Deep into the second term of our worst president, the man who was supposed to resolve racial problems in America, we can look back fifty years and see how little the dreary cant of leftism has changed.  On August 11, 1965, Watts exploded into an orgy of violence and destruction, resulting in 34 deaths and thousands of injuries.  Tens of millions of dollars of damage gutted much of Watts, and this destruction, combined with the lawlessness of the black rioters, drove business from that part of Los Angeles.

The reflexive reasons given by experts for the Watts Riots were “racism” and “poverty,” but the riots took place after LBJ had begun “The Great Society” – essentially an expansion of FDR’s “New Deal” – and after civil rights laws and a constitutional amendment against the poll tax and after Supreme Court decisions banning even de facto segregation (segregation that occurred without any government action).

The bitter dregs of leftist solutions to black poverty haunt us still.  Conservatives noted fifty years ago that the principal problem was not material poverty, but rather the poverty of values that had been deliberately cultivated by leftists in Washington, who wished blacks to be forever miserable, angry, and unbalanced.  This was decried then, as now, as “racist.”

So when conservatives insisted that black women not have children out of wedlock because the consequences of pandemic bastardy were calamitous, the left and their black hirelings screamed, again, “racism!”  Feminists would soon add their voices, assuring these black women that children no more needed fathers than mothers needed husbands. 

Young blacks were told that learning to read and to speak and write English well was surrender to Whitey.  Juvenile delinquency and its natural successor, criminality, were excused as the fault of some magical white curse on blacks.  Sexual promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse, gangs as surrogates for fathers – all these flourished in the malignant garden of calculated dependency.

Crime flourished because the lives of millions of blacks were channeled into both destructive and self-destructive paths, and because when police stopped crime in black areas, these officers were blamed as racists, even when the police officers were black themselves.  Black neighborhoods that in the 1920s were peaceful and hopeful, even if rather poor, descended into a leftist-made maelstrom of despair and rage. 

The endless infusions of government “help” were as destructive and addictive in the lives of those made dependent upon this money as a drug dealer’s increased sales to addicts.  The vile cynicism of the left, of course, insisted that we must “invest” more into this new servitude of blacks by building bigger and better plantations for these voter-slaves to live on.  

If leftists had consciences, perhaps this would bother them.  These leftists, after all, condemned tens of millions of human beings to Hell on Earth, and the same leftists have profited mightily from this slave trade.  These leftists have left, as well, poor white families trapped in cities of crime and debauchery while their own pampered children go to private schools and live in fancy neighborhoods as Mrs. Clinton does.

If these leftists actually wanted policies that succeeded in helping blacks, perhaps they would at least casually glance back at the moonscape that is black America in big cities.  Has anything gotten better since Watts?   It does not seem like it, and, even more importantly, it does not sound like it. 

Listen to the same dull voices of black “leaders” in America droning on about the blight of racism, the legacy of racism, or the blah, blah, blah of racism.  Listen to the same monotonous claims by drudges like Hillary that Republicans who are against voter fraud are actually trying to keep blacks from voting or that black police officers who arrest black criminals are enemies of the black people they are protecting.

The Watts Riots were fifty years ago.  The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, was ratified one hundred and fifty years ago.  What, then, is holding blacks back in America?  Those who buy the votes of black Americans and who sell their souls – the left, which prospers only on misery and exults only in failure.