Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, whose politics are, er, flexible, has dropped out of the presidential sweepstakes, and not a moment too soon. The highest she ever reached in the polls was 3 percent—and it was downhill from there. Her politics were so “flexible” she didn’t get traction even with women voters, who were her primary target. She was a giant hypocrite among hypocrites. And she played the race card shamelessly.
She was asked by a reporter what she would “do for Baltimore and other cities that need help.” It’s too bad her interlocutor didn’t list the other cities that “need help.” It’s a roster of places that have been governed, mostly for decades, by liberal Democrats. The moderator’s question was oh-so-trendy because President Trump had just tweeted out his message that Baltimore is a Hell-hole, and that its congressman—for the last 23 years!—Elijah Cummings (who happens to be black), is partly to blame.
During a tour of Baltimore last year, the city’s mayor, Catherine Pugh (no white supremacist she), described the situation there in language rather more graphic and startling than anything Trump has ever said: “What the h-ll? We should just take all this sh-t down. … Whoa, you can smell the rats. … Whew, J-sus. … Oh, my G-d, you can smell the dead animals.”
When a couple of years ago Trump described some African countries as Hell-holes (the transcript’s a bit fuzzy) he was gang-banged by the usual posturing hypocrites, not one of whom was known for vacationing in said Hell-holes, nor probably in Baltimore either. Oh, my God, you can smell the hypocrisy.
But Gillibrand wasn’t about to take on the situation in Baltimore. She pivoted to the Democrats’ post-Russia-collusion campaign hope: white supremacy. So in answer to the question, what would you “do for Baltimore and other cities that need help” she replied, “I can talk to those white women in the suburbs that voted for Trump and explain to them what white privilege actually is.”
Come again? Is she hearing impaired? No, she’s just doing what comes naturally: playing the race card.
“When their son is walking down the street …”—whoa! Whose son, exactly? Their son? In her scenario, Gillibrand is talking to a bunch of white women (“those white women in the suburbs”): how can a plurality of white women have “a” son? One son between them? Between all of them? Or just some of them? Even the pointy-headed professors at the Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Stanford Center for the Study of Bizarre and Quite-Unbelievable Sexual Antics and Practices haven’t produced a male baby from a group of women, not of any color.
Gillibrand means, “When their sons are walking down the street ….” Is that too technical for a girl from upstate New York to master (snowflake alert: use of word “master” may channel unpleasant feelings of male dominance)? Probably not, and if she can’t manage a sentence as simple as that one, how would she ever have been able to manage the nuclear codes?
“When their son is walking down the street with a bag of M&Ms in his pocket, wearing a hoodie, his whiteness is what protects him” from being shot, said Gillibrand.
How to play the race card! Gillibrand’s half right, but wholly wrong. It’s their boys’ white skin color that may protect them, but it has nothing to do with privilege. It has to do with the odds, odds that almost everyone knows: it’s more likely that a non-white boy in a hoodie is a “problem” than a white boy in a hoodie.
One person who knows that is Jesse Jackson. That’s why he said, famously: “There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
Why did Jackson feel relieved, Sen. Gillibrand?
Jackson knew the numbers as does almost everyone else. According to a study by the Vera Institute of Justice, black people are 3.6 times more likely to be incarcerated than white people, down from 6 times in 1996. Does Gillibrand know that young black men commit homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic young men combined? This means that, however unfair it may be to assume that a black male is criminally inclined, it is not entirely irrational.
As interesting, or perhaps more interesting, black adults in the United States consistently express more concern about crime than white adults. Does Sen. Gillibrand have any clue why? Could it be that most black crime is committed on black people, for whom crime prevention is therefore exceedingly important?
Black boys tend to be a problem, but it really isn’t entirely their fault. Most of them grow up in broken “families”: the black illegitimacy rate is 77 percent. That’s the real problem, in part a legacy of the sexual sixties.
Illegitimacy’s a problem Sen. Gillibrand and the surviving ultra-permissive contestants for the Democratic nomination don’t dare discuss. They’d rather play the race card and blame all societal ills on whites, and white supremacy, and white supremacists, and Donald Trump. And you. And me.
Oh, my G-d, you can smell the hypocrisy.
This article has been updated.
