LeGend Taliferro was asleep in his Kansas City, Mo., home in late June when a gunman opened fire from the street outside his window, shooting him dead. He was four years old, one of the many black boys and girls killed in the past three months.
Victims were front and center at the Democratic National Convention: of police brutality, of climate change, and of every other -ism. And while virtually every speaker said that "black lives matter," not a single moment at the Democratic convention was dedicated to the dozens murdered this summer in America's Democrat-led cities.
Maybe the DNC’s hypocritical silence comes from their awareness that President Donald Trump polls ahead of Democratic nominee Joe Biden when it comes to keeping America safe from crime. More likely they were mum because supporting law and order, never mind the police, makes one persona non grata in today's Democratic Party.
Biden, at least, managed to trip over the bar, acknowledging that "most cops are good"—a tepid endorsement of law enforcement, which outraged activists nonetheless.
The DNC’s LGBTQ caucus backed the outright elimination of police, a position supported by just 15 percent of Americans. One caucus leader called for doing away with immigration enforcement and prisons too. If they had their way, at least Harvey Weinstein would be free to produce the Democrats’ 2024 convention.
The DNC's silence on the murder spike is more evidence of the grip that jailbreak liberalism has on the party, driven by mindless hatred of public safety and the police who provide it. If you are a victim of police brutality, you merit a nationwide moment of silence. But if you are one of the hundreds of young men, many of them black, who have been shot and killed under a Democratic mayor's watch this summer, then your death is beneath the attention of the party's elite.
The only time that Democratic leaders do speak up about homicide is when it serves their gun-grabbing goals. Take Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, who’s blamed her city’s shooting spike on out-of-state guns, even though the plurality of illegal guns in the city are from Illinois, home to some of the toughest gun laws in the nation.
To leaders like Lightfoot, murdered black men are just an opportunity to push the gun-control agenda and complain about the (sadly much diminished) influence of the NRA. Never do they consider that it might be their own failed governance, and the anti-police protests that they continue to stir up, that’s driving the violence.
When Democratic governors call federal law enforcement an "occupying force," and when Biden's criminal justice platform says more about investigating police forces than keeping crime down, voters should be afraid. They should be afraid for themselves and their families. But they should also be afraid for the young black men in Chicago and Baltimore and Kansas City for whom the chance of being murdered is 30 to 40 times higher than the national average.
Biden and his party will no doubt spend the coming months lecturing Americans about the need for, as he put it Thursday evening, "the hard work of rooting out our systemic racism." And they will tell us, over and over again, that "black lives matter."
When they say that, they don’t mean the black lives, like LeGend Taliferro’s, so senselessly snuffed out. Voters should remember: In the Democratic Party, the only lives that matter are those that get Democrats votes.