Two years ago I noticed what looked like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to woo longtime Democrats into the GOP, and we had just the right man in the Oval Office to make the pitch.
In his decades as a businessman and in his too-short stint as an elected official, Donald Trump wasn’t shy about going after minority voters who traditionally voted Democrat. That gave Trump — no matter what the infotainment industry might have you believe — the kind of colorblind cred needed to take advantage of the opportunity I’d seen.
For many white Democrats, being a registered Democrat was like a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card on race issues.
ASIDE: Look, I know the Democrat Party is functionally racist, and always has been. But politics is appearances, and the Dems (along with their allies in infotainment) have excelled these last 60 years of making people believe that they’re the not-racist party. It’s part of the unlevel playing field that pre-Trump Republican politicians accepted as normal.
“What happens,” I wondered aloud on several Right Angle segments for BillWhittle.com, “now that high-ranking Democrats, Hollywood, and the schools are taking that Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card away?”
In other words, how long could the Democrats tell their white supporters that they were all racist, even if they weren’t?
How long would you stay at the same church if the new pastor insisted you weren’t merely a bad person, but also irredeemably so?
With Trump leading the GOP in a new and more inclusive direction, one amenable to traditional Democrats who must have been getting mighty sick of their new pastor, as it were.
Imagine for a moment that you’re a well-meaning Democrat. How much of “All White People Are Racist” clips could you get through before jumping on board the Trump Train?
But then reality reared its ugly head, as reality always does — and this was one of those times when it hurt more than usual to be wrong.
The pastor in this case — everyone leading the “systemic racism” bandwagon — was preaching to people who wanted to believe they were bad people, who wanted to believe they were (nearly) irredeemable.
If there’s virtue being the victim then there’s a mirror virtue in being the victimized.
White progressives of no importance or even notoriety were able to gain importance by ritualistically embracing their “white superiority,” and then gain virtue by ritualistically rejecting it.
It’s political kabuki elevated to moral superiority over anyone who won’t themselves engage in the charade.
This clip of Matthew Hall, Provost at Southern Seminary, is just one of countless like it that I’ve seen over the last two years.
What makes Hall’s take interesting (if you could really call it that) is that unlike so many others he isn’t engaging in overly emotional or even physical antics.
Vox, the young adult infotainment site, recently posted a 22-minute long “explainer” video titled “How Racist Am I?”
The description reads:
This is a difficult question to ask yourself. But recent events and an increasing amount of research has shown just how much racial bias impacts our world. Before we can start the work of dismantling systemic racism, we have to first understand our own biases.
It begins with the assumption that you, progressive Vox reader, are indeed a racist.
It’s been viewed 1.3 million times.
Democrats and progressives are being told that they’re awful people and they respond by embracing the allegation.
How bad is the self-loathing situation on the left? So bad that when Presidentish Joe Biden got up before a truncated Congress and the entire nation on Wednesday night to denounce our country as racist, Democrats watching the speech overwhelmingly loved it.
Sadly, not all their loathing is self-directed.
When Senator Tim Scott — a black Republican — countered Biden’s speech with the truth that the country is not systemically racist, the Left called him an Uncle Tom and worse.
Two years ago I thought I knew what to do with Democrats accused by their own party leaders of racism.
Today I’m clueless about what to do with Democrats who openly embrace the charge.