OPINION:
The concept of White privilege has increasingly become a key tool of the American left to polarize and inflame the nation. It is defined as the “set of social and economic advantages that White people have by virtue of their race in a culture characterized by racial inequality.”
Well, nothing says White privilege like a group of educated, trained left-wing activists marching in the streets against law enforcement officers who are attempting to arrest criminal illegal immigrants.
Renee and Rebecca Good are far from pawns in America’s alleged systemic oppression of its own people. They are poster children for the very privilege they believe is at the root of injustice.
Instead of being at work, Renee and Rebecca had the privilege of being activists who track and interfere with federal law enforcement.
They had the privilege of being financially mobile enough to move from Kansas City, Missouri, to Canada after President Trump’s reelection, and then again to Minneapolis last year.
They had the privilege of sending their child to a charter school that groomed young political activists.
They had the privilege of graduating from college.
Renee even had the privilege, after being married to two men and having three children, of engaging in a same-sex union.
Of course, both women had the privilege of living under a Constitution that protects freedom of speech and assembly with very few exceptions.
Renee Good and her spouse were so drunk on their privilege that they gave no thought to what would happen to their children if they were arrested, injured or killed by interfering with a federal law enforcement operation.
They abdicated their responsibility to their children for the sake of their ideology. That is perhaps the saddest, sickest part of the story.
What makes that last point so stark is the fact that these are not grassroots movements. They are well-financed and organized national efforts to disrupt not just the Republican administration but also our republican form of government.
Many of these people are the same ones who drove the fraudulent “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” narrative after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and the same ones who told you George Floyd was a hero in 2020.
They are the same people who convinced millions that Black Lives Matter was a charity that helped Black communities, and drove the false narrative that unarmed Black men are being mowed down in the streets across America.
They are the same folks who championed the cause of the terrorists after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel and marched to allow men to play in women’s sports, give boys access to girls’ locker rooms and permit states to “trans” youths without parental consent.
They are the same radicals who march to allow pornography and drag queens in schools and libraries.
If nothing else, they are picketing to spread climate change doomsday-ism, and don’t forget the old standby of killing babies in the name of freedom.
Last year, their cause du jour was split between support for Islamic terrorists and opposition to Mr. Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to help address chronic violent crime in minority neighborhoods in some of America’s most dangerous cities.
Their true colors come not just through their lies and manipulation but also through their vehement opposition to voter ID. Apparently, they think minorities are too unsophisticated to have identification.
Today, the puppet masters of these protesters want you to think that Renee and Rebecca Good were just ordinary soccer moms — or, as one commentator said, “could have been any of us.”
Renee, in particular, is a victim not of the American experience but of her own radical movement’s dangerous stranglehold over the psyche of its adherents.
These women and the organizations with which they are affiliated are apostles of the modern, left-wing philosophy of intersectionality. Americans would do well to remember that those who believe in a hierarchy of victimhood cannot also believe in true equality.
As the Iranian people are taking to the streets and being killed by the thousands to rally for freedom from Islamofascism, American leftists are attacking law enforcement to protect millions who have violated U.S. immigration and other laws.
When the left says Mr. Trump and other Republicans are the problem, think about the hypocrisy of Democratic-adjacent groups funding roving gangs of radical activists to ensure lawlessness.
There is a line between empowerment and freedom, zealotry and servitude.
The sad irony of leftists like the Goods is that they have been so indoctrinated to hate anyone who disagrees with them, and even America itself, that they have surrendered their freedom to their ideology. That makes them slaves.
Cushioned by freedom and consequence-free dissent, they leverage their privilege to demand radical social reforms that, in fact, attack the neediest in our society.
They and others like them seek to operate outside the American legal system, leveraging organization and the media to avoid accountability for their extrajudicial strategy.
While the American left protests from a standpoint of privilege and safety, Iranians, Venezuelans and others protest from desperation and a passion for the freedom Americans so casually take for granted.
The saddest part of Marxism — as the people of Russia and China discovered after the revolutions that transformed their nations a century ago — was that the promise of equality lasts only as long as it takes for elites to consolidate power to control the population.
The ideology of those such as Renee and Rebecca Good is a close cousin to that of authoritarians who simply made up the laws or enforced only those that aligned with the agenda of the elites. Those threatening violence today online and in the streets are the real latter-day Stasi.
They leverage their privilege to acquire the power they claim to fight.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV.
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