RUTHFULLY YOURS

Selma, the new Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, had barely been released before it was being used as a weapon of racial division by Sharpton.

Al Sharpton is a racist whose advocacy of hate has made him the dominant black leader. The ascent of Sharpton from street thug to MSNBC host and Obama confidante is the clearest possible rejection of the MLK legacy, not by white racists, but by black racists and their progressive collaborators.

That hasn’t stopped Sharpton from hijacking the King legacy by holding annual MLK day events and using Selma to accuse Hollywood of racism to shake it down for money.

Sharpton, like King, has managed to bring people together, but not in the same way. After the racist #BlackLivesMatters marches culminated in the murder of two police officers, a majority of White and Hispanic New Yorkers polled said that they view Sharpton as a negative influence on their city.

But Sharpton monetizes negativity like no one else. If Martin Luther King Jr. often spoke of the power of love, Sharpton has shown that racial divisiveness is far more effective. Unlike King, Sharpton never had any interest in racial healing. His specialty is racial divisiveness for personal profit. Even his new book is being published by “Cash Money Content.”

Sharpton’s sins however are not just his own. The days when he was just a street agitator yelling hate through a megaphone and sweating through his latest track suit are long behind him. Instead he became a campaign stop for a long line of Democratic candidates from Bill Bradley to Barack Obama.

“Racial unity, it’s who I am, what I believe and what I care most deeply about,” Bill Bradley said, even while making nice with a bigot who stood for the exact opposite of racial unity.

Sharpton was more likely to assert that, “White folks was in caves while we were building empires…. We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and those Greek homos ever got around to it.” Or “We are the royal family on the planet. We are the original man. We gazed into the stars and wrote astrology. We had a conversation and that became philosophy. We are the ones who created mathematics… We are the alpha and omega of creation itself.”

But the Democrats have wanted a racial id more than a racial superego. Behind every Democrat preaching racial unity, there’s a Jeremiah Wright screaming “God damn America” or a Sharpton denouncing a “white interloper.” The Democrats rejected King long ago. From the KKK to Sharpton’s NAN, they have always put their money on racist demagogues skilled at stirring up racial troubles.

Sharpton is part of a duo with double-dealing Democrats claiming to believe in racial unity while playing up racial divisiveness.

New York City Mayor David Dinkins, Sharpton’s original better half, had promised that, “I am the mayor of all the people… and my administration will never lead by dividing, by setting some of us against the rest of us.” But he kept the NYPD from responding to the racist attacks on Korean groceries and then the Jewish community of Crown Heights.

The hypocritical rhetoric of racial unity coming from Dinkins and Bradley should sound familiar.

“There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America,” Barack Obama had told the country. But once in power, Obama shifted to the brand of racial divisiveness that he had condemned, setting some of us against the rest of us.

Obama’s cynical choice to screen Selma in the White House is not a reminder of what has been achieved, but of what is missing. His administration has set back race relations by decades. Polls show that the majority of Americans believe that race relations have grown worse under him.

Race relations have been set back because like Sharpton, Obama and his supporters have wielded racial division as a weapon, whether to scapegoat critics or to stir up protests to improve voter turnout.

Sharpton succeeded because he understood his role as the dark side of the Democratic Party. He knows that the Democrats don’t want “I have a dream,” instead they want Sharpton’s “These whites must learn in this town that they going to pay when they put their hands on African people.”

Selma is the carrot. The dream is never supposed to be achieved because if it is achieved, it isn’t only Sharpton who will have to go begging for work, but much of the Democratic Party. What used to be the spectator sport of urban political machines has become national politics. Obama endorsed the hate marches that led to the murder of two cops, not because he cares about their goals, but because racial conflict drives voter turnout in the black community along with insecurity and guilt among whites.

Having killed the dream, they resurrect it every few years to blame its failure on their opponents.

Somebody is always killing the dream, but it’s never Al Sharpton or Barack Obama. Instead it’s any interference with the Democratic Party’s political program of welfare ghettos, broken families and political machine fraud that kills the dream that the machine had already run over and left for dead.

In a culture of weaponized racial grievance, Selma’s appearance has quickly become a tool of racial division by the same players who have made the racial healing that appeals to audiences so impossible to achieve. The feel good moment, whether it’s Obama promising a post-racial nation or Selma invoking old dreams of the same thing, always has to give way to racial guilt and discord.

The feel good post-racial moment milks audiences for their best intentions and then gleefully poisons them.  And that is what makes it so evil.

Sharpton, for all his vileness, was preferable to the Democrats who were using him. In the same way Jeremiah Wright’s vicious rants were far better than the disingenuous rhetoric of his protégé, Barack Obama. Likewise, Louis Farrakhan is a truer version of his former man, Keith Ellison.

If we’re going to have bigots, then at least let’s have honest ones. If we can’t have unity and healing, then let’s stop letting the people responsible beat us over the head with their absence.

What we have here is not a dream deferred, but a dream perverted. The civil rights movement is no longer invoked for progress, but as a reactionary segregation of hostilities between races and parties. Martin Luther King Jr’s dream is no longer on the menu. The only things being served up are politicians like Obama who can talk like King, but think like Malcolm X and govern like George Wallace.

The civil rights movement ended in the gruesome hypocrisy of becoming identified with racist demagogues whose civil rights activism seeks to perpetuate racism in order to monetize it. Racial inequality is not its enemy, but its power base. Violence is not the unfortunate response to conditions, but the reason for which those conditions have been maintained by the Party of Sharpton.

The only thing more repulsive than the Democratic Party’s racism is its racial hypocrisy. A former outpost of the Klan, the party was taken over by the ideological descendants of left-wing radicals who despised Martin Luther King Jr., but insist on using him as a weapon against a nation that listened to his plea for unity, rather than to their divisiveness.

The Democratic Party replaced Martin Luther King Jr. with Al Sharpton. It’s hypocritical for them to celebrate King while rejecting his message.