“The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people, which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” —Thomas Jefferson (1787)

In June, Hillary Clinton suggested the unthinkable. While visiting a black community church in Florissant, MO, she asserted that, in fact, “All lives matter.”

The backlash (or blacklash) was immediate, because leftist race-bait political hustlers claim exclusive rights over whose lives matter, and any Democrat who dares suggests anything other than “black lives matter” is subject to immediate reprimand.

After hearing Clinton’s remark, Rev. Renita Lamkin concluded, “That blew a lot of support that she may have been able to engender here.”

The sound bite “black lives matter” was born alongside the “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra after a black Ferguson thug was shot by a white police officer, and the St. Louis County Prosecutor (a Democrat) determined the shooting was justifiable self-defense.

No matter. Political agendas trump facts, and the dishonest and disgraceful “hands up” myth persists to this day.

Last weekend, Democrat presidential contender Martin O'Malley, the former governor of the People’s Republic of Maryland, made the same egregious mistake at this year’s Netroots Nation convention of “progressive” political activists.

O'Malley’s address to the gathering was interrupted by attendees shouting, “Black lives matter!” He responded: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.”

Oops! The audience was rendered apoplectic — how could a “Nutroots” regular make such an appalling mistake?

Clinton was quick to chastise O'Malley, working in both Democrat “divide-and-conquer” themes of race and class: “Everyone in this country should stand firmly behind [black lives matter]. We need to acknowledge some hard truths about race and justice in this country, and one of those hard truths is that racial inequality is not merely a symptom of economic inequality. Black people across America still experience racism every day.”

A day later, O'Malley apologized: “That was a mistake on my part, and I meant no disrespect. I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or to communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”

O'Malley’s error occurred in the shadow of the death of a black drug dealer in Baltimore Police custody, and the more recent murder of Christians at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. The Baltimore death was unintentional, but will produce a solid $5-$10 million liability lottery payout for the perp’s family, as was the case in the police-involved death of a New York thug. While Baltimore has already named a youth center in honor of the “victim,” the cash will be coming.

However, the Charleston assault was clearly motivated by racist views — which had been cultivated by an abusive broken home life and amplified by habitual drug use. In fact, racially motivated white-on-black assaults are far more rare than racially motivated black-on-white assaults, but who’s counting?

In the month after the Baltimore drug dealer’s death, there were 43 homicides in Baltimore, almost all of them black-on-black. The weekend after the assault in Charleston, there were 10 homicides in Obama’s hometown of Chicago, and again, almost all were black-on-black. This epidemic of black-on-black violence is typical in most urban centers across the nation.

And yet, not a word of protest from any Democrat or leftist black activist.

So, do black lives really matter?

After the Charleston attack, instead of focusing on the real issues fomenting racial disunity, Democrats did what they do best — used the blood of innocents to advance their political agenda. In this case, they equated the Confederate Battle Flag with the Nazi swastika, and they are now endeavoring to eradicate every vestige of that historic symbol from the planet.

The flag came down in Charleston, despite the fact that one of the individuals murdered there, Pastor Clementa Pinckney, had previously voted to keep the flag flying at the South Carolina capitol grounds. It is noteworthy that among the other bold black supporters of the flag is H.K. Edgerton, former president of the North Carolina NAACP.

The Obama administration ordered the Confederate Battle Flag removed from the nation’s first National Military Park, Chickamauga, established in 1890 for reconciliation between veterans of the Confederate and Union forces after the War Between the States. (For the record, at our offices we fly the American flag, but honor both our nation’s Union and Confederate Veterans.)

And now, black “leaders” across the South are attempting to whitewash from the earth, Soviet-style, our nation’s Confederate heritage — calling for removal of the sculptures of Lee, Jackson and Davis on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, and the removal of statues of Confederate Patriots in every major Southern city. Memphis officials want to exhume the remains of the brilliant Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest from a city cemetery. Others want to rename Ft. Hood, Ft. Bragg and other military installations that take their names from Confederate war heroes.

Of course, all these race hustlers might want to visit U.S. Code 85-425, Sec 410, which established that all Confederate veterans be recognized equally with Union veterans, which is to say that defacing or removing such monuments is a felony. In reality, if history so bothers these race-baiters, they should start by taking down the Democrat Party, which supported and defended slavery during the War Between the States. The Republican Party, of course, was opposed to slavery.

Walter E. Williams sums up this charade as a case study of historical ignorance. And Thomas Sowell writes of the futility of refighting the Civil War: “We need a lot more serious thinking about the present and the future, and a lot less time and energy spent on the past.”

Apparently black lives do matter to Williams and Sowell, two of our nation’s most esteemed thinkers on matters of economy and race.

Black lives also mattered to Martin Luther King. In 1963, King said famously: “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

In 1993, Bill Clinton stood before a black Memphis congregation where King delivered his last sermon and asserted that King “did not live and die to see the American family destroyed” or “for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon.”

But Clinton’s feigned concern belied the truth about how the Democrats’ “Great Society” programs and policies have killed King’s dream. Indeed, the poverty pimps have turned that dream into a living nightmare.

Fact is, if black lives really mattered to today’s so-called “black community leaders,” they’d be protesting all the social and cultural factors (read: “Democrat policies”) that have created urban poverty plantations across the nation, keeping black folks enslaved for generations and thereby allowing Democrats to ensure their lockstep allegiance.

If black lives really mattered to race-hustling activists, they’d be protesting the epidemic of fatherless black children and the resulting black-on-black crime, drug abuse, rampant illegitimacy, crumbling inner-city schools, and a murderous and misogynistic “gangsta” culture.

If black lives really mattered to race-hustling activists, they’d be protesting the fact that, though black people only represent 13% of the population, almost half of all homicide victims are black, and more than 90% of their assailants are also black.

If black lives really mattered to race-hustling activists, they’d be protesting in front of Planned Parenthood offices across the nation, under whose banner 90,000 black babies perished last year. Perhaps they are unaware that, according to Planned Parenthood’s eugenicist founder Margaret Sanger, the poor are “human weeds, reckless breeders, spawning human beings who never should have been born.”

Now, five decades after King’s speech, our nation’s first black president, Barack Hussein Obama, is still pimping color over character. Here’s an excerpt from just one recent speech: “A deep distrust exists [in] communities of color. … There are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. … [The] frustrations have deep roots in many communities of color. … Too many individuals, particularly young people of color, do not feel as if they are being treated fairly.”

Hmmm … I wonder where they’d get that idea.

If black lives really mattered to race-hustling activists, they’d reject the failed policies that continue to subjugate and disenfranchise millions of black Americans.

But they won’t, because their political and financial fortunes are worth far more to them than black lives. And to ensure those fortunes, they continue to propagate the insidious notion of “black privilege,” which excuses the social and cultural degradation in today’s urban centers.

Their fallacious pretense that black lives matter is nothing new.

At the conclusion of the War Between the States, one of the most famous abolitionists, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), wrote, “Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, ‘What shall we do with the negro.’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us… [If] the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall… All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”

But Democrats have done everything but what Douglass asked, and the consequences today are devastating.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), founder of Tuskegee University, was among the last generation of black people born into institutional slavery prior to emancipation. Washington became a leading advocate for the rights of blacks — and of all people.

In his 1911 work, “My Larger Education,” he wrote, “There is a class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. … There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”

Indeed, Democrat “race-problem solvers” have done everything in their power to ensure black Americans don’t “lose their grievances” in order to “make themselves prominent before the public.”

In the footsteps of Booker Washington followed Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950), an esteemed historian, author, journalist and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Woodson is most often cited as “the father of black history,” and this passage from his seminal work, “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” is representative of his thinking: “If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.”

Democrats have masterfully maintained the black ghetto through policies that ensure they will “never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.”

Carrying on the legacy of Washington and Woodson today is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who notes: “Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race.”

Thomas speaks precisely to the concerns expressed 150 years ago by Frederick Douglass.

Today, the inconvenient truth is this: If black lives really mattered, Barack Obama and leftist cadres of race hustlers would stop enslaving black people on urban poverty plantations in order to advance the Democrat political agenda. For them, it’s more aptly stated, “black LIES matter.”

Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis