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Rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats have rewritten it
The world saw this over the past two years with the now notorious shakedown organization known as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC has made hundreds of millions of dollars from calling other organizations and people racist, yet its founder Morris Dees and president Richard Cohen were forced to resign in 2018 over numerous accusations of racism and sexual harassment.
The same is true of appeals to feminism: Progressive Democrat Eric Schneiderman, the New York State Attorney General who denounced Donald Trump for sexism, was forced to resign in 2018 when four women accused him of violent abuse, including non-consensual sex, physical assault and even death threats.
“This is a man who has staked his entire career, his personal narrative, on being a champion for women publicly,” one accuser told the New Yorker Magazine. “But he abuses them privately.”
And yet nowhere is this dynamic of projection – people and organizations accusing other people of the very sins of which they are most guilty – more obvious than with the contemporary Democratic Party.
Like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Democrats have made a virtual industry out of calling people and organizations racists.
It’s their go-to strategy, the fallback position they use for every issue and occasion.
Since the days of at least Dwight Eisenhower, the Democrats have called every single Republican nominee for president a racist – from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the now-lionized “mavericks” Mitt Romney and the late Sen. John McCain.
The Democrats now insist that the United States was founded on “racist principles” — and also that racism permeates virtually all of the institutions of American life, including the nation’s police forces, college entrance exams, the teaching of mathematics, the celebration of the Fourth of July, and on and on.
For the Democrats, everything is racist all the time.
Yet just as Eric Schneiderman publicly waged a campaign against sexism while privately beating up his girlfriends, so, too, the Democrats call everyone else racists when they have been, historically, the most racist political organization of all – despite recent attempts by the controlled media to cover up the Democrats’ checkered past with discredited and bogus “fact checks.”
It is an historical fact that when the Democratic Party was founded in 1829 one of its central tenets was the legitimacy of slavery – and, for more than 150 years, many of its most prominent leaders, such as Woodrow Wilson, have opposed black advancement.
In their first national platform of 1840, the Democrats explicitly stated their opposition to the abolition of slavery:
“All efforts by abolitionists or others, made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences, and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people, and endanger the stability and permanency of the union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend to our political institutions,” the Democrats proclaimed.
However, then, as now, leading Democrats faced the inconvenient truth that the United States was founded upon the explicit belief that all men and women are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The Democrats’ strategy ever since has been to reinterpret these ideals, with lawyerly sophistry, so that they only apply to certain people – to men only, or to those of European ancestry, or, most recently, to those already born.
In the infamous Dred Scott decision, Supreme Court justice and prominent Democrat Roger Taney admitted that the clear meaning of words of the Declaration of Independence “seem to embrace the whole human family,” yet, he said, that was not the case.
“t is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration,” Taney wrote. He added that black slaves “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
The manifest injustice of the Dred Scott decision and efforts to expand slavery into new territories in the west led to the creation of a new political party in the 1860s, the Republican Party, which insisted that the God-given rights of which the Declaration of Independence speaks apply to all people, not merely to the descendants of the original British settlers.
“We brand the recent reopening of the African slave trade, under the cover of our national flag, aided by perversions of judicial power, as a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age,” the Republican platform of 1860 declared.
The Democrats rejected this stand outright.
The Democrats rejected this stand outright.
In a series of debates with Abraham Lincoln, the Democratic Senate leader Stephen A. Douglas denounced the Republicans for being too friendly to black slaves.
“We are told by Lincoln that he is utterly opposed to the Dred Scott decision, and will not submit to it, for the reason that he says it deprives the negro of the rights and privileges of citizenship,” Douglas said, during the first debate in August 1858. “If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro.”
Following the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves by the Republican president Abraham Lincoln, Democrats in Congress did everything in their power to prevent former slaves from being able to exercise their hard-won civil rights.
It was Democrats, possibly including Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson in their youth, who filled the ranks of the vigilante terrorist movement known as the Ku Klux Klan – despite claims to the contrary by media “fact checkers.”
In fact, as late as the 2000s, Congressional Democrats were led by a former enthusiastic member of the Klan – Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), a former local Klan organizer and personal friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Democrats and their media allies today claim that this history is irrelevant, that all this changed in the 1960s when the political parties “changed places.” As the pundit Mona Charen has put it, rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats “have simply rewritten it.”
According to the theory advanced by the Democrats and their media propagandists, the Democrats overnight became the champions of civil rights while Republicans adopted the “southern strategy” and appealed to racist whites.
The truth, however, is almost precisely the opposite.
It was the Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower who signed the first civil rights legislation – and who sent federal troops to integrate a Little Rock high school in 1957.
A strong believer in equality under the law, Ike also ordered the desegregation of all military bases.
He and later Republican leaders, such as Richard Nixon, were opposed by virtually all of the Democrat politicians in the South.