It would be difficult to name a dirtier political trick than calling opponents ‘racist’ and publicly disclosing their names. Is this mere dress rehearsal for the 2020 US election, or something far worse?
Today in America, when a sizable segment of the population is suffering from the acute, long-term effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome, even the simple act of supporting a political candidate – especially if the candidate’s name happens to be Donald Trump – can make a person not only feel like a criminal, but treated like one as well. And that’s not mere hyperbole.
Consider the following. In the US, when sexual predators are released back into the general population after serving out their prison sentence, they are required to register themselves in a state data bank. This is no dating site. Its purpose is to inform Americans if a potentially dangerous individual will be residing in their neighborhood, possibly in the vicinity of their children. This is the sort of blacklist most Americans could probably agree with.
But what about a blacklist made up of American voters who have had their names and addresses dumped into the public realm for the ‘crime’ of donating money to the Trump campaign? When it is remembered that supporting political parties and candidates with cash is a democratic form of ‘free speech’, it sounds almost too incredible to imagine.
Yet that is exactly what happened this week when an obscure group that fashions itself as the Public Media Service Group, Inc. released the personal information of Trump donors across the country – complete with little red flags – in a shocking invasion of privacy. If there were a better way of triggering civil strife in the US, I personally cannot imagine it. But it gets worse.
What is particularly disturbing and deranged about this “mapping of recent Trump donors,” however, is that the now disabled website screamed ‘RACIST WATCH’ in large font at the top of the page, followed by the paranoid question: “Do your neighbors support a president that supports racism and hate speech?”
Aside from its embrace of the Orwellian act of snitching on neighbors and loved ones, it also takes it on faith that the US president is some kind of xenophobic megalomaniac hell-bent on driving all foreigners out of the country. Thus far, however, much of those media-baked claims that say ‘Trump is a racist’ derive from his campaign pledge to build a wall on the Mexican border. If that makes Trump a racist, then the overwhelming majority of state leaders around the world must also be categorized as such since most governments still consider it their responsibility to protect their national borders in the name of security. That is not racism; that is common sense.
The most important consideration here, however, is not Donald Trump, who has a vast security apparatus at his disposal to protect him wherever he goes. What about those outed Trump donors who have been tarred and feathered on a ‘Racist Watch’ website. What next? Will they be required to wear some kind of conspicuous insignia in public, much like the Jews were identified by yellow stars in Nazi-occupied Europe, to identify their ‘racist’ affiliation? Will Trump supporters be forced to knock on the doors of their neighbors, admitting with all the guilt they can muster that they donated money to the mogul of Manhattan? Pray tell, what kind of insanity has gripped God’s Country?
Such public blacklisting, aside from appearing as a scare tactic ahead of one of the most momentous presidential elections in recent history, places Trump donors at no small personal risk. Just ask Tucker Carlson, the Fox News conservative host. Late last year, Antifa, the left-wing, mask-wearing protest group known for gratuitous displays of unprovoked violence, showed up late one night outside Carlson’s family home, chanting “Tucker Carlson we will fight, we know where you sleep at night” and “racist scumbag leave town.”
These ‘progressive’ liberals, having cried ‘racist’ on so many occasions in the past, risk suffering the same fate as the little boy who cried wolf once too often. Just this week, for example, Democrats screamed ‘racism’ over a political poster that depicts the mayor of San Francisco as – perish the thought! – a wealthy elitist.
Also on rt.com Democrats cry racism over campaign poster showing black SF mayor smoking with stack of moneyThe poster, paid for by a Republican opponent, shows a cartoon caricature of Mayor London Breed in a red dress sitting with her high heels propped up on a desk. She is holding a stack of dollars in her left hand and a cigarette in the right. Such elitist cliches have been used myriad times in the past to portray white male power structures without any outcry over ‘racism’. Yet when the concept is applied to a minority black woman, the PC police are duly notified and a full-blown political crisis is declared. The message here is that minorities are beyond all reproach. Thankfully, a number of people took to social media to point out the double standards and hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, there is real irony in the liberal campaign to toss the ‘racist’ epitaph around with reckless abandon. In fact, if a group of enraged Liberals took up the ‘Racist Watch’ challenge and appeared at the homes of the blacklisted people, they might be very surprised to discover who lives at these addresses.
There is a chance they would come face-to-face with popular video bloggers Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, two African-Americans better known as ‘Diamond and Silk’, who have thrown their support behind Donald Trump. Or perhaps they would show up at the door of actor and comedian Terrence K. Williams, another African-American pro-Trump commentator who has left a mark on social media. And I would really hope, for their sake, that some misguided liberal protesters never have the misfortune of protesting against racism outside the house of Candace Owens, one of the most vocal African-American supporters of Trump, as well as one of the biggest critics of the Democratic Party today.
The lesson here is that while racism certainly exists in the United States, it does not appear to be anywhere near the five-alarm levels as the PC police would have us believe. The racist hysteria is being politically driven in an effort to portray Trump and his millions of supporters as sub-human xenophobes and ‘haters’. This is the way the liberals hope to steal the White House in 2020, by cheap fearmongering.
Fortunately, many Americans are ‘woke’ to the scam.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.