The following are real excerpts from a CNN segment Friday night about the South Carolina Republican primary, which ultimately saw a handy Donald Trump victory.
Bakari Sellers, Democrat CNN political analyst: “Donald Trump is a racist who utilizes racism as a political currency. … He says these things to black voters, to their faces — the ones who are ignorant enough to be in that room — not talking to them. That’s what people miss. Donald Trump is not talking to black voters when he goes down these tropes. He’s actually talking to white voters and to his base to churn them up and build in a lot of resentment that we see.”
It’s not a particularly original argument that Democrats’ opponents are anti-black racists, even when the opponents are black (recent CNN headline: “The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism”). But there’s a new air to it, as surveys repeatedly show black voters souring on Biden and at least stating they’re interested in supporting Trump. Just as they did in 2016, prominent media commentators at CNN, MSNBC and the rest are stating WITHOUT EVIDENCE that Republican overtures to black voters, specifically from the Trump campaign, are in reality intended to beef up support from whites.
More from Sellers: “And when you see him (Trump) talking down to black folk in their face, there is a large swath of the American public that says, ‘I like the way that sounds.’ And that’s the currency that he uses.”
It’s notable that Sellers referred to black voters open to supporting Trump as “ignorant” and simultaneously berated the candidate for “talking down to black folk.” But more importantly, he offered nothing to back up his assertion that black voters are, by very nature of being black, only vulnerable to Trump’s campaign message if they’re helplessly uninformed.
Van Jones, another Democrat CNN commentator: “There is this weird nostalgia that is about, ‘Well, under Trump, you know, pre-Covid the economy was better, we got some criminal justice reform, and some of the stimulus support was welcome.’ So, what’s actually happening, though, is there is an online influence campaign — some of it I think is coming from Russia, China, and Iran — that is whipping up that conversation way unnaturally. … We have to talk about it more, an online influence campaign designed to depress and distress black voters and to split black voters.”
This is a microwaved serving of the media’s hysterical “foreign memes” conspiracy of 2016-2020 that claimed untold numbers of Americans were manipulated by foreign-generated social media posts intending to agitate and divide Americans. (God knows we’ve needed a nudge on that front!) This was supposedly done, I kid you not, by the proliferation of Facebook and Twitter posts that said things like, “History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late,” and, “Cops kill black kids. Are you sure that your son won’t be the next?”
Those aren’t exactly “pro-Trump” as we understand the concept, yet those are real examples of memes allegedly published on social media by accounts outside the United States. By the way, would someone in corporate media do me a favor and explain how those sentiments are anything different from what I’ve heard on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” or read in the op-ed pages of The New York Times over and over and over again for about a decade now?
As one Democrat activist told the Washington Post a few years ago on this very same subject matter, “Russians are not creating and invoking these feelings. These are real feelings, not Internet-created feelings.”
If you want a deeper, first-hand experience of what Van Jones is talking about, say a prayer and follow a few black-centric entertainment accounts on Instagram, like “The Shade Room.” Drop into their political posts. You’ll invariably come across comments by many black users who say they’re disappointed by Biden (often for failing to “cancel” their college debt), they’re switching to Trump in 2023, or that, by comparison, their lives were better four years ago. Those opinions can’t possibly be genuine if they’re coming from a black person, according to Van Jones’s theory.
Never mind that prominent black celebrities who have either come around to supporting Trump or expressed misgivings about supporting Joe Biden in the past include popular talk radio host Charlamagne “tha God,” rapper 50 Cent, and entrepreneurial sommelier Snoop Dogg. I don’t know about you, but that’s exactly who comes to mind when I think of Kremlin assets or agents of Iran.
In the same CNN segment, Sellers went on to fault Democrats for their failure in “messaging” Biden’s many “successes” for “people of color.” Then Van Jones heaped some blame on Republican governors for “shipping immigrants into blue cities” which he said “manufactured conflict between black and brown folks at the grassroots level.” Corporate media condescension to black voters isn’t new, but it’s taking an exciting turn.
