"In recent years, the public has been assailed with rhetoric condemning "the politics of hate," which according to leftist commentators and politicians is the exclusive domain of conservatives and traditionalists. In the final weeks of the 1998 congressional campaign, Bill Clinton used several political addresses before predominantly black congregations to insinuate that the Republican congressional majority was motivated by hatred of black Americans. At the same time, the Democratic National Committee ran radio advertisements that said, in so many words, that every time a vote was cast for a Republican candidate, a black church would go up in flames.

This campaign of misrepresentation became an exercise in self-parody during the impeachment struggle, with Bill Clintons partisans insisting that his critics were acting from disguised racist motives. Radical black essayist Toni Morrison even conferred upon Bill Clinton the unlikely title of Americas "first black President," the better to "authenticate" the supposedly racist motives of his critics. More recently, Donna Brazille, the manager of Vice President Al Gores floundering presidential campaign, told the Washington Post that she was determined not to let "the white boys win" once again advancing the notion that opposition to the variety of socialist politics embodied by Gore is ultimately propelled by white racism.

As used by the Left, the term "racism" like "sexism" and the recently minted expression "homophobia" has no objective meaning. As a black conservative American, I can attest from personal experience that the Left excels at the politics of race hatred. For defending Bible-based values, the traditional family, and our constitutional system, I have been assailed as a "conservative Uncle Tom," a "racist," a "homophobe," and other unsavory epithets that cannot be repeated in a family magazine. I spent 17 years as an activist in the Democrat Party before I came to the conclusion that the left wing that controls the Party is motivated not by a love of the oppressed, but rather by hatred for the values I cherish and those who defend them.

"We must hate," Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin exhorted his followers. "Hatred is the essence of communism." Lenin gathered around him a movement of those who regarded themselves as victims and who were motivated by hatred for Russian society; once the Bolsheviks came to power they created a regime that left behind tens of millions of corpses and the ruins of a wrecked nation. Americas Establishment-anointed "Black Leaders" Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Maxine Waters, and others faithfully follow Lenins destructive blueprint.

Leninist politics is based entirely upon lies, and the most important lie told by Leninist race-baiters like Jesse Jackson is that black Americans are not individuals, but rather part of one undifferentiated "community" headed, of course, by Jackson and other "Black Leaders." When I was a candidate for the California State Assembly in 1984, I saw billboards throughout Watts and South Central Los Angeles proclaiming, "ONE VOICE! ONE PEOPLE! ONE VOTE!" Those billboards were placed in support of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign.

The evil that the Jackson campaign slogan represents can be better appreciated if it is presented in rough German translation: "EIN VOLK! EIN REICH! EIN FUHRER!" ("One people, one kingdom, one leader.")

The Jackson campaign was using exactly the same rhetoric, and the same race-based politics that had been used so successfully by Lenin’s German disciple, Adolf Hitler. Thus it was appropriate that Jackson supporter Maxine Waters, as a congressman, vocally supported the Brown shirt-like street thugs who tore South-Central Los Angeles apart during the 1992 "Rodney King" riots. It was also appropriate that Waters was a devoted defender of Bill Clinton during the impeachment hearings, insisting that whatever offenses Mr. Clinton may have committed against the rule of law, he was her leader her in the struggle against the "radical right."

Socialist Slave Masters

Along with a small but growing number of conservative black leaders, I have challenged the chokehold that Establishment-ordained "black leaders" have on black Americans. Left-wing groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, Jesse Jackson’s PUSH and Rainbow Coalition, and the Congressional Black Caucus do indeed speak with "one voice," but they do not speak for black Americans and are not accountable to the people they presume to represent. Not since slavery have blacks had to endure such strong masters. It is a painful irony that descendants of the very people who were brought to America as slaves centuries ago are now being exploited in an effort to enslave Americans of all races, colors, and creeds under the yoke of socialism.

Socialism is based upon the redistribution of wealth from the productive to the parasitical. The growing demand that black Americans be given "reparations" for slavery offers a new twist on socialism by seeking race-based redistribution of wealth from white Americans, the supposed beneficiaries of slavery, to black Americans, the descendants of slaves. This is, in fact, a natural outgrowth of the institutionalized racism known as "affirmative action," which assumes that all whites are "privileged" and all non-whites are "victims."

A "reparations" bill sponsored by Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has been floating around Congress since 1989. Not surprisingly, most black, left wing politicians support the proposal. However, many prominent black "conservatives" have been seduced into supporting the reparations movement as well. Star Parker, a Republican leader whose conservative credentials were certified by no less an authority than Rush Limbaugh, insists that "each descendant of a slave should get his million dollars.... I dont care how much it costs; America can afford it."

Miss Parker is not unique. My husband and I were seated alongside several other black Republican leaders during the closing dinner speech of the 1995 Christian Coalition "Road to Victory" conference in Washington, D.C. We were the only ones at our table who did not applaud when the speaker, Rev. E.V. Hill, called for America to pay slavery reparations to blacks. My husband and I were hardly surprised that Rev. Hill would endorse this socialist proposal, since during the mid-1980s, as the media was hyping him as "Mr. Republican of South-Central Los Angeles," we learned from his own lips that he was an ally of Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters, and that he did not appreciate our criticism of these Establishment-chosen "black leaders."

During the same period we became aware of the fact that the California Black Republican Council selected delegates who would parrot the Democrat Parties socialist line within the Republican Party, thereby blocking the emergence of authentic conservative views among black Republicans.

All of this illustrates that the race-based application of Lenin’s collectivist strategy is faithfully followed by leaders of both major parties. And it is not just black Americans who find themselves trapped in this system. Americans from many backgrounds are corralled into a constituency and assigned "leaders," whose role is to act on behalf of their "communities" in the drive to socialize our nation. Americans who refuse to cooperate in this corrupt game are denounced for being outside the "mainstream"; if they continue to resist, they are denounced as "extremists" and "haters."

Fighting for Family Values

In the late 1980s, after learning of plans by the California State Department of Education to instruct schoolchildren as young as kindergarten age in "mutual masturbation and homosexuality," I organized a group of Watts parents to protest this assault upon our children.

For our organization we chose the name Black Americans for Family Values, which certainly met any test of truth in advertising. We also suspected that having a "minority" angle to our organizations name would attract media attention and our suspicions were correct.

The "minority" angle earned extensive media coverage of our organizations work at the 1987 California Republican Party Convention. As a delegate at that convention I introduced three "family values" resolutions, one of which sought to deny convention credentials to groups seeking to advance support for homosexuality.

Another condemned pro-homosexuality propaganda disguised as "AIDS education"; a third demanded that operators of "dial-a-porn" services be prosecuted. These resolutions so enraged representatives of the Log Cabin Club a homosexual pressure group attached to the Republican Party that they engineered my arrest on trespassing charges as a way of preventing me from distributing literature at the convention.

However, when I returned to the convention the following day, our group succeeded in winning approval of two of our resolutions.

As a teacher at South-Central L.A.s Bell High School, I discovered that our students had been targeted by a homosexual recruitment program called "Project 10." The chief instigator behind this effort was a homosexual activist teacher named Rodney Polte, who celebrated national "Coming Out Day For Teachers" by wearing a t-shirt reading, "I’m not gay my boyfriend is."

Polte would also bring his "lover" to the classroom to lecture his students about their "lifestyle."

Many of Poltes students attended my classes as well, and they were sickened and intimidated by the militant homosexual activist. They were particularly revolted by posters on the walls of his classroom depicting "half-naked men" in erotic poses. A bulletin board in Poltes classroom displayed a homosexual newspaper complete with classified advertisements referring to sex with "young boys" and animals, and other degenerate practices.

A battle ensued with the Gay and Lesbian Commission of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which predictably attacked Poltes critics as being motivated by "homophobia" that is, "hatred" of homosexuals.

However, the battle was won after a brave parent and her daughter, along with an interpreter (the parent didn’t speak English), appeared with me on Rev. Jesse Lee Petersons cable television program to describe what it was like for schoolchildren to be sentenced to serve time in Poltes pornography-filled classroom.

Immediately thereafter, the disgusting material was removed from Poltes classroom, and the homosexual radicals were forced into temporary retreat and I earned the label "homophobe."

For condemning affirmative action, Ive been branded an "Uncle Tom." For opposing bilingual education and illegal immigration, Ive been pilloried as a "racist."

My commitment to Bible-based moral principles has provoked left-wing activists to denounce me as a "right-wing Christian extremist." I have heard the hate-drenched rhetoric of the Left, and I have seen the faces of leftists contorted in hatred as they hurl their epithets at me.

I have seen Communist-led mobs of street thugs beat Americans in the streets of Los Angeles for the offense of peacefully celebrating the Fourth of July. Amid all of this I have asked myself, "How is it that were the ones accused of practicing the politics of hatred?

As it has been wisely said, a "hate group" is any group of people whom leftists hate. I have come to understand that Americans who eschew the politics of collective grievance, and seek Whats Right for All Americans (to quote the title of my book), can expect to be assailed as "haters" by those who quite earnestly hate them.

Our hope resides in the possibility that a sufficient number of Americans of all backgrounds will find their way out of the leftist hate maze and embrace the principles of individual liberty and personal responsibility upon which our nation was founded."

--Ezola Foster