If you thought the mainstream media has been coming down a bit hard on Donald Trump of late, you haven’t seen anything yet.
In his speech Tuesday night the businessman had the temerity to hit them where they really live by going where no Republican on a presidential level has dared to go before. He declared aloud what almost everyone secretly knows, that the horrifying condition of black people in urban America is at least partly, probably largely, the fault of the media’s darling, the Democratic Party. Their failed liberal policies and exploitation of blacks have been making things worse for African-Americans for decades.
Trump is right, of course. And under Obama and Clinton, the carnage has only reached new levels with people shooting each other in the streets of Chicago and Baltimore as if they were the suburbs of Raqqa.
Pushing the envelope further, the businessman made an overt pitch to black voters to come over to him for the sake of their own communities, to make their lives better by breaking the stranglehold the Democrats have had on African-Americans.
Oh, the vapors, the vapors.
It’s safe to say the MSM will now go into overdrive, attacking Trump every way they can, branding him a racist for telling the truth, and begging him to make some sort of slip, any slip, so they can change the subject as quickly as possible from this most sacred of their sacred cows. Minutes after the speech, panicked CNN was already fixating on the fact that the businessman did not make his speech in a black neighborhood, thus supposedly making it invalid although it was readily available to millions of Americans of all colors on television.
Those of us who care about our country, however, could not have but rejoiced in Trump’s speech. Someone should have made it thirty years ago. (Well, in a way, Daniel Patrick Moynihan did.) Nevertheless, it was good to hear honest words like these:
The main victims of these riots are law-abiding African-American citizens living in these neighborhoods. It is their jobs, their homes, their schools and communities which will suffer as a result.
There is no compassion in tolerating lawless conduct. Crime and violence is an attack on the poor, and will never be accepted in a Trump Administration.
The narrative that has been pushed aggressively for years now by our current Administration, and pushed by my opponent Hillary Clinton, is a false one. The problem in our poorest communities is not that there are too many police, the problem is that there are not enough police.
Or this:
Every time we rush to judgment with false facts and narratives – whether in Ferguson or in Baltimore – and foment further unrest, we do a direct disservice to poor African-American residents who are hurt by the high crime in their communities.
During the last 72 hours, while protestors have raged against the police here in Milwaukee, another 9 were killed in Chicago and another 46 were wounded. More than 2,600 people have been shot in Chicago since the beginning of the year, and almost 4,000 killed in President Obama’s hometown area since his presidency began.
[snip]
For every one violent protestor, there are a hundred moms and dads and kids on that same city block who just want to be able to sleep safely at night. My opponent would rather protect the offender than the victim.
Hillary Clinton-backed policies are responsible for the problems in the inner cities today, and a vote for her is a vote for another generation of poverty, high crime, and lost opportunities.
Indeed. I only wish Trump had been more specific about how to solve the situation. (A couple of days ago I recommended he consider some of Jack Kemp’s old proposals). But let’s hope that will come and that he will indeed spend more time in African-American communities. Why not?
Like most on the right, I abhor identity politics. They are inherently divisive and racist in essence. But they are so ingrained in our culture that I suspect the only way to get rid of them is to go through them, to meet the communities head on with sensible and creative conservative proposals. Trump made a great start in this regard Tuesday night. If he continues to go forward with this and makes genuine inroads, it may well prove to be his, or anyone’s, greatest contribution to this campaign.
And if, in the process, he is able to put a dent in the reactionary monoculture of mainstream media, we should take our hats off to him for a very long time.
Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His most recent book is—I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already. You can read an excerpt here. You can see a brief interview about the book with the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal here. You can hear an interview about the book with Mark Levin here. You can order the book here.
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