Can I just say it here? Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the 2020 election season’s most awkward candidate. And she proved it again on Thursday when she told the New York Times that she supports reparations for black Americans because of 19th century slavery.

As you recall, Warren fell off the Victim Express last year when she found out that she wasn’t really part Cherokee, and that those “family stories” from her “mamaw and papaw” were bogus.

But now she’s trying to get her cred back with the Identity Politics crowd by boarding the Reparations Train, along with Sen. Kamala Harris:

“We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country that has had many consequences, including undermining the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations. We need systemic, structural changes to address that.”

Did Warren provide any specifics as to how she would provide reparations? Nope. However, her campaign does support home-buying assistance for residents of poor non-white neighborhoods. She also supports universal child care.

I’m not sure how that directly relates to 19th century slavery; however, it’s obvious that Warren is blatantly pandering to black voters. And for Princess Paleface-With-High-Cheekbones it’s an awkward move. But self-awareness has never been her strong suit.

Elizabeth Warren prediction:

She posts some kind of video of her drinking beer and telling us all how relatable she is during the Super Bowl. pic.twitter.com/0i1T46GWOD

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) February 3, 2019

However, Sen. Kamala Harris is pandering, too. After all, even if she claims to be a “person of color,” she’s not exactly down for the struggle. Her Indian mother was a cancer researcher and her father is an economics professor at Stanford University. She’s so high atop the social food chain in San Francisco that a local journalist wrote “her Brahmin background accounts for her ease around wealthy, powerful people.”

But, as the saying goes, “Money talks, cash walks, nobody balks,” while these two poseurs duke it out by offering goodies to blacks.

Watch Tucker Carlson and Mark Steyn critique Warren and Harris:

But there’s more to this shtick than mere vote pandering. With their promotion of reparations, Harris and Warren both demonstrate their contempt for capitalism. It’s not enough for blacks to have opportunity, they say — because of the past, they will never ever gain economic parity with whites.

As a writer for The Intercept wrote:

“. . .how can black Americans, first enslaved and then legally barred from participating in capitalism for the overwhelming majority of this country’s history, begin to catch up with a systemic adjustment to the system?

The answer is we can’t. There will be no racial equality under capitalism.”

We get it. Capitalism bad, socialism good. And socialism and government handouts are the only way for blacks to become equal with whites, according to folks like Elizabeth Warren.

And there’s precedent, too, say reparations supporters. They point to Germany, which has paid out over $89 billion to Holocaust survivors. Moreover, here in the US, President Ronald Reagan apologized for nation’s internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, initially paying over $1 billion to over 800,000 victims.

Oh, and lest we forget — Democrat saint President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the one who brought about those internment camps.

Eleanor Roosevelt at Japanese internment camp. National Archives/Public domain.

But there’s a huge difference: there are still Holocaust survivors living, along with those Japanese-Americans. Many of their children are also living. However, as Mark Steyn pointed out in the video, there are no living grandchildren of slaves.

Moreover, didn’t the United States fight a civil war which abolished slavery? What other nation has done that?

So how would the proposals of Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris work? Would all blacks receive reparation payments — even those who, like President Obama’s father, came from Africa? Then there’s Kamala Harris herself — her father is not a descendent of Southern slaves. Does she get some goodies from the government, too?

Moreover, how does a black person identify themselves as descended from slaves? Perhaps all those applying should be required to trace their ancestry to a slave ancestor — like the Daughters of the American Revolution prove they’ve descended from a Revolutionary War soldier. I can see a whole cottage industry of fraudulent family trees springing up to prove slave ancestry.

And speaking of ancestry, what about whites whose forebears never had anything to do with slavery? There are millions of us with grandparents and great-grandparents who came through Ellis Island. There are also many of us whose ancestors lived entirely in northern states — even fought for the North in the Civil War. Should they be responsible for paying these amounts?

Reparations will not heal broken school systems in inner cities, nor repair social dysfunction. Nor will they reduce crime or raise incomes among poor black Americans. Moreover, foisting reparation payments upon citizens whose families had nothing to do with slavery, or even Jim Crow laws in the South, will do nothing except exacerbate racial tensions. But Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris think that jumping aboard that Reparations Train is how you win primaries. This is sheer race-hustling at its worst.

Featured image: cropped from National Library of Wales. CC0 1.0 Universal.