Elizabeth Warren Adds Slavery Reparations to Her Platform

In an interview with The New York Times this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said that she supports giving reparations to black Americans and intends to make it part of her presidential agenda. While Warren’s campaign staff has yet to come up with any details on how those reparations would be distributed – or in what form – Warren expressed support for them when discussing the real estate practice of “redlining.” Redlining is defined as when lenders refuse to deliver mortgages to people moving into low-income neighborhoods, and it has been targeted by liberals and activists as one of the practices contributing to racial wealth inequality.

“We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country that has had many consequences including undermining the ability of Black families to build wealth in America for generations,” Warren said in a statement. “Black families have had a much steeper hill to climb — and we need systemic, structural changes to address that.”

Warren is not the first Democrat this year to flirt with the idea of using the federal government to “make good” on this country’s history of slavery. In a radio interview last week, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) hinted that she might be open to some form of reparations as well.

“America has a history of 200 years of slavery. We had Jim Crow. We had legal segregation in America for a very long time,” Harris said. “We have got to recognize, back to that earlier point, people aren’t starting out on the same base in terms of their ability to succeed and so we have got to recognize that and give people a lift up.”

This kind of talk has to be sweet music to the ears of President Trump, because it’s yet another sign of just how far the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton nor even Bernie Sanders supported the idea of handing out reparations to American blacks. Granted, these Democrats pushed and endorsed policies that could be viewed as giving people “a lift up,” as Harris put it, but the fact that today’s Democrat presidential candidates are willing to outright speak of reparations speaks to just how far the party has swung outside the mainstream of America.

You may not be surprised that the first Democrat to bring up reparations this year was neither Harris nor Warren, but the girl they both seem to be taking their cues from – yep, good ol’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Last month, AOC said: “People think reparations is reparations for slavery, but really, economically speaking, reparations are for the damage done by the New Deal and redlining because that is where we saw a compounding of the existing inequity from the legacy of slavery, where we drew red lines around black communities.”

Reparations, democratic socialism, getting rid of all cars, boats, and planes? Yes, this is the Democratic Party of 2019 for you.

No wonder Democrats in all but name like Howard Schultz are thinking about running. This party is too radical even for the radicals.