The Ugly Reaction to Tim Scott’s Speech Is Telling

By David Harsanyi

Thursday, April 29, 2021

 

Tim Scott gave a competent Republican response to Joe Biden’s mendacious speech last night. And boy, the contrived, hyperbolic outrage and derision we saw from liberal talking heads was something to behold.

 

Some of it was just farcical. Take MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace’s contention that the speech, in which Scott praised the Trump administration vaccines, was “delivered from a planet where facts don’t matter.” Operation Warp Speed, she claimed, “didn’t do anything to get a needle in the arms, so a lot of disinformation.” Well, it did help boost the life-saving innovation that flows through those needles – not to mention a million needles into arms every day by the time Joe Biden got his shot.

 

But Scott’s most controversial statement, allegedly, was to contend that, “America is not a racist country.” All the usual suspects took to social media to mock the senator for simultaneously saying the nation wasn’t racist and pointing out that he had personally experienced bigotry. Of course America is a racist nation, they wailed, before getting “Uncle Tim” trending on Twitter to try and prove it. The Left’s demeaning of any African American who strays from leftist orthodoxy is one of the ugliest acceptable smears in our political discourse.

 

Scott’s two claims are wholly compatible. Bad actors and ugly ideas exist among people of all nations, and always will, and yet that does not necessarily mean the nation itself is fundamentally, legally, culturally, or systemically racist. We can always do better, but by world standards, the United States is likely the least racist place.

 

And Scott never alleged that racism was nonexistent in America. To do so would be absurd. Scott wrote a police-reform bill, in fact, and Democrats such as Harris, Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin shut down debate using the filibuster, which they now call a “relic of Jim Crow.”

 

In any event, at CNN, Van Jones argued that Scott’s message “was nonsense” and that the senator had lost African Americans “by the tens of millions” by denying what everyone knew was true about America. This was the tone across left-wing media.

 

Yet this morning, Vice President Kamala Harris, when asked by ABC News about Scott’s comments, said: “I don’t think America is a racist country but we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today.”

 

There are flagrant double standards in politics, and then there is seeing two people say the same thing within 24 hours but being treated completely differently. Is Harris spinning nonsense as well? Is Harris losing tens of millions of black voters? If not, why not? Or are liberals simply trying to smear Scott as a quisling because they’re worried about his appeal? (That last question is rhetorical.)