a Marxist who argued that “abolishing the white race is … so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”
Then there’s a slide show entitled “What is the Black Lives Matter Movement?” which is made for children and was produced in part by teachers at LAUSD. It includes a glossary of terms like “white supremacy,” the definition of which includes the line, “systems, like schools and jails, have white supremacy built into them because white people have had so much power for so long.”
The ADL’s linked document “George Floyd, Racism, and Law Enforcement” defines racism as “the … oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people,” a definition that reinforces the malicious lie that white people can’t be the victims of anti-white racism.
The district’s equity resources page is just the most visible result of a series of steps in support of CRT that started long ago. In fact, the district was a testing ground for CRT before it spread throughout the nation. The book “Research Studies on Educating for Diversity and Social Justice” was published in 2018 and describes the process. An entire chapter, written in part by my former teacher, is dedicated to discussing how CRT was used at my high school so it could be replicated.
The book noted the use of the theory, saying, “CRT is used here to centralize the discussion of race and racism at Branham High School.” It went on to describe an “equity advisory” class that I was placed in as a sophomore, where “Students learn about the different types of oppression along with the privilege it affords the oppressors.” The authors hoped their tactics would spread, writing, “the intent behind sharing the process Branham underwent is to provide a model that could be followed by other schools across the nation.”
The district’s Board of Trustees supports this agenda, recently offering unanimous support for a resolution resolving to “dismantle institutionalized racism in our society and our school district” and is “committed to … implicit bias training, Ethnic Studies, and resources that foster dialogue around the guiding principles of #BlackLivesMatter.”
Note the district’s adoption of the term “equity” rather than “equality.” Here’s superintendent Robert Bravo two hours and 39 minutes into a board meeting saying he believes “equity is about equity of outcomes.”
CUHSD even established an Anti-Racism Team, which is divided into eight Equity Teams that include teachers, principals, administrators, and even two students who must be “BIPOC.” That means white students are banned from the “Equity” Teams. They’re tasked with “challenging imbalances of power and privilege,” among other roles.
Michael Espinoza is a member of one such Equity Team and a teacher at Branham High School who won the district’s teacher of the year award. Here he is calling a Native American tribe the “rightful stewards of the lands our schools and district offices stand on” and telling teachers to recognize “the power of critical race theory and use it in our lesson plans.”
He also gave a speech to the class of 2021, where he levied leftwing complaints against America and quoted Huey Newton, imploring students to engage in revolution instead of “conforming to the machine that is the United States.” On his Instagram account, Espinoza celebrates mandates for ethnic studies classes and complains of living under “white supremacist, heteropatriarchal rule” in a plea to his “co-conspirators.”
If this is CUHSD’s model teacher, what does their model student look like? Espinoza’s students created a variety of leftwing posters in his ethnic literature class. One poster demanded “Dear White PPL: Start Listening, Stop Talking” and others that said, “Wear UR F-cking Mask” and “Give us back our land.” Principal Lawton took down the posters amid outcry before caving in and apologizing to the leftwing agitators.
Co-Conspirators? Or A Conservative Counter Culture?
The full ramifications of our education system’s descent into leftwing radicalism is yet to be fully realized, although we can be certain that many of the students it doesn’t lose to homeschooling will be successfully transformed into “co-conspirators.” But as the rhetoric of revolution becomes standard for stodgy school administrators, its appeal to youth might wane.
Conversely, they run the risk of creating a small but clever cadre of conservative youth who understand from firsthand childhood experiences the consequences of toxic racial grievance politics. Don’t be surprised if the propagandizers who intend to give permanency to left-wing hegemony instead give rise to a nascent conservative political force that will uproot it.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
The Los Angeles Unified School District Office of Human Relations, Diversity & Equity prepared a presentation that told students critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools while the district made presentations that did precisely that. The district also mandated that teachers take an “antiracism” course taught by a known critical race theorist who told them to “challenge whiteness.”
LAUSD Lies, Denies That Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught In Schools
A LAUSD presentation titled “Critical Race Theory and Racism in K-12 Education” starts out by defining the theory as a “Theoretical Framework through which researchers and scholars try to understand how structural and racial inequities exist and endure in our society.”
The PowerPoint implores students to rename a headline referring to critical race theory, “since we now understand that Critical Race Theory is not taught in schools.” A separate document, which claims “there is no evidence that CRT is widespread in K-12 education,” is also listed on LAUSD’s website.
Although administrators at LAUSD claim CRT isn’t taught in their schools, the district created lesson plans that embed the corrosive theory in their very own classrooms, all after the district brought in a critical race theorist to tell teachers how to “challenge whiteness.”
K-12 Students Subjected To Critical Race Theory By Diversity And Equity Team
The LAUSD Office of Human Relations, Diversity and Equity introduces its advisory lessons by highlighting their desire to speak with students “about power, privilege, oppression, and resistance.” The section of the website labeled “Human Relations, Diversity & Equity” lists several critical race theory-inspired presentations, including slideshows that teach Thanksgiving is evil and propose an alternative holiday.
One presentation told students to check their privilege and included a video called “What is Privilege.” It shows people engaging in a privilege walk, an activity that I had to do six years ago as a freshman at my California high school. In it, people line up and take steps forward or backward depending on their answer to a series of questions. It is incredibly easy to manipulate the results through selective questioning in order to make people believe CRT’s sweeping claims of privilege and oppression based on skin color.
The presentation claims that white people, among others, are uniquely privileged, before telling students how to become an ally of left wing social justice movements. There’s also a slideshow about the Black Lives Matter movement that includes a note signed by the LAUSD Human Relations, Diversity and Equity team. The presentation mocks the phrase “all lives matter” in a comic.
It also includes the infamous tagline “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” and featured a grab bag of intersectional insanity, imploring students to “celebrate queer people,” “dismantle patriarchal practices,” and undermine “hetero normative thinking.” One graphic demanded that our society “fund counselors not cops” and “mandate black history and ethnic studies.”
The presentation discussed white supremacy, which it defined as “The belief that white people are better than other races” and claimed that “Some systems, like schools and jails, have white supremacy built into them because white people have had so much power for so long.”
The administrators are evidently not fazed by the irony of peddling the conspiracy theory that America’s schools are fundamentally controlled by hegemonic white supremacy while they, as influential members of the nation’s second-largest school district, engender animosity against their white students by offering a state-sponsored crash course on racial identity politics.
A wide variety of other presentations also peddled the same themes and pushed for CRT.
Teaching critical race theory and then lying about its presence in schools isn’t new. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, has claimed CRT isn’t taught in schools after her organization boasted of teaching it on national television.
LAUSD Enshrines Core Tenets of Critical Race Theory
One slideshow focused on the Cleveland Indians changing their name, claiming that various teams were named after racial slurs and that Native Americans are the only people group whose identity has been turned into a mascot, conveniently forgetting about teams such as the Minnesota Vikings, Boston Celtics, and Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
A whole section on the LAUSD website is dedicated to “Election, Insurrection, and More.” One slideshow focused on “domestic terrorism,” invoking Jan. 6, 2020. It also features discussion of white supremacist domestic terrorism, while making no mention of Black Lives Matter riots or the rape and murder-infested Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
When asked why the Human Relations, Diversity and Equity team told students that CRT is not being taught in schools despite teaching it themselves, the team’s coordinator Judy Chiasson avoided the issue, responding, “We encourage students to hear different perspectives, become critical thinkers, and build camaraderie across identities so they may become the leaders of tomorrow.”
LAUSD Brings In Known Critical Race Theorist
Lest you believe these presentations were simply the handiwork of a rogue team of far left administrators, turn your attention to this memorandum from the LAUSD that mandates that teachers take a course dubbed the “Anti-Racist Journey.”
During the training, Howard tells teachers to “celebrate people of color,” and then discusses the need to “challenge whiteness,” which he bizarrely connects to ideas of merit and individualism. As Howard and one facilitator guide notes, “Whiteness’ … does not mean an indictment of white people and refers to a majority perspective and construct.”
But critical race theorists frequently use the term to secure this indictment. Psychoanalyst Donald Moss published an article claiming that whiteness is a “parasitic condition” without a “permanent cure,” while Noel Ignatiev, the communist and Harvard lecturer who founded the journal “Race Traitor” and claimed that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” argued that “abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”
Yet we’re somehow expected to believe that these critical race advocates are just trying to end racism. They’re not being anti-white. They’ve simply constructed an ideology around attributing some of the worst evils to “whiteness.”
In the face of the district’s lies, there might be reason to rejoice. It might be an indicator that even school districts in incredibly far-left areas have realized just how quickly they’re losing ground on the issue among decent people of all races. By lying, LAUSD might’ve accidentally admitted a greater truth about critical race theory: that parents and voters can stop it.
Howard, the LAUSD School Board, and Superintendent Reilly did not respond to requests for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
President Joe Biden’s support in the black community is one of the most inexplicable phenomena of modern politics. Despite several racial gaffes during the 2020 primaries — like talking about his work with Dixiecrat segregationists on racial busing as evidence of “civility” in Washington or telling a crowd in Iowa that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” — it was black support in the South Carolina primary that saved his campaign after a series of botched debates and poor showings in the first three primaries and caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.
While it could be argued that the only other viable Democrat candidate after the first three contests, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, never gelled with black voters (or anyone outside of his white progressive base, for that matter), black support propelled Biden to the nomination. Many pundits felt black turnout for Biden — particularly in Georgia — helped Biden take the presidency.
What fueled the loyalty? Was it the fact Biden is seen as being close to former President Barack Obama, having served as his vice president? Was it the connections he’s made with black leaders during nearly a half-century in Washington politics? Was it the time he went on the New York City-based radio program “The Breakfast Club”and told listeners that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black?”
Or is it the fact he keeps lying to black America about what he’s done for racial justice?
Case in point: On Monday, Biden addressed the 2021 State and National Teachers of the Year event at the White House. These are the kinds of national TV speeches that should easily pass without incident. As far as the White House and Biden supporters are concerned, the best news that can come out of these affairs is if no news comes out of them. We’re talking about it, however, so guess how that went?
According to a White House transcript, the president began getting himself in trouble when he told the long-winded tale of how he first got elected to the Senate in Delaware even though the seat was considered “to be a lead-pipe cinch” for the Republicans.
If you’re familiar with Biden’s backstory, that part’s actually kind of true. We have an improbable Democratic upset during a 1972 Republican landslide to thank, in part, for the fact we now have a president who, if his handlers weren’t there to direct him to Air Force One, would spend the afternoon wandering around Joint Base Andrews looking for the Braniff International check-in counter.
The rest of the rambling story would probably be marked on Wikipedia as [citation needed]. It involves attending an off-year state party convention and having a bunch of Democrat bigwigs bust into his room while he was “in a towel with shaving cream on my face,” saying he should run for the seat that was supposed to be a GOP lock.
After leaving the convention, Biden said, he went and saw an old professor at the University of Delaware, a Dr. Ingersoll, who paraphrased Plato to him: “The penalty good people pay for not being involved in politics is being governed by people worse than themselves.”
There are so many jokes one could make about that statement, particularly when we look at who’s governing us from the White House. The important part, however, was the lie Biden was about to tell:
“And he looked at me, and he said, ‘Joe, you should run.’ I said, ‘But I — I feel strongly about all of these issues, but I…’ I had gotten involved in the civil rights movement and the wa- — but I —
“He said, ‘Joe, you should do it,’” Biden continued. “He had enough confidence in me that he gave me confidence in myself. With a kid with no money, coming from a middle-class family, who grew up in grade school stuttering, literally — for me, I’m confident I would have never done it were it not for Dr. Ingersoll.”
Maybe if Dr. Ingersoll knew Biden was lying about being involved in the civil rights movement, this could have worked out differently.
Joe Biden was never involved in the civil rights movement in any meaningful sense. He’s admitted as much in his own words, when he wasn’t trying to exaggerate his own importance. He was “concerned,” he said, but was not an “activist.”
By that standard, football fans who watch every Sunday from their couch or a stool at the local bar are more “involved” in the NFL than Biden was in the civil rights movement. (They’re not just “concerned.” They’re screaming.)
And we know this would get a “pants on fire” fact-check rating because he’s been caught lying about his involvement in the civil rights movement before and had to walk it back.
And then he started spouting the same lies again:
In 1987, Joe Biden claimed he marched in the civil rights movement. A few months later, Biden disavowed the claim. Decades later, during the Obama era, and more recently on the campaign trail, he started making the same claims again. https://t.co/NAlMJ6ZTq7pic.twitter.com/tpmE6VXmG6
The first spurious claims came during his abortive 1988 presidential run, which eventually died after he was caught plagiarizing a speech. However, claims he made about his involvement in marching and protesting for civil rights also came under scrutiny.
As The Intercept pointed out, his rhetoric changed considerably over the course of 1987.
In February: “When I was 17 years old, like many of you, I participated in sit-ins to desegregate the restaurants and movie houses of Wilmington, Delaware.”
In April: “I came out of the civil rights movement … I was one of those guys that sat in and marched and all that stuff.”
In September: “During the 1960s, I was in fact very concerned about the civil rights movement,” Biden said. “I was not an activist. I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Delaware. I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling. I was involved, but I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma, I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans in my own city.”
What’s more, this pattern continued during the Obama years. As The Intercept reported, Biden would frequently spend his time as vice president citing his attempts to desegregate Delaware movie theaters despite inconsistencies in his stories and almost no evidence he was seriously involved. And this isn’t even counting his biggest race-related whopper — technically not related to the American civil rights movement but still worth noting.
In February of 2020, Biden claimed apartheid-era South African police arrested him as he was trying to visit Nelson Mandela, saying “I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”
Soweto is a township in Johannesburg, hundreds of miles away from Robben Island, the prison off of Cape Town where Mandela was being held. Biden would later try to explain this away by saying he was “stopped” and could not “move where I wanted to go,” not that he was actually arrested. As for being hundreds of miles away from Mandela, he didn’t explain that part — nor was he asked to.
In short, Biden has lied and continues to lie about what he’s done for civil rights and racial justice. He gets called on it occasionally — but is rarely taken to task in any serious manner for inflating his civil rights resumé. And yet, in 2020, a man who blatantly and repeatedly lied to the black community about his commitment to their cause got their overwhelming support.
Sure, Bernie Sanders was and is no great shakes. At least he never claimed he got arrested in Toronto trying to bail Martin Luther King Jr. out of a Birmingham, Alabama jail.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.@CillianZealFacebook
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.take our poll – story continues below
One brave girl from Fishers, Indiana, had some important questions for members of her local school board last week. Fighting back tears, the girl explained to the board members how they have “failed [her] as a student.” Her comments can be seen starting around the 41:57 mark in a video on the Hamilton Southeastern Schools website.
“I have been in counseling as long as I can remember because I was adopted from foster care at age 4,” she said at the school board meeting on Wednesday.
“The things I’ve learned along the way are being challenged now when my science or math teacher is trying to teach me how to be emotionally — and why are they teaching me about sexuality and how to identity?” the girl said.
“I don’t want to hear about sexuality during class in front of other students because that should be a private thing. This should be left in the homes and between students and counselors or one-on-one conversations.‘
“This has been a very traumatic part of my past, and the more that the school focuses on sexuality, the more it affects me and my anxiety.”
Following that, she revealed that she had been accused of having “white privilege” by school staff members.
“I was told I have white privilege. How can a child born in an abusive, drug and alcohol abuse home who lost her entire biological family, that has experienced all forms of abuse and neglect, be privileged?” the girl asked.
“If you found a child at 15 months in a home with holes in the floor eating cat poop, would you consider them privileged? Just asking, because when I was told that, I was upset and cried myself to sleep.”
A quick look at the website of the girl’s school district confirms that far-left “equity and inclusion” propaganda is being disseminated to students. Just as she said, this propaganda focuses on sexuality and anti-racism (which teaches about the supposed prevalence of “white privilege”).
An “Equity and Inclusion”web page on the district’s website offers various “Anti-Racism/Bias Resources,” presumably for teachers, students and parents to use for educational purposes.One resource recommended by the district encourages educators to read a book by Ibram X. Kendi, a controversial scholar known for pushing the philosophy of “anti-racism.” According to Kendi, you are either an anti-racist — a progressive political activist who agrees with Kendi’s vague redefinition of racism — or a racist. In his view, there is no in-between.
“What’s the problem with being ‘not racist?’” Kendi wrote. “It is a claim that signifies neutrality: ‘I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.’ … One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.”
In other words, vote for Democrats and radical socialist policies such as welfare redistribution — the very same policies that have impoverished the African-American community for decades — or you are a racist. These are the sorts of ideas that Hamilton Southeastern officials push on their students.
Another resource offered by the district links to a video defending the political goal of equity, also known as equality of outcomes.
In its argumentation for the necessity of equity policies, the video uses a popular meme that supposedly shows how equality, or treating people as equals, is not good enough to address supposed systemic inequity. Instead, the proponents of equity argue, in order to reach true equality of outcomes, minorities must be afforded special privileges in order to address the unique disadvantages they face.
Not only is such thinking illogical, but it is also deeply racist due to the fact that it treats minorities as helpless children in need of government aid. Moreover, as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro explained in a Feb. 2 Op-Ed, such reasoning is faulty because it fails to take into account group differences.
“This philosophy is both idiotic and perverse. It’s idiotic because all human groupings — literally all of them — will result in differential outcomes. Draw a line down the middle of any room in random fashion and the result will be unequal income distribution, criminal records, educational histories,” Shapiro wrote.
“When culture takes a hand, disparities can be more deeply rooted than random chance. Discrimination would still not be the cause of such disparity. As a basic logical matter, discrimination is not the cause of all disparity.’
“This philosophy is perverse because it attributes malice to those who have none; it fosters policy that actively discriminates, supposedly in order to alleviate unproven discrimination.”
Indeed, when it comes to the Hamilton Southeastern Schools, this philosophy certainly attributed “malice” to someone who has none.
A girl who has suffered abuse and neglect was called “privileged” just for being white.
Michael Austin joined The Western Journal as a staff reporter in 2020. Since then, he has authored hundreds of stories, including several original reports. He also co-hosts the outlet’s video podcast, “WJ Live.”@mikeswriting
A.F. Branco coffee table book “Keep America Laughing (at the left)” ORDER HERE
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The Left is pushing Critical Race Theory the very opposite of MLK’s Dream of being judged not “by the color of our skin but the content of our Character”.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Violence sprung from the streets of New York City’s Chinatown on Monday, leaving an Asian woman sprawled on the ground after a black man punched her in the face for no apparent reason. Surveillance video posted by Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, whose district includes Chinatown, showed the 55-year-old woman walking past the Kong Sihk Tong café at around 6:15 p.m. A black man in an orange hoodie and denim jacket then punched her square in the face with a hard left. The woman collapsed on the pavement. The attacker then raved at the victim.
“What’d you hit me for?” the attacker said, according to the New York Daily News. “Why’d you hit me?”
This was just sent to me from my constituent. This just happened in my district in Chinatown. He has been arrested and our precinct is investigating. pic.twitter.com/sxNfCbrlza
Several people went to check on the victim, who remained motionless on the ground. She was later taken to a hospital, reportedly in stable condition.
Police were called and arrested the man at the scene.
The Daily News quoted a source who said the attacker was “homeless, and he has a long criminal record.” The attacker was taken to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Charges are pending.
“Can’t believe I actually witnessed an attack on an Asian lady right in front of me at the heart of NYC Chinatown,” Jin Zhen wrote on Instagram, according to the New York Post.
“When I saw the lady rolled over to the ground and went unconscious I quickly hung up on my food order and start recording the situation for evidence.”
Donald Ng, who works in the area, said that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio“needs to do something about this mental health issue.”
“Some customers were calling for help. They said a guy punched a woman. She was sitting there on the sidewalk like she was tired, like she was out,” Chiu Cheng, the restaurant manager, said, according to the Daily News.
“He was crazy. I know it’s serious. I feel sad about it. With all that’s happening, I feel scared. I work at the restaurant late. I’m afraid about walking to the subway at night,” Cheng said.
The issue of bail reform entered the incident after former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik noted that a consequence of bail reform has been putting people such as the attacker on the street.
The NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force is looking into the assault, according to WCBS-TV.
Hate crimes against Asians in New York City are up 353 percent over last year.
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Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded to MSNBC host Joy Reid’s racist remarks against him by questioning why the network permitted her to get away with it and saying that comments of the like were leading Hispanics to turn their back on the Democratic Party.
On Tuesday, Reid discussed the Texas senator with guests Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California and NAACP legal counsel Janai Nelson, and made a reference to the movie “Django Unchained” — comparing Cruz to a traitorous house slave in the film for not supporting the For the People Act, which aims at altering voting processes across the country.
Cruz’s rebuttal was swift, calling out the host of the MSNBC segment “The Reid Out” for “using overt racial slurs” to make assumptions concerning how Hispanic-Americans should vote.
“I appreciate MSNBC lecturing me on how people of ‘my race’ are supposed to vote,” Cruz tweeted on Wednesday. “This arrogant condescension is a big reason Hispanic voters are moving right in large numbers.
“Also, why is MSNBC ok with their hosts using overt racial slurs (‘Stephen from Django’)?”
Cruz called the For the People Act, officially known as House Resolution 1, “Jim Crow 2.0” — a reference to President Joe Biden’s remarks about Georgia’s new voting law, which the president called “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.”
“Jim Crow laws were bigoted, racist, and disenfranchised millions of people,”Cruz said in a Tuesday tweet. “Those laws were drafted by Democrats and implemented by Democrats to keep Democrats in power. Today, Democrats are doing it again. The Corrupt Politicians Act is Jim Crow 2.0.”
Reid was highly critical of Cruz and the GOP after his comment, alleging that the Republican Party was attempting voter suppression in his state of Texas.
“Ted Cruz says a lot of stupid things,” Reid said Tuesday. “He does a lot of stupid things. But I personally — as a person of color, as a black person — am beyond offended that he would dare use the word ‘Jim Crow’ when his party is literally a ‘Jim Crow’ party at this point, trying to suppress the votes of people, including in his home state.”
She later called Cruz “Stephen from Django Unchained.”
Reid continued with attacks on the Texas senator, saying that he “could give a d**n about Jim Crow,” and that he has “never raised once concern ever in his entire life … about Jim Crow or racism or discrimination.”
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
Reid suggested Cruz was a traitor to Hispanics and defended HR 1, saying that if it fails to pass, America may never see free and fair elections again.
Republicans, however, have said that the act threatens election integrity and the rights of states.
“The legislation would strip states of their constitutional authority to run elections and allow the federal government to decree what’s best,” Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said in a Fox News Op-Ed.
“It would ban voter ID laws, which maintain the integrity of elections in my state and a majority of others … To put it simply: states don’t need Washington, D.C., to strip them of their authority and impose burdensome requirements to fix problems that do not exist,” Moore said.
Reid has made racist comments about Republicans in the past. She has made an “Uncle Tom” reference, alluding to the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel, about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom she called “Uncle Clarence.” She has also called Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina the token black person in the Republican Party.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Ryan Bomberger is the co-founder of The Radiance Foundation.
We see it everywhere. Thanks to Corporate America, mainstream media, so-called civil rights groups, academia and a relevance-worshipping Church, we are a nation increasingly judging one another and separating ourselves by the color of our skin. We’re surrounded by marketing that elevates one group while excoriating another. It’s okay, we’re told. It’s all in a day’s work toward “diversity” and “inclusion.”
Funny thing how so many get excluded in those pursuits. Racism is evil. Exploiting it, marketing it, and expanding it is too.
The racial messaging is loud and clear: if you’re not the right hue, there’s obviously something wrong with you. And those reminders are relentless. From Hollywood babble to pandering politicians to Big Tech Tyrants to Institutions of Higher Mislearning to euphemistic bridges to nowhere in woke churches, we’re barraged by an unending stream of color conscious craziness that demands society sees hue before they see you.
As with all things rooted in human frailty, today’s celebrated form of segregation is immensely profitable, especially for those peddling the victimhood. There’s no scarcity of New York Times bestselling authors reminding us to define ourselves by our “whiteness” or “blackness,” and to assess every situation, every word, every interaction with others through the broken narratives of Critical Race Theory. It’s exhausting. That’s not living.
At every turn we’re being commanded to check our color, check our privilege, check our to-do-lists of guilt-oriented tasks. Corporate America has taken genuflection to a whole new low. Remember when Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy got on his knees and started shining hip-hop artist Lecrae’s shoes in a seriously cringey display of reconciliation-gone-wrong? He told other white people to do the same. If you ever try to shine my shoes, I will kick you. I repeat. I. Will. Kick. You. This doesn’t erase racism. This doesn’t change the past. This just makes someone feel really uncomfortable.
Guilt is a powerful thing. And when it’s coupled with racism, it’s a cash cow, especially for the groups that rely on victim evangelism. The Black Lives Matter movement raked in millions while cities and businesses burned last summer. The NAACP, in full denial of the massive violence and destruction wrought by many #BLM “peaceful protests,”was the recipient of millions more in pledges from Corporate America.
Apple has turned up the volume on its social justice rhetoric with its Racial Equity and Justice Initiative and its “Black Unity”branded watch. Why not a “Unity” collection that celebrates us all? Never mind these same corporations closed and boarded up their businesses to protect their assets during BLM protests. They sent out press releases that sounded like an abused spouse making excuses for the abuser.
Taxpayers get to be force-fed the Cult of Neo-Segregation even in our museums. Remember when the Smithsonian posted an infographic about “whiteness” and “white culture” claiming that having a “protestant work ethic” was a “white thing.” So, as someone with brown skin, I don’t believe in working hard? The Smithsonian got fierce pushback and removed the infographic, but (of course) kept the racist “whiteness” section on their website.
We’re siloing, and it’s toxic. I’m all about expressions of diversity and learning others’ cultures. We are a beautifully diverse nation, and that diversity exists even within the same shades of pigmentation. But we don’t make up for the suppression of some cultures by demonizing everyone else. We don’t bring people together by constantly obsessing over our hues, our past, and our assumed “privileges.”
I’m all about addressing inequality…real inequality. I’m all about taking steps to dismantle systemic racism where and when it actually occurs (let’s start with Planned Parenthood —the leading killer of black lives). I’m all about criminal justice reform and law enforcement accountability, but I won’t embrace a lie (BLM, CRT, DNC) to achieve it. I’m all about more healthy dialogue, more relationships and more unity around the fact that we’re one human race.
Church, can you help me out on this? Acts 17:26 if you’ve forgotten.
I’m not about living in the past. I’m not about mainstream media’s and academia’s revisions of the past. And I’m not about a mindset that certain people can never escape the past. Thank goodness this doesn’t apply to us in the spiritual sense. We’re forgiven by a God who loves us and redeems our past. But a broken worldview wants us to hold someone responsible for something they may or may not have done. Some want perpetual penance for wrongs someone’s ancestors have committed.
Are we responsible for the crimes of even our parents? Am I responsible for the crime of my biological father because I was conceived in rape? Too many times the past is weaponized and used to justify present behavior. If African-Americans, who lived in the horrific oppression of slavery, could forgive and move forward, what’s holding our modern society back?
The Civil Rights Act of 1871 (aka the Ku Klux Klan Act) was a piece of legislation that addressed the horrific KKK violence that terrorized black Americans and their white allies. No surprise, but zero Democrats in the House and Senate voted for the bill. A group of African-American Congressman (they were all Republicans) had a profound take on the legislation which alarmingly allowed pardons for former Confederates. The trailblazer legislators were Senator Hiram Revels and Representatives Robert Elliott, Robert De Large, Benjamin Turner and Joseph Rainey — all born into slavery. They proclaimed: “We have open and frank hearts toward those who were our oppressors and taskmasters. We foster no enmity now, and we desire to foster none for their act in the past to us, nor to the Government we love so well.”
We have a lot to learn from our past. But the most powerful lesson that benefits all of us, regardless of our beautiful hues, is how (especially as Christians) we can choose to have a more loving, more forgiving and more unified future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ryan Bomberger is the Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of The Radiance Foundation. He is happily married to his best friend, Bethany, who is the Executive Director of Radiance. They are adoptive parents with four awesome kiddos. Ryan is an Emmy Award-winning creative professional, factivist, international public speaker and author of NOT EQUAL: CIVIL RIGHTS GONE WRONG. He loves illuminating that every human life has purpose.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Bill Maher, as he typically does, brought up a hot-button issue on his “Real Time” program Friday night by asking if racism in America is really the huge problem that “radicals” have been saying it is.
“So, am I wrong to not want to see race all the time? Because that’s how I was brought up,”Maher said. “Like, that’s what a good liberal does, is you don’t see race. And now they switched it all around, and I’m bad because I don’t see it all the time. And Is ubiquity even effective? To make people aware of this issue at every turn?”
With that, guest Kmele Foster — a popular podcaster who happens to be black — chimed in with his observation that left-wing endeavors such as “diversity and inclusion training” and “talking often about racism and discrimination” actually “can make people presume that it exists in places that it does not.”
Foster then noted “you have to acknowledge that racism is a subjective allegation, right? I can presume intent on your behalf, whether or not it is actually there, and that’s a major defect — and I don’t want to be the object of your special concern, Bill, or anyone else’s. I’m an individual, and that’s what’s important.”
Maher was moved by Foster’s words and said — as if he was speaking to left-wing racism salespeople — that “I’m so sympathetic to the cause, but don’t gaslight me, you know?”
He added that “this is what I hear privately from my black friends: ‘I don’t want to be the focal point. I just want to blend in. I want to have a beer like you. Don’t look at me like I have to, like, make a speech about it, or that you have to make a speech about it.'”
Maher also asked, “Is the picture of America that’s presented by the radicals, I would say — Black Lives Matter, some of them, the anti-racists — of America 2021? Is it an accurate picture? Because sometimes I’m like, ‘Are they talking about 2021?'”
Foster told Maher, “I don’t think so,” and added that there’s a “great deal of hyperbole” within the constant hollering “in the streets” among left-wing protesters “who, quite frankly, do not have a serious grounding in these issues … they’ve got the bullhorns in their hands, and they don’t know the numbers. I’m really surprised when I see, sort of, the outrage in Portland over these issues. When I actually go back and look at the number of police-involved shootings or deaths in custody, for example … the numbers simply do not bear out this genocide against black America. It’s not a thing.”
As you might expect, leftists didn’t agree with Foster or Maher and blasted both of them on social media:
“Bill Maher must want to retire, I’ve been watching #RealTimewithBillMaher for a long time. I can’t tolerate this bulls**t,” one Twitter user said. “Kmele Foster sounds like a house slave, and this show with him grinning as Bill Maher talks like he knows every black perspective. I’m f***ing disgusted.”
“I feel like #billmaher found @kmele in the ‘I hate being black’ room on clubhouse,” another commenter wrote. “I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true.”
“This ugly episode of ‘Real Time’ would have been significantly better if Bill Maher had one of the leaders from the BLM movement on the show to dispute some of the Klan propaganda spread by this duplicitous version of Uncle Ruckus,” another user declared. “Engaging in white grievance isn’t a good look.”
Foster later ripped a story that appeared in the Daily Beast about his appearance on “Real Time,” calling it“bulls**t, opportunist, garbage.” He added that the story’s author Marlow Stern “isn’t a journalist. He’s a professional tattletale. And even at this bold endeavor — he fails, utterly. A cad. A charlatan. A man who wouldn’t dream of asking anyone for comment/context. My intent and meaning, they aren’t so hard to discern.”
You can view video of the “Real Time” discussion between Maher and Foster in the Daily Beast’s story.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: AP Photo/Julio Cortez
Why can’t liberals ever just let Trump hang himself? Isn’t what he’s actually done bad enough? No, the media always have to punch up the story, layering lie upon lie, until normal people are forced to say, I don’t want to defend the guy, but that didn’t happen.
This was the whole point of my book “Resistance Is Futile,” written at the outset of the Trump administration:
“[M]y advice to the Resistance is: Get Trump on the worst thing he’s actually done, and stop running off with Wouldn’t it be great if he raped and murdered a nun? You’re right: If Trump had done that, he would be finished, done, put a fork in him. Unfortunately, he hasn’t committed that particular crime.”
Even after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, the media felt the need to pile up the false accusations.
Their first order of business was to turn it into a story about race.
The Trump riot has as little to do with race as any story in 21st-century America. COVID, immigration, tax cuts, the stimulus — I could come up with a racial angle for any of those.
Your assignment: Make the siege at the Capitol a story primarily about race relations.
You, a normal person, one week later: I’m stumped.
But to our media, the main point to be made about the riot was: Can you imagine what would have happened if black people had done that?
An unarmed Trump supporter crawling through a window at the Capitol was shot dead. Please name the black protester killed by the police throughout 2020’s incessant BLM riots, lootings and arsons. He’d already be on a postage stamp.
During the 2015 BLM riots in Baltimore after a heroin dealer, Freddie Gray, died in the back of a police van, the mayor announced that she was giving “those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”
If you look at a mob storming the Capitol to protest Biden’s certification as president and immediately think, This is a story about black people!, you’ve got racism on the brain.
— Renee Zellweger Wins Oscar for Best Actress
Oh like she would have gotten if it she were black. I don’t think so!
— Nobel Prize for Physics Awarded to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for “Discovery of a Supermassive Compact Object at the Center Of Our Galaxy”
Does anyone seriously believe that the prize would have been awarded if the discovery had been made by Black Lives Matter?
— Denver beat the Knicks 114-89
Can you imagine Denver intentionally running up the score like that on a white team?
I’m beginning to suspect that conservatives are the only people who were genuinely appalled by Trump supporters storming the Capitol. The left’s consistent reaction has been: OK, what do we have to do to make it look bad?
It must be awkward to have to work up a high dudgeon about the Capitol protest after spending half of 2020 saying “mostly peaceful” protests were OK, even if beyond the “mostly” there was a lot of arson and looting.
SOLUTION: A riot is not bad unless it can be denounced as “racist.”
Liberals were indignant with Sen. Tom Cotton for saying Trump should send in troops to restore order during the George Floyd riots. His New York Times op-ed making this point was slapped with a disclaimer from the editors that’s nearly as long as the original column.
Today, there are more troops on patrol in D.C. than in actual war zones.
But, this time, instead of calling the militarization of our nation’s capital “fascist” — as the Times’ Michelle Goldberg dubbed Cotton’s proposal — the very presence of troops is cited as proof of how awful the Jan. 6 riot was.
Liberals have got to learn that their neuroses are not proof of their opponents’ perfidy. The hysterical deployment of more than 20,000 troops to Biden’s inauguration says something about them, not the rioters.
Similarly, cable news has been featuring Democrats giving long, emotional TV interviews describing their fears during the storming of the Capitol. I was afraid they’d kill us all! What if they’d started lynching senators? They could have taken hostages! I fully expected a mass shooting. I thought the building would collapse on top of us! What if they’d had a nuke?
Oh my gosh! What did they actually do?
They broke four windows, took selfies and threw papers on the ground.
The “Your Neurosis Proves My Malfeasance” argument is a specialty of the feminists. If I wasn’t sexually harassed, then please explain why I gained 30 pounds? You want proof that Trump is a monster? I can’t sleep at night! Do you want to see my psychiatrist’s bill?
No, no! We believe you! But it’s not evidence that anyone did something bad to you. Your mental anguish comes in during the penalty phase, not during the guilt-finding phase.
The raid was disgusting, appalling, sickening, but it’s not a license for concocting imaginary accusations. Trump is bad. The thugs who stormed the Capitol are bad. You don’t need to manufacture evidence against them, media.
One of the biggest stories in this election is how President Trump, whom leftists and their media allies have constantly called a “racist,” made great inroads with minorities. The left is clearly shocked. Rather than humbly spending some time on self-reflection, however, they are doubling down on identity politics by blaming minority Trump voters.
Since Election Day, leftists have been attacking minority Trump voters from two angles. First, they claim minorities who voted for Trump are “white” voters who shouldn’t be classified as minorities. This nonsense is nothing new. Prior to the election, Joe Biden famously said black voters who vote for Trump “ain’t black.”
Immediately after the election, this nonsense came up again courtesy of none other than Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the now-debunked 1619 Project. When it became clear that Trump would win Florida thanks to enthusiastic support from Latino voters, Hannah-Jones tweeted: “One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains [sic] why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate.”
National Public Radio’s Gene Demby quickly endorsed Hannah-Jones’ assertions. In an NPR post-election segment, titled “Who is the White Vote?” Demby said:
It’s important that, you know, we think about the ways that there are many, many white Latinos. And because whiteness so thoroughly informs voting behavior, we should probably be asking better questions about Latino voters, like whether they identify as white or not. That might be more illuminating than simply whether someone refers to themselves as Latino in some ways.
No, Democrats Don’t Own Brown People
Here is the thought process behind these kinds of comments Only white people vote for Republicans. Since skin color trumps ethnicity, of course, light-skinned minorities would vote for a Republican candidate because of their “whiteness.” They shouldn’t be counted as minority voters at all.
This thought process is deeply flawed. Dividing the Latino community by skin color is possibly the most racist thing to do. Latino voters are unique, both as individuals and based on their diverse Latin American countries of origin, but it’s wrong to use colorism to explain Latino voters’ behaviors. Regardless of skin color, many Latino immigrants have suffered or watched their families suffer under socialist policies in their home countries. Many came to America to escape socialism, so naturally, they will not vote for Democrats, whose party enthusiastically embraces it.
Further, claiming skin color drives a voter’s behavior is an insult to minority voters’ intelligence. During Trump’s first term and prior to the pandemic lockdowns, both black and Hispanic unemployment rates were at historic lows. The black and Hispanic household median annual income increase (adjusted for inflation) more than doubled during Trump’s term compared to the Obama years. Minority voters, like any other voters, will naturally support the candidate whose policies have benefited them.
By the same token, minority voters will reject candidates whose policies might bring them harm. Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, explained to a puzzled NPR journalist why Biden lost Latino support in Texas. “For example, a lot of the Border Patrol law enforcement are heavily Latino in the Rio Grande Valley,” Garcia said. “So when you are talking about defunding the police, and you don’t stand up to those types of rhetoric, then it leaves an opening for Republicans to come in and take advantage of that.”
When will leftist pundits such as Hannah-Jones and Demby ever realize it is the radical policies and ideas they support that have driven away minority voters?
The Left Believes Minorities Have No Agency
Apparently, blaming minority Trump voters’ “whiteness” doesn’t go far enough for some on the left. Charles M. Blow, a New York Times columnist, complained that some minority Trump voters have Stockholm syndrome, a psychological response that occurs when abuse victims bond with their abusers.
In his most recent article, Blow listed statistic after statistic showing that “a larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016,” including Trump doubling black women’s support from 4 percent in 2016 to 8 percent in 2020, and increasing black men’s vote from 13 percent in 2016 to 18 percent in 2020. “It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists,” Blow said, calling all Trump voters either racists or accomplices of racism.
There’s more. According to Blow, the number that really put him on his heels was “the percentage of L.G.B.T. people voting for Trump doubled from 2016, moving from 14 percent to 28 percent. In Georgia, the number was 33 percent.”
Although none of the statistics Blow presented even remotely support the title of his piece, “Exit Poll Points to the Power of White Patriarchy,” he found a way to blame white patriarchy and demean minority Trump voters in the end. According to Blow, Trump’s widening support across racial and gender groups “points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. … Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.”
In the eyes of leftists such as Blow, nonwhite voters and non-straight voters who supported Trump are nobody but coattail riders who have neither personal agency nor the ability to make it on our own in the world. I had never read anything more racist, more divisive, and more insulting than this, and I am not the only one. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist and a fellow at the Hoover Institute, tweeted: “This is the dumbest, most divisive drivel I’ve read in a long time. We should be talking about what unites us now. Not doubling down on ID-Politics. Shame on you!”
Minorites Had Good Reason to Vote for Trump
It is obvious that leftist pundits are dumbfounded by Trump’s widening support among minority voters in 2020. Since the 2016 election, rather than trying to understand half of the country who voted for Trump the first time, these talking heads turned toward nurturing their hatred of Trump and getting him out of office as their full-time jobs.
They thought that after repeating “Orange Man Bad” day after day for four years, the electorate would just follow their lead. They have no clue why someone they despised so much could have attracted even more minority votes this time around. Since they are unable to come up with any reasonable explanation, let me shed some light on the matter.
Minorities like me voted for Trump because we like his policies: lower taxes, fewer government regulations, and strong national security. American people, especially minorities, have seen real economic benefits during Trump’s first term. He stands up to socialism and promises, “America will never be a socialist country,” and his unconventional foreign policy approach has brought a historical breakthrough of peace in the Middle East.
We want a safe environment to raise our families. We don’t want to see our cities burned, our shops looted, and our statues toppled. We want good-paying jobs so we can enjoy the lifestyle we desire through our own hard work. We want all families, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to be able to choose the best school that matches their children’s educational needs. We want to continue to express ourselves without being censored or canceled.
We certainly don’t believe race and sex are the roots of nor the answer to every social ill. We are tired of identity politics, critical race theory, and cancel culture, all of which have sucked the fun out of life and shut down the exchange of ideas. We know our country has room for improvement, but it is not a racist nation. We take pride in being Americans and in all the progresses our nation has made, and we are tired of the left condemning our country’s founding and the American ideal.
As long as leftists continue to weaponize identity politics and dress us down as if we are mindless cattle, their candidates will continue to lose our support.
Helen Raleigh, CFA, is an American entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. She’s a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her writings appear in other national media, including The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Helen’s new book, “Backlash: How Communist China’s Aggression Has Backfired,” is available for pre-order with a release date of October 20, 2020. Follow her on Twitter: @HRaleighspeaks.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
Yusra Khogali is a woman who at one point had, as these things go, a fair amount of gravitas within the Black Lives Matter orbit. According to the Toronto Sun, she’s the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, the organization’s official chapter in Canada’s largest city. She’s also a poster child for why conservatives don’t necessarily believe the transnational Black Lives Matter organization — as opposed to the lower-cased three-word construct “black lives matter” — is a particularly representative movement.
You may have seen Khogali’s name once or twice in your Twitter feed this week, although not because of any her own tweets. Her account is gone. Same thing with Facebook.
Before then, however, she left quite the trail.
In 2015, she wrote this message, which one popular Twitter user reminded us all of:
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That’s James Lindsay, famous as one of the minds behind the “Sokal Squared” grievance studies academic hoax.
This, alas, isn’t a hoax. Nor is the fact that Khogali won a leadership award from the city. What Lindsay gets wrong is that the city was Toronto and that she received the award in 2018, after she wrote this, according to the Toronto Star.
The post got a bit of play in the media a few years back, though, and it’s worth revisiting if just because this is what Black Lives Matter Toronto was willing to countenance.
“[W]hiteness is not humxness,” Khogali wrote in the Facebook missive, which used post-gendered spelling. “[In fact], white skin is sub-humxn. [A]ll phenotypes exist within the black family and white ppl are a genetic defect of blackness.”
I don’t believe I’ll get an answer, but I’m curious — how does that work? Her explication reads like someone just watched her first Louis Farrakhan speech on YouTube and was duly mesmerized: “[W]hite ppl have a higher concentration of enzyme inhibitors that [suppress] melanin production.”
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White people are “genetically deficient” because, among other things, “melanin is present at the inception of life … directly linked to the strength of the nervous system … directly linked to the strength of neuro systems affecting capacities like intelligence, memory and creativity.”
It also “enables black skin to capture light and hold it in its memory mode which reveals that blackness converts light” and “directly communicates with cosmic energy.”
“[T]his is why the [indigeneity] of all humxnity comes from our blackness,” Khogali said. “[W]e are the first and strongest of all humxns and our genetics are the foundation of all humxnity.”
“THEREFORE white ppl are recessive genetic defects. [T]his is factual,” she continued. “[W]hite ppl need white supremacy as a mechanism to protect their survival as a people because all they can do is produce themselves. [B]lack ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to.”
“[D]o you ever wonder how black ppl after centuries of colonial violence, genocide and destruction — no matter what systems created to make us extinct … how we keep coming back?” she concluded.
“[I]t is because we are superhumxns.”
This post, unearthed by the Toronto Sun in 2017, was deleted, because of course it was, though it wasn’t the only controversial statement Khogali had made on social media:
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That’s not even particularly surprising, given what we know about Khogali. It had also, like the strange post about eugenics, been written before she became a media figure.
In a column for the Toronto Star shortly after that tweet — and the backlash it caused — she said she was reacting to negative tweets.
“During Black History Month, I was bombarded by tweets from white men asking me to prove that racism, Islamophobia and misogyny exist. Why should I have to prove the existence of the forces that torment me and members of my community to people who don’t believe they exist and, worse, who perpetuate them?” she wrote.
“And so two months ago I tweeted, ‘Plz Allah give me strength not to cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today.’ I put my rage and trauma into words, not action, not threat. Faced with hate, I sought restraint from god and support from my online community.”
That tweet got traction, however, after she became visible due to the BLM movement.
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“I am not a public official. I am not a police officer. The state does not entrust me with violent weaponry. I have never contributed to the mass targeting of a community. All I have done is used a turn of phrase, a rhetorical flourish, to voice my frustration and dared to be a person calling for justice,” she wrote.
“To date, I have directly received many disturbing death threats from white supremacists across the country. Somehow a tweet I wrote out of anger months before our protest began has become a bigger media story than our protest’s many and profound accomplishments.”
Whatever the “profound accomplishments” of BLM Toronto, Khogali is a public figure and her thoughts on race are, um, illuminating.
This isn’t to say she should be marked by her opinions forever, but it isn’t as if she disowned this stuff when given the opportunity to, either. And that was just for the tweet. Khogali’s strange “superhumxns” talk — which sounds like nothing more than someone who’s skimmed Nietzsche’s philosophy and Farrakhan’s eugenics — is genuinely frightening for someone who would go on to help lead Black Lives Matter Toronto.
And that’s the bigger story here. Khogali is no different from the racist trolls you can find in social media’s dingier corners, should you want to look hard enough. They aren’t oft allowed to remain in any degree of control of a major group like the Black Lives Matter chapter in Canada’s biggest city.
This isn’t your ordinary left-winger. This is someone who, in the not-entirely-distant past, called white people “sub-humxn.”When you don’t consider an entire race human, you can do the math as to where this leads next.
Black Lives Matter Toronto isn’t particularly upfront on their website about who their leadership is, so it’s unclear whether she’s still in a position of power with the organization.
The most recent evidence is an event listing from early March at York University’s Centre for Feminist Studies; in the brief bio section, she’s described as “a black feminist multi-disciplinary educator, writer, performance artist, activist, public intellectual, emcee and grassroots community organizer. She co-founded the Black Lives Matter Toronto movement that has shifted the current political landscape of Canada by actively working to dismantle all forms of anti-Black racism.”
The other kinds of racism she’s all right with, though — and Black Lives Matter Toronto was all right with that, too, apparently.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal for four years.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany doesn’t read the newspapers. Maybe AOC should try reading what McEnany actually says before she launches an attack that basically accuses the press secretary of racism — even subconscious racism.
In a social media dispute that flared up Monday, New York’s best-known democratic socialist tried to paint the Harvard Law graduate McEnany as too ignorant to know the office Ocasio-Cortez holds, apparently thanks to a Politico summary of McEnany’s comments during a White House news briefing.
“@PressSec wouldn’t be the first person to mistake a women of color for having a lower position or title than she does, but Kayleigh – in case you haven’t picked up a newspaper in two years, I’m a Congresswoman,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
“The@PressSec comment is steeped in a long, hurtful, & horrendous history of stripping women of color of titles and diminishing them to ‘the help.’ Perhaps she isn’t aware that what she did is mired in racist history. If that is the case, I look forward to her apology tomorrow.”
First of all, since it’s unlikely McEnany has been living under a rock since the 2018 election season, it’s a good chance she knew full well who the Bronx-Queens Democrat is even before becoming White House press secretary.
Second, Ocasio-Cortez appeared to be triggered by Politico reporter Jake Sherman’s suspiciously snarky Twitter post that implied McEnany had referred to AOC as simply an “adviser” to Joe Biden, the elderly, white male who’s somehow become the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee for 2020.
Also, since McEnany was referring to Ocasio-Cortez’s status as co-chairwoman of a panel advising Biden on “climate change,” there’s an argument to be made that McEnany was complimenting AOC by elevating her beyond the ranks of an ordinary member of Congress to a powerful player in presidential politics.
Finally, as Alyssa Farah, White House director of strategic communications noted, Ocasio-Cortez was just dead wrong.
Had the congresswoman taken more than a minute to look, and resisted the urge to leap immediately at Sherman’s cc’ed Twitter bait, she would have known McEnany had fully described her, as well as AOC’s equally obnoxious “squad” mate Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan.
The two women came up when McEnany was fielding a question about the Democrats’ insane push to defund American police departments.
At a Friday night debate, according to the U.K. Independent, Ocasio-Cortez called for the “reduction of our NYPD budget and defunding a $6 billion budget, that costs us books in the hands of our children and costs us very badly needed investment in NYCHA and public housing.”
.@PressSec wouldn’t be the first person to mistake a women of color for having a lower position or title than she does, but Kayleigh – in case you haven’t picked up a newspaper in two years, I’m a Congresswoman. https://twitter.com/jakesherman/status/1270057686990819329 …
“The president is appalled by the ‘defund the police’ movement,” McEnany said, according to the transcript.
“The fact that you have sitting congresswomen wanting to defund the police — notably Rashida Tlaib, notably Biden adviser Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — former Clinton and Eric Holder spokesperson Brian Fallon wanting to defund our police across this country, it is extraordinary.”
In other words, Ocasio-Cortez fired off Monday apparently on the basis of a reporter’s tweet that seemed designed to get a rise out of her, and she jumped right at it. That’s not exactly the behavior voters should expect of their elected officials, but it’s the kind of action Americans have learned to expect from Democrats and “progressives” who have spent the Trump years demonstrating the maturity of middle schoolers.
As is usual with anything coming out of the Trump White House, McEnany’s tweet drew plenty of liberal responses as AOC’s supporters flocked to the congresswoman’s defense like the flying monkeys of “The Wizard of Oz” — but McEnany had plenty of backers, too.
.@PressSec wouldn’t be the first person to mistake a women of color for having a lower position or title than she does, but Kayleigh – in case you haven’t picked up a newspaper in two years, I’m a Congresswoman. https://twitter.com/jakesherman/status/1270057686990819329 …
Read your own transcript, you literally called her an adviser in the same sentence, I’ve highlighted it below to help you out.
Becky Frady@CRNA_Pred
I’ll go slow, try to keep up…she said sitting congressWOMEN (meaning multiple), then gives examples of those congressWOMEN, the second of which, AOC, is ALSO an advisor to Biden. AOC has TWO JOBS, congresswoman AND Biden advisor, BOTH mentioned. Got it?
Following the example of former press secretary Sarah Sanders, whose tenure was a textbook example of how the White House should handle an unrelentingly hostile press corps, McEnany has made it clear from the beginning that she wasn’t going to be intimidated by the divas in the briefing room.
Even the most vainly obtuse (say, Jim Acosta?) should be learning by now that attacking McEnany without a decent cause is going to be an exercise in failure.
Maybe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will learn the lesson too — assuming she reads enough about it.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Nancy Pelosi has been lowering herself — and American politics — for decades now. But on Monday, she did it literally.
As the country heads into President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election bid, the crassly opportunistic (and maliciously anti-Trump) House speaker clearly hopes to capitalize on a wave of anti-police sentiment, stemming from the May 25 death of George Floyd after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for roughly nine minutes during an arrest, to defeat Trump’s campaign.
Claiming that police are the real problem, Democrats at the local level are working to “defund police” forces in their communities — and leave the minorities they claim to care about even more vulnerable to crime. The mainstream media is doing its ever-predictable part by portraying an astonishing orgy of riot and looting as some kind of heir to the dignified, morally driven protests of the civil rights movement.
And now comes House Speaker Pelosi herself, ostentatiously taking a knee in the ornate surroundings of Emancipation Hall (formerly the Great Hall) in the nation’s Capitol before introducing a bill to put a new set of federal regulations onto the nation’s locally controlled police forces.
Congressional Democrats take a knee as they observe a nearly nine minute moment of silence for George Floyd at Emancipation Hall at the U.S. Capitol. https://t.co/JnqDlzMFDqpic.twitter.com/8CBdgtLUjz
The bill, officially known as the “Justice in Policing Act,” is ostensibly intended to “hold law enforcement accountable in court, improve transparency through data collection, and reform police training and policies.” What it’s more likely intended to do is whip up Democratic voters heading into the November election, and provide a patina of legislative covering to continuing unrest in overwhelmingly Democratic-controlled cities.
“The martyrdom of George Floyd gave American experience a moment of national anguish as we grieve for the black Americans killed by police brutality,” a somewhat garbled Pelosi said at a news conference after the kneeling ceremony.
“Today, this movement of national anguish is being transformed into a movement of national action as Americans from across the country peacefully protest to demand an end to injustice.”
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For Democrats, it probably looked like a moment of perfect political theater.
But some of the online reviews were appropriately damning:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "The martyrdom of George Floyd gave American experience a moment of national anguish as we grieve for the Black Americans killed by police brutality. Today, this moment of national anguish is being transformed into a movement of national action" pic.twitter.com/xu22quQaHQ
It’s interesting that this is a Democratic proposal, given that the highest-profile incidents of “police brutality” that Democrats seem to think is suddenly on an epidemic scale in the nation seem to crop up mainly in cities where Democrats have been in control for decades. Minneapolis, for instance, where Floyd died and where the city council now wants to disband the police force, is made up entirely of Democrats but for one Green Party member.
New York City, where a black vendor of illegal cigarettes named Eric Garner died after being arrested by police back in 2014, is staunchly Democratic.
Baltimore, where the death of a drug dealer named Freddie Gray in 2015 set off days of rioting, hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1967, as Breitbart has noted.
Its elected officials at the local and federal level (including the late Elijah Cummings) have done nothing to prevent Charm City from a descent into slums. These are just a few examples, and every American, Democrat and Republican, knows the truth.
Yet Democrats see themselves as the force to reform American police agencies? The reality is that the party is throwing anything it can at Trump and the possibility he will serve another term in the White House.
The three-year national nightmare known as the “Russia collusion” probe came up deservedly empty. The impeachment affair from the first month of the year was so ludicrous it’s almost hard to remember — at a remove of six months — the exact lies Rep. Adam Schiff and Co. were peddling.
When the coronavirus hit, Democrats thought they had their issue, but Trump’s handling of it compared far too favorably with other world leaders — and especially favorably to the obvious ineptitude of Democratic governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo and rumored Democratic vice presidential possibility Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
So now Pelosi’s Democrats have turned to the death of George Floyd and a national outbreak of looting and violence to try to convince American voters that the real problem the country has is racist police officers. It’s a desperate attempt to rally a dispirited Democratic base in time to win a 2020 election in which Democrats have pinned their hopes on a 77-year-old Joe Biden whose chief strength in the Democratic primaries was that he wasn’t Bernie Sanders.
He’s a man with a lifetime’s worth of political baggage, including the 1994 crime bill that Democrats despise today and a questionable past with China, not to mention endless accusations of improper behavior with women, as well as one serious claim of sexual assault.
Pelosi’s career has made clear for years that there’s really no depth she will not lower herself for the sake of political power — for herself and her party. On Monday, in the Capitol’s Emancipation Hall, she did it literally, for the whole world to see. And every voter needs to remember it in November.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
A church deep in Alabama has put up a controversial message on its sign calling Trump supporters either racist or mentally ill. The pastor of the church is the one behind the message.
The controversial sign put on display outside the New Era Baptist Church reads on one side, “A black vote for Trump is mental illness.” The other side of the sign displays another message: “A white vote for Trump is pure racism.”
Michael Jordan, the pastor of the local church, told WZDX that he put the sign up hoping it would encourage people to choose a name other than Trump on their ballots next year.
Daxton Kirk, a local Trump supporter, told the station that people “should not be able to come into a building and feel like you are hated or diversified just because you came here to worship the Lord.”
Kirk told the local station that he has reached out to the town’s City Hall to see if local officials can take action on the sign.
The pastor even defends his hateful and racist message saying, “God motivates me to take a stand for what’s right. Read the Bible and look in the White House. If they call me a racist, look in the White House. When you vote for Donald Trump, you are supporting institutionalized racism.”
This pastor needs to take some time to read the Bible for himself and see what Jesus said about judging. I’m not arguing that the Bible says not to judge anyone because it does numerous times. But God tells us not to judge hypocritically and to not judge by appearance but make right judgment.
When this pastor automatically calls every Trump supporter a racist, he’s violating the Lord’s prescription for judging. I’ve NEVER been able to get a solid reply from anyone who says that Trump is a racist. The most recent thing they try to claim is telling the “Squad” to go back to their countries and fix them. Which, in the full context wasn’t racist at all.
The mainstream media, the propaganda arm of the Democrat party, keep throwing fake news stories like Russia collusion, Trump’s a racist, and now recession as a way hurt Trumps 2020 campaign.
Will Joe Biden’s speaking gaffes negatively affect his run for President?
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
The bad news keeps piling up for Democrats. Particularly given their cries of “Trump is a racist!”.
If President Trump is a racist, then somebody better tell black people. Because from my vantage point, Trump is the orange version of Rev Martin Luther King, Jr.
This white man has gone stone crazy helping black people. From getting black criminals out of China and releasing others domestically, Trump can add to his list of “Things I did today for blacks”, record low unemployment.
Despite media reports, blacks at street level recognize Trump’s accomplishments. Further, many begin to realize how much the Democrats, media, and other Leftists have gamed blacks for decades.
One such notable is Former Fayette [Mississippi] Mayor Charles Evers. He’s the 96 year old brother of slain civil rights icon Medgar Evars.
He is quoted as saying that he felt Trump “was getting a bad rap” from fellow civil rights leaders and that his economic policies “were creating jobs for people of all colors.”
“I love Donald,” he said without hesitation.
“When Trump came to Jackson [Mississippi] in 2016, he came to my office,” recalled Evers, brother of slain Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers and himself the first black politician to seek elective office in the Magnolia State since Reconstruction.
Evers told us he especially liked Trump’s “plain way of speaking and I liked what he had to say. He’s a businessman, not a politician, and we agreed that if you create jobs, you are helping people of all colors.”
Asked if he ever felt Trump was a racist, Evers shot back: “No more than anybody else. We’ve all got a little bit of racism in us.”
As they say in the beer commercials: “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
So what about all these charges of racism against “The Squad”, and Trump’s attack on Baltimore?
Evers declared,
“There’s no racial thing here. He’s telling them to go back to their districts and fix things there. Then come back and show us how, instead of criticizing.”
Evers’ comments are in stark contrast to the media narrative. And I’ve said on my radio show for some time that Democrats again grossly miscalculate the “Trump is racist” angle against Trump. It has already backfired, and the results will show in the 2020 election when Trump trounces whatever idiot the Democrats finally settle on.
Moreover, down ticket will feel the impact, as I’ve further predicted Pelosi will lose the Speaker’s gavel to a Republican.
Evers echoes the sentiments of many blacks. And in case you’re missing it, more and more blacks are becoming vocal in support of President Trump.
Democrats call their opponents racist in order to shield their disastrous policies such as Detroit, Baltimore, and other intercity issues they’ve caused across the country from the public.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
Nike shoe company has pulled its Betsy Ross flag shoe because of a washed-up ex-football player felt it was racist. Maybe it’s a shoe better fitted for Antifa.
Which Democrat Presidential Hopeful Has The Wildest Campaign Promise So Far?
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
Social Justice vs True Justice at Oberlin College. Gibson Bakery blamed for racial profiling and racism when Oberlin College student was caught shoplifting and assault at their place of business.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2019.
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