Having spent so long defaming conservatives as racists, progressives can’t stop turning the accusation on each other. Two weeks ago Democratic presidential contenders all but called Joe Biden a segregationist. This week Nancy Pelosi got a taste of her party’s poison.
The House Speaker has lately criticized some of the most extreme progressives in her caucus for cultivating their own celebrity status at the expense of the party. Mrs. Pelosi had four of her caucus’s freshmen especially in mind: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
The four—in addition to trumpeting socialist measures, flirting with anti-Semitism and usingTwitter to criticize moderates in their own party—voted against last month’s emergency spending bill for the southern border. They did so even though three of them have compared what’s happening at the border to the Holocaust. Mrs. Pelosi told the New York Times that these Members “have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
That inspired a few testy remarks from the four. “The public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez explained in a tweet. Which in turn prompted a rebuke from the Speaker: “You got a complaint?” she reportedly said to Democratic colleagues in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday. “You come and talk to me about it. But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just OK.”
With that, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez decided to resort to her default defense. This “persistent singling out,” she told the Washington Post, has reached “a point where it was just outright disrespectful . . . the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”
And there it is—the old accusation of racial animosity. We should have seen it coming.
We’re no fans of Mrs. Pelosi’s politics, but the suggestion that her criticisms had anything remotely to do with the color of these four women’s skin is preposterous.
Not that Mrs. Pelosi is above playing the color card herself. Last year the Speaker explicitly called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a racist. “When the Republicans took power when President Obama was President of the United States,” she said on MSNBC, “what Mitch McConnell said is, ‘The most important thing we can do is to make sure he does not succeed.’ If that wasn’t a racist statement. That is unthinkable.”
What Mr. McConnell had said in 2010 was, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President”—a partisan statement but not a racial one.
Mrs. Pelosi is exercising much-needed adult supervision over her caucus, as she also has in ducking impeachment. Perhaps she, and others, will also be less inclined to use race as a political weapon now that it has been used against her.
![[scooter]](/data/avatars/m/22/22287.jpg?1659477690){kind=avatar}
