Racism

President Biden’s wisdom and penetrating intelligence sometimes escape him. So far, they have stayed away for fifty years and show no signs of returning. They are often accompanied by wild exaggerations, invented personal stories and hyperbolic attacks on opponents. Examples are not hard to find, and the public is catching on. The latest fulmination came during a campaign-style rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, aimed at supporting his bill to nationalize election laws. Since that bill contravenes America’s long, constitutionally enshrined tradition that state legislatures control voting rules (as long as they don’t violate individual civil rights), the bill will fail in the Senate, blocked by the filibuster. Biden, once a man of the Senate, has long supported the filibuster.

Vice President Kamala Harris has been quoted as saying her media coverage would be better if she were a white man. She is absolutely right. She wouldn’t have bad coverage. She wouldn’t have any coverage at all. That’s because she would still be a minor senator from a big state, not the second-highest official in the Executive Branch. She was selected only because she has the identity-politics markers so important to Democrats. It should be obvious by now that Harris is a terrible politician. When friendly reporters toss her softballs, she swings, misses and blames them. When she is given hard policy assignments, she swings and misses those, too. (In her defense, her main assignment, immigration, is President Biden’s failure, not her’s.

In his timely new book Woke Racism, Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter examines the force of an ascendant political religion that to his mind “has betrayed black America.” “White privilege becomes the original sin that requires perpetual atonement,” McWhorter observes. Woke rebukes white America for its passive, unpardonable complicity within a fundamentally racist system. One is cleansed only through self-mortification. According to McWhorter, a multi-racial Elect thinks of itself as a bearer of exclusive wisdom and empathy. Woke positions itself against the white race, men, Christianity, capitalism and private property, heterosexuality — in other words, against people, institutions, belief systems and worldly activities at the nation’s core.

There are white people in this country and elsewhere who rank human beings by race, with the whites at the top, blacks at the bottom and everyone else in between. They are convinced that whites have a divine or natural right to rule, and they abhor racial intermarriage. They are a minuscule minority, here and elsewhere. White supremacists hold no government power. Their resources are negligible. They gather in obscure places, online as in person, and their conventions are ridiculous spectacles in which the costumes are as odious as the fantasies are pathetic. It wasn’t always like this. From about the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the world was theirs to exploit. Western politicians, thinkers and scientists theorized freely about racial hierarchy.

“If you didn’t vote for Biden, you ain’t black,” tweeted 2020 Florida Republican congressional candidate Lavern Spicer on Thursday, “I guess you’re a negro.” Spicer, who is black, was referring to President Joe Biden’s latest gaffe. Delivering his first Veterans Day address at Arlington National Cemetery to a nation reeling from the baleful effects of his failed presidency, and amid historically low approval ratings, Biden referred to the 1940s black baseball player Satchel Paige as “the great negro,” apparently because Paige could still competitively play at age 47. https://twitter.com/ForAmerica/status/1458851297378119684 Biden’s history with race is, at the risk of using a woke euphemism, troubled.

What news network did you watch on election night? Thankfully we all had plenty of options. There was CNN, where John King's magic wall grows ever more granular: "we're moving the Kelleher household into the leans-Republican column, Wolf, though their dog remains undecided. Now next door to the Smiths..." There was Fox News, where loud people shout at each other until Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum finally pull over the car and tell everyone to knock it off. And then there was MSNBC. Oh, Lord, was there MSNBC. There did we find Nicolle Wallace, one of the network's fastidiously objective anchors, declaring that Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin "worshipped at the altar of Donald Trump.

We are told we should Defund the Police. Some say it in anger, but for others it’s an opportunity to partake in the great American grift as activists, journalists, or further varieties of opportunist. Politically, it mostly benefits the Democrats. While Biden is hiding, they’re riding a wave of outrage, avoiding questions about their historic liability and their present competence to govern. Most of America’s metropolises are liberal. They are run like liberal fantasy lands. Behold the herds of young, aspiring liberals, unmarried and clueless about life. They’re supposedly happy, but they take out their unaccountable anger through radical politics.

The Democratic party, mired in infighting only a week ago, has reunited over racial division. New Jersey senator Cory Booker stated in a speech on Wednesday in Charleston, S.C., that the recent acts of white nationalist violence received a stimulus 'from the highest office in our land, where we see in tweets and rhetoric, hateful words that ultimately endanger the lives of people in our country.' Joe Biden took direct aim at President Trump: in an impassioned speech in Burlington, Iowa, he declared, 'in both clear language and in code, the president has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation.' A day earlier, Fox News host Tucker Carlson tried to douse the controversy over white nationalism by averring that the phenomenon is a 'hoax.

‘You would think you were in a Third World country,’ the millionaire white New Yorker of retirement age said of Baltimore’s heavily black Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in 2015. There is nothing remotely racist about this statement. We know that because Bernie Sanders said it. Yes, the Bernie Sanders who lives in whites-only Vermont and whose inability to connect with a key group of the Democratic base means that he has what the pollsters call an ‘African American problem’. It was, however, disgracefully and irredeemably racist of President Trump to refer to Rep. Elijah Cummings’s Baltimore district as a ‘disgusting rat and rodent infested mess’ and a ‘very dangerous & filthy place’.