Whoever posted a video on President Trump’s social media containing a racist animation of the Obamas as apes committed an own goal that overshadowed what otherwise would have been a great week for the administration.
It shouldn’t have needed the GOP’s only black senator, Tim Scott, to decry the clip as racist for the post to be deleted and an apology issued by the White House.
The one-minute video reposted late Thursday night on Trump’s Truth Social account was about voter fraud in the 2020 election, one of the president’s favorite subjects. At the end, the video flashed for a split second to a clip of the Obamas from an old “Lion King” meme depicting Democrats as animals, and Trump as a lion.
It was obviously a mistake. Trump says he never watched the video through to the end, and the White House says a “staffer erroneously made the post.”
It certainly doesn’t warrant the breathless media coverage it’s received all weekend.
Dumbed down
The New York Times’ rapid response squad went into overdrive, shoehorning the outrage into its silly new “Autocracy Index” measuring how close Trump is to turning the country into Nazi Germany.
“What motivates Trump? The answer is simple: racism,” one opinionista asserted.
The storm in a teacup helps the resistance media maintain the fiction that Republicans, especially the MAGA variety, are irredeemably racist, while Democrats are paragons of virtue when it comes to defending minorities.
The truth is the very opposite.
You can see the inherent racism — or is it classism — on the Democrat side most acutely in their opposition to voter ID in the SAVE America Act, which is up for a vote in the House this week.
The Trump-backed legislation will require proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot.
Democrats have gone ballistic in their desperation to stop it.
They call it a “racist GOP voter suppression bill,” “Jim Crow 2.0” and “segregation-era tactics used to disenfranchise black voters in the South,” according to Chuck Schumer, the most senior Democrat in the Senate.
“Why don’t the Democrats want voter ID?” the president asked NBC in his Super Bowl halftime interview Sunday. “Because they want to cheat in elections.”
That’s it in a nutshell, and it’s why Democrat leaders from Schumer to Kamala Harris and Kathy Hochul have to resort to absurd theories to justify their opposition.
They want us to believe that minority voters — and women — are somehow so dumb and incompetent that they don’t know how to procure identification to carry out a basic civil duty. This mythical American is so unmoored from normal society that they can’t find a DMV and don’t know how to access the internet.
“People have to understand that when we’re talking about voter ID laws,” Harris memorably babbled. “In some people’s mind, that means you’re going to have to Xerox or photocopy your ID to send it in to prove who you are. Well, there are a whole lot of people, especially people who live in rural communities, who don’t — there’s no Kinkos, there’s no OfficeMax near them.”
Hochul once went so far as to say black children in The Bronx do not know the word “computer.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin thinks women are also too stupid to get an ID, saying the SAVE act “might violate the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote because you’ve got to show that all of your different IDs match so if you are a woman that’s gotten married and you’ve changed your name to your husband’s name . . . now your current name is different.”
Tale of two IDs
It’s laughable. Expecting people to prove they are American citizens before they register to vote is the bare minimum in election security. Democrats have never explained why they encouraged all those illegal migrants under Biden to register to vote when they got driver’s licenses. (The licenses are another story).
The only conceivable reason to register ineligible voters is to harvest their fraudulent votes, something Democrats assure us never happens, even while it does.
An equally important safeguard against fraudulent voting is requiring people to present ID at the ballot box. But Democrats pretend that’s just too hard for their helpless voters.
A classic vox pop by New York “guerilla journalist” Ami Horowitz, which resurfaced on X last week, illuminates how these patronizing attitudes of white liberals compare to the reality for black voters in Harlem.
The liberals quizzed on the UC Berkeley campus mindlessly echo Democrat talking points. They tell Horowitz voter ID laws are “racist,” “a way to perpetuate racism”; “minority voters are less likely to have the kinds of IDs . . . required:; “These type of people don’t live in areas with easy access to DMVs”; “You have to have access to the internet [and] be able to pay an internet service provider”; “[minorities] don’t have the knowledge of how it works”; “a lot of people have smart phones but might not have data”; “They’re not informed.”
Horowitz then went to East Harlem and asked black people on the street how they felt about the comments.
The response was bafflement, amusement and a little umbrage. All of them had ID and knew where the closest DMV was on 125th Street. They described the liberal comments as “very, very ignorant” and “a little racist,” and none of them had a problem with showing ID to vote.
“Why would they think we don’t have ID?”
“I have ID and my friends have their ID. We know what we need to carry around.”
“Everyone that I know have ID. That’s one of the things you need to walk around in New York with: ID.”
“Is this a trick Candid Camera question?”
“No access to the internet! That’s just stupidity, honestly.”
“Everyone has access to the internet. Even a little kid can figure out how to work the internet.”
“I have unlimited data. I use my phone as a hotspot.”
Low expectations
This soft bigotry of low expectations among Democrats accords with a 2019 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that found liberals dumb down their language and present as less competent when speaking to black audiences, while conservatives don’t change the way they speak.
“This possibly unintentional but ultimately patronizing competence-downshift suggests that well-intentioned liberal Whites may draw on low-status/competence stereotypes to affiliate with minorities.”
It suits Democrats to perpetuate ugly racist stereotypes to avoid accountability from the electorate.
They cover up by inventing fanciful stories portraying Republicans as racists and white supremacists — like the Jussie Smollett hoax, the “very fine people” lie they still tell about Trump, and their entire Jan. 6 narrative. It’s a smokescreen to disguise the guilt of the original pro-slavery party.
The real reason Democrats foment racial division is as a divide-and-conquer strategy to seize political power — and keep it forever.
It’s about time we stop falling for their hoaxes.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
