The Grifters

by G. Murphy Donovan (May 2023)

Grifter #2, Karen Ganz, 1997 

 

 

I used to be a Democrat, but not by choice. I was born into what used to be thought of as the progressive American political party, champion of the working man and blue collars. You know, all those “salts of the earth.” The Bronx of my youth was indeed a cluster of congenial, if not totally integrated, Democrat Party ghettos: Irish, Italian, and Jewish proletarians.

The Step Inn on White Plains road was a model of entrepreneurial harmony. A Jewish guy owned the building, an Irishman owned the bar, and somebody’s Italian auntie made the pizza in a small kitchen. Liquor license law mandated that food be served in New York gin mills; so pizza, beer, and whiskey were pretty much the menu at the Step Inn.

There were African Americans and Puerto Ricans too but back in the day they were fewer in number, yet still Democrats like their neighbors. Indeed, at Our Lady of Solace grade school, Lincoln and the Republican Party were historical artifacts. God help you if you confused the Roosevelt presidents.

Expectations were also modest in the blue-collar Bronx of my youth. You needed to finish high school, pass the Regents Exam, serve a couple of years in the military, and then come home to a job with Macy’s, New York’s finest, the Fire Department or Consolidated Edison.

Politics in our neighborhood were simple matters also—in brief, a Democrat Party ward healer managed a reliable local vote from a bar stool at the Van Nest ‘Social’ Club. The Van Nest neighborhood, like much of the Bronx, was Dutch farmland back in the day when New York was New Amsterdam.

By the mid-20^th Century, the Dutch were long gone. The Van Nest Club, near the intersection of Morris Park Avenue and White Plains roads, was the place you went to get a handout (aka Thursday loan), run for office, or a recommendation for school or a job with the city. Hard to believe today, but at one time a leg up was largely a local affair in the Bronx, not a suite of city, state, and federal dependency rackets.

Dependency, nee welfare, is now a generational political commodity, a barter system where votes are bought and sold retail and wholesale, especially in urban Democrat Party sinecures. Today’s college debt forgiveness program is an example of a wholesale vote buying grift now extended to millennial through Gen Z college graduates.

Alas, like blue collars and parish charities, local social club beneficence expired well before the turn of the 21^st Century. Now, Democrat party ghettoes cater to, not working stiffs, but rather to a demographic of race hustlers and dole grifters strung out on a rash of social tropes, pathologies, and related dependencies—from racial quotas, to affirmative action, to rent control, to housing subsidies, to EBT/SNAP gift cards.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion pretty much captures the metropolitan American ideological landscape as we speak.

Without reciting the all too familiar litany of urban decay, crime, and political monotheism that plagues urban rent traps like the Bronx; let’s just say that my primary post-high school ambition was to see the “boogie down” Bronx in the rearview mirror.

For the flavor of politics in the hood today, you need only know that today Van Nest is now known as “Little Yemen” and is represented in the US Congress by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the reigning doyenne of shrill urban hate politics that now includes a grotesque, yet socially acceptable, brand of anti-Semitism, often cloaked in a burka of Muslim civil rights. Jews are priority targets in urban American race wars today.

AOC, like Imam Louis Farrakhan, a notorious Islamist grifter, has been normalized on the American left. Just the other day, in a major address to Nation of Islam zombies, Farrakhan referred to the Jewish places of worship as “the synagogues of Satan.”

There was nary a mention of the latest black ministerial racist harangue in the legacy press.

Sadly, Farrakhan’s brand of toxic Islamism is not too far removed from mainstream African American Christian politics these days, a subset of a larger Democrat Party DEI ideology. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a Baptist, and Father Michael Phleger, a Catholic, are other examples of interdenominational racist, separatist, corruption—and exploitation.

Just as Farrakhan hijacked the American Ummah, race extremists have co-opted the American Democrat Party. No more talk about equality and opportunity; the ask now is reparations, a kind of fiscal revenge, underwritten by street justice which is now featured daily on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

Citizens whose ancestors never owned slaves now owe reparations to an angry generation that never experienced slavery? In practice, reparations are a variety of revenge—or ransom.

For many, victim is a career option in America today.

If we are candid about American minorities, contrast African America and Jewish America today, the difference is the future not the past. In spite of a horrid historical experience; Jews use education, use opportunity, and choose not to be victims. The Jewish, and indeed Israeli, answer to oppression, suffering, and bigotry has never been special pleading.

The consistent Jewish response to insult is global enterprise and national success, an ethnic cultural persistence with few peers. Jewish values are ethics that make success possible anywhere.

In contrast, the black American street version of reparation is called a “polar bear hunt,” or “knockout game” where gangs of African American thugs sucker punch whites in public. Indeed, favored targets for looting, assault, vandalism, and arson are Jews, Asians, and white juveniles or elders.

Ironically, on any given day, you might also see woke, overweight NYC cops taking a knee before a BLM mob.

Public transport assaults are favorite venues for urban punks where victims are cornered or thrown onto rail tracks. Ironically, were it not for Chinese CCP sponsors and their TikTok platform, we would never see the video evidence of street ‘justice’ due to near universal legacy media news censorship of American social pathology in places like New York and Chicago.

Indeed, iconic celebrity bigots like Whoopie Goldberg use venues like ABC to aggravate racial division with impunity. Just recently, on The View, Miss Goldberg claimed that Jews are not a race and that World War II was just ‘whites killing whites.’ The real truth about African American culture is that neither white nor ‘black lives matter’ to partisan, platformed shills like Whoopie.

Black lives only matter if the killer is white.

Apparently lives lost to drugs, alcohol, black-on-black crime, and to the abortion industry are lives that do not matter either in America. Goldberg has little to say about genocide in African America, a self-inflicted social tragedy; yet she continues to misrepresent the Jewish Holocaust.

Ironically, Ms. “Goldberg” began her celebrity run by using a Jewish alias to get her through the Hollywood door. Surely, Goldberg rationalizes her white-face appropriation by claiming that Hollywood is controlled by Jews.

Still, there are no excuses for wartime race crimes any more than race-based peacetime genocide should be ignored. One dead black punk killed by a cop is riot tinder, whilst 19 million black abortions since Roe Vs. Wade (1973) is just another statistic today.

Goldberg is an iconic gender and racially immunized anti-Semite of the American left, who obviously spends more off-camera time at real buffets and fake hair markets than she does at a library or gym. If contemporary black role model is too generous for Miss Goldberg, token might be closer to the truth.

Whoopie is not old, fat, alone, and angry by accident. Caryn ‘passing’ as a Goldberg is as sad as Josephine Behar would be wearing cornrows. Goldberg’s real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson, albeit today’s spelling might more appropriately be “Karen.” Caryn doesn’t just lecture her audience, she whines.

Unfortunately, many well intentioned white celebrities virtue signal about racism and anti-Semitism too, weak sisters all, if we can use a gender trope. Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots football franchise is an example.

Kraft is sponsoring a campaign to highlight the rise of anti-Semitism in America without naming the usual suspects, institutional sponsors, or prevailing examples; examples like the harassment and targeting of conservative Jews in urban centers like New York and Boston, liberal sierra hotels to a fault.

The high point of Kraft’s virtue campaign to date is lapel pins.

Ironically, Robert Kraft is owner of a franchise in a very profitable racial monoculture where most of the help is black and where the owners and stockholders are not. Kraft must know that the NFL, NBA, and the NCAA are now largely self-segregating racial ghettoes exploited by sporting, gambling, advertising, corporate, and media liberals.

Nothing does more damage to real black men than fake white liberals.

Athletes are literally bought, sold, and traded at auctions euphemistically called “drafts,” or worst still “free” agency. If the truth be told, big time sports in America is an archipelago of 21^st Century urban plantations. Sport may pay better today than slavery did yesterday, but the ownership ethos on the American left and in the Democrat Party is vintage Jim Crow. Race-based indentured economic or political servitude is acceptable in America today only because the price is right.

African Americans are literally skewered coming and going by woke sporting life in America. Black Americans are twice as likely to be addicted to drugs, welfare and gambling; and much more likely to do time in prison or sell and or abuse drugs.

Black independence is not purchased in America as often as dependence is sold. Black privilege is now a license to plumb the depths of social morbidity.

In such a culture, religious grifters, criminals, and race hustlers are pretty much immune from public criticism for any number of reasons, with white guilt and establishment fear leading the pack. Slavery is the historic hustle that keeps on giving.

Reparations are now a local and national grift.

The threat is riot and mayhem in urban centers and retail malls. Whites may take refuge in their suburbs and cliff houses; but down below, the public spaces are owned by a restive, angry demographic. Polar bear hunts, recreational arson, and looting are daily smoke signals that strike fear into the hearts of a liberal, white, American nomenclatura.

Beyond threats of violence, arson, and riot; racists and militants have a political ace in the hole. Whilst, African Americans only represent 13.6 per cent of the American population; 96 per cent of those millions vote for Democrats. Those numbers represent the margin of victory in many an election. Black America, like no other group, votes often and reliably for liberal, leftist, or radical Democrats.

With such leverage, all side hustles and grifts come into play. Dependency is now sustainable and predictably generational.

If you ever wondered why African Americans vote consistently for Democrats; the historical party of slavery, the party of lynching, the party of segregation, and Jim Crow; the answer is fiscal not ideological. Follow the money. White liberal guilt is the American cash cow with udders that never go dry, teats that never stop giving.

Racial and social dependency is now as common as pot and fentanyl. The reparations grift is likely to follow suit ad infinitum as long as the Democrat Party has the con in cities, statehouses and inside the Beltway.

Daniel Moynihan (D/NY) predicted as much in 1965. Nothing today suggests that Senator Moynihan’s prophesies about American social divisions, family deterioration, or skin parsing will change any time soon.

The tragedy of African America today is that this unique demographic of perennial victims is neither African nor American. Pervasive colorism and toxic “black” nationalism says it all.

The future is not dark, nor will it be bright—or white.

 

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Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of domestic and national security.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast