Bernie Sanders Ignores Stellar Jobs Report, Uses Sharpton Conference To Peddle Ridiculous Trump Idea
Bernie Sanders thinks that Donald Trump is an irredeemable racist. A deplorable, one might say. He made that clear Friday during a speech at a conference for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in New York City.
And if you disagree with his assessment, well, be assured that you’re railing against “the damn truth.”
“It gives me no pleasure to tell you that we have a president today who is a racist, who is a sexist, who is a homophobe, who is a xenophobe and who is a religious bigot,” the independent Vermont senator told the audience, according to Fox News.
“I wish I did not have to say that. But that is the damn truth.”
And then came the airing of grievances from the man seeking to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020.
“During Donald Trump’s presidency we have seen a sharp rise in hate crimes and that rise comes as this country continues to be plagued by institutional racism and racial inequality,” Sanders said.
This “sharp rise in hate crimes” continues to be referenced by Democrats everywhere, and it’s kind of misleading.
As Reason points out, yes, there was a 17 percent rise in the number of hate crimes reported between 2016 and 2017. However, what almost nobody notes is that approximately 1,000 more agencies were officially reporting hate crimes to the FBI in 2017 than in 2016. So, it could well be crimes now reported as “hate crimes” were already on the books, just not being designated that way.
“If every agency reporting data for the first time in 2017 reported just one hate crime, this would account for the entire 17 percent increase,” Reason’s Robby Soave noted.
And then there was Sanders’ claim on Friday that “when Trump and his real estate empire were discriminating against African Americans here in New York, I and others in the civil rights movement were protesting that kind of housing discrimination in Chicago and marching on Washington with Dr. (Martin Luther) King,” Sanders said.
This has to do with a 46-year-old case alleging racial discrimination by Trump Management when the company was run by Trump’s father, Fred Trump. It ended in a fairly large settlement for the federal government, according to NPR, although the Trumps never admitted guilt. And the level of Donald Trump’s complicity — if any — has ever been established.
And then there was this claim from Sanders:
“(W)hen Donald Trump and his allies were trying to suppress the black vote in the 2016 election, I was running around this country campaigning for Hillary Clinton and pressing for automatic voter registration to expand the vote.”
This alleged “voter suppression” usually has to do with either voter ID laws or enforcing existing voter registration rules.
The assumption among liberals here is that “the black vote” cannot either follow established rules or get proper ID. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies are the “racists” here. Right.
By the way, this was a common theme throughout Sanders’ speech on Friday, where he said that Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and Maryland gubernatorial candidate Ben Jealous all lost because of “institutional racism.”
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders suggests Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum, and Ben Jealous lost their elections because of “institutional racism” pic.twitter.com/wII6Q6SPMr
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 5, 2019
Of course, there wasn’t any mention of the fact that we’ve seen record low black unemployment during the Trump presidency or that the economy added 196,000 jobs in March, a number that even The New York Times admitted had beaten expectations.
These are both things that the African-American community can use more than rhetoric.
But for Sanders and his ilk, Trump is a chief executive “who is a racist, who is a sexist, who is a homophobe, who is a xenophobe and who is a religious bigot.”
I hope you enjoyed this, because this is a preview of the Democrats’ 2020 strategy. Deviation from the Democrat platform in any way on issues of an identitarian nature makes you a bigot. Don’t believe that transgenders serving in the military is a sound idea? Transphobe. Want to enforce voter registration laws? Racist. Want to enforce immigration laws? Xenophobe.
These terms have become so shopworn and frayed that they mean nothing anymore. It’s difficult to call out actual racists, xenophobes and homophobes because, well, who can tell nowadays?
In most polls, Sanders is running in second place to Joe Biden. Due to, ahem, recent developments, one could imagine that Sanders could easily become the front-runner.
Of course, you could get outraged over this baseless name-calling from Sanders, but therein lies the problem: Biden’s going to do it, and so is everyone else piled up in the polls behind Sanders.
This isn’t an aberration, just the tactics we’re going to see deployed over and over again. That, unfortunately, is “the damn truth.”
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