President-elect Donald Trump’s resounding victory in the 2024 election has made leftists’ incessant race-baiting feel more tedious than sinister.
Nonetheless, racist Democrats still have the power to inflict real-world harm.
For instance, Monday morning on social media platform X, Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts showcased the modern American left’s enduring obsession with identity politics when she praised President Joe Biden for commuting the death sentences of 37 federal inmates because, in her words, “[t]he death penalty is racist.”
“There is no action more powerful or righteous than sparing someone’s life, and today President Biden is doing just that,” Pressley’s statement began.
Biden showed his righteousness by sparing the lives of convicted murderers on federal death row. In fact, one particular recipient of the president’s righteous mercy kidnapped and killed a 12-year-old girl.
Pressley, however, concerned herself with skin color, not victims.
“The death penalty is a racist, flawed, and fundamentally unjust punishment that has no place in any society,” she wrote.
“For far too long, it has been disproportionately weaponized against Black and brown communities, exacerbated systemic inequities, and failed to make America any safer — which is why we’ve urged the president for years to work with us to abolish the federal death penalty,” she added.
There is no action more powerful or righteous than sparing someone’s life, and today @POTUS is doing just that.
My full statement on his historic death penalty clemency action: pic.twitter.com/xNLqC0zTeu
— Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (@RepPressley) December 23, 2024
Pressley crammed so much rubbish into a short statement that one hardly knows where to begin.
Should we use the death penalty more frequently in the United States?
First, her assertion that the death penalty “has no place in any society” made no sense by her own reasoning. She praised Biden for commuting 37 death sentences, but he kept three in place.
Those three death-row inmates committed either acts of terrorism or “hate”-inspired mass murder. For instance, the president did not commute the death sentence handed down to Dylann Roof, the racist mass murderer who took the lives of nine black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Roof, of course, does not deserve clemency. But Pressley made it sound as if Biden had struck a principled blow against capital punishment. In reality, however, the cognitively diminished president (or whoever issued these commutations in his name) made a unilateral decision about who should live or die. And he did so on the basis of presumptions about what makes a crime particularly heinous.
“He believes that America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” the White House’s Monday statement on the commutations read, “except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder — which is why today’s actions apply to all but those cases.”
If you kidnap and kill a 12-year-old girl, you may live. But if you have hate in your heart — as opposed to the love that presumably motivates other murderers — you die.
Imagine congratulating yourself on clemency while simultaneously believing that some killers deserve special punishment because of their views on race.
On second thought, maybe don’t imagine that. You don’t want to inhabit the race-obsessed leftist mind even for a moment.
Likewise, Pressley’s claim of a justice system “disproportionately weaponized” against criminals of color constitutes a typical logical fallacy.
In short, she inferred motives from outcomes. If criminals of color have disproportionately found themselves on death row, it must be because the people who put them there targeted them on account of their skin color, not because those criminals actually committed the crimes that warranted the death penalty.
Leftists like Pressley love the “systemic inequities” argument, however, for its sheer simplicity. Barring some positive statement of racial bigotry by police or judges, race-baiters like Pressley cannot prove racism. But neither can anyone disprove it. Thus, in the leftist mind, the blanket charge of “systemic” injustice covers all grievances.
Finally, Pressley insisted that the death penalty has “failed to make America any safer.”
This, too, serves her purposes, for she can neither prove nor disprove it. After all, only 40 federal inmates found themselves on death row before Biden’s commutations. Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, a number that small hardly allows reasonable people to reach conclusions one way or another about capital punishment’s effectiveness as a deterrence.
In sum, Pressley modeled typical race-baiting leftist behavior. She falsely characterized Biden’s commutations as a principled stand against the death penalty and then made broad, unprovable assertions about the relationship between capital punishment and skin color, or between capital punishment and public safety.
Happily, Trump’s victory signaled that the majority of Americans have had enough of race-obsessed leftists prioritizing criminals over victims.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.