OPINION:
Once upon a time, your entire life — or death — depended on the identity of your parents or your skin color, facial features or religion. A king’s son was a prince. A dark person became a slave. An attractive female became a concubine.
Primitive and medieval societies worshipped kings and queens, and they enslaved people with the wrong skin color, religion or race — or just butchered them.
There as vestiges of this in some languages. To this day, the term Al-Aswaad in Arabic means “the Blacks” but also “The Slaves.”
America led other modern societies to stress the equality of all persons — “all men are created equal.” Each person rose by virtue of achievement and drive. Crimes and misdeeds were judged by objective law, blind justice, that did not distinguish the high-born or low-born, the light-skinned or dark-skinned.
America led other societies to declare that all people were equal before the law, and this motto — “Equality Under Law” — decorates the U.S. Supreme Court.
In modern times, only the National Socialist Party (the Nazis) and the Eugenics movement wanted to return to the dark ages when inherited genetic features set or sealed one’s future. The Nazis murdered Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. The Eugenists (featuring many “progressives”) wanted to kill the handicapped and deformed.
Democrats have told us now in three straight elections that we should vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton “to break barriers” or “the glass ceiling.” This really means vote for Mr. Obama who has more skin pigment than John McCain or Mitt Romney and for Mrs. Clinton whose XX-chromosomes trump Donald Trump’s XY-chromosomes.
Their message is vote for the right color or sex, not for “the White guy” and the domesticated media have embraced this racial-sexual narrative.
The Democratic National Convention and the domesticated media have spent days telling us that Republicans and Donald Trump were leading us to “a dark era,” but it is Democrats who have returned to a dark age where they shout allegiance to a candidate primarily for genetic reasons or family links, not merit.
“Identity politics” means vote for a woman, not man, vote black, not white. Superficial politics means vote for a tall man with good hair, not a short man with more in his head than on it.
“We have better hair,” bragged candidate John Kerry to the 2004 Democratic convention. His running mate, John Edwards became infamous for $600 haircuts and betraying his dying wife by impregnating a campaign worker, using campaign funds to hide the affair. Mr. Edwards narrowly escaped conviction for campaign spending violations.
Democrats traditionally pander to external qualities, and it often works. America’s Democrats have chosen candidates who are tall on the outside and small on the inside, candidates who brag about their cheek bones (Elizabeth Warren) and flaunt good hair (John Kerry and John Edwards) or a hair transplant (Joe Biden) rather than a good head.
At the 2004 Democratic Convention, Illinois state senator Barack Obama warned not to look at America in divisive fashion: “Red States” or “Blue States” but as “The United States.”
The enthralled media and academia claimed Mr. Obama was a unifier, a post-racial, post-partisan politician who made color, religion and sexual distinction irrelevant.
What a contrast a few years make. We not only have Red and Blue America, we have a battered, “black-and-blue” America. Indeed, we are not just black-and-blue, but have become black Against blue. Black skin color is pitted against blue police uniforms.
Policemen are now hunted by people incited by groups who say “Black Lives Matter.” The inciters claim white police single out young black men for execution.
Several studies show this contention is just plain wrong (i.e. Roland Fryer, Harvard, 2016 who studied more than 1,300 shootings in 10 U.S. cities over a 15-year period and a Department of Justice investigative study of Philadelphia Police Force).
The media have bought into the racial lie, and so has President Obama. The truth is a white person confronting the police in America is more likely to be shot than a black person.
Exploiting politically correct but factually inaccurate racial motifs or playing race and gender games divides America and ultimately threatens its special role in the world.
Anyone who loves America knows that the world needs a strong and free America, an America that is strong and united at home in order to lead a chaotic, divided world.
If America has entered a dark period, it is not because of Republicans or Donald Trump, but because Democrats, many in academia and in the media use race, sex and outward appearance as the key to political success.
• Michael Widlanski, the author of “Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat” (Threshold/Simon-Schuster), was strategic affairs adviser in Israel’s Ministry of Public Security.
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