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Thank you for posting that link, MeneMeneTekelUpharsin.

I have never read that entire speech before, and like most Americans, I have only seen bits of it taken out of context, often used as that contemptible stain Kaepernick and his ilk did, to make political points on the ignorant.

The overarching irony is that many blacks are being kept on a modern form of a slave plantation, often willingly, by the same type of people Douglass takes the time to pillory in scathing fashion in his oration.

The same type of people who profess the same type of sentiments (however implausible and in different and more modern ways) that they use on the Left to justify their actions that only result in the black community being kept in chattel to The State instead of in slavery to their Fellow Man.

Today, those same types of people are often aided and abetted by their fellow blacks. People today like Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, and Colin Kaepernick, who would sell their fellow blacks out to gain currency both real (in the form of Nike contracts or Rainbow Coalition kickbacks) or power in the form of virtue-signaled celebrity or election to public office.

Aided and abetted in the same way the merchants in the “internal slave trade” were aided and abetted by their fellow black brethren in 1852 who helped hunt down and imprison escaped slaves, or ironically, aided and abetted by those distant relatives of Barack Obama who helped hunt down, capture, and enslave free African blacks in the service of slave merchants at an earlier date when there was an accepted international slave trade. And done so for a piece of silver.

Today, it is done for both silver AND power, both of which for many amount to the same thing. And it is contributed to by many in the black (and non-black) communities who embrace a poisonous version of black culture that glorifies disdain for personal responsibility, knowledge, education, misogyny, drug use, and violence.

That oration by Stephen Douglass was a powerful speech, and in context, true with scathing denunciation of the hypocrisy of our Republic in its present state in the year 1852. It is sad to see his accurate references to the hypocrisy of the Fugitive Slave Act, and chilling to see his prescient and accurate vision of the horrible and bloody war that was then less than 10 years away.

But it is also true that his criticism is as trenchant today and should be (but is not) directed towards the like of the Left who believe that blacks are not qualified to rise on their own abilities and merits, and can only do so with the power of the state applied, a poisonous and corrosive belief system that potentially destroys not only seeks to tear down those (such as conservatives) who oppose that mindset, but those who embrace it.

It is unsettling to see Douglass’s unformed vision of the terrible yet unavoidable conflict looming less than ten years in their future in 1852, and wonder if those of us who see a coming storm are unknowingly destined to see the same bloody thing in that same time frame.