The following essay from Politico is a leftist’s attempt
to convince us that the reaction we’ve seen to recent events in Ferguson and
New York is a noble “civil rights movement.”
It makes for a good lesson on how leftist’s lie and spin. The comments in red italics are mine. ~CW
The shattering events of 2014, beginning with
Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, in August, did more than touch off
a national debate about police behavior, criminal justice and widening
inequality in America.
There’s the first lie.
There’s been nothing resembling “debate.” Debate implies honest people calmly engaging
in a sincere examination of both sides of an argument. Instead what we’ve seen is the opposite of
debate. Race hustlers with a one-sided
agenda swarmed in and people have rushed to judgment before hearing the
facts. That’s not something to be proud
of, it’s shameful, and it’s a giant step backward for this nation. The second lie is the assertion of “widening
inequality” in America. There’s no basis
for such a statement whatsoever.
They also gave a new birth of passion and energy to
a civil rights movement that had almost faded into history, and which had been
in the throes of a slow comeback since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
There’s a good reason the civil rights movement had almost faded
into history, Mr. Demby. The original
civil rights movement wasn’t about insulating blacks from the consequences of
their actions, as this new “movement” is.
It was about achieving equality under the law, and that’s been
done. Your problem and the problem in
the black community is that equal treatment of minorities doesn’t guarantee
equal behavior by minorities. They
commit crimes at a far higher rate than non-minorities, and thus attract
greater attention from the police.
That the nation became riveted to the meta-story of
Ferguson—and later the videotaped killing of Eric Garner in New York—was due in
large part to the work of a loose but increasingly coordinated network of
millennial activists who had been beating the drum for the past few years. In
2014, the new social justice movement became a force that the political
mainstream had to reckon with.
For those who may not know it, “social justice” is leftist-speak
for legalized theft and special protection from consequences and
responsibility.
This re-energized millennial movement, which will
make itself felt all the more in 2015, differs from its half-century-old civil
rights-era forebear in a number of important ways. One, it is driven far more
by social media and hashtags than marches and open-air rallies. Indeed, if you
wanted a megaphone for a movement spearheaded by young people of color, you’d
be hard-pressed to find a better one than Twitter, whose users skew younger and
browner than the general public, which often has the effect of magnifying that
group’s broad priorities and fascinations. It’s not a coincidence that the Twitterverse
helped surface and magnify the stories of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner and
Michael Brown.
In other words, we’d better watch out because the mischievous and
misinformed can spread their lies faster and farther than ever before.
Two, the new social-justice grass roots reflects a
broader agenda that includes LGBTQ
(lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-questioning) issues and immigration reform.
Translation: Gays want their share of the loot too.
The young grass-roots activists I’ve spoken to have
a broad suite of concerns: the school-to-prison pipeline, educational
inequality, the over-policing of black and Latino communities.
You have to marvel at Mr. Demby’s skill at cramming so much
dishonesty into one sentence. The
“school-to-prison pipeline” is a consequence of 50 years of liberal social
engineering that’s just done wonderful things for the black community. Now the Left’s brilliant solution to fixing
the mess is to relax the laws and police enforcement in those communities. In five years they’ll be back to tell us that
blacks and Latinos are being neglected by law enforcement, their communities
have turned into jungles and it’s all our fault. Wait for it.
In essence, they’re trying to take on deeply
entrenched discrimination that is fueled less by showy bigotry than systemic,
implicit biases.
Wrong again, Mr. Demby. They
aren’t taking on any such thing, nor is that their goal because bigotry and
bias can’t be cured by marching and threatening. It can only be cured by demonstrating that
these attitudes are based on false impressions.
The truth is that these “activists”
are fighting for freedom from all accountability, and they are getting help from
the usual suspects, their ever-dependable enablers on the Left.
Three, the movement’s renewal has exposed a serious
generational rift. It is largely a bottom-up movement being led by young
unknowns who have rejected, in some cases angrily, the presumption of
leadership thrust on them by veteran celebrities like Al Sharpton. While both
the younger and older activists both trace their lineage to the civil rights
movement, they seem to align themselves with different parts of that family tree.
And in several ways, these contemporary tensions are updates of the
disagreements that marked the earlier movement.
That’s right, Mr. Demby.
Al Sharpton is not militant or radical enough for these “young unknowns.” That should alarm you but you’re a clueless
leftist, so….
Sarah Jackson, a professor at Northeastern
University whose research focuses on social movements, said the civil rights
establishment embraces the “Martin Luther King-Al Sharpton model”—which
emphasizes mobilizing people for rallies and speeches and tends to be centered
around a charismatic male leader. But the younger activists are instead
inclined to what Jackson called the “Fannie Lou Hamer-Ella Baker model”—an
approach that embraces a grass roots and in which agency is widely diffused.
Indeed, many of the activists name-checked Baker, a lesser-known but enormously
influential strategist of the civil rights era. She helped found Martin Luther
King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference but became deeply skeptical of
the cult of personality that she felt had formed around him. And she vocally
disagreed with the notion that power in the movement should be concentrated
among a few leaders, who tended to be men with bases of power that lay in the
church. “My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders,” she said.
“My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders,” said
Baker as they look to her for leadership.
Baker’s theories on participatory democracy were
adopted by later social movements, like Occupy Wall Street, which notably resisted
naming leaders or spokespeople. But James Hayes, an organizer with the Ohio
Student Association, said that he didn’t think of this new social justice
movement as “leaderless” in the Occupy style. “I think of it as leader-ful,” he
said.
“Participatory democracy” is another leftist term to facilitate
the legalization of wealth transfer, because theft by another name apparently
helps ease the conscience of the thieves.
By December, some of these same uncelebrated
community organizers who spent the year leading “die-ins,” voting drives and
the thousands-deep rallies around the country would meet privately with
President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. (“We got a chance to really lay it
out—we kept it real,” Hayes told me about the meeting. “We were respectful, but
we didn’t pull any punches.”) A few days after that White House meeting,
Hillary Clinton, widely assumed to be eyeing another bid for the presidency in
2016, nodded to them when she dropped one of the mantras of the
demonstrators—“black lives matter”—into a speech at a posh awards ceremony in
New York City.
“We were respectful, but we didn’t pull any punches.” Yeah, they want their money and they want it
now, or there’s going to be trouble.
Good thing these “community organizers” have a useful idiot like Hillary
Clinton on their side!
All this new energy comes, ironically, as the
country’s appetite for fighting racial inequality—never all that robust in the
best of times—appears to be ebbing. The tent-pole policy victories of the civil
rights movement are even now in retrenchment: 60 years after Brown v. Board of
Education, American schools—especially in the South—are rapidly resegregating;
the Voting Rights Act, which turns 50 in 2015, has been effectively gutted;
and, despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act, our neighborhoods are as
segregated as ever. Once-narrowing racial gaps in life outcomes have again
become gaping chasms.
Yeah, isn’t it “ironic” that our appetite for fighting racial
inequality ebbed after the laws were changed to guarantee equal treatment under
the law (and in some cases to even provide preferential treatment)? What an amazing coincidence!
But what isn’t a coincidence is that the “retrenchment” has come
after 50 years of liberal policy that has progressively (no pun intended)
turned much of the black community into government-dependent spoiled brats, Mr.
Demby. That’s no surprise at all.
At the same time, the new movement’s emergence has
caused friction with the traditional civil rights establishment that identifies
with those earlier, historic victories. At a recent march put together by
Sharpton’s National Action Network in Washington, D.C.—meant to protest the
recent decisions not to indict the officers in several high-profile
police-involved killings and push for changes in the protocol from
prosecutors—younger activists from St. Louis County were upset at what they saw
as a lineup of older speakers on the podium who were not on the ground marching
in Ferguson. So they climbed onto the stage and took the mic. “It should be
nothing but young people up here!” a woman named Johnetta Elzie yelled into the
microphone. “We started this!” Some people cheered them. Others called for them
to get off the stage. After a few minutes, the organizers cut off their mics.
(In the crowd, someone held up a neon-green sign making their discontent with
the march’s organizers plain: “WE, THE YOUTH, DID NOT ELECT AL SHARPTON OUR
SPOKESPERSON. HAVE A SEAT.”)
Hahahaha! The spoiled
brats are turning on their plantation masters.
I love it.
A few days later, Elzie downplayed the incident and
told me that the disagreement was simply about “someone who doesn’t want to
give up the reins and who has a huge platform.”
That’s right, Elzi. Race
hustling is a lucrative and ego-gratifying business. Sharpton and Jackson and the rest of the
original hustlers aren’t going to go away quietly, I’m afraid.
Gene Demby is the lead blogger for NPR's Code Switch
team, covering race, ethnicity and culture.
NPR. That figures. These are your tax dollars at work, folks.
Lately when I read articles that attempt to put a credible spin
on the Left’s agenda I’ve been taking a little time to peruse the comments
posted by readers, and I’m seeing an encouraging trend. Hopefully it’s not just wishful thinking on
my part, but more and more it seems that readers are waking up and soundly
rejecting the insanity with comments that reveal genuine disgust. Writers like Gene Demby, who appear to have
cocooned themselves in the world as they would like it to be, would be
well-advised to read what their commenters have to say.
~CW
A special thanks to Crawfish for bringing this gem to the
attention of Nox & Friends and allowing me the honor of ripping it apart.
