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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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I had not paid much attention to the so-called “Justice Democrats,” until this morning, when I saw that they had come out strongly against the just-announced presidential campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden. Mr Biden is a bad candidate, whose only claim to fame might be that he might, might! be the least bad of the Democratic contenders.

So, I decided to do a little research, and the first thing I found about the Justice Democrats was their website logo:

On the right hand side of their logo are four new members of Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY 14^th), Representative Ayanna Pressley Harris (D-MA 7^th), Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI 13^th) and Representative Ilhan Omar Hirsi (D-MN 5^th).¹ All are ‘women of color,’ telling us that only women of color matter to the Justice Democrats. All are anti-Semitic; while Mrs Hirsi has been the most openly anti-Senitic, the other three leaped to her defense when the resolution condemning anti-Semitism was announced. All four have been very aggressively anti-Israel, supporting the Palestinians.

The vision of the Justice Democrats is inherently racist. In a blurb on their home page, they say:

We recruited and helped Alexandria pull off one of the biggest upsets in American history. But the top of the Democratic Party is still disproportionately wealthier, whiter, and more male than the base.

Now it’s time for more leaders in the Democratic Party who don’t just represent corporate donors, but the voters of the Democratic Party: women, people of color, young people, and working-class people of all backgrounds to help build our progressive movement.

Only one visibly white male, who happens to also be Hispanic, is pictured on their home page, in a montage of seven people. We know what they mean. Nor are there any white women pictured; the people pictured are the four congresswomen shown above, plus Representative Rohit Khanna (D-CA 17^th), Representative Pramila Jayapal Williamson (D-WA 7^th), and Representative Raúl Manuel Grijalva (D-AZ 3^rd).

Justice Democrats support all kinds of whacko-leftist things. Their Issues page reads like a laundry list of ‘progressive demands, including reparations:

We support a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the generational harms caused by slavery and Jim Crow and propose remedies.

They wish to ‘reform’ the police, to enable petty criminals to escape and specifically oppose “broken windows” policing, a policy in which, where actually used — certainly something that hasn’t happened in Philadelphia — the small-time criminals are apprehended and punished before they become big-time hoodlums. They advocate restrictions on our Second Amendment rights, and support a ‘federal jobs guarantee’ for ‘anyone who wants to work.’² Naturally, they want to legalize marijuana and abolish immigration restrictions.

What does ‘justice’ mean for the Justice Democrats? They don’t say so, explicitly, but it doesn’t take much reading behind the lines to figure it out: they want to take from those who have worked hard and made it in our economy and give it to those who have not.

The Justice Democrats, the Democratic Socialists of America, and ‘progressives’ in general seem to see a vaguely-defined socialism as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her $3,500 photo shoot suit, a socialism in which everyone will be prosperous. They seem wholly unable to see socialism for what it actually has been in the history of the world, in a devastated and failed Soviet Union, in the impoverishment of North Korea and Venezuela today. North Korea had the same resources, the same people and the same culture as South Korea, yet the South’s capitalism has led to a very prosperous society while the Communist North has been unable to provide even a decent diet for its subjects.  Though ethnically the same — the Korean peninsula has seen very little immigration — North Koreans are physically shorter than their brothers in the South, and “we now see a situation where the average South Korean woman is approaching the height of the average North Korean man.”

In Venezuela, roughly 7% of the total population have fled the country, preventable diseases, including polio, have returned, and even the soldiers on whom Nicolas Maduro depends to retain dictatorial power are going hungry.

That the Justice Democrats are all in for gun control seems appropriate; Hugo Chavez banned the private ownership of firearms in 2012, leaving the people disarmed in the face of the military enforcing President Maduro’s misrule.

Only a fool would think that the same socialist ideas which have brought poverty everywhere they’ve been tried — and the People’s Republic of China avoided it only by becoming functionally capitalist — would somehow lead to prosperity in the United States.  But that’s what the Justice Democrats are: fools.
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¹ – The Editor of The First Street Journal uses women’s married names. Conan Harris, Mrs Harris’ husband, paid off a $17,000 back taxes debt after his wife took office.
² – Something I could support if it included an end to welfare for those who do not want to work.
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