Blacks clearly didn’t switch for reasons of race because the Democratic Party was, in the 1930s, the undisputed home of racism. It remained so until at least the early 1960s. (I say “at least” because I believe that modern progressive Democratic ideology remains infused with racism, although this racism manifests itself in a new way.) So many blacks switched reluctantly, because they knew they were leaving the party of Lincoln for the party of segregation, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Why did they do it? They did it because the Democrats promised them economic benefits. These benefits meant a great deal to blacks then living through the hardships of segregation and the Great Depression. Democrats offered blacks some of the same security that blacks had during slavery—in which the basic needs of blacks were met on the plantation—and blacks, during a desperate time, went for it.
This was one of the most significant political transformations in American history. Long-term, it has proven to be a terrible bargain for blacks. They have remained the worst-off group in America, surpassed even by poverty-stricken immigrants who came to this country much later with nothing. The inner city remains a kind of Third World enclave in America, and whether or not blacks realize it, the Democrats intend to keep it that way.
Yet counterproductive though the black shift of political allegiance has proven over the past seventy-five years, I cannot entirely blame black Americans for making it. They were under extreme economic stress. And they were conned by the artful pitch men of the Democratic Party. These pitch men said to blacks: you have had it hard enough in the past; now you deserve to be taken care of by the federal government. And many blacks figured: after all we’ve been through, this is our due.
But if the Democrats were such racists, why did they offer to uplift blacks in this way? Here we find the true switch, which was a switch of tactics by progressive Democrats. Democrats had already tried various exploitation schemes after slavery, from segregation to lynching to white supremacy. Yet from the 1860s through the 1920s, the Democrats remained the minority party nationwide.
A NEW SCAM
So progressive Democrats realized they needed a new and bigger scam. For two centuries they had oppressed and stolen from blacks and other minorities; now they had an idea for how to do it to the country as a whole. The new Democratic scam was progressivism, not the old progressivism of forced sterilization and support for fascism, but a new progressivism that turned blacks and other minorities into pawns in a grand larceny scheme.
The scheme works like this. Progressives supply the basic needs of poor blacks, creating for them a new plantation called the inner city. There blacks are provided with food, subsidized housing, medical care, and so on. In this regard, the new plantation functions pretty much like the old one, with a few modifications. Under slavery, this was rural paternalism; now it is urban paternalism. The slave master is replaced by the government; i.e. the Big House of slavery is now replaced by the White House.
In both cases, it’s a meager living. But there is an important difference. Under slavery, blacks had to work; today’s blacks don’t have to work to inhabit the progressive plantation. In fact, they must not work, because if they become self-reliant, then the progressives have no future use for them. Consequently, many young blacks have productivity, creativity, even human dignity sapped out of them. This is the core of today’s progressive racism.
Progressive racism is dedicated to uplifting poor blacks to a certain point and then keeping them there. The proof is that poor blacks today are about as poorly off as they were a half-century ago, when the progressive schemes of black uplift went into place. Every other ethnic group in America has dramatically improved its life except this one. Blacks have delivered for progressives, but they haven’t progressed very much themselves. This, I suggest, is by design.
Several years ago the black pastor and activist Eugene Rivers made the startling statement that today’s young black males in the inner city are “ill-equipped to secure gainful employment even as productive slaves.” Rivers’s point was that at least slaves had skills like masonry, carpentry, and agricultural skills that made them useful; today’s inner-city black males don’t have any skills at all. They have truly become useless people.14
Actually the Democrats have made them that way. That’s because these inner-city blacks, though useless in the traditional sense, are useful to the Democratic Party—first, as voters, and second, as public exhibitions of the need for progressive redistribution programs. Under Democratic supervision, blacks in the inner city must remain poor, because their poverty is required to support and justify the progressive scheme. In this sense the ’hood is an invention of the Democratic Party.
Progressive Democrats are fiercely protective of these dilapidated, crime-ridden neighborhoods. That’s why they mount fierce opposition whenever some reformer proposes to give poor black parents a choice of sending their children to private or public schools. Here the fear is that poor black children may actually get a good education, and that would liberate them from dependency on the Democratic Party.
Progressive Democrats also fought welfare reform every step of the way. They were outraged at the idea that single mothers with illegitimate children should be required to work. The progressive scheme is to increase their benefits every time they produce a new child. That child, to Democrats, represents a future Democratic voter. Progressives do not want to change this system of intergenerational dependency that has been working for them politically.
Finally, progressives scream every time entrepreneurs attempt gentrification projects in cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis. No matter that gentrification would bring new money, new jobs, and new people into the inner city. Crime would go down, and people could move up. Here progressive opposition is most revealing of all. A transformation of the inner city is precisely what progressives do not want to happen.
So progressives talk incessantly about black uplift but no uplift actually occurs, even though black neighborhoods are all run by Democratic officials, from mayors to school superintendents. In fact, the Democratic establishment works to assure that no one gets off the plantation.
Now, Democrats are working overtime to create new Hispanic plantations called barrios. Long-term, they would like to have some Asian American ghettos also. Democrats have created a plantation model for blacks that they hope can be applied to other minority groups as well. In that case, black suffering would extend more broadly to minority suffering, a real political success from the Democrats’ perspective.
Why? Because minority suffering is the basic moral justification for the progressive Democratic rip-off. If there were no minority suffering, then where is the need for all the social welfare programs? The suffering of blacks and other minorities has actually been caused by the Democrats themselves, but in a crafty rhetorical move, this suffering is now blamed on “America.”
And here we get to the central thrust of progressive education, which is to fault America with the crimes of the Democratic Party. Here’s a choice example from Michael Omi and Howard Winant: “The broad sweep of U.S. history is characterized not by racial democracy but by racial despotism, not by trajectories of reform but by implacable denial of political rights, dehumanization, extreme exploitation, and policies of minority extirpation.”15
Well, who exactly did these things? Omi and Winant refuse to point the finger at the real culprits. From their point of view, “America” did this to the blacks and other minorities, and in recompense, America owes them. For Hispanics, this means a right of free entry and a right of amnesty for illegals; for blacks, it means that government owes you a living into the indefinite future.
So Democrats propose greater government—which is to say, Democratic—control over private industry and over the private wealth of this country, all in the name of advancing racial unification and social justice. Democrats justify their programs as the sine qua non of fighting racism and advancing civil rights, and define any opposition to th
ose programs as opposition to civil rights itself and resurgent racism.
We should take a moment to appreciate the political feat the Democrats have pulled off. Through a fantastic political and rhetorical legerdemain, they have turned the tables on their opponents. In a sense, they have done a new type of switch—they have switched the blame.
Incredibly Republicans—who are the party of emancipation and equal rights and civil rights—are now portrayed as the enemies of blacks and other minorities, while Democrats with a straight face present themselves as the party of anti-racism. The people who have been fighting bigotry for two centuries have somehow become the new bigots. Meanwhile—and this mirrors what recently happened in Flint, Michigan—the very people who had long poisoned the wells then showed up claiming to be the Committee for Clean Drinking Water.
Poor blacks, we will see, have become the pawns and suckers of this scheme. And subsequently progressives have attempted, with mixed success, to draw in Hispanics and other ethnic minorities as well. Their larger plan is to enslave the whole country. It’s the greatest rip-off in American history. If this scheme is successful, future historians may describe the history of the Democratic Party as a movement from slavery to enslavement.
Slavery and enslavement are two distinct, though related, things. Slavery represents a specific condition: the slave is quite literally owned by his master. Enslavement is a process: people are enslaved to the degree that they are deprived of their rights and the fruit of their labor. The ultimate endpoint of enslavement is slavery, but there are many points of serfdom and servitude in between.
In this book I will show how Democrats went from slavery for blacks to enslavement for the whole population. Even those who benefit from the progressive state become dependent on it and remain captive to their progressive benefactors. Meanwhile, the rest of us are forced, intimidated, and terrorized into forking over our earnings and possessions so that progressives can dispose of them as they see fit. In sum, progressive Democrats have gone from exploiting blacks to exploiting everyone. This is their actual Big Switch.
Enslaving the population is what Obama and Hillary mean by the “remaking” of America. They want to remake America into a society in which progressive Democrats control the entire wealth of the country, and citizens become serfs of the progressive Democratic state. In such a society all our major decisions are regulated and controlled by the progressives. Their goal is to own us—our property, our lives, even our dreams—and to a considerable degree, they already do.
But how to pull off such a scam? In order to carry out their heist, progressives require the consent of a majority of Americans. This, after all, is democratic theft—theft that is ratified through the democratic process. So how to obtain that consent? Progressives need a pitch, and the best pitch is the idea of social justice.
I should take a moment to explain what I mean by a pitch. A pitch is the line that criminals use when they require the consent of their victims. Imagine a gang that wants to rob an old lady and take her stuff. They could kick down the door, but it would be much easier for them if they could somehow convince the old lady to lift the latch. In that case they would only have to push their way in. So the pitch is the sweet talk the gang members use to convince the old lady to lift the latch.
I learned about the pitch in a federal confinement center where I spent eight months in overnight captivity for my sins against the Obama administration. My crime was exceeding the campaign finance laws by giving $20,000 over the campaign finance limit to a college pal of mine who was running for the U.S. Senate. I didn’t do it to get anything in return; I did it simply to help an old friend. For this, I found myself at the receiving end of the full force of the U.S. government.
But since no one in American history has been prosecuted—let alone incarcerated—for doing what I did, I should be allowed to suspect that my real crime was in exposing President Obama in my film 2016: Obama’s America and my books The Roots of Obama’s Rage and Obama’s America. Obama hated my film, vituperatively attacking it on his website barackobama.com, and a few months later, the FBI was knocking on my door.
During my eight-month confinement, I got to know attempted murderers, drug smugglers, coyotes, armed robbers—the whole gamut of the criminal underclass. Here I learned how criminals think, how they organize themselves into gangs, how they recruit allies, how they come up with their pitches, and how they cover up their misdeeds. I realized there is a close similarity between these criminal operations and the longstanding practices of modern progressivism and the Democratic Party.
A GANGSTER PAR EXCELLENCE
All this talk of criminals brings me to the main subject of this book, which is Hillary Clinton. So far it may seem like this has been all about progressivism and the Democratic Party, but Hillary is there from the beginning, she is present in every chapter, her spirit haunts the history of her party because all the evil schemes of her party have, in a sense, become consolidated into her own career and life. Hillary is, in this respect, the dark id of the Democratic Party.
Her husband Bill is as crooked as they come, but his venality is circumscribed by his ambitions, which are mostly personal: to be lionized, attended to, and have his private parts regularly serviced. Obama too is lawless, but his is a lawlessness of means rather than ends. Obama will bend the law when it suits his purposes, but his purposes are mainly ideological, to reduce America’s wealth and power.
These two are small-time hoods in comparison to Hillary. Obama is capable of gangsterism but it doesn’t define him; neither does it define Bill; but it does define Hillary. For Hillary, gangsterism is not merely a matter of means; it is also her end. Hillary wants to be the crime boss of America. That is the only way to satisfy her unquenchable desire for money, power, and social control.
As we will see in this book, Hillary is a criminal who found the criminal practices of Saul Alinsky to be too weak-kneed for her taste, and Alinsky was a gangster who found the criminal practices of the Al Capone gang to be a tad sentimental. In short, Hillary is the true Democrat, the gangster par excellence.
I suspect this is why the Democratic establishment lined up so quickly behind her. While the Republicans had a real primary, hotly contested, the Democrats had a primary in which Bernie seemed to win again and again but never seemed to make a dent in Hillary’s lead. That’s because the Democratic super-delegates were uniformly in her camp, even though there was throughout the campaign the risk that she would be indicted.
Why? Because the Democratic establishment recognizes that they need a thuggish enforcer, and Hillary fits the profile. Hillary is, in this respect, more promising than Obama. One of the progressive Democrats’ main complaints is that Obama has not been a sufficiently skilled looter. He did pull off one big job, Obamacare, but other than that he’s been mainly talk, talk, talk. Democrats are hoping that Hillary will be less talk and all action. I suspect they are right.
One of the original contributions of this book is to offer a new interpretation of that bizarre arrangement called the Clinton marriage. This marriage seems to be held together by a single cord: larceny. The Clintons have been on the make since their Arkansas days. They continued their vile operations through Bill’s presidency, which culminated in the pardoning of criminals who donated lavishly to the Clintons and the Democratic Party.
The Clinton marriage seems to affirm the Bonnie and Clyde principle that the couple that steals together, stays together. The famous criminal duo Bonnie and Clyde too had a complicated romantic relationship, perhaps just as twisted and bizarre as that of the Clintons. We may never know what the glue was that kept Bonnie and Clyde together, but what about the Clintons? What unites them and how did their partnership come about?
Here there are a couple of theories, both in my view mistaken. The first—occasionally whispered on the Right—is that Hillary is a lesbian. This would explain her apparent indifference to Bill’s carrying-on. Strangely the best source to confirm this suspicion is
Bill himself. Two of Clinton’s former mistresses—former Miss Arkansas Sally Miller and Gennifer Flowers—have quoted Bill as saying that Hillary likes girls. Flowers somewhat colorfully cites Bill to the effect that Hillary “has probably eaten more p*ssy than I have.”16
I have to confess that I cannot refute this theory, but I believe it is unsubstantiated. No woman has ever come forward saying she was even propositioned by Hillary, let alone had a relationship with her. Sometimes the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
The second theory is probably the most widely held view, certainly among Democrats but even among many Republicans. This is the view that Bill is the predator and Hillary is the long-suffering wife. Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill spoke for many when she praised Hillary but said of Bill, “I don’t want my daughter near him.”17 This view holds that Bill is the Big Creep—this is the term Monica Lewinsky used for him—and Hillary is the woman who sticks by the creep since she is married to him.
This second view is not entirely favorable to Hillary. At its worst, it depicts her as a kind of Camille Cosby, turning a blind eye to her husband’s atrocious predatory behavior toward other women. But even in this analysis the main blame falls on the husband. The two Bills are the ones who did it; the wives are merely guilty of putting up with all this bad behavior.
In reality, I show that the Cosby and Clinton situations are quite different. Bill may be a big creep but Hillary is creepier than he is. She is much worse than Camille Cosby. That’s because Camille, as far as we know, had no role in orchestrating her husband’s drugging of unsuspecting women. Camille is, at best, a passive enabler.
Hillary’s role can be understood when we realize that she is both aware of and involved in Bill’s crimes. She facilitates them because she benefits from them. How does she benefit? Hillary didn’t necessarily want a husband, but she needed a lifelong “pitch man” for her political schemes. Goofy, likeable, gregarious Bill was the perfect find. But why would someone like Bill want someone like Hillary? Not for sex. She couldn’t do it for him in the bedroom. Hillary knew that. If she wanted him, she had to make herself useful to him in other ways.
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