By Timothy D. Naegele[1]
In an article entitled “‘Own up to reality’: 2020 Democrats urged to confront US racial divide,” Lauren Gambino has written thoroughly anti-Trump screed in the UK’s Guardian, which nonetheless is worth reading:
In August 2016, Donald Trump stood before an overwhelmingly white crowd in Dimondale, Michigan, and asked black people for their votes.
“What the hell do you have to lose?” he growled.
He went on to accuse Hillary Clinton of caring more for immigrants than for black Americans, who he said were forced to live like “refugees in their own country”. After four years of a Trump administration, he vowed, 95% of African Americans would vote to keep him in office.
This week, it was evident that at least among members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, voters did not need four years to make up their minds.
A man who entered national politics by promoting the false “birther” conspiracy against the nation’s first black president, has, in office, equivocated in his response to a white supremacist march in Charlottesville; asked why the US does not attract more migrants from Norway instead of “shithole” countries like El Salvador, Haiti and various African nations; enacted brutal policies at the southern border; tried to include a citizenship question on the census; and told four lawmakers of color to “go back” to their home countries, regardless of the fact three were born in the US and all are American citizens.
At the association’s annual convention in Detroit this week, a unanimous vote recommended the impeachment of Trump, who the NAACP president, Derrick Johnson, said led “one of the most racist and xenophobic administrations since the Jim Crow era”.
“The pattern of Trump’s misconduct is unmistakable and has proven time and time again that he is unfit to serve as the president of this country,” Johnson said.
Appearing at the convention, the former vice-president Joe Biden cast the 2020 election as “a battle for the soul of this nation”. Other members of the most diverse Democratic presidential field in US history attacked Trump as a “bigot” whose rhetoric and policies have harmed communities of color while Bill Weld, Trump’s only Republican challenger, said the president “is a raging racist, OK? He’s a complete and thoroughgoing racist.”
Yet disagreement remained over whether Trump is an “aberration,[“] as Biden has argued, or if he is a symptom of more deeply rooted social and political ills.
“A country that elects a man like Donald Trump has serious problems,” said the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. “And we need to make big structural change.”
‘A strategy for a massive loss’
After Clinton’s defeat, many top Democrats determined Trump had won because white working class white voters abandoned the party as a result of its emphasis on race and identity. To beat him, they argued, candidates should only respond to Trump’s most inflammatory provocations and even then to quickly return to “kitchen table” issues: the economy, jobs, healthcare.
Trump spent the final months of the 2018 midterm campaign whipping up fear about an immigrant caravan at the southern border and the MS-13 gang. But Democrats won control of the House, taking seats in districts Republicans had held for decades with the help of suburban and college-educated white voters.
Now, though, in the wake of Trump’s incendiary attacks on the congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, leading voices of the progressive left, many black leaders and liberal activists are pushing candidates to more aggressively combat the president and his combustible politics of racial division.
The former NAACP president Cornell Brooks said Trump was playing a dangerous game and implored Democrats not to treat 2020 as “race-neutral”.
“You cannot pretend,” he said, “that healthcare, highways, jobs and climate change, that those are issues of consequence but that hate crimes, xenophobia, children in migrant camps and the targeting of women of color are not real issues. That is a strategy for a massive loss.”
Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor in Georgia, advocated a new approach.
“We’re taught that you could only win people of color – you can only turn African Americans – by losing white voters,” she said. “But we didn’t believe that was true.”
Abrams lost narrowly but in Detroit she argued that her historic candidacy – she would have been the first black female governor of a US state – had helped reshape the political landscape before the arrival of long-term demographic change, through which Americans of color are projected to become a majority around 2050.
African American votes are critical already. They formed a strong base of the multiracial coalition that twice elected Barack Obama and overwhelmingly backed Clinton in 2016. But that year also saw turnout among African Americans falling to its lowest rate in 20 years, with particularly sharp declines in midwestern states like Michigan, where Trump won by less than 11,000 votes of the 4.8m cast.
At a Pennsylvania rally after his election, Trump thanked black voters who stayed home, saying they were “almost as good” as those who voted for him.
‘Come-to-Jesus moment’
In Detroit, Marjorie Innocent, an NAACP staffer from Baltimore, said Trump had handed Democrats a “come-to-Jesus moment”.
“Under the Obama years there was a false sense of security around the progress we had achieved and the extent to which, collectively, we were on a similar page,” she said. “The Trump administration has exposed these divisions and shown us that they are still very much pervasive in our country and that they are deeply grounded in race and class – in that order. Now we need a leader who will own up to that reality.”
The public remains deeply divided over race but attitudes have shifted. In 2017, a record 41% of Americans said racial discrimination was the main reason black people could not get ahead. Among Democrats the figure was 64%, more than double what it was in 2010.
Accordingly, the party has introduced ambitious and detailed proposals to address racial disparities in maternal healthcare, to overhaul the criminal justice system and to expand access to public housing, improve accountability in policing, invest in education and explore reparations for the descendants of slaves.
But race and racism remain hot issues and the NAACP presidential forum provided a preview of battles to come in the second Democratic debate, which will take place in Detroit next week.
Biden said he was “not going to be as polite this time”. In the first debate, the California senator Kamala Harris, one of two leading black presidential candidates, clashed with the former VP over his record on race[].
Biden, who enjoys sizable support among African American voters, is also exchanging barbs with New Jersey senator Cory Booker, the other prominent black candidate. On the sidelines of the NAACP forum, Booker called Biden the “architect of mass incarceration”, regarding his role in helping to pass the 1994 crime bill while a senator for Delaware.
Biden, who has proposed criminal justice reform legislation to undo some of the effects of that bill, refuted the accusation and then unloaded on Booker, attacking his record as mayor of Newark. Biden’s campaign later released a memo on Booker’s time in the city, claiming there would not be sufficient time to raise each point during the TV debate.
Biden also reminded NAACP members that Obama had not been forced to pick him for vice-president.
“They did a significant background check on me,” he said. “I doubt he would have picked me if these accusations about my being wrong on civil rights [were] correct.”
On the debate stage on Wednesday, Biden will stand between Harris and Booker.
‘A matter of survival’
White House officials and Trump allies argue that voters will be persuaded by economic gains. The president regularly brags that unemployment among Hispanic and black Americans has fallen to record lows, even though the rates have since climbed. He also signed into law bipartisan legislation overhauling a criminal justice system that disproportionately ensnares people of color.
But NAACP members said such efforts pale in comparison to the harm Trump has done. Hate crimes have risen. Experts say white nationalism is a growing threat.
“Our interest in this conversation is not political,” said Johnson, the NAACP president. “Our interest in this conversation is a matter of survival.”
Trump hopes moves such as his attack on the progressive congresswomen can drive up white turnout while depressing Democratic support among moderates and independents. Some think that could backfire. At the NAACP convention, the Rev Jesse Jackson warned: “When you separate four bees, the whole hive comes out.”
But on Saturday, in tweets attacking the Maryland congressman Elijah Cummings and calling his district “a rat-infested mess”, the president did it again.[2]
First, by and large, the British media is biased against America’s President Donald Trump. The marshaling of almost every conceivable negative against him in the article above simply mirrors these biases.
Second, by way of contrast, Barack Obama is praised despite the fact that he was and is a racist and anti-Semite.[3] If anyone has any doubts whatsoever, please read his book “Dreams from My Father,” which is shocking. It is summarized in the first article of this blog, with direct quotes and page cites. It should be read by every American, which ideally should have happened before he was elected to the presidency.[4]
Third, Donald Trump was and is correct: if Hillary Clinton has cared about anyone other than herself, it seems to be illegal immigrants who would take jobs away from America’s blacks and other minority groups who are in the United States legally.[5] Also, slavery and economic servitude were perpetrated and perpetuated by the Democratic Party, while the “Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party brought an end to it.[6]
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was once a respected group; however, sadly today it is little more than another collection of race hustlers who sow racial divisions and victimization, and pander to America’s blacks in the hopes of being relevant and staying afloat financially. As I have written previously:
150 years after slavery ended, the pathetic NAACP and other black racist organizations—like the so-called “Black Lives Matter,” Antifa and other violent groups—continue to play the “race card” at every turn, and seek “reparations” (e.g., welfare payments) for their flock.
They are spearheaded by “race hustlers” such as Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, Elijah Cummings and other members of the so-called “Congressional Black Caucus”—which should be outlawed as a racist organization.
As other minorities rise up the economic totem pole, America’s blacks remain at the bottom and are passed over. And their thugs aka NFL players are highly paid, but ignore the plight of elderly and other blacks in Chicago and other American cities.[7]
Fourth, America’s blacks whose ancestors were brought to our shores as slaves are U.S. citizens. Their rights must be protected and nourished and not destroyed or lessened by the influx of illegal immigrants from other countries.[8] It is arguable that Barack Obama has never understood this, much less fully, because he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, and never lived on the American mainland until he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Fifth, with respect to Barack Obama’s former Vice President, Joe Biden, he is being attacked by those in the Democratic Party who seek to destroy his presidential candidacy and advance their own. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and the other members of their so-called “Squad” may cost the Democratic Party both the presidency and the Congress in 2020. And neither of them may be reelected.[9]
Sixth, as I have written:
[Progressive] is a term that has been coined or affixed to [members of America’s Left], to cloud, obscure or mask their true natures, identities and intentions.
They are the Jerrold Nadlers; the Adam Schiffs; the racist Maxine Waterses and Elijah Cummingses; the Richard Blumenthals (who lied repeatedly that he served with our military in Vietnam); the Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren (who lied repeatedly about her native-American heritage); the Kamala Harrises (who rose to “fame” and recognition as former San Francisco mayor WIllie Brown’s ho); and the list goes on and on.[10]
Seventh, the racists attempt to portray “people of color” as being all the same, when the reality is very different. Blacks, or “African-Americans”—those whose ancestors were brought to America from Africa as slaves—are in the distinct minority, having been surpassed by Hispanic-Americans, or those with Hispanic heritages.[11]
Lastly, Barack Obama’s legacy may be that of a traitor who sowed racial divisions, and sought to destroy the candidacy and presidency of his successor. Indeed, it may be concluded that he was and is the greatest traitor in American history.[12] And yes, the United States and the American people will survive his treachery. It warrants repeating:
I believe in this country, and I believe in Americans of all colors, faiths and backgrounds. The United States is the only true melting pot in the world, with its populace representing a United Nations of the world’s peoples. Yes, we fight and we even discriminate, but when times are tough—like after 9/11—we come together as one nation, which makes this country so great and special. Also, all of us or our ancestors came here from somewhere else. Even the American Indians are descended from those who crossed the Bering Strait—or the “Bering land bridge”—according to anthropologists.[13]
© 2019, Timothy D. Naegele
[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (see www.naegele.com and Timothy D. Naegele Resume-19-4-29). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com
[2] See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/28/own-up-to-reality-2020-democrats-urged-to-confront-us-racial-divide (“‘Own up to reality’: 2020 Democrats urged to confront US racial divide”).
[3] See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/ariel-sharon-is-missed/#comment-12626 (“DEMOCRATS ARE ANTI-SEMITES”).
[4] See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/is-barack-obama-a-racist/ (“Is Barack Obama A Racist?”) (see also the extensive comments beneath the article).
[5] See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/washington-is-sick-and-the-american-people-know-it/#comment-7185 (“Clinton Fatigue”).
[6] See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation (“Emancipation Proclamation”—”In Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi hailed Lincoln as ‘the heir of the aspirations of John Brown’. On August 6, 1863, Garibaldi wrote to Lincoln: ‘Posterity will call you the great emancipator, a more enviable title than any crown could be, and greater than any merely mundane treasure'”).
[7] See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/is-barack-obama-a-racist/#comment-10895 (“Race Hustlers Like The NAACP, Colin Kaepernick And Barack Obama”).
[8] See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/illegal-immigration-the-solution-is-simple/ (“Illegal Immigration: The Solution Is Simple”) (see also the extensive comments beneath the article).
[9] See, e.g., http://www.dickmorris.com/aoc-omar-crash-in-the-polls-2020-election-alert/ (“AOC & Omar Crash In The Polls – 2020 Election Alert!”).
[10] See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/abortions-and-autos-kill-more-in-america-than-guns/#comment-17600 (“Abortions And Gay Rights Are Not American Values”); see also, https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2019/07/17/is-trump-driving-a-wedge-through-the-democratic-party/#comment-18289 (“The Democrats Are Pure Evil, And They Must Be Crushed”).
[11] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Americans (“White Americans”—”White Americans (including White Hispanics) constitute the historical and current majority of the people living in the United States, with 72% of the population in the 2010 United States Census. . . . European Americans are the largest ethnic group of White Americans and constitute the historical population of the United States since the nation’s founding”); see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans (“African American”—”African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the black racial groups of Africa. . . . Of the 12.6% of United States residents who identified as black [according to the 2010 U.S. Census], around 10.3% were ‘native black American’ or ethnic African Americans, who are direct descendants of West/Central Africans brought to the U.S. as slaves”) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans#20th_and_21st_centuries (“Hispanic and Latino Americans”—”Hispanic and Latino Americans constituted 18.1% of the total U.S. population in 2017).
[12] See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2018/05/24/should-barack-obama-be-executed-for-treason/ (“Should Barack Obama Be Executed For Treason?”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/the-real-russian-conspiracy-barack-obama-the-clintons-and-the-sale-of-americas-uranium-to-russias-killer-putin/ (“The Real Russian Conspiracy: Barack Obama, The Clintons, And The Sale Of America’s Uranium To Russia’s Killer Putin”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/ariel-sharon-is-missed/#comment-12626 (“DEMOCRATS ARE ANTI-SEMITES”); see also https://www.apnews.com/277fe31ea2234658a991243a9c6f2466 (“Polls show sour views of race relations in Trump’s America”).
[13] See https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2019/07/17/is-trump-driving-a-wedge-through-the-democratic-party/ (“Is Trump Driving A Wedge Through The Democratic Party?”) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/america-a-rich-tapestry-of-life/ (“America: A Rich Tapestry Of Life”) (quoting http://www.philstockworld.com/2009/10/11/greenspan’s-legacy-more-suffering-to-come/ and http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/2951-ilene/31177-interview-with-timothy-d-naegele).
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