Tangled up in Tulsa

President Biden traveled to Tulsa to deliver a speech on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. I can’t find an official White House version of the speech President Biden delivered in Tulsa yesterday. Rev has posted an unofficial transcript here. I have embedded the Guardian News video at the bottom.

The speech mixed its memorial purpose with low Democratic politics while giving no hint of remarkable progress made by the United States in the past 100 years. Low Democratic politics predominated, not just with respect to the promotion of legal protection for vote fraud in the name of voting rights, but also in the name of fraudulent “infrastructure.”

The Democrats’ race hustle permeated the low politics of the speech, which in that sense contributed to our current regression from equal rights and equal treatment without regard to race. Indeed, in the modern era, regression from equal rights has become Democratic Party orthodoxy.

The regression manifests in various forms. Most recently, it has taken the form of “equity.” We badly need a speech on the history of the retreat from equal rights in the name of “affirmative action” and “equity.”

At one point Biden discussed the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan. He recalled that “there were 37 members of the House of Representatives who were open members of the Klan. There were five, if I’m not mistaken, could have been seven, I think it was five members of the United States Senate, open members of the Klan. Multiple governors who were open members of the Klan. Most people didn’t realize that a century ago, the Klan was founded just six years before the horrific destruction here in Tulsa.”

Biden could have noted his own friendship with one such member of the Klan from his days in the Senate and recounted the role of the Democratic Party in perpetuating slavery and Jim Crow. The speech made no departure from low politics in favor of a fuller accounting of historical responsibility for the ills it purported to assess.

On the contrary, Biden claimed a piece of victimhood as a Catholic: “And one of the reasons why [the second iteration of the Klan] was founded was because of guys like me who are Catholic. It wasn’t about African-Americans then. It was about making sure that all those Polish, and Irish, and Italian, and Eastern European Catholics, who came to the United States after World War I would not pollute Christianity.”

And the Klan lives: “The flames from those burning crosses torched every region of the country. Millions of white Americans belonged to the Klan, and they weren’t even embarrassed by it. They were proud of it. And that hate became embedded systematically and systemically in our laws and our culture.”

Biden makes it sound like this is where we are today. He skips a few items, such as civil rights law. He reaches it indirectly in his discussion of John Lewis, the civil rights movement, and voting rights law. He puts this discussion to use solely for low political purposes that are themselves dishonest. It is disgusting.

Common though it has become to invoke “systemic” this and “systematic” that, Biden’s indictment of the United States on this ground is unforgivable. The United States continues to attract people from every race known to man and from every corner of the world. Name a country that is our equal. Let’s hear it.

There is a pretense in Biden’s declaration that he isn’t pretending:

We do ourselves no favors by pretending none of this ever happened or doesn’t impact us today, because it does still impact us today. We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know and not what we should know. We should know the good, the bad, everything. That’s what great nations do. They come to terms with their dark sides. And we’re a great nation. The only way to build a common ground is to truly repair and to rebuild.

Good point. It’s a shame that he didn’t bring up the mania of destruction, rioting, and tearing down which we have lived through with the complicity and support of Democrats all over the United States. That dark side doesn’t come from 100 years ago. It’s here today and present in his administration.

These are serious matters, but there was unintended humor as well:

Just imagine, if instead of denying millions of entrepreneurs the ability to access capital and contracting, we made it possible to take their dreams to the marketplace to create jobs and invest in our communities. The data shows young Black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding given the chance as White entrepreneurs are, but they don’t have lawyers. They don’t have accountants, but they have great ideas. Does anyone doubt this whole nation would be better off from the investments those people make? And I promise you, that’s why I set up the National Small Business Administration that’s much broader, because they’re going to get those loans.

Jumping ahead a bit:

And although I have no scientific basis for what I’m about to say, but those of you who are over 50, how often did you ever see advertisements on television with black and white couples? Not a joke. I challenge you, find today when you turn on the stations, sit on one station for two hours, and I don’t how many commercials you’ll see, 8:00 to 5:00. Two to three out of five have mixed race couples in them. That’s not by accident. They’re selling soap, man. Not a joke. Remember old Pat Caddell used to say, “You want to know what’s happening in American culture? Watch advertising,” because they want to sell what they have.

This is Biden’s bizarre hellworld:

As I said in my address to the joint session of Congress, according to the intelligence community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today, not Isis, not Al-Qaeda, white supremacists. That’s not me. That’s the intelligence community under both Trump and under my administration.

We are in a heap of trouble, but not for the reasons Biden claimed. Biden ended on this utterly false note of optimism:

I’ve never been more optimistic about the future than I am today. I mean that. The reason is, because of this new generation of young people. They’re the best educated. They’re the least prejudice [sic]. They’re the most open generation in American history.

What a complete and utter farce.

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