Fifty years ago exactly I spent my summer as a civil rights worker in South Carolina. I am proud of my participation, but I did one thing for which I am ashamed. I was reminded of it by Donald Trump’s visit to the African-American church in Detroit Saturday when he recalled that Republicans were the party of Lincoln.
One of my tasks back then was voter registration. We would go to the cotton fields and drive black field workers to the registrar’s office. Most of those workers were illiterate and I would sign for them as witness just below where they put their X.
I would also — and here’s the act for which I am ashamed — uniformly register the field workers in the Democratic Party. In my snot-nosed, Ivy League arrogance, I thought I was doing the right thing — for them.
My world view then was similar to the one dominating the mainstream media to this day — though few of these journalists, to my knowledge, actually participated in the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, they came to identify with us, fighting second hand what they thought was the good fight.
But for the last fifty years that’s about all they did, identify with a cause without paying any attention to the results of the policies they and the Democratic Party espoused. It was a feel-good enterprise by the press and a perpetual voter power grab by the Democrats. We all know what the results have been for African-Americans, the inevitable fruits of one-party rule as seen today in Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago, among so many other places.
Besides the fact that what I did taking it upon myself to register those field workers as Democrats was probably illegal, or should have been, I was helping, in my tiny way, create that situation we live in today. This is a situation that is rapidly becoming intolerable.
That is why Donald Trump’s outreach to African-Americans is the most significant action of the 2016 campaign so far, especially for its potential longterm implications for our culture.
The liberal media and their academic and entertainment industry allies know this and for that reason they will redouble their efforts to portray Trump as a racist. This is not just to defend the pathological liar Hillary–can you imagine the moral cartwheels necessary to support Clinton at this point?–but to defend themselves, to justify the way they have been living their lives for decades, all the “progressive” pronouncements covering up the most comfortable of bourgeois lifestyles, as far from the inner city as Mars.
The intention of the Founders was for the Fourth Estate to be the people’s watch dogs on our rulers; instead they have increasingly become the willing collaborators and enablers of elites, particularly of important Democratic politicians. Hillary Clinton’s house boy Sidney Blumenthal, who began as a journalist, is the prototype, the selfish man masquerading as the “liberal” man, personified. (Perhaps we need a new Biblical injunction: “By your emails shall we know ye.”)
Donald Trump has put them “up against the wall,” especially by receiving a standing ovation in, of all places, a black church. My how the journos must hate him now.
I have seen this enmity personally, riding the Trump press plane on a couple of occasions. I have also noticed how the press almost never talked to the thousands of Trump supporters at the several rallies I have attended, as if these people were members of some untouchable class secretly migrated from the sub-continent. Actually, these “untouchables” were remarkably decent and open-hearted people if you bothered to communicate with them, some of the nicest I have ever met. I never heard a racist word from any of them. They were also unfailingly polite. You wouldn’t know it from the reportage, but Trump rallies have been among the most peaceful crowds I have ever been in.
Now that Trump has broken the code and actually solicited the African-American vote, going personally to Detroit with more such visits to come, it’s important for all of us to support him against the coming media onslaught, especially if we care about our African-American brothers and sisters. The members of that community willing to welcome Donald are some of the bravest people in our country, just as some black conservatives are the most valuable and insightful of our pundit class.
I will conclude with a special nod to Dr. Ben Carson, whose presence on the campaign trail has turned the neurosurgeon into the moral voice of our country. Bravo!
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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