Harris’ big plantation

OPINION:

Democrats are panicking. In their all-out effort to get their candidate elected, they’ve turned again to the kind of rhetoric that is patently insulting to America’s Black community.

Vice President Kamala Harris started by running a campaign about nothing. As the polling shows momentum for the GOP, it looks like hers could end as perhaps one of the most cringeworthy displays of political pandering on record.

Ms. Harris has been patronizing to several ethnic groups. When she’s in Atlanta, she turns on a phony Southern accent. On “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” she sounded Jamaican. At the Hispanic Caucus event, she pandered in a new accent. It keeps getting worse.

The desperate attempt to shore up her base among minority voters came to a head with her plan to allegedly empower Black men. At least former President Barack Obama told them, “Yes, we can.” Ms. Harris believes, “No, you can’t” — unless there’s a discriminatory, demeaning government program to help.

Her plan is full of taxpayer-funded giveaways to build wealth, as if that has ever worked for the Black community. Loan forgiveness based on race are unconstitutional and violate the Civil Rights Act, but Ms. Harris is hoping those young Black men won’t notice her scam.

Then there was her “regulatory framework for cryptocurrency” to protect Black men who invest in or own digital assets. Maybe she wants points for sounding fancy, but how many Black men struggling with inflation have cryptocurrency at the top of their minds?

But it was her “drugs for votes” policy to attract young Black men that hit a new low. The suggestion that people are in federal prison for possession of small amounts of marijuana is a lie. Federal prosecutions for possession or public use of small amounts ended years ago.

The drugs that Ms. Harris suggests will bring opportunity are industrialized for higher potency to drive shareholder profits and higher rates of addiction. They are increasingly linked to psychosis, schizophrenia, depression, risk of suicide and IQ loss, particularly in young people.

The cognitive damage resulting from regular use of cannabis, including high-potency vapes and edibles, is like turning an A student into a C student. That is apparently Ms. Harris’ vision for America’s Black men.

Democrats’ belief that Black men will vote for Ms. Harris if you allow them to use more drugs is perhaps the most racist and appalling idea in recent memory. Former President George W. Bush warned about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” But there’s nothing soft about Ms. Harris and Democrats’ bigotry.

To top it off, she’s also peddling the line that more drugs equate to social justice because legalizing THC products together with race-based government incentives will increase Black entrepreneurship. It’s a grand plan created by White investors to appeal to drug legalization skeptics that in more than a decade has never come to fruition.

You also can’t talk credibly about opportunity without fixing public education and expanding educational opportunities for minorities affected by our failing government school system. But the teachers unions, which have massive influence over the Democratic Party, will never let that happen.

For Democrats, the system is more important than the student. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Ms. Harris didn’t mention public education in her opportunity plan.

All this pandering, and she still didn’t mention the crime affecting young Black men and families. Not a word for the mothers whose children are killed on the streets of Chicago, St. Louis and Washington.

Her deliberate deception of the Black community continued in her interview with Charlamagne da God this week. Ms. Harris doubled down on slavery reparations that she knows are likely never to happen because they’re unconstitutional and would cost Americans trillions of dollars.

All this condescension, intended to affect Black turnout, is more likely designed to target White, college-educated suburbanites who, over these last transformative decades in our politics, have become another easily plied group.

Democrats love praying on liberal White guilt with platitudes that provide the patina of caring about the plight of vulnerable populations.

It’s the same political strategy of Democrats and the media that Nixon White House aide Robert Brown characterized to The Washington Post in 1972 as “bellicose rhetoric or empty promises that seem to delight those who are not victims of injustice because of their race.”

It’s a sick game that’s been played for decades.

You don’t have to like former President Donald Trump to acknowledge that on his watch, the inflation that hit minority families first and hardest was low while buying power was higher. Mr. Trump’s opportunity zones program injected $50 billion into struggling communities and increased Black employment.

For progressives, public policy is a race to the bottom because it is developed through the lens of dependency on the state. Through all the happy talk, they’re building new walls to keep people on the modern welfare plantation.

Between urban Black communities and the illegal immigrants who will soon outnumber them, that plantation will be bigger than ever if Ms. Harris wins.

• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV and is a columnist for The Washington Times.