Editor’s Note: Say What? is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing, and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class.
Tim: It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that we have now entered a full-strength cultural civil war. The radicals and anarchists are no longer interested in a conversation and haven’t been for at least the last four years. They use the George Floyd tragedy to demand drastic action right now, leading to insane ideas like defunding the police. And I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again: Words matter and defund means to deprive of funding. It does not mean to reduce it, as some people on the left are trying to say to protect themselves from the overwhelming consensus among Americans that the police are vital to public safety even if there are more bad cops than there should be.
But perhaps the most disturbing element of all this is the abject surrender of people and companies far and wide to Black Lives Matter. Once thought extreme, now depicted as mainstream by the virtue-signaling media bathing at the deep end of the pool of political correctness. And it’s everywhere. Viewers who tuned into the ESPY Awards presented by ESPN expecting stuff about sports were instead treated to a lecture by athletes from three sports.
Russell Wilson: I pray for a world where I don’t have to fear for my children due to systemic racism from hundreds of years of oppression. The only thing that must die is racism. Black Lives Matter.
Megan Rapinoe: Do Black Lives Matter to you when they’re not throwing touchdowns, grabbing rebounds, serving aces? If that was uncomfortable to hear, good.
Sue Bird: Colin Kaepernick never shied away. He knew that discomfort was essential to liberation and that fighting the oppression against black people is bigger than sports.
Megan Rapinoe: This is our moment to prove that we know a better world is one where black lives are valued. No one deserves white privilege.
Tim: That was Russell Wilson, NFL, Megan Rapinoe, the radical lesbian soccer player, and her life partner, Sue Bird, WNBA. But the re-deification of the sainted Colin Kaepernick, who started a lot of this by taking a knee rather than standing for the National Anthem, is now apparently on course to the point that Kaepernick should be considered heroic, according to the great former NFL quarterback Brett Favre, who compared Kaepernick to a player who left the NFL to join the Army and was killed in Afghanistan.
Brett Favre: He’s deserving of much praise and respect, because it’s not easy for a guy his age, black or white, Hispanic, whatever, to stop something that you’ve always dreamed of doing and put it on hold, maybe forever, for something that you believe in. I can only think of, right off the top of my head, Pat Tillman’s another guy who did something similar and we regard him as a hero. So, I assume that hero status will be stamped with Kaepernick as well.
Tim: So Brett Favre, almost certainly a future Hall-of-Famer, compares a guy taking a knee to make a political statement to a guy who gave up the game to fight for his country and lost his life doing so. That’s the moment of cultural upheaval we are in right now.
The nation’s most powerful Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, has enthusiastically jumped aboard the deconstruction train, of course. The House Speaker tosses around reckless accusations about Trump every day of the week, but this week she went DEFCON-1 over Republicans and the murder of George Floyd because their police reform legislation doesn’t include everything that’s in her bill. And then she went on MSNBC to double down.
MSNBC Anchor: When you were speaking yesterday, you said that Republicans are “trying to get away with murder, actually. The murder of George Floyd.” Senate Republicans are demanding an apology for that statement. Will you apologize?
Nancy Pelosi: Absolutely positively not. The fact is when people say … I think you, frankly, in the press have given them far too much credit for a bill that does nothing.
Tim: Again, there’s where we are. Without Trump even being involved, the most powerful Democrat in the nation says congressional Republicans, including the widely admired black GOP senator from South Carolina and sponsor of the bill, Tim Scott, are trying to … get away with murder. The radicals pick apart every word we say. They say our words matter. So do theirs. Words like murder, getting away with murder.
But of course, the normalization and the elevation of Black Lives Matter wouldn’t be complete without the media playing from the same sheet music as the marauders. On MSNBC, where they must be feeling like their time has come with all the progressive rage coursing through the land, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson defended the toppling of statues going on far and wide, from confederates to now Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln as he decried hundreds of years of white supremacy, apparently not even realizing that everything he decried was under the rule of the Democratic Party.
Eugene Robinson: These monuments were generally erected around the turn of the century, decades after the Civil War. They were erected at a time when the South had strangled reconstruction in its crib and was imposing Jim Crow repression … Taking down Confederate monuments is not destroying history, it’s actually presenting the real history because the monuments themselves were an attempt to distort history and to tell a false story about the Civil War.
Tim: In other words, they shouldn’t be allowed to keep statues of confederates, a debate which has raged for years, but which is now considered by the militants and their white liberal supporters to be beyond debate. Much easier to just topple them all one by one – no one’s stopping them – and move on to larger prey as they have: George Washington and the succession of white supremacist founders and presidents. All with the tacit, if not explicit support of the Democratic Party.
But the litany of attacks on President Trump from the left every day have been supplemented in recent days by another of those former Trump hires who got bitter that Trump didn’t do everything his way. And so, he wrote a book to make money attacking the man who resuscitated his dying career. John Bolton, one of Washington’s foremost egomaniacs, and of course that’s saying something. War hawk. And according to former Trump Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, who worked closely with Bolton during his entire tenure as Trump’s national security advisor, Bolton was always about … Bolton.
Sarah Sanders: John Bolton was your classic case of someone who was completely drunk on power, who thought he was the president. He was constantly pushing his own agenda, which was all he cared about. The big problem for John Bolton is that’s not how it works. He forgot that no one elected him to anything and that it was President Trump and President Trump’s agenda that mattered within the White House. For 17 months, he went out and championed President Trump and his agenda saying all the things that he was doing right, how he had been tough on a variety of countries. And now all of a sudden that he is a disgruntled former employee, his entire tune changes. And I don’t think he has any credibility at this point.
Tim: Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, and all the rest, all telling Trump tales out of school. And now John Bolton, caricature of the Washington persona, all full of himself and his own importance. And as Shakespeare once said, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But what President Trump said about Joe Biden and black people this week was also full of sound and fury, but it signified a lot more than nothing. It signaled once again that the president is absolutely intent on trying to steal a bigger chunk of the black vote away from Joe Biden.
Donald Trump: Virtually every policy that has hurt black Americans for half a century, Joe Biden has supported or enacted. I’ve done more for the black community in four years than Joe Biden has done in 47 years. Racial justice begins with Joe Biden’s retirement.
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Read more from Tim Donner.
