The Reparations Solution

The Hologram is jumping on the reparations bandwagon according to Jen Psaki:

White House press secretary Jen Psaki signaled on Wednesday that President Joe Biden is open to considering racial reparations depending on the actions of Congress, promising that the president is committed to taking “comprehensive action to address the systemic racism that persists today.”

Racial reparations is a widely unpopular proposal in the United States which, even immediately following the racially charged death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, only 20 percent of Americans supported.

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Just the thing on which to focus at this particular moment in time, as there certainly aren’t any other major pressing issues that need attention. And why not since his flurry of executive orders has been a “progressive” wish-list for every cockamamie idea that the Democrat Party has hatched but not been able to push through into law over the past 50 or so years? Oh, and just like clockwork, some 180 House Democrats are pushing for a slavery reparations commission, too.

Reparations are defined in an online dictionary as “the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.” For years, leftwing elements of the Democrat Party have pandered to black Americans by dangling “reparations” as a payoff for historical slavery. Reparations can take many forms and have been authorized by various governmental bodies over the years, as noted here:

“… individual monetary payments, settlements, scholarships, waiving of fees, and systemic initiatives to offset injustices, land-based compensation related to independence, apologies and acknowledgements of the injustices …”

The stark reality is that reparations for slavery have been used as a political tool by the Democrat Party for decades. This is the ultimate irony because the Democrat Party was the party of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan, as noted here. And now they are all-in on disbursing other people’s money to right the historical wrongs for which they themselves were primarily (but not exclusively) guilty.

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Of course, this is of-a-piece with Democrats promising various constituent groups something for nothing. Is that statement crass and unfeeling? Let us examine the subject:

  • Slavery ended in the US in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment; at the time, there were an estimated 4 million slaves freed.
  • No living person has been a slave or slaveholder (with the exception of modern human traffickers servicing sexual predators) – certainly not in the sense of the slavery in 19th century America.
  • The US was one of the first countries in the world to ban slavery, yet reparations-mongers seek to penalize innocent Americans while stigmatizing a country that actually ended slavery, which has been the scourge of mankind for thousands of years.

Despite the above points, white guilt continues to be a prime leverage point for the reparations-mongers. That was how Barack Obama was sold to an unsuspecting nation: “Vote for this nice, articulate, and clean black guy, and your white guilt will be assuaged forever (and never mind that he’s a Marxist hell-bent on destroying our constitutional Republic!).” That didn’t work out at all, as he and the Marxists who infested his administration pushed the racism and divisiveness that has led directly to the Black Lives Matter and “cancel culture” insanity currently gripping the country and showing no sign of being reversed.

The notion that all of these reparation demands are going to somehow cease at some point is just as absurd as thinking that the Democrat National Committee will one day declare that they will no longer propagandize white guilt! They will never throw away a useful political tool that has served them so well over the years. The Left’s demands never cease; they just grow more grandiose and sensationalist over time.

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Let’s get back to the Democrat Party’s history with black Americans. How many BLM rioters actually know about these facts? Or Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), the author of the House reparations bill (HR 40), for that matter?

[T]he Republican Party was formed in the late 1850s as an oppositional force to the pro-slavery Democratic Party.  Republicans wanted to return to the principles that were originally established in the republic’s founding documents and in doing so became the first party to openly advocated strong civil rights legislation. Voters took notice and in 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President along with a Republican Congress.  This infuriated the southern Democrats, who soon afterwards left Congress and took their states with them to form what officially became known as The Slaveholding Confederate States of America.

Meanwhile, Republicans pushed full steam ahead.  Take, for example, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that officially abolished slavery in 1864.  Of the 118 Republicans in Congress at the time, all 118 voted in favor of the legislation, while only 19 of 82 Democrats voted likewise.  Then there’s the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteeing rights of citizenship and voting to black males.  Not a single Democrat voted in favor of either the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments.

In spite of this, in almost every Southern state, the Republican Party was actually formed by blacks, not whites. Case in point is Houston, Texas, where 150 blacks and 20 whites created the Republican Party of Texas. But perhaps most telling of all with respect to the Republican Party’s achievements is that black men were continuously elected to public office.  For example, 42 blacks were elected to the Texas legislature, 112 in Mississippi, 190 in South Carolina, 95 representatives and 32 senators in Louisiana, and many more elected in other states — all Republican. Democrats didn’t elect their first black American to the U.S. House until 1935!

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The Democrat Party was the party of slavery and the KKK and resisted Republican efforts to grant citizenship and voting rights to black Americans after the Civil War. Democrats also filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 75 days before it was finally passed in 1965. And Democrats have worked hard over the years to suppress these facts; they certainly aren’t taught in Democrat-controlled public schools!

In pursuit of the “unity” that The Hologram purports to desire in America, I propose a “grand compromise” on the subject of reparations. Although I am generally against reparations for the reasons bulletized above, I will agree that reparations should be paid to black Americans if Biden will agree that only registered Democrats should pay for those reparations. After all, it is only fair that those who perpetrated the crimes (and their ancestors who share their guilt – according to the logic of the BLM and cancel culture crowd) pay the freight. And we all know that the Democrats are big on fairness, right?

The end.

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