Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart revealed in his latest book that he quit the newspaper’s editorial board over a disagreement regarding former President Joe Biden’s rhetoric in the debate over election integrity laws.
You may recall when Biden and Democrats castigated red states for passing laws aimed at protecting the integrity of U.S. elections. One of their favorite terms to use against Republicans was “Jim Crow 2.0.” It was part of the false narrative that these laws would somehow prevent Black voters from casting their votes.
One of Capehart’s colleagues wrote a piece in 2022 criticizing Biden for using the term “Jim Crow 2.0,” arguing that it was “hyperbolic.” In his book, Capehart notes that this, along with a disagreement with Karen Tumulty, the paper’s Opinions editor, who happens to be White, drove him to step down from his position on the board, according to The Daily Beast. Tumulty felt the term was disrespectful to those who actually lived through the Jim Crow era in the South.
Capehart took issue with this assessment, saying that she “took an incident where I felt ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity.”
You read that right. The columnist actually claimed that Tumulty’s opinion on Jim Crow 2.0 somehow made him less human.
But it gets even more absurd.
“She either couldn’t or wouldn’t see that I was Black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit different from hers, was equally valid.”
The situation became so tense that after the piece criticizing Biden was published, top editor David Shipley was asked to meet with the Supreme Master of race hustling, Rev. Al Sharpton, to discuss the matter.
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In a statement provided to Semafor, Tumulty said she had “a very different recognition of the events and conversations that are described in this book” but indicated she would not comment any further on the incident.
I had a brief flirtation with the Democratic Party in my youth. Folks like Capehart were one of several reasons why this period in my political life did not last long.
While I never denied that there are racial issues in America, their constant whining and prattling on about how everything is racist was a gigantic turnoff. But even back then, a Black man would never put pen to paper to claim that a disagreement with a White colleague was tantamount to stripping him of his humanity.
Why does the left-wing intelligentsia only elevate soft, weak-minded Black faces to represent their ideology? If he had said this foolishness in a Black barbershop full of regular everyday Black men, he’d have been laughed out of the room — even among those who might agree with his viewpoint on the “Jim Crow 2.0” narrative.
The Washington Post’s editorial board was right, of course.
At the time, I made the same criticism against Biden and other left-wing racists who are all too eager to minimize the experiences of Black Americans to promote their vile racial narratives. The “Jim Crow 2.0” trope was not just hyperbolic; it was a direct insult to everyone who suffered through the real Jim Crow era. It was nothing more than a cheapening of this dark period in American history.
The same is true of leftists claiming that those who disagree with their views while wearing a red hat are akin to Nazis. These people are more than willing to diminish the severity of the Holocaust by exploiting it to score cheap political points against the right.
It is this brazen disregard for Black American history that partially fuels my contempt for progressives of all ethnicities who would dare to take advantage of what my ancestors went through. One can disagree with voting laws without resorting to this cynical weaponization of history. But they would rather bastardize history to achieve their ends.
What is amazing about this is that it clearly did not work. The only people who bought into that narrative were those who already wanted to believe it. This demonstrates that they are not just wicked, but also not very bright.
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