Shhh … hear that? It’s silence at CNN. Deafening silence.
With all the noise about race – CRT, antiracism, blah, blah, blah – there was none of the usual jubilation over the history-making of the first black female lieutenant governor-elect of Virginia, Winsome Sears. No TV profile with movie music weaving through the sentimental story-telling. No specials with Tom Hanks voiceovers. Nothing.
Wait! I hear something. It’s Van Jones. Yep, here we go … he’s about to comment on the Youngkin-Sears win.
“The stakes are high. When this election is over in Virginia, we will know … have we seen the emergence of the Delta variant of Trumpism? The Delta variant of Trumpism,” Jones repeats as if he’s taken aback that the panel wasn’t mesmerized by his $100 million political metaphor. “In other words, Youngkin, same disease, but spreads a lot faster and can get a lot more places.”
OK, we get it Anthony Kapel “Van” Jones (his real name). I’ll call him Anthony Jones. Better yet, Tony. We get it, Tony. You’re the black face of white guilt blowing a dog whistle, right? We heard it loud and clear: Youngkin is a disease.
But what about Sears, the first black female lieutenant governor of Virginia? The first in America. You know … ever. Are we taking note of the “first black” anything, or what?
Hmm, a tweet. Tony, again. An unapologetic clarification apology. Looks like someone reminded him about the Courage and Civility Award centibillionaire Jeff Bezos gave him after that Blue Origin spaceflight in July.
“We need unifiers and not vilifiers,” said Bezos. “We need people who argue hard and act hard for what they believe. But they do that always with civility and never ad hominem attacks.”
Tony’s tweet:
“My point is that playing on racial fears by demagoguing CRT furthers dangerous aspects of Trumpism,” just in friendlier form,” Jones tweeted the day after the Virginia election. “Did not mean to imply that human beings are diseases.”
OK.
Flip the channel. Let’s see. MSNBC online. Still looking for the media’s usual exuberance over the “first black” female to be a breath away from being Virginia’s governor. Looking for something to read that’s joyful. Ah! Here we go – Joy Reid.
Reid interviewed Dr. Eric Dyson, the guy who reminds me of Oswald Bates, Damon Wayans’ big-words prisoner character on “In Living Color” years ago. You know Oswald Bates, right? The one who famously said: “First of all, we must internalize the ‘flatulation’ of the matter by transmitting the effervescence of the ‘Indianishian’ proximity in order to further segregate the crux of my venereal infection.”
Dyson is Oswald Bates with a doctorate degree. In his own mind, Dyson is a Martin Luther King figure saving his people from oppressive American pharaohs. Key: “In his own mind.” Here’s what he said to Joy Reid about Winsome’s win.
“The problem is, here, they want white supremacy by ventriloquist effect,” said Dyson, who sucked up more air from the room than a vacuum cleaner. “There is a black mouth moving but a white idea running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices.”
He wasn’t done.
“We know that we can internalize, in our own minds, in our own subconscious, in our own bodies, the very principles that are undoing us,” he said. “So to have a black face speaking on behalf of a white supremacist legacy is nothing new. … This is the Pre-K of race.”
Shockingly, Joy’s not celebrating Sears, either.
“What Republicans are now doing is they basically demand credit any time any of them ever voted for anybody black or if there’s a black guy on the Supreme Court that’s conservative,” Reid said on Thursday. “Any black conservative is supposedly – or the black president having ever been elected, right, the fact that he was elected period means there’s no racism. And even if they’re literally trying to ban books about black people and saying you cannot talk about the black experience, we’re going to cut that out of schools because white people don’t like it, they still want credit.”
Ex-ESPN anchor Jemele Hill tweeted on Wednesday: “It’s not the messaging, folks. This country simply loves white supremacy.”
Sigh.
“I am destroying all of the narratives about race,” Sears told Fox News host Martha MacCallum after Reid described the Virginia win as dangerous. “Look at me! Look at me! I wish Joy Reid would invite me on her show. Let's see if she is woman enough to do that.”
Sears is 100 percent correct on destroying the narratives. But going on Reid’s show? Please. Don’t. It’s a complete waste of time. It dignifies their ad hominem attacks with an answer.
The Joneses, the Joys, and the Jemeles of the world are only blind to color when the history-making black person is a conservative. Larry Elder, who the L.A. Times egregiously headlined as the “Black Face of White Supremacy,” would’ve been the first governor of one of the country’s largest states. An irate white woman in a gorilla mask threw insults and eggs at him. His entourage was shot at. The propaganda media saw no evil, it heard no evil, and it spoke of no evil. But they all screamed in silent unison: “And therefore, what?”
All this noise about race has NOTHING to do with race. It’s pure ruthless ideology. What’s at the root of it all is a deep disagreement on the role of government in society. One side believes in central planning, as economist Friedrich Hayek might say – that a small group of experts must direct the economy to bring about “social justice.” And the other side believes that the freedom that flourishes is found in competition (decentralized planning), and individual responsibility.
It doesn’t matter what name you call it – socialism, communism, fascism, progressivism – all central planning leads inevitably to tyranny, whether the do-good planners intend to or not. All the noise-makers complaining incessantly about white supremacy fall snuggly into that group.
“If you don’t agree with us,” they say to black conservatives, “then you ain’t black. You don’t matter. You don’t count. No matter what your background is, you are invisible.”
These are crazy, unserious people.
So, Winsome Sears, we see you! And we see you exactly for who you are. And we know exactly who they are: useful idiots for political wolves who are addicted to racial dog whistles. Skip Joy Reid’s show. And all the rest. You have bigger fish to fry.