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Do Democrat Voters Really Believe This Stuff?
In a cynical ploy to capitalize on our current hysteria over the video of George Floyd’s death, Democratic Reps Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) and Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts) announced the BREATHE Act last week. This proposed legislation seeks to radically transform America’s criminal justice system through a wide variety of actions:
- Eliminate life sentences
- Retroactively expunge drug crimes
- Permanently shut down multiple federal agencies
- Permanently close many prisons and detention centers
- End gang databases
- Establish pilot programs for universal basic income
- Give voting rights to all illegal immigrants
- Give voting rights to all incarcerated criminals
- Give free lifetime education to all illegal immigrants
- Give free lifetime education to all incarcerated criminals
This sweeping legislation brings up two groups of questions in my mind.
First, do the congresspeople who proposed this bill hope that it will become law? Or is this just their version of virtue-signaling? And if it does become law, do they expect it to help black communities? So they want to defund police and release criminals from jail. And they expect this to reduce crime. How, exactly? Is this a real effort to reduce the crime rate in black neighborhoods, or is it simply a cynical ploy to get votes?
Which brings up my second set of questions:
I have a lot of friends whom I respect who vote Democrat. How many of the proposals above would these Democrat voters be in favor of? Does the average Democrat voter actually believe that you can reduce crime by decreasing the number of police on the streets and increasing the number of criminals on the streets? How, exactly, do they expect that to work?
Which reminds me of another interesting news story from last week:
Kanye West is a rapper, Christian, and now, apparently, a presidential candidate. He recently made a statement about Planned Parenthood: “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.”
Remember that he has a point here. Planned Parenthood was started by famous eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who started it as “The Negro Project,” to limit reproduction of races she found to be mentally and culturally unfit. She even bragged about speaking for the KKK in this passage from her autobiography: “I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan… I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.”
Every year Planned Parenthood gives out its highest award, called “The Margaret Sanger Award” to honor the legacy of its founder. When Hillary Clinton received the award in 2009, she said during her acceptance: “It was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously. … I’m really in awe of her. There are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life, from the causes she launched and fought for and sacrificed for so greatly.”
Kanye West has been known to say outrageous things with little basis in fact. But in this particular case, even if one disagrees with him, one can certainly understand how he might reach his conclusion that “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.”
Anyway, as one might expect, Planned Parenthood took exception to Mr. West’s statement. Nia Martin-Robinson (the director of Black Leadership and Engagement at Planned Parenthood’s national headquarters) said, “Black women are free to make our own decisions about our bodies and pregnancies, and want and deserve to have access to the best medical care available. Any insinuation that abortion is Black genocide is infantilizing. The real threat to Black communities’ safety, health, and lives stems from lack of access to quality, affordable health care, police violence and the criminalization of reproductive health care by anti-abortion opposition.”
So let’s do this again. Same two sets of questions:
First, does Ms. Martin-Robinson really believe that statement that I bolded above? Police violence kills more black people than abortion? A perceived lack of access to quality, affordable health care is more of a threat to black communities than gang violence? The ‘criminalization of reproductive health care’ is more of a threat to black communities than the destruction of the black family? Does she really believe any of that?
And second, does the average Democrat voter out there really believe those things? Are those statements a winning platform for Joe Biden?
The Democrat party seems to presume that their voters are stupid. In my experience, that is not true. But it does appear that the average Democrat seems to have an uncomfortable relationship with facts. So perhaps it’s not lack of intelligence, but a lack of interest in facts that don’t confirm your biases. For just one example:
Last year, Trump administration officials met with Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats to negotiate about the border wall. Attempting to explain why this wall is so important to American citizens, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen did a presentation that listed how many criminal aliens have been detained at the border, plus drug smugglers, terrorists, human traffickers, and various other undesirables. To her credit, Nielsen thought quickly on her feet (rather than running away screaming, which is what I generally do when I’m attacked by a rattlesnake). When Pelosi interrupted her presentation and flatly stated, “I reject your facts,” Nielsen immediately shot back, “These aren’t my facts, these are the facts.”
When the facts don’t fit their biases, they don’t propose their own reasoning or logic, they just deny the existence of those particular facts. Democrat voters of normal intelligence see this and vote for it. I don’t understand.
I’ve often wondered how my Democrat friends can vote for this stuff. I can say, “Your party intends to decrease crime by decreasing the number of police on the streets and increasing the number of criminals on the streets. They believe that lack of access to affordable health care is a greater threat to the black community than gang violence. They know what the weather will be like 500 years from now but they’re not sure how many genders there are this week. You won’t listen to a Ph.D. in climate science but you will listen to a Swedish teenager with a learning disability. You scream about Trump’s history of shady business dealings while you vote for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. C’mon – you’re voting for this stuff? You’re not stupid. I don’t understand.”
I’m not sure how they would respond, but I’m sure that they would go vote Democrat again. The Democrat party could run a career criminal with no record of success, a viciously unpleasant personality, and an affinity for tyrants and KKK sympathizers, and they would win half the vote.
In fact, in the last presidential election, they did exactly that.
I really don’t understand. These people are not stupid. But they vote for stuff that is absolutely, positively, mind-bogglingly stupid. Over and over and over again.
I just don’t understand.
And what I really don’t understand is how a Republican candidate can compete for the votes of such Democrats. How does one debate with such people? Imagine your attempts to discuss even obvious topics: “Yeah, well, you see, less police, more criminals…how do you think that’s likely to turn out?” And you would still lose the argument. To them. Somehow. I just don’t understand.
Those people are half the electorate. And I have no idea how to change that. Because I don’t understand how they think.
Published in General
Most Democrats are not members of the Squad. Our body politic would be far better if AOC and Tlaib were purged by the Democrats, just as Steve King and Roy Moore were purged by Republicans.
Your heart? See Comment #2.
Yes. After the election in 2016, I really tried to put the past behind me and to look at Trump in the best light possible. See my post from January 5, 2017, Time to Move on from NeverTrump. http://ricochet.com/401094/archives/time-to-move-on-from-nevertrump/
I tried. I really tried. But after Charlottesville, I locked in. I see Trump as an existential threat to the Republican Party, and perhaps even America.
Perhaps we can agree to disagree?
You need to see someone about that. There are several I despise: Schumer, Pelosi, Blumenthal, De Blasio, Durbin, and a few others. But all I feel is contempt and I ignore them if they are on a newscast. They don’t deserve any more attention than that.
BTW, I never thought I’d encounter at ricochet someone so arrogant and self-centered that he’d elect Biden to make himself feel better. You need help more than I thought.
It can’t be a more sensitive subject than discussions/studies of racial differences in intelligence. Can it?
Be careful! That’s a big rocket President Trump is planning for Mars.
But d0 you agree Trump got this part right about Charlottesville:
The people who fulfilled Trump’s warning in that second tweet all have Biden ’20 bumper stickers.
Hard to laugh @kozak because it’s not funny.
Fact Check: Inaccurate
Sort of an Ark Fleet Ship B?
Botany Bay from “Star Trek”, except that instead of having Joe Biden in the role of Kahn as their leader, Joe’s playing the role of John Gill from the Nazi planet episode.
Excellent post, Doc. I’ll have time later to read through the responses, and I’m looking forward to it.
One quick comment, in case no one else has made it already: while Ms. Sanger was indeed a product of an ugly time, and held views that were popular then and are now considered (appropriately, in my opinion) to be loathsome today, I’ve never been able to find a solid source for the “weeds” comment attributed to her. I’d be interested in seeing one if anyone can find it, because it’s in keeping with her pro-eugenics philosophy, if not with what I take to be a reasonable caution as a public speaker.
Been there, heard that. One of the nicest people I’ve ever known; the mother of my best friend (she’s since died, at the age of 98) genuinely believed that she was voting for the Democratic party of FDR.
And you’d be surprised how many of those folks are still around. Until statues of FDR start to topple, nothing will change their minds.
Excellent points. I remember back in the 80s the term “Paradigm Shift” was coined and that’s exactly what we’re facing. Time for conservatives to realize that.
…and Fish and Wildlife. I haven’t seen a bigger money-waster in recent memory. Turn all the refuges, etc. over to individual state Game and Fish departments. Federal government would save BILLIONS.
I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed. But I do say 10-15 million, tops. Depending on the breaks.
Thanks, Buck.
I briefly considered copying the bulleted proposals listed here, sharing them on Facebook, and asking my Democrat friends if those ideas are really what they want Congress to implement. As I thought about doing that, I wondered if most Democrats would trust the language in the list here as a fair representation of the bill’s proposals. I read the language of the actual proposal in order to contrast it with the paraphrased summary posted here. There were clearly differences–differences that seemed fair to me but would seem biased to my Democrat friends. So I imagined myself a Democrat and read the actual act. After doing so, I had to conclude that my reasonable Democrat friends wouldn’t object to the Breathe Act. The human mind is pretty malleable, and some pretty substantial mallets have been pounding away on the minds of Democrats for a long time.
As the imaginary Democrat I’d created read the bill, one thing became clear to him. The proposals therein didn’t sound as blatantly foolish and dangerous as they’d sounded to the conservative me who’d first read the list posted here.
Like a lot of left-wing proposals, this one leaves wide latitude for bureaucrats to interpret the language of the bill. Skeptical conservatives like most of us here can wade through the language and see where the act will lead, but Democrats will construct a much different image for the end product. Their minds focus on feel-good phrases like “banning the use of police agencies as tools of political repression” and “promot[ing] educational justice.” They imagine their resulting version of the city on a hill and immediately shut off any skeptical impulses. Finally, they attribute any concerns about the bill to the prejudice, close-mindedness and greed that they believe are characteristic of conservatives.
So I changed my mind. I won’t post the list of the Breathe Act’s proposals for my Democrat friends to consider. Sigh.
I always thought you were basically a Stalinist.
Why wouldn’t Democrats be in favor of these things? From their position, it makes perfect sense. It gives them a warm and fuzzy feeling while providing power for the foreseeable future for the Democrats.
11 million more votes from illegals nationally and those in prison, and game over for Republicans for at least a generation.
Free lifetime education for illegal immigrants and incarcerated criminals is lifetime employment for the professoriate teaching political indoctrination. More PhDs in whatever studies will be provided with lucrative lifetime employment.
Free basic universal basic income – why not? After all those people in the whatever studies department of the university have been indoctrinated, they need a way of paying their footsoldiers of more Obamas in training on everybody else’s dime rather than having to rely on some tax-deductible organization. (Why do Republicans still favor tax-deductible political organizations?)
Let’s turn it around: Why would you not understand why every-day Democrats would not favor this? You clearly don’t know your opposition, so don’t have any possibility of winning.
Oh what a crock.
I’m thinking of Google. Facebook and twitter are giants but don’t have the kind of growing economic power and global interaction over everything. They are easy to avoid, show a variety of views but Google not at all easy to avoid and their growing reach is frighting.
You notice that part is not addressed .
As usual.
I wouldn’t bet on that.
You will have to get used to Democrats. Trump will be gone in 4 years at worst. He was transforming the economy, not as much as it needs but more than any other President did or candidates promised. The Democrats will continue to centralize, weaken local politics, buy votes, organize minorities keeping them poor and dependent. You seem to think it’s back and forth. It was for most of our history but we’ve now had almost a century of one way government growth that is inconsistent with the constitution and our first 150 years. You admit you took an early dislike so now don’t pay attention or listen. You should.
“It’s about the particular member. There are always soft procedural advantages to being the credible extremist in Congress, regardless as to whether your bill makes it out of committee.”
What do you mean by this? I see nothing credible about this bill or the extremists proposing it. Of course I’m not a Democratic member of Congress.