Many Americans right now are wondering how on earth former President Jimmy Carter could be so utterly deluded as to accuse millions of regular Americans, from soccer moms and Wal-Mart greeters to military vets and grandmothers, who oppose the attempted socialist transformation of their country, of being racists. How could he be so out of touch with reality?
Actually, there’s a method to the madness of America’s ruling elite when they accuse everyday Americans of being racists, bigots and Nazis. (Remember Nancy Pelosi’s recent condemnation of townhall attendees as swastika-carrying “angry mobs” out to “destroy Obama”)? Although the White House strategically feigns disagreement with Carter’s racism comment, during last year’s presidential election season, Obama was fond of accusing the McCain campaign of appealing to voters’ racism.
Racism – in the form of slavery, and later segregation – was America’s great national sin. We’ve had other faults as a nation, to be sure, but slavery was the worst and most consequential (at least until the modern era, which has given us legalized abortion, another monumental national sin). Slavery dehumanized millions of souls of African origin. It ripped us apart in the Civil War, costing more than 600,000 lives to exorcise it from the nation. Moreover, because the national government (which opposed slavery) held the moral high ground over the southern states (which wanted to retain slavery), the vital power balance between states rights and the federal government was destroyed during the civil war, with the federal government establishing dominance and growing uncontrollably ever since.
For decades afterwards, segregation remained a blight on our nation. Fortunately, it was legally and culturally purged during the 1960s civil rights movement, when the nation largely embraced Martin Luther King’s “dream” of a colorblind America.
Nevertheless, in this life, even if we face up to our personal sins, have apologized and made restitution if appropriate, there remains a certain pain called guilt – an uncomfortable memory of our past failings.
It just so happens that in the realm of personal and political manipulation, few things can be more effectively exploited than guilt. As I explained last October in “Yes, Barack Obama really is a Manchurian candidate”: “Manipulative and unprincipled humans soon discover how to use our guilt to get their way. They can even make us feel guilty when we haven’t done anything wrong – for instance, by way of false accusation, a tactic the left has perfected.”
Since past mistreatment of blacks is a major national guilt, and therefore an entry point into our culture, it has become the template for many movements attempting to foment cultural and political transformation of society: The “gay rights” movement, for example, has been largely successful in mainstreaming behavior that was once widely considered morally a sin, psychiatrically aberrant and legally a crime by superimposing its agenda directly on top of that of the 1960s civil rights movement. Instead of “racists,” those who don’t like you are “homophobes” (a made-up word). Instead of people with deviant, immoral behavior, they recast themselves as a persecuted minority and pushed, successfully, to get “sexual orientation” added to the list of characteristics good Americans couldn’t “discriminate” against, along with race and gender.
Since then, Islamic pressure groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, have modeled their PR approach after the civil rights movement and its homosexual rights clone, complaining endlessly about “Islamophobia” and wildly exaggerated “anti-Muslim hate crimes.”
Most recently, militant atheists are patterning their emerging political movement after the successful gay rights movement, adopting much of their language and logic in portraying themselves as a discriminated-against minority.
All of this works so well because of our national guilt over slavery and segregation, the result of which is that the last thing Americans want to be called is a racist. It cuts into our tender psyche so deeply that we’d almost rather be called a murderer or a bank robber than be labeled a racist, Nazi or bigot. These are the words that wound us most deeply, that stir the troubled waters of our collective national guilt most painfully.
So, what do you expect the elitist leaders of the most radical and dangerous government in modern American history to do when they’re confronted with regular folks – hundreds of thousands, if not millions of them, people so “normal” you could just about pluck them out of a classic Norman Rockwell painting of Americana – standing up and urgently pleading: “Don’t destroy our country. Don’t ruin everything we’ve worked and prayed and fought so hard to preserve, protect and defend”? What do the powers-that-be call them? Racists, bigots, Nazis.
Do yourself a favor and don’t be intimidated by this desperate tactic. The Obama administration is operating basically on two great principles of evil: seduction and intimidation. The seduction part was in full swing when Obama was being elected (hope, change, free college education and a cure for cancer – yes, he said that). Now that widespread opposition to his radical programs has emerged into the public arena, the intimidation tactic is growing. Everyone opposed to the socialist transformation of America is a “racist,” or a “Nazi,” or a “right-wing extremist,” or a “birther,” or a “deather,” or a “global warming denier.”
So stop caring whether demagogues in high places call you racists, bigots, homophobes, Nazis or Islamophobes. You’re Americans, the salt of this earth, and you’re not racists. If electing a black man as president in a nation where less than 13 percent of the population is black is not proof positive that America is the least racist nation on earth, then nothing will ever prove it.
