I & I Editorial BoardThree of the big issues of the day have the liberal left scrambling to pretend that it’s not a group of outside-the-mainstream radicals: defunding police, critical race theory, and voter ID laws. There should be repercussions for such cravenness.
After spending the better part of the year talking up a “defund the police” agenda, Democrats are now trying to claim that it’s Republicans who want to strip the police of their resources.
Defund the Police: For more than a year, leading Democrats – up to and including President Joe Biden – have talked up the idea of cutting police budgets because local law enforcement is plagued by racism.
During his campaign, Biden was asked, “Do you believe there is systemic racism in law enforcement?”
“Absolutely,” Biden responded.
In another interview, Biden was asked, “Can we agree that we can redirect some of the funding” for the cops.
Biden said, “Yes, absolutely.”
His running mate and now Vice President Kamala Harris said that governments must “reexamine” where their funding is going.
Democrats didn’t just talk about defunding the police. Deep blue cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Austin, Portland, and others acted on it, slashing police budgets. The predictable result was an explosion in violent crime. Over the July 4 weekend alone, more than 180 people were shot to death. Not only that, but ambushes of police grew more than 90% this year.
So what’s the Democrats’ response? To claim that it’s Republicans who are defunding the police.
Here’s Biden senior aide Cedric Richmond on Fox News, saying “Republicans are very good at staying on talking points of who says defund the police. But the truth is, they defunded the police,” because they opposed Biden’s spendthrift “recovery” bill. White House Press Secretary Jan Psaki reinforced this, saying, “Some might say that the other party was for defunding the police.” Even the leftist FactCheck.org site called this “misleading.”
Critical Race Theory: Meanwhile, even as the left pushes the Marxist “critical race theory” into the nation’s schools, military and private sector, it’s denying what it’s doing. The Daily Signal’s Jarrett Stepman noted that:
On Sunday, NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ host Chuck Todd said that resistance to critical race theory was ‘manufactured,’ and one of his guests, Cornell Belcher, a Democratic Party strategist, said it was nothing more than a ‘tool … in the racial tribal bogeyman’s toolbox,’ concocted for electoral purposes.
Others on the left have said that critical race theory has been too broadly defined by opponents and legislatures that want to remove it from public institutions. It’s just an insignificant school issue, they insist: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Why is the left trying to gaslight America on this? Because, for one, an increasing number of parents are in open revolt over this noxious propaganda. As we noted in this space:
Local school boards already face growing parent revolts, possibly the start of a national movement, as Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo reports, noting that 58% of Americans in a recent YouGov survey oppose critical race theory.
Voter ID: Then there’s the issue of voter ID laws. Up until just days ago, Democrats were united in decrying voter ID laws as racist attempts to suppress minority voters.
Biden compared a Georgia law that included a voter ID requirement as “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.” Back in 2014, when he was vice president, Biden called voter ID laws “an attempt to repress minority voting masquerading as an attempt to end corruption.”
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris claimed that voter ID laws “targeted African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
Now, suddenly, they are all more accepting of the idea, if not openly endorsing it. But instead of admitting that their past opposition to this common-sense reform was a wrongheaded attempt at race-baiting, Democrats are pretending that they never opposed voter ID laws.
Stacey Abrams, the would-be Georgia governor, in the past had called voter ID laws “simply a redux of a failed system that is designed to both scare people out of voting and make it harder for those who are willing to push through, make it harder for them to vote.”
Now she claims that “No one has ever objected to having to prove who you are to vote. It’s been part of our nation’s history since the inception of voting” and that saying anything else is “one of the fallacies of Republican talking points that have been deeply disturbing.”
Why the sudden turnaround on this issue? Two reasons: Polls show widespread approval of voter ID laws, and the only chance Democrats have of getting their big bill to nationalize elections passed is to get voter-ID-supporting Sen. Joe Manchin on board.
Politicians will be politicians, of course. But if Trump, or any Republican for that matter, tried to so blatantly deceive the nation like this, we’d never hear the end of it.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
The other reason that Dumbs are backtracking on voter IDs is that Manchin will go along with their unConsitutional “Fork The People” bill if there is a voter ID clause appended to it.