Liberal supporters of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom must be applauded for their chutzpah, if for nothing else.

During a rally held Monday, a left-wing professor campaigning for Newsom reportedly called his Republican challenger Larry Elder “a Black face on White supremacy.” Melina Abdullah (née Melina Rachel Reimann), the academic who reportedly uttered these utterly racist remarks, was parroting a column previously published in the Los Angeles Times, which also accused Elder of being a “Black face on white supremacy.”

Thus, according to Democrats, anyone who supports Elder’s efforts to become California’s first-ever African American governor is championing “white supremacy” (and is, therefore, a racist, if white, or a race-traitor, if black). Conversely, liberals in California are also telling us that the best way to “dismantle” and destroy “white supremacy” is to give more power to the rich, uber-privileged white male whose estimated net worth is at least $20 million. Only in the oxymoronic realm called liberal logic could such an asinine position be taken seriously.

Although the type of nonsensical reasoning embraced by Abdullah should insult the collective intelligence of all Americans, it is par for the course from liberal supporters of the Democratic Party. From the 1960s onward, Democrats and their allies have constantly resorted to specious, race-baiting tactics while ignoring or distorting reality when it is time to win the black vote. (Much like when they bring up fantastical talk of reparations during election season while discreetly shelving the topic immediately after they have won political power.)

Playing the race card — and playing black folks in the process (e.g., threatening, as Biden once did, that a vote for Republican Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains”) — has helped numerous Democrats acquire tremendous amounts of political power during the past six decades, which they have used as a springboard to acquire vast sums of personal wealth. So, it is far from surprising that liberals are now playing this card against Elder.

It is also far from shocking that Abdullah, the daughter of “a self-proclaimed Trotskyist” is ridiculously arguing, in her capacity as a co-founder of BLM Los Angeles, that the best way to oppose white supremacy is to further empower a rich white liberal instead of a successful black entrepreneur. Communists and their closeted supporters have long sought to infiltrate and topple the United States, and it is clear that they see race as a wedge they can exploit to destabilize our country — hence their financial backing and co-opting of the BLM movement and its leaders — who now apparently enjoy opulent lives just like their Marxist counterparts in Russia, China and Venezuela.

But what is surprising — and depressing — is that the public (and black people in particular) would allow this type of dishonest race-baiting attack against Elder to go unanswered or, even worse, buy into such arguments.

Elder is being attacked because he opposes “progressive” policies that are supposedly beneficial for black people. Yet, in truth, policies championed by liberals and the Democratic Party have systematically undermined and weakened the black community over the past 60 years.

For example, Democrats have long opposed school choice even though ample research has shown that the academic scores and achievement of black students from working-class families increase significantly when they are afforded the opportunity to attend charter or private schools. Because of Democrats’ steadfast opposition to school choice, generations of black students have been trapped in broken down public schools and have received an inferior education that ensures they will have limited job opportunities once/if they graduate, thus perpetuating a permanent underclass. This is especially true in California where “Black students continue to be on the bottom of almost every academic category regardless of family wealth,” according to Californians for Justice. Even worse, new research education data shows that the achievement gap in math and reading test scores is widening between black and white students under Newsom’s watch in California.

Likewise, during the Biden administration, the unemployment rate between blacks and whites has gotten worse, according to the August 2021 jobs report. And in California and elsewhere, millions of African Americans have either lost jobs they once held or experienced a relative decrease in wages because of Democrats’ decades-old support of illegal immigration.

So, when Elder opposes supposedly “progressive” policies favored by Democrats like Newsom, he is hardly supporting white supremacy. To the contrary, liberals and progressives are the arch-defenders of white supremacy in America because the best way to preserve and entrench existing racial inequalities is to keep large numbers of black people under-educated, underemployed and/or unemployed, which is something Democrats have mastered from the late 1960s onward. It is time for educated voters in California and elsewhere to see through liberals’ racial hustle. A good start would be by recalling Newsom, the smug posterchild of privilege and inequality, and replace him with Elder, who offers a more uplifting vision for the people of California.

Nick Pilgrim is a trial attorney in the Washington, D.C. area who formerly worked for the United States Department of Justice as an award-winning federal prosecutor. He is the author of a new book, “Black Culture Matters: Why It’s Time To Stop Pretending Racism Is The Problem.”