Sowell versus Obama

At RealClearPolitics they like to pair columns with contrasting points of view, but they have President Obama injecting his poison into our bloodstream without an antidote this morning. Obama was out campaigning for the Democratic candidates in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races this weekend. RCP has posted a video clip and transcript of Obama’s appearance in New Jersey under the heading “We Don’t Have Time To Waste On These Phony Right Wing Culture Wars.”

Coincidentally, Jewish World Review editor Binyamin Jolkovsky writes this morning to advise that Thomas Sowell has come off the bench to weigh in on the Virginia race. He sees it differently from Obama. Sowell’s column is “High stakes in Virginia.” Take this as Sowell’s response to Obama’s “argument,” such as it is:

This is one battle in a much bigger war, and the stakes are far higher than the governorship of Virginia or the Democrats and Republicans. The stakes are the future of this nation.

When school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people, that is a danger to all Americans of every race. Anyone at all familiar with the history of group-identity politics in other countries knows that it has often ended up producing sickening atrocities that have torn whole societies apart.

If you have a strong stomach, read about the 1915 atrocities against the Armenians in Turkey, “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, or the reciprocal atrocities between the Sinhalese and Tamils during their civil war in Sri Lanka.

Do not kid yourself that this cannot happen in America. The relations between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka were once held up to the world as a model of intergroup harmony.

They got along better than blacks and whites have ever gotten along in the U.S. But then a talented demagogue polarized the country with group-identity politics, to get himself elected prime minister.

Once he was elected, he was ready to moderate his position. But you cannot just turn group hatred on and off, like a light bulb. He was assassinated and the hatred continued on.

There is a point of no return in America as well. And we may be nearing it, or perhaps past it.

Low-income minority students, especially, cannot afford the luxury of having their time wasted on ideological propaganda in the schools, when they are not getting a decent education in mathematics or the English language.

When they graduate, and go on to higher education that could prepare them for professional careers, hating white people is not likely to do them nearly as much good as knowing math and English.

Here is a bit more:

Parents who protest the arrogant abuse of a captive audience of children are performing an important public service. They deserve something better than having the Biden administration’s Attorney General threatening them.

But this whole issue is far older and far bigger than the Biden administration. It will be a cancerous threat to this country, long after the current administration is over.

Poisonous indoctrination will not stop unless it gets stopped. But most parents and voters have lives to lead, and cannot keep monitoring everything the schools do.

Most low-income parents lack the one thing that would get them taken seriously by the education establishment — an ability to take their children to other schools

Sowell has more and I urge interested readers to read the whole thing here.

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