The Patriot Post® · Harris Disgraces the Memory of Selma

Vice President Kamala Harris made her way down to the Deep South yesterday to commemorate the 57th anniversary of one of the iconic moments of the Civil Rights era: the “Bloody Sunday” march by black voting-rights activists across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The marchers’ destination was the capital city of Montgomery, 54 miles away, but they were soon set upon as they tried to cross over the bridge, savagely beaten and clubbed by white state troopers under the orders of the state’s segregationist governor, Democrat George Wallace.

Harris was thus the perfect Beltway ambassador for this commemoration because, well, nothing says “Selma” and “Civil Rights” and “Bloody Sunday” like a Bay Area progressive of Jamaican-Indian descent who grew up in Canada and whose ancestors were slaveowners.

Those who get their news from the taxpayer-funded Democrat cheerleaders at NPR might’ve thought Harris the second coming of John Lewis, such was the heroic language of their reporting about Joe Biden’s woeful veep. Lewis, the now-deceased congressman, was a leader of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and he had his head split open for it. Harris? Not so much. But she was in fine form for promoting unity spewing racial demagoguery:

Under a blazing blue sky, Harris took the stage at the foot of the bridge where in 1965 white state troopers attacked Black voting rights marchers attempting to cross. Harris called the site hallowed ground on which people fought for the “most fundamental right of America citizenship: the right to vote.”

“Today, we stand on this bridge at a different time,” Harris said before a cheering crowd of thousands. “We again, however, find ourselves caught in between. Between injustice and justice. Between disappointment and determination. Still in a fight to form a more perfect union. And nowhere is that more clear than when it comes to the ongoing fight to secure the freedom to vote.”

Yes, of course. Because blacks in this country aren’t currently free to vote.

These people have no shame.

“So last year,” she continued, “we all joined together. We locked arms and lifted our voices and fought to pass Federal Voting rights legislation. We brought the freedom to vote act, yes, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to the floor of the United States Senate. And on the night of January 19, every Republican senator in the United States Senate voted to block passage of this law.”

Your tax dollars at work, folks.

Despite the worst efforts of the vice president, the Bloody Sunday commemoration has become something of an exercise in self-loathing among leftists and Democrats. This is partially because none of the issues they’re fighting for these days has even a scintilla of the majesty of a real civil rights struggle, and partially because today’s rich, pampered, privileged leftists are far too soft and irresolute to risk shedding their blood for any cause, much less the cause of poor Southern blacks. Oh, Joe Biden may well prattle on about “voting rights” and how the Republicans’ efforts to enact modest anti-fraud electoral reforms in certain states is tantamount to Jim Crow 2.0, Jim Crow on steroids, and even Jim Eagle. But poll taxes and literacy tests were eliminated with the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Voting has never been easier for American citizens than it is today. Nor has cheating. Anyone who thinks Biden and Harris are fighting nobly for the right of black Americans to vote is delusional. They’re fighting to keep their deeply unpopular party from being swept out to sea on November 8. They’re doing it because Democrats are, above everything else, desperate to hang onto political power.

Here, we suppose we should give Harris credit. After all, she stopped short of suggesting that the upcoming electoral shellacking will be illegitimate.