Since the days of LBJ, Democrat schemes have eroded the keystone of our nation’s social structure: the American family. For decades, big government has incentivized single-parenthood. Thanks to financial assistance, mainly to unwed mothers, rearing children in fatherless homes is considered honorable in contemporary society. This deterioration of traditional values has caused lasting damage: Over 40 percent of American marriages will end in divorce, and only 69 percent of children live in two-parent homes. American families systematically have been crippled for more than half of a century, due to short-sighted legislation, and a confounding dismissal of basic moral principles.
This disregard extends far beyond public policy, however. Top Democrats recently have abandoned familial decency in pursuit of memorable rhetoric and burnished public images. The latest instance of this perverse behavior involves Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA). She recently appeared on Power 105.1’s “The Breakfast Club,” which proved quite the damning experience.
While the senator’s pandering wasn’t as blatant or egregious as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 claim to black voters that she carried hot sauce in her purse, Harris crossed another line. When the show’s host, “Charlamagne tha God,” asked her if she ever smoked marijuana, Harris boasted, “Half of my family is Jamaican. Are you kidding me?” While this statement initially was overlooked amid that day’s plethora of other controversies, it now has garnered the stark disapproval of the senator’s own father, Professor Donald J. Harris.
The Jamaican-born Stanford academic had harsh words for his daughter: “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.” This paternal spanking intensified, with this learned man proclaiming that his ancestors “must be turning in their graves.”
Visualize the next Harris family reunion!
Alas, this is far from a standalone instance. Remember Barack Obama’s backhanded comments regarding his own grandmother? During his 2008 presidential campaign, then-Senator Obama (D – Illinois) branded her a “typical white person.” He explained that she feared unfamiliar people in the street based on reactions that are “bred” and that “don’t go away.” This subtle condescension demonstrated one thing: Barack Obama was so intent on advancing identity politics that he saw fit to besmirch an 86 year old woman — and no less than his mother’s mother — as a racist.
What a stellar display of “When they go low, we go high.”
Nevertheless, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) managed to exceed the former president’s lack of class. In a 2012 interview with NECN’s Jim Braude, she recounted the difficulty her parents faced as they attempted to marry. Throwing her deceased kin under the (presumably eco-friendly) bus, Warren insinuated that her paternal grandparents loathed “interracial” marriage, which forced her parents to elope. “My father’s parents said, ‘Absolutely not. You can’t marry her because she’s part Cherokee and she’s part Delaware.’ And, um, after fighting it as long as they could, my parents went off. They eloped.” Imagine growing up with such irredeemably bigoted grandparents!
Justice swiftly ensued. Two months after the interview, a Cherokee genealogist named Twila Barnes issued a detailed report exposing Warren’s tale as a fabrication. Barnes and her team “took the liberty of researching her parents, their marriage, the minister, and the Herring family (her paternal grandparents)” in their hunt for the truth. Their conclusion? “Ms. Warren’s story does not make sense.” Pair this finding with the senator’s laughable DNA test results last October, and it becomes evident that Warren engaged in a cold political maneuver, tarnishing her own family’s reputation in exchange for electoral gain.
Harris, Obama, and Warren prove that, at least among Democrats, ruthlessness is acceptable in pursuit of a grander message. Sadly, this trend will persist so long as identity politics maintains its stranglehold on the American Left. Nobody is exempt from these cold methods, not even family. Next of kin have become collateral damage in a never-ending ideological war.
Parents should heed this warning: If your child exhibits a “woke” disposition and political ambitions, you could be in danger. Beware of the bus!
Michael Malarkey covers current events from just outside Philadelphia. He serves as an intern for National Review Online contributing editor and Fox News contributor Deroy Murdock and will attend Bucknell University next fall.