Posted on 04/01/2021 5:02:35 AM PDT by Kaslin
A couple of years ago, I gave a speech before a conservative, predominantly white audience. I couldn't help but notice a tall, heavyset Black man, arms folded, standing in the back. From time to time, I would look at him, only to see him frown and shake his head, I assumed disapprovingly, when I made what I considered important points.
After the speech, he came up to me. "I am angry," he said. "Not at you -- at myself. I thought I was well informed. I read the news. I watch the news. I now see I've been manipulated by the party that I voted for all my life."
He then ticked off some of the points I made in my speech that he said surprised or even shocked him.
He said he had no idea that (according to a 2004 Thomas B. Fordham Institute study) 44% of Philadelphia public school teachers send their own school-age kids to private school. Yet the Democratic Party adamantly opposes school vouchers, which would give K-12 children of urban parents a chance at a better school.
He did not know that Democrats, including President Barack Obama, tried to end the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program. It is a lottery that allows fortunate parents to opt out of their local public school for a better private school. The program is so popular that there are far more parents who want to participate than there are seats. "What's more important, " he asked me, "than making sure are kids are well educated?"
He did not know that, in 1965, 25% of Black kids were born outside of wedlock, versus 70% today, a phenomenon that cannot be attributed to slavery and Jim Crow. He did not know that Barack Obama once said, "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison."
He said he was unaware that out of the approximately 390,000 slave owners in 1860, no more than a "handful" were Republican, according to conservative Dinesh D'Souza.
He did not know that more Republicans, as a percentage of their party, voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats. Nor did he know that more Republicans, as a percentage of their party, voted for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 than did Democrats. He did not know that Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan and that one of its goals was to stop the spread of the Republican Party.
He said he was unaware that, before 1938, when the first federal minimum wage law was enacted, a Black teenager was more likely to be employed than a white teenager.
He did not know that, according to Harvard economist George Borjas, illegal immigration creates winners and losers. But the big losers are low- and unskilled American workers of color who compete against low- and unskilled illegal immigrant workers -- who place downward pressure on the wages of the native-born.
The man did not know that, according to The Washington Post, in recent years, more unarmed whites have been killed by the police than unarmed Blacks. He was unaware of studies, including one by a Black Harvard economist, that found the police more hesitant, more reluctant, to pull the trigger on a Black suspect than on a white suspect. He did not know that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, police killings of Blacks declined almost 80% from the late '60s through the 2010s, while police killings of whites have flatlined.
He did not know that, about racism, then-Sen. Barack Obama said: "The previous generation, the Moses generation, pointed the way. They took us 90% of the way there. We still got that 10% in order to cross over to the other side." This would be the same Obama who, when he became president, said: "The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives -- you know, that casts a long shadow. And that's still part of our DNA that's passed on. We're not cured of it."
According to MSNBC political analyst Steve Kornacki, 43,000 votes in just three states would have switched the winner from Joe Biden to Donald Trump. This means all Republicans need to do is change the minds of a small percentage of the electorate.
The man at my speech proves this is more than doable.
Facts get deleted.
I’ve been banned by two sites in the last few months simply for posting legitimate articles that contained information regarding Rona that they didn’t like.
Question: How does one get banned for posting a youtube video of senate hearing testimony? And the reason for the banning: Repeating conspiracy theory nonsense. And the video was the Ivermectin doctor’s heartfelt testimony.
This kind of stuff is FAR worse than Rona.
Writers of articles lie, get facts wrong, Fakebook pulled many of my posted articles, all I put up was title and URL. Even conservative writers repeat many of the erroneous facts, to lazy to fact check. Townhall has a few who don’t dig deep enough. FAKEBOOK blames the poster. Which is why I dumped them. Repeat a lie often enough it becomes truth.
Goo article until this final sentence. This election was rigged. Fraud was widespread in the key states. No amount of changing of minds would have changed the pre-determined outcome. More votes would simply have been manufactured. Larry Elder knows this.
Arggh! “Goo” should be “Good”
This is closer to Facism than even Communism, in many respects.
Look at the banning of Trump's interview by FaceBook the other day. Their justification? In their words: "...any content "in the voice of Donald Trump" would be scrubbed from the social media platform..."
The year is 2021. And here we are.
Yeah, we kind of been doing that since before ObamaIdiot got into office, Larry......
Hence why they know engage in cancel culture, censorship , and screaming like tard Karens and Darens.
BTW, the catch-all excuse for cancelling people on forums now - and I noticed this before Trump got into office - is “trolling”.
Simply disagreeing with the majority opinion can be labelled as “trolling”. And on most sites it is a rules violation.
It’s worth than fascism or communism because we have a recently function infrastructure and a lot (comparatively speaking) of individual wealth.
It will take some time before most will be aware of the destruction such a system will cause.
And by then it will be to late.
Anything liberals don’t like will get you censored or banned.
I’ve been censored plenty times tryingto comment on Breitbart articles, through Disqus. Sometimes its hard to figure why, it just gives you a generic message, “waiting to be approved by Breitbart.” Then it’s gone forever.
I tried contacting them to find out what was going on, no reply. Another site did reply, Gatewy Pundit I think, they said it was Disqus moderators, not the site itself.
Never did have any interest in facebook, have a twitter account but I haven’t logged on in so long I can’t remember my user name and password to go delete it.
Anything conservative is being scrubbed off the internet as much as the communists can manage. I’ve tried looking for news articles I had bookmarked, only to find them gone 6 months later. Articles not critical of Donald Trump, of course.
This is just one facet of a wide ranging effort to eliminate conservative political speech at all levels.
I won’t be surprised at all if they start using federal agencies to come after us, same as the IRS did to Tea Party groups not too long ago. It would be a lot easier to go after private individuals than it was to go after political groups with a public presence.
Glad you were able to reach that one guy, Larry, but you know that most lefties are impervious to facts, data, hard evidence and “patterns” - they have no reasoning power or common sense - only bumper sticker slogans repeated endlessly that they believe are true...”Black men are being hunted down by White police officers and killed in large numbers every single day.”
Try overcoming some of these myths and see your life and career threatened.
Facts are irrelevant to people whose primary form of mentation is “Feeling.”
"This means all Republicans need to do is change the minds of a small percentage of the electorate."
Right. If I understood your point (correct me if I am wrong) that like a headless chicken, we may stumble forward for some time living off the reservoir of individual wealth that has been accrued, but at some point...that runs out and wont be able to replenish it because the system that created it will have been destroyed or corroded.
I guess with $27 Trillion in debt, we likely have been going down this road for a while.
I don’t see how we can survive as a country unless we can fix the electoral system.
And one side (and a good portion of the other side) has absolutely not interest in “fixing” it, if they aren’t actually antagonistically opposed to it.
Which really worries me.
spot on.
You have identified the problem.
Trump would be a lock in 2024 if he could figure out how to make the elections legit.
How did the US become like the Soviet bloc?
In the old days you had Democrats and labor with business as a counterbalance and at least some media supporting Republicans.
Now the whole mess is “progressive”
God help us.
Facts are racist.
L
I am a huge fan of Larry Elder, especially after watching his documentary “Uncle Tom”.
But I think part of the larger problem we face here, like the WWI generals who thought you could still send infantry into the teeth of machine guns, or WWII admirals who refused to recognize that battleships had been superseded by Aircraft Carriers as the queen of the naval warfare chess board, is that facts no longer matter.
We as a country have degenerated to a point where we not only have legitimized “moral relativism” and “cultural relativism”, we have legitimized “factual relativism”.
That is, “your facts”, even if they are rationally unfounded and diametrically opposed to obvious reality, are just as valid and worthy of respect, consideration and action as “my facts”.
Which is horse crap.
But it is in my opinion, the “new reality”.
Now, if two of us go out on a sunny day and see the sun come up in the East, one of us can say in all seriousness and believability that the sun rises in the West...and we are bound to have to accept that as a valid statement.
You may well say to the other person: “Look. We have a compass, established and factual, a standard that says “East” is that way, “West is THAT way, and if you stand stationary on a fixed point on the equator and face “East”, you will see the sun appear from that direction and rise in the sky each and every day.”
And they will retort that “East” is a social construct. I didn’t agree to that construct...blah blah blah.” And knowledgeable and learned people are required, under pain of social ostricism (never mind governmental persecution) to accept that as a valid alternative explanation.
So it is that we as Conservatives still believe that we can say 44% of Philadelphia public school teachers send their own school-age kids to private school, that, in 1965, 25% of Black kids were born outside of wedlock, versus 70% today, a phenomenon that cannot be attributed to slavery and Jim Crow, that out of the approximately 390,000 slave owners in 1860, no more than a “handful” were Republican, that more Republicans, as a percentage of their party, voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats or that more Republicans, as a percentage of their party, voted for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 than did Democrats, or that Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan and that one of its goals was to stop the spread of the Republican Party, and that the truth is a shield to ignorance and lies.
We believe we can say all these things to “prove” and “backup” our case. And these things extend to military defense, tax cuts, 2nd Amendment rights, you name it. We can even hold up The Constitution and present it as a fact.
We still believe Logic will prevail and we can use it.
But that may no longer be true.
The Truth may now be that truth and logic will NOT prevail, and what is more important are perceptions, thoughts, needs, desires, and feelings.
And worse...the enemies of this Republic (both foreign and domestic) may well know that it is no longer true, and that they can use this as an effective tool to make us spin our wheels and waste our time.
Agreed...and that is the crux.
When a ship has sustained battle damage, the first thing you must do is stop the flooding. If you don’t, fires and dead people don’t make any difference, the ship is going down.
So it is with this. We have a huge debt problem, never mind the cultural and political ones.
But if we cannot plug those holes below the waterline in our electoral process (Even as the enemies of Free and Fair elections work ceaselessly to create MORE and LASTING holes below the waterline to ENSURE we sink...
We are going to sink, our ship of state will descend beneath the waves, and debt, politics, and culture are going to go down with the ship.
Which is what they want.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.