Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  According to Adams, some of his fellow Justice Department officials suggested that “the law should not be used against black wrongdoers because of the long history of slavery and segregation. Less charitable individuals called it ‘payback time.’ ” The left called Adams a liar.

  Then the New Black Panthers opened up on the issue. Malik Shabazz, who is notable for two reasons—having two z’s in his name, and heading up the New Black Panthers—spoke to a Panther event in July 2010. There, he joked, “You know we don’t carry batons . . . PSYCHE! I’m just playin’.” He then followed up that sliver of comedic genius with this stunning justification for the nonprosecution of the Panthers: “Justice Department leadership changed into the hands of a black man by the name of Eric Holder.”71 Shabazz reiterated that two years later, explaining, “[The Democrats know] that it’s not fair to persecute [the New Black Panthers] group and we’re not going to back down even though it’s hurting us politically, even though it’s being used every day against us politically. That’s what you call ‘mercy.’ Really, it’s fairness, which is what we deserve anyway. . . . And so we have mercy, really, right now. We will receive no mercy under these new enemies that are now taking over really right now [Republicans] and controlling the action.” He lamented the fact that Obama and Holder might not be able to hold out in favor of the Panthers. He also said that Obama and Holder owed the Panthers “some favors.”72

  The idea that enforcing the law is racist has become a pervasive pattern in liberal America. The most obvious example is the left’s bullying take on illegal immigration, in which they label anyone who wants to police the southern border a bigot. Now, obviously there’s nothing racist about opposing illegal immigration. For the love of God, it’s illegal immigration. You can have a ton of sympathy for the poor unfortunates who risk their lives to cross the American border—I fully understand and sympathize with people who simply want to escape the current drug cartel regime cesspool in favor of the beacon of hope that is America. But that doesn’t mean that the United States can afford to continue to usher across its borders people who don’t pay into the system yet do reap the benefits of our generous social services.

  That sympathetic but pro-legal perspective makes you a racist, according to the left. Many Democrats, Time reported in 2006, say that “a hint of racism or nativism” really underlies the immigration debate. “I have no doubt that some of those involved in the debate have their position based on fear and perhaps racism because of what’s happening demographically in the country,” said Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO). Of course, Time agreed. It wasn’t a “political ploy”—instead, “there certainly is a case to be made that racial fears are informing some of the debate on immigration policy.”73

  The issue truly came to a head in 2010, when Governor Jan Brewer (R-AZ) signed into law Arizona’s senate Bill 1070, the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act. The bill merely allowed local law enforcement to act in accordance with federal immigration law, allowing officers to ask for identification during traffic stops if there was reasonable suspicion that the person was an illegal immigrant. The law explicitly barred racial profiling.

  There could not have been a more race-neutral law than this. We have to show ID every time we buy a beer, every time we get on an airplane. When we’re stopped for a traffic ticket, we have to show ID. There is nothing racist about having to show identification, especially when such checks can help enforce the border.

  Arizona had good reason to pass the law. There were nearly half a million illegal immigrants in the state in April 2010, when the bill became law. Violence along the Arizona border had become a massive issue for the state; much of it was driven by Mexican drug cartels, which also funneled agents across the border.

  Yet Brewer was quickly raked over the coals and labeled a racist. Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles suggested that Arizonans were “reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques.” Protesters flooded Arizona, threatening Brewer personally and comparing her to Hitler; local congresspeople suggested that white supremacist groups were behind the law. Meanwhile, outside the state, the media pressured Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game out of state; the Los Angeles City Council voted to divest from Arizona; the Phoenix Suns donned Los Suns jerseys in an attempt to make a statement. Al Sharpton, always in search of a camera without a face before it, dragged his bloated carcass down to Arizona to sneer, “The Civil War is over. Let’s not start it again with states’ rights.”74 Because, of course, asking people for ID was exactly the same as shackling them in the hold of a cargo ship and moving them to plantations in Alabama. As usual, Sharpton also called for civil disobedience.

  President Obama himself led the charge against the law. He said, “You can try to make it really tough on people who look like they, quote, unquote look like illegal immigrants. . . . Now suddenly if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed, that’s something that could potentially happen.”75 Obama hosted Mexican president Felipe Calderon, who had done nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigrants crossing the American border; at that meeting, he told Calderon, “[T]he Arizona law has the potential of being applied in a discriminatory fashion.” Minorities, he said, could be “harassed and arrested.”76 On the day Brewer signed the law, Obama held a press conference at which he said that the law would “undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.”77

  Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Obama administration would be bringing a federal lawsuit against the state of Arizona . . . for enforcing federal law. So the Justice Department wouldn’t prosecute Black Panthers intimidating voters but would prosecute a state for obeying the law. Said Holder, SB 1070 “has the possibility of leading to racial profiling.” He then admitted he hadn’t actually read the law.78

  But he didn’t have to read the law. Liberals never do. The law is made in the United States. That means it’s racist. And that means it should be disobeyed, whenever and however possible.

  Brewer tried to meet with Obama for months over SB 1070. He routinely ducked her. When they finally did meet, he was “patronizing,” according to Brewer’s book, Scorpions for Breakfast.

  The next time they met, in January 2012, Scorpions for Breakfast had already come out. Somebody in Obama’s inner circle had read it. So Obama confronted Brewer about it on the tarmac of the airport in Arizona. There, he promptly lectured her; she responded by pointing her finger at him. She later said she felt “a little bit threatened.”

  And, sure enough, the liberal bullies called her a racist for daring to point her finger. The NAACP told Politico that Brewer was playing on racist stereotypes. “What were you afraid he would do, steal your purse?” sneered Hilary O. Shelton of the NAACP. Al Sharpton used his show to promote the notion that Brewer was disrespecting Obama because he was black.79 Perhaps Brewer was a little bit afraid that the president of the United States might come after her personally, or her state. After all, he’d already done it over and over again.

  CONCLUSION

  In May 2012, a few weeks after George Zimmerman was arrested, the George Soros–funded Center for Social Inclusion held a special session for House Democrats. The purpose? According to the organization’s founder and president, Maya Wiley, the session would teach Democrats how to decode “racially coded . . . conservative messages” and inform them how to “raise racial disparities” in public policy contexts. In other words, Wiley taught Democrats how to play the race card. A staffer for Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) told the Washington Examiner that Wiley would walk Democrats “through their strategy and how they message and talk about stuff.”

  What exactly were those “racially coded” conservative messages? According to Wiley, it was racist when Newt Gingrich called Barack Obama the “food stamp president,” even if Gingrich “did not intend racism.” Rick Santorum’s statement that the Obama administration wanted to hand out “more food stamps, giv
e them more Medicaid” was racist, too. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) stating that he was against raising “taxes on those that are paying in, taking from them, so that you just hand out and give them to someone else”—that was racist, too. Said Wiley, “It’s the emotional connection, not rational connection that we need.”80

  That’s how political bullies operate. They manipulate emotion by claiming victimhood, then bludgeon political opponents into submission. Thus a Hispanic man who had his head bashed against pavement by a black man ends up a symbol of white racism—and that racism justifies the entire plethora of leftist causes. Thus organizations that support conservative, race-neutral laws end up on the wrong end of boycotts, for no apparent reason at all.

  Everything becomes racist.

  In 2009, James O’Keefe worked with Andrew Breitbart to release video of O’Keefe and his partner Hannah Giles infiltrating branches of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), showing that ACORN employees were willing to help pimps and prostitutes engage in tax evasion and child sex trafficking. In those videos, O’Keefe posed as a pimp and Giles as one of his prostitutes; they asked ACORN employees how they could avoid tax consequences for shipping in illegal underage prostitutes. The ACORN employees were only too happy to offer their assistance. Shortly after this blockbuster story, ACORN was defunded by the federal government and then fragmented.

  Now, child prostitution should be a nonracial issue. But it wasn’t for the left. That’s because ACORN was a tool of the race-bully community, constantly working to threaten businesses and government agencies in order to obtain special benefits, generally for minorities. So when O’Keefe took down ACORN, he poked the hornet’s nest. Sure enough, within weeks, the liberal media was suggesting that O’Keefe was a racist. Mediaite suggested that the pimp costume O’Keefe donned in the videos had “racial subtext.”81 Salon.com, which had attempted to downplay the ACORN story, now ran a big piece by slimy smear artist Max Blumenthal suggesting without a shred of evidence that O’Keefe was somehow a white supremacist.82 The Economist called O’Keefe’s tape a “minstrel show.”83

  The left was so desperate to protect ACORN from the group’s own willingness to engage in child sex crimes that it pulled the race card.

  Neither O’Keefe nor Andrew ever backed down on the story. The left tried to cudgel them into silence. And they refused to be bullied.

  That’s a tough stand to take. Typically, white Americans—with good reason—are so afraid of being called racist that they will do just about anything to avoid it. They’ll embrace liberal positions. They’ll soften their language. They’ll avoid difficult issues that could even tangentially touch on race. They’ll go completely silent.

  That is how the race bullies win.

  Ironically, the greatest victims of the race bullies are minorities who don’t buy into the anti-American theory that the United States is so racist that it requires constant liberalism. No group is more bullied than black conservatives, who must face down charges of racial disloyalty every day—just ask Ward Connerly, Larry Elder, Herman Cain, Condoleezza Rice, or Clarence Thomas. Many minorities are cowed into silence. Meanwhile, the racial thugs like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton—and yes, Barack Obama—are glorified.

  The race bullies win by relying on racial guilt. But collective racial guilt can only separate Americans. We are individuals, not homogeneous members of racial subsets. Only when we learn to cherish the words of Martin Luther King, judging people as individuals, will we truly have the guts to stand up to the race bullies. After all, to paraphrase a man who once stood for unification rather than division, we’re not black America or white America. We’re the United States of America. We’re brothers and sisters.

  If we don’t begin to recognize that simple truth—and recognize the inherent goodness of America, and our ability to look beyond skin color and ethnic heritage—the race bullies will continue to tear America down for their own political gain, brick by brick.

  4.

  CLASS BULLIES

  In 2008, the American economy essentially melted down. Thanks to decades of government interventionism in the free market, the American financial system hit a crisis point.

  Fortunately, government was only too happy to step in and spend taxpayer money to fix up the perverse system it had created in the first place. On March 16, 2008, JPMorgan Chase bought up Bear Stearns at $2 per share in a government-brokered deal that required $30 billion in federal investment. Just fourteen months earlier, the stock had been trading at $171 per share. On July 30, 2008, President Bush signed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, effectively guaranteeing $300 billion in federal funding for subprime borrowers; on September 7, 2008, the government nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which owned half the mortgage debt in America. Taxpayers absorbed Fannie Mae’s loss of $25.2 billion in the last quarter of 2008 alone, and ponied up another $15.2 billion to pay off additional debt. On September 14, 2008, the federal government rammed through a deal for Bank of America to acquire Merrill Lynch. On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. On September 17, the Federal Reserve “lent” $85 billion to American International Group (AIG) to bail them out. At the same time, Citigroup took $45 billion of government cash; by January 2009, the U.S. government owned 36 percent of Citigroup. Finally, on September 18, 2008, Bush Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke met to propose a $700 billion bailout plan that would buy up “toxic” assets—the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Instead of buying up the assets, however, the $787 billion TARP ended up being a series of bailouts to the banks.1

  From October 1 to October 10, the stock market dropped nearly 2,400 points, losing more than 20 percent of its value. The real estate market utterly collapsed, with housing prices dropping nearly a third. Overall, between 2007 and 2010, Americans saw 40 percent of their net wealth disappear.2

  Normally, you’d think this would be a bad thing.

  For liberals, it was a dream come true.

  Class bullies—socialists—love crisis. When everyone is fat and happy, there is no great furor for redistribution of income, for a leveling of the economic playing field. Marx was wrong when he said that capitalism carries the seeds of its own destruction thanks to inequalities between rich and poor—the fact is that capitalism helps both rich and poor, even if the rich get richer faster than the poor get richer. When everybody’s getting richer, nobody really cares about income inequality.

  But recessions—those are another story. When economic times get tough, the knives come out. When the rich get poorer and the poor get poorer, things get ugly. When the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—then things really get ugly. Suddenly earners find themselves under scrutiny. Violence against the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy becomes something tolerable. The class bullies begin engaging in threats and brutalities. After all, they can’t just let a good crisis go to waste.

  The Obama administration certainly wasn’t going to let a good crisis go to waste.

  On April 3, 2009, President Obama met with the CEOs of thirteen of America’s biggest banks. Obama seated them at a table with no food, and one glass of water per person. No refills. Then he told them he’d have to cut all the top salaries at the banks.

  For some of these companies, that was fair. For others, it wasn’t. Certain firms had been forced to take TARP money. And many of the firms weren’t being allowed to pay back the TARP money. The government wanted to own a piece of the banks. And the banks would have to deal with it. Around the time of the meeting, Stuart Varney of Fox News reported that the Obama team had turned down repayments from a bank that had been forced to take cash, “since unlike smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, [the bank at issue] is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with ‘adverse consequences’ if its chairman persists.”3 The Obama administration even began administering “stress tests” to the banks—tests that determined whether the banks were “stable.” If
they weren’t, they’d be forced to take more TARP money, raise capital, or allow the government to convert its preferred, nonvoting shares into common stock, which would give the government greater ownership of the company.4

  Back to the meeting. Obama apparently looked around the room at the various CEOs of the banks. As they told him that they needed to be able to compete for top management talent, his temper flared. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that,” he said.

  This was sheer bullying. As one person who attended the meeting later said, “The signal from Obama’s body language and demeanor was, ‘I’m the president, and you’re not.’ ”

  Then Obama got to the punch line. “My administration,” he spat, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”5

  Of course, Obama had been ginning up those pitchforks for months. In his Inaugural Address, Obama blamed “greed and irresponsibility” for the economic collapse, rather than governmental interventionism. He called for “hard choices”—choices that would, of course, be hard for the earners, and relatively easy for everyone else.

  And now, like Gaston in Beauty and the Beast urging the ignorant townspeople to march on the castle and bring back the Beast’s head, Obama was going to put those pitchforks to use. Rather than acknowledging that the banking firms had made crucial mistakes, pushed and aided by the federal government, Obama blamed it all on the rich folks. The financial crisis became a divisive rather than a unifying moment. It was all the fault of those wealthy New Yorkers and their big wallets.