Motive Behind the Left’s Impeachment Attempts

I am not a fan of Tulsi Gabbard, generally speaking. However, I find her reaction to the release of the transcript to the call President Trump made to Ukrainian President Zelensky to be spot-on:

“I think when you step outside of the bubble here in Washington and you get to where most folks are … I think most people reading through that transcript are not going to find that extremely compelling cause to throw out a president that won an election in 2016.

“And instead what I think most people will see is, ‘Hey, this is another move by Democrats to get rid of Donald Trump,’ further deepening the already hyperpartisan divides that we have in this country.”

Ms. Gabbard, of course, is an extremely liberal congresswoman who referred to the president in the same interview as “corrupt” and “unfit to serve our country as president” She is also attempting to persuade Democratic voters to allow her to replace President Trump. It is unlikely she is politically motivated to defend Donald Trump.

Nor is Charlie Cook, publisher of [i] The Cook Political Report [/i], who tweeted “I don’t Tweet very much but reading transcript has moved me to comment. I was totally underwhelmed by the transcript. After the build-up, it was not much more inappropriate said than we hear from him in a typical week. This will not move malleable voters.”

I don’t Tweet very much but reading transcript has moved me to comment. I was totally underwhelmed by the transcript. After the build-up, it was not much more inappropriate said than we hear from him in a typical week. This will not move malleable voters.

— Charlie Cook (@CharlieCookDC) September 25, 2019

Yet, Democrats would have one believe that President Trump has committed an impeachable offense by asking President Zelensky for “a favor” by looking into possible corruption involving Hillary Clinton’s server and Joe Biden’s demand that Ukraine fire a prosecutor who was investigating Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

As Congresswoman Gabbard pointed out, it strains belief to think that most Americans would find anything President Trump has done in this regard as impeachable. Nor, I would add, does it seem credible to believe that every Democrat see anything here or in past impeachment attempts that rise to the level of “treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors”, despite what they say to the contrary.

The reason for my speculation is that these attempts to impeach the president have so far been nothing but a steady stream of BS.

There was, for example, an attempt to impeach President Trump for firing James Comey in May of 2017. However, only months earlier both Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer expressed a lack of confidence in Mr. Comey’s ability to continue to lead the FBI.

There was the attempt to impeach President Trump for obstructing the Mueller Report. This effort continued even after Robert Mueller testified before Congress that his investigation was not “curtailed, stopped, or hindered.” In other words, there was no obstruction.

There is this current attempt to impeach President Trump for pushing President Zelensky into investigating Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden although President Zelensky himself says he was not pushed into anything.

There was even an argument that the president, whose net worth is reportedly about $3B, should be impeached for violating the Emolument Clause and profiting from his office by having Vice-President Pence stayed at a Trump golf resort.

I do not take seriously the notion that so many Democrats — many of whom possess enviable academic and legal credentials, so they can’t all be considered dunces — actually ever believed they had a legitimate case for impeachment against President Trump any more so than they ever thought that Brett Kavanaugh was a serial rapist.

The reasons given most often for why Democrats continue to put forth charges that they themselves do not believe are that they want to appease their increasingly Stalinistic base who want socialism now at all costs, or that they want to disrupt Trump’s reelection efforts.

Both are true. As Representative Al Green, a Democrat, said, “I’m concerned if we don’t impeach this president, he will get reelected.”

But perhaps there is another motivating factor behind these efforts to impeach the president. It is likely, in my opinion, that these efforts are part of a larger pattern we are witnessing — to an increasingly alarming degree — an effort to intimidate political opposition.

Recently Debra Katz, who represented Dr. Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh debacle, stated:

“In the aftermath of these hearings, I believe that Christine’s testimony brought about more good than the harm misogynist Republicans caused by allowing Kavanaugh on the court. He will always have an asterisk next to his name. When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him, and that is important. It is important that we know, and that is part of what motivated Christine.”

We have also seen attempts to blacklist those in the entertainment industry for attending a Trump fundraiser, a conservative student was punched on a Berkley campus for “encouraging violence,’ and Facebook joining forces with Twitter and Pinterest in their campaign against pro-life group Live Action.

Not far from where I live, an 81-year old man was beaten in a supermarket for wearing a MAGA cap. MSNBC’s Chuck Todd declared that those who are “climate change deniers” will not be allowed to express their views on his show “Meet The Press.” And, various college groups are still voting to ban conservative speakers, conservative groups, and Chick-fil-A restaurants from campus.

One final example: Joaquin Castro, brother of Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro, recently tweeted the names and business addresses of Trump donors, for no other apparent reason other than to have these donors harassed or otherwise punished for not supporting the Progressive agenda.

I could list enough examples of the left’s assault (often physical assault) on conservatives to fill several more pages, but, hopefully, I’ve provided enough that the reader gets the gist.

There is a pattern to repress conservatism that goes beyond winning debates and winning elections. This pattern includes expelling conservatives from academia, entertainment, and certain social circles. At the very least it is a pattern to make Republican supporters feel wary about expressing their ideology, for this expression could easily lead to negative consequences for them.

This pattern reaches all the way to the top with the harassment of President Trump in the form of impeachment attempts, but it affects our lives as well.

— DK

Photo credit: Mike Fritcher on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC

MSDNCNN and the New Racism

In June of 2019 in Portland, a hostile white mob — calling itself Antifa — threateningly surrounded a man who is a person of color.

Unlike another incident allegedly involving a hostile white mob, in which a person of color claimed to be assaulted by the smile of a skinny 15-year old kid near the Lincoln Memorial, the gentleman in Portland (Andy Ngo) was assaulted with kicks, punches, and vegan vanilla milkshakes. So beaten was he that he required hospitalization for his injuries, which included brain bleed.

Yet while the Lincoln Memorial incident dominated social media for days with accusations of racism and white supremacy, the Portland incident barely elicited a whisper of outrage.

It may be a struggle for some to see why the Lincoln Memorial incident was deemed racist while the Portland incident was not. After all, both contained a similar key element: a white mob against a lone person of color.

Yet clearly the reactions to the incidents differed wildly. While a group of Catholic high school teens were so demonized that their school received hundreds of threats, the media sanitized Antifa. Newsweek columnist Tae Phoenix even wrote of Antifa, “I’ve met golden retrievers who scared me more.”

While Ngo’s plight is sickening, it is not unique. Many incidents against people of color occur yet oddly are not generally considered to be racist or racially motivated.

In Washington, D.C., for example, a Hispanic senator was chased out of a restaurant by a hostile white mob. An Asian author who occasionally posts some of the hate mail she receives included one that suggested she commit “hari-kari.” The one black member of the Supreme Court is regularly singled out by liberals for being “the absolute worst” and even for being “fat” and “lazy.”

Again, one has to wonder how can these things happen without being called “racist” at a time when MSDNCNN — the name I’ve given to this alliance between the Democratic Party and MSNBC, CNN, the NY Times, the Washington Post, and numerous other media outlets — froths at the mouth for weeks in moral outrage over the “racism” of President Trump calling Representative Elijah Cummings “a bully” or Don Lemon “dumb.”

The conclusion is inescapable.

Columnist Ramesh Ponnuru wrote, “Nearly everyone agrees that racism is evil. But liberals and conservatives have different thresholds for what constitutes it.”

This is not completely accurate. It is not that liberals and conservatives have a different threshold for racism but rather that they define it very differently.

To a conservative, racism is prejudice against or the hatred of another race, or the belief that one’s own race is superior to other races. To a liberal, racism is simply the expression of opposition to a progressive person of color by a white conservative.

Therefore, consistent with this definition, neither the attack against Andy Ngo, nor any of the other examples I listed above, involving Ted Cruz, Ying Ma, and Clarence Thomas, are racist because in each case none of the subjects are progressives.

Imagine a group of white conservatives — a group of Tea Partiers perhaps — chasing Kamala Harris out of a restaurant, or suggesting that Senator Hirono commit hari-kari. Imagine white conservatives assaulting a liberal Asian reporter the way Antifa assaulted Andy Ngo. Had that happened, the reaction would have been extremely different. It would have been loud, constant, and would have been discussed from dusk to dawn on cable television for months. We would have been called upon to reexamine our own soul as a nation. The reaction would have made the Mueller investigation seem like something mentioned in passing.

It is also interesting to note that when an African American conservative is attacked by a white liberal in a way that would outrage if the African American was progressive, the conservative will find no defense forthcoming from their fellow progressive African Americans. Black liberals, in my experience with them, put their party before their people, not just in terms of policy but in practice as well. And, they do it in a very shameful way.

When white congressman Steve Cohen suggested that African American pro-life activist Star Parker’s testimony before Congress ‘showed her ignorance,’ The Root, which claims to be “Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture,” did not defend this black woman. Instead, they wrote:

“People were shocked to hear him go after a black woman publicly like this, but here is the thing:

She is kinda ignorant, though.”

Allen West, a former congressman and possible candidate for Texas Republican Party Chair, and an African American, recently provided an example of how black liberals slavishly grin in support of white liberals who attack black conservatives on his blog, The Old School Patriot:

“I have shared with y’all my 2012 congressional reelection campaign experience with an ad run by my opponent that depicted me with a gold tooth punching white women. What was the response from the left . . . crickets. The NAACP Director of the Washington Bureau and SVP for Advocacy and Policy, Hillary O. Shelton, laughed on TV and said the ad had me dressed in a nice suit . . . butthole. Who are the “sellouts” again?”

Again, imagine the reaction if a white congressman spoke as rudely to a liberal black woman testifying before the House as Rep. Cohen did to Star Parker, or if a white Republican running against an African American Democrat ran an ad similar to the one that denigrated Allen West.

The left’s re-defining the word “racism” to suit their needs has had a significant impact on our politics.

According to a Quinnipiac poll, 51 percent of voters believe that President Trump is a racist. Quinnipiac also found that only 6 percent of black voters support him.

Trump’s support among African Americans deserves to be much higher for a variety of reasons, including his presiding over record low unemployment in the black community.

However, in an era in which MSDNCNN relentlessly hammers that such things like calling West Baltimore rat-infested, an accurate assessment that echoes the view previously expressed by many Democrats, including Baltimore’s own mayor, is somehow racist, then not only has the word been cheapened and redefined, but now is more clearly than ever a propaganda tool of the progressive left.

–DK

Photo credit: stevebott on VisualHunt / CC BY 2.0

Left’s War on People of Faith

Almost exactly one year ago today, January 18, 2018, NJ Senator Cory Booker used his position as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to force Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen to listen his “tears of rage” diatribe upon hearing Senator Durbin’s claim that President Trump described some nations like Haiti as “sh*tholes”.

So pleased was Senator Booker with his performance that he posted the video of his performance on Twitter with the words “When ignorance and bigotry are allied with power, it’s a dangerous force in our country. To not stand up to this; to be silent— is to be a part of the problem.”

The Democrats are indeed adept at not being silent when acts of bigotry target minorities. And they often do so without regard to whether these acts are real, imagined, or manufactured for partisan advantage.

However, when ‘the dangerous force of ignorance and bigotry’ rages not against people of color but against people of faith, Democrats often put aside their “tears of rage.” In fact, they are often more than “a part of the problem,” they are the problem itself.

Putting aside the false notion that President Trump calling Haiti a sh*thole is racist — Haiti is not a race, and one can express contempt for a nation such as Haiti, Russia, Venezuela, and North Korea without being racist against the people who live in that nation — one wonders why there would be “tears of rage” over an alleged diss of a Caribbean country when similar insults against other nations barely elicit a whisper of discontent.

For example, imagine if there was only one Black nation on Earth — let’s call it Wakanda — and that this nation was an important American ally, but there was a conservative movement to boycott and alienate this nation.

Imagine if President Trump walked out of a meeting with the president of Wakanda, forcing him to sit alone in a White House meeting room while President Trump had dinner with his family.

Imagine if the Wakandan president addressed Congress to plea against a deal that President Trump had engineered that would give an enemy nation a clear pathway to obtaining the weapons needed to bring about that destruction, and 56 Republicans refused to even listen.

Or imagine if President Trump and other prominent Republicans had an apparent friendly relationship with a rabid racist who leads crowds in chants of “Death to Wakanda!” and calls Wakandans “termites.”

One would think that if these scenarios were true President Trump and his fellow Republicans would be guilty of “ignorance and bigotry,” I’d imagine. One might even join Senator Booker in seeping “tears of rage.”

But didn’t President Obama walk out of a meeting with Israeli President Netanyahu? Didn’t 56 Democrats skip Netanyahu’s 2015 address to Congress against the Irani Deal? Haven’t President Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus, and other prominent Democrats embraced Louis Farrakhan?

Furthermore, isn’t there a BDS movement?

BDS — Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions — is a movement that calls for a boycott of Israel, those who do business with Israel, and even those who do business with those who do business with Israel. Purportedly it is designed to pressure Israel into better treatment of Palestinians, yet many see it as an anti-Semitic attack upon Israel to delegitimize it.

Given that there is ample evidence that Palestinians are treated relatively well by Israel, including the fact that the Palestinian population in Israel is rapidly increasing despite claims that Israel is committing genocide against them, and are certainly better treated than say Venezuelans are treated by Venezuela or Cubans are treated by Cuba, the latter point — that it is a sign of anti-Semitism — seems to hold. Yet, BDS is only concerned with the Jews, to put it bluntly.

However, BDS is becoming increasingly popular within Democratic party, one that is supported by new stars like Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, Andrew Gillum, Rashida Tlaib, Stacey Abrams, and Ilhan Omar.

T.his is primarily because the Democratic Socialists of America, which has been dominating Progressive politics, are themselves rabid BDS supporters.

And I’ll add that Congresswoman Tlaib confirmed the suspicion of many about BDS anti-Semitism when she tweeted that those who oppose a recent anti-BDS bill “forgot what country they represent.”

Given the history of American Jews being accused of being more loyal to Israel than the United States, this may be at minimum an example of what the Left tirelessly calls “a dogwhistle” to anti-Semites.

For more evidence of the anti-Semitism in the Progressive movement one need only witness the notoriety surrounding the Women’s March, whose most well-known leaders — Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour — are open supporters of Mr. Farrakhan and clearly hate Jews.

This account from Women’s March member Evvie Harmon of a conversation that involved Ms. Mallory, Ms. Perez and Vanessa Wrible, who is a fellow Women’s March member and is Jewish, is both disturbing and telling.

Ms. Harmon said:

“I suddenly realized that Tamika and Carmen were facing Vanessa [Wruble], who was sitting on a couch, and berating her—but it wasn’t about her being white. It was about her being Jewish. ‘Your people this, your people that.’ I was raised in the South and the language that was used is language that I’m very used to hearing in rural South Carolina. Just instead of against black people, against Jewish people. They even said to her ‘your people hold all the wealth.’ You could hear a pin drop. It was awful.”

Progressive anti-Semitism is not new. As Philip Spencer writes:

“This first became a serious problem on the left in the late 19th century, as antisemitism first became a political force in the modern world. Some on the left flirted with the response that there might be something progressive about antisemitism: that it was a kind of anti-capitalism, however crude.”

Nor is Progressive antisemitism unique to the United States. Part of Hugo Chavez’s campaign to be Venezuela’s president for life was an assault against Jews, who he called “descendants of those who crucified Jesus Christ.”

And, of course, there are some individuals on the right who are very likely bigots, such as the well-rebuked Congressman Steve King. (See here, here, and here).

However, it is unfortunate that our media rarely discuss bigotry from the Left, and do so primarily when they think they can use it as a hammer to bludgeon the right.

We witnessed such a bludgeoning on President Trump after Richard Bower’s killing of 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Numerous reports implied that Trump was responsible for this massacre.

These reports somehow ignored that President Trump has a Jewish daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren, and is arguably the most pro-Israel president in history. The revelation that Mr. Bowers himself hated President Trump because he felt that he was too friendly with the Jews, as well as for “being insufficiently supportive of the white supremacists of the deadly Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally and of the Proud Boys, a violent alt-right gang.”

The Progressive war on people of faith is also not limited to attacking Jews. This assertion can be supported by the saga of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop.

Mr. Philips famously won a religious liberty case when the Supreme Court acknowledged that he was within his rights to refuse to make a same-sex marriage cake due to his Christian beliefs.

Unfortunately this victory only inspired some to become obsessed with destroying him. In fact, almost as soon as this decision was announced, the Masterpiece Cakeshop was contacted by a lawyer-activist named Autumn Scardina who requested that Mr. Phillips sell him a custom designed cake to celebrate his ‘transition from a male to a female.’

David French of the National Review adds:

“Lest anyone wonder whether this request was made in good faith, consider that this same person apparently made a number of requests to Masterpiece Cakeshop. In September 2017, a caller asked Phillips to design a birthday cake for Satan that would feature an image of Satan smoking marijuana. The name “Scardina” appeared on the caller identification. A few days earlier, a person had emailed Jack asking for a cake with a similar theme — except featuring “an upside-down cross, under the head of Lucifer.” This same emailer reminded Phillips that “religion is a protected class.”

Masterpiece Cakeshop continued to be inundated with requests for lewd or Satanic cakes from Mr. Scardina, who either wanted to harass Mr. Phillips for his Christianity, or just really loves cakes shaped like sex toys and pentagrams. Only in the past few days has a federal judge allowed Mr. Phillips to sue the Colorado Civil Rights Commission which punished for refusing to make a trans-cake.

But the Democrat’s attack on Christians is not limited to pastries. It is endemic of the party’s core philosophy.

David Limbaugh writes https://www.timesexaminer.com/david-limbaugh/2937-the-democratic-party-s-christian-problem “Is its frequent disrespect for the God of the Bible, Christian home-schoolers and the constitutionally protected religious liberty of Christians indicative of something or just a matter of my imagination? How about Democrats’ hostility to voluntary prayer in public schools, their selective excising of Christian history from public school textbooks, their allergy to Christian-themed hymns in public schools or their dislike of Christmas displays in the public square? How about leftist Hollywood’s routine depiction of Christians as fanatical lunatics? Remember when the Democratic National Committee denounced God in three votes and took the word and concept of God out of the party platform at the 2012 convention?”

Archbishop Timothy Dolan adds this about the Democrats: “…[I]t saddens me, and weakens the democracy millions of Americans cherish, when the party that once embraced Catholics now slams the door on us.”

Even Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, adds to this her criticism of the Democrats for attacking the faith of judicial nominees, She writes in The Hill:

“Elected leaders engaging in religion-baiting are playing with fire. They are sacrificing the well-being, peace and harmony of our country to satisfy their own political ambitions for partisan political interests.”

Rep. Gabbard’s comments will be especially relevant if current rumors are true, and Justice Ginsburg retires within the next weeks, and the replacement nominated is Catholic conservative jurist Amy Coney Barrett.

While questioning Judge Barrett during her nomination to a seat on the 7th Circuit Court, Senator Feinstein said to her, “You are controversial. You have a long history of believing that your religious beliefs should prevail. … When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”

To Senator Feinstein, that Justice Barrett’s deep faith in the very Christian beliefs on which this country and its judicial system was largely founded makes her “controversial.” That Justice Barrett is a Person of Faith, that the Christian dogma lives loudly within her, makes her lesser qualified for the Circuit Court position for which she was nominated than a person of lesser or no faith – not just to Senator Feinstein but to a great number within the Progressive movement as well.

That view is a dangerous force in our country. To not stand up to this — to be silent— is to be a part of the problem.

— DK

Rep. Steve Scalise’s Attack: First Casualty of the Left’s Climate of Hate

I am stunned as I write this.

A sitting member of Congress, Rep. Steve Scalise, was shot this morning, based purely upon his political beliefs.

The shooter, James Hodgkinson, posted many anti-Trump rants on his social media feeds. And, it is reported that before unloading approximately 50 shots at a congressional baseball game, he asked if the group was comprised of Democrats or Republicans.

Let me be as blunt and clear as I know how to be:

Whereas the shooter pulled the trigger, and now must answer for his vile deeds before God — since he was shot on the scene and later succumbed to his injuries — he is not the only one to blame.

After a fair election representing the will of the people, we have seen nothing but a culture of hate spewed forth by the Left. Post after post after the election was filled with #NotMyPresident. Riots on Inauguration Day. Silly kitty-hatted women dressed as genitalia – many with kids in tow as political props with sayings far too precocious to have come from them – listening to “celebrities” talk bout blowing up the White House, and spouting ugly prose.

And, then, the piece de #RESISTANCE: Kathy Griffin’s “joke” holding the “severed head” of a sitting president she disagrees with.

Sure, many — even on her side of the aisle — panned the action. But many did not. Jerry Seinfeld didn’t “get what the big deal” was. Anderson Cooper hoped she “bounced back.”

Not long after, a play glorifying the assassination of President Trump came out. The director of which saw nothing wrong with the scene.

Here’s the irony: The folks who idealize gun control 1) ended up shooting up the joint; 2) were saved by gun-toting law enforcement, without whom – according to reports – we would have seen a massacre.

I am calling on every pink hat wearing, dyed in the wool Democrat who has ever said anything about this administration to take a page out of Nancy Pelosi’s playbook today, and denounce this tragedy.

Not only that, check yourself. Check your speech, your actions, your anger, your tone. Remember Hillary’s commercial with kids glued to a TV set watching Trump speeches, captioned “they’re watching you?” Well, they are. We all are.

I co-founded African-American Conservatives based on political dissent. I didn’t dress up as a body part. I didn’t scream “NOT MY PRESIDENT!”

I disagreed with just about everything the previous administration did. For eight whole years. But, never once did I say, “not my president.” I was proud of the historicity of the moment. That a bi-racial man – bi-racial just like me – was elected to the highest office in this nation.

I have ranted about the policies of that administration on these pages and on our radio show. But never once did I say Mr. Obama was “not my president.” In fact, I prayed for him.

I watched him advocate for Planned Parenthood, an organization founded to “eradicate human weeds” by a eugenicist woman who spoke before the Ladies Auxiliary of the KKK, Margaret Sanger. An organization that has achieved the milestone of seeing more Black babies aborted than born alive in New York City. An organization that has spawned a cultural genocide in the Black community. An organization that saw its core mission realized, because in order to survive as a race, Black America needs a 2.1% fertility replacement rate, and we are at 1.8%.

Yet, I denounced every effigy of him – unlike the Left who put up “Hitlerian” effigies of both presidents Bush 43 and Trump – every put down of his children – unlike the left who constantly attacked Bristol Palin – and every racial epithet I ever heard of him.

I was taught that regardless of who sits in the chair, you honor the office. Yet, we’ve seen sports teams “boycott” White House invitations (and rumors of boycotts are circulating at this moment). What an honor to be invited to the White House. As a brown person, to be invited to come in through the front door of our nation’s symbol of freedom and power?

I implore any and every one reading this: Check yourself.

Slow your roll and regard your actions. If “love trumps hate,” folks are not doing a very good job of this. Where is loving your “enemy?”

All this vitriol spewed is contributing to climate change all right: the political climate that has become so frosty, a man shot up a baseball field of politicians this morning. That’s not love. The shooter “persisted” all right. But he did not prevail.

If you remember the old Smokey the Bear commercial, Smokey told us, “only YOU can prevent forest fires!” Well, the Bible tells us that “the tongue is a world of fire (James 3:6).” Proverbs 6:27 asks, “Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?”

Don’t be that guy. Be love. “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” as Ghandi encouraged. Dr. King told us, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only love can do that.” If you have contributed to the culture of hate, use this opportunity to take stock “and make that change, sha’mon.” (Michael Jackson, Man in the Mirror).

Our prayers for a speedy recovery for Rep. Scalise.

— Marie Stroughter

** As I write this news is emerging about another shooting, in a San Francisco UPS facility. Motive is unknown, but prayers are requested.

Mediocre Negroes

There are likely many who, if told that an award winning Black female singer was inundated with death threats and racist insults until she was finally forced to decline an invitation to perform at a presidential inaugural ball, would assume the story was from a century or so ago, and that her tormentors would be the KKK.

Similarly, if one was told that a group of African Americans — including Jim Brown, football great and long-time advocate for African American civil rights — would be called “a bunch of mediocre Negros” on national television for meeting with a president-elect to discuss ways to help inner-city Blacks, it would understandable to assume such racial vitriol would be directed to people meeting with Barack Obama in late 2008.

One may not easily assume that the year would be the current one, and the spewers of this vile speech would be Black themselves. Yet here we are, in 2017, listening to Grammy and Tony award winning singer Jennifer Holliday, speaking to The View about the backlash from her initial consideration to perform at Trump’s inauguration:

“I was receiving death threats from Black people, being called the N-word from Black people. They were saying they were going to kill me . . . At first I said, ‘Are these White people just messing with me?’ I would push the button to see who was calling me, cause your face is there, you could look at their thing or whatever, I’m going, ‘Oh my God, these are Black people calling me this.’”

It should be noted that most of these attacked for meeting with Trump, or who have asked to sing at his inauguration, are not Trump supporters. Jim Brown, for example, said on Fox News,”I was for Hillary, so I’m one of those that Mr. Trump defeated — but he is the president-elect of the United States.”

Therefore, Mr. Trump’s meeting with Jim Brown, Martin Luther King III, Steve Harvey and others who did not support his candidacy, to discuss such issues as inner city poverty and voting rights, would seem to be laudable to anyone eager to see these issues addressed by the next White House, as well as those eager to see Trump be more politically and racially inclusive. So why then did these meetings offend so many, including many Black Progressives?

Professor Michael Eric Dyson argues that the problem is that Trump did not reach out to ‘the right bunch of Negroes,’ so to speak:

“Steve Harvey is not the point man for discussing policy in black America. I’m saying that there are many people who are practicing that, who are dealing with that every day, who have strategic advantages because they’ve been thinking about this: Steve Harvey is the attempt by Donald Trump to avoid with some serious weight and theological and theoretical and sociological analysis about what’s going on in the community.”

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro however rebutted Professor Dyson’s remark by stating:

“I don’t think it’s intellectually honest for Professor Dyson to be talking about how they were just wanting someone with more expertise, because I really doubt if Donald Trump had invited Thomas Sowell, for example, or Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal to talk about housing policy they would have been supremely happy either.”

“What this really is about is that there’s a cadre of people on the left who get very insulted any time a Republican reaches out to a prominent Black person who doesn’t immediately slap that hand away and say, “Listen, you guys are the bad guys,” because too many folks on the left like to racially polarize in order to make hay politically and that is really quite terrible.”

I am more skeptical than even Mr. Shapiro, and I find it unlikely that even a meeting with Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the founding members of Black Lives Matters would have been satisfying to many of Mr. Trump’s critics as well.

Having a president willing to be inclusive to those racially and politically different seems to be less important to many than the ability to make the argument that the president is not inclusive to either group, as are the potential benefits to the country and to the African American community of such a president.

— DK