If you listen to any major media outlet or the media’s political arm, elected Democrats, you will hear that Republicans are racist bigots. They hate people of color and want to bring back slavery and segregation.
Joe Biden inadvertently threw a wrench into this dogma last week. The New York Times reported the Biden campaign “was forced into a defensive posture … after he invoked his work with Southern segregationist senators to make a point about bygone comity in Congress.”
Not surprisingly, the Times never mentioned the party affiliation of the two senators Biden spoke of, James Eastland and Herman Talmadge. USA Today, to its credit, described as “Democratic segregationist senators.”
How inconvenient that the candidate leading the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has opened a Pandora’s box of Democratic history.
Media often claims that Republicans are all “bigots.” Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and see which political party has the most racist history.
In June 2018, the New York Times published an op-ed that asserted, “Trump is a present-day Bull Connor.” Yes, this is the same president who commuted Alice Johnson’s sentence and pushed through prison reform legislation, helping black citizens who are disproportionately incarcerated. This is the same Trump whose economic policies created record-low unemployment for black workers and other minorities.
Who was Bull Conner? He was the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama during the civil rights movement. He ordered police to use fire hoses and police dogs against civil rights protesters. He protected the KKK from the legal consequences of its violence. And he was a Democrat, serving in the Alabama House and as a five-time delegate to Democratic national conventions. He twice ran for Alabama governor as a Democrat. No, he was not a Republican.
There is also George Wallace, who MSNBC’s Chris Hayes once incorrectly identified as a Republican. Perhaps Hayes chose to ignore the fact that Wallace was a four-term Democratic governor of Alabama and a three-time Democratic presidential candidate.
Martin Luther King is an icon of the civil rights movement. The FBI also spied on him from the mid 1950s until his death. Inconveniently, “Robert Kennedy authorized wiretaps on King’s home and Southern Christian Leadership Conference offices in October 1963.” In case anyone forgot, Robert Kennedy was a Democrat.
Around this time, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. MSNBC happily fueled the gaslighting with a 2014 headline claiming a “Republican war on civil rights laws.” The network is either ignorant or dismissive of history.
In reality, more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act. Several influential Democratic senators, including Robert Byrd, William Fulbright, and Sam Ervin, led a filibuster that spanned 57 days.
Byrd, who served in the Senate for 51 years and was honored after his death with a flagged-draped casket on the Senate floor — a rare honor — also has an inconvenient past.
In his younger years, he was an “exalted cyclops” of the Ku Klux Klan. He started a Klan chapter in the 1940s. In the 1960s, he tried to prevent passage of the Civil Rights Act. The same senator served as a “mentor” to Hillary Clinton, who once described Byrd as “a man surpassing eloquence and nobility.”
But it’s Republicans who are racist?
Bill Clinton had mentors who included Democratic Sens. J William Fulbright and Al Gore Sr. “Fulbright signed the Southern Manifesto, which objected to the Supreme Court’s desegregation of schools in Brown v. Board of Education and Gore Sr. voted against the Civil Rights Act.” Both were Democrats.
Byrd wasn’t the only KKK member in American politics. Wikipedia lists 19 notable US politicians who were active in the Klan at some time; 16 of the 19 were Democrats.
Fast forward to another Democratic policy: abortion. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, described the “Negro Project” in 1939, saying, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”
Abortion, which today’s Democratic Party wants available on an unrestricted basis, is still working to fulfill Sanger’s dream. According to the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, “black women are five times more likely to have an abortion than white women.” Black Americans make up 14 percent of the population, yet have 36 percent of abortions.
Abortion clinics are placed to service certain populations; 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are strategically located within walking distance of African American and/or Hispanic communities. This certainly sounds racist, and it’s a practice supported almost unanimously within the Democrat Party.
All of these inconvenient facts point suggest that just one political party is racist. It isn’t the Republican Party, as the media and politicians claim, but the Democratic Party. Thanks to another of Biden’s utterances, that fact is an election-year news item.
Brian C. Joondeph (@RetinalDoctor), MD, MPS, is a Denver-based physician.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.