PrairiePundit

 Headline USA: Colombian National Arrested for 2024 Voter Fraud, $400K Identity-Theft Scheme Lina Maria Orovio-Hernandez allegedly used that identity for more than 20 years, collecting over $400,000 in government entitlements... She got away with it for several years, but it finally caught up with her. 

 Heather McDonald: Judging Merit by Identity   In making race and sex the paramount considerations for his Supreme Court nomination, President Biden will deal another blow to the quality of our most important institutions. Some of the worst offenders are black politicians and Democrats who pander to their identity politics.  Biden is one of those panders.  He did it to get an endorsement and save his campaign during the primary. His administration also is bypassing the ABA which has also pandered to "diversity" over merit.

I think identity politics is a mistake and it is interesting to see Democrats now using it against each other.  It becomes inherently racist to accuse your political opponent of racism because they are being critical of your policies.

The Hill: Congressional Black Caucus members are furious at Justice Democrats, accusing the outside progressive group aligned with firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) of trying to oust lawmakers of color, specifically African American lawmakers. Justice Democrats is backing primary challengers to eight-term Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), a Hispanic Caucus member, and 10-term Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The insurgent group also made noise this year about challenging Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), a CBC member seen as the heir apparent to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). And CBC leaders are fretting that Justice Democrats may target other black lawmakers in the coming weeks and months, including Reps. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) and Anthony Brown (D-Md.). Brown said the group has been making calls in his district, actively trying to recruit a challenger to ...

Washington Post: Republicans despise identity politics. Trump wants to immerse his campaign in it. The right’s position on identity politics is a misrepresentation of what identity politics is. Democrats have been practicing identity politics for decades.  Before the civil rights movement made it easier for blacks to vote Democrats used identity politics to get poor southerners to vote against Republicans.  Now they are using to get poor blacks and other minorities to vote against Republicans.  It is a consistent theme of demonization of opponents they just are exploiting different groups now. It is a bastardization of politics that rather than focus on issues focuses on alleged grievances of groups and those grievances are in many cases manufactured.  When Joe Biden tells a group of blacks that the Republicans want to put them back in chains he knows that is a lie, but says it anyway to stir antagonism toward the GOP.  It is a form of identity politics a...

Silvio Cantu Jr.: Virginia is "ground zero" in the story of identity politics and the modern Democrats.  And Virginia is probably only the beginning of what will be a long and painful identity politics nightmare. I like what Michael Walsh  wrote about it :   It's not easy being a Democrat these days.  At any moment, some action or character trait that was celebrated just a few years ago suddenly becomes verboten; or some hitherto unknown social-justice concern comes flying in from left field or outer space and lands in your lap. Such is the case with the senior Democrats in the Virginia state house, who from the governor on down have suddenly been accused of behavior that was perfectly acceptable when Al Jolson, Laurence Olivier, or Harvey Weinstein used to do it. Yes, it's a new world for the people who decided to destroy Justice Kavanaugh over innocuous yearbook posts and spurious accusations from the past. As I see it, the...

Washington Post: Va. Gov. Northam insists he is not in racist photo, admits past ‘mistakes’ "I am not either of those people" in a racist yearbook photo, Gov. Ralph Northam (D) said, a reversal after his apology Friday for "the decision I made to appear" in the photo. Northam alluded to other actions in his past, including darkening his face with shoe polish for a Michael Jackson costume in 1984. Northam won running a gutter level campaign based on identity politics and bogus charges of racism against Ed Gillespie .  In the past, the Washington Post has been complicit in this type of campaign in Virginia one of which impacted a Senate race. Only days after defending Northam for his statements which appeared to approve of infanticide the Post and the Democrats are left trying to explain what looks like racism in Northam's past. While the Governor might argue that he has matured since medical school and no longer finds racist pranks amusing he seems to...

Tyler Cowan: Imagine the perfect political and intellectual weapon. It would disable your adversaries by preoccupying them with their own vanities and squabbles, a bit like a drug so good that users focus on the high and stop everything else they are doing. Such a weapon exists: It is called political correctness. But it is not a weapon against white men or conservatives, as is frequently alleged; rather, it is a weapon against the American left. To put it simply, the American left has been hacked, and it is now running in a circle of its own choosing, rather than focusing on electoral victories or policy effectiveness. Too many segments of the Democratic Party are self-righteously talking about identity politics, and they are letting other priorities slip. Of course there is a lot of racism out there, which makes political correctness all the more tempting. Yet polling data suggests that up to 80 percent of Americans are opposed to politically correct thinking in its current man...

Washington Post: Democrats worry that lackluster Latino support could hurt bid for Congress From the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Nevada and Arizona to sprawling turf wars in Texas and Florida, there are signs that the Hispanic vote has yet to flourish in their favor this year. If identity politics is not working that is a good sign for democracy.  It should mean a return to issue oriented policy debates instead of group grievance mongering by Democrats.   Democrats have used identity politics as a divisive means to dived the country.  In Texas, there are several Hispanics who are winning elections as Republicans.

NY Times: After a Tough 2016, Many Pollsters Haven’t Changed Anything Private pollsters are trying harder to capture the opinions of less-educated white voters, but some public pollsters haven’t adjusted at all. Because Democrats and liberals have been so nasty in their opposition to conservative points of view as many as 60 percent of the country are reluctant to even talk about the issues or who they support.  I suspect this is the reason the polling was so wrong in 2016, and there is probably no easy way to fix the problem. When you call someone a racist for saying Black Lives Matter got it start based on a lie and that the crime statistics do not support their claim that police target blacks to kill them you are not going to get a reasonable discussion of the issues.  How do you have a reasonable discussion with someone who claims FBI data is racists?  This is just one example of how Democrat identity politics has poisoned the discourse in a way ...

J.B. White: Trump Has Broken the Apology Hypnosis on Race ... That identity politics game, part and parcel of the Communism/Marxism/Socialism dialectic, could only work for as long as Americans of European descent were consistently hypnotized into thinking of themselves as guilty white people who forever had to apologize, apologize, apologize. I mean, every white male I’ve ever met has a white mother. Most of whom, love their son(s). These children often have white brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, and—incredibly—white grandparents. Donald J. Trump, simultaneously as Deprogrammer-in-Chief and Liberator-in-Chief, was able through skillful utilization of his brilliant and relentless laser (yes, by this I mean his Twitter account) to break the apology hypnosis that was strangling the dominant ethnic group in the nation. It was no surprise when a majority of white males voted for him to be president in the general election. The no way to get around it stu...

Spectator: ... While Trump and his fiery brand of populism grab all the headlines, the most powerful ideology in America remains identity politics. It permeates our culture and fuels our national obsession with diversity, understood as the proportional representation in all realms of life of the various “communities” that have gained recognition: African-Americans, women, Hispanics, LGBTQs, Asians, and, if the Census Bureau has its way, MENAs — Middle Easterners and North Africans. Conspicuously absent from the list, of course, are whites, Christians, and men — three of the most numerous groups in America. Via the doctrines of affirmative action and disparate impact, identity politics has reshaped our laws and our legal system. It has weakened our commitment to meritocracy and equal treatment under the law as a result of its single-minded focus on equalizing group outcomes. It has replaced post-modernism and watered-down Marxism as the unofficial creed of our institutions of hig...

Red States: “Offensive” Hobby Lobby Decoration Goes Viral For Being Problematic When I was in grade school I had a friend whose father grew cotton and he allowed both of us to pick it to earn some spending money.   We were not the only white people who picked cotton either.  His aunt and her husband also picked it. This reminds me of how stupid identity politics has become.  People are going crazy over the fact that fried chicken is supposedly a black thing when we used to have it almost every Sunday as a special treat.  It was just a typical southern dish along with other things that came to be associated with "soul food."