Frustrated at its party’s impotence in dealing with the issue of slavery, on March 20, 1854, former members of the Whig Party met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to form a new party; the Republican Party. Republicans considered slavery a moral evil and a stain on the character of our young nation, and just six years later a little-known Illinois Republican congressman named Abraham Lincoln won the presidency.

From its inception, the Republican Party has fought for equality for black people. The bloodiest war in American history began in large part because the Democrat Party violently opposed efforts to free black slaves. It was the Republican Party that passed the first Civil Rights Act in 1866 (struck down by a Democrat-appointed Supreme Court), and it was Republicans who secured the right to vote for blacks and women, and who led the effort to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

It is one of the greatest con jobs in history that Democrats now claim the title of defenders of black Americans, intentionally deceiving them with the outrageous lie that racist white Southern Democrats switched to the Republican Party in the late 1960s (as if it made sense that racists would flee to the party that just passed the Civil Rights Act they so loathed).

In reality, of course, it is the Republican Party that has fought, and still fights, for equality and prosperity for black Americans. And though they get little credit for it, Republicans are doing right by black Americans.   Joe Biden famously screeched that Mitt Romney, the most decent, milquetoast man to run for office in living memory, was going to put blacks “back in chains.”

Yet where are black Americans truly in chains? In the Democrat poverty plantations of cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Memphis, and St. Louis, where their hopes are crushed under generational poverty, high unemployment, sky-high murder rates, and gang violence. These are cities where Democrats have had free rein to implement their policies for decades, and blacks are the ones who suffer most.

The Democrat Party is the party whose leaders send their own children to elite private schools while striking down school-choice programs that have a strong record of educating poor minorities so they can escape the ghettos.

Of course, more than a third of black babies don’t get a chance to escape the ghettos because they never escape the womb. Democrats funnel more than $500 million a year to Planned Parenthood, an organization founded for the sole purpose of eradicating, through abortion and sterilization, blacks and other “undesirables.”

That’s all well and good, you may say, but what have Republicans done for black Americans lately?

For one, they continue to fight for school choice for mothers of poor black children. When Obama repeatedly defunded the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, it was Republicans who kept bringing the money back.

Under President Donald Trump, supposedly the most virulently racist president ever, black Americans, indeed all Americans, are experiencing a renewing of the American Dream. In October 2016, as we closed out the last few months of Obama’s eight year term, black unemployment stood at 8.6%. In less than two years under Trump, black unemployment hit 5.9%, a historical low.

After eight years of Obama there were 18.1 million blacks with jobs. Under Trump, it’s up to 19.3 million, a 1.2 million jump in two years.

And that’s just the beginning. Congressional Republicans passed, and President Trump signed, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, without a single vote from the Democrats. The new law created Opportunity Zones, which gave “tax incentives for businesses to invest in economically distressed communities, making them a powerful vehicle for economic growth and job creation.”

As job creation and personal wealth continues to grow in the black community, they will be able to look at Democrats and say, “You didn’t build that!”   Realizing that far too many young black men are in a revolving door when it comes to prison, Republicans have been relentlessly pursuing criminal-justice reform with the goal of rehabilitating those sent to prison, and putting them on the path to prosperity through education and work. Republican-led states like Georgia and Texas are leading the nation in criminal-justice reform, leading to historic lows in the number of black prisoners.

In 2016, as he made his final pitch to voters nationwide, Trump asked black Americans to give him a chance and vote for him, inquiring, “What the hell do you have to lose?!”

Trump ended up with 8% of the black vote in the 2016 election — not much, but still 2% higher than Romney.

Today, having seen the benefits of Trump’s tax-cutting, regulation-slashing, job-creating, pro-growth policies, as well as important symbolic gestures — like declaring Martin Luther King Jr.‘s burial site a national landmark (which Obama didn’t do in eight years) — Trump’s approval rating among blacks stands at a mind-bogglingly high 40%.

Democrats are desperate to recapture the narrative of Trump and the Republicans as white-robe clad, cross-burning racists, but it seems that more and more black Americans are seeing their lives improved by Republican leaders and conservative policies and realizing an important truth: The Democrat Party has never been their friend.