While I support legal immigration, no one likes line skippers at Disney World or the border. Legal citizens who are here pursuant to our laws should have the right to vote — no one else.
West Virginia State Senator Mike Stuart, as quoted in “Proposed amendment to add U.S. citizenship to W.Va. voting requirement passes House,” West Virginia Record (February 7, 2024).
On March 16, 1995, the state of Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state of the Union to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment had been officially ratified in 1865, one hundred thirty years earlier.
James Madison, fourth President of the United States and “Father of the Constitution,” was born on this date in 1751.
So said one student when asked “Why should students
How well-paid? $1,400, for learning to fight for “racial justice” and “social justice.”
Parrot left-wing propaganda, that is.
The activist group Californians for Justice has paid at least 78 public high school students a total of around $100,000 to take CFJ’s ideological training. Another $20,200 has gone to parents for participating.
The training apparently does not include lessons in independent thinking or assessing alternative viewpoints, such as the view that “social justice” is typically a euphemism for collectivist injustice.
One teacher, who preferred to remain anonymous lest she lose her job, told The Free Press that it’s helpful to know what students think “would help them learn better, but” the students were “obviously reading scripts that have words that they don’t know how to say.” One trainee advised this teacher that students would “come to class on time if we built relationships with them.”
Another teacher in the district, agreed that “CFJ is not helping students find their own voices. . . . They’re teaching them parroting . . . the exact opposite of how you empower children.”
The focus on “racial justice” is manifested in CFJ’s own recruiting: its website reports that CFJ has “trained hundreds of youth of color in Long Beach to be community leaders and organizers.” Why only
The training is not funded by strictly voluntary donations, of course. Long Beach Unified School District has been subsidizing it, using taxpayer dollars. The district has already given CFJ nearly $2 million.
The whole operation stinks to high heaven. But they’re “paid good.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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There are people with whom everything they consider a means turns mysteriously into an end.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 428.
March 15 was “the Ides of March” in the Roman calendar. On that date in 44 BC, Julius Caesar, Dictator of the Roman Republic, was stabbed to death by a handful of prominent senators.
On the same date in 1783, General George Washington eloquently entreated his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy. His plea was successful: the threatened coup d’état never took place.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman has ruled that a federal agency established to give subsidies to businesses, in its current form called the Minority Business Development Agency, may no longer use race or ethnicity as a criterion for distributing benefits.
The ruling comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty on behalf of three business owners who weren’t allowed to apply for help from the MBDA because they’re white. The plaintiffs argue that the Agency violates the constitutional requirement of equal treatment under
According to Judge Pittman, although “the Agency may intend to serve listed groups, not punish unlisted groups, the very design of its presumption punishes those who are not presumptively entitled to MBDA benefits.”
Supporting rights-based governance, I’m no fan of any welfare programs. As long as we have them, though, why should the handouts or the ability to apply for them be determined by race?
Government-imposed racial discrimination is unjust on its face. It should be extirpated wherever it exists. The Minority Business Development Agency is one of
If Pittman’s ruling is allowed to stand, it may have a salutary effect on many other agencies and programs.
The MBDA’s name presents a problem, however.
I guess it won’t be too hard to remove the word “Minority” and call the agency the Business Development Agency.
Or just shut it down.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The old Romans all wished to have a king over them because they had not yet tasted the sweetness of freedom.
Titus Livius, History of Rome, Book I, §17.
On March 14, 1900, the Gold Standard Act was ratified, ending the long practice of bimetallism by placing the United States Treasury — and banking and currency — on the gold standard.
The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 created a giant package of subsidies that shouldn’t exist to begin with and is made even worse by all the strings attached.
The Act authorizes giving $52 billion of taxpayer money to microchip manufacturers to make chips in the U.S. The boost to domestic production will supposedly help us if China invades Taiwan and disrupts Taiwan’s globe-leading microchip industry.
But chipmakers eligible for the largesse are recoiling from all the embedded DEI mandates. “DEI” means “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” It’s a collectivist mantra and ideology designed to make employers fret about racial and gender quotas and DEI indoctrination at the expense of hiring qualified people and making high-quality microchips.
According to Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson, writing for The Hill, nineteen sections of the Act are devoted to DEI. One gives the Department of Commerce a mission that Commerce describes as “strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem” by ensuring “significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”
The authors believe that CHIPS is “so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.” Worse, it’s making it hard for chipmakers to move, forced to focus away from making microchips and, instead, onto the wasteful exercise of appeasing regulators.
Now that they are finally about to get CHIPS funding, Intel and others are delaying announced factories and foundries on U.S. sites and instead going ahead with more overseas plants.
I guess they want to get stuff done.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947; 1997 edition), p. 120.