Partisan Prejudice
Irrational bias has many sources, and politics is certainly one of them.
Excuse me for resurrecting a controversy that erupted on X back when it was still called Twitter, and Julia Claire Seibolt’s tweet got tens of thousands of angry reactions. This 2022 tweet came to my attention via homeschooling advocate Jonathan Prescott and what caught my eye was the casual libel Ms. Seibolt made by implying that Holocaust denial is commonplace among Evangelical moms.
WHY WOULD YOU EVEN TYPE THAT SENTENCE?
Where did Ms. Seibolt get this idea? Why would she imagine that publishing such a categorical smear was clever? BTW, who is Julia Claire Seibolt?
She is a writer for Crooked Media, a Democratic Party propaganda outfit founded by Obama administration alumni, whose chief product is “Pod Save America.”
Perhaps a disclaimer is needed: This not about Ms. Seibolt. It’s certainly not about her personally, and definitely not an all-call for an online troll-swarm. The only reason I include information about her background (e.g., Loyola University Maryland, Class of 2011) is to illustrate the environment in which her prejudices were formed.
Why are Democrats anti-homeschooling? Why do they hate Evangelical Christians? Questions like this don’t get asked often enough, because Americans tend to take for granted that certain groups naturally belong to one party or the other — of course black people and immigrants and “childless cat ladies” are Democratic voters, right? And, on the other side, if you’re an Evangelical Christian homeschooling mom, then of course, you vote Republican. These are just basic demographic assumptions.
When did we start making these assumptions and why? Two words: Exit polling.
It was after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and particularly after Reagan’s landslide reelection in1984, that Democrats fell in love with polling data as a roadmap that could lead them out of the political wilderness. Eventually, that led to Bill Clinton’s “soccer-mom” focused campaigns in the 1990s. Because of polling, Democrats had identified suburban white women as the crucial “swing” constituency, and everything the Clinton administration did was based on getting enough of these women to vote Democrat to win the election. (Incidentially, Clinton never won a majority of the popular vote in 1992 or 1996; his presidency was made possible because third-party candidate Ross Perot split the conservative opposition.)
Those of you who did not live through the 1980s and ’90s may not realize why Democrats became obsessed with defeating “the Religious Right.” It was exit polls which told them that conservative Christians were a decisive factor in the three consecutive defeats (Jimmy Carter in 1980, Walter Mondale in ’84 and Mike Dukakis ’88) Democrats suffered at the presidential level. First it was Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, then it was Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition, which served as the bogeyman of Democratic nightmares. Whatever the actual impact of these organizations, the exit polls were clear that Bible-believing Christians had abandoned the Democratic Party en masse, and thus did Democrats become anti-Christian.
Oh, they won’t say it that way, and they’ll howl in rage when you call them out for their prejudice, but anyone or anything that stands between Democrats and power automatically becomes The Enemy, and Democrats have been waging war against Christianity for at least 30 years. And they never think about why, for the same reason they never think about why “Free Palestine” became a cause célèbre on the Left.
They say that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, but perhaps more importantly, they don’t know why they’re repeating it. Why did “Evangelical” become such a pejorative among Democrats that Julia Claire Seibolt didn’t think twice before smearing them as crypto-Nazis? But you can’t answer that question without realizing that it also explains why Democrats believe that backlash to the Dobbs decision would enable Kamala Harris to beat Trump, and why Democrats thought it was a good idea to lash themselves to the mast of the LGBTQ+ agenda. To Democrats, it is a sufficient recommendation for anything that Evangelical Christians are against it.
By the way, why is it that Evangelical Christians are an especial target of Democratic rage? Is it not the case that conservative Catholics also oppose abortion and the LGBTQ+ agenda? This thought occurred to me the first time I attended the annual March for Life in D.C. Most of the attendees and activist organizations involved in the event are Catholic, but you seldom hear Democrats ranting against Catholics. Why?
Again, it’s a matter of history: Urban Catholics were an important constituency of the Democratic Party dating back to before the Civil War, when the wave of Irish famine refugees poured into Boston, New York and other northern cities. This political tendency continued into the 20th century and reached its zenith with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy. Part of what fractured the old liberal coalition after the mid-1960s was that most Catholics were anti-Communist and, after the disaster in Vietnam, most Democrats didn’t seem to be willing to fight Communism. Having a candidate with nice Irish name (although Reagan was raised Protestant) certainly didn’t hurt the Republican Party in the 1980s. But to this day, Democrats are unwilling to demonize Catholics the way they demonize Protestant evangelicals, because of the pro-urban/anti-rural prejudice that is baked into contemporary “progressive” ideology.
It’s those dumb hillbilly Bible-thumpers they hate, see? This bias has become such a touchstone of Democratic Party politics that nobody — especially not partisan apparatchiks like Julia Claire Seibolt’s bosses at Crooked Media — ever questions it, not even after they get wrecked in an election like they did in 2024.
Y’know, I’m old enough to remember when Democrats loved hillbilly Bible-thumpers. Nobody in the Democratic Party objected to the religious zeal of Southern Baptists and other evangelicals back when Jimmy Carter corraled them in sufficient numbers to win the White House in 1976. During the late ’70s, being “born again” was actually quite fashionable for a while, as various Hollywood celebrities went public with their come-to-Jesus conversion stories. It wasn’t until Carter went down to defeat in 1980 that anti-Christian bigotry started to become characteristic of Democrats (who, predictably, accused these scapegoated enemies of “extremism,” because anything that might cause people to vote Republican is “extremism,” you see.)
Irrational prejudice like Julia Claire Seibolt’s is so widespread among Democrats nowadays that they cannot see it for what it is. And God willing, they will continue to be blind to their errors until they completely destroy their party.
I'm surprised she credited the "Evangelical mom" with any education at all. Yes, pretty much anything that isn't the narrative is "extremism" according to the narrative followers who are pretty much totalitarian about the narrative itself. My view though is that apart from abortion, they aren't really tied to any specific policy. If tomorrow Davos changed the narrative to home schooling is good, they'd get behind it pretty quickly. And speaking of "isn't sure about the holocaust", I see that "Joe Biden" gave George Soros, Jewish betrayer of Jews, the medal of freedom today. I'm not holding my breath waiting for the legacy media to ask about it though.