Note: After this column was submitted there was more unfolding news about the terrorist attack in New York City. “We will go about our day” was the essence of the response from Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio. As of this moment eight are dead with another twenty injured. The attacker, 29-year-old Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov of Tampa, Florida by way of New Jersey and Uzbekistan, was shot but survived, yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as he jumped out of his rented truck. According to the New York Post, Saipov had left “behind handwritten notes pledging loyalty to ISIS along with an image of an ISIS flag.”
This is, yet again, a reminder that race has no place in American life — for America’s enemies. As this is written we have no idea who among the dead and injured were or are white, black, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, man or woman or transgender, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Atheist or other. While this is New York and it is very conceivable there could be a visiting foreigner among the casualties, without doubt one suspects that those who were targeted were one thing in the terrorist’s mind and one thing only — Americans.
It is way, way past time for those in this country who would divide by race for political purposes — as shown in the column below — to stop it. There is plenty of room for honest disagreement on economics, the environment, social issues etc., etc. in an endless parade. The irony is that the terrorist only saw Americans — but other Americans are having a problem seeing the same. It is finally time to stop dividing by race.
Yet another note: Per Mediaite in a piece time dated at 12:47 PM on 11/1 here’s the headline:
Latino Victory Fund Pulls Ad Depicting Gillipsie [sic] Supporters as Confederate Predators
By now Northam and company had to know they were going to get reviews like the one below… which is not withdrawn for what seems like obvious reasons of principle and decency.
•••••
And there they go again.
In a flagrantly racist ad, Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Virginia Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam unintentionally highlights his party’s history and still-very much current culture of the worst racism imaginable.
The ad, sponsored by a racial outfit calling itself the Latino Victory Project, is discussed here and is described thusly by ABC News:
New Va. attack ad shows minority children chased by truck with Gillespie sticker, Confederate flag
The minute-long ad — entitled “American Nightmare” — from the Latino Victory Project features a pickup truck adorned with a Confederate flag and an Ed Gillespie bumper sticker driving aggressively through the neighborhood chasing young minority children fleeing in terror.
Northam, locked in a tight race with Republican nominee Ed Gillespie, is blithely clueless that this ad all by itself is a vivid illustration of the racist culture of the American Left. That Confederate flag represents the Democratic Party’s past and Northam’s ad represents the party’s racist present — every bit of each centered around appealing to people (not to mention judging their fellow Americans) by race. Appallingly the children in that Northam ad are presented by race and religion. They are not kids with names — individual kids in a colorblind Virginia. No, these kids are “black” or “Latino” or “Muslim.” And of course the driver of the truck is “white.” Past or present for Ralph Northam and his legacy of hate, his party is always, always, always about race. The sponsor for the Northam ad is, by the way, a group named the “Latino Victory Project” — a group that quite brazenly self-identifies by race like those “White Citizen Councils” of old.
And here’s a sad irony. Chris Plante, the ever-observant nationally syndicated radio host who parks at WMAL in Washington, was quick to note in the wake of the Northam ad the following as reported here by Larry O’Connor in Mediaite:
As nationally syndicated radio host Chris Plante observed earlier today on WMAL in Washington, Northern Virginia actually experienced a recent murder involving a young Muslim girl wearing a hijab who was chased down by a suspect in a vehicle. According to police reports the suspect then abducted and murdered the young girl with a baseball bat.
The suspect is an illegal alien.
The suspect was identified as “Darwin Martinez Torres, a citizen and national of El Salvador.” No word from the Latino Victory Project and the Northam campaign as to whether they will be running a commercial about that.
Over at the Washington Post meanwhile appears this jewel from various historians bemoaning the recent remarks of White House Chief of Staff and General John Kelly on Laura Ingraham’s new Fox show The Ingraham Angle. The headline:
Historians respond to John F. Kelly’s Civil War remarks: ‘Strange,’ ‘sad,’ ‘wrong’
The story begins, quite tellingly, this way:
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly was the guest for the premiere of Laura Ingraham’s new show on Fox News Channel on Monday night. During the interview, he outlined a view of the history of the Civil War that historians described as “strange,” “highly provocative,” “dangerous” and “kind of depressing.”
While refuting Kelly on points about Robert E. Lee, the historians in question do exactly what Ralph Northam does in that racist commercial. They can’t bring themselves to say who was responsible for that Confederate flag let alone for the Civil War.
Here’s historian Stephanie McCurry, identified by the Post as “a history professor at Columbia University and author of ‘Confederate Reckoning: Politics and Power in the Civil War South.’” And what does Professor McCurry have to say? This:
“What’s so strange about this statement is how closely it tracks or resembles the view of the Civil War that the South had finally got the nation to embrace by the early 20th century,” she said. “It’s the Jim Crow version of the causes of the Civil War. I mean, it tracks all of the major talking points of this pro-Confederate view of the Civil War.”
… “In 1861, compromise wasn’t possible because some Southerners just wanted out. They wanted a separate nation where they could protect slavery into the indefinite future,” McCurry said. “That’s what they said when they seceded. That’s what they said in their constitution when they wrote one.”
Another historian, identified as “David Blight, a history professor at Yale University and author of ‘Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,’” chimes in along the same lines:
“This Trump-era ignorance and misuse of history is forcing historians — and I think this is a good thing — to use words like “truth” and “right or wrong,” Blight said. “In the academy we get very caught up in relativism and whether we can be objective and so on, and that’s a real argument.”
“But there are some things that are just not true,” he said. “And we’ve got to point that out.”
This last bit about the need to point out the truth is an incredible statement to make when the entire story skips one very large fact. Those “Southerners” the historians mention were… Democrats. And it was Democrats who established the “Jim Crow” system they rightly decry. As Dinesh D’Souza correctly notes in his bestselling The Big Lie of progressives and their paradigms of what really happened in history:
The Left is really good at inventing and disseminating these paradigms…. (Like) the paradigm that the progressives and the Democrats are the party of emancipation, equality, and civil rights. I showed instead that they are the party of slavery and Indian removal, of segregation and Jim Crow, of racial terrorism and the Ku Klux Klan, and of opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Dinesh is exactly right, and no better evidence of this is on display at the moment than in that racist Northam commercial. What you actually see in that commercial is the Democratic Party’s past of racial politics chasing its present of racial politics, all presented by a group that is itself based entirely on race. In terms of Virginia’s current politics it is creating for Ralph Northam a legacy of hate.
The good news here is that the commercial has stirred a backlash of Virginians and others who simply are not willing to put up with a potential Virginia governor and his allies who make it plain that if elected he will govern by race.
Stay tuned.
