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Democrats know they have an edge in voting numbers over Republicans so if they can keep stirring the pot, by instigating wedge issues, they are more than likely to retain power. You would think it would be the other way round and on occasion the voting public do get fed up enough to "throw the rascals out" and take a chance on what Republicans have to offer and thus the 2016 election.
Because Trump's personality was so all encompassing it turned off enough voters in 2020 who ignored his accomplishments and Biden was able to win by staying above the fray down in the basement. Now that we have had a few months of Biden, were the 2024 election held today and Republicans came up with two rational nominees they might recapture the Oval Office and House and possibly even achieve an edge in The Senate. This is why Pelosi needs to shove HR1 down America's throat as well as turn DC into a state and pack the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Biden needs to swamp the nation with illegals so a packed SCOTUS could then allow them to vote.
Biden would love to be the president who ensured Democrat succession for as long as one can see but if we still adhere to the dictates of our Constitution, Democrats might not be able to pull off this coup. Time will tell.
Whether American remains a Republic is the question but even if we do, I submit America will never be the same. Obama saw to that.
Too much, by way of significant transformation, has occurred. Acceptance of intimidation, political character destruction, "wokeness," cultural disruption, loss of and challenges to basic freedoms, growth of government intrusions, debt imposed spending restraints, bloated spending on welfare, handouts and forgiveness programs, weakened patriotism, anti-American education curricula etc. will forever assure America is in a slow but permanent decline and I have yet to discuss corrosive pressures from adversaries like China etc.
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DUH!
White People Don't Have a Monopoly
on Hatred
I know. I once held bigoted beliefs myself.
|
By Zaid
Jilani |
|
||
King
Soopers employees and customers run down Table Mesa Drive in Boulder after a
shooting inside the store on March 22, 2021. (Photo by Matthew Jonas/MediaNews
Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images)
Today’s guest writer, Zaid Jilani, first came on my radar in
late 2011. When I first heard his name it was an attached to an epithet:
antisemitic.
Zaid was then working at a think tank called the Center for
American Progress and he’d used the phrase “Israel Firster” in a number of
online arguments. He was echoing others who had used the term, having little
idea that it invoked the old and insidious notion of Jews having dual loyalty.
Ultimately, he resigned from the organization.
It would be years before Zaid and I met in person, introduced by
another writer, Shadi Hamid, in
Washington, D.C. The person I encountered was nothing like caricature I knew
online. He was generous, kind and fiercely independent in his thinking. It was
an important reminder to me to never judge anyone by their worst mistake. And
more, that people are capable of change.
Those are among the themes that Zaid tackles in today’s powerful
essay, which I am proud to publish:
Middle school is terrible for everyone, but you’re going to have
to trust me that it was rougher on me than many. I was short, funny-looking, and a practicing
Muslim in a town called Kennesaw, Georgia, where I almost never met anyone who
looked like me or who worshipped like me. I was relentlessly picked on and beat
up on a regular basis.
Ninth grade was my opportunity for a new identity. In attending
a magnet school that was outside of my normal district, I had the chance, at
last, to make new friends. But I often found myself being misinterpreted or
misunderstood.
There was a student in one of my classes with whom I got into
arguments over trivial things. He was friends with one group of people, and I
was trying, desperately, to be friends with another, rival group. In retrospect
it was utterly normal high school cliquishness, but I interpreted it as
something else.
We were all asked to keep diaries to describe our experiences in
class. I mentioned in that diary that I thought I didn’t get along with this
other student because he was Jewish. A teacher read the diary and asked me to
speak to a school administrator.
That administrator was a calm, soft-spoken man who used the
conversation to learn more about me. He quickly realized that I had anxiety
issues and was struggling to fit in. He pointed to the comments I had written
about my classmate and suggested to me that they were antisemitic. I was judging
him on the basis of stereotypes I had about Jewish people, not based on who he
was.
Here is a good moment to reflect on the fact that I am a
Pakistani-American Muslim. Our community is warm and generous, hardworking and
inventive. My parents came to this country in the 1970s because they knew it
was welcoming to people like us. Unlike life on the Indian subcontinent, here
you aren’t instantly judged by your ethnic group, sect or caste. In America, we
were free to be whoever we wanted to be.
But every community has its problems. Antisemitism was ours. The
data bears this out: one ADL poll found that
more than half the Muslim populations of some Western European countries hold
antisemitic attitudes.
In political conversations and at social gatherings, it was all
too common to hear ordinary Jewish people get conflated with extreme actors,
like far-right Israeli politicians, or to hear about complicated conspiracies
involving Jews that, if nothing else, are far too elaborate to ever reflect
reality. (How can they possibly control the banks, the borders and, at the same
time, be the actual founders of ISIS?)
What saved me from the same fate — of holding ignorant beliefs
about an entire people — was that extraordinary administrator. The most
important thing he impressed on me, calmly and without shaming me, was that my
classmate, like me, was an individual. He wasn’t an avatar of some kind of
monolithic group. And neither was I.
The primacy of the individual — that we judge people not by
their lineage but by their deeds — is at the very foundation of a free society
and of the American experiment. Here, unlike so many other places, including Pakistan, the law
and our common culture insists that we see people as individuals who are the
product of their character, not their tribe, family, race, or status.
This wisdom has come under sustained assault by an ideology that
insists that we are, in fact, avatars of various demographic markers — race,
gender, sexuality — rather than complex human beings.
Critical Race Theory sees people not as individuals, but more
like the Borg from Star
Trek. It insists that white people are inevitably oppressors and that
African-Americans are inherently oppressed. And everyone else, like
Schrödinger’s cat, exist in a kind of liminal position, playing the role of
victims or victimizers depending on the situation. That is how, in the context of the admissions process
at Stuyvesant, Asians are seen as “white-adjacent” and privileged,
but in the context of street crime, they are cast as victims. Attributes of
specific races are assumed.
Even after yesterday’s tragic shooting in a Boulder grocery
store, this racist illogic reared its head. “It’s always an angry white man.
always,” tweeted a “race and inclusion editor” at USA Today. A senior editor at
Deadspin tweeted: “Extremely tired of people's lives depending on whether a
white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not.” Kamala Harris’s niece,
Meena, offered: “violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our
country.”
It turns out the suspected shooter wasn’t white. The suspect’s
name is Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa. And the fact that he is alleged to have carried
out a mass shooting should not surprise us: If you look at the data on the
ethnic composition of mass shooters they reflect, roughly, the ethnic
composition of the American population. But given the rules of this ideology —
that the importance of the lives lost depends on the group characteristics of
the perpetrator — you can bet that the mainstream press will now pivot to
a different story.
Perhaps the most disturbing, sustained example of the way this
ideology distorts the truth is the coverage of ongoing violence against
Asian-Americans, most recently last week’s Atlanta-area murders, in which six
of the eight victims were Asian.
If you thumb through news articles from the past few days or
read over statements from leading politicians, you’d imagine that the Ku Klux
Klan is responsible for the spree of robberies, assaults and murders of
Asian-Americans across the nation. The phrase “white supremacy” is used
repeatedly. The Root’s Damon Young, for instance, took the occasion of the
shooting to declare that “whiteness is a pandemic.” While it’s true that the
shooter in Atlanta was a young white man, there is no evidence that he was a
“white supremacist,” as Young writes. The facts we know so
far suggest that he was motivated by perverse sexual beliefs, not racial
hatred.
This narrative is pervasive, but it bears no relationship to the
evidence before us. Not only are none of the high-profile attackers over the
past few months white supremacists, many of them aren’t even white.
Although there is no comprehensive database that lays out the
details of all of the attacks over the past year — we will likely have to wait
until the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report is released — there is data showing
what victimization of Asian-Americans generally looks like in the United
States.
One recent study looked
at hate crimes carried out between 1992 and 2014. It concluded that around 25%
of those that carried out anti-Asian hate crimes during this period were
nonwhite. (In contrast, about 1% of offenders in anti-black hate crimes were
non-white.) Last year, the NYPD arrested 20 people accused of anti-Asian hate
crimes. Two of them were white.
Those are just hate crimes — crimes in which the suspect
explicitly declares a racial motivation. If you look at all violent crimes,
you’ll see a picture that diverges even more sharply from the white supremacy
narrative.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2018 the
majority of violent offenders who attacked white and black victims shared the
same racial background as those they were attacking. For Hispanics, 45% of them
shared the same racial background. But for Asians, that number is only 24%.
This is relevant because much of the violence that has occurred
over the past year doesn’t neatly fit into the hate crime category. A robbery and attack on
a 69-year-old Asian-American woman earlier this month in Daly City, California,
for instance, is unlikely to be logged as a hate crime. Same for a disgusting episode this
week on the New York City subway in which a man urinated on an Asian-American
woman in her 20s.
While these sorts of incidents are unlikely to be legally
charged and recorded as hate crimes, that doesn’t mean that prejudice
necessarily plays no role at all. As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted in a 1992 report,
“many Asian immigrants operate small retail stores or restaurants in
economically depressed, predominantly minority neighborhoods. The entry of
small businesses owned by Asian Americans into these neighborhoods and their
apparent financial success often provokes resentment on the part of
neighborhood residents.”
A more recent 2012 survey by
Pew asked Asian-Americans how well they get along across various racial
divides. Twenty-eight percent of Asian-Americans said they get along not too
well or not at all well with African-Americans. For whites, 9% of
Asian-Americans gave the same response.
So why are so many self-described liberals embracing an ideology
that seems to insist that white racism is the only kind of racism? That bigotry only counts when the
perpetrator comes from a “powerful” group? That denies that the same person can
be both a victim and a victimizer?
I suspect that many white liberals — ridden with guilt over
American history and biases that still exist among the white majority — believe
they are doing minorities like me a favor by denying us the responsibility of
addressing our own prejudices. Critical race theorists often argue that the
true definition of racism should be prejudice plus power, implying that only
whites can be racist But hidden within that construction is the assumption that
minorities can never be powerful.
My high school administrator disagreed. He looked at me and saw
a young man full of potential. I wasn’t some domino set in motion by centuries
of white supremacy. I was a human being with critical thinking skills and
agency. And because he forced me to take responsibility for my own prejudices,
I was able to become the person I am today — a journalist whose words carry the
weight of social influence and power.
You cannot have power without responsibility. Denying minorities
responsibility for their own actions, both good and bad, will only deny us the
power we rightly deserve.
If you haven’t yet subscribed to Common Sense, please consider
it. Your support allows me to publish writers like Zaid:
Opinion: Tim Scott:
Let’s set the record straight on ‘woke supremacy’ and racism My comments, of course,
were not comparing the long history of racial hate to the very short history of
wokeism. That would be ludicrous. I am painfully aware that four centuries of
racism, bigotry and killings does not compare to the nascent woke movement. As
a country, we continue to pay a heavy price for our original sin.
My
comments were a sound-bite-length reaction to yet another media figure accusing
me of being a token for Republicans. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time
I’ve heard that type of slur. I spoke out because I am gravely concerned for
our future if we ignore either type of supremacy — both of which are rooted in
racism or discrimination.
Criticism
has included the suggestion that I and other Republicans are “living
proof that neither racial nor gender diversity is a guarantor of progressive,
inclusive and broad-minded thinking. Diversity, much in vogue, has
its limits.” In other words, my ideology does not match that which they
prescribe based on my complexion.
That
is woke supremacy. It is the “tolerant” left’s intolerance for dissent. It is a
progressive conception of diversity that does not include diversity of thought.
It is discrimination falsely marketed as inclusion.
This
isn’t the first time the woke folk have come after me. I’ve been called a
member of the “coon squad” for sharing
my story and conservative vision for America at the 2020
Republican convention. A former leader of the NAACP called me a ventriloquist
puppet. I’ve been called an Uncle Tom and a house n-----, among
thousands of other insults.
I
am proud to be both a Black man and a Republican. Because of those aspects of
my identity, many critics have ignored things I have actually done. In the past
few years alone, my Republican colleagues and I secured permanent
funding for historically Black colleges and universities for
the first time in history. We’ve passed bipartisan legislation to help
those battling
sickle cell disease. We’ve fought
for school choice because poor, and often minority, parents are
consistently the ones without choice. And I helped author the Republican
tax reform that lowered taxes for single moms, doubled the
child tax credit and brought Black unemployment to historic lows. That list
barely scratches the surface.
Critics
discount these accomplishments for the Black community because it conflicts
with the caricature they’ve created of what it means to be Black and to be a
Republican.
But
the victims of woke supremacy aren’t just Republicans. After a recent vote against
her fellow Democrats’ attempt to pass a job-killing minimum-wage hike during
the pandemic, my friend and colleague Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) received so
many death threats that she had to increase security for herself and her
partner. I’ve received
similar threats. A man — a “woke” Black man — is to be sentenced
this month for threatening to gut me “like a fish” and blow me away with his
rifle.
Woke
culture is speeding our country toward ideological and literal segregation.
Already, Columbia University has decided to host segregated graduation
celebrations based on race or
socioeconomic status. We are living in a society that has allowed “autonomous
zones” that effectively prohibit
law enforcement from protecting people from crime, and campus
“safe spaces” to protect students from others’ opinions.
Carving
out public spaces for people of only one race or mind-set? Since when is
separate but equal back in vogue?
Two
wrongs don’t make a right.
When
you give license for one person or group of people to discriminate, you give
license for everyone to discriminate. Dividing society along racial lines is
everything leaders in the civil rights era fought against, yet leaders of the
woke movement are attempting to codify discrimination in law, including by
Democrats setting aside funding exclusively for non-White farmers in their
recent stimulus
package. Blood wasn’t shed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge or the
streets of Birmingham so that we could reinvent the mistakes of our past.
Six
years ago, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who was not just a civil rights icon but
also my friend, asked me to co-chair
the march to Selma on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
When I think of my vision for America, I think about standing shoulder to
shoulder on that bridge with John and Presidents Barack Obama and George W.
Bush, walking forward together.
So, we collectively have a choice: We can continue down the path of toxic woke mandates and virtue signaling that themselves create discrimination, segregation and hate, or we can choose to create equality of opportunity and access to the American Dream for everyone. Because I believe in the goodness of America, I remain hopeful that we will choose the Opportunity Society
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A tongue in cheek cynical investment suggestion:
Ever since the tragic automobile death of Princess Diana the public has begun to purchase and display flowers as a way of contrite recognition and expression of sorrow.
In our own country, as mass shootings escalate, we have adopted this same protocol. There are no public nursery companies I know of that grow flowers. The flower business is primarily a small, private one but Scott-Miracle Gro (symbol SMG) has been a prized investment vehicle over the years and with increasing random mass shootings demand for flowers and related items might be worth investigating.
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