Last week, virtually every serious 2020 Democratic presidential candidate spent an unserious period of time embarrassingly kissing the ring of race-baiter extraordinaire Al Sharpton at his National Action Network conference.
Sharpton’s burning question for each of them? Would they support H.R. 40, a bill originally introduced in 1989, probably as a joke, by former Democratic Michigan Rep. John Conyers, but reintroduced in today’s beyond-absurd political climate by Democratic Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. If passed, and I’m not kidding, it would create a “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans to examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.”
That’s right. Sharpton was asking if 2020 presidential candidates - 2020 mind you - support paying black slave descendants reparations for an institution that ended in 1865.
If you don’t already know, do you really need to wonder how the candidates answered this guy’s ridiculous question? Of COURSE each and every one of them responded with a “hell yah,” because it’s 2019 y’all, and because to a person everyone running for president under the Democratic Party banner are either shameless liars, intellectually dishonest, or hopelessly stupid.
So Dems, how exactly would this work, you know, in real life and outside your pea-sized brains, you feckless morons? Was that mean? I’m sorry, I meant to say, “you handi-capable morons.” Is that better? But I digress. Let’s get back to figuring out how on earth this reparations thing would work.
First of all, geniuses, where is the money going to come from? We know good and well it won’t be voluntary, so do we tax everyone, or just white people? What if the white person descended from Italians who, like my grandfather, emigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s? Do we tax ALL white people or just rich ones? What if the white person descended from Northern soldiers? What if the person being taxed is only half-white, or maybe, just for fun, three-fifths white? Finally, on the topic of where the money is going to come from, might it be possible that, should we finally settle on who is to be taxed, said parties might not be amenable to having their money stolen to cement the Democratic Party power base or, at best, assuage the consciences of guilt-ridden liberals?
Secondly, who gets the money? All black people, just poor ones, or just poor ones descended from slaves? Does Michael Jordan get the same as a Blood member just released from prison? And if poor is a criteria, how does one determine if someone is poor because of “systemic racism,” one’s capabilities, or just simply bad choices in life? To what percentage does one have to be of both a black and/or slave descendant in order to qualify for all this free money? Or are we creating a scenario where, as Fox News host Laura Ingraham aptly put it during her Friday conversation with former ACLU Executive Committee member Michael Meyers: “The guy that came here from Serbia six months ago is going to have to write a check for a Somali refugee that came here 20 years ago?”
Speaking of Meyers, the guy tore into the “buffoonery” and “sheer racial rhetoric” surrounding Al Sharpton, the Democratic candidates, and today’s slavery reparations movement in a blistering segment for the ages:
“At that house of so-called justice, you have either a horror picture show showing or you have a farce,” Meyers told Ingraham, speaking of Sharpton. “Either way it is not to be taken seriously. I can’t understand how serious presidential contenders can give legitimacy to a racial blowhard and I think it is outrageous and silly on the part of the presidential candidates. Anybody who thinks that white Americans are going to take the blame or going to feel guilty or give their land and their property away in some sort of reparations pot because they feel responsibility for the sins of their forebears. They are not.”
The former ACLU executive also had some insight on where the money is NOT coming from:
“Nobody is giving up their house,” he said. “Nobody is giving up their land. Nobody is giving away acres. The 40 acres are gone. Not even a building is going into the reparations pot. So what are they talking about? These people they are chasing thoughts.”
The ever-present quest to achieve equality of results, as opposed to simple equality of opportunity and under the law, lies at the root of the liberal approach to this and so many other matters. In this case the thought is, since so-called “economic inequality” exists, simply shift some of the economic wealth over the “disadvantaged” and all will be well. It’s a racially biased form of the unworkable and thoroughly discredited “welfare state,” except worse because for every individual you temporarily make “wealthy” you run the risk of making many more resentful.
Libs, do you want to create racial animosity where none existed before? Try telling the white son of a West Virginia coal miner working his way through community college as a bartender, or the white single-mom daughter of an Iowa farmer, or a down-on-their luck white couple who just got turned down for a home loan that their taxes are going up so the black son of a professional athlete can get richer because his ancestors a dozen generations back may have been slaves, or something.
I don’t think anything remotely like this could ever conceivably happen in the foreseeable future, for any number of the above reasons and a thousand more, but the real kicker would come if it ever did happen and - gasp - it made no long-term difference whatsoever. Because despite the insistence of Joe Biden and virtually every excuse-making liberal out there, “systemic racism” is a myth, like the equal pay gap, the Loch Ness monster, and Bigfoot. But that’s another column ...
Yes, there are certainly issues and problems facing America’s black communities, but they’ll only begin to get solved if enough people start listening less to the likes of Al Sharpton and more to thinkers like Walter Williams.