Category Archives: culture

Citizenship and Birth

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President Donald Trump (R) has issued his Executive Order (see below a few posts to see a related one) that seeks to apply an alternative interpretation to the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause that eliminates birthright citizenship. His EO can be read here, and the currently implementing law he references in his EO can be read here. His argument centers on the subject to the jurisdiction thereof phrase in the clause.

This is the first clause of the 14th Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The order strongly implies, IAW “plain language” that folks are citizens of the nation first and citizens of the State in which they reside second. Further, that citizen of the State aspect follows them from State to State as they declare (and take some steps to demonstrate) their residency in the subsequent State(s). That, in turn, strongly suggests that a person’s State citizenship exists only as derivative of their national citizenship.

The law may give this EO some legs, even though the “subject to jurisdiction” part has been tried before.

Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself

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Somebody said that a while ago; it’s still true today.

The milieu this time, though, concerns drones and the People’s Republic of China, and the headline lays out the matter:

Drone Makers Looking to Steer Clear of China Fear Beijing’s Wrath

And this, to put the gooseflesh on the skin:

For US companies, dependence on China has become untenable, particularly as Beijing shows it is willing to cut off their access to essential supplies.
In Taiwan, that spells opportunity. ….
However, recent examples of Beijing punishing companies for their ties to Taiwan have made US businesses cautious in their efforts to avoid China in the production of drones, an industry where commercial ambitions and national security intersect.

“Cautious” is it? This is just one more shameful example of the cowardice of American business managers.

The way to avoid PRC wrath and repercussions over no longer sourcing essential supplies from the PRC and sourcing them from the Republic of China is to stop sourcing from the PRC and source them from the RoC. And from anywhere else.

When the goodies no longer come from the PRC, the PRC can no longer threaten their cutoff. When all the goodies, for everything else besides drones, no longer come from the PRC, the PRC can no longer use any cutoff for leverage or retaliation, or any other purpose. Don’t overthink things. Don’t artificially complexify things. Just do it.

Even managers of American companies can understand that.

Certainly, the transition will be short-term expensive, but in the mid- and long-term things get so much cheaper, so much more stable, and so much less threatening that the time to incur that expense is today.

Lose the fear.

Why Some Can’t Have Nice Things

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A canonical example of this is Progressive-Democrat Party-run Chicago and Illinois:

City taxpayers spent $262 million from August 2022 through last month to care for migrants, records show, in addition to $368 million in state and federal grants.

Assuming a naïve estimate of 50% of those grants being from Springfield, that’s nearly half a billion dollars that could have gone—should have gone—toward dealing with Chicago’s homeless—more than 76,000 as of a month ago—supporting voucher and charter schools to improve the abusively undereducated children’s opportunities, (re)creating a market economy so the unemployed and underemployed could get jobs and off the city’s and State’s welfare rolls. That last, too, would release yet more funds for dealing with those homeless, children, and jobs.

All of that is a set of failure conditions that Chicago’s Progressive-Democrat managers are determined to maintain.

An effort to water down Chicago’s sanctuary ordinance failed Wednesday [15 January 2025], 39-11, in a city council vote. Mayor Brandon Johnson [D], a progressive critical of Trump, opposed a proposal that would have allowed police to work with federal agencies on deportation cases for those accused or convicted of gang activity, drug crimes, sex trafficking, or sex crimes with minors.

These wonders would rather have gangs, drugs, and sex criminals roaming the city’s neighborhoods than take care of their own.

This sort of progressive abusiveness is why so many American citizens can’t have nice things.

If They Were Serious

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Callum Borchers, a self-identified DEI maven, ended his Wall Street Journal article with this bit:

To restore confidence in hiring fairness, companies should make clear that business goals come first and diversity is part of a strategy to recruit top talent, she [Ruth Villalonga, who advises companies on diversity messaging as senior vice president at Burson] says.

If these wonders were serious about diversity improving their bottom lines, though, and not just engaged in cynically rephrasing their DEI sewage to better message it, they would take concrete steps in that direction.

Those concrete steps would begin with the Critical Item of no longer lying to their prospective hires and those passed over for promotion. Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, as paraphrased by Borchers:

When a woman is promoted and a man was in the running, HR will often wink and say, “Maybe next time, guy.” Even when the woman is promoted because she’s better-qualified, it’s a way for the manager to get out of having a difficult conversation.

Here’s a carefully anonymous executive recruiter, whose level of integrity is illustrated by his cowering behind that anonymity:

[P]roviding honest feedback to unsuccessful job candidates is awkward and sometimes adversarial, so it is tempting to fudge the reason for rejection.
He offered a scenario: “How do you tell someone they had body odor or were weird? ‘Sorry, bud, DEI strikes again!'”

The answer to Anonymous One’s scenario is as straightforward as telling that person he has body odor, or is weird by the company’s standard. The truth may well be uncomfortable and awkward, but avoiding that in favor of lying both does a gross disservice to the one being rejected, denying him his opportunity understand where to improve, and it’s plain cowardly and dishonest. Who wants to work for a liar or a coward?

Those concrete steps would continue with another Critical Item: working from the ground up to help toddlers and pre-schoolers, and their parents, have actually equal opportunities at quality education so those children could develop their skills, their talents, their interests as they grow up and progress through K-12 and then trade school/community college or college and university.

Employers’ concrete steps would further include the Critical Item of pushing colleges and universities to eliminate DEI-related positions in school management and push STEM subjects in their school curricula, withholding recruiting efforts on their campuses and ignoring resumes with those schools’ degrees on them until they do.

Diversity—true, honestly built diversity—would flow out of that.

Progressive-Democratic Party and Identity Politics

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James Freeman had an interesting op-ed on this subject. At the end of his piece, he quoted Michael Baharaeen, who blogs at the Liberal Patriot [emphasis in the quote]:

One such risk [political…of focusing on identity politics] is coming to believe that the shared characteristic that binds a group of people together is the most important factor informing that group’s voting habits… conceiving of any group in monolithic terms risks missing meaningful differences within it. Even terms like “Latino” have limited utility, as they lump the very different life experiences of people with ancestry in, say, Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia into one broad category….

Indeed. It might be more useful, instead, to focus on the differing positions, perspectives, ideas themselves without any regard for who, or which group, has them. Maybe Party would be better served, be more attuned to what makes us all Americans, to treat us all as the individual Americans that we are, rather than as this or that collected subset of us and then pretend to care about each group.