Today is D-Day, Day One of the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor would have the world believe that she is fighting racism. And if you believe her, I have a great deal for you on a slightly used bridge.
Sonia Sotomayor is waging war on “racism.” If you don’t believe me, just ask her. Why do blacks and Hispanics not do as well as whites on standardized tests? “Racism.” (Never mind about the Asians.) Why are more blacks and Hispanics in jail than whites? “Racism.” We can’t have capital punishment, either. As The Urban Grind observes, “Judge Sotomayor also believes that capital punishment is racist.”
The Urban Grind observes, as well, that Judge Sotomayor “believes that denying felons the right to votewhile they’re still in prison is racist.”
During the Great Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax of 2000, as the overlapping groups of Democratic operatives, white leftists, and black supremacists sought to steal the election after the fact, they employed at least two different strategies:
Telling ever more exaggerated race hoax stories supporting their claim that Republican forces in Florida had stolen the election via the disenfranchisement of black voters (in reality, some of the black voters claiming disenfranchisement, at three segregated black colleges, were found to be guilty of vote fraud, through having voted twice, but none was prosecuted); and
Projecting their contemporary hoax onto the past, by inventing a white conspiracy to disenfranchise blacks through denying felons the vote, after they had served out their sentences.
(According to the Miami Herald, some 5,000 convicted felons, 75 percent of whom were registered Democrats, illegally voted in Florida in 2000. To my knowledge, none of the felons who committed vote fraud was prosecuted, either, as Florida officials backed off, in the face of black racial demagoguery.)
Back then, the purpose of strategy #2 was to get all black felons who had finished their jail sentences reinstated as voters, under the assumption that the overwhelming majority would vote Democratic. (It wasn’t clear whether they had to have actually finished their sentences, i.e., including their terms of parole or probation, meaning that the hoaxers likely sought to get the convicts’ franchise re-instated while they were still convicts.) The Village Voice even made this racist strategy explicit, with references to Marcus Garvey and black power.
Sotomayor’s position came in a terse dissent to the 2006 case Hayden v. Pataki. The case argued that New York’s law barring convicted felons from voting until they are released from prison or complete parole is racist and thus unconstitutional. Its supporters made this argument on the grounds that “[m]ore than 80% of the New Yorkers disenfranchised…are Blacks or Latinos, who lose their right to vote at more than ten times the rate of other citizens.” Plaintiff Joseph “Jazz” Hayden, before he began his humanitarian crusade on behalf of the disenfranchised, was convicted in 1987 of stabbing a sanitation worker to death.Most Second Circuit Court of Appeals judges disagreed with him, but Sotomayor found Hayden’s objection supported by the “plain terms” of the Voting Rights Act.
Her minority opinion (no pun intended) puts into perspective precisely what a judicial activist she is and how deeply concerns of ethnicity color her view of the law.
Johnson then enters into a scholarly discussion of the ancient Greek roots of the practice of disenfranchising felons, and shows that, contrary to racial socialists’ phony claims, in America the practice is older than the black franchise.
Note Sotomayor’s further radicalization beyond the 2000 talking point. Back then, forbidding ex-convicts to vote was “racist”; now, forbidding current convicts from voting is “racist.”
And one may not disagree with Sotomayor, et al. Merely disagreeing with these people is “racist.” Referring to them as “these people” is “racist,” too! Given Sotomayor’s documented viciousness from the bench, just imagine oral arguments in a Supreme Court on which she sat. It would be like a contemporary university faculty senate meeting!
In case anyone should accuse me of hyperbole, the practice whereby black and Hispanic racists and their white allies constantly harass whites with charges of “racism” regarding the most innocent, trivial linguistic usage, in order to continuously keep them on the defensive, is an over 20-year-old tradition.
(When Sotomayor’s critics argue that she lacks “judicial temperament,” they are implicitly making the same sort of character requirement of jurists that was a given in pre-affirmative action, pre-“diversity” higher education, back in those benighted days before “diverse” faculty and administrators had their own goon squads, with which to terrorize colleagues. In City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College (1994), James Traub showed how tenured black supremacist Leonard Jeffries used his personal goon squad—almost certainly at taxpayer expense—to physically intimidate people, including Traub, at the City College of New York. Thanks to thugs like Jeffries, and the jettisoning of all moral and academic standards, in a few short years, City College deteriorated from America’s most rigorous undergraduate college, to a racist, ghetto hellhole.
How long will it be, at this rate, before Supreme Court justices have personal goon squads, with which to “persuade” their fellow justices as to the power of their arguments?)
Note too Sotomayor’s rationale: By assuming that any law that “impacts disproportionately” on blacks’ or Hispanics’ versus whites’ voting rights (or, apparently, blacks’ or Hispanics’ murder rights) is racist, she is applying what is called “disparate impact” to voting rights (and the death penalty).
“Disparate impact” is the pseudo-scientific fig leaf that has been used since circa 1970 to cover the racist power grab that successfully, more often than not, illegally violated civil service law, the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in order to racially discriminate against qualified whites and East Asians on behalf of radically unqualified blacks and Hispanics, destroy the merit system, and turn America into a system of racial spoils.
According to “disparate impact,” any government action, regardless of intent, that results in rewarding “protected classes” (initially blacks, then Hispanics and American Indians, now the handicapped and homosexuals, and sometimes, depending on political expediency, white women) in a smaller proportion than it does non-protected classes (white, heterosexual men and sometimes, depending on political expediency, white women), is discriminatory.
“Disparate impact” made the counter-factual assumptions that, absent discrimination, all racial (and due to political alliances since) and other demographic groups which, due to political expediency will be counted in a given situation, will have identical average IQs, test scores, grades, poverty rates, school and college graduation rates, crime rates, etc. (Those indices, such as professional sports, in which “protected classes” have disproportionately higher success rates than non-protected classes are either to be ignored or attributed to the virtues of the protected class in question. ‘Heads we win, tails you lose.’)
The combination of using “disparate impact” and screaming “racist!” (or “sexist!,” etc.) at every critic, and if those tactics didn’t work, firing, “whitelisting,” and/or assaulting him, ushered in a counter-scientific revolution. “Scholars” and lawyers no longer had to marshal evidence and prove intent. All they had to show was inequality of results, in order to “prove” their case.
But why arbitrarily limit the criticism’s target? Given that blacks are incarcerated at over eight times the rate of whites—and at over 30 times the rate of Asians!—the criminal laws themselves must be repealed as racist. (Hispanics are imprisoned at half the black rate.)
The sophistry of “disparate impact” is central to the racial profiling myth. If it is declared unthinkable, the facts be damned, that blacks and Hispanics could commit crime at higher rates than whites, and whites are blamed for every social ill, higher rates of black and Hispanic imprisonment must necessarily be the fault of white racism.
These are the logical consequences of disparate impact dogma, which Sonia Sotomayor and “Barack Obama” both embrace. If we accept disparate impact’s backwards theory of the law, whereby the law’s legitimacy is determined after the fact, based on whether its enforcement results in parity of imprisonment between minorities and whites, there can be no criminal law. It must be jettisoned, while anti-white civil rights laws must be retained.
“Disparate impact” dogma demands that the worse blacks and Hispanics conduct themselves, the more whites and Asians must be punished, especially when the original black and Hispanic misconduct entailed victimizing whites and Asians! And there must be ever more blacks and Hispanics, and ever fewer whites and Asians. “Disparate impact” is a weapon of ultimately genocidal race war.
“Disparate impact” is incompatible with science or any rational, fair, system of law. For Sonia Sotomayor, as for the man who nominated her, there is no law or science; there is only race war.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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