Joe Biden was nominated by an increasingly radical Democratic Party to be an acceptable face to mainstream Americans in a general election. Yet the presidential contender is seeing the progressive shibboleths to which he, along with every other rival, bowed down during the primary season come back to haunt him.
In Los Angeles, two law enforcement officers were ambushed, shot, and left clinging to life Sept. 12 in a shocking crime. Black Lives Matter protesters attempted to block the emergency-room entrance at the hospital the officers were rushed to, with one thug shouting, “I hope they f—— die.” For month, leading Democrats, including Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), have been expressing their vocal support for the Marxist BLM movement and its slogans.
As this was happening, live-streaming entertainment goliath Netflix reaped a tsunami of public outrage by releasing Cuties, a French film about 11-year-old girls “coming of age” that is widely perceived to normalize pedophilia. The powerful corporation is seeded with top Democratic donors at its highest ranks. From a strictly political point of view, President Donald Trump should write each of them a thank-you card.
Out on a BLM Limb
A Fox News poll released Sept. 13 shows public support for the Black Lives Matter cause continuing to plummet. A sturdy 48% of likely voters surveyed believe BLM protests in Portland, OR, Kenosha, WI, and New York are riots. Only 40% of those polled see the unrest as legitimate protest. In a July ABC News poll, when the summer of George Floyd was in full fever, 63% of those surveyed expressed support for “the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Police officers are now being openly targeted by hoodlums draped in a threadbare “social justice” garment that Democrats and their media allies are finding impossible to keep stitched together. Given the incendiary language long used by BLM activists, the cold-blooded attempted execution in Los Angeles was almost a foregone conclusion. Law enforcement officials had warned of the escalating dangers against them. The FBI reportedly informed Chicago police in late August that more than 30 street gangs had “formed a pact to ‘shoot on-sight any cop that has a weapon drawn on any subject in public.'”
It seems Democrats should have been able to anticipate the consequences of their imprudent proclamations. In a telling 2016 television appearance with CNN’s Jake Tapper, even Biden acknowledged a facet within BLM that promotes a murderous hatred of cops:
“Look what the President [Obama] said when the Black Lives Matter people in one – one – demonstration said, ‘you know, kill the police, the sooner the better,’ or some phrase like that. The president condemned it immediately. But that’s not – that’s not the black community. That’s not the community – that group, that element of Black Lives Matter doesn’t speak for all of Black Lives Matter….
“And so it is just a very broad statement. There are some people in Black Lives Matter who don’t want to talk and have dialogue and others who do.”
Biden went on to call BLM an “umbrella” of various peoples protesting racial discrimination by police. So as far back as 2016, he knew that people who advocated the killing of police officers were sheltering under that “umbrella.” Yet he and his fellow Democrats blindly waved the Black Lives Matter banner following the death of Floyd in police custody in late May. Biden parrots BLM talking points on “systemic racism” and made them a significant focus of his dystopian nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic convention.
As the officers in Los Angeles fight for their lives, Team Biden is charged with the difficult task of tamping down the overheated reaction while trying not to offend the identity politics-obsessed members of his Democratic Party.
Netflix Creates Uproar
With that in mind, Biden did not need Netflix to create a pedophilia uproar less than two months before the election. But it did, furthering many Americans’ disgust with cultural progressivism at a time when the blue nominee is trying to steer a moderate course.
The release of Cuties has spurred a consumer backlash. A Change.org petition demanding Netflix remove the film has well more than 600,000 signatures, and the company’s stock price has taken a hit amid reports of massive subscriber cancellations.
It is well known that Barack Obama and his wife Michelle have a lucrative production deal with Netflix. And former top Obama adviser and reported Biden running mate finalist Susan Rice is a member of the company’s Board of Directors.
What may not be widely realized are the other high-level Democratic Party connections at Netflix. CEO Reed Hastings and his wife Patty Quillin are major party donors. The couple donated $2 million in 2018 to the Senate Majority PAC, which funds efforts to elect Democrats to the U.S. Senate, according to the watchdog website Open Secrets.
Netflix Co-CEO and Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos is responsible for green-lighting all programming offered by the streaming site. He and his wife Nicole Avant are also huge Democrat donors. The Hollywood Reporter noted in 2012 that the pair had “just made the top tier of Obama ‘bundlers,’ raising more than half a million dollars in one night.”
Avant was Southern California finance co-chairwoman for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and became ambassador to the Bahamas in the Obama administration.
Many repulsed by leading Democrat financial bigwigs airing a movie that starkly depicts pre-teen girls sexually gyrating will no doubt recall the loony embrace of “transgender” children by then-party frontrunner Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) last October. The nationally televised spectacle became even more outlandish when Warren later declared that the nine-year-old child involved would personally vet her Education Secretary nominee if she became president.
This is the weirdness Democrats had hoped to avoid with Biden at the front. But it does not seem to be working. Even the Coronavirus crisis, which the party considers politically advantageous, is proving damaging in unforeseen ways. With Americans suffering mightily from the economic strains caused by lockdowns and social curbs imposed in the name of health, Democrat championing of illegal aliens has become an unpopular topic,
Trump has not been hesitant to pounce. At a Sept. 13 rally in Nevada, he reminded supporters of Biden’s acquiescence to radical progressive demands during the primary:
“Remember the [first Democratic] debate where they’re all standing there and they looked around. ‘Who’s going to give free healthcare to illegal aliens?’ And everyone’s raising hands and he’s going ‘ah, ah.’ Take a look, I’m not kidding. It’s sad. It’s pathetic.”
On a variety of issues, Democrats are finding a fragile Biden gives poor cover for the radical utterances of 2019 and the lemming-like embrace of Black Lives Matter agitators. The milk is spilled, and it’s not going back in the carton.
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Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
