In his book on John F. Kennedy, Profile of Power, Richard Reeves writes about the late president’s concerns about communist influence over the civil rights movement. Reeves describes a meeting at which Kennedy asked Martin Luther King Jr. to fire two advisers, Stanley Levison and Hunter Pitts O’Dell. “They’re Communists, you’ve got to get rid of them,” Kennedy told King.
One can’t imagine Kennedy’s successors in the Democratic Party holding such a conversation today. Far from fearing Marxist influence over groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), they celebrate it. The Biden administration’s policy of flying Black Lives Matter flags atop U.S. embassies is a measure of the party’s transformation.
In the Cold War, Kennedy worried about America’s image abroad. He was loath to hand the Soviets propaganda victories. No such fears trouble today’s Democrats. They happily disseminate anti-American propaganda to America’s enemies. Biden’s State Department calls the promotion of BLM a “national security priority.” Kennedy would have found this posture baffling.
The memo that the State Department sent out to embassies on “racial equity” reads almost like a parody.
We have gone from America First under Mike Pompeo to America Last under Antony Blinken.
It authorizes embassies to operate as extensions of BLM. It rattles on about “deep-seated inequities rooted in colonialism and the oppression of racial, tribal, ethnic, and other minority communities.”
Kennedy would have found it bizarre that the American government itself is generating lies about “systemic racism” in the country that not even her enemies bother to concoct. Antony Blinken, Biden’s Secretary of State, says, “We can’t sweep our shortcomings under the rug or pretend they don’t exist. We need to face them openly and honestly. Even if that’s ugly. Even if that’s painful.” In other words, let’s blacken our own eye with a series of lies. This is the most gratuitous America-bashing imaginable, and it is coming from “American diplomats.” We have gone from America First under Mike Pompeo to America Last under Blinken.
The poet Robert Frost once recounted a comment Nikita Khrushchev made to him: “Khrushchev said he feared for us modern liberals. He said we were too liberal to fight. I suppose he thought we’d stand there for the next hundred years saying, ‘On the one one hand — but on the other hand.’ ” Kennedy was angry with Frost, who had been sent by his administration to meet with Khrushchev, for disclosing this conversation: “Why did Frost say that?” Kennedy didn’t want to be perceived as soft.
Today’s Democrats signal softness all the time. “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel,” said Frost. Imagine what he would say today. Democrats now pride themselves on indoctrinating America’s children in the anti-American propaganda of critical race theory, which teaches that America was the oppressor in past quarrels, such as the Revolutionary War.
Incorporating Black Lives Matter into the State Department takes this insanity to a new level. The Biden administration won’t even observe the most rudimentary nationalism. It has aligned itself with an openly anti-Western, explicitly Marxist organization, one whose founders called for the destruction of the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Sadly, that, too, dovetails with the priorities of Biden’s State Department. Blinken has urged U.S. diplomats across the world to meddle in the moral and religious affairs of other countries for the sake of advancing “LGBTQ rights” and abortion.
It is not enough for Biden to undercut the traditional family at home. He also wants to undercut it abroad. Yet he has the gall to say that he is restoring America’s “moral” standing in the eyes of the world. But the more Biden’s America become a left-wing dystopia, and the more it immerses itself in the anti-Western ideology of Black Lives Matter, the less the world will take it seriously. The troubles in the Middle East already suggest that the world of radical Islam is taking its measure of Biden as weak and frivolous.
John F. Kennedy feared a disintegrating America would embolden America’s enemies. Both parties at that time had some concept of the national interest. It is difficult to picture Lyndon B. Johnson, at the height of the Cold War, supporting athletes who boycott the flag or encouraging donations for the purpose of springing looters from jail. But for Kamala Harris, such positions are second nature. What would once have been called anti-Americanism is now the platform of the Democratic Party. It exists not to solve problems but to create them, and its most cherished imaginary problem is “systemic racism.”
Of all the images already associated with the Biden administration, perhaps the Black Lives Matter flags atop U.S. embassies serve as the most vivid and mortifying. It is yet another sinister foreshadowing of Biden’s fundamentally transformed America.
