Last Friday, the terminally sophomoric Rachel Maddow turned her adolescent sarcasm on the Republican National Committee for seeking advice from Dick Cheney, Hugh Hewitt and David Horowitz. How absurd it was she cackled. “I thought I was being punked.” In regard to Frontpage editor Horowitz, she was aroused by the fact that the RNC invited him to keynote their conference at the Reagan library (as it happens that very Friday) to advise them on how to persuade minorities that their best interests were served by voting against Democrats, remarks, by the way, that got a standing ovation. (The attack on Horowitz begins at 3:09 of the video.)
Since Rachel Maddow is incapable of dealing in ideas or facts, she thought it was sufficient to read off the titles of three of what she called David’s “books,” including what she described as his “magnum opus” – The Race Card. The Race Card is actually not anything that anyone who read it could think of as a “magnum opus.” It is a book of essays written mostly by other people that Horowitz and Peter Collier edited fifteen years ago. The other titles Maddow chortled over were Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes and “Black Skin Privilege” (not even a book by David but a 35-page pamphlet that he wrote with John Perazzo). Since Maddow can’t be bothered to read let alone think about the ideas of people who don’t share her blind prejudices, she remains blissfully ignorant that her own attitudes are racist, which happens to be what these texts are about.
It is inconceivable to people like Maddow, for example, that an incompetent, unaccomplished, left-wing ideologue like Barack Obama, whose closest friends and advisers were America-haters Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, would never have been elected president if he weren’t black – one of the points of “Black Skin Privilege.”
Of course there’s a method to the sarcasm and scorn that Maddow directed at David Horowitz. It is to avoid confrontation with the fact that the principal oppressor of blacks and Hispanics in American society are Democrats and progressives like her. We don’t have a transcript of Horowitz’s remarks to the RNC, but everything of substance that he did say is contained in the passage below from Go For The Heart: How Republicans Can Win (the full text is available at www.gofortheheart.org).
Go For The Heart: How Republicans Can Win
By David Horowitz
(Excerpt pp.30-35)
The bottom line is this: If Republicans want to persuade minorities they care about them, they have to stand up for them; they have to defend them; and they have to show them that Democrats are playing them for suckers, exploiting them, oppressing them, and profiting from their suffering.
Large populations of the African American and Hispanic poor are concentrated in America’s inner cities – Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Harlem, South Central Los Angeles. In these inner cities the unemployment rates are off the charts, the school systems so corrupt and ineffective that half the children drop out before they graduate and half those who do are functionally illiterate. They will never get a decent job or a shot at the American dream.
In these inner cities every city council and every school board and every school district are 100% controlled by Democrats and have been for more than 70 years. Everything that is wrong with the inner cities and their schools that policy can affect, Democrats are responsible for. Democrats have their boot heels on the necks of millions of poor African American and Hispanic children and are crushing the life out of them every year. But Republicans are too polite to mention it.
In the middle of the 2012 campaign a teacher union strike shut down the schools in Chicago, Obama’s home town. The issue was not pay but the union’s refusal to allow teacher rewards to be connected to teacher performance. African American and Hispanic children were the true victims of the determination to protect bad teachers and not to reward good ones. Yet Republicans ignored the strike, and never put a face on its victims.
At the Republican convention one keynote speaker referred to the teacher unions and the issue of teacher rewards and union obstruction. This was Governor Chris Christie, probably the most aggressive and articulate Republican warrior. But here is how Christie framed the Democrat/union atrocity:
We believe that the majority of teachers in America know our system must be reformed to put students first so that America can compete…. We [Republicans] believe that we should honor and reward the good ones while doing what’s best for our nation’s future — demanding accountability, higher standards and the best teacher in every classroom.
They believe the educational establishment will always put themselves ahead of children. That self-interest trumps common sense. They believe in pitting unions against teachers, educators against parents, and lobbyists against children. They believe in teacher’s unions.”
And that’s all he said. The issues are there – accountability, standards and rewards for teacher performance. The policy is there. But the moral outrage is missing. The victims are missing and the culprits aren’t named. It’s not the “educational establishment” that’s ruining the lives and blocking the opportunities of African American and Hispanic children. It’s the Democrats – they are the educational establishment in every failing public school district. The Democrat teacher unions and the Democrat Party that supports them are destroying the lives of African American and Hispanic students whose parents are too poor to put them in private schools – the same private schools where Democrat legislators and union leaders send their own children.
Democrats will fight to the death to prevent poor parents from getting vouchers to provide their children with the same education that well-heeled Democratic legislators provide for theirs. This is a moral atrocity. This is an issue to get angry about and mobilize constituencies over. This is an issue that could drive a Gibraltar size wedge through the Democratic base. But Republicans are too polite to do that.
This is merely the most obvious atrocity that Democrats are committing against America’s impoverished minorities. Subverting family structures through a misconceived welfare system, encouraging food stamp dependency, providing incentives to bring into this world massive numbers of children who have no prospect of a decent life just to earn a welfare dollar. These are the corrupt fruits of Democratic welfare policies which are spiraling out of control. Republicans criticize these programs as “wasteful.” They need to start attacking them as destructive, as attacks on the human beings who are ensnared by them.
The way for Republicans to show they care about minorities is to defend them against their oppressors and exploiters, which in every major inner city in America without exception are Democrats. Democrats run the welfare and public education systems; they have created the policies, ruin the lives of the recipients of their handouts. It’s time that Republicans started to hold Democrats to account; to put them on the defensive and take away the moral high ground, which they now occupy illegitimately. Government welfare is not just wasteful; it is destructive. The public school system in America’s inner cities is not merely ineffective; it is racist and criminal.
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