OPINION:
The last few weeks have been a test of leadership for President Biden and the Democratic Party. They’ve failed with flying colors. Two years after all the George Floyd political theatrics and political violence, the Democrats’ response to Uvalde has proven they believe some lives matter more than others.
In the wake of the massacre in Texas, the American people were watching to see if Democrats would give Republicans political space to compromise on measured legislation. They haven’t. Americans were watching to see if Mr. Biden would sound a unifying tone. He didn’t. They were watching to see if Democrats were ready to view gun violence through the larger lens it deserves. They quietly refused.
What Americans got was unrealistic legislation, deliberate efforts to use the deaths of 19 children as a wedge issue for the November elections, hyper-partisan attacks and perhaps most disgraceful, a continued disregard for the lives lost to urban violence.
Since Uvalde, dozens of people have been shot in America’s cities. As of this writing, the dead range in age from three to 73. Nearly all of the victims were Black, lower-income or minority.
No national address from the White House. No presidential visit. No photo op with local officials and families. No collages of victims’ photos on national newscasts.
No grand plans to create enhanced gang units in cities dealing with spikes in violent crime. No press conferences demanding new policing practices to get illegal guns off the streets and confiscate the weapons killing literally thousands of young Black and Hispanic people every year.
Congressional Democrats are too busy working with former ABC News president James Goldston to produce the Jan. 6 hearings for primetime television.
For Mr. Biden, who’s been in Washington for 50 years, the lack of focus on the larger problem must be intentional. A tweet on June 6 mentioned six school shootings that have taken place in the last 20 years, where most of the victims were white. After last weekend’s violence in America’s cities, not one social post from the president calling for action.
According to the CDC’s data, more than half of all firearm death victims in 2019 were Black males, despite being 6.4% of the U.S. population.
Shining a light on urban violence would mean highlighting crimes committed by largely minority gangs and the lower-income who were supposed to elevated by the Great Society programs. That can’t happen. Genuine outrage risks further revelations about failed policing, immigration and welfare policies of the left. That can’t happen either.
Talk about the 70% of Black children born to fatherless households? God forbid.
So, if a deranged kid shoots up a supermarket or a school, it’s worth days of wall-to-wall news coverage. Democrats spring into action, whipping up their base and demanding “comprehensive” legislative solutions. But if a few Black teens in Chicago get gunned down, the higher echelons of the Democratic Party scarcely seem to care. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot would rather talk about protecting abortion rights than fighting crime.
Democrats have been exposed for treating Blacks and Latinos as expendable. They don’t want them protected and advanced. They want to keep them dependent, angry and imperiled.
One chilling theory is becoming increasingly plausible. Today’s Democratic Party, with its bulging socialist veins and arteries pumped with the venom of perpetually outraged intellectual elites, must view those dying daily on the streets of the cities they run as somehow less than human.
This would follow the pattern of fascist, socialist and communist ideologies that historically hold the view that only certain people truly matter. The rest are simply a means to an end.
If it means a state like California can leverage persistent violence and poverty to justify a reparations agenda, then so be it. If a city like Chicago or New York can feign outrage over gang killings to drive a message of white supremacy and black victimhood, then so be it.
Democrats tighten their grip, the government gets bigger, and New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams gets to go to the Met Gala next year again. Everyone else can go buy an electric car.
With an ascendant far left, backed up by Big Media, Big Tech and an insatiable bureaucracy, this mentality will get more pervasive unless Americans stand together against it.
For America to recapture its greatness, all lives must matter, but Democrats would rather focus on made-for-TV Jan. 6 hearings.
Black and Latino Americans should be afforded the same level of outrage, grief and calls to action as the children of Uvalde. It couldn’t be clearer now Joe Biden disagrees.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax Television, an author and a former Bush administration official.
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