The announcement that President Trump will hold his first rally since the coronavirus shutdown on June 19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has touched off the predictable demagogic response from Democrats. And the national media, just as predictably, does not point out that the feigned outrage is just a page from the Democratic Party playbook that has been used for years.
For example, Alicia Andrews, an black woman who chairs the Oklahoma Democratic Party, echoed the remarks of national Democrats when she described the announcement as “a deliberate insult” to black Americans.
How could a president simply holding a rally to promote his candidacy, be insulting to anyone? It seems that the argument is that the date Trump will speak in Tulsa — June 19 — is what is called “Juneteenth,” the celebration of the end of slavery in the United States, so called because it was when President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was read publicly in Texas.
In other words, the argument is that Trump’s rally will somehow detract from the holiday and is therefore insulting to blacks. Of course, if Joe Biden were to emerge from his basement to hold a rally on Juneteenth, Democrats and their media allies would no doubt praise Biden for his thoughtfulness to honor the black community on such an important date.
Andrews also detects something sinister in holding the rally in Tulsa. “The fact that he chose that day, the fact that he will be a mile and a half from Greenwood feels deliberate.” Greenwood was the section of Tulsa that was almost destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa race riot, perhaps the deadliest race riot in U.S. history. After an angry white mob attempted to lynch a black man being held in a Tulsa jail for allegedly sexually assaulting on a white woman, a riot broke out between armed blacks and whites, many of them World War I veterans.
While the Tulsa race riot (alternatively called the Tulsa Race War or Tulsa Race Massacre) was certainly a blot on the history of Tulsa, the riot took place in 1921, almost 100 years ago. There may be nobody still alive in Tulsa today who was alive in Tulsa then, and even if they are that individual could have had nothing whatsoever to do with that horrific event. Should Tulsans today be denied a presidential visit because of something that happened in their city a century earlier? That would be like condemning an event in either Dallas, Texas, or Buffalo, New York, because presidential assassinations took place there. Should Memphis, Tennessee, be blackballed from holding political rallies because that is where Martin Luther King was assassinated? For that matter, one would have to remove Oklahoma City from consideration for an event, since that’s where the Murrah Federal Building was destroyed in 1995.
This is clearly a case of Democratic demagoguery, designed to damage Trump among black voters. Democrats are concerned that Trump, whose approval rating has reached 40 percent among black Americans in a recent Rasmussen Poll, could make electoral inroads into a key Democratic Party constituency, and it is not surprising that they would resort to these types of tactics to forestall such an occurrence.
Republican presidents are frequently accused of bigotry against blacks so as to damage their standing among black voters. Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” an effort to advance the Republican Party in the Deep South, was considered racist, for example. You see, Republicans are not supposed to try to win elections. (In truth, the Republican Party had been gaining strength in that section since the late 1930s, long before the Civil Rights movement had anything to do with it).
One might recall that when Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that was called a “dog whistle” by Democrats. Why? Well, it was in Philadelphia that the bodies of civil rights workers were found in June 1964. They had been abducted and murdered by local members of the Ku Klux Klan (who were, of course, all Democrats, but that fact is just ignored today by the Democrats who want to call Republicans racist).
Reagan said in his speech, “I believe in states’ rights.… And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.” Despite that being true — Reagan’s conservative rhetoric was often spot on — columnist William Raspberry used the occasion of Reagan’s death 24 years later to say Reagan’s use of the term “states’ rights” was a justification of segregation.
This is despite Reagan having a long personal history of opposing segregation. While he was governor of California, he refused membership in a country club because it was closed to blacks. When he was a college football player, he would invite black players to stay in his parents’ house when a hotel turned them away due to a “whites only” policy.
Even Mitt Romney was called a “race-mongering pyromaniac” by Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky. George W. Bush was accused of blowing up the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina to wipe out black neighborhoods.
Think the false accusations that Trump was in league with the Russians was a novel tactic in the Democratic Party repertoire? Richard Nixon was accused of getting the North Vietnamese not to make peace in 1968 so as to enhance his election chances, and Reagan was charged with prevailing upon the Iranians to help out his 1980 campaign by holding onto the hostages until after Jimmy Carter was out of office. (If that were the case, one wonders why they did not release them in November after Reagan won a 44-state landslide, rather than waiting until January 20, 1981, as Reagan was being sworn into office).
If the mainstream media were not allied with the Democratic Party, they would point out the historic demagoguery of the Democratic Party over the past several decades. Because they have not, the sheer lack of any consideration for the truth by Democrats and their media allies has become, with the brazenness of the attacks on Trump, increasingly absurd.
Just as a football coach who discovers that he can go off tackle for a sizeable gain any time he wants, and keeps doing so until the other side stops it, the Democrats will keep using crude accusations of racism and collusion with foreign powers until the tactics no longer work.
Image: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
Steve Byas is a university instructor of history and government and is the author of History’s Greatest Libels, which details how the Left has used lies about historical figures like Marie Antoinette and Joe McCarthy to advance their cause today. He may be contacted at [email protected].
