By Roger L. Simon
One of the true glimmers of hope in these gloomy times is the spontaneous pro-Donald Trump movement among blacks. We don’t know how big it is, but it’s there and it’s growing.
Watching social media videos of working-class blacks cheering in support of former President Trump and his motorcade en route to and from the 45th president turning himself in at a Georgia jail, makes you just want to stand up and applaud.
Gateway Pundit has various examples, including this telling tweet from Antoine Tucker: “@realDonaldTrump just reached the point where the Hood just like [expletive] the Government Bring Back Trump so we can feed our families and not take our money to feed other ppl families.”
Most blacks aren’t so keen on gender studies for 7-year-olds either. They have more important things to deal with—like real life.
And they recognize a two-tiered justice system as well as anybody. They have seen it, as the saying goes, “up close and personal.”
It’s obvious that every single one of us should do our absolute best to cheer these people on. They are our brothers and sisters and America’s hope to save our republic.
That made me think of some other things, including how badly the Republican National Committee dropped the ball by leaving Larry Elder off the debate stage in Milwaukee.
Larry is suing and I’ll get back to that in a moment, but first, I’d like to tell a personal anecdote I have told before, but from the perspective of our time.
Around 2003, when I had just started blogging, I received an email from someone named Michael Berman. I see you have moved from left to right (the subject of many of my blogs), he wrote in essence. I have done similar and would like to take you to lunch to discuss.
I hadn’t heard of the man, so I looked him up. To my astonishment, he was the brother of Rep. Howard Berman—the very liberal congressman from very liberal West Los Angeles, called the “Congressman from Hollywood” because he was relied upon by the studios to keep their tax incentives in place. More surprisingly, Michael was Howard’s chief political strategist, as he was, at least partially, for Sen. John Tunney, Gov. Jerry Brown, and a whole host of the biggest California Democratic Party players of the time.
This person was a conservative?
Naturally curious, I had lunch.
Michael Berman was a chain smoker, so we were sitting outside when he stated his observation that 9/11 was apparently my reason for changing sides. It was more than that, but I nodded because I was anxious to hear from him.
He averred that he had changed his political views many years before me. I asked him then why he was doing what he was doing, and he shrugged—it was the family business. (This was my first lesson in the hypocrisy of American politics. I was to have many more.)
Then, I asked him what motivated his change.
“What the Democratic Party did to black people,” he said. “I couldn’t stomach it anymore.”
I knew immediately what he meant.
We were sitting at a café on the Sunset Strip and over his shoulder, spread out below us for miles, practically all the way to LAX, was South Central Los Angeles, the home of black Los Angeles and also, sadly, a prime location for mayhem and blight since before the Watts Riots, and the Rodney King riots, and on and on.
Never had it changed in the 30-some years I had lived in L.A., despite liberal promise after liberal promise after liberal promise, many from the exact same people who had promised before.
This was “virtue signaling” long before we knew the term. It was as empty then as it is now.
But it was worse than that. I, and everyone else paying honest attention, had watched as the black family—the women incentivized to marry the state instead of husbands via the public doles from Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”—went from fathers in roughly three-quarters of homes to now something like one-quarter.
This was at once a crime, perpetrated by people who thought they were doing good or told themselves as much, and a tragedy. When would it end?
This was the warning message that I heard over and over on the radio early on with extraordinary clarity from one Larry Elder, known as “The Sage of South Central.” He brought the term “victimology” into our lives, helping us learn how pervasive and self-destructive playing the victim was, not just for blacks, but for everyone.
Later, I’m happy to say, he became a friend.
And he’s still repeating that same message, with, if anything, more clarity. Some things are so important you have to do them until something changes.
As most of us know, Mr. Elder made a failed attempt to unseat that master of “virtue signaling,” Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.
Undeterred, Larry continued on to throw his proverbial hat in the ring for the presidency. My first reaction was frustration. Why would a man I admired so much waste his time on such a quixotic adventure?
But given how things have transpired, I have changed my mind and wish him luck in his suit. He was squeezed off the debate stage via a technicality that was hard to follow, let alone understand. (The same may be true for businessman Perry Johnson, but I am less familiar with the details.)
And yet Mr. Elder had far more to offer the country, to share with the voting public, than most of the participants, especially considering what seems to be happening in the streets of Atlanta and most probably elsewhere.
As I mentioned at the start, it appears significant numbers of black people are at long last starting to reject their serfdom to the Democratic Party.
They should be made aware, and many already very much are aware, of what we could call the coup de grâce in the Democrats’ war on the black working class—the open border.
Kari Lake in Arizona tells us it is even welded open in parts (think about that!).
One, perhaps the best, way to understand this absurd open border that is destroying our republic is that Democrats, sensing what might be happening to their once-reliable American black constituency, have thrown open the country, looking for replacements.
What could be more racist than that?
