Category: Constitution

Why Have Democrat-Controlled Schools Become Such Cesspits of Racism?

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The headline phraseology is borrowed from Glenn Reynolds who, in a different but related context, calls attention to the concurring opinion of a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:

“I write separately to express my views on the topic of hate speech, disturbingly present in both the facts of the case before the panel and regrettably, a reemerging threat to society throughout the nation today. . . . The continued prevalence of hate speech and crimes against American citizens and residents on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability is evidence of the enduring threat of hate crimes to the fabric of American democratic society and to the safety and security of individuals.”

What bothers me most here is that casual conflation of (a) “hate speech” with (b) “hate crimes,” suggesting that suppression of (a) will prevent (b), a suggestion offered without evidence. And it is my belief that, not only is this false, but that the opposite is true, i.e., that there is likely to be more violence motivated by “hate” if people are forbidden to express whatever resentments and grievances might inspire such violence.

Consider the fact that the case before the court involved two students — Cedric Epple and Kevin Chen — who were expelled from Albany High School in Alameda County, California. This is on the east side of San Francisco Bay, barely three miles from the Berkeley campus of the University of California, which is to say that this school is nearly at the Ground Zero of Wokeness. Less than 5% of the voters in the town are registered Republicans. There is perhaps no place in America where “hate speech” is more strongly condemned, and yet here’s what was going on among these teenagers:

In November 2016, at the suggestion of a friend, [plaintiff] Epple created a private Instagram account to share comments “privately with my small group of friends.” . . .
Chen “followed” the account using the Instagram username “kkkevinkkkkk.” Chen likewise understood that Epple’s second Instagram account was to “be a private forum (by invite only), exclusive to [their] friends, and a place where [they] could share sarcasm, jokes, funny images, and other banter privately.” Not all of the persons who eventually followed the account knew who the owner of the account was.
Between November 2016 and March 2017, Epple used the account to make a number of cruelly insulting posts about various AHS students. These ranged from immature posts making fun of a student’s braces, glasses, or weight to much more disturbing posts that targeted vicious invective with racist and violent themes against specific Black classmates. For example, in early February 2017, Epple uploaded a photograph in which a Black member of the AHS girls’ basketball team was standing next to the team coach, who was also Black, and Epple drew nooses around both their necks and added the caption “twinning is winning.” In another post, he combined (1) a screen shot of a particular Black student’s Instagram post in which she stated “I wanna go back to the old way” with (2) the statement “Do you really tho?”, accompanied by a historical drawing that appears to depict a slave master paddling a naked Black man who is strung up by rope around his hands. On February 11, 2017, he posted a screenshot of texts in which he and a Black classmate were arguing, and he added the caption “Holy shit I’m on the edge of bringing my rope to school on Monday.” Other posts, although not referencing specific students, contained images either depicting, or making light of, Ku Klux Klan violence against Black people. One post included what appears to be a historical photograph of a lynched man still hanging from a tree; another depicts a Klan member in a white hood; and a third combines the caption “Ku klux starter pack” with pictures of a noose, a white hood, a burning torch, and a Black doll.
Epple also created several posts that, while omitting references to violence, still aimed highly offensive racist insults at identifiable Black classmates. In one, he uploaded an image of a Black student sitting in class that was captioned with the statement “The gorilla exhibit is nice today.” . . .

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The issue before the court was whether the school could expel students based on private communications that happened off-campus, a relatively narrow question about the limits of public school disciplinary policy. What is of interest to me, however, is what the behavior of these students says about the apparent presumption of the Circuit Court judge who thinks that censoring “hate speech” is the best way to deal with what he calls “a reemerging threat to society.” As if California public schools weren’t already in the iron grip of wokeness?

Isn’t it likely that these teenagers were pursuing the thrill of defying authority — the frisson of rebellion — by expressing beliefs and attitudes they knew were forbidden? Maybe these kids aren’t actually any more racist than their classmates, but instead are just doing what adolescents have always done, rebelling against the prevailing social norms which, in Alameda County, are those of uber-woke liberalism.

While it is certainly not my intention to defend such behavior — crude and deliberately offensive “jokes” — or even to argue against expelling these students, it seems to me that the facts of the case contradict the Ninth Circuit judge’s argument in favor of more aggressive suppression of “hate speech.” It’s not as if Epple and Chen were doing this in an environment of tolerance toward expressions of racism — quite the opposite. So, the judge seems to be arguing, the answer to acts of rebellion against repression is . . . more repression?

Count me as skeptical — or call me a RAAAAACIST! for doubting that more stringent political correctness will solve anything.



 

How to Get Yourself Shot

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Say hello to Steven Joaquin “Zhoie” Perez (a/k/a “Furry Potato”), a transgender YouTuber who specializes in “First Amendment audits.”

You may not have heard of this phenomenon: People who record videos in public places — post offices, municipal buildings, etc. — in order to test {“audit,” as they say) the police response. These self-declared “auditors” are deliberately non-cooperative when confronted by law enforcement, refusing to identify themselves and sometimes insulting the officers who usually show up in response to reports of “suspicious behavior.”

“First Amendment auditors” seemed to emerge into the news in 2017 when two Michigan men, James Baker and Brandon Vreeland, showed up armed at the Dearborn police station:

The two men wanted to file a complaint about being pulled over earlier by Dearborn police officers, but also saw it as an opportunity to test the suburban Detroit department to see if its officers “honored” the Constitution and their right to carry guns. . . .
“We audit police to see how well they honor the Constitution and people’s rights,” said Vreeland, who was free after posting $1,500 bond late Sunday night. “We showcase police abuse and abuse of police power in the totalitarian police state that we live in.”

Baker and Vreeland were subsequently sentenced to jail, but the “movement” which they represent has grown. I never heard of this until the other day when I saw a video by a guy named Abiyah Israel who calls his YouTube channel “We the People University.”

The doctrine being promoted — i.e., that you don’t have to cooperate with law enforcement when, for example, they ask to see identification — reminded me of so-called “sovereign citizens.” And as it turns out, I’m not the only one who sees this resemblance:

[C]ritics, including domestic terrorism experts, say the tactics are intimidating — sometimes downright scary — and that the “auditors” seem intent on inciting authorities. And they fear that it’s just a matter of time before one of the encounters turns violent.
“I am definitely concerned,” said Bob Paudert, former police chief of West Memphis, Ark., whose son and another officer were gunned down by anti-government sovereign citizens during a traffic stop in 2010. “These are the same tactics the sovereign citizens use. The language they use, going into city office buildings, refusing to give their names but demanding you give yours, videotaping everybody.
“They’re harassing city employees and government employees, and they’ve got no legitimate reason for being there other than just to film. They’re trying to provoke these people to make an arrest or hit them or whatever. The problem is, the employees don’t know how to handle it. They’re not sure what to do.”
Sovereign citizens believe the government is corrupt and out of control; therefore, they do not recognize local, state or federal authority or tax systems. Not all are violent, but in recent years they have come to be considered a top domestic terrorism threat by the FBI and other government agencies.

The “auditors” deny any connection to “sovereign citizens,” but their apparent intent to provoke confrontation with law enforcement is dangerous. Certainly, I value my First Amendment rights as much as any American, but I also value not getting shot by cops. Which brings us to the case of Steven Joaquin “Zhoie” Perez:

[In February 2019], Perez got into an altercation that provoked a security guard at a Los Angeles synagogue to fire a shot that grazed her leg.
It was a bizarre cultural clash between a social media provocateur and a community on edge since the Pittsburgh synagogue mass shooting in October and rising incidents of anti-Semitism.
Perez filmed for 40 minutes outside the gates of the Etz Jacob Congregation/Ohel Chana High School building in the Fairfax District. As the security guard grew angrier, he filmed Perez in return, then pulled out his handgun.
“Get away from the door,” the guard said in one of two videos Perez posted to her “Furry Potato Live” YouTube channel. “You try one more time and I shoot you.”
The gun fired, and Perez repeatedly shouted that he shot her in the leg.
Police arrested the guard, Edduin Zelayagrunfeld on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. He could not be reached for comment Friday.
Perez was treated for her injury and gave a news conference later.
She is a self-proclaimed “1st Amendment auditor” — a phenomenon that started in the last two years. According to Brian Levin, director of Cal State San Bernardino’s Center on Hate and Extremism, the “audits” usually involve people provoking police or others near sensitive locations who might challenge their right to assemble or film in a public space.

Prosecutors declined to file charges against the security guard, perhaps because if you’re hired to guard a synagogue, you get a lot of leeway when dealing with suspicious strangers:

Videos that Perez posted to her YouTube channel, where she is better known as “Furry Potato,” show the guard repeatedly telling Perez to leave the area and constantly moving his hand toward his firearm, even though she is standing on a public sidewalk.
At one point in the video, Zelayagrunfeld threatens to shoot Perez if she does not move away from an entrance. The guard appears to have his weapon pointed toward the ground when a gunshot is heard in the video.
Before the shooting, Zelayagrunfeld had asked school staff to move students to a safe location, triggering a lockdown, according to the memo filed by the district attorney’s office. Taken together with recent surges in anti-Semitic hate crimes and the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh roughly four months earlier, prosecutors believed the guard’s “perception of Perez’s behavior as dangerous was reasonable.”
“Perez went to a Jewish school, and place of worship, dressed in all black and with a backpack secured to her body by a harness,” the document read. “As Zelaya told detectives, Perez’s backpack could have contained a bomb, and her attire could have concealed a firearm or other deadly weapon.”

See what I mean? The guard’s actions were “reasonable,” considering the circumstances. Perez is lucky to have been only grazed by a bullet.

Sooner or later, one of these “auditors” is likely to be a lot less lucky. Generally speaking, if a cop is going to shoot you, he’ll keep pulling the trigger until the magazine’s empty. Your “rights” don’t do you much good after you bleed to death. Your family might get a lawsuit settlement payoff, but you won’t be around to spend that money.




 

Historic Thoughts on ‘Our Democracy’

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The Constitutional Convention

“It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.”
— The Federalist No. 1

America’s form of government is unique among nations, in that we are a federal republic. Other nations may call themselves such, but they do not have our distinct history, in which 13 separate British colonies, having fought and won a war for independence from their homeland, then developed a new charter for their combined government as a federation of states. As a condition of ratifying that charter, the constitutional conventions of several states — most particularly Virginia — insisted that it must be amended to include guarantees of certain rights.

Most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights address what the Americans had inherited from the Whig tradition in England (e.g., religious freedom, trial by jury, etc.) or else seek to prevent the sort of abuses of power (e.g., unwarranted search and seizure) by which the colonists had felt oppressed under the British rule. But the most unique expressions of the rights our founders saw fit to prescribe were contained in the Second Amendment (the right to “keep and bear arms” which “shall not be infringed”) and the Tenth Amendment (reserving to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government). In both cases, these amendments express the concerns of the Anti-Federalists that the federal government might obtain too much power, becoming not the servant of the people, but rather their master. You cannot understand our Constitution and its Bill of Rights without studying the debates over ratification, a point made by M.E. Bradford in Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution. Every student of American history is (or rather should be) familiar with The Federalist Papers, in which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay made their arguments in favor of ratifying the new Constitution. But those arguments cannot be fully understood without reference to the arguments of the Anti-Federalists, who opposed ratification. The Constitution could not have been adopted as the supreme law of the land if its proponents had not succeeded in assuring delegates to the state ratification conventions that this new government would not become a centralized tyrannical power, as the Anti-Federalists claimed.

This is why the Second Amendment and the Tenth Amendment are so important to understanding what “our democracy” actually is. By ensuring that the population could never be disarmed, the founders meant to guarantee that “We the People” would forever be able to defend our liberty. The reference to “a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” is a direct expression of the Anti-Federalist concern about the federal government becoming a tyrannical power. Militias were subsidiary to the individual states, and a safeguard of their security and freedom. The phrase “well-regulated” would be better understood as meaning “well-trained,” i.e., proficient in the use of arms. A militia could be summoned quickly to deal with a crisis only if the population in general owned weapons and were capable of using them effectively. The inclusion of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights was the states saying to the newly-created federal power: “Don’t even think about disarming our people. What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ do we have to explain to you?” And the Tenth Amendment added an exclamation point to this opposition to centralized power.

In the ensuing 233 years, many Americans have lost their fear of a tyrannical authority. Indeed, some of our “elite” seem to love such authority, which they hope to control for their own tyrannical purposes, and these elites have lately gotten into the habit of using the phrase “our democracy” as if there were a consensus agreement in favor of the nebulous concept this phrase is meant to express. Specifically, the elites who endlessly blather on about “our democracy” claim that it is threatened by Donald Trump and his supporters, so that “our democracy” can only be safe if 74 million voters are effectively disenfranchised. In other words, “our democracy” requires the suppression of dissent, which certainly is not what most Americans think of as democracy.

Is “our democracy” whatever CNN says it should be?

Appearing on CNN’s New Day Thursday morning, Don Lemon once again urged the media to hold Republicans to a different standard than Democrats in their media coverage.
The primetime host tied the GOP to the threat of “growing extremism” on the right. He warned journalists to not give a “false equivalence” to both sides, and instead acknowledge Republicans were endangering America.
“We sit around and we talk about these things and we want to give this false equivalence to Democrats and Republicans. That is not where we are right now. Republicans are doing something that is very dangerous to our society and we have to acknowledge that. We have to acknowledge that as Americans, we must acknowledge that as journalists because if we don’t, we are not doing our jobs,” Lemon declared. . . .
Lemon was referring to Republicans who continue to support former President Trump after the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, as well as the recent Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“They have to answer for those questions if they come here on CNN, they must answer for that. If they go on MSNBC, they must answer for that. If they go on ABC, they must answer for that. And they cannot expect to be coddled when they go on to a news organization or if they step in front of a crowd of supporters or voters or Americans.” . . .
Lemon referred to an interview he did with a former spokesperson for the Oath Keepers saying Republicans had become associated with “extremists.” He rejected any Republican opposition to that belief.
“You have the inmates running the asylum basically. You have the extremists because I know there are Republicans sitting out there going, ‘Don Lemon that’s not what we are.’ Maybe it’s not what you are but it’s what [the Republican] party has become and what you have allowed to happen,” he lectured.

Several critics noted that Lemon’s argument — “January 6 now! January 6 tomorrow! January 6 forever!” — was aimed at CNN’s new ownership, who want to get the network out of the ratings basement by ditching their Trump-obsessed left-wing slant.

There are so many issues where “Democratic operatives with bylines” have decided that only one side deserves a respectful hearing, so that the media’s thumb is always on the scale in our national debate, and these journalists believe “freedom of the press” requires the active suppression of dissenting voices. Fortunately, the proof is in the pudding, and we judge the wisdom of this one-sided approach by the results it produces. It’s not just that CNN has lower ratings than reruns of Spongebob Squarepants, but that the orchestrated anti-Trump hysteria of the so-called “mainstream” media — part of a “cabal” that foisted Joe Biden upon us — are apparently happy to see a nation groaning under record-high gas prices, out-of-control crime and a looming financial crisis, just as long as there is not a Republican in the White House!

Don Lemon and his ilk are advocates of centralized authority, one-party rule dictated by an unelected “elite” class, the exact sort of tyranny that our founders sought to prevent. This is what “our democracy” really means to them, and guess what? Don’t expect Don Lemon to invite me (or anyone else who shares my views) onto CNN to debate the meaning of “our democracy.” There can be no debate in “our democracy.”

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

‘Cryptic Messages’

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‘FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!’

The “debate” over gun control is never actually a debate. Democrats keep trying to take our guns away, and we keep saying, “Hell, no!”

Enter Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf:

Two important points to make about this:

A. He’s lying,
but
B. He’s a Democrat, so what else do we expect?

Hannah Cox goes into more detail:

The graphic explains the process of red flag laws like this: Jane sees a Facebook friend, Randy, post “photos of guns and cryptic messages.” She then reports him to the police. (Holy escalation!)
The police then petition a judge to “temporarily” remove Randy’s Second Amendment rights. Police provide “evidence” (seemingly a cryptic Facebook post in this scenario) that Randy is a threat to himself or others. The court agrees to temporarily take away Randy’s rights.
Kumbaya. The justice system is perfect. Nothing to see here.
Come on . . .
Can you imagine how overrun our courts would be if every left-wing Karen could report people for merely owning guns and not liking their government? We have an environment where people are being told speech is violence and where a not insignificant part of the population believes they are justified in “canceling” someone for simply holding differing political views.
We already knew that the red flag law system is ripe for abuse. But Tom Wolf just proved our point all over again.

Tom Wolf is term-limited and can’t seek re-election, and the Democrats have nominated attorney general Josh Shapiro for governor. But the latest Pennsylvania poll shows Shapiro with just a 4-point lead (44%-40%) over Republican Doug Mastriano, and Biden’s favorability is now 10 points underwater in a state he allegedly won by 80,000 votes. Pushing “red flag” laws is unlikely to improve matters for the Democrats in Pennsylvania, where everybody has watched as George Soros-funded DA Larry Krasner turns loose criminals in Philadelphia. And would you care to guess who has given money to Josh Shapiro’s campaign?

Got your “cryptic message” right here: Molon labe.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)




 

‘Alexa, What Is an Ideologue?’

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This week’s Judiciary Committee hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson were eye-opening in a lot of ways. Sen. Marsha Blackburn — whom I’ve considered a 2024 presidential contender for a long time — managed to embarrass Jackson with a very simple question:

Blackburn: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?”
Jackson: “Can I provide a definition?”
Blackburn: “Mhmm, yeah.”
Jackson: “No, I can’t.”
Blackburn: “You can’t?”
Jackson: “Not in this context — I’m not a biologist.”

The “not in this context” part has been somewhat overlooked in the general point-and-laugh reaction to her “not a biologist” reply. As someone said, I’m not a veterinarian, but I know what a dog is. Nevertheless, as Byron York notes, the “context” is important because Blackburn prefaced her question by referencing the 1996 Supreme Court case of U.S. vs. Virginia, which declared that the all-male status of Virginia Military Institute was unconstitutional on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. It so happens that I believe that case was wrongly decided — a legal travesty, as the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment obviously had no such intent at the time the amendment was ratified.

In the hands of ideologues, the Fourteenth Amendment becomes an omnivorous predator that swallows whole the rest of the Constitution, like a great white shark gobbling up baby seals in shallow water. If you want to know how we got to the point that Will “Lia” Thomas is NCAA women’s swim champion, you can look back to U.S. v. Virginia as a milestone on the road to this madness of “equality.”

Anyone who directly opposes the radical egalitarian agenda can expect to be smeared as a “racist,” etc., as I remarked earlier this week (see “The Problem With ‘Equality’”), and it is therefore scarcely surprising to hear Democrats attacking Marsha Blackburn (“Can we just go set Marsha Blackburn on fire?”). Neither should we be surprised that academic “gender experts” rushed to defend Jackson.

Cited as “experts” by USA Today were Rebecca Jordan-Young, “a scientist and gender studies scholar at Barnard College,” Sarah Richardson, “a Harvard scholar, historian and philosopher of biology,” Juliet Williams, “a professor of gender studies at UCLA who specializes in gender and the law,” and Kate Mason, “a gender studies professor at Wheaton College who studies social inequality.”

The prestige of their positions as professors is thus thrown into the balance on Jackson’s side, and we are supposed to be so awed by this display of academic prestige that our critical faculties simply cease to function and we mutely accept the assertion that only “experts” are qualified to tell the difference between male and female. This consensus of academic “experts,” however, is an artifact of the ideological conformity that prevails in our nation’s education system which, in turn, is enforced through federal Title IX authority. Any university employee who expressed skepticism toward contemporary “gender theory” would face severe career repercussions, and might even become unemployable in academia. An ambitious young scholar is not going to find many opportunities to publish research that doesn’t support the prevailing gender theory narrative, so the artificial consensus of “experts” is maintained by the simple mechanism of silencing (or excluding from membership in the professorial guild) any would-be dissenters.

This regime of conformity has been enforced with increasing rigidity for the past three decades. Back in the late 1980s and early ’90s, there were still university professors who were outspoken in opposition to the ideology of radical egalitarianism, but those dissenters have retired, and the growing conformity of the academic system has prevented them from being replaced by like-minded scholars. Meanwhile, the fanatical beliefs that once were shocking when expressed by elite university professors (e.g., Judith Butler at Cal-Berkeley) have trickled down and become pervasive among nearly all college-educated young people. This is why, for example, you have elementary school teachers promoting LGBTQ ideology and telling them to keep it secret from their parents.

It is almost certain that the Senate will vote to confirm Judge Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. If Joe Manchin won’t vote against her, that more or less guarantees her seat on the court. But we have learned something valuable about the beliefs of those who would rule over us.




 

The Problem With ‘Equality’

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In the mid-1970s, in an attack on [Wilmoore] Kendall, [Harry] Jaffa published an article, “Equality as a Conservative Principle,” the very title of which served to mark him as a latter-day Jacobin in the eyes of many conservatives influenced by Edmund Burke. (“Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level never equalise. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The Levellers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things,” etc. — Reflections on the Revolution in France.)
Jaffa has the obnoxious habit of denouncing as “nihilists” all who dispute his particular philosophy, which can best be described as an eclectic (or, perhaps some would say, peculiar) stew of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Abraham Lincoln. Considering that both Kendall and [his ally Frank] Meyer were close associates of William F. Buckley Jr., it is difficult to understand why their antagonist Jaffa was embraced by Buckley, but he was.
— from “Angelo Codevilla, Conor Friedersdorf and the Straussian Time-Warp,” The American Spectator, July 18, 2010

We keep having the same arguments about “equality” because so few people bother to study the arguments we’ve already had. Another factor is that many of the people involved think of themselves as being so intellectually and morally superior to the rest of us that our opposition to their enthusiasm for Equality (with a capital “E” denoting its status as a religion to some people) makes it unnecessary to rebut our arguments. We’re all just a bunch of ignorant bigots in the eyes of the High Priests of the Cult of Equality, and therefore our objections can be ignored or dismissed as expressions of hateful prejudice.

It should not be necessary for me to explain what is wrong with Equality — why a fanatical cult-like devotion to this abstract ideal is harmful and erroneous — because such eminent thinkers as Burke have already made the argument with such clarity that no honest and intelligent could fail to grasp the point, and yet here we are in 2022, dealing with David French.

Dear God, how I wish we could all resolve to ignore that fool, but someone quoted him in the Hot Air headlines, and there goes my whole morning. Whatever else I might have blogged about must be laid aside so I can administer the kind of bitch-slapping he deserves.

While I hate to keep my quoting myself, it’s helpful to illustrate how persistent the egalitarian error is when I show you that I was arguing about this more than 13 years ago in January 2009:

Are men and women equal in the fullest sense of the word? If so, then equality implies fungibility — the two things are interchangeable and one may be substituted for the other in any circumstance whatsoever. (La mort à la différence!) Therefore, it is of no consequence whether I marry a woman or a man.

The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is to-day the audacious reform, and will be tomorrow the accomplished fact.

This is why so many of those who would defend traditional marriage find themselves unable to form a coherent argument, because traditional marriage is based on the assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, and hence, unequal. Traditional marriage assumes a complementarity of the sexes that becomes absurd if you deny that “man” and “woman” define intrinsic traits, functions, roles.

Insofar as any two things are different, they are not equal. This is a fundamental principle of mathematics, and its application to human affairs seems logical enough that further explanation should be unnecessary. And yet, there goes David French:

For those who haven’t followed, a trans woman named Lia Thomas just won the women’s 500-yard freestyle championship, and the race wasn’t close. Before this year, Thomas raced as a man in both high school and college. While competing as a man, Thomas was a fine swimmer, but nowhere near the NCAA championship level.
Here’s where I am on the dispute. In the vast majority of life circumstances, I do not believe that a trans person should face discrimination because they are trans. But there are limited circumstances where biological realities mean that some distinctions are not only wise, they protect other classes of Americans from both unfairness and intrusion on their rights. . . .

Where to start? Permit me to risk the accusation of transphobia by saying that a man is a man and woman is a woman and that anyone who thinks otherwise is in the throes of “strong delusion.” For French to say that those who suffer from such a delusion should be treated as if they actually were what they think they are — i.e., that the rest of us are obligated to play along with this make-believe, or else be accused of wrongful “discrimination” — is a perfect example of how hopelessly confused French has become. He imagines himself to be a defender of the True Principles™ of conservatism, a belief every bit as delusional as the belief that Will Thomas is now a woman named “Lia.”

If you’re going to be a conservative, you have to accept the reputational damage you will suffer as a result of character assassination by liberals who need little or no actual evidence to accuse you of racism, sexism or some other prejudice. Sic semper hoc — “Now listen you queer, quit calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered,” as Bill Buckley replied to Gore Vidal. The Left’s habit of trafficking in ad-hominem smears as a substitute for argument was noted a century ago by Ludwig von Mises:

Marxism criticizes the achievements of all those who think otherwise by representing them as the venal servants of the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person.

It does not behoove a conservative to waste much time denying such smears, and it’s always a bad idea for a conservative to go out of his way to show how “not racist” (or “not sexist,” etc.) he is. This is the real root of French’s problem; he fears that actually being against whatever liberals demand would injure his reputation as a pious Christian. While I don’t want to get into a theological discussion here, French seems to think that bluntly telling liberals “no” is sinful, and thus he twists himself into knots of self-contradiction by, on the one hand, ceding every premise of liberal syllogisms (e.g., transgender people are “valid” substitutes for whatever it is they pretend to be) while trying to deny the conclusion of their arguments (e.g., Will Thomas should be an NCAA women’s swimming champion). Conservatives are generally too polite to question the bona fides of leftists — considering it rude to doubt their sincerity — but I was born and raised a “yellow dog” Democrats, so I’m under no illusions about this. Democrats really only care about one thing — winning — and they don’t consider any political tactic to be unfair, so long as the result is Democrats winning. This is why political conflict in America is so often one-sided, with the GOP trying to fight by the Marquis of Queensbury rules against Democrats who roll like the Crips vs. Bloods.

Returning from that digression, however, when I speak of egalitarians as having a religious devotion to Equality, this is scarcely an exaggeration. Consider this passage of French’s argument:

To understand my reasoning, let’s go back to the founding and guiding texts of the American republic — texts that don’t just create specific legal doctrines but embody a particular biblically-informed morality about the dignity and worth of all people.
The founding declaration can be quoted by heart: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Note that this sentence proclaims not just people have equal status (equality isn’t enough), but also possess inherent dignity, which is recognized and protected through our unalienable rights.

As with so much of what French writes, the question is, where to begin? As more eminent writers than I have explained, the lofty prose of the preamble to the Declaration had a specific authorial intent — in particular, appealing to Whig sentiments in England — that attenuate the claims of egalitarians who view it as a promise of a utopian ideal that we are obligated to pursue as a matter of federal policy. You will often find this “all men are created equal” phrase from the Declaration compounded with the phrase “a more perfect Union” from the preamble to the Constitution to create a sort of Permanent Revolutionary Mandate, by which we are compelled always to measure ourselves against some imagined ideal condition of Equality, and to pursue whatever crazy measures are necessary to achieve this “perfect Union” — immanentizing the eschaton, as Eric Voegelin would say. This is an error based upon a misreading of the Constitution. Why, after all, were the delegates representing “We the People” gathered in Philadelphia in 1787?

The faults of the Articles of Confederation had become manifest, and the “Union” of the several states was so imperfect that it was universally agreed that something had to be done to fix these problems, or else the whole thing might go flying asunder. In avowing their intent “to form a more perfect Union,” the authors of the Constitution were merely saying that they meant to make possible a greater cohesion of the different states under a common government. This is why, for example, that they specified that “regulation of interstate commerce” as a federal power, because under the Articles the different states had been slapping tariffs and other trade restrictions on their neighbors. Many of the other provisions of the Constitution, including the federal assumption of debts from the War of Independence owed by the state governments, can be viewed in this light, i.e., as seeking to bring about greater unity (i.e. “a more perfect Union”) than was the case under the Articles.

David French is worshiping in the Temple of the Cult of Equality, and thinks of this political idolatry as “biblically-informed morality,” so that those of us who fail to join along in singing his peculiar hymns to the Fourteenth Amendment are just a bunch of retrograde sinners. While I could go on fisking his argument for hours, I’ve already wasted most of the morning on this project, and it’s now past lunchtime, so I’ll let the commenters chew over the rest of it. In the bowels of Christ I beseech you, can we agree to ignore David French from now on?




 

What ‘Intellectuals’ Believe

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Elie Mystal Jr. is the son of a Haitian immigrant. His father became a politician in Suffolk County, N.Y., whose “tenure as a county lawmaker ended in 2008 after he faced charges that he lied about living in the district in 2007 and 2008, a period during which he was splitting his time between Huntington Station, which was outside the district, and Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. He was sentenced to five years of probation and was ordered to pay $84,300 in restitution.” The younger Mystal attended Harvard, where he graduated in 2000 and got a law degree in 2003.

Having been educated at an elite private university, of course, Elie Mystal is filled with hatred for the United States:

The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal said Friday on ABC’s “The View” that the United States Constitution is “trash” written by slave-owning white people.
Discussing his new book “Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution,” Mystal said, “Republicans are obviously trying to manipulate those laws, particularly the rights of minorities, women, and the LGBTQ communities, and I explain it in ways we can understand so we can fight them.”
Co-host Ana Navarro said, “I live in Florida, so I’m, like, on ground zero of where all of this is happening. I’m out of my mind about the bills banning conversations about race and ethnicity and LGBTQ, just even mentioning gender identity in primary schools…Are you arguing for throwing out the Constitution? Should the Constitution be thrown out? What do we do? Is it a living document, or is it a sacred document?”
Mystal said, “It’s certainly not sacred. Let’s start there. The Constitution is kind of trash. Again, let’s just talk as adults for a second.”
Co-host Joy Behar said, “What did you say?”
Mystal said, “It’s kind of trash. It was written by slavers and colonists and white people willing to make deals with slavers and colonists. They didn’t ask anybody who looked like me what they thought about the Constitution.”
He added, “This document was without the consent of black and brown people in this country and without the consent of women. I say if that was the starting point, the very least we can do is ignore what those slavers and colonists and misogynists thought and interpret the Constitution in a way that makes sense for our modern world.”

Note that Ana Navaro, the daughter of a wealthy Nicaraguan family, is only an American because her family was granted asylum while fleeing the Sandinistas. She repays our national generosity by trashing the country, expressing ridiculous concerns that the Florida legislature is denying public school children their opportunity to be indoctrinated with Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ propaganda. And as for Elie Mystal’s comments about the Constitution as “trash,” does this Harvard-educated intellectual not realize that he is implicitly endorsing the arguments against racial equality made by, e.g., Jefferson Davis?

“Mr. President, the propositions, both the main one contained in the bill and that contained in the amendment, I think, rest on two fundamental errors: in the first place, that our Government was instituted for eleemosynary purposes, and in the next place, that it was instituted for a mixed race. This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes, but by white men for white men. It was not founded for eleemosynary purposes, but as an agent of the States; and there is no right to take one dollar from the Treasury to appropriate it to public schools. . . .
“The errors are fundamental on which the bill rests; and these errors have been developed by the alliance which it has brought from the other side, developing, as a consequence of the very proposition, this controversy as to the rights of whites, and the equality of the negroes. I do not choose to argue with any one who thinks proper to assert the equality of the negro and the white man. The man who makes the assertion may prove to me his equality with the negro. He proves to me no more; and I accept his argument only for so much.” [Emphasis added.]
— Sen. Jefferson Davis, April 12, 1860

Asserting that our government was founded “by white men for white men” — how is this different from Elie Mystal’s argument? Does the Harvard-educated intellectual wish us to conclude that Jefferson Davis was right? He might succeed in persuading us, however inadvertently.

If the cost of achieving “equality” is to discard our Constitution as “trash,” and to degrade our Founders as unworthy of consideration — if we must ignore those slavers, as Mystal insists — then how many Americans will conclude that this is bad bargain? The consequences of this are perhaps too frightening to imagine, yet seem not to have occurred to Elie Mystal, nor to the producers of “The View” who invited him on ABC to promote his noxious views. Can anyone imagine “The View” inviting on a white guest to express equally controversial opinions? While I’m sure Jared Taylor or Peter Brimelow would accept the invitation — there’s no such thing as bad publicity — dissident whites are not given the red-carpet treatment that the liberal media extends to black dissidents.

There seems to be a belief, among a certain type of liberal, that black radicals must be allowed to spew hateful nonsense as a sort of “release valve” for whatever grievances and resentments might exist in the black community. These grievances are assumed to be inherently legitimate — the Harvard-educated son of a New York politician is so obviously oppressed, after all — whereas it is considered impossible that white people might have legitimate grievances with the current state of race relations in America. And the next time some deranged cracker goes off on a shooting rampage after posting his neo-Nazi “manifesto” on Facebook, who will be invited onto “The View” to discuss this bloody tragedy? Well, it won’t be Peter Brimelow, that’s for sure. Merely to name him is to risk the accusation of dangerous “extremism,” even though Brimelow doesn’t habitually denounce the Constitution as “trash.”

It would be dangerous for “The View” to host Brimelow, you see, because the producers would not want to be responsible for what might happen if millions of their viewers found themselves agreeing with Brimelow, yet they’ll have on someone like Elie Mystal as if his opinions are harmless. If that’s the attitude they’re going to take — that even the most extreme views ought to be given a hearing, so long as the person espousing them is black — then why don’t the producers of “The View” book as a guest Augustus Claudius Romain, Jr., a/k/a “Gazi Kodzo”?


If it’s black radicalism they want, why not give ’em the real thing? But of course, Gazi Kodzo doesn’t have a Harvard diploma, so he won’t get a shot at peddling his flavor of racial insanity to ABC daytime audiences, whereas Elie Mystal — though arguably just as deranged — is OK.

Meanwhile, on the West Coast . . .

UC Berkeley Prof. Zeus Leonardo:
Abolish Whiteness, Abolish White People

He’s employed at taxpayer expense:

Zeus Leonardo made $248,514 in total compensation. Of this total $166,933 was received as a salary, $53,159 was received as benefits and $28,422 came from other types of compensation . This information is according to University of California payrolls for the 2019 fiscal year.

Being an intellectual can be a very lucrative racket.




 

Be Careful in Richmond, Please

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Thousands of Second Amendment activists are assembling today at the Virginia capitol in Richmond to protest against proposed legislation that would infringe their right to “keep and bear arms.” Last week, activists noticed signs that the Left might be sending agents provocateurs to this event in an attempt to create some incident that might embarrass the gun-rights movement. So if you are going to this Richmond rally, stay safe, and do not allow yourself to be baited into saying or doing anything offensive or illegal. Keep your eyes open for trouble, and urge your fellow attendees to stay away from any conflict that might emerge. Because great minds think alike, Dana Loesch is offering the same advice:

Some in media and many anti-gun/gun control advocates are desperately trying to gaslight everyone into thinking that Virginia’s Second Amendment lobby day will be Charlottesville 2.0. Since 2002 the Virginia Citizens’ Defense League has peacefully gathered law-abiding Virginians in Richmond to speak to lawmakers on behalf of preserving Second Amendment rights. This year is no different — except the numbers are expected to be astronomically larger due to state Democrats’ gun control kegger.
Do not be baited. Do not be provoked.
You are at an extraordinary moment in history and the rest of us in states, counties, and cities across the country (all of us dealing with rights grabs like you, some at stages earlier than others) are watching you, praying for you, and depending on you. How you choose to use your time and impact your community will send shockwaves throughout the rest of the country. Do not be distracted from your good work by bad actors sent to incite, antagonize, and sabotage your efforts. Stay relentlessly focused.

The First Amendment specifically protects the right of citizens “peaceably to assemble” and express their grievances. Anyone attempting to disturb the peace at such an event should be carefully avoided.