Al Sharpton. Courtesy New York Post
by James C. Sherlock
“Progressive for who?”
That question was asked by Al Sharpton directly to a gathering of his supporters at a conference hosted by his National Action Network while flanked by Lori Lightfoot, Eric Adams and two other big city Democratic mayors.
“Anybody that tells you they’re progressive but don’t care about dealing with violent crimes are not.”
“Progressive for who?”
“We gotta stop using progressive as a noun and use it as an adjective.”
“You’re labeled progressive but your action is regressive. I’m woke? You must think I’m asleep.”
He demanded “a national agenda around urban violence, urban crime and accountability.”
“Accountability.” There is no word more anathema to progressives. He could not have hurt them worse.
That was not the first shot, but one of heavy caliber, in the revolution against progressive destructiveness by the Black people who are among its primary victims.
The Democratic Party of Virginia, tethered to Northern Virginia progressives, left its base, not the other way around.
It is now the “progressives with college credentials” party that tolerates other voters at election time.
It deals blows to Black communities starting before birth. In the name of “helping” them.
- Democrats demand limitless abortion to the moment of birth. To preserve … what, let’s say it … the vastly disproportionate share of Virginia abortions that destroy minority children.
- It is the party with such utter disdain, against all evidence, for the talents of minorities that it ignores their plight in utterly dreadful public schools like those of Richmond and Portsmouth. Figuring, one supposes, that if they just keep their eyes closed long enough something will change.
- It has declared public schools “systemically” racist and thus irredeemably bad educators of minorities.
- But it is at the same time terrified that Virginia’s minority citizens will find out about the extraordinary achievements of poor minority kids in New York City. Find out that there are tens of thousands of kids on the waiting lists for those schools, blocked from expansion by Democrats in Albany. Charters are blocked effectively from existing at all in urban districts by Virginia law that requires school divisions to approve their own competition.
- Democrats decided against the evidence from New York City that minorities are uneducable to common college standards, and rail against both those standards and the tests that reveal the damage done by progressive dogma in schools.
- Democrats in colleges and universities, which is a redundancy, have implemented lower college admission standards and created tailored degree programs for poorly educated minorities to attain credentials.
- Seeing the unemployability of graduates with such degrees, progressives implemented reserved categories of post-degree jobs in a new division, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), to employ them to police the ideological purity of the progressive institutions themselves. Those jobs require nothing but those tailored credentials and the appropriate levels of social justice warrior zeal.
- Democrats have physically threatened one of their own major constituencies, teachers, by in 2020 making schools more dangerous with changes to Virginia law that used to require reporting to police of assault and battery in schools.
- That law change was made to allow for what Democrats in the General Assembly deemed the culturally irredeemable violence of minorities bound for its self-defined “school-to-prison” pipelines. The progressive fix to their self-defined problem? Don’t report it.
- Anti-cop city councils cut back on police budgets and drove cops to leave with relentless attacks on their honor and fitness to risk their lives to serve the people of their cities. Leaving too few cops to maintain public safety in minority neighborhoods. See Sharpton, Al.
- Anti-prosecution Democrats ran in Virginia in 2019 and after to be Commonwealth’s Attorney in progressive districts. Many won. They have since as policy released career criminals back into un-policed minority neighborhoods to terrorize them. Again, I defer to Mr. Sharpton.
Bottom line. Virginia Democrats call opponents of those policies racist.
Seriously.
Their quasi-religious dogma and zeal, fed by self-referential academic “studies,” are intact.
But even Al Sharpton, who still claims credit for criminal justice “reform” and police “accountability,” thinks they went too far.
He is not standing for the results any more.
“Progressive for who?”