Democrat congressman: Tea Party wants blacks ‘hanging on a tree’

By David McElroy · September 1, 2011

Almost all politicians exaggerate from time to time, but U.S. Rep. Andre Carson moved straight into flat-out lying territory Tuesday when he told fellow blacks that members of Congress allied with the Tea Party movement “would love to see you and me … hanging on a tree.”

In an age of more and more demagoguery, it’s one of the most blatant lies I’ve seen — and it’s clearly designed to push political buttons.

I’ve talked a lot about the need to get past the political hatred that’s so much a part of our system today. I’ve said we need to quit ranting at each other and learn to understand where other people are coming from. I can’t add much to what I’ve already said about that, but I want to review — again — why this is happening.

My conservative Republican friends tell me that progressive liberal Democrats are liars and idiots, but the reverse tends to be true, too. Just about every group is angry at every other group. They’re all convinced that the ones who oppose them aren’t just wrong, but stupid and dishonest and probably the cause of cancer, too. In fact, in response to one of the pieces I wrote earlier this week about this, a conservative friend said this:

“David, you’re way off. Conservatives discuss things logically. Liberals get emotional, and it takes no time until they are using vile words to attack and label anyone who disagrees with them. You should get around more.”

My friend is an intelligent and educated man, and he honestly believes that people who agree with him are logical, but the people who don’t are illogical. The truth is that most groups are reasonable and rational part of the time and emotional and irrational at others. It’s part of being human.

We do this about politics because we have a “winner take all” system. If you get the majority on your side, you have the power to force other groups to do what you please. If Carson and his group get power, they would be just as happy to impose their views on the rest of the population as he claims the Tea Party types want to do. He’s simply taking a step further to claim that he knows the Tea Party’s real motivation — which he claims is to lynch blacks. This is no more honest than when conservatives make up bizarro claims about Barack Obama. (No, Obama isn’t planning to round us all up and send us to secret FEMA camps. Obama also hasn’t “admitted” that he’s a Muslim.)

As long as other groups have the right to live the way they want to — and agree that we have the same right — we have no reason to care what they believe or how they live. If we lived in a world like that, we would have no reason to have these political battles. The only reason we have to care now (and the only reason they care what we think) is that our system forces us to put up with whatever the majority wants.

I believe that Andre Carson and people like him are dangerous — regardless of which party they claim or what race they are. Even the people who might politically agree with me are dangerous if they claim a right to control others. Andre Carson isn’t the problem. The system is the problem.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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