During the second hour of Thursday's CNN Tonight, host Don Lemon and his race-baiting buddy, The New York Times columnist, Charles Blow fervently ripped on the United States for being a nation imbued with “white supremacy.” According to Lemon and Blow, the ideology of white superiority isn’t actually a fleeting idea that fewer and fewer people believe as the United States ages—as study after study has suggested. Instead, these two leftist purport that America was founded on racism and, therefore, it has pervaded society.
When asked about San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education’s recent (and near-unanimous) vote in favor of renaming over three dozen schools currently named after former presidents and other prominent figures including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Blow unreservedly expressed his acquiescence and flat out decried any person who once owned a slave—irrespective of the fact that slavery was commonplace across the globe during America’s founding.
“I am sorry if I do not commiserate with people who owned slaves,” sneered Blow, “and I do not excuse it as being an artifact of the time.”
Slavery, unequivocally, was an artifact of the time. Many of our founders conceded that slavery was morally wrong and at odds with American principles and ideals.
Slavery was horrible but, fortunately, was brought to an end via Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and the—later—ratification of the 13th Amendment. However, that doesn’t matter to Blow—Lincoln doesn’t deserve a school named after him.
Of course, neither Blow nor Lemon mentioned the fact that the board of education’s vote was extremely unpopular and even drew criticism from San Francisco’s very own Democratic mayor, London Breed.
Blow then went on to fantasize about how much power blacks would wield and how diverse a future government would be, had blacks not “migrated.” What Blow failed to acknowledge was the fact that part of the reasons blacks migrated were for better paying industrial jobs in the North.
“Well, it's very simple. At the end of the Civil War, three southern states were majority black: Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Another three were within four percentage points of being majority black. If people had not migrated, and I understand why they did, but if they had not migrated and you still had the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, black people would control up to 14 Senate seats. They would control more Electoral College votes than California and New York state combined. If they voted over that same period the way they vote now, you would not have had a Republican president in the last 50 years. That would mean that the entire Supreme Court would look different than it does today. That would mean that if Hillary Clinton had lost every single mid-western state in 2006, she still would have won the presidency.”
Lemon didn’t question Blows deduction; instead, he fawned over how he “can’t wait to read” Blow’s new book which contained the words “Black Power” in its subtitle.
The contempt and animus for prodigious American figures exemplified by Blow and Lemon was sponsored, in part, by Mercedes Benz. You can contact this advertiser, and others, via the Media Research Center’s Conservatives Fight Back page conveniently linked here.
Click “Expand,” to read the full January 28 transcript:
CNN Tonight with Don Lemon
01/28/21
11:49 PM
DON LEMON: So a month ago, white supremacists, people carrying American flags, invaded the seat of our democracy and tried to overturn our election. And my next guest has some ideas about how to fight this. I want to bring in, now, Charles Blow, the op-ed columnist for The New York Times. He’s the author of the book "The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto." Charles, good to see you. We’re going to talk all about that. But I have to talk current news with you as well, as we always do. When you look— good evening, by the way. When you look at the insurrection at the Capitol, white supremacist symbols, confederate battle flag, nooses erected outside the Capitol, what role did white supremacy play in the Big Lie and in what happened that day?
CHARLES BLOW: I think white supremacy woven throughout that episode, and is, in fact, connected to the way white supremacy always behaves when it feels threatened. How is that different from the nooses that were erected outside of courthouses all across the South when they would let mobs go into feder—into official buildings, drag out black people accused of things and lynch them? How is that not a parallel? White supremacy always behaves violently. It always responds violently when it feels threatened. Donald Trump was a white nationalist president. He was the embodiment of white supremacy. And he was threatened. He told his supporters that he was being unfairly removed from office and that threat to their power, symbolized by him, activated them.
LEMON: Uh-huh. Look, we've been talking about, you know, you talk about nooses and these confederate symbols and so on and the naming. People are looking at our history and how we celebrate it. This week in San Francisco, the unified school district voted to rename 44 schools named after various public figures including the former presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Is there a difference between naming buildings after these presidents and having confederate generals as namesakes of buildings and bases?
BLOW: I think – I have a real problem – I’m kind of an absolutist around the idea of owning slaves. I do not buy into the concept that it was part of the mores of the time. I always tell the people who tell me that, that, those people who were slaves are just as human as I am today. Stop looking at it through the white gaze and look at it through the black one. Those people were enslaved by other human beings. They had no freedoms of their own. They -- those people who enslaved them knew where they came from, many of them went to the slave markets, which reeked – reeked of human excrement. The ships that came in, you could smell them before they arrived. The people came out of those hulls very often unable to either lie down or sit up, depending on the ship. Their food was thrown down to them. They were treated like animals. And they engaged in that market. They made a market for an appetite to feed – for a market to be fed. I am sorry if I do not commiserate with people who owned slaves, and I do not excuse it as being an artifact of the time.
LEMON: Let's talk about your book. "The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto." And in it, you write, you said, “The proposition is simple: as many black descendants of the great migration as possible should return to the south from which their ancestors fled.” Talk to me more about, I find, this a fascinating idea. I know you were working on this book. Talk to me more about that idea, Charles.
BLOW: Well, it's very simple. At the end of the civil war, three southern states were majority black: Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Another three were within four percentage points of being majority black. If people had not migrated, and I understand why they did, but if they had not migrated and you still had the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, black people would control up to 14 Senate seats. They would control more Electoral College votes than California and New York state combined. If they voted over that same period the way they vote now, you would not have had a Republican president in the last 50 years. That would mean that the entire Supreme Court would look different than it does today. That would mean that if Hillary Clinton had lost every single mid-western state in 2006, she still would have won the presidency.
LEMON: 2016.
BLOW: Black people – black people had the access to that power and it scared the white supremacists in the South to death, and they did everything to strip them of it. Terror, intimidation and then rewriting southern constitutions to, as they say in their minutes, which I have read, to write white supremacy into the DNA of those states. That victory cannot be allowed to stand.
LEMON: Considering what just happened with the election for president and for senators, is Georgia already representative of what you're saying in your book?
BLOW: I called it a proof-in-concept, and I would have had no idea it was going to happen when I moved here or started writing the book. You know how books are to write, you start years before you actually publish, so you have no idea what's going to be happening at the time you publish. But it is absolutely a proven concept. There are two things that happened that changed Georgia. One was undeniably amazing organizing by a whole bunch of groups, including the amazing Stacey Abrams. The other, however, was the result of the reverse migration. The black population of Georgia doubled from 1990 to 2020. Black people, the last time Georgia went Democratic, it was 1992. Black people were only 25% of the population in 2002, now – 1992. Now, they are 33% of the population of Georgia, and they became for the very first time the majority of the population—the coalition that elected a senator and not just one, but two.
LEMON: Well, Charles, I can't wait to read the book. "The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto" by Charles Blow. Charles, good to see you. Thank you so much for appearing. Good luck with the book.
BLOW: Thank you so much; I appreciate it.
LEMON: Thank you.
