If the Left’s 2024 strategy is to divide and conquer, you’re on the hit list.
Elected Democrats and their activist handlers are surging forward with plans to implement multi-billion-dollar slavery reparations bills first in blue states, then nationwide. The latest push came on Jan. 8, when socialist Rep. Cori Bush (D–MO) introduced her $14 trillion “Reparations NOW” bill, which has made its way from the fringe of the far Left to the Democratic Party plank in just a few years.
While cynically bribing black voters ahead of the November presidential election is the obvious goal, Democrats are also stoking racial hatred to justify further radicalism. If we keep going this way, the result will be an unprecedented race war in America’s cities—and they know it.
Coming to a State Near You
The Supreme Court may have struck down race-based college admissions in 2022, but creative leftists are trying to preserve affirmative action by automatically granting “full-tuition support” to black students—call it “admissions reparations.” But that’s just the start.
In December, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) made New York the third state to pursue reparations payments, following Illinois and California last summer. Even on the Left Coast, the $1.2 million per person payout—for 20th century housing discrimination, felony drug arrests, and “overpolicing”—is proving hard for staunch “progressives” to stomach amidst a record $68 billion deficit.
In North Carolina, the city council of High Point—a town of 115,000 with a median income of $58,000—voted on a $45,000 research project to explore slavery reparations, after a push from the local NAACP. (The hired African American studies “experts” are both white, by the way.)
If you think it can’t happen in purple Wisconsin—where slavery was never legal—guess again.
In Congress, Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D) co-sponsored the bill to form a reparations study committee last January, backed by nearly 200 professional activist groups.
Closer to home, the Wisconsin ACLU and its Black Lives Matter allies are pressuring Gov. Tony Evers (D) to back a state reparations plan. “If you don’t support reparations, we’re not going to support you,” one organizer threatened in a Juneteenth celebration.
Only ideologies believe extorting Hispanic, Asian, and white citizens to pay off black Americans is fair. A recent poll by Steve Cortes and the League of American Workers found that just 19 percent of Wisconsiners—split evenly between Republicans and Democrats—think that reparations are a good idea. A whopping 63 percent of Hispanics oppose reparations. Only 46 percent of Biden voters support the measure.
The Long Con
So where does the support for reparations come from? Thank Big Activism and its “dark money” donors. A constellation of far-left groups has been thumping the reparations drum for years, shepherding it from the fringe to Democratic Party dogma.
Reparation Generation, which lobbies against middle America’s “structural racism,” is a front for the San Francisco-based nonprofit Multiplier, which incubates new leftist policy groups. We’ve traced $119 million in funding to Multiplier from the Rockefeller, Packard Foundation, and Moore Foundations—all top mega-donors—as well as the Mark Zuckerberg-bankrolled Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
The Reparations Project orders “white people [to] repair racial injustice now” by paying off their black neighbors. It, too, is a front for a tax-exempt group: the Georgia-based Quarterman & Keller Foundation. Ditto the Human Rights Watch, which urges Biden to establish a federal reparations commission in response to George “Fentanyl” Floyd’s death in May 2020.
And you’re indirectly supporting reparations activism—if you’re buying Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, that is. The Vermont retailer is a major backer of reparations activism, even endorsing congressional Democrats’ study committee in 2021 while castigating the country’s “systemic racism.”
But demanding billions of dollars is practically chump change compared with the global campaign for slavery reparations.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley recently demanded—with a straight face—$4.6 trillion in reparations from Europe for her little island of 281,000 people. For reference, the U.K.’s annual GDP is under $3.1 trillion; Barbados’ is $4.8 billion, almost all of it from Caribbean tourism and offshore banking.
Naturally, she’s magnanimous: “We’re not expecting that the reparatory damages will be paid in a year, or two, or five,” Mottley informed a weepy-eyed King Charles. But cash only.
And that’s getting off with a “miniscule” bill, she warns. One firm estimates that Britons alone owe $24 trillion to countries affected by slavery; Spain $17 trillion; Portugal $21 trillion; France $9 trillion; the Netherlands nearly $5 trillion; and the United States a whopping $27 trillion. But don’t worry, we’re told, because once their $108 trillion global wealth redistribution payment plan is inked, past wrongs will all be set right. The “healing” can finally begin. Pinky swear.
Of course, that’s $7 trillion more than global GDP in 2022, meaning the entire globe couldn’t afford the plan (even if it wanted to). Worse, this cash grab callously reduces chattel slavery to “damages” (like a bent fender) and punishes the living for the sins of the long dead. No one involved in the scam was ever involved in slavery. And it ignores the profound sacrifices Americans and Britons made to abolish human bondage in the 19th century.
Everyone knows about the 600,000 Americans who died in the Civil War, almost none of whom owned a single slave. Far fewer realize that it took British taxpayers from 1833 to 2015 to pay off the gargantuan debt—one of the largest loans in history—accrued from freeing the countless empire’s slaves.
None of that matters to the thieving Left, because in reparations they spy the most lucrative con of all time—one that literally enslaves hundreds of millions of Westerners to the debt yoke for generations to come. There is no “true” cost of slavery because it can always be ballooned.
The madness must end here. For the millions of moderate Americans who continue to vote for Democrats, the message couldn’t be clearer: This isn’t your father’s Democratic Party. If Democrats win in 2024, you’ll learn that the hard way.
Hayden Ludwig is director of research for Restoration of America, which publishes Restoration News