It is a strange election cycle when Republicans go to war with each other with a ferocity rarely manifest when they are confronting Democrats and their progressive agendas.
It is especially puzzling because a general consensus has formed on the right that the Democratic Party is moving so far left that its agendas threaten the very foundations of America’s social contract. These include a frontal assault on the system of individual rights that the Founders set in place. The left envisions a fundamentally transformed America where individual rights are secondary to the collective rights of races, ethnicities, genders and classes. That is why the particular circumstances of individual acts, such as the ones that led to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, for example, don’t matter to progressive mobs. It’s the races of the actors that do.
This progressive assault is being waged in the name of an “identity politics” that places whites at the bottom of the racial totem pole while holding them responsible for all the sins attributed to Americans but none of their achievements, specifically their success in creating the most tolerant and inclusive society on earth. Identity politics has a long and ugly history under its proper name – fascism – which is another term for the socialism of the Volk or nation (as opposed, for example, to the socialism of classes). Today p.c. fascism is an integral feature of the ethos and tactics of the progressive left, which has become the dominant force in the Democratic Party.
Republicans may feel they have the luxury of being nasty towards each other because they fail to grasp that in the hands of their opponents politics has become a form of warfare conducted by other means. It is no longer about getting elected and enjoying the perks of office. It is about defaming opponents with the intention of driving them from the public square, so that only the party of “decency” and “compassion” remains standing. Its effect is to traduce the culture of civility that respects dissent, and its logical conclusion is a one-party culture and state.
In this destructive enterprise the left’s chief weapon is race, which it uses to attack departures from its orthodoxies as racial bigotry. But even as progressives prosecute this race war, racial bigotry by whites has ceased to be a factor in public life. Progressives deal with this intractable reality by inventing a fictional construct called “institutional racism” to which they attribute all the disparities affecting blacks. “Institutional racism” is a necessary fiction – institutionalized racism has been outlawed for sixty years – because actual racists have become so hard to find.
Even as white racism has become a phenomenon of the insignificant fringe the left’s accusations of white racism have escalated to the point of terminal absurdity. Thus Black Lives Matter and other progressive voices describe America as a “white supremacist nation.” This accusation is made against a country that outlaws racial discrimination, that has twice elected a black president, has recently had a black four-star general head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two black secretaries of state, three black national security advisors and two successive black attorneys general along with thousands of black elected officials, mayors, police chiefs and congressmen.
The statement that 2016 America is a “white supremacist” nation is not only the reflection of a deranged hatred for whites, but an act of hostility towards black America, whose opportunities and rights in this country are greater than in any other under the sun, including every African nation and Caribbean country governed by blacks for hundreds and even thousands of years. The characterization of America as “white supremacist” trivializes the historic sufferings of American blacks, seeks to divorce them from their historic contributions to American culture and society, and depreciates the moral struggles of the civil rights movement that achieved their liberation.
Black Lives Matter – a driving force behind the white supremacist meme – is a roving lynch mob whose premise is the claim that a systematic war is being waged on black people. This claim is deployed to justify riots in the streets, the burning of cities and open incitements to kill police. (What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!) There is not a shred of evidence to support the claim that there is a hunting season on blacks. Black Lives’ blood libel is sustained by portraying black street predators like Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, who died resisting arrest, as civil rights martyrs.
Here is how Black Lives Matter justifies its rhetorical venom and articulates its political goal: “#BlackLivesMatter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.” According to the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Seattle chapter, Marissa Jenae Johnson, the phrase “All lives matter,” which was coined as a response to the original, is a “new racial slur.” Her justification: “White Americans have created the conditions that require a phrase like ‘Black Likes Matter.’…Do you know how horrific it is to grow up as a child in a world that so hates you? While you’re literally being gunned down in the street, while you’re being rounded up and mass incarcerated and forced into prison slavery.”
Johnson’s racial lies are easily refuted by the facts. White America does not hate black children, and blacks are not being gunned down in the streets by whites or “rounded up” like Jews in Nazi Germany to be forced into “prison slavery.” According to a study conducted by the Washington Post, last year police officers (who are black and Hispanic and Asian as well as white) killed 662 whites and Hispanics, and 258 blacks. The overwhelming majority of all those police-shooting victims were attacking the officer. Overall, there were 6,095 black homicide deaths in 2014—the most recent year for which such data are available—compared to only 5,397 homicide deaths for whites and Hispanics who constitute 80% of the population. Thus it is true that blacks are being gunned down in numbers far out of proportion to their representation in the population. But the truth Black Lives Matter racists want to obscure is that almost all of those black homicide victims were gunned down by black killers. It is not whites who are gunning down blacks in the streets but other blacks. Moreover, 90% of the homicide victims of black killers are black. In other words, the real oppressors of black communities are the Black Lives Matter movement and its Democratic Party sponsors who are enabling a criminal element in inner city communities to terrorize law abiding black citizens, while crippling the efforts of law enforcement to protect them.
While blacks are only 13% of the population, they commit 38% of the violent crimes and over 50% of the murders. In Chicago and New York, two of the homicide capitals of America, blacks and Hispanics commit more than 95% of the murders. If one removes from the equation the criminal elements of the black and Hispanic populations of this country, America’s violent crime rates shrink astronomically until America looks more like European countries whose citizenries have no guns.
Since blacks are 90% of the victims of black criminals, it is obvious that crime expert Heather MacDonald is correct when she writes, “The one government agency that is the most dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter is the police.”[1] The war on police is a war to deprive law abiding black citizens of their only real protection, since Democratic gun control advocates have already removed from the black and white populations of Chicago, Baltimore and other crime ridden cities much of their right to bear arms.
According to FBI data, over the past decade 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police officers who are black as well as white. Those blacks killed by police are with few exceptions resisting arrest, do not have their hands up and are not pleading, “Don’t shoot.” Yet the sinister propaganda of Black Lives Matter is to suppress and invert these critical facts. That Black Lives Matter is attacking the police who constitute the first line of defense for inner city blacks reveals the truth about this movement, which is anti-white in its intentions, but anti-black in its effects.
In other words, the greatest daily threat to black lives in America is an anti-white racism that has made violent street criminals its civil rights heroes, multi-racial law enforcement agencies the targets of its hate, and actively suppresses the facts about black and minority criminality by attacking anyone who attempts to raise the issue as racist. The results of the attacks on police departments were entirely predictable. In the immediate wake of the Ferguson and Baltimore race riots, homicide rates rose 56% and 60% in those areas and significantly elsewhere as police retreated from the streets while local Democratic officials curtailed anti-crime measures, rewarded the families of career predators like Freddie Gray with six-million-dollar-settlements, and emboldened violent criminals to prey on vulnerable citizens, who are mainly poor and mainly black.
A prime cause of this catastrophic war on police is the vicious propaganda spread by progressive and liberal elites and Democratic Party operatives, beginning with presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. For them, America is still mired in the pre-civil rights era of more than 60 years ago when there was systemic injustice in the criminal justice system, and white attitudes towards blacks were radically different. How different? In 1960, as commentator Larry Elder has pointed out, 60% of Americans said they would never vote for a black president, but in 2008, more than 50% of Americans did just that, and did it again in 2012. Moreover, in 1983 a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, made Martin Luther King’s birthday the only national holiday honoring an American. To do so he eliminated the national holiday specifically honoring George Washington the father of the country. If that isn’t a revolution in attitudes, what is?
Facts, however, don’t prevent Black Lives Matters supporters like Ta-Nehisi Coates, America’s most pampered racist, from promoting poisonous fictions like this: “And so that beauty that Malcolm pledged us to protect, black beauty, was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white.” Coates was born in 1975, and was eight years old when King was honored with the nation’s only national holiday honoring an American, and George Washington was sent to the back of the bus. The first motion pictures championing civil rights and equal dignity for blacks – most notably Home of the Brave – began appearing in 1949. Sidney Poitier won the Academy Award as best actor for his role in “Lillies of the Field” in 1964. In 1960 Harper Lee’s novel about racial justice for blacks won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to sell over 60 million copies. In 1977, television featured “Roots” the epic miniseries about black oppression which was the most widely viewed show of its time. Its episodes were viewed by more than 30 million Americans and it won a score of Emmys. As is typical of Black Lives Matter and “social justice” progressives generally, Coates simply lies to sustain his hatred of whites.
Because Coates is the most celebrated of the new racists, he is a perfect emblem of the corruptions of a “liberal” culture, which condemns invisible white racism while defending black criminals who prey on the minority inhabitants of America’s inner cities. A principal source of the war on white people generally and law enforcement in particular is our leftwing university and literary culture, which for forty years has taught college students that it is politically correct to hate white people; which fosters a hatred of America so virulent, that it has inspired millennials to flock to a lifelong supporter of communist causes like Bernie Sanders and to avert its own gaze from this impertinent fact: the largest, most oppressive and most violent inner cities in America are 100% controlled by the Democratic Party – the party of slavery and segregation – and have been for fifty to a hundred years. Everything that is wrong in the social environments of America’s black poor that policy can affect, Democrats and progressives are responsible for.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a prime product of this cultural sickness. Although he never graduated college, Coates was made a visiting professor at MIT, was offered a column by the New York Times (which he turned down) and is currently an editor at one of America’s most venerable liberal journals, The Atlantic. He is also currently the recipient of a $625,000 MacArthur “Genius Award,” and this year was given the National Book Award for Between the World and Me, accompanied by fawning reviews in the New York Times and the rest of the liberal press. The book is written in the form of a letter of advice to his teenage son to whom he explains that if a black cop kills a black youth (which is what happened to Coates’ best friend) that is because the black cop is acting white. In other words, whatever crime is committed by a black person the white devil made them do it. This is Farrakhanite racism in its purist form.
“White America,” explains Coates, “is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.” Portraying killings of blacks by police officers as racist business as usual, Coates continues, “there is nothing uniquely evil” about these officers “endowed with the authority to destroy your body;” they “are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.” America’s heritage is killing black people because they are black. America’s heritage is slavery – control over black bodies. Actually – historically speaking – it is black Africa’s heritage is to have enslaved black people and delivered control of their bodies to others; America’s heritage is to have liberated them.
The historical reality is actually this: slavery had existed for 3000 years in every country but was never proclaimed immoral until white Christian males in England and America did so towards the end of the 18th Century. In 1776 a new nation dedicated itself to the proposition that all men have a God-given right to liberty that no government can take away. Within 90 years of America’s declaration, slavery was abolished on this continent at the cost of 350,000 mostly white Union lives, and then – thanks to the English and the Americans – throughout the western hemisphere and large parts of Africa. This is the truth the left desperately seeks to suppress so it can justify its attacks on a country that has provided not only blacks but all minorities with privileges, rights and opportunities unprecedented in the history of mankind.
Hatred of America and contempt for its guardians among the police and the military is the social gospel of the left. For nearly half a century this hatred has been the unwavering theme of the “progressive” movement in our universities and our streets and in the Democratic Party; its practical agendas are the destruction of the culture of individual liberty and accountability at home, and America’s retreat abroad. This is what Republicans and all Americans, black and white, should be concerned about and what they should be joining forces to defeat.
David Horowitz is the author of Progressive Racism, Encounter Books, April 26, 2016
[1] Heather MacDonald, “The Myths of Black Lives Matter,” http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myths-of-black-lives-matter-1455235686. The statistics in this section were taken from the same article.