Barack Obama famously accused red state conservatives—Republicans in general, I suppose—of “clinging to their guns and religion.”
Condescending and nasty as that was, to some extent he had a point. But another way to say the exact same thing and give it a more positive overtone is “clinging to the Bill of Rights.”
Nothing wrong with that, in fact it’s laudable, unless you’re a Marxist, another kind of totalitarian or, apparently these days, the United States ambassador to the United Nations.
The Democrats, however, “cling” to something far more pejorative and pernicious—racism.
You could say they can’t live with it, can’t live without it, but the emphasis should really be on the latter. They can’t live without it.
We have seen that virtually everywhere since Obama’s election that many of us hoped would put an end to racism. It did the reverse. It brought it back, or more accurately, talked it back, as we hadn’t seen it in decades, reversing a very positive trend the left found threatening, possibly fatal to their interests.
It was as if the Democrats and the rest of what we might eye-rollingly call the “liberal intelligentsia” (media, entertainment, academia, ad nauseam, ad tedium) suddenly panicked.
Who were they without the accusation of racism to hang around their opponent’s necks? In what way could they demonstrate their undeniable superiority?
This attitude reached its apotheosis in the Biden Administration with all the endless talk (that word again) of “systemic racism.”
But what is “systemic racism”? What is the ”system” exactly to which they refer? Racist actions have been against the law for decades, as they should be.
That is not enough for our “liberal” and “progressive” friends. There’s a system behind the whole thing, they say. Everyone’s a racist, no matter what they do or say. It’s systematized; they’re sure of it. Critical Race Theory tells us so.
And now they want the whole world, at the United Nations no less, to know just how bad our country is, how infected by racism from the start. (Maybe that’s what they mean by “The System.”)
From The Hill:
“Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said that white supremacy is ‘weaved’ into America’s ‘founding documents’ during a speechWednesday to the National Action Network.”
Weaved into the founding documents? Sounds pretty bad, except…
What’s really woven into the founding documents, if you read them, is the ability to self-correct, to “amend” the propositions themselves—and those amendments have been used to do such things as eliminate slavery, give blacks and women the vote, limit the number of times someone can be elected president, and so forth.
What the Founders were smart enough to know is that they weren’t perfect (who is?) and that they should structure into their documents a manner through which they could be improved as time went on and conditions changed. And that is what has happened, obviously, as in all history, by fits and starts.
Ms. Thomas-Greenfield may have virtue signaled her pompous nonsense to a particularly receptive activist audience (National Action Network) but her words were not whispered in secret. You can be sure they were noted with pleasure by Iran, Russia, China, North Korea and others of a similar ilk who will be delighted to exploit them.
Under Biden, the United States has reversed Trump and rejoined the infamous U.N. Human Rights Council, an Orwellian group dominated by the above mentioned nations that have given us such institutions of unremitting present day horror as Tehran’s Evin Prison and the concentration camps of Xinjiang Province.
These near Nazi-like fellow “progressives” are now Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s colleagues on the UNHRC, but she urges us to approach them with “humility” because we once had slavery.
Never mind that we long ago worked our way through this and Iran, under the mullahs, and China, under Xi Jinping, are headed in the opposite direction—toward more oppression on a global scale.
But who are we to criticize? We, after all, are racists. It’s systemic. (Can you imagine what the average Tibetan, Uyghur, or Taiwanese must think when he or she hears her?)
