The Racism of the Progressive-Democratic Party

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It’s demonstrated once again, and disgustingly so, by a law “professor” at the University of Michigan, Barb McQuade, with this post of hers:

By forcing a “colorblind” Constitution, Roberts usurps the proper role of Congress. Congress may limit rights if law is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest, such as promoting diversity or reducing disparate impact discrimination.

Never mind that—as McQuade must surely know—there is nothing in our Constitution that mentions promoting diversity or reducing disparate impact discrimination. There is, on the other hand, the first Article of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, which explicitly bars preferential treatment under any guise. The salient clause mandates equal protection of our laws—of which our Constitution is the supreme Law of our nation. There are exactly zero caveats or exceptions in that clause.

Keep in mind, instead, that McQuade is a member of the erstwhile Democratic Party, now Progressive-Democratic Party

  • that forced a bloody civil war over States’ “rights” to keep slaves
  • that after losing that, created the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate and murder blacks and their white supporters
  • that enacted generations of Jim Crow laws aimed at functionally disenfranchising blacks
  • whose cultural and Party icon, Woodrow Wilson, resegregated the Federal government after it had been integrated in the post bellum decades—blacks should be grateful for the protection of segregation, he held
  • whose next hero, Franklin Roosevelt, enacted national-level minimum wage laws explicitly to keep blacks from migrating north to compete (successfully, as it was turning out) against white laborers on the wages they were willing to accept and who refused to integrate our armed forces
  • that emphasized Party bigotry by expanding it to include sexism with its ongoing zealous push for identity politics
  • that explicitly still(!) holds blacks to be intrinsically inferior by classing them as permanently oppressed and unable to compete at all without special government treatment.

McQuade is far from alone in her racist bigotry, and (tertially) it’s a sad commentary on the degradation of what was once a strong, high quality law school that she’s employed there.

H/T ralflongwalker

It’s Broader than That

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Dominic Green, in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Free Expression, wrote of the German government’s attempt to censor—to bar from public viewing—a movie that was, by most accounts, badly done schlock (Green’s term). The rationale was that the movie depicted unrepentant and graphic violence by German vigilantes against Germany’s “immigrants,” the illegal aliens present in that nation.

German regulators’ problem with Citizen Vigilante wasn’t its depiction of unspeakable acts, but their unmentionable perpetrators. For years, European governments did their best to deny that mass immigration, notably from majority-Muslim societies, correlated to documented rises in the number of sexual crimes, especially gang rape.

Green closed his piece with this:

We like to think of the arts as our conscience, pushing social problems to our attention. If Europeans must rely on cinéastes of Mr Boll’s caliber to depict Europe’s current problems, it’s because no one else wants to admit their nature and extent.
Mr Boll has illuminated the crisis of political legitimacy and social order that is rapidly unraveling Europe’s peace. His film was censored to keep the peace. That shows the severity of the continent’s crisis, and the fragility of Europe’s peace.

It’s broader in scope than that, though. Government censorship, of nearly anything in any milieu, is a clear and dispositive sign of the intellectual bankruptcy, arrogance of Knowing Better, of cowardice of the politicians and bureaucrats who inflict it. Even the (legitimate) censor of slander is after the fact, not preemptive.

If the citizenry cannot speak freely, they cannot be free. It’s on those citizens in their aggregate—We the People as we put it in the opening phrase of our Constitution—not just individual makers of bad movies or one-off rich idealists, to change out those politicians who would limit our speech.

Iran, the Strait, and Nuclear Weapons

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In Michael Gordon’s piece on The Battle for Hormuz, he wrote that

A stable peace appears elusive, some former officials say, as each side is calculating that it can win the long game in a test of wills….

A stable peace with terrorists is an oxymoron, and it’s time to put down that pipe dream. Green then closed his piece with this:

Former military officials say the US can weaken the regime if it is persistent but warn there is a long road ahead.
“The US will need to identify and pursue a longer term strategy that addresses Iran’s focus on controlling the Strait of Hormuz, threatening its neighbors with missiles and drones, and the nuclear weapons program,” said Joseph Votel, the retired Army general who led Central Command from 2016 to 2019. “This is going to be a long-term effort.”

The leaders of the Iranian government, the civilians in Tehran and the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, will never agree to limits on their nuclear weapons program or to giving up their aspiration to control the Strait of Hormuz. That doesn’t mean we should quit the struggle.

In fact, we can shorten it well within Votel’s implied time frame with a change in emphasis and a firmer drive to achieve the fight’s primary aim, the end of Iran’s nuclear weapons acquisition capability. Rather than seeking to “influence” or “coerce” those leadership teams, or “weaken” them into agreeing to a deal, it’s time to accelerate and broaden—escalate, if you will—the attacks on Iran, focusing on three target sets in all their breadth and (occasionally literal) depth: destroy Iran’s ability to fight at all by destroying not just some weapon sites and caches, but the means of producing replacements; destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities wherever they are along with their caches of purified uranium, including deepening the burial of those caches already hit; and killing Iran’s leaders, especially those running the IRGC. The latter has dispersed its command and control facilities and personnel, so that will be especially…tedious. Israel, though, has a demonstrated facility at this sort of activity; it would be good if we could enlist that nation’s aid here.

Only by completely disarming Iran and killing the terrorists reigning over it can there be a lasting, stable peace and one that includes a restoration of the Strait, and of the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, to their status as international waters freely usable by commercial shipping.

Finally

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President Donald Trump (R) has had done with trying to negotiate with Iran’s government. Finally. For now.

I don’t want to negotiate now. I said, “Let’s not negotiate. Three days ago, we had a deal.

He’s finally figured out, maybe, that it’s not possible to negotiate with terrorists.

In many diplomatic respects, Trump is as naïve as Jimmy Carter was.

Chatrie v United States and Follow-on

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The Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie that police gatherings of Google location histories constituted a search and so must be subject to 4th Amendment strictures. From that, we get parents pushing back against K-12 school districts conducting surveillance of students’ parents, explicitly to gather [a]ccess license plate data and develop pattern of life information.

One of those tracking packages, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, explicitly brags about the software’s ability to collect and provide to school managers residency verification, address validation, license plate verification, all with a view to [u]nderstand who owns and lives at the address provided and other related locations and to develop pattern of life information. The purveyors of this PRC-esque surveillance package also brag that school managers can [e]asily connect information about people, businesses, assets, affiliations, and other vital content.

All of that without the parents’ prior knowledge or permission and without any court sanction of the surveillance.

That such invasions of average Americans’ privacy is being done by school system managers is one more reason they need their reins jerked up short.