A task force examining reparations for Black residents in California released its final report Thursday with more than 115 recommendations for how the state should compensate those harmed by slavery and “historical atrocities.”
Recommendations in the landmark report, comprised of more than 1,000 pages, include a formal apology on behalf of California to descendants of people enslaved in the United States and recommendations for reforms linked to health care, housing, education and criminal justice, among other areas.
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The task force hired a panel of experts, including economists, to calculate what Black Californians have endured. Through their formula, they determined that an eligible person could be owed up to an estimated $1.2 million. [emphasis added]
A Racist Collectivist Scam
The idea of slave reparations is absurd enough on its own. Taxing one group of people based on their race, to pay off another group of people based on their race, to compensate one group for money some of their ancestors weren’t legally owed, using the money of millions whose ancestors (such as mine) were still illiterate peasants and fishermen in Europe at the time … that isn’t justice. It’s racial collectivism of the kind my father helped General Patton to stomp out in 1945 Germany.
It’s just a political boondoggle, a means of buying votes because you think it’s easier than faking them. Why not reparations for all the immigrants who built the railroads in America, who were paid less per hour than today’s legal minimum wage, under conditions that violate every OSHA regulation now in place? Why not force the German government to compensate Italy for the barbarian invasions that toppled Rome? How about Saudi Arabia compensating all the Christians of the Middle East for the savage Islamic conquests? Can I dun King Charles III for my mother’s family’s sufferings during the Irish Potato Famine?
No, They’re Not Sincere
Reparations are stupid and fake, and not one person sincerely believes they offer justice. Remember that: you’re not dealing with earnest, misguided people, but with hucksters, grifters, and demagogues — especially the white leftist politicians who are promoting this scam. Plus a tiny sprinkling of upwardly mobile Christians who think that smearing themselves with White Guilt will help them pass for posh Mainline Protestants.
Reparations would even be wrong if we could fund them by taxing citizens who are actually descended from slaveowners, and direct that cash exclusively to those descended from the slaves who actually worked for their families. Such a scheme is impossible, and it’s not what any leftist is actually proposing. But it wouldn’t be as blatantly absurd as “Take money from all the white people and use it to buy black votes for white Democrats who want to abort more black kids.”
Think It Can’t Get Dumber? Hold California’s Beer
Leave it to the State of California, of course, to build this house of cards into a Tower of Babel. That state never legalized slavery. While discrimination existed, California didn’t have anything like the South’s appalling Jim Crow laws. It didn’t stop blacks from voting — which is why it was never targeted by the Voting Rights Act.
So I’m trying to figure out what exactly the State of California (as opposed to say, South Carolina, which at least was the first to secede from the Union) is compensating black citizens for? Maybe for just the staggering, soul-crushing, monstrous inequality imposed on non-white people in the U.S., as evidenced by the millions of non-white people trying to move here, legally or illegally? If so that would be strange, since California Democrats seem keen to import as many victims as possible into the U.S. to suffer such treatment.
Nah, that’s too absurd. Nobody could really think that. I clutch in the dark for clues, trying to find what exactly California taxpayers wish to make up for. I can only take guidance from the leader of this strange and irrational place, its Governor Gavin Newsom. Maybe his words and actions can make sense of this.
Laphonza Jumps the Shark
Newsom just chose to replace the existentially challenged Senator Diane Feinstein with Laphonza Butler, a Maryland resident, and longtime leader of Emily’s List — the most powerful pro-abortion lobby in America.
And blammo: It all falls into place. One of the first states to legalize abortion, which has disproportionately killed black babies at a higher rate than white babies everywhere it’s legal, California is admitting that it did its best to abort every black child in the state. But it failed. And it’s sorry. So it’s offering reparations to those victims who somehow got born anyway.
Californians Do Merit Pity
Now I’m sympathetic at first to the idea that getting born as a member of any race in California is a kind of inherited curse. Certainly, as Christians we ought to be sympathetic to people who through no fault of their own emerged on that blighted soil — ruled as it has been for decades by maniacs, including close allies of the Marxist cult leader Jim Jones, such as Willie Brown (the mentor of our Vice President Kamala Harris, who used to employ Laphonza Butler as a political strategist).
We ought to permit immigration to the United States by political refugees from that failed state — provided they don’t bring with them the poisonous ideology of their regime. Perhaps asylum seekers from California should have to take some special citizenship test, and swear an oath. I leave such details to the policy wonks.
The Anti-Human Party
But California Democrats are no different from those who run their national party. The left as a whole today regards human life itself as a kind of curse, a blight on the planet and a miserable, wretched condition. The environmental movement no longer even bothers to talk about clean air, clean water, or leaving behind a livable planet for our grandchildren. Instead, it urges us not to have any children at all.
The “Climate” is now a fetish all its own, with man’s existence at best a footnote, but more commonly a problem.
It’s a problem which Emily’s List, and California, and the Democrats, are doing their best to solve. If they can’t save all of us from this vale of tears by snuffing us out in the womb, they can at least castrate and sterilize as many schoolchildren via “transgender” therapy as possible. Those who reach adulthood still in danger of reproducing will face crushing housing prices, crippling energy shortages, a stagnant economy and a culture that screams via every medium: “Curse God and die!”
Maybe that will do that trick. For anyone else, who somehow gets born anyway, anywhere in the country: Send California a bill.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”
