It’s 1963 again, according to Democrats. We’re all living in the neo-Jim Crow era, and if you’re silent, you’re complicit. At least that’s what the Left, Hollywood, and woke women are trying to tell you. Race is all they seem to care about these days. “The View” host Sunny Hostin is telling folks that black athletes should boycott scholarships at Southern public universities to fight redistricting. Former Squad member Ayanna Pressley is demanding reparations, again, for the nefarious chattel enslavement of black Americans that no living person in this country participated in. And Democratic leaders and white ladies are squawking about Jim Crow and demanding a color-20/20 vision society. Who’s going to tell them that it’s the Left that is acting racist and making it worse for the very people they claim to champion? All of these partisan power punches in the name of “helping” consistently end up hurting. This latest SEC boycott scheme would hurt young black athletes most of all. Reparations are tired and ineffective, and Democrats have spent the better part of the last century figuring out new ways to keep them on the plantation. It is time they get out of the way. Hostin and her View co-hosts could barely contain their glee over House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the NAACP’s plan to have black athletes boycott scholarships at Southern public universities in states like Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, which could inflict “economic damage and economic harm” on the South over redistricting. Cloudy Hostin proudly calls for these athletic protests as an effective civil rights tool. I call it rich, bored women playing revolutionary on someone else’s dime. And someone else’s future. Young black athletes are disproportionately the ones who land these scholarships and NIL deals in revenue sports. For many, it’s the only realistic ladder to a degree and a shot at a professional career. Walking away means lost education, lost earnings, lost exposure, and lost dreams. The same people who spent years telling kids the system was rigged against them are now telling them to burn their own escape hatch because the table-talkers didn’t get their way. Hostin, whose own family owned slaves, is urging black men to sacrifice their futures so she can feel morally superior on television. Slow clap for the girls. Meanwhile, they’re hoping you don’t look too closely at the Tennessee redistricting situation they’re clutching their pearls over because the new Republican-drawn maps could result in the first woman of color being elected to Congress in the state. All performative. Except the SEC and universities know better than to play along. Life-changing opportunities aren’t poker chips for D.C. politicians and daytime TV hosts to gamble with. Athletes have agents, families, futures to protect, and real games to win. Then there’s Ayanna Pressley, still out there yelling into the wind about how every bit of prosperity “we” enjoy was built on black backs, so reparations are in order! Poor thing is trying to stay relevant. Unfortunately, race-baiting alone doesn’t move the needle for Democrats anymore. To stay relevant, she’d need to go full communist and start endorsing terrorism. Handing large lump sums of cash to people does not grow wealth over time. It’s a one-time transfer that gets spent, divided, or litigated into oblivion. Who pays? Who receives? Newsflash — nobody alive today was a slave owner or chattel slave in the American South. Many black Americans owned slaves. Many white Americans did not. Reparations are deeply unpopular, economically illiterate, and socially poisonous, but figures like her and California Governor Gavin Newsom care not about practicality. They care about virtue-signaling. Black families are struggling on multiple fronts that have nothing to do with 1865. Around 64% of black children live in single-parent homes. Abortion rates in black communities are 4-5 times higher than white women. Poverty and welfare dependency persist in patterns that track with family structure and culture. Not distant history. The welfare state that exploded after LBJ’s Great Society correlated directly with the breakdown of two-parent households that had been rising for decades prior. What started as a political project to lock in votes has become a generational handicap. Useful idiots like Pressley keep the cycle alive by blaming everything on ghosts instead of asking what actually moves the needle today: strong families, education, work, and personal responsibility. Though to be fair, this is the same brain trust that produced Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who recently surveyed the crack pipes and mental illness slathered amid her streets and concluded that what these people really needed was a government dental plan. Ingenious. What would actually solve problems? Color-blind standards. Merit. The same principles that animated Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party are still alive today. As Wesley Hunt recently reiterated: get elected because you’re good, not because you check a box. History is not as complicated as the revisionists pretend. The Republican Party was founded in opposition to the expansion of slavery. The vast majority of votes to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments came from Republicans. The first black members of Congress were Republicans. Lincoln wanted to free black Americans and let them stand on their own, not keep them tethered to government favor. As Dinesh D’Souza’s Death of a Nation explains, the Democrat Party’s long history of racial control, from slavery and Jim Crow to the political machines that replaced them, did not magically flip in the 1960s. The strategy simply evolved. Instead of poll taxes and literacy tests, we now see the Democrat Party offering dependency and grievance. Their goal is the same as it always has been: keep a reliable voting bloc on the urban plantation. Republicans have consistently argued for the same thing from Lincoln forward: individual liberty, equal protection under the law, and the chance to rise or fall on your own merits. Democrats have spent the modern era perfecting the opposite: identity as destiny, government as savior, and anyone who objects labeled a racist bigot. We are not living in Jim Crow. We are living with race problems stoked by Barack Obama and the institutional Left that followed. They inject identity into everything, normalize viewing political opponents as existential threats, and act shocked when the temperature boils over. “The View,” the NAACP, and Hakeem Jeffries need to stop treating young black athletes like disposable pawns in their theater, Ayanna Pressley can retire or radicalize into full communism (that’s her only path forward), and the Left can leave the SEC alone. Leave athletes alone. Let people compete, achieve, and live as individuals instead of avatars in someone else’s grievance campaign. The hamster wheel of identity politics has run long enough. Time to get off. Besides, who needs to run anymore anyway? We have GLP-1s.