Reparations, California, & The Evil of Progressive Race Hustling
The idea of reparations for long past “racist sins” will do nothing to absolve the non-progressives of our nation from their supposed sin of racism. Reparations are merely a truly evil progressive tool to gain power at whatever cost to our nation.
Introduction
We live in a world where progressives claim that anything that does not advance their raw grab for power is “racist.” It is all they have. And they claim racism exists in the legal realm as well as in the historic and cultural. Moreover (and as just one example), they make their claims wholly irrespective of objective facts. This racial war upon our nation destroys lives, distorts all aspects of society (see here for one example), and gives rise to the worst racial violence.
In the modern progressive retelling of history, blacks and progressives are the heroes, entitled to be protected from any criticism, while all others are evil and morally culpable for the permanent sin of racism. In this retelling of history, the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the Civil Rights movement are of no note. In this incredibly dark and destructive progressive fantasy, all of non-progressive America is today as hopelessly and unforgivably racist as were the inhabitants of Selma, Alabama, circa 1952.
Reparations
Perhaps the biggest weapon exercised by progressive race hustlers’ is the claim that reparations are owed to certain blacks for historic racism. Most often, this is stated as the moral necessity of paying blacks for the sin of slavery and the amorphous concept of the legacy of slavery (something which economist Thomas Sowell has called a baseless “cliche.”) These race hustlers go so far as to suggest that reparations — and only reparations — will be an adequate “atonement “slavery” and its “legacy.” Reparations have long been the Holy Grail for race hustlers.
In 2020, the California legislature established a 9-member Reparations Task Force. That California’s pretty boy governor, Gavin Newsom, largely appointed the Task Force members, with the force ending up consisting entirely of progressive blacks. Not having been a slave state, California had to look hard to find the “legacy of slavery.” It recently issued its findings, concluding that all Californians living today are guilty of the sins of a small number of Californians in the distant past. To atone, today’s Californians must transfer astronomical sums to some of the state’s black citizens:
A California task force studying the long-term effects of slavery and systemic racism on black residents in the state has estimated a whopping $569 billion in reparations is owed to the descendants of enslaved people [solely in California], according to a report.
The nine-member panel concluded that black Californians whose ancestors were in the US in the 19th century are due $223,200 each due to housing discrimination practices utilized from 1933 to 1977, the New York Times reported. . . .
. . . “We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is one of the nine members, told the Times.
The task force hopes to shrink the wealth gap between white and black Californians. . . .
There are several things to note here.
The “wrongs” for which the Task Force is offering absolution are a mere start. Every modern fantasy of racism can form the basis of future claims that will need to be satisfied before the race hustlers will even consider granting absolution. “The task force has identified four other areas that might warrant reparations in the future — mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of businesses and health care.”
Approving the reparations demanded would establish both the moral culpability and the legal liability of every American for historical acts they did not commit. It is morally repugnant and legally unconstitutional. To begin with, this would be a type of “corruption of blood” punishment that Art. III § 3 explicitly makes unconstitutional. Additionally, the Supreme Court held that race-based “remedies” cannot indefinitely “reach into the past”:
The Supreme Court has said that race-based remedies are allowed only when they target the current effects of the government’s own widespread discrimination in the relatively recent past. In Richmond v. J.A. Croson, the high court ruled that the government cannot provide race-based “remedies that are ageless in their reach into the past.”
In Hammon v. Barry, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an affirmative-action plan for Black people in which the discrimination occurred 18 years earlier. Similarly, in Brunet v. City of Columbus, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals stated that “conduct that occurred at least 14 years before” an affirmative-action consent decree was “too remote to support a compelling governmental interest to justify the affirmative action plan” before it.
Moreover, race-based remedies can be used to remedy only the government’s discrimination, not “societal discrimination,” such as discrimination by private landlords or housing providers. In rulings such as Coral Construction Co. v. King County (1991), the federal appeals court in California has made clear that the government can’t impose racial preferences, unless it is necessary to remedy recent widespread discrimination. . . .
There is much more from Hans Bader at the link.
The call for reparations is not really about reparations. There are a lot of cynical, evil, and power-hungry people, the odious Gavin Newsome not being the least of them, who know that there is no way forward for “reparations” under existing constitutional law, and yet they are pushing this anyway. These dangerous progressive ideologues are doing all that they can to advance a sense of victimization and entitlement among blacks while painting the rest of non-progressive America as racist. Given the cost of race hustling to all aspects of our society, it is truly evil.
Marxism, Progressivism, and Reparations in Context
Our modern progressive race hustlers are the lineal descendants of Karl Marx. They have an ultimate goal — to destroy America’s constitutional and Judao-Christian foundations, and then to rebuild the nation with progressives exercising permanent and unrestricted power. It is the exact same goal Marx laid out for communism and the world in his magnum opus, The Communist Manifesto, first published in 1848.
It is worth noting that Marx did not invent socialism. Still, he greatly strengthened its philosophical underpinnings and described and agitated for communism that was to be socialism’s final stage.
Steeped in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and born in the crucible of the French Revolution, socialism was meant to wholly rework society. Socialist philosophers, most notably Karl Marx, rejected class and religion as the bases for societal structure and advocated remaking society under the watchful eye of a central government that would redistribute the nation’s wealth and mandate social equality. At the center of the socialist revolution was the Marxian belief that all events could and should be analyzed in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed, the victim classes and the victimizing class – a simplistic and distorting theme that makes up such a large part of our political discourse today. It creates, in its myopic view, a world of demons and perpetual victims. As Marx wrote in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Inherent in that proposition is a rejection of Western values, history and norms and, in its stead, an embrace of militant secularism, moral relativism, [post-modernism,] and, multiculturalism.
While there is no difference in the goals of Europe’s 19th-century communists and America’s 21st-century progressives, there is an important distinction between the two. Marx saw everything through the lens of socio-economic class conflict, something that transcended race or religion. He envisioned a utopian ending with a single, united class of economically equal workers.
Our 21st-century progressives, having failed to spark a class war in America’s 19th and 20th centuries, have turned to race as a substitute. They have been exploiting race and using it as their primary weapon to undermine our Constitution and the foundations of our nation since the 1960s:
Sometime about 1968, [progressives] . . . hijacked the civil rights movement and made it, ostensibly, [their] raison d’etre . . .
The far left fundamentally altered the nature of the Civil Rights movement when they claimed it as their own. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement’s goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. The far left has been the driver of reverse racism and sexism for the past half century. . . .
The far left did not merely hijack the civil rights movement, they also wrote over a century of American history, turning it on its head . . .
As utterly evil as communism turned out to be in practice, with over a hundred million murdered by police states dedicated to simply preserving state power, how much worse will a police state be in a progressive utopia where there is an entire class of race sinners who must be punished for their crimes? The only possible endpoints for the progressive racial hustling in America are balkanization and civil war, if not outright mass slaughter. It is pure evil. And that is left in horrific reality when one considers that this nation’s fully realized vision is a peaceful melting pot in which all of “God’s children” are “judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”
