Joe Biden’s about-face on a border wall, as his concierge migrant invasion engulfs blue cities like New York, left many Democratic colleagues with egg on their faces.
Watch how they try to sidle away from past obstruction of Donald Trump’s efforts to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
The backflips are particularly acute in Texas, which has borne the brunt of the border crisis, and where former NFL player-turned-civil rights attorney and three-term congressman Rep. Colin Allred is running for the US Senate.
When Trump was president in 2018 and trying to build the wall he had promised, Allred was one of the most vociferous Democrats opposing him in the Lone Star State.
Allred declared any wall was “racist” and vowed to “tear it down. We are not going to have a wall in this country.”
Those words should have come back to bite him. Instead, he got to play border tsar in the New York “Amnesia” Times.
“I have long said that targeted physical barriers have a role to play in securing our border,” said Allred last week, with not a trace of shame.
No wonder he is a rising star of the Democratic Party.
Texas is the bright red jewel in the crown that Democrats have been fantasizing about turning blue for decades.
Despite their singular lack of success, those 38 Electoral College votes are too tempting to give up on.
They’ve thrown everything at the seemingly doomed mission, but Republicans still control the legislature and every statewide office.
Cynics see the record surge of illegal migrants under Biden as a plot to harness the gratitude of newcomers into Democratic votes.
But shifting the state’s demographics further toward Hispanic has not been the guaranteed vote-winner Democrats once imagined, as their social policies grow ever more at odds with the family values of migrants from traditional cultures, and open border policies alienate Hispanic Americans who don’t want illegal immigrants competing for jobs and public resources.
There was a time when Beto O’Rourke was the great blue hope. He came within three points of unseating Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. But then he failed in his runs for president and governor and became a national laughingstock in the process.
Cruz, who boasts that he is the Republican whom Democrats most love to hate, after Trump, remains the white whale they are itching to harpoon.
Allred, 40, is the latest gladiator to wade into this battle, and has been raising money faster than O’Rourke ever did: $6.2 million in his first two months.
With the Senate majority at stake, it will be one of the most fiercely fought contests of 2024.
In Allred’s pitch, you see the same false promise of “unity” that slipped Biden into the Oval Office, where he has been the most divisive president in history, railing against MAGA Republicans and siccing prosecutors on his political rivals.
Nevertheless, Allred has retooled himself as an “even-keel” bipartisan who wants to bring people together, a practical, non-ideological candidate, spurning culture war issues that “turn off ordinary folks.”
He has adopted focus-tested middle-of-the-road positions on everything from border security and abortion to guns and climate change, while trying to pigeonhole Cruz as a right-wing extremist.
Like Barack Obama, Allred was brought up by a white single mother with an absent black father, and has been anointed the darling of the national media, where vats of ink have been spilled burnishing his image as a reasonable centrist.
You won’t be surprised to know that the characterization is fake.
“Colin Allred spent years as a woke critical race theory activist, and his radical record proves that he’s driven by the same extremist ideology to this day,” says Jarrod Griffin, spokesman for the Cruz-aligned Truth and Courage PAC, who points to Allred’s support of “critical race theory [and] Biden’s open borders agenda and … the ‘Defund the Police’ movement.”
Allred’s background does reveal an education steeped in the foundational ideas of the most divisive ideology in American politics — critical race theory, a vile Marxist construct which classifies all white people as oppressors and all black people as victims.
Concerned Texans watching Allred’s star rise have marveled at his transformation into a moderate while his radical history was memory-holed by the media.
But old interviews online give a clue to his ideological pedigree. In 2018, the Berkeley Law alumnus described how his civil rights activism was “rekindled” by his mentor, radical professor Haney Lopez, one of the founders of critical race theory, who attended Harvard with Obama.
During Obama’s presidency, Lopez slammed any criticism of ISIS, Ebola, illegal immigration — or Obama — as “racially charged.”
While at law school, Allred worked as a researcher on Lopez’s contentious book, “Dog Whistle Politics,” which likewise sees racism in all things.
In the acknowledgments, Lopez praises Allred as one of the “loyal cadre of research assistants” who “believed fervently in getting these arguments right and in getting them out broadly.”
According to “Dog Whistle Politics,” white Americans are racist until proven innocent, there is no such thing as an “illegal alien,” and Hispanics who become Republicans are racists who are afraid of “darker-skinned immigrants.”
Suburban Americans also are racist because of where they live, and school choice is a racist ploy to destroy public education.
The book singles out Republicans for special vitriol, claiming “they typically disregard blacks except as a disposable foil for racial posturing.”
It derides Republican Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida as “minority mouthpieces.”
Ronald Reagan, who advocated colorblindness, is depicted as a closet racist.
“It sounds liberal yet works like a racial cudgel, denying that there’s discrimination against minorities, elevating whites as racial victims, justifying white superiority, and facilitating dog whistle racial appeals that emphasize culture and comportment.”
Allred believed “fervently” in this toxic soup of racist demagoguery, designed to exacerbate racial division, foster grievance, and create an army of racial revolutionaries.
The former Tennessee Titan has worked hard to hide his CRT pedigree, which included a stint as articles editor on a leading CRT publication, the Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy. Hence his newfound embrace of a border wall.
But occasionally the mask slips.
In March, he appeared on the leftie podcast “The Next Level,” playing the moderate candidate wanting to reach out to “apathetic” Texas voters. The host quickly scuttled the pretense, declaring he would say what Allred was hedging around.
Those voters were nothing but “rednecks” and “non-college whites,” the host sneered, as Allred grinned along.
Allred agreed: “No, you’re right, they’re not all going to vote for a Democrat, that’s for sure.”
His metamorphosis is a classic example of the way Democrats disguise radical candidates to appear palatable to the electorate while depicting their Republican opponents as the dangerous extremists.
Let’s hope Texas voters see through the ruse this time, or that wall will never get built.
