Friday, August 13, 2021



The ACLU Claims the Second Amendment Is Racist

The ACLU fired shots on Twitter last month, claiming that the Second Amendment is “racist” alongside an article and podcast episode that posed the question “Do Black People Have the Right to Bear Arms?”

The article, written by Ines Santos, claimed that gun violence in America — which she labeled an “epidemic” caused by widespread “vigilante” firearm ownership — negatively impacts black people because of racially discriminatory policing. “What is absent in the intense debates on gun rights in America is the intrinsic anti-blackness of the unequal enforcement of gun laws,” she wrote.

Santos went on to say that racism determined the Second Amendment’s inclusion in the Bill of Rights.

These are hefty charges worth examining. Let’s break down the claims made here and review the history.

The Second Amendment has indeed been selectively upheld throughout our nation’s history, with gun control frequently being used to block black Americans from accessing their right to self-defense. Additionally, enforcement of gun control laws has been discriminatory, and the rhetoric around guns has often framed black people as a threat.

But to leave the narrative there ignores a rich history of black people using guns to free themselves from oppression. Let’s review.

Before the Civil War ended, black people were prohibited from owning guns under the “Slave Codes” and “Black Codes.” For example, under the 1806 Louisiana Black Code, Chapter 33, Section 19 statute, slaves were banned from using firearms or any other “offensive weapons.”

Under the 1819 Acts of South Carolina, slaves without the company of white people or a slave master’s written permission were prohibited from using or carrying firearms “unless they were hunting or guarding the master’s plantation.”

These laws were put into place to hinder black people from using arms to rise up and break the shackles of slavery. But throughout the history of American chattel slavery, black heroes did use guns to free themselves and others. The most notable example of this was Harriet Tubman, who carried a pistol on her missions to free slaves as well as a sharp-shooting rifle during the Civil War. Mary Fields (better known as Stagecoach Mary) was a former slave and one of the first two black women to serve as a “star route” mail carrier. She famously used two guns to defend herself and the mail from thieves along her route.

The Freedmen’s Bureau Bill of 1865, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Civil Rights Act of 1870, and the Fourteenth Amendment — ratified in 1868 — knocked down the overtly racist Slave Codes and should have made the Second Amendment applicable to all citizens. However, in the 1870s, racists in power turned to the use of “facially neutral laws” to continue blocking black people from gun ownership. These laws did not explicitly state that black people were the target, but the end result was the same.

How did they achieve this? They used things like police-issued licenses, permit laws, and business and transaction taxes on guns that disproportionately affected black people, thus successfully disarming them. One of the first major examples of these laws was the 1870 Tennessee “An Act to Preserve the Peace and Prevent Homicide,” which banned the sale of all handguns except the expensive “Army and Navy model handgun” which was more affordable to white people.

In the early 1900s, racially charged acts of mass atrocity such as the Tulsa Race Massacre and the Atlanta Massacre caused leaders in the black community to organize for self-defense, continuing the rich and powerful history of black people arming themselves to rise up against their oppressors.

In subsequent decades, as cracks began to show and eventually break Jim Crow in the South, the armed resistance of black Americans grew more organized.

The Deacons for Defense and Justice were formed in 1965 to fight against white supremacist terrorism in Louisiana and Mississippi with .38 special revolvers. When Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the “Meredith March Against Fear” for black voter registration in Mississippi, they provided the security. Their presence in the deep South also deterred the Ku Klux Klan from attacking the black community in many instances.

This exercise of the black community’s Second Amendment rights led to and helped ensure the success of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

But the history doesn’t stop there. In response to racially discriminatory policing in California, the Black Panthers began armed patrolling in black neighborhoods to “copwatch” in the late 1960s. In 1967, the Mulford Act, named after Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford, was signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan to stop the Panthers from armed protesting. The bill was supported by both parties in the state House, as well as the NRA, according to History.com. The policy effectively banned open carry in California, and it stemmed directly from the Black Panthers embracing their Second Amendment rights.

By no means was this the end of discriminatory gun control laws or enforcement in our country.

To date, black Americans are more likely than any other group to suffer the adverse impacts of gun control laws. Urban cities with concentrated black populations have the strictest gun laws, and black people are more likely to be convicted of and subjected to a firearms offense carrying a mandatory minimum. In addition, stop-and-frisk, infamous for its role in the police harassment of black Americans, was employed to enforce gun control measures.

To conclude, the ACLU is correct in its allegations that gun control has at times been racially written and enforced. But abundant historical evidence shows that Second Amendment rights, when firmly asserted, have been crucial to black Americans in their fight against oppression and white supremacy.

Finding: TRUE

It is clear that gun control has been used in systemically racist ways, and that gun rights have often only been upheld for some groups of people. But does that mean the Second Amendment is inherently racist?

Good principles have often been defended for the wrong reasons in our society. Many accuse the left of defending the right to free movement out of a desire to increase their voting base, for one example. If true, does that mean the principle of free movement is wrong? Certainly not. Such is the case with the Second Amendment. The principle is good, even if the arguments in its favor have not always been without ulterior motives.

It is correct that our Founders did not craft the Bill of Rights for all people, notably excluding women and ethnic minorities from its legal protections of our natural rights. Various groups of people, including black people, Native Americans, and even white populations like the Irish, have all been subjected to violations of their rights at times throughout our history due to this hypocrisy.

But to allege that the right to self-defense, or the right to fight back against oppression—which are the natural rights the Second Amendment is meant to restrain government from infringing upon—are inherently racist is detached from history and reality.

In fact, it is the removal of this right that has led to systemic oppression. As discussed, the implementation of gun control targeted and negatively impacted black communities throughout our past, preventing them from rising up to defend their other natural rights.

It is when we have seen the black community organize and peacefully take up arms in self-defense that we have seen the greatest increase in civil rights. The Second Amendment is a weapon against oppression, not a tool of it.

Finding: FALSE

Freedom Is Indivisible

Historically, the ACLU has been one of the most important and consistent champions of free speech in our country, although that support has unfortunately waned in recent years.

For their prior work, they deserve praise. Were it not for their advocacy, specifically in the courts, it is likely we would have seen a much greater erosion of free speech over the past several decades.

But while they have been a tremendous champion of one civil liberty, they have simultaneously failed to recognize and uphold another that ensures its survival. In practice, freedom of speech and the freedom to bear arms are just different facets of the same human freedom.

The economist Ludwig von Mises once said, “Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.”

Without the freedom to bear arms, individuals are helpless against government infringements on their freedom of speech or any other facet of their freedoms. Liberties quickly erode when the people have no means by which to defend them.

This is why we’ve seen the government work so hard to block those they view as a threat from fully accessing their fundamental rights. And it’s why we’ve seen such tremendous gains for civil rights when oppressed communities have finally accessed it

**************************************

Biden’s Unprecedented Attack on the Constitution

Joe Biden certainly isn’t the first president to violate his oath of office, but he might be the first in memory to openly brag about doing it.

As Biden announced a new “eviction moratorium,” he informed Americans that the “bulk of constitutional scholars” would say the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eviction moratorium is “not likely to pass constitutional muster.”

Not likely? It already failed.

In June, Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed with the majority Supreme Court that the CDC “exceeded its existing statutory authority,” even though he allowed the order to sunset. The president admitted as much, noting that the new moratorium is meant to give the administration time to act on “rental assistance” before the court again shuts it down. What stops Biden from stalling and trying a third time? A 10th time?

Biden admitted to the media that he would be circumventing the courts, the law, and his oath of office, in which he promised, to the best of his ability, to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” not to infringe on the property rights of Americans to placate crackpot socialists in his party.

When asked today about the discrepancy, White House press secretary Jen Psaki promised, “This is also going to be a temporary solution.” Because, as Article 2, Section 5, apparently states, the executive can make laws irrespective of Supreme Court rulings, as long as he also crosses his heart and promises it’s only going to be temporary.

When pushed further on the matter, Psaki could not recall the moment when Biden was convinced there was solid legal ground to move forward. Probably because no such moment exists.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was far more honest, noting that this was “a huge victory for the power of direct action and not taking no for an answer.”

Not taking no for an answer—in this case, not taking no for an answer from the Supreme Court—is lawlessness. The process—the sacred norms that Democrats pretended to care about over the past five years—is irrelevant to engaging in “direct action” within government. It’s been clear from their efforts to delegitimize the Supreme Court to their effort to undermine faith in federalism and countermajoritarian institutions.

None of this is to even speak of the tremendous abuse of power inherent in the underlying eviction moratorium itself. Biden’s new 19-page order includes draconian penalties, fines, and potential jail time for violating a concocted “law.” Forget that it’s terrible public policy; it is also, as I noted when it was first issued by the Trump administration, state-sanctioned theft. At best, such an “emergency” infringement should be left to state and local municipalities.

Does anyone really believe that the Founders would approve of the CDC—an incompetent agency tasked with dealing with infectious diseases—retroactively ripping up millions of legal contracts and unilaterally suspending the property rights of 90% of landlords? If it can do that, what can’t it do?

Some have argued that former President Donald Trump’s reappropriation of funding for a southern wall or former President Barack Obama’s power grab on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program paved the way for this kind of executive abuse. But neither the wall nor DACA policies had yet been adjudicated by higher courts when they were put into play.

Obama had, on numerous occasions, admitted that he had no constitutional authority to enact amnesty for millions of Americans by fiat. In 2010, he said, “I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself.” The next year, he again acknowledged that, as president, he was not empowered to “just bypass Congress and change the law myself. … That’s not how a democracy works.”

Obama, of course, didn’t believe in any such limitations, and he went ahead with DACA anyway. Yet not even he enacted the executive action after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. That is unique.

You can imagine what the future looks like once we’ve normalized the idea that presidents can regurgitate unconstitutional executive actions as long as the polling is positive.

One of the often repeated—and legitimate—concerns regarding Trump was that he would simply ignore the will of the court. That is exactly what Biden is doing right now. Writers at major outlets such as The Washington Post and CNN are already celebrating this lawbreaking as a moral good.

Democrats will dutifully defend the president, talk about the purported benefits of the moratorium, and ignore the unconstitutional manner in which it is implemented.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an alleged leader of the legislative branch of the American government, pressured Biden to ignore Congress and the courts. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer celebrated the decision. And it is highly unlikely that a single Democrat will stand up and speak up for the rule of law.

*******************************************

Bias by Omission: 1619 Project Ignores Democratic Party’s History of Racism

Democrats who advanced a bill in June to remove statues of white supremacists from the U.S. Capitol ignored a central fact about those figures: All of them had been icons of their party, from Andrew Jackson’s adamantly pro-slavery vice president, John C. Calhoun, to North Carolina Gov. Charles B. Aycock, an architect of the white supremacist campaign of 1898 that ushered in the era of Jim Crow.

At a time when governments, sports teams, schools, and other bastions of American society are rushing to expunge legacies of slavery or racism, this was another instance of the Democratic Party’s failure to acknowledge that it did more than any other institution in American life to preserve the “peculiar institution”—and later enforce Jim Crow-style apartheid in the Old South.

“I think it’s absolutely fair to criticize the history of the Democrat Party when we’re literally changing the names of birds because they’re named after racists,” said Jarrett Stepman, author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” referring to a new racism-cleansing push in, yes, ornithology. (Stepman is also a columnist for The Daily Signal.)

Democrats’ circumspection in the face of this trend is especially noteworthy because it comes at a time when they are criticizing Republican legislation to block the teaching of critical race theory on the grounds that the GOP wants to whitewash American history.

But one of the most noteworthy efforts to reframe American history in terms of race, The New York Times’ 1619 Project, virtually ignores the Democrat Party’s role in advancing and sustaining racism in the United States.

Named after the year slaves from Africa were first brought to North America, the curated collection of essays on race in America presents even the most complex modern issues—from obesity and traffic jams to capitalism itself—as being primarily a consequence of America’s history of slavery and racial injustice.

The 1619 Project has been widely adopted as a historical framework on the left, despite criticism from eminent historians, being repudiated by the 1619 Project’s own fact-checkers, and mangling basic facts.

Double Standard, Hidden Agenda
Yet, in the essay texts, the Democratic Party is named only three times, in passing. The Republican Party, the political entity formed to fight slavery, also receives little mention. But when the GOP is mentioned, it is excoriated as the 21st-century heir to 19th-century racist ideology.

For critics of the 1619 Project, the virtual omission of any discussion of the Democratic Party is not only galling, but revealing.

In their view, the goal of the 1619 Project is neither historical, nor educational—it’s thoroughly political.

“[1619 Project editor] Nikole Hannah-Jones has been explicit about saying that the point of her essay and the point of the 1619 Project more broadly is to get a reparations bill passed. So, that’s a partisan objective,” says Lucas Morel, a professor at Washington and Lee University who has authored books on Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Ellison.

Hannah-Jones did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Jake Silverstein, the editor of the Times’ Sunday magazine, where the essays originally appeared.

Peter Wood, head of the National Association of Scholars and author of “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project,” agrees that politics is a likely explanation for the 1619 Project’s significant analytical failing.

“If you’re going to be leveraging this project in order to persuade Congress to pass legislation that would entail spending many billions of dollars giving money to the descendants of former slaves, then you need to court favor with the political party that is most likely to advance that agenda,” he says.

“At least from Nikole Hannah-Jones’ perspective, I would think that the careful avoidance of casting shade on the Democratic Party fits with her longer-term agenda of extracting wealth from the American people and transferring it to a subset of American people who can prove they are descendants from slaves.”

Democratic Party’s ‘Problematic’ History
Historians also note that applying the 1619 Project’s standards for evaluating historical racism could prove especially awkward for Democrats.

“I think the history of the Democratic Party is even more problematic than anyone suggests, and the time period of its ‘criminality’ is very long indeed,” says historian Jay Cost, author of several books, including “Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic” and a forthcoming biography of James Madison.

It would be difficult to overstate the Democratic Party’s enduring and baleful role in slavery and racism. Its origins in the 1820s are closely aligned with Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s second vice president and later president himself. Van Buren was a New York power broker whose efforts supporting slavery, partly in the name of preserving the union, earned him the moniker “a Northern man with Southern principles.”

The Democratic Southern states, such as Georgia, specifically criticized the anti-slavery policies of President Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party in their declarations of succession in the Civil War.

Even after the war, Cost notes, the Democratic Party’s “central purpose in the second half of the 19th century was specifically to prevent civil rights legislation from being implemented.”

In response to black Republicans being elected in Southern states during Reconstruction, it was Democrats who enacted poll taxes and literacy tests to suppress the black vote.

A Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, resegregated the federal workforce in Washington and hosted a White House screening of D.W. Griffith’s egregiously racist, white supremacist “Birth of a Nation.”

Who Supported Civil Rights Act?
As late as 1952, the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, John Sparkman, was an open segregationist.

A significantly higher percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than did congressional Democrats, and segregationists such as George Wallace were major figures in the Democratic Party until the 1970s.

Even during President Barack Obama’s tenure, Robert Byrd, a former “exalted cyclops” of his local KKK chapter, was one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate.

The absence of Democratic Party critiques is all the more conspicuous when you consider that the 1619 Project doesn’t shy away from critiquing the GOP.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie’s contribution to the 1619 Project begins by purporting to explain the “strain of reactionary extremism that has taken over the Republican Party.” Bouie traces this “reactionary extremism” directly back to John C. Calhoun, who famously argued that slavery was a “positive good.”

Morel has written at length about his puzzlement over how Bouie can determine historical culpability for the Republican Party:

Remarkably, Bouie manages to explain reactionary politics in the South, from secession over Lincoln becoming President to ‘solid blocs of Southern lawmakers’ and ‘reactionary white leaders’ resisting federal regulation of their region up until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, all without mentioning it was the Democratic Party in control of those Southern states.

Bouie thinks that Republicans today are somehow the heirs of an institution that owes its defense and longevity in American history almost entirely to the historical Democratic Party.

He argues that “a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery” has outlived some—but not all—of its racist origins and concludes that today’s Republican opposition to Democratic policies “are clearly downstream of a style of extreme political combat that came to fruition in the defense of human bondage.”

Morel observes this is a dubious argument, either as a matter of journalism or history, and “any objective reader, I don’t care what your political party is, would have to conclude it is a hit piece on the modern Republican Party.”

Bouie did not respond to a request for comment.

1619 Indoctrination in Classrooms
What Morel finds most alarming is that the Pulitzer Center, co-sponsor of the 1619 Project, immediately turned the project into K-12 course materials now in use in thousands of classrooms.

The study guide that accompanies Bouie’s essay asks students to answer the question: “According to the author, how do 19th-century U.S. political movements aimed at maintaining the right to enslave people manifest in contemporary political parties?”

In a courtroom, that would be called leading the witness.

Students given this curriculum are going to be expected to give only one correct answer, though that answer is more a matter of indoctrination than education.

“Bouie identifies only one contemporary political party as the heir of 19th-century racist politics—namely, the Republican Party,” Morel writes. “By omitting the reactionary politics of the historical Democratic Party—for example, the ‘Massive Resistance’ to school desegregation in the 1950s—the only evidence presented in the essay implicates the Republican Party.”

News Media Complicity

An honest accounting would acknowledge that contemporary racial issues have a complicated history that implicates both major parties. The problem, illustrated by the 1619 Project, is that the media and other increasingly left-leaning institutions are invested in historical narratives that help achieve specific political ends.

Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars, suggests that The New York Times itself seems to have used the 1619 Project as part of the paper’s broader agenda to affect the outcome of the 2020 election. While the Times committed to doing the 1619 Project in January of 2019, Wood observes that “the hope of energizing the Democratic electorate to oppose [Donald] Trump in the 2020 election” was one of the animating reasons the Times featured and promoted the 1619 Project so prominently.

To that end, Wood notes the timing of the 1619 Project’s publication in August 2019 came just one month after “the failure of the Mueller investigation to deliver the results that the Times eagerly anticipated (the 1619 Project was intended as part of what New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet called a ‘pivot,’ from Trump as Russian collusionist to Trump as the face of white supremacy).”

“It’s almost like history is being used as like a vast oppo research thing to make things that they don’t like in the present look bad,” says Stepman. “I think it really comes down to power.”

The Times is hardly alone in distorting history. USA Today ran an article last year headlined: “Fact check: Democratic Party did not found the KKK, did not start the Civil War.”

“I was honestly quite amused reading through the USA Today ‘fact check’ last year saying that the Democrats weren’t really the party of slavery and the KKK,” says Stepman. “They came up with all these various caveats—‘Well, you know, it wasn’t all Democrats. It was only most Democrats in the South.’ I’m thinking, if this was literally any other institution, if this was the name of a street, or if this was a statue, it would have been immediately canceled. It might have even been ripe for being torn down by a mob.”

To the contrary, USA Today is now one of Facebook’s official fact-checking partners. After the right-leaning Media Research Center published an article critical of USA Today’s fact check absolving the Democratic Party of its ugly legacy, Facebook started censoring the center.

One can recognize that the Democratic Party is conscious of its problematic past—for example, many of its organizations have renamed Jefferson-Jackson Day fundraising dinners to avoid any racist taint—and yet still see why it’s problematic to whitewash its racist history.

“[Hannah-Jones] produced a partisan polemic and left out anything in the historical record that wouldn’t help her make the case. They’re trying to shape how people think about our past so that what happens going forward will, of course, follow a particular liberal agenda,” Stepman says.

“This is a travesty of history, and the fact that it’s being taught in high schools is rank partisanship. Believe me, I would rather be doing other things than correcting her errors, but the fact that her errors are being printed as gospel and sold as gospel, that’s a problem. It’s a problem for civic education, and it’s a problem for our cohesion and our unity as a nation.”

***************************************

My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

*****************************************

No comments: