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Make them own it
Robert Byrd after filibustering 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Besides having announced his candidacy for president in 2020, Senator Cory Booker has called on the U.S. House of Representatives to designate lynching as a federal hate crime. Why? Because of an alleged incident involving the gay black actor Jussie Smollett, who stars in the TV series “Empire.”
Liberty Counsel has called for a provision in the bill, passed by the Senate in December, under unanimous consent, to be removed. That provision is claimed to create a federal protected category of gender identity and sexual orientation, prelude to using this category, through the 14th Amendment, to gut the 1st Amendment. Indeed, the left has shown its hand already, smearing Liberty Counsel as an “Evangelical ‘hate group.'”
Anyone who has been paying even a little bit of attention to developments in our culture and politics will see that Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) is right and that his warning must be heeded. https://t.co/50GWDV3r7a
— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) January 19, 2019
Senator Tim Scott, sadly, was silent, as history was hijacked for a feel-good vote, averting his eyes from the amendment that actually attacks the faith he professes. While he was leading the band in the Washington Post to drive Representative Steve King out of the Congress, and the Republican Party, as a “racist,” he, like Senator McCain before him, seems selective in the targets of his moral outrage. He certainly has not felt led to take bold public stands against the judenhass resurgent in the Democratic Party. Perhaps this is for the same reason explained in “Why Liberals Don’t Call Out Democrat Hate.”
Liberals have no escape from their party’s embrace of hate. For a liberal to criticize Democrat’s hatefulness towards whites, men, Jews, Christians, Catholics—it can’t be done. It would destroy a liberal’s career, perhaps his or her marriage, in an instant. Dissent is punished swiftly and ruthlessly by liberals. Apple’s black, female vice president of diversity and inclusion was fired after six months in her new position (she was a 20-year veteran at Apple, on the leadership team expanding retail worldwide). Her crime? She said twelve white men from diverse backgrounds with different life experiences and perspectives also provide “diversity.”
The correct answer is for the Republican chair(s) of the relevant Senate committee(s) to hold hearings, in which the whole sordid past of Senator Booker’s party is laid out, without equivocation. Lay out the decades of Democratic Party resistance to federal anti-lynching legislation (protected by that sacred filibuster rule that Mitch McConnell relies upon to evade ever actually enacting decades of GOP party platform promises). Lay out the difference between Wild West frontier justice lynchings and the ritualistic torture murders–by whites, of blacks–euphemistically called “lynchings.”
Lay out why an anti-lynching law was once necessary, to stop domestic terrorism by Democratic Party affiliates and allies, who monopolized political power in former Confederate states. Use every single written and photographic piece of evidence. Enter into the record every single day of the Congressional Record where Democrats fought to protect their terrorist wing.
Enter former president Bill Clinton’s mentor, Senator Fulbright’s, voting record into the modern record. Enter the modern Democrats’ eulogies of Senator Robert KKK Byrd into the record.
Then enter every last Jew-hating social media post, article, and meeting, past and present, into the record. Then enter every last anti-Catholic utterance of the current Democrats in the Senate.
Robert P. George, of Princeton, ties it together (via PowerLine Blog):
Similarly, today’s leading Democrats will move from support for Israel, to merely nominal support for Israel, to neutrality, to quiet, somewhat ambiguous opposition, to something effectively indistinguishable from “Zionism is racism.” The left calls the tune, and just as the left settled in on abortion in the early 1970s and marriage redefinition in the 90s, it has now settled in on opposition to Israel–not merely the policies of its government, but its very existence as a Jewish state and homeland of the Jewish people. Do you doubt me? You can do a test of your own. Go to the center of campus at your local university and hoist a placard bearing a large blue star of David and the words “Long Live Israel!” (Notice: Please make sure your health and life insurance coverage are in good order before conducting this experiment.)
Speak real inconvenient truth to cultural and governing elite power. Break their fraudulently constructed, would-be permanent, political coalition of intersectionally superior identity groups. Bury them in their own vile record.
Published in Politics
This has become a recent bugaboo of mine: the misuse of the term “lynching.”
Even if what supposedly happened to that actor is true, it still wasn’t a lynching.
It would only be a lynching if:
No. Sorry, but “lynching” has a clearly understood meaning in the context of white supremacist terrorist violence against black men. It was short-hand for torture murder, in which the hanging part was for display, as was the occasional removal of mutilated portions as trophies. Let’s not play this game.
Seriously, you say that two men can’t murder a black man, by hanging, at night, for being black, and leave him there to be found in the morning, and have it be called by civilized society a lynching?
No. It would be a murder.
So old newspapers that reported “lynchings” of whites were wrongly using the word, even though the act was the same?
I’n not sure of your intent, but I thought the term “lynching” was the act of a community or other large group killing a person suspected of a crime before legal justice can be carried out. The race of the perpetrators or victims does not affect the definition. We just associate Whites lynching Blacks because it was notorious in the south, and sometimes used to repress Blacks, but Black communities also lynched people. One-quarter of all lynching victims in the U.S. were White, though these were mostly done by White crowds.
I don’t see that the actor’s story has anything to do with actual “lynching.” If what he described was true, then this would have been just your ordinary hateful assault. “Lynching” seems to be used by the actor as a hyperbolic statement, the way Clarence Thomas referred to a “hi-tech lynching.”
This is a fascinating, interactive map from data compiled at Tuskegee by Monroe Work. My only complaint is that it does not include Leo Frank.
I admire and appreciate your outrage, Clifford, although I think you know that trying to conduct those types of investigations would be beyond the pale. The hypocrisy of the Left is outrageous, sickening and pathetic, and I would love to find a way to call them out. Where are you, Republicans??
CT may have used it more appropriately, as he was accused of a social crime meant to destroy his career without a fair hearing (and carried out by a mob).
He clearly didn’t mean a real, actual lynching given his use of the modifier. But they do parallel each other in kind, if not severity.
My point is ever since the creation of the concept of “hate crime laws” the left seems to want to make any attack on a non-white person a “lynching.”
Put that way, you have a fair point. The left debases all sorts of words for short term political gain. I hope I conveyed the need to fight back by burying the left and the Democratic Party with their sordid past and present.
Oops, she did it again. This time, Speaker Pelosi had to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), sort of. There was no loss of committee assignments, unlike the bi-partisan isolation of Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) for four words in one interview. There has also been no moral outrage from Senator Tim Scott (R-SC). Instead, Senator Scott made it about his bill, diverting focused outrage away from the Somali immigrant expressing what are actually widely accepted beliefs in her community and constituency.
I couldn’t find what she said or did on either link, what was she condemned for?
Ilhan Omar’s latest anti-semitic tweets are embedded in this BBC story. She did not see any problem with advancing the old smear that Jews control government with their money.
Contrast responses by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) and Nikki Haley, versus establishment “leadership.”
According to the Tuskegee database which covers 4,743 lynchings (defined as extrajudicial killings by a mob by any method) from 1882 to 1968, 73% were of blacks. On a per capita basis, blacks were 25 times more likely to be lynched than whites. Lynchings of whites declined after 1900 both in numbers and as a percentage of the total – from 1900 until WW2 91% of lynchings were of blacks. Two states, Mississippi and Georgia accounted for 24% of all lynchings and 30% of black lynchings. The Tuskegee data base does not cover mob violence against blacks during Reconstruction (1865-76) which was extensive.
Oof, I was thinking of moving to GA.
I’m with you all the way on fighting back rhetorically. I’m tired of Republicans being mealy-mouthed when they are unfairly attacked. Fighting back might be the number one positive character trait we could pin on Trump. I hope he inspires others to do the same.
I’m confused. Why is anti-lynching the hill to die on? I grant you it’s a state matter that doesn’t need federal intervention, but that’s not a problem unique to anti-lynching legislation nor is it a particularly politically resonant objection. I don’t understand why making it a federal matter is a particular outrage. We’re not pro-lynching, are we?
I kind of wonder why the Republicans don’t support it while making the point that it would have been on the books for the last hundred plus years if the Democrats hadn’t spent more than 50 years opposing it. This assumes there is no joker in the deck, some objectionable provision in the fine print, but it seems they should be demanding that the Democrats put aside their history of racism and finally support this legislation.
If there is a joker in the deck, propose an alternative bill, and demand that Nancy hold a vote on a ‘clean anti-lynching bill’.
This, exactly. AND the sacred filibuster made effective the Democrats resistance to federal legislation, that would end their reign of terror, and so their monopoly on former Confederate states.
Not sure how you get that from the OP. The point is to turn the bill from a potential anti-religious sexual politics Trojan horse, or at best a feel good gesture, into a real exposition of our real history, one in which the Democratic Party, not the GOP, is the political center of bigotry and violence.
Okay, now we’re talking about why Republicans wouldn’t welcome a bill such as this, unless there’s some poison pill. But isn’t that pill what started this discussion in the first place?
This is may be nit-picking for the current matter, but IIRC “lynching,” by legal definition doesn’t require the death of the victim, nor a hanging, nor the other elements traditionally associated with the word. My Black’s Law Dictionary is currently unavailable (it fell behind my desk). Correction, anybody? I can see how the legal definition, along with the generally – accepted understanding, could either hurt or help in this present matter.
The Progressive Era was much worse than Reconstruction on the lynching front.
Georgia has changed quite a bit since the death of Jim Crow. (We can celebrate *that* dude’s demise for sure.) ;)
For example, I grew up there and never saw a single soul in blackface. Weird, huh?
Thank you, very much. :)
I wasn’t clear on why the bill was an “anti-religious sexual politics Trojan horse.” I also don’t think many people care about what a bunch of dixiecrats did 50 or 60 years ago. Yes, that party is where the worst congressional racists were back in the day. But it’s ancient history and voters aren’t going to blame 2020 democrats for the sins of now deceased democrats circa 1960.
Actually, probably not. The Tuskegee database shows 1,764 lynchings of blacks from 1900 to 1938 and less than 100 after that date. There were probably several thousand extrajudicial murders of blacks in the decade of the Reconstruction era. Estimates for Texas alone are about 2,000.
I would have to look closer at the numbers, and I believe Tuskegee is actually low in the early 20th century. There are reasons for the spikes, as I’ve always understood them, which make a ton of sense, ie abandoning attempts at civil rights legislation after Democrats regained some voice in Congress, rising beliefs about social Darwinism that helped rebirth the KKK, the actual birth of Jim Crow with Plessy, clashes over jobs, etc. I’m no expert in that historiography, but I feel really comfortable with the number being highest in the early 1900s per what I learned in graduate school…. I guess I’ll have to doublecheck on a day I have time to look at multiple sources….
Because anti-white hate is what holds together their Coalition of the “Persecuted.”
Well, there’s one exception in that list. Liberals jumped all over Democrat Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic tweet. Jews apparently are different.
Your suggestion of hearings to pin the “real racist” label on the Democrats is folly. Despite years of conservative media playing the “real racist” card, nothing has been accomplished: racism is even more potent an accusation against conservatives today than it was 20 years ago, and blacks continue to vote Democratic with mind-numbed, robotic, 90-percent-plus consistency.
Should such hearings be contemplated, the mainstream media and the progressive monolith will treat them as dismissively as they treated the commission to investigate voter fraud in 2017. Like that effort yours will disappear without effect.
If you want to stop a powerful ideological force, such as anti-white hate, you need a counter ideological force – not Debate Club.