Do Democrats Understand What They Are Supporting?

Leftist friends shared a meme on Facebook during the August 24-27 Republican National Convention. The meme appears on many Facebook pages, including that of "Will and Grace" actress Debra Messing, here. It's also on various websites, for example here, and at the Democratic Underground, here.

The meme is rife with grammatical and punctuation errors, but, more importantly, it is a pack of lies. Perhaps the thousands who shared it think that their party is the party of the working man, of patriotism and fair play.

There is another, more diabolical possibility: those who shared this meme are consciously participating in Orwellian brainwashing attempts. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Today's Democratic Party is not extreme.

This meme doesn't just try to hoodwink the reader; it scapegoats Republicans. The bad things you are hearing about Democrats? It's all lies, cooked up by those nasty Republicans. Refusing personal responsibility and agency eliminates morality and hope for progress. As long as Democrats refuse to look, hard and long, in the mirror, and address their own faults, their denial will hurt the party and the country, and their extremism will be but a pendulum swing that inevitably produces extremism in the opposite direction. I'm a lifelong registered Democrat. I want the best for my party and my country. That's why this meme breaks my heart.

Let's take the meme point by point.

"THEY SAY WE WANT TO DISBAND POLICE DEPARTMENTS … THAT'S A LIE."

"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police," is the headline, and main point, of a June 12, 2020, New York Times op ed. "Policing Doesn't Need Reforming; It Needs to be Abolished" is the headline above Courtland Milloy's 2016 Washington Post op-ed. "Abolish the Police" is a frequently seen slogan at Black Lives Matter rallies, for example here, here, here, here, and here. The Democratic Party is 100% onboard with BLM; see here. The DNC felt like a virtual BLM rally, reports the Washington Post.

"THEY SAY … WE HATE THE POLICE … THAT'S A LIE."

A speaker at an August, 2020, BLM rally in Kenosha urges his listeners to kill police, here.

A speaker at an August, 2020, BLM rally in Washington, DC, urges his listeners to "burn the f---ing White House down" and to "take the police to the f---ing grave." He also wants to fight senators, congressmen, and "burn them down." "I f--- police. I bust police in the head" see here.

At a July, 2020 Portland event, BLM protesters placed a police cap on the head of a dead pig and then placed the pig on an American flag and burned their Goebbels-worthy creation.

Colin Kaepernick famously wore socks with images of pigs in officer caps. BLM protesters regularly graffiti images of pigs in police caps. BLM protesters chant, "What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now" and "Pigs in a blanket; fry 'em like bacon."

In August, 2020, United Teachers Los Angeles Secondary Vice President Julie Van Winkle, representing Los Angeles Unified School District teachers, posted, on a teachers' union website, a photo of herself wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words, "Blue Lives Murder." Van Winkle posted a statement, "We need to bring attention to what really matters – fighting for Black lives in our schools and in our communities."

Actions follow these words.

During BLM protests in 2020, police officers have been hit by cars driven at high speed (see here and here), they have had urine and feces hurled at them, and they have been beaten with rods. Senior Officer David Dorn was shot to death during a Facebook livestream. BLM protesters followed a black officer to his girlfriend's house and tried to kill him. Protesters, including white protesters, call black officers "slaves" and the n-word.

At an August, 2020, BLM rally, "peaceful protesters" threw a heavy metal disc, the top of a garbage can, at a police officer, striking him in the neck and knocking him to the ground. Observers cheered. See here.

In 2016, in Dallas, Texas, 16 people, including 14 police, were shot; five died. The killer targeted white police officers. He was inspired by BLM.

On December 20, 2014, Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were seated in a patrol car in Brooklyn, NY. Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley shot both of them in the head, killing them. His act was "revenge" for the August 9, 2014 death of Michael Brown.

BLM had disseminated falsehoods about Brown's death. BLM insisted, and continues to insist, that Brown put his hands up in surrender and said, "Hands up; don't shoot." BLM's "Hands up; don't shoot" creation myth is a lie. In fact Brown was a six foot four inch tall, 292 pound criminal who had just committed a strong-arm robbery of a minority-run business. Brown assaulted and charged at the officer who shot him. If BLM had not told the "Hands up; don't shoot" lie, Rafael Ramos' wife and two sons would still have a husband and father, and Wenjian Liu's wife would still have a husband.

Democrats, you unquestioningly embrace BLM and you tell me that you don't hate cops? How stupid do you think I am?

"THEY SAY WE WANT TO RELEASE ALL PRISONERS: WE DON'T, THAT'S A LIE."

"Abolish prisons" is a new chant on the left. "The prison industrial complex routinely targets and harms Black people, immigrants, disabled people, sex workers, queer and transgender people, and poor people" is the rationale for this movement. "If black lives matter, we must abolish prisons," the narrative goes. Even Teen Vogue is onboard. "We’re not going to just be able to get rid of prisons in one day, overnight. This is going to be a process," announces Patrice Cullors, BLM co-founder. A first step in that process: New York Democrats' elimination of cash bail.

"WE WANT TO WEED OUT RACISM."

Now, this one is really interesting.

My most emphatic BLM-supporting Facebook friends are all economically comfortable white women, and some men, who have never, as far as I have seen, posted a photograph of themselves in the company of a black person. My single most enthusiastic BLM-supporting Facebook friend is a very well-to-do white woman who posts many selfies that emphasize her own attractiveness. Her selfies are always followed by lengthy threads of compliments. Her BLM posts are another form of selfie. She says how much she hates white America and how sad black people's suffering makes her, and lengthy threads of compliments for her compassion follow.

In all of their posts insisting on their support for BLM, I have never seen a single suggestion on how to improve anything. For anyone. At all. The gist of their posts: cops are bad; America is racist; anyone who isn't immediately and enthusiastically and monolithically onboard is "Racist! Racist! Racist!" "I am compassionate and woke and this all makes me so sad I am weeping; The End."

I once lived in the Central African Republic. I loved my students, and like all service workers, I wish I could have done more. Back in 2013, Muslims were committing what some called a "genocide" of black Christians in the CAR. Christians retaliated. I posted links. These posts received just about zero engagement. No likes, no comments, no calls to action, no memes, no donations, no nothing.

In 2017, terrorists attacked a caravan of Egyptian pilgrims. Thirty were murdered; media ran photos of blood-stained sand. Again, I posted on Facebook and the folks who are now all worked up about BLM were indifferent.  In 2011, five Nigerian churches were bombed during Christmas. Dozens of Nigerian Christians were blown to bits. These posts receive virtually no engagement and absolutely zero comments from leftists. BLM supporters insist that they want to fight racism but they are highly selective about which racism they will fight.

Persecution of black Christians in Africa is an epidemic and experts warn it could soon lead to a continent-crippling war. "Open Doors estimates that 245 million out of 631 million African Christians currently experience high levels of persecution, up from 215 million last year." In Nigeria alone, "Tens of thousands [of Christians] have been killed and millions of refugees created." Christians are treated as "second class citizens." Egypt, a country that receives significant American aid, is on "every list" of African nations that persecute Christians. It is also one of many Muslim countries where a specifically Islamic, Arab anti-black racism is pervasive.

One might conclude that my leftist Facebook friends don't care because Africa is too far away. In fact, quite a few of the BLM supporters on my page are not Americans and live overseas, closer to Africa than to the US. Both American and overseas BLM supporters are frequent critics of Israel, a country they do not live in but focus on obsessively. 

When I post about murders in Paterson, NJ, my own American city, for example of Genesis Rincon, a 12-year-old girl who was shot to death by Jhymiere Moore, this black victim and black assailant rouse little interest from my leftist Facebook friends. Jhymiere was a teenager when he shot Genesis and 16-year-old Ragee Clark to death a mile from my home. I wonder how we can bring attention to shooters and victims like Jhymiere, Genesis, and Ragee, who outnumber the George Floyds by magnitudes.

BLM forbids and demonizes discussion of black-on-black crime. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and literally millions of other op-eds, social media posts, and broadcasts insisting that any mention of black-on-black crime is monstrous and utterly beyond the pale. Jhymiere, Genesis, and Ragee's lives don't matter; their lives are erased and discussion of their tragedy is anathematized by ever-vigilant BLM thought police. You can't make revolutionary tinder out of a black girl murdered by a black boy.

If we focused on teen-age murderer Jhymiere and too many others like him, we would rapidly realize that young black males commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime, crimes usually committed against other black people, and that that crime leads to a disproportionate number of contacts with police, some of which end fatally. We need to address a subculture that valorizes oppositional criminality, in everything from fashions, like sagged pants, to hip hop lyrics. We should be reading authors like John McWhorter and John Ogbu who have addressed this culture. BLM would not have us do this. Instead, we are to put cops in the grave, burn the White House down, and solve nothing for future young victims like Genesis Rincon.

In Facebook posts, I cite black conservatives who offer an alternative approach to black advancement. I mention, and encourage liberals to read, Shelby Steele, Jason Riley, Jason D. Hill, John McWhorter, Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, and others, who offer hope, power, self-respect, mastery, authority, success, and a way out of the underclass for their fellow black Americans. None of these black conservative authors believe that black people need whites to "rescue" them. All believe in black self-reliance. BLM supporters on Facebook have never heard of these conservative black leaders. When informed of them, they refuse to read them. And yet they say, "We want to weed out racism." I am dubious.

"THEY SAY WE WANT OPEN BORDERS: WE DON'T, THAT'S A LIE."

In a June, 2019 Democratic presidential candidates' debate, candidates (with one exception – Michael Bennet, who had to drop out early for lack of support) raised their hands to announce support of decriminalizing illegal border crossings. When asked if they would provide free health care to illegal immigrants, all Democratic candidates raised their hands.

The answer to those two questions, ladies and gentlemen, equals open borders.

"WE WANT TO HELP PEOPLE WHO ARE COMING FROM UNIMAGINABLE TERROR AND POVERTY HELP TO GIVE THEM THE CHANCES WE HAVE."

I wonder how much time you have spent in a city like Paterson, Chicago, Detroit, or Camden? We deal with imaginable terror here. There have been two four-alarm fires within feet of my building in the past month. An arsonist set one of the fires. Sometimes local heroin addicts set fires in abandoned textile mills. We live with the terror that at any hour of the day or night we will be homeless, and everything we own will be destroyed. The constant shootings are another source of imaginable terror but you've already demonstrated how good you are at ignoring shootings in the inner city.

Judy Smith, an African American public housing resident, said at the RNC, "I think it's wrong that Democrats put illegal immigrants before black Americans. How is it that we have people on the waiting list for New York City public housing for ten years or more, but we have illegal immigrants living here? Something is wrong with that picture."

Read George J. Borjas on the negative impact that illegal immigration has on low-wage American workers. To you, illegal immigrants are cheap lawn care. To poor and working class Americans, that is to those of us who don't have lawns or who cut our own grass, illegal immigrants are competition with whom American workers cannot compete. Yes, this issue is complicated and neither party has any easy answers, but please don't frame it as your compassion vs. Trump's cruelty, because any such framing is a lie that ignores the issues that need to be addressed, and there is nothing compassionate about fudging the facts to burnish your halo, a halo that, frankly, you have not earned.

"THEY SAY WE WANT TO TAKE AWAY YOUR GUNS: WE DON'T, THAT'S A LIE."

"We have to have a buyback program and I support a mandatory gun buyback program," said Kamala Harris.  

In a Democratic debate, Beto O'Rourke said, "Hell yes, we will take your AR15, your AK47." Joe Biden said to O'Rourke, "You're going to take care of this gun problem with me. You are going to be the one who leads this effort. I'm counting on you. Thank you."

"THEY SAY WE WANT TO WAGE A WAR ON CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTIAN VALUES: WE DON'T, THAT'S A LIE."

Baker Jack Phillips has been demonized and persecuted because he declined a commission to design a cake for a same-sex wedding. He also refuses to design Halloween, bachelor party, and other cakes that go against his beliefs. No one crucified him over his refusal to design Halloween cakes. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission compared Christian Jack Phillips to Nazis carrying out the Holocaust and to slave owners. They ordered him to design same-sex wedding cakes. The government ordered an artist to create art. Even Orwell didn't take it that far in 1984. They also ordered him and his staff, including his 87-year-old mother, to attend sensitivity training sessions to reorient their thinking and feeling to what the state wanted them to think and feel – mind control right out of A Clockwork Orange. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Phillips' persecutor, was, an audit found, a shoddily run organization that ignored thousands of other cases to focus all its energies on destroying Jack Phillips.

Steven Crowder videorecorded Muslim bakers declining commissions to bake for gay weddings. These Muslim bakers were not harassed, taken to court, shut down, or forced to take re-education classes. Just the Christians, like the owners of Memories Pizza, who had to shutter their business forever after they naively told a reporter desperate for a story that they would not cater a gay wedding in their pizza parlor, a highly unlikely scenario in any case.

Barronelle Stutzman is a florist and 75-year-old great-grandmother who happily served gay customers and hired gay employees. Her friend, Robert Ingersoll, stabbed her in the back and took her to court for declining his commission to design flowers for his same-sex wedding. Ingersoll wanted blood, and he got it. Democrat Attorney General Robert Ferguson is doing everything he can to destroy Stutzman emotionally and financially – because she is a Christian.

Astronomer C. Martin Gaskell was denied a university teaching job he was likely to get – because his prospective employers discovered that he is Christian.  Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses, campuses obsessed with "diversity." There are thousands of documented cases of Christian students or professors being harassed by institutions of higher learning. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, both Democrats, expressed a negative assessment of judicial nominees because they were Catholic.

Christophobic "humor" is a staple of today's most prominent comics, including Penn and Teller, Bill Maher and Saturday Night Live. See here, here, and here, and also here and here.

The left is not waging a war on Christianity? If what's happening now is not war, I hate to see what it will be like once you really do get going.

"THEY SAY WE WANT TO GET EVERYTHING FOR FREE: WE DON'T, THAT'S A LIE."

First, let's clarify terms. When the left says "free," intelligent persons hear the words, "tax-payer funded."

Current Democratic party superstar, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, when not demeaning America, demanded free stuff in her DNC speech. The government – that is the taxpayer – is to give people guaranteed health care and higher education. Even as she demands free stuff, Ocasio-Cortez rejects the concept of working for stuff. Ocasio-Cortez actively chased jobs away from her district, based on an idiotic misunderstanding of economics; that's not the Wall Street Journal talking; that's the liberal Washington Post.

Stripper and owner of a "wet-ass pussy," Cardi B, who self-describes as a "whore in the house," interviewed Joe Biden. During the interview, she said she wanted free college and free health care. Bernie Sanders has insisted on free college and free health care. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed that the government provide every citizen with a "universal basic income."

"THEY SAY WE WANT A WAR AGAINST TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE: WE DON'T, THAT'S A LIE."

"We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure." That's from BLM's own statement.

It Takes a Village to Raise a Child, insisted Hillary Clinton in the title of her 1996 book. Too many use that African proverb to justify taxpayers, rather than their own parents, taking on the burden of financially supporting children. Thus Bob Dole insisted that "It takes a family to raise a child." In any case, having lived in Africa, I can tell you that the elders of a village demand obedience from children, and get it. Democrats use this proverb to support taxpayer spending on children, but they reject the reciprocity the proverb demands. They do not support, for example, taxpayers demanding that children live up to traditional morality, clothing, and hairstyles.

Here's another leftist lie: anyone who supports traditional marriage is a homophobe. One can love and support gay people, and still elevate traditional marriage above other forms. Roger Scruton, in an attempt to define conservatism, explained exactly why we support traditional marriage.

“good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created … peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, [for these] we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain [them] … the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull.”

We support traditional marriage because it is good for kids, and what is good for kids is good for society at large, and because it is good for women, and because the alternatives open up a hellish chasm, especially for women.

Children who grow up with both biological parents present in their homes, on average, do much better than children who do not grow up in such households. These kids are less likely to commit crimes, to live in poverty as adults, to commit suicide, to become addicts, and to drop out of school. There are mountains of studies that support these assertions.

Conversely, kids who are raised by step-parents are more likely to be abused or even killed. Cinderella is the most famous folktale in the world. Back in the day, when women often died in childbirth, there were more step-parents, and the folk recognized the pattern. Today, scientists call it the "Cinderella Effect." When abusive parents have both their own, genetic offspring in the home, and step-children, those abusive parents are likely to abuse their step-children, while treating their genetic offspring better.

Your personal life is none of my business, but when I am assaulted on the street, and I discover that my assailant, like so many other criminals, grew up in a one-parent home, and has a different last name than his mother, his father, and his siblings, his home life suddenly becomes my business. When yet another baby is born to an unwed teenage mother, and statistics show that I, the taxpayer, am going to be paying for that child's food, rent, and medical care, likely for the rest of his life, your homelife becomes my business.

New models of marriage have arrived in the US. Mohammed, founder of Islam, married a six-year-old girl. Because he is the "perfect example," age-of-consent laws are taboo in many Muslim countries. Muslim men are permitted to have multiple wives and countless sex slaves. Upon divorce, mothers can lose all contact with their own children. Men can divorce women simply by saying "I divorce you" three times. Women have no such option. Wife-beating is recommended in the Koran. The Islamic concept of marriage was supported in the United States in at least one court case, where a New Jersey Democratic politician and judge, Joseph Charles, decided that a Muslim man had the right to rape, beat, and torture his 17-year-old, arranged-marriage bride because to do so was consistent with his religious beliefs.

Once we start redefining marriage, we embark on a slippery slope, one that hurts women. Biblical teaching, such as "Let him be the husband of one wife," and "Be faithful to your own wife and give your love to her alone," as both the New and Old Testament counsel, have elevated women, as historians note. We trash this millennia-old bedrock of Western Civilization at our peril.

The left has been at war with the traditional family for decades. That war plays out in public policy and on TV shows, where dads are laughable buffoons who require their woke children and wives to educate them. The wreckage of the war on the family is visible in any inner city. Using statistics, Larry Elder makes the case concisely of how Democratic policies, starting with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, blasted to smithereens the black family.

"THEY SAY WE WANT TO DESTROY OR REWRITE HISTORY: WE DON'T, THAT'S A LIE."

My Democratic friends, you support a movement that has devoted time and energy to tearing down and defacing statues of American luminaries. Your comrades spray painted a pig and the f-word on a statue to Tadeusz Kosciuszko. You don't know who Kosciuszko is, so I will educate you. He lived his entire adult life, unlike you, as a real freedom fighter. He was wounded and imprisoned for his liberation activities. He left money in his will to buy freedom for American slaves. Hans Christian Heg was a Norwegian immigrant who gave his life to abolition. He volunteered to fight to free slaves, distinguished himself with his courage, and died in battle. He's a martyr. Your comrades tore down his statue. The Emancipation Memorial was paid for by freed slaves. It is the first American monument to depict black people. It was dedicated by Frederick Douglass. Your comrades want that torn down. Miguel de Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote, is credited with inventing the modern novel. He was himself enslaved by Muslims. Your comrades defaced his statue. Black men fought with the union to defeat slavery. Your comrades defaced their statue.

Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi echoed the mob. "I don't care about statues," she said. This is a stunningly ignorant statement. Desecration, destruction, and commandeering of cultural sites is an essential feature of cultural genocide. When Nazi Germany was losing a war on three fronts, Hitler ordered his troops to waste, in military terms, precious time fire-bombing Polish museums and churches. He prioritized wiping out Polish culture over winning military victories. Kristallnacht – torching synagogues – was an act of cultural genocide. Advancing Muslims claiming the Temple Mount for their Dome of the Rock mosque, across from the church of the Holy Sepulcher, was an act of cultural genocide. China has destroyed countless sites sacred to Tibetan Buddhists, in their goal to erase Tibet and turn it into Chinese territory. The centuries-old struggle over the site of a Hindu temple, and then a mosque, in Ayodhya, India, has world-security implications.

Martin Niemoller famously said, "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I am not a socialist." Socialists, in Nazi Germany, were low-hanging fruit. Socialists were killing people over in Russia. Everybody was afraid of socialists. It would have been unseemly, crazy, to defend socialists. When the Nazis rounded socialists up, nice people looked the other way.

Low-hanging fruit today are Confederate statues. Northerners feel no sympathy for Confederate generals. Let their statues go. But beginning with Confederate statues was merely a softening-up tactic. The ultimate target is Western Civilization. "Peaceful protesters" in Oakland, California in August, 2020, marched through the streets, setting fire, smashing cars, and chanting "Death to America." "We will burn this system down and replace it," said Hawk Newsome.

"THEY SAY WE WANT TO TAKE AWAY YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS: WE DON'T, THAT'S A LIE."

Have you heard of Nick Sandmann? He was literally convicted of a "face crime." Your fellow leftists decided that his facial expression in a brief video proved that he was a white supremacist. Your fellow leftists lynched this teenage high school boy online because he was Catholic, he was wearing a MAGA hat, he was male, white, from the South, and he had attended the March for Life. He received so many credible death threats that they had to close down his school. Your comrades on the left wanted to murder a boy because they didn't approve of his facial expression.

Dr. David Wood is a Christian apologist. YouTube's "Trust and Safety Team" once banned one of Wood's videos that presented statistics on the persecution of Christians. They banned the video, that consisting only of statistics, for "hate speech."

In 2013, on Facebook, I posted, without comment, this lovely photo of British soldier Lee Rigby, wearing a red British military uniform and holding his toddler son in his arms. A leftist objected to my posting a photograph of a man who had recently been decapitated in a London street by jihadis, and reported the post. I was put in Facebook jail for a week – for posting a poignant photo of a father and son.

Peter Vlaming, a beloved high school teacher, lost his job because he, once, accidentally, referred to a female student who prefers male pronouns as "she." John Kluge, another high school teacher, was also fired over pronouns.

Leftist politicians support hate speech laws that would criminalize thought crimes like those listed above. Richard Stengel, the State Department's undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the Obama administration, editorialized in the Washington Post that America's first amendment is an "outlier" and that the Koran should be protected from "desecration" by American law. "America Needs a Hate Speech Law," he insisted.

UC Berkeley's prominent and politically active leftist theorist George Lakoff agrees. "Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech," he wrote, using a leftist slogan. "Hate speech" "imposes" "on the freedom of others" he argues. Goodbye first amendment.

"WE CHOOSE TO BELIEVE SCIENCE"

Really? Then why do you fire teachers who refer to biological females as "she"? Why do you insist that there is no difference between the genders, and then insist that gender is all-important – when and how you want it to be all-important? Why did leftists drive Larry Summers out of his job at Harvard merely for asking if there is an anatomical basis for the differential between male and female success in mathematics and the hard sciences? Why do you force biological females, including high school students, to compete in sports against biological males? For these girls, high schools sports may be their best chance at college – where they might study science! Their chance at a scholarship depends on whether or not they are in the top three athletes at their high school in a given sport. Your leftist, anti-science policies have, at some high schools, ceded those spots to biological males.

Why do you mandate an entire lexicon of euphemisms around abortion? Abortion must be referred to as "women's health care," though most abortions have nothing to do with a woman's health, but rather her convenience. Why do leftists continue to refer to a fetus as "a clump of cells"? There is nothing more "scientific" than the anatomy and physiology of fetal development. And yet it's taboo.

Why do leftists insist that America is "systemically racist" but reject the peer-reviewed research that shows that there is no epidemic of white officers shooting unarmed black males? See here, here, here, and here. Why did The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences repudiate a previously published study just because Heather Macdonald cited it?

Why did 550 scholars sign a letter condemning Steven Pinker, Harvard's Johnstone Professor of Psychology and a bestselling author, after he tweeted, "Data: Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately. Problem: Not race, but too many police shootings"? Either the data are wrong, or they are correct, but data are not racist. If 550 scholars disagreed with Pinker's data, wouldn't the best approach be to present alternative data, rather than to submit a beloved senior scholar to a public Maoist struggle session, where lesser mortals rush to enhance their own profile by bringing down a lion?

If leftists are so pro-science, why did you persecute Lisa Littman for publishing an article demonstrating that rapid-onset gender dysphoria could be a social contagion? Littman discovered pockets of white girls suddenly deciding that they were males trapped in female bodies. She theorized that they had taken their cue from peer pressure via social media. Littman and her publisher were pilloried as "haters" and "transphobic." Can science really be "transphobic"?

"THEY SAY WE HATE AMERICA: WE DON'T, THAT'S A LIE."

You support BLM, a movement begun by "trained Marxists" and lead by people who say they want to "burn the system down" and "replace it." You adore Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who, during her DNC comments, never said a single positive thing about America, but did say that America is a land of "racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia, violence and xenophobia … brutality … explosive inequalities of wealth … crises of mass evictions, unemployment, and lack of health care."

"STOP WITH THE US VS. THEM. "

Democrats don't divide the world into "us" and "them"? Tell me then, why you condemn right-wingers for not wearing face masks or gathering in large groups during a pandemic, but you praise "peaceful protesters" who forgo face masks and gather in large groups?

Democrats don't do "us" and "them"? Do you ever read your own posts about Trump supporters? About poor whites from the South?

Your comrades in BLM have been marching around DC demanding that diners raise a black power fist in salute. Those who decline are screamed at and menaced at length. That's "us and them" at terrorist volume.

Your new darling, Robin Diangelo, insists that all white people are racist and that any white person who says he is not racist is just proving how racist he is.

You are the ones inventing terms like "white privilege," "white fragility," "white comfort," "white silence" and "white complicity" to silence, smear, dehumanize and denigrate anyone with white skin. You are the ones drawing the lines and you are the racists.

If the left is not about "us vs. them," then why did the left cancel Adolph Reed, a black professor, called by Cornel West the "greatest democratic theorist of his generation"? Reed believes that whites and blacks should unite and work shoulder-to-shoulder to improve all their lives. Reed is grateful to white soldiers who died in the Civil War to end slavery. Reed's cancelers say that his call for "class solidarity" between whites and blacks "is preposterous." Rather than giving him a hearing, leftists erased him. That's Soviet-level us vs. them.

Prove me wrong about "us and them." "Friend" a hundred – or a dozen – Trump supporters. "Like" their patriotic post on the Fourth of July. Send "best wishes" when their kid joins the armed forces. Pray with them when a family member is ill. Do not "lib-splain" to them about how wrong they are when they say something you disagree with. When I see you do that, I'll believe that you don't engage in "us vs. them."

THE BIGGEST LIE OF ALL

The biggest lie is unspoken in the above meme. That lie is that the Democratic Party of today is still the party of the working man and of the poor, that it is a party that judges not on the color of one's skin, but on the content of one's character. Lunch Bucket Joe Biden is from Scranton, near where my immigrant grandfathers and father mined coal. From the DNC, I hoped for a message of unity. Instead, after examining the Democratic platform, which mentions racism repeatedly, one journalist declared, "Under President Biden, it will be about white privilege all day, every day."

Democrats insisted that Kamala Harris' lack of support during her presidential run was evidence of "white privilege." Voters didn't like Harris because she is – suddenly – black.

In fact, though, Kamala Harris' mother, a PhD biologist, was a Brahmin, a beneficiary of caste, perhaps the oldest, largest, and most oppressive discriminatory system on earth. One hundred million Untouchables occupy the lowest rungs of Hindu society. They perform deadly tasks like cleaning sewers by hand. They confront obscene persecution. The caste system was established by the Hindu myth of Purusha, a primal being from whose body humans were created. Brahmins, the highest caste, Harris' caste, were made from Purusha's mouth. Untouchables did not descend from Purusha at all. They are complete outsiders.

In 2015, in Ganeshpura, India, an Untouchable girl's shadow fell across the body of a higher caste man. High caste women beat the girl badly and threatened to kill her. This is in accord with tradition. An Untouchable's shadow may not fall across a Brahmin's body. In another 2015 incident, high caste men in Krishnagiri urinated in an Untouchable boy's mouth. Such cases occur regularly.

Harris cannot be blamed for her ancestry, over which she has no control. (Of course whites are denied that courtesy, and are all guilty for slavery.) Harris is, though, a person who has occupied one powerful position after another, including US Senator. Harris is a multimillionaire, the daughter of a professor at Stanford, the sixth-ranked university in the US, and she lives in an almost all-white Los Angeles neighborhood.

To get votes, during the Democratic presidential debates, Harris played the part of the Little Match Girl – the poor folklore heroine, dying in the cold, gazing in the window at a life of comfort and ease forever denied her. In her "That little girl was me" speech, Harris depicted herself as a helpless victim in an America that tried to keep her down, when in fact her biography records unceasing upward ascent. She later marketed "That little girl was me" t-shirts at $30 each.

The phrase "white privilege" was popularized by wealthy New Jersey heiress Peggy McIntosh. McIntosh, a woman who has no history of "working directly to better anyone’s condition but her own," did not describe, in her "white privilege" article, what it is to be white. She described what it is to be rich.

Training Americans that all whites are privileged has earned people like Robin Diangelo millions of dollars. What happens to the students of "white privilege" lectures? Peer-reviewed research provides an answer. Lessons in "white privilege" teach rich, liberal whites to despise poor whites. Lessons in "white privilege" decrease liberals' sympathy for poor white people, as opposed to black people. Lessons in "white privilege" also cause liberals to feel a greater urge to punish and blame poor whites. These results were reported by researchers in 2019 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

No one at the DNC, as far as I know, ever mentioned one of the demographic catastrophes of recent years, a catastrophe affecting poor whites. For the past twenty years, what we think of as "normal" demographics have reversed themselves. Americans, recipients of medical and hygiene advances, are supposed to live longer and longer. Poor and working class whites, though, since 2000, have reversed that trend. We are dying younger and younger. Our deaths are called "deaths of despair." Some are suicides. Some are from drug and alcohol addiction. This pattern is "seen almost nowhere else on earth."

I did a search of "racism" on the Democratic Party's homepage. I found 133 results, and a result for "white privilege." I found no results for "deaths of despair."

I am not a Republican, but I watched the Republican Convention. I was surprised by my own reaction. I saw speaker after speaker present hope – even under the most grueling circumstances, for example, knowing that one's child was being raped and tortured in a foreign land, beyond the reach of a parents' loving rescue. I saw exemplary dignity and love of country and service in Ann Dorn, widow of Officer David Dorn. I saw powerful patriotism in Madison Cawthorn, a paralyzed man who stood for the flag, a man who insisted on not wallowing in his paralysis, but on being the full man he can be in spite of this setback. I was reduced to tears by Jon Ponder, a former bank robber, who turned his life around with the help of Jesus and a good white cop – Ponder is black. Though Maximo Alvarez is Cuban-born and speaks with a Spanish accent, I felt completely at one with him as he warned against the dangers of Marxism. My family suffered under this system, too. The formidable Sister Dede Byrne, with her understated excellence, reassured me that there are unseen heroes in this country who, in spite of everything, will provide a light in the darkness.

Every last one of these people was someone I'd want next to me in a foxhole. I don't want droopy Billie Eilish next to me in a foxhole, and, admit it, no matter what your politics, neither do you.

"Deaths of despair," researchers theorize, are caused, at least in part, by a anomie and a sense of meaninglessness. Democrats' constant belittling of America and Americans can only increase that anomie. As a teacher, I know that the leftist narrative poisons the minds of young people. I wish I could feel good about being an American, feel pride in America, one of my students said to me. But my teachers keep telling me how bad America is. That student was an immigrant Muslim. She wanted to love her country and wear her American identity with pride. Leftists robbed her of that right.

Democrats, look in the mirror. If not today, do it on November 4.

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

You can read this essay at FrontPageMag here