Chris Roemer: Progressives are driving the Democratic Party, and destroying America | COMMENTARY – Baltimore Sun
Todays college students are protected from the most insignificant microagression, but at Columbia University anti-Israel activists are allowed to shout vile epithets at Jewish students in the name of free speech.
These activists have created such an intimidating environment for Jewish students, students have been given the option to attend classes virtually to protect them from the hate that surrounds them everyday.
One activist at Columbia proudly declared, Oct. 7 will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, but 10,000 times.
The Hill reports New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has had enough of the hateful rhetoric being hurled at Jewish students on city campuses.
I am horrified and disgusted, Adams said, with the antisemitism being spewed at and around the Columbia University campus, like the example of a young woman holding a sign with an arrow pointing to Jewish students stating Al-Qasams Next Target, or another where a woman is literally yelling We are Hamas, or another where groups of students are chanting We dont want no Zionists here.
The progressive movement bred this hate by teaching our children to view everything from an oppressed/oppressor point of view to the exclusion of all other perspectives.
Its this one-dimensional view of the world that allows progressives to be willfully blind to the obvious moral bankruptcy of supporting a terrorist group like Hamas that butchers people and then celebrates having done so.
No one should be surprised this sort of thing is happening at American universities. Its been decades in the making.
Where is the Office of Civil Rights? Where is the Department of Justice? Where is the Department of Education? Waiting for the White House to give them permission to do their jobs.
They might have to wait a while. President Joe Biden has his progressive base to placate and that base doesnt seem very placated at the moment.
Progressive have had an enormous impact on the Democratic Party. Some would argue theyve destroyed it.
Today, Democrats are the champions of illegal immigration. Seven million migrants have crossed the southern border during Bidens time in the White House, and we have no idea who they are.
Its progressives who run our sanctuary cities and who wont allow their police departments to cooperate with ICE.
Democrats have become the party of abortion. The party favors giving a woman the right to end the life of her unborn child anytime she pleases 10 weeks, 15 weeks, 40 weeks it doesnt matter.
They can cloak abortion in as many high-sounding phrases as they like. Womans healthcare. Reproductive rights. The hard reality is, with each abortion a baby is killed, which is true no matter what language Democrats use to obfuscate that fact.
Democrats have become the party of gender affirmation care. Genital mutilation and mastectomies for minors. Pumping kids full of hormones and puberty-blocking drugs, and taking children from their homes if their parents resist.
It is the party that demands biological men be allowed to compete in womans sports simply because they say theyre a woman.
Democrats are the party who nominated a Supreme Court justice to the bench who is unable to define what a woman is, because, she said, she is not a biologist.
Its progressives who are destroying our public schools, using them to indoctrinate the next generation of leftist activists rather than focusing on academic achievement. Its progressives who stand in the way of any public school innovation (i.e. school choice) that strays from the current failing model schools have used for far too long.
Its progressives who have destroyed American cities. Today, lawlessness, homelessness and a general decay of civic order characterizes most American cities.
And its progressives who teach our children every white person in America is a racist.
Despite their radicalism, progressives have made for a very comfortable home for themselves in the Democratic Party. In fact, theyre now setting the partys agenda. Theyre driving the Democratic train.
If youre a passenger on that train, you might want to consider where its taking you.
Which brings to mind something liberal commentator Bill Maher said during an appearance on the The Joe Rogan Experience.
You can be woke, he said, with all the nonsense that that now implies, but dont say that somehow its an extension of liberalism. Because its most often actually an undoing of liberalism.
He went on to say, the goal is to not see race at all, anywhere for any reason. Thats what liberals always believed all the way through Obama, going back to Kennedy, everybody, Martin Luther King. Thats not what the woke believe.
They believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan.
Liberals first started referring to themselves as progressives when the term liberal gained too much of a negative connotation.
But as Maher points out, since then the left has metastasized into something completely different than it was when liberals ran the Democratic Party.
Today, progressives are taking the party to the very edge of reality.
Chris Roemer is a retired banker and educator who resides in Finksburg. He can be contacted at chrisroemer1960@gmail.com.