By Hank Beckman -
It’s probably a fool’s errand to try to explain to our liberal friends why the daily accusations of racism lodged against President Trump gain so little traction with his supporters, but let’s try anyway.
Their latest shrieks of outrage were provoked by the President suggesting that the four leftist Democratic Congresswomen known as “The Squad” should go back to where they came from, fix the countries that so desperately need fixing and come back and tell us how they worked their magic.
For those who somehow escaped a newspaper or a cable news broadcast in the last year or so, the Squad is made up of its most influential member, New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, a refugee from Somalia, Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, whose family hails from Palestine, and Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts.
The President’s remarks were spot on, no more than a restatement of the old “America, Love it or Leave it” sentiment that was so popular when I was young.
But of the four, only Omar was not actually born in the United States, so this turned into yet another example of the President’s, shall we say, "imprecise" manner of speaking sparking an uproar that stepped all over his message.
All of the representatives richly deserve condemnation; AOC for charging that we are operating concentration camps on our Southern border; Pressley for insisting that people of color, gays, and Muslims need to speak a certain way; Tlaib and Omar for the clearly anti-Semitic comments they have made in their short careers.
Indeed, if the country is as bad as they claim—AOC insisted that “where we are is not a good thing” and warning against settling for “10 percent better than garbage”—it’s hardly out of bounds to advise them to find a country where they might feel more comfortable.
Somalia, from where Omar escaped, would be a good test case for her superior policy skills. AOC’s family is from Puerto Rico, and from what we see in the news lately, the country could use her talents. Tlaib’s family hails from Palestine, so perhaps she could head to the West Bank and Gaza and explain to Hamas and Fatah the error of their ways.
The problem is that not that the Left is speaking out against perceived bigotry. No decent person denies that criticizing hate speech is the right thing to do—when the criticism is warranted. But liberals have lost all credibility on the bigotry issue in recent years (decades?) because according to them, everything they don’t like is racism.
Racism is the default explanation for every problem plaguing the Black and Hispanic communities. If there is an achievement gap in academic test scores, the tests themselves must be racist. If there is any gap at all between Black/Hispanic earnings and that of Whites, it must be discrimination at work. If Blacks and Hispanics are overrepresented in our nations’s prisons and jails, it must be a plot by People of Pallor to keep their male populations repressed. If some people so rudely expect our Federal government to actually enforce immigration laws, it’s because they hate Hispanics.
The racism argument ignores Blacks sometimes having higher scores on mental health tests than Whites as far back as a century ago, as often noted by the peerless Thomas Sowell. Was there less racism then? Left unexplained is how Asians have higher average earnings than Whites. Does the White power structure favor Asians? Conveniently unmentioned is the fact that the higher rates of incarceration mostly result from crimes being committed by Blacks and Hispanics against other Blacks/Hispanics. And if it’s racism to enforce immigration laws, how does one explain the support in the Black and Hispanic communities for stricter enforcement of those laws?
And if someone is so insensitive as to mention any of the inconvenient facts listed above—to politely suggest that racism is not present in a given social phenomena or incident—that person is guilty of, you guessed it, racism.
Some examples used in the modern era to “prove” racism are often nonsensical to the point that you wonder if some right-winger made them up to make liberals look bad.
One FaceBook post that popped up on my newsfeed contained a 2018 Tweet by Kurt Eichenwald that pointed out that while there were 660,000 white people in the country illegally, none were being forced into cages or having their children stripped away.
“We all know why,” was his solemn reasoning.
Did it ever occur to the people so impressed by this nonsense that the Europeans who are here illegally count for a fairly small percent of illegals and almost certainly overstayed their visas and are not part of the hordes of invaders crashing the border and overwhelming our border security? Would those that believe this nonsense have our government abandon policing our borders and begin to hunt down Europeans in the country illegally? That doesn’t seem like a wise use of resources.
Then there’s the recent Rasmussen study that found that about a third of Democrats think that anytime a White politician criticizes a Black politician, it’s evidence of racism.
Think about that. Any criticism of a politician who happens to be Black is racist. These people, a third of all Democrats polled, are out here among us operating motor vehicles, using sharp utensils and blessed with the franchise to vote. Not very encouraging, is it?
However inelegantly he put it, President Trump is absolutely right. He didn’t call for the Squad to be deported; he suggested they leave voluntarily, after which they can fix the countries of their parents and come back and tell us how they did it.
Liberals can go on babbling about racism, ranting about White Supremacy, and banging their spoons against their high chairs until the 2020 election—and beyond. What else do they have to say?
The rest of us are not impressed.
