The perspective they have on - well, everything now - begs the question: Are they intentionally misleading folks or are they really that clueless? There is no third option.
If one were to believe the American Left - and unfortunately many people do - one would also have to believe that the ills of America are uniquely our own. If only we were like the rest of the world, all would be fine.
Most recently, the moral degenerates at the Democrat Convention blamed Trump for the 170,000 COVID-related (as opposed to COVID-caused?) deaths. The fact that they trot out New York’s feckless governor, he whose state has helmed a state with more death than any other, to call Trump a clueless virus responder should be proof enough of both their vapidity and their deceitfulness.
At any rate, what could we have done instead? To the best of my knowledge, they offered no alternative solutions at the convention. Certainly not send the dying eldery to nursing homes.
Stepping into the bigger picture, no honest person actually thinks America is perfect, with COVID or any other facet of society, culture, or politics. Far from it. Conservatives certainly don’t, and have thus constantly sought, and fought for, the betterment of both our philosophies and our commensurate actions in order to align to the founding principles of personal liberties and equal opportunities.
Among a long list of accomplishments, this pursuit of expanded justice and equality is why the Republican party became the party of abolition and emancipation; it’s why Reconstruction ended once racist Democrats regained control of Congress; it’s why Democrat congressmen voted against the 19th amendment and also why eight of the nine states that denied its ratification were led by Democrats; it’s why Republicans overwhelmingly voted for Civil Rights legislation against Democrat opposition.
And, today it’s why conservatives espouse a message of reliance on self and family, because after a reading of human history, even American history, how does anyone still think a government can and would do a better job taking care of you or improving your life other than yourself?
We aren’t perfect in America, but we certainly aren’t the worst, as the Left claims. The conversation should be focused on where we can do better, not how we just do everything horribly. It’s time to contextually reframe a few of the political battlegrounds.
Leftist Claim #1: America Has the Worst COVID Response
When it comes to COVID, we all want safe, effective, and efficient solutions. That should be obvious. The question becomes that if Democrats had held the Oval office, what would they have done differently than Trump? They mocked his Chinese travel ban at the onset of the spread and Fauci even advised against wearing masks for the first several weeks. Would Biden have ignored science and experts and not done those two things? Minnesota’s Tim Walz had quietly banned the dispensing of hydroxychloroquine for months, and governors in Nevada, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and Texas tried banning or limiting its use. This despite Minnesota Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar’s husband receiving it for treatment and Nevada’s Democrat governor openly mocking its effectiveness while covertly hoarding the medication for selective communities. Medical journals even retracted agenda-driven publications suggesting HCQ was not effective. Would Biden as president have promoted the cheap, safe, and seemingly effective drug? If not, what treatments - remember, there is no cure, only treatments - would he be offering instead?
I wrote a piece in July about the relationship between states adopting early mask mandates and the death rates several months later. The numbers are slightly dated but still hold up to current patterns. There was an odd relationship between mask wearing and subsequently higher incidents of COVID. Now, one does not necessarily cause the other, but at the very least masks did not statistically reduce the death rates. Wasn’t that the point? This coincides with evidence from the CDC that all studies previously demonstrated the general public use of masks has always been found to be ineffective. No matter, governors on power trips and the media blazed through that data.
How would Biden have handled the economic disaster wrought by mandated lockdowns? South Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation and does not need the bailout unemployment money offered through the federal government. They are led by a Republican (woman (!) - I thought we hated women) that never shut down. This, despite the DNC also blaming Trump for an economic crash that is a direct result of their scam-demic and their forced lockdown procedures. Is it not obvious this is all contrived?
Then there are the actual COVID numbers. Forgetting for a moment that the worst states to live in terms of death rates are all helmed by Democrats (it’s not even close), how do we compare to other countries? Disclaimer: These numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt; does anyone really think that America loses 1,000 people per day and the Chinese government reports not a single case in the same time? The origin country four times our size doesn’t report a death, let alone a case, and we are supposed to believe everyone is faithfully reporting?
That being said, numbers coming out of the UK, Belgium, and Sweden are going to be about as reliable as anywhere else. These countries are touted by Democrats for their universal healthcare and more socially liberal and responsible policies. How are they doing?
According to the latest Johns Hopkins tallies, each country has a higher death rate than the United States. Masking, healthcare access, and social responsibility (as opposed to our rugged American individualism like the display at Sturgis) don’t seem to have produced better outcomes. While the United States has a consistent death rate of around 52/100,000. Sweden is currently at 56, the UK at 62, and Belgium at 87.
If we are doing so poorly with COVID, can any Democrat make sense of these numbers? Not only that, but Italy disappeared from news after its tactical two-week media blitz for scaremongering. One must assume they figured it out. Perhaps unknown but not surprisingly, they are buried in COVID. An astounding case fatality rate of 14% (compared to the US rate of 3%) tops the list of countries and it still has a death rate of 58/100,000.
That being said, the path to those numbers is astonishingly different. Sweden has never instituted a lockdown, mask mandate, school closures, “non-essential” business closures, and as one of their doctors points out on his excellent blog, they might have achieved herd immunity and gotten over the hump. Contrast that with the Democrat- and media-driven lockdowns and economic closures here in America, and those similar death rates don’t look so similar anymore. We are still looking at cases, and will inevitably face more if and when the lockdowns end. Was it really the best course of action?
Leftist Claim #2: America Has Racism
Yes, there are racists in America. This is not a new problem in the course of human history. What do leftists think, that all races merrily cohabited the planet before 1776? At any rate, racism will never be fully eliminated, but for 99.9% of all cases involving race, the underlying issues relate more to values.
Case in point: Have you seen this video of a black woman running for office in Baltimore? She’s my new favorite politician. Have you seen this awful video of a white Antifa thugs beating a man senseless in Portland for no reason? According to Black Lives Matter, these thugs and I are like brothers because...white skin. Got it.
The loudest of many simultaneous America-Is-Racist choruses has to do with policing. The problem is that this ignores a fundamental reality. There are bad people in this world. Period. By that logic, then, there are bad people in the line of police work.
It doesn’t stop there, either. There are bad people teaching your kids. And not even bad as in harmful by teaching them Marxism and Social Justice Theory, just bad in the sense of ineffective and cruel to kids. There are bad doctors, lawyers, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, politicians (!), Americans, Vietnamese, Congolese, Tibetan, historical figures, modern-day figures, and so on and so forth. Do you see a trend? Might there be elements of “bad” people in all walks of life and throughout human history?
Humor me for a second, though. If some police are bad, are not the criminals - by definition - that they engage with all bad? Yes, we have “bad” police that might be on a power trip (or might just be frustrated with a two-hour long attempt at getting basic compliance), but the narrative has deceptively shifted away from the fact that every criminal is a morally defective person to begin with; otherwise, they wouldn’t be committing a crime. Does that count for anything?
Even accounting for the bad police, the numbers just don’t support the claim that our justice system is inherently racist. Study after study, even by leftist black professors at Harvard, refutes the charge that officers act in racially motivated or deadly ways. It is simply not true. It is tragic whenever it happens, but more whites are killed every year by police than blacks, whether armed or unarmed. Isn’t that proof alone of the system at work? Shouldn’t a racist system that allegedly targets blacks actually target more blacks?
The police data won’t catch on. Is there another argument to make? IN our world, because blackness is beautiful and whiteness is a stain, a simple comparison to the African continent should suffice. They must be free of racism, right, being mostly black and righteous?
According to Wikipedia, this is how racism manifests in the Congo:
“Ethnic pygmy populations in Central Africa suffer from racialized discrimination from Bantu peoples.[1] Pygmies and Bantus differ physically and genetically due to long lasting evolutionary separation until the Bantu expansion brought them back into close contact.[2] Pygmies have been targeted for slavery by Bantu populations continuing into the modern age. They are frequently ostracized from participation into the wider society in the various African countries that they live in and are seen as untouchables.[1] Racially-motivated attacks occur on Pygmies including rape and cannibalization.”
So...super racist. Also, can you imagine if white people raped and ate blacks in America? My goodness. The Congo is not alone in its maltreatment of its citizens; in the Ivory Coast, racism actually targets whites. Here’s what it says about this gem of a country that sponsors veritable black-on-white brutality:
“In 2004, the Young Patriots of Abidjan, a strongly nationalist organisation, rallied by the state media, plundered possessions of foreign nationals in Abidjan. Rapes and beatings of persons of European and Lebanese descent followed…”
This is not entirely removed from our own history. The KKK was essentially a government-sanctioned organization that committed horrible atrocities against blacks and the white communities that sympathized with them. But that was three or four generations ago; we are removed from the awful point in our history. If racism is so prevalent today, why does the left have to continually remind us of bad things from so long ago? Black Wall Street, Jim Crow, lynchings - these are all terrible episodes, but they aren’t happening now.
And in Mauritania, not only is racism embedded in society, it results in the continuation of enslavement, which was only just abolished but persists nonetheless. If America is awful for having slavery, how do the moral giants on the left view this failing nation, which still has slavery?
“Slavery in Mauritania persists despite its abolition in 1980 and mostly affects the descendants of black Africans abducted into slavery who now live in Mauritania as "black Moors" or haratin and who partially still serve the "white Moors", or bidhan, as slaves. The practice of slavery in Mauritania is most dominant within the traditional upper class of the Moors. For centuries, the haratin lower class, mostly poor black Africans living in rural areas, have been considered natural slaves by these Moors.”
Suffice to say, even if we acknowledge that America has not achieved the utopian and impossible ideal of racist-free attitudes, the reality is that our society performs a lot better than many other places. The listing of Congo, Ivory Coast, and Mauritania only reflect the first three entries in a lengthy page of racist practices in many African nations.
This is not to suggest that white society is better than black society, although I do not see our black American population clamoring to return to these places, rather it is used to illustrate the fact that all societies are grappling with elements of human nature. Namely, how do different people coexist harmoniously? Say what you will about deficiencies of coexistence in America, but we can’t compare America to a Utopia, Shangri-La, or Eden; we must compare it to everything else in reality. On that level, we look pretty good.
Leftist Claim #3: America’s Founding Was Rooted In Slavery
Yes, American whites owned black slaves. Black Americans also owned black slaves, and white Americans indentured white Europeans. Tobe sure, slavery was in the United States.
Guess where else it existed? Everywhere else and for all of human history.
How does someone reconcile the fact that slavery has existed unchallenged for thousands of years throughout the world whereas America had been in existence for just a few decades when it moved to abolish the practice. Think about it: For nearly five thousands years prior to the founding of America, societies built themselves up on the backs of slaves (of all races and backgrounds) and yet in under a century the entire paradigm shifted. This thanks is owed entirely to America and her Judeo-Christian centered Western Civilization allies like Britain.
Moreover, if America was only successful because of slaves, like the 1619 Project alleges, and everyone else had slaves, why didn't they achieve the same material and moral success that we have?
As was observed, many African nations would be lucky to evolve as morally and culturally as we have.
Now, slavery in America might generally have around notions of racial superiority, but that once again ignores a lot of context. If racism drove whites to owning blacks, then how does one account for blacks enslaving fellow blacks in Africa (or right here in America), or the Aztec and Inca enslaving other Indian tribes in their respective homelands? Or any other local tribe anywhere on the planet capturing and abusing similarly-raced neighbor tribes?
No one ever answers those questions.
Either way, we all agree slavery is an awful, man-made evil. It strips away a person’s dignity and humanity, and only results in torment, pain, and death. It is proof that mankind is not basically good.
There is also the destructive element in relation to all things connected to our slavery-rooted past. Monuments come down, buildings burn, school curriculum is revised. Where does it end? If destroying all remnants and memories of people and places is the requisite task of a forward-thinking society, nothing can remain.
America obviously has to burn. So too will Britain, for it colonizing and enslaving ways. The rest of Europe must as well. We clearly pointed out Africa had, and still has, ties to the heinous practice. A similar Wikipedia entry for Slavery in Asia details a trove of historical and recent enslavement. There were no Mayan, Aztec, or Inca empires without the use of forced labor.
Surely you’re aware of the modern-day evils perpetrated by China against its Uighers? Can you imagine if Americans transported millions of Muslim minorities to forced camps? Democrats cozy up to China, but this is exactly what they accused Trump of wanting to do with people here at some point. Apparently.
Do we burn down Machu Picchu? The Great Wall? The Pyramids? Slaves built them all.
If blacks in America are entitled to reparations from past harm, certainly my ancestry in Europe, which no doubt faced a marauding band of Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Franks, Celts, Vikings, or at another time were conquered by the Romans, entitles me to monetary recompense. Do Germany and Italy owe me anything? I look forward to that interest payment.
The next time someone points out America had slavery and is therefore evil or owes a great debt, just ask them what we should do with every other individual or society throughout history. Then, ask them where this emancipatory journey would presently be if America had never existed.
Then, shake your head at them for being so blind to reality.
Finally, thank your Creator that you were born in the United States of America, where we have moved past the awful conditions of human history and designed the most wealthy and morally evolved society ever witnessed on this planet.
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