Did the judge really rule that racially discriminatory contracting is expression protected by the First Amendment? Can’t be, that goes against the entire body of law, and if true, would eviscerate a wide range of civil rights laws. So I awaited the written Order and decision before writing about this, surely he would correct that error when it came time for a formal ruling.

But the Order Denying Prelminary Injunction did not correct the error, it memorialized the error //

Section 1981 bans all racial discrimination in contracting—public and private, no matter which race is harmed. See 42 U.S.C. §1981. Defendants run the Fearless Strivers Grant Contest. Contests are contracts—submissions for prizes—and here Fearless admits that its contest’s rules “ARE A CONTRACT.” Yet the contest is open only to black women. Whites, Hispanics, Asians, and every other race are barred from entering. A more blatant violation of §1981 is hard to imagine. //

Fearless claims the right that those cases all deny: a right to discriminate in contracting because §1981’s mandate of race neutrality might have an incidental effect on the communicative effect of their conduct. In other words, they seek First Amendment protection for the discrimination itself. While they want to deliver their message that businesses owned by black women are important, Fearless remains free to express this message by donating money, encouraging others to support businesses owned by black women, and through mentoring and networking. But the First Amendment gives them no right to discriminate by race in contracting, even if that discrimination might deliver some message. //

That a federal court would say the Civil Rights Act of 1866 likely violates the First Amendment is alarming. And it’s indefensible given the many Supreme Court precedents saying the opposite. //

The district court said discriminatory contracting itself is protected speech. That line is one the Supreme Court has always been careful not to cross, as it would destroy the whole enterprise of antidiscrimination law.

Mike Ford
5 hours ago
Not one of these unelected jurists have cited even ONE, Article, Section or Clause of either the Constitution of the Voting Rights act that requires a state's congressional delegation to mirror its racial demographics. NOT ONE.

They are using the same turgid "logic" that Roberts did to rewrite O-Care to make it "legal."

The State of Alabama needs to ignore this decision and place any Federal officer attempting to enforce it, under arrest.

Majority-Minority districts are inherently racist, and unconstitutional. //

Rollin L
4 hours ago
There is no Constitutional authority for the federal government to impose its preferences on decisions regarding redistricting by the state legislatures. That is the states' lawful prerogative. The Voting Rights Act is statute, which is inferior to Constitutional law. Even if one argues it was once necessary, it certainly has outlived its usefulness and is without Constitutional foundation. It usurps state power and gives it to the federal government.

It is racist to draw boundaries to favor ANY race over another. This order by a federal judge displays far more prejudice than the map drawn by the state legislature. It literally orders districts along racial lines, and the goal has little to do with actual race. The goal is clearly to create another Democrat district. The inescapable conclusion is that the court believes black citizens are all supposed to think and vote alike, and that this must be considered a permanent condition. I don't know what can be more racist than that. The court owns that position now. //

etba_ss Rollin L
4 hours ago
Exactly. They are arguing that is you don't put black people people in district with a majority black people, they aren't represented. How stupid.

So by extention then, the other black people not in those districts are also disenfranchised. So are the white people in the black districts. So, it's okay to disinfranchise people as long as you make a group or two that are not? Moronic.

one of the signals that a war is over and peace is achieved is when the defeated enemy is allowed to honor their war dead.

“If the victorious side starts to desecrate their enemies war memorials, it means the war is back on,” he said.

“Look at what happens when divers find a sunken Japanese battleship,” he said.

“They will inform the Japanese government, and they would turn that into a memorial, a gravesite--not allowing anybody near it,” he said. “We don't desecrate those memorials, even though they're a thousand feet underwater.” //

Kennedy said no one was worse to American soldiers than the Japanese soldiers, but Southerners are no longer given the same respect.

“We are American citizens, Americans, descendants of the founding fathers, our heroes cannot be honored, and we're not allowed to honor their graves.” //

Just an old soldier...
a day ago edited
America is turning into one, long Maoist/Communist struggle session. America must be made to hate her past. All evidence of the evil past must be destroyed and defamed. Great American Forts like Bragg, Benning and Hood will be renamed so soldiers who served there will know they served at evil locations for an evil cause. You will be ashamed of your history!
How did America hating leftists get to be in charge of EVERYTHING? //

C. S. P. Schofield anon-055q
19 hours ago
Like you, I have scant patience with the Confederacy and its mythology. But I cannot help but notice that the political party most closely concerned with erasing traces of the Confederacy is the party that supported it. And that that party STILL divides people by race… //

emptypockets
20 hours ago
How very ISIS-like so many in America have become. Destroying art because some don't like what or who it represents or commemorates even though it is true remembrance of our actual history. The Left screeches about how so much of our history hasn't been honest--as they forge ahead destroying bits that don't comport with their delusional dystopian narrative.

Besides, sculptor was a Jewish American so hit them with "ANTI-SEMITES!"

It's a beautiful piece of artistry and workmanship remembering a very unbeautiful part of our history. //

Jerry1955 anon-1etz
15 hours ago
Cutting heads and noses off statues. Blowing up Buddahs. Some create. Some appreciate. Some as are so pitiful they can only destroy. //

laughinglordwithweepingeyes
a day ago
The great conquerors make honorary monuments to the best from their enemies and inspire.

The small-minded conquerors try to pretend they were never threatened by erasing their foe. //

Michael1745
19 hours ago
The tragedy is this is a symbol of America’s national reconciliation. It has nothing to do with the dead institution of slavery or secession. One would think the Army would have more important issues to deal with than promoting hate, division and regional bigotry.

The Supreme Court’s Thursday decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College dealt an overdue blow to race-based college admissions, and some of the best punches were thrown by Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurrence. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf

The court ruled that so-called “affirmative action” at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were in violation of the 14th Amendment and its application via the Civil Rights Act. Policies that discriminate based on race without demonstrating a compelling public interest, the six justices in the majority agreed, are not compatible with our founding principles of equal rights under the law for every American.

In addition to signing on to the majority opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, Thomas wrote a nearly 60-page concurrence to express his horror at the idea of institutionalized racial discrimination in 21st-century America. Here are 15 of his best lines.

1. The best way to fix discrimination is not more discrimination.

The New York Times
@nytimes
·
Follow
Breaking News: The Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at Harvard and UNC. The major ruling curtails race-conscious college admissions in the U.S., all but ensuring that elite institutions become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.
https://nyti.ms/4347Xrx
10:21 AM · Jun 29, 2023

The claim, of course, was made without evidence because there is none.

There is, however, fresh and real-time evidence that the unapologetically woke New York Times newsroom is packed full of the very types of disreputable people they claim to abhor, as lawyer/YouTuber Viva Frei explained:

The @nytimes explicitly stating they believe blacks & latinos are intellectually inferior to whites & asians such that they cannot succeed on their own merit.

This is the face of true racism. The not-so-soft bigotry of low expectations.

Congrats, NYTimes. You are the racists you warn others about.

"The solution to our Nation’s racial problems thus cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity," Thomas writes. "Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism. Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is incorporated in our Constitution: that we are all equal, and should be treated equally before the law without regard to our race," he adds. "Only that promise can allow us to look past our differing skin colors."

Elsewhere in his concurring opinion, Thomas lays bare the left's flawed — and quite racist — beliefs about different races.

"In fact, all racial categories are little more than stereotypes, suggesting that immutable characteristics somehow conclusively determine a person’s ideology, beliefs, and abilities. Of course, that is false," Thomas notes. "Members of the same race do not all share the exact same experiences and viewpoints; far from it," he explains. "A black person from rural Alabama surely has different experiences than a black person from Manhattan or a black first-generation immigrant from Nigeria, in the same way that a white person from rural Vermont has a different perspective than a white person from Houston, Texas."

Despite this obvious reality, Thomas reminds that "universities’ racial policies suggest that racial identity 'alone constitutes the being of the race or the man.'"

"That is the same naked racism upon which segregation itself was built," Thomas rightly concludes. "Small wonder, then, that these policies are leading to increasing racial polarization and friction." //

Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims. Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me. I cannot deny the great accomplishments of black Americans, including those who succeeded despite long odds.

Nor do Justice Jackson's statistics regarding a correlation between levels of health, wealth, and well-being between selected racial groups prove anything. Of course, none of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race—rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor—and individual outcomes. So Justice Jackson supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.

"Justice Jackson’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step," Thomas declares. "Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them," he notes. "And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism," Thomas adds. //

The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.

The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional. See Brown II, 349 U. S., at 298 (noting that the Brown case one year earlier had “declare[d] the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional”).

While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.

Divisive activists and media trick people into believing their sensibilities about right and wrong are something racial that must therefore be rooted out. //

For good people who refuse to judge their fellow man on the basis of his skin color, it’s confusing that these recent incidents would be painted in racial terms at all. We want a society that agrees that law-abiding, justice-loving people are the good guys and that antagonizing criminals are the bad guys. That’s not an equation that should consider race, nor one that needs to.

But a vocal minority of people who seek to weaponize unfortunate incidents like these to advance their own Marxist designs are construing these two events as the most recent face of the struggle for racial justice in America. And as they do, blue-collar workers and single moms and middle-class dads and the other millions of Americans who keep the country’s lights on — people who emphatically believe that everyone should have a chance at the American dream, no matter their skin tone — will see a fight they do not recognize. //

In reality, the fight is between decent Americans of every color and those in power who wink at rampant lawlessness and wield its messy results to pit neighbors against each other. It’s between two ideologies: one that says each individual should be responsible for his own actions, and another that says people should be treated differently based on their membership in an identity group.

Manufactured racial animosity is only made possible by out-of-context clips and willing accomplices in Big Tech and corporate media.

Threats against the judiciary did not come suddenly. The slouch toward selective law enforcement and politicized violence has a history. //

The violent bear it away. That title of Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel still resonates. Some relentless atavism is at work in our culture, a monstrous irrationality that awakens what O’Connor called “the stuff of which madmen and fanatics are made.” Violence, no longer shunned, is now an accepted political tool.

The attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh—preceded by U.S Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to enforce federal law against protesters at justices’ homes—exposed the fragile divide between constituted order and willed anarchy. In effect, the attorney general’s inaction acquiesced to mob intimidation and signaled a willingness to risk further lawlessness.

The descent into Third World-like threats against the judiciary did not come suddenly. The slouch toward selective law enforcement and politicized violence has a history. By whatever name we call it—wokeism nowadays—adversary culture has been loosening essential restraints for some six decades. Like the lifecycle of a parasite, the passion for repudiating established order mutates and reappears in successive stages. Today’s recurrence of the New Left virus keeps the inherited infection alive in a new generation of hosts. //

In “Notes on Nationalism” (1945) George Orwell wrote that the key to political judgments—who is guilty? who is the victim?—is apt to lie in the identities of the parties involved instead of in the nature of the wrongdoing: “Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage … which does not change its moral when it is committed by ‘our side.’”

His comment was a counter ahead of time to Jean-Paul Sartre’s glorification of “Wretched of the Earth.” In his preface to Fanon’s text, Sartre spoke for the revolutionary side: “No gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them.” He made a romance of it: “irrepressible violence” against a perceived enemy is “man recreating himself.” //

Frederic Kremer
19 days ago
It is a necessary condition for the victims to sanction the supposed morality of their destroyer in order for a culture such as ours to be swept into the library of failed cultures. Guilt is a powerful dis-arming tool. The intellectuals have led the charge to impose guilt, destroy defense and lay open the field to violence by convincing those susceptible to guilt that their destroyer is more moral than they themselves are.

Unfortunately Ben Franklin’s warning, though taken seriously by those who wanted to change from a republic to an elitist pretense of limited democracy, was not taken seriously by those who wanted a republic of limited democracy. The mob is fueled by their righteousness as they swallowed it from the vomit of the intellectuals. The citizens who made possible the environment the mob operates in is without intellectual heroes and like Achilles, hobbled.

Our politicians, with rare exceptions, are most assuredly products of the culture and totally without capability to protect a limited democracy. Heck, they would not even understand the concept. They are the last persons to correct this slide into violence, they are encouraging it. They too will eventually be on the receiving end. So, my question is: why wait? Where is the decency in giving your executioner time and resources to prepare for your slaughter? As Bonnie Tyler put it: where have all the good men gone?

If you are a Common Sense reader, you are by now highly aware of the phenomenon of institutional capture. From the start, we have covered the ongoing saga of how America’s most important institutions have been transformed by an illiberal ideology—and have come to betray their own missions.

Medicine. Hollywood. Education. The reason we exist is because of the takeover of newspapers like The New York Times.

Ok, so we’ve lost a lot. A whole lot. But at least we haven’t lost the law. That’s how we comforted ourselves. The law would be the bulwark against this nonsense. The rest we could work on building anew.

But what if the country’s legal system was changing just like everything else?

Today, Aaron Sibarium, a reporter who has consistently been ahead of the pack on this beat, offers a groundbreaking piece on how the legal system in America, as one prominent liberal scholar put it, is at risk of becoming “a totalitarian nightmare.”

This is a long feature on a subject we think deserves your time. //

That lawyers could be tainted by representing unpopular clients was hardly news. But in times past, lawyers worried about the public—not other lawyers. Defending communists, terrorists, and cop killers had never been a crowd pleaser, but that’s what lawyers had to do sometimes: Defend people who were hated.

When congressional Republicans attacked attorneys for representing Guantanamo detainees, for example, the entire profession rallied around them. The American Civil Liberties Union noted that John Adams took pride in representing British soldiers accused of taking part in the Boston Massacre, calling it “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered to my country.”

But that’s not how the new associates saw Boies’s choice to represent Weinstein. They thought there were certain people you just did not represent—people so hateful and reprehensible that helping them made you complicit. The partners, the old-timers—pretty much everyone over 50—found this unbelievable. That wasn’t the law as they had known it. That wasn’t America.

“The idea that guilty people shouldn’t get lawyers attacks the legal system at its root,” Andrew Koppelman, a prominent liberal scholar of constitutional law at Northwestern University, said. “People will ask: ‘How can you represent someone who’s guilty?’ The answer is that a society where accused people don’t get a defense as a matter of course is a society you don’t want to live in. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.” //

All of sudden, critical race theory was more than mainstream in America’s law schools. It was mandatory.

Starting this Fall, Georgetown Law School will require all students to take a class “on the importance of questioning the law’s neutrality” and assessing its “differential effects on subordinated groups,” according to university documents obtained by Common Sense. //

As of last month, the American Bar Association is requiring all accredited law schools to “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” both at the start of law school and “at least once again before graduation.” That’s in addition to a mandatory legal ethics class, which must now instruct students that they have a duty as lawyers to “eliminate racism.” (The American Bar Association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, voted 348 to 17 to adopt the new standard.) //

Stith, the professor who was lambasted for telling students to “grow up,” doesn’t see the pile-on as an isolated incident.

“Law schools are in crisis,” she told me. “The truth doesn’t matter much. The game is to signal one’s virtue.” //

“That’s hugely corrosive,” said a corporate lawyer in Virginia, who, like most attorneys contacted for this article, would not go on the record for fear of losing his job. “You see it in all of the worst things we see in Donald Trump. ‘The law means what I say it means. The election was stolen because I lost.’ Once you depart from the idea that we’re all people under the law, it really matters who is in power. That starts to feel like the rule of man, not the rule of law.” //

The problem, Strossen said, is that rights mean nothing without representation. “ANYONE who doesn’t have access to counsel in defending a right, as a practical matter, doesn’t have a meaningful opportunity to exercise that right,” the former ACLU chief told me in an email. “Hence, undermining representation for any unpopular speaker or idea endangers freedom for ANY speaker or idea, because the tides of popularity are constantly shifting.”

Ken Starr, the former solicitor general who led the 1998 investigation of Bill Clinton, agreed. “At a time when fundamental freedoms are under assault around the globe, it is all the more imperative that American lawyers boldly stand up for the rule of law,” Starr said. “In our country, that includes—especially now—the representation of controversial causes and unpopular clients //

Then there’s the erosion of the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. “The Anti-Innocence Project,” one criminal-defense attorney in San Francisco joked.

​​Progressive lawyers have become more determined to turn a blind eye to certain defendants while cracking down with even greater than usual fervor on certain crimes. “The same people who are anti-incarceration for some defendants will support life plus cancer for others,” said Scott Greenfield, a criminal-defense attorney in New York. “Good people—which in practice means blacks and Hispanics, regardless of what they did—should be free. Bad people—which in practice means sex offenders and financial criminals—should go to jail.”

In 2019, for example, the American Bar Association nearly passed a motion urging state legislatures and courts to adopt a new definition of “consent” in cases of sexual misconduct that would flip the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused—despite fierce criticism of the standard from legal scholars, and despite some evidence that it has unfairly hurt black, male students on college campuses

The idea that Anne Frank was a recipient of “white privilege” is so insane as to seem like parody, but I can assure you that the left is full of people who think like this. In fact, you may recall “The View”s Whoopi Goldberg making the same argument some months ago, arguing that Hitler wasn’t racist because the Holocaust was “white people doing it to white people.” She later tried to insinuate that the Holocaust wasn’t equivalent to historical racism against black people because Jews could hide behind the fact that they were white.

The toxicity of woke intersectionality truly knows no bounds. The idea of generic racial “privilege” has always been stupid. Aspects of privilege span all races and are highly dependent on each individual’s personal situation. Yes, the color of one’s skin could be a factor, but there are dozens of other factors that are rarely considered and are often far more important in modern society.

Returning to Anne Frank, she was a Jewish child who lived in a time when her people were seen as subhuman, and they were subject to extermination by evil men. How shallow and sad must one’s life be to try to claim she was “privileged” in order to make themselves seem like more of a victim? And in almost every case, those who stoop to such idiocy are themselves highly privileged, whether they want to admit it or not.

Antisemitism is alive and well in our society, and it should be shunned and mocked. Unfortunately, the woke left making victimhood into a currency is only exasperating it.

“I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)

“The bitterness and hate ... would have long since been obliterated in this state, were it not for some unprincipled men who would keep alive the bitterness of the past, and inculcate a hatred between the races, in order that they may aggrandize themselves by office, and its emoluments, to control my people, the effect of which is to degrade them.”
Senator Hiram Revels (1827-1901)

Clarence Thomas’s influence must not be reduced to his race because that characterization inherently contradicts everything he stands for. //

The Washington Post’s attempt to smear Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for thinking like a white man is a completely incorrect interpretation of the justice’s legal legacy. //

It’s fair to say that after the justice’s more than 30 “distinguished” years on the bench, The Washington Post’s interpretation of Thomas is all wrong. Thomas’s thinking has shaped the way all conservatives today think, regardless of their race. He is a great thinker who is not only admired in conservative circles but has inspired them. Thomas’s influence cannot and should not be reduced to his race because that characterization inherently contradicts everything he stands for.

The left is rolling back the progress we have made in making discrimination unacceptable in our culture and society. //

They are the ones who have implemented a discriminatory racial-spoils system in government and academic institutions throughout the country. Democrats’ racial preferences have much more in common with Jim Crow than what Biden likes to call “Jim Crow 2.0,” referring to benign Republican efforts to ensure election integrity.

Let’s start with President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will consider only a black woman for the U.S. Supreme Court. This is something no private employer is allowed to do: disregard all other qualified job candidates to make a hiring decision based solely on race and sex.

In virtually every other context, such odious behavior would violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans racial and sex discrimination in employment and many other facets of everyday life, including education. That law not only made racial and sex discrimination unlawful, it helped change American society to make such discrimination morally unacceptable, as it should be. //

Many universities — American, Stanford, and Cornell among them — are now establishing segregated “black student-only” housing. Most of us thought the detestable separate-but-equal doctrine was discarded in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. Apparently, we were wrong. Judging from its total inaction, the Biden Justice Department sees nothing wrong in reviving this aspect of a foregone era that we had successfully discarded. //

Modern “progressives” are rolling back the progress we have made in making discrimination unacceptable in our culture and society. They are teaching our young people that discrimination is not only acceptable, but laudable as long as the “right” sex and races benefit.

The next generation is learning that no matter how hard they work, no matter their qualifications, no matter their circumstances, they may be denied a college education, medical treatment, a job, and a host of other benefits based on the color of their skin or how many X chromosomes they have.

So, who is really closer to imposing “Jim Crow 2.0,” one of Biden’s favorite phrases? To answer that question, he and his cohorts need only look in the mirror.

The elites told us that Joe Biden would protect black people and believe black lives mattered. They also said he would ensure the community’s prosperity and success. Here’s the problem: His presidency has been the antithesis of all that. //

What about black prosperity? In the Trump era, African-American unemployment had reached the lowest on record — 5.5 percent in September 2019, shortly before the start of the pandemic. There had never been so many African Americans who were part of the workforce. This was essentially thanks to the economic policies pushed by Republicans. Tax cuts, wage increases, and GDP growth helped create an economy where everyone benefited.

In the Biden era, Joe takes credit for a lower unemployment rate. But what he won’t tell you is that the rate is lower now thanks to a decline in labor participation among African-Americans. This is nothing to celebrate. If anything, it’s one of the most significant indicators of black poverty.

Andrew Kerr
@AndrewKerrNC
BREAKING: Black Lives Matter's national arm just went and shut down ALL its online fundraising streams following a @dcexaminer investigation that exposed the charity's shocking lack of financial transparency
washingtonexaminer.com
Black Lives Matter shuts down fundraising days after liberal states threatened legal action
6:46 PM · Feb 2, 2022 //

the group and its leaders have caused profound damage to the credibility of the movement they claim to represent, and in a saner world, the DOJ would be investigating right now. I would be shocked if laws haven’t been broken. Unfortunately, I suspect that the racial politics involved have made the organization and its leaders largely untouchable, at least while a Democrat inhabits the White House.

The American left’s sickening neo-racism as demonstrated in Biden’s use of race and sex to pick people for government leadership posts is completely anti-American. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. believed and said they were working to make good on our nation’s founding affirmation of the great and universal truth that “all men are created equal.” Now our nation’s top leaders instead work to communicate the disgusting idea that “some men are created more equal than others” based on performance-indifferent personal characteristics people are born with and cannot change.

It’s shameful to see our president declare self righteously that he bestows government authority based on people’s skin color and sex. Joe Biden is a complete embarrassment and making major steps backward for our nation.

Our nation has worked very hard to get away from this poison. People died, were beaten by police, lost jobs, and made other huge personal sacrifices to bring about a United States in which “they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.” Is this what we’re going to do with what these Americans sacrificed to achieve?

What a slap in the face, by the way, to Breyer. Nothing says, “Thanks for your service!” like a president effectively deciding you’re unfit to fill the very post you just vacated because he believes it’s politically convenient to discriminate against the skin hue and gonads you were born with. But that’s what the left does. In two years, Breyer will have his namesakes and statues ripped down, just like Lincoln. That’s what they call progress. //

I call this disgustingly racist and sexist. It is not progress, it is retrogression. Americans should not tolerate social Jim Crow dynamics like these any more than we tolerated Jim Crow laws in the second half of the 20th century. I don’t want to go through another round of mass civil unrest to re-establish that American ideal, either. Neither should anyone else, but that’s what this kind of sex- and race-baiting will lead to if left unchecked.

As Ron DeSantis takes on CRT, the AP miraculously finds white rage where none is actually there.

The Critical Race Theory siege continues in this country, and those making the argument on the other side have failed to become any more lucid over time. As Glenn Younkin took initial steps to keep the CRT curriculum out of Virginia schools his opponents resorted to not making sense to make their point. Some screeched, “It’s not even being taught in schools!” Others went further, trying to claim that CRT does not even exist.

These retorts are rendered neutered immediately by basic responses. If it is not being taught then banning it should not be an issue, but if it does not even exist then getting upset over any action makes absolutely no sense. Try to imagine getting emotionally worked up if it was announced that schools could not teach unicorn husbandry. That is how vacant their argument becomes.

It is with similar logic that The Associated Press reports on a new bill in the Florida legislature, with the news syndicate declaring racism in the policy by injecting words that were not written. Called The Individual Freedom bill, the legislation would limit the teaching in schools or the diversity training in businesses that a particular race is responsible for historic actions. The AP declares it to be protection for one race alone.

It begins with the headline: Florida could shield whites from ‘discomfort’ of racist past. From there the syndicate describes this as, A bill pushed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel “discomfort” when they teach students or train employees about discrimination in the nation’s past. //

Those words are not found to be anywhere in the bill. Instead what you get is a neutral address that includes all races, and protects an individual from being punished in a fashion for a reason stemming solely from their race or sex. As it is written:

“An individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex. An individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” //

State Senator Shevrin Jones:

“At no point did anyone say white people should be held responsible for what happened, but what I would ask my white counterparts is, are you an enabler of what happened or are you going to say we must talk about history?”

Just astounding. He manages, within a single sentence, to declare that whites would not be held responsible for past actions, but if you support this law, that makes you an enabler to what happened in the past. That is the very thing this bill is addressing! This is a state senator denying the need for this bill, and then proceeding to illustrate the very behavior requiring it to become a law.

John Schreiber
@johnschreiber
Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLA

6:30 PM · Jan 13, 2022

As you can see, trains frequently slow or stop in this area as they get worked into the @UnionPacific Intermodal facility near Downtown LA. The thieves use this opportunity to break open containers and take what’s inside. I’d say every 4th or 5th rail car had opened containers.

Missing a package? Shipment delayed? Maybe your package is among the thousands we found discarded along the tracks. This is but one area thieves have targeted trains. We were told this area was just cleaned up 30 days ago so what you see is all within the last month. @CBSLA

Responsibility for policing the railroad right of way falls on Union Pacific Police... not local agencies like LAPD. We did see Union Pacific police chasing two people today off the tracks and keeping an eye on things.

New Today: My colleague @CBSLAKristine spoke with @UnionPacific about train theft and they forwarded her this letter they sent to LA County DA in December. UP says they arrested > 100 people in last 3 months but many were fined and released within 24 hours. //

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html

There are 90 containers breached a day, theft up 356 percent, according to Union Pacific. UP is now considering rerouting its trains out of LA county, so they don’t have to deal with this, but are begging the DA to be harder on the thieves. //

“Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?”

"You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large."

-- Thomas Sowell

You can’t learn from your experiences if you can’t remember them in some capacity. As a child, you may have burned your hand by touching a hot lightbulb, or ran too fast down a hill and fell hard after you tripped over your own feet. These experiences teach you simple lessons. Don’t touch a hot lightbulb, and pace yourself when moving quickly down a hill.

Human collective experience is just like that. It’s imperative that we remember the mistakes we make in the past in order to avoid making them again.

In fact, one of the most important lessons we’ve learned is about this lesson in particular, and it was best put by George Santayana when he said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” //

You’ve likely noticed the deletion of various parts of our history, or at the very least, the attempt at completely rewriting it. For instance, the “1619 Project” is an attempt at reimagining the history of the United States with more of a focus on slavery than every other aspect of our story that brought this nation to what it is today. If the people who push this monstrosity were given their way, they would actually achieve the opposite of raising awareness about the evils of slavery and racism.

The founding fathers created their nation in a time when slavery was so embedded into culture that it would have killed it if they had immediately done away with it, but they, being men who truly believed in freedom and opportunity for all, set things in motion that would slowly poison slavery to death and eventually see the nation cast it off. To be sure, it’s a moment that came to fruition under President Abraham Lincoln, who later said that he was finishing what the founders had started.

https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2020/07/02/lincoln-debunked-dems-n245192 //

Perhaps it won’t take well, but future generations will be so far removed from the concept because we’ve taken the lessons out of the picture by completely stripping it from other forms of media.

In other words, we lose the lesson. We have nothing to learn from, and thus no one should be surprised when, at some point in the future, repeating the sin becomes a reality.

That slavery is a sin needs to stay right where it is. Moreover, how we dealt with that sin in the past also needs to stay fully intact.

We as a nation eliminated a great evil and at great cost, and that should never be forgotten. We should never forget why we eliminated it too.