"He spoke in generalities that everyone found agreeable at first and meaningless upon reflection." That is one summary of Democrat icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speaking style.
Last week's Democratic National Convention shows how little Democrats have changed — a beautiful outer shell with nothing inside. Professions of equality, justice, compassion, and empathy are precisely the types of slogans many of us find initially agreeable but too vague and empty to warrant additional thought. The only difference is that today's Democrats bring a parade of celebrities to play the part of aesthetically pleasing decorations on the outer walls of their empty shell.
Democrats have built their brand on proclamations of benevolence. They've successfully branded themselves to many Americans as the party who cares about others, the tolerant people, the non-racist party, and the party for good-hearted people who want us all to get along. This brand image was mostly built on the backs of tie-dye-shirted, pacifist 1960s hippies. Educators romanticized the sit-ins and protests for decades, which calcified the left as the brand of non-violence. After all, the pacifist hippie is a much better brand spokesman than the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground, who routinely committed terrorist attacks in the 1960s.
To be fair to Democrats, they have no choice but to be disingenuous. They are beholden to a brand image that doesn't accurately depict who they are. For decades, the left's monopoly on mass communication systems concealed its true character. Today, ubiquitous camera phones and social media have made leftists' hate and violence impossible to hide. Their only option is pretending to align with the existing Democrat brand and hoping we forget the last ten years.
Democrats approve of burning cities, mass riots, and hundreds of beatings for those willing to wear Trump-branded clothing. Surveys show that nearly half of leftists won't even be friends with Trump-supporters. There are also countless examples of Trump-supporters blacklisted for incorrect political viewpoints. None of this is congruent with a kind, tolerant, peaceful brand. Perhaps the pinnacle of the left's false brand image happened at a Minnesota high school when students violently beat another student for carrying a Trump flag during a protest — against gun violence.
It's hard for someone to be likable when any level of disagreement is anathema to him. The same applies to the Democrat brand. Hollywood has resorted to rewriting existing superheroes to be more woke because it can't create woke heroes. That's because there is nothing admirable about wokeness. Children don't aspire to be perpetual complainers who thrive on destroying people for typos . There is nothing likable about paranoid malcontents, who see racism and Russian assets everywhere they look. Nobody wants to be a leftist because it sounds miserable, and multiple polls prove that Democrats are less happy than Republicans. Democrats can create superheroes — just not in their own image, because there is nothing honorable or likeable about the left. Its brand is dead.
The Democrats' brand has collapsed beyond repair and they know it. The current strategy to prevent the flock from fleeing the pasture is not preserving their brand, but branding the alternative option as so deplorable that it's beneath consideration. The only way to cover up the noxious fumes of leftism is to double down on the negative branding of Republicans as a party of hate.
"Love Trumps Hate," "Make America Hate Again," "Hate Has No Home Here" — these are merely a few of the slogans attempting to link hate to the conservative brand. Hate speech, hate crimes, hate groups — everything is "hate."
The dominance of the Democrat brand throughout mass media, education, and American culture successfully branded the left as the default way to vote — especially for young people. But Democrat branding efforts are most effective when they're the only show in town. For years, the left has bullied Republicans to preserve its brand monopoly.
If conservatives are scared to share their political beliefs, it makes those flamboyant about their left-wing politics seem like the morally superior choice. If Republicans were morally superior, why would they hide their views? Threats , intimidation , and doxxing are the primary reasons for the silence, and this bullying has prevented Republicans from taking pride in their brand.
The real cause for the vitriol toward Trump-supporters is that this new Republican pride is symbolic of the left's brand decline. With every MAGA hat is the realization of the left's intimidation and propaganda not working as effectively as they once did. The rage that follows is a panicked leftist struggling to understand why the left's efforts aren't working. Leftists have inundated Americans with leftism at every turn but can't understand why some people still don't convert. Every sighting of a MAGA hat is a reminder that the Democrats' brand is fading fast.
The only solution is to take the conservative brand down to their level and regain the advantage of the default vote. Their desperation is obvious when they compare Donald Trump to Democrat segregationists like George Wallace, often incorrectly labeling Wallace as a Republican to strengthen the lie. It no longer matters if lies, censorship, and cancel culture further damage the Democrat brand — their brand has already collapsed. Efforts must focus solely on damaging the conservative brand. Besides, if they win one more election, they won't need to rely on branding anymore.
A Democrat sweep in November will provide amnesty to 20+ million illegal aliens, plus another five to ten million immigrants imported over the next four years through our new open borders policy. These new American citizens will be bribed with our tax dollars to vote away our rights. A Somalian immigrant isn't going to turn down a monthly paycheck to preserve your Second Amendment rights. Antifa will help draft public policy; they'll abolish the Electoral College and pack the SCOTUS with leftists. That's not hyperbole, either — they are open about all of this. Under such circumstances, it will be difficult for Republicans to win an election anytime soon.
They know how close they are to reaching their goals — which is why the Democrats no longer even try to defend their brand. Democrats have sacrificed their brand to win in 2020 without any contingency plan. Their lust for power has blinded them to the consequences of destroying their brand in a losing effort.
When Trump wins in November, the death of their brand will finally sink in.
Bode Lang is a conservative blogger who produces conservative videos on YouTube. You can find him at https://www.youtube.com/c/Bodelang .
Black-Only Student Housing on NYU Campus? Welcome to racial self-segregation in the age of post-oppression.
Fri Aug 28, 2020
In yet another gesture of shameful appeasement to racist demands by black students for yet more racial self-segregation in the Age of Post-Oppression, New York University recently opened negotiations with students to create black resident floors on campus next year. A “themed engagement floor” for black students is being advanced by a group called “Black Violets NYU .” The group has complained that the overwhelming presence of white students has made it difficult for black students "to connect." Black Violets has also called for more black professors in its politics department, and for the creation of a black student lounge on campus.
In June of this year, students at Rice University had demanded that the University fund a “non-residential Black House” on campus. They also wanted a statue of the university’s founder removed. Other demands included that new students’ requests for black roommates be met during orientation weeks. This demand is clearly at odds with federal civil rights laws. Other demands included that course descriptions have tags indicating what race and ethnic groups are involved, since several course titles did not make it clear if diverse perspectives were offered in their course materials.
We must jog our memories and remember that in June, 2017 Harvard University held separate commencement ceremonies for black graduate students. One hundred and twenty students attended the third LatinX commencement ceremony replete with Latin music. Emory University and Henry College held diversity and inclusion year-end ceremonies. The University of Delaware joined a growing list with “Lavender” graduations.
There is no doubt that by the time this article is published there will be a multiplicity of schools meeting mostly new black students' demands for special black student lounges, all-black dorms, black seating spaces in cafeterias, and more spaces such as we witnessed at Evergreen University -- where white people are absent for days so black students can have a time on campus to feel special as black people. What next? All black libraries with only black authors, black gyms, black professors teaching only black students to avoid the racial trauma of being taught by a white instructor? If you think this is hyperbolic, observe that one of the demands made by the black students at Rice University is that the school hire more black counselors and therapists, and that they be trained in how to handle racial trauma.
I believe some thoughtful analysis is required here, especially as I have been a professor in the academy now for almost 24 years. I have taught at two Ivy League Universities, and have taught poor kids from the cornfields of Indiana, and poverty-stricken black kids from East St. Louis.
To begin, let’s be clear that no student at any elite university in this country, whether he or she be black, queer or international, is marginalized. Also, can anyone imagine what life will be like for a black student with a degree from an elite university like NYU? One simple word: fabulous. They’ll probably never have to apply for a job; they’ll be recruited midway through their senior year, long before any white student has even completed his or her final exam. Such students are catered to, pampered with high-end scholarships, treated like royalty with their every need anticipated, and every perceived slight they might feel anticipated and solved long before it might have arisen in their consciousness. Progressive American universities are the least racist to these radical left-wing students. Their peers and the various administrative bodies who run the universities are likely to prostrate themselves like obsequious Babbitts before them; and not just in meeting their tyrannical demands for exceptional treatment, but in feeling inordinate guilt that such students report feeling uneasy about their place in the universities.
So, what is this demand for racial segregation all about? To begin with, it is a disgraceful exercise in racist reactionary politics and an egregious display of misanthropic behavior. At the heart of it is not just the practice of the Big Lie—if ever there was one—that they are victims, but a preternatural conmanship at work. These students are racial hucksters exploiting white guilt, and milking a certain group of whites of their low-self esteem. There are white university administrators who need to engage in some twisted masochistic play with the sadistic whippings of privileged, entitled, black narcissistic students who, having been granted an enormous deal of institutional power, know , not feel, that the world does really revolve around them and will capitulate to their demands. If the world refuses, they as anointed victims, who by default have the permanent imprimatur of innocence, are certified moral icons who exist beyond the reaches of criticism.
They have been encouraged by the institution to not just feel welcomed on campus, but to treat the university as an extension of their living rooms and the homes from which they come from. There were no white people in those rooms and homes and so, why should they now have to live in the real world and engage and live among white people?
Their tribal separatist logic and the attendant trauma they report feeling is a charade. These students act like tribalists and biological collectivists; that is, as if their whole mode of being in the world, their values and principles and terms of engagement, are governed by some internal form of chemical pre-destination. But they are not.
What they face is a post-oppressive age, one that treats them as full-fledged human beings—and they can’t stand it. A deep existential crisis, and a chronic sense of anxiety afflict them in such a world because…well, it is drama-free. It’s just ordinary. And though they are feted and treated like royalty on these elite campuses, what they truly want is a situation in which they can command power and,inversely, create a racist institution.
Yes, on today’s elite college campuses discrimination exists towards conservative thinkers and their ideas. God help you if you’re a patriotic American who is pro-capitalism and pro-individual rights, a First Amendment and Second Amendment absolutist, a critic of the welfare state, a lover of Israel, and a critic of Islamic Jihadists. But that hardly describes the Marxist-inspired Black Lives Matter-motivated black separatists, racial self-segregationist reactionaries.
Today these students, their administrative appeasers, and their professors who have schooled them in their schemata are the purveyors of institutional racism—not its victims.
They have consciously weaponized their blackness and white guilt as a means of silencing criticism. They wish to harken back to some atavistic period when the black body is viewed as some amorphous, homogenized shaping of a majestic Nubian culture that, today, in our institutions of higher learning, will revolutionize thought: from decolonizing syllabi and ridding them of all European white thinkers, to declaring grammar, logic, and now even math as racist; to abolish history departments because history itself is a fabrication of mythologies and not a codification of objective facts. The very faculty that distinguishes us from every other creature and makes Man a human being—reason —is being called into question as a social construct meant to erase the identities of marginalized people.
This weaponized black body foists itself upon the world as a moral axiom from which all subsequent “truth claims” that emanate from any black body may be regarded as self-evidently true.
This is the real racialized identity politics behind the students’ demands. The black body as an argument . Unfortunately, there is nothing special about the black body. There is nothing special about any physical, racialized body, per se. Black skin does not convey the validity of an argument or a truth claim. It cannot justify a “themed engagement floor” because skin color does not represent a moral theme or any “theme” for that matter. Neither does white skin or yellow skin. Your body is not special until it conjoins itself to a mind and adapts nature to its needs and desires and rational aspirations, its self-actualization and manifested agency. Any human body that merely weaponizes itself in a crudely racialized manner and fails to achieve a rational self-cultivated moral character that can communicate clearly in rational terms, with inscrutable and inexorable logic, is merely an ecological social ballast: ignoble, exploitable, and a heap of unintelligible junk on this earth.
These students may have a safe haven while spineless university bureaucrats yield to their unintelligible shouts, snarls, moans and groans. When they matriculate into the real world with real, rational, practical and reality-oriented people who wield real power, and who will not capitulate to their demands, then reality, which ultimately cannot be cheated or faked, will set in. And after having been given so many opportunities and the keys to heaven on earth in our great republic, they will eventually be tossed on to the dustbin of history, screaming in abysmal terror at a universe that will care not one jot about them anymore.
Jason D. Hill is professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His areas of specialization include ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy and American politics. He is the author of several books, including “ We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People ” (Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press). Follow him on Twitter @JasonDhill6
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