Poor Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA). Just as Sen. Chris Van Hollen finally put himself on the map (after serving more than two decades in Congress in obscurity) by exploiting the deportation of degenerate Kilmar Abrego Garcia in April, Padilla hoped the Los Angeles riots might provide him the same opportunity.
The casually dressed senator, whom no one recognized, entered a briefing room in the West Los Angeles federal building where Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was holding a news conference on Thursday, to make his stand.
The stunning video of Padilla being surrounded by federal agents, pushed out of the room, forced to the ground, and handcuffed, was played on an endless loop for the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening. Unfortunately for the previously unknown senator, the Israeli strikes on Iran abruptly ended his moment in the spotlight.
In any case, news of Padilla’s takedown sent Democrats into overdrive. His Senate colleagues railed over the way he was treated, calling it a “sickening disgrace” and an “affront to democracy.”
The Democrats’ manufactured outrage was likely meant to raise the temperature at this weekend’s planned anti-Trump “No Kings” protests.
But in a crowded field of nonsense, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) managed to distinguish himself with a social media post of almost impressive absurdity. He placed an image of Padilla surrounded by Secret Service agents alongside an iconic photograph of a young black man fighting for civil rights at a protest, presumably in the 1960s. That young man would go on to become the long-serving congressman from Georgia, John Lewis. Lewis, who passed away in 2020, remains a towering figure in American history for his pivotal contributions to the Civil Rights Movement.
It was a disingenuous comparison at best. Whitehouse was trying to equate two vastly different situations to score political points. And his efforts backfired spectacularly.
Here are several more responses to Whitehouse’s pathetic post:
The “all-white beach club” references relate to Whitehouse and his wife’s long-standing membership in the exclusive—and controversial—Bailey’s Beach Club, located in Newport, Rhode Island, whose membership is said to be all white.
The story broke in June 2021. Asked by a reporter at the time if there were any minority members of the club, Whitehouse replied, “I think they’re still working on that and I’m sorry it hasn’t happened yet.”
But the core reason Whitehouse’s tweet is so utterly contemptible lies in the Democratic Party’s long and dark history of racism. Though the party tries to distance itself from its racist past, celebrating such civil rights icons as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955 triggered the historic boycott, they never acknowledge how ruthlessly Democrats demonized them at the time.
King’s house was bombed twice, once while his wife and baby were inside. On another occasion, shots were fired at his home. He was arrested by local law enforcement on bogus charges several times. But these arrests and the mug shots that followed only served to lift King and the movement he led to national attention.
Parks was not the first black person to sit in the white section of a bus, nor was that the first attempt by activists to organize a bus boycott, but her act of defiance gained national attention. Coming on the heels of Emmett Till’s lynching in August 1955, the national press began focusing on the shocking injustices endured by black Americans in the South.
Historian Robert Caro detailed this period in the third volume of his widely acclaimed series, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. Shortly after the boycott began, Montgomery’s Democratic mayor organized what was described as “the largest pro-segregation rally in history.” More than 10,000 people gathered to hear Democratic Mississippi Sen. James O. Eastland speak.
According to Caro, Eastland told the group, “In every stage of the bus boycott, we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, incredibly stinking n******. African flesh-eaters. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots, and knives. All whites are created equal with certain rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of dead n******.”
The Democrats’ despicable treatment of black people during that era should disqualify them from claiming early civil rights activists as their own.
And modern-day Democrats like Whitehouse, who try to alter history so they can virtue signal must always be reminded: Democrats were the party of slavery. They even fought a war to defend it.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn or X.
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