League Of Outlaw Bloggers: discrimination

Showing posts with label discrimination. Show all posts

Sunday, October 4, 2015

White Rights

These days you can visit a considerable number of places on the Web to hear racial rants, taunting, denunciations, and calls for this or that sort of “action.” The “Black Lives Matter” whores are only the currently most visible examples. Nearly all such sites are contemptible. But not all: some are worse. Clearly, this is an imbalance that demands to be redressed.

Our esteemed Colonel Bunny has posted a statistics-laden piece that utterly refutes one of the most important lies currently bedeviling American society: the canard that American Caucasians of European descent, who will henceforth be referred to as whites, despise and are attempting to destroy the members of other races and ethnicities. The truly stunning thing about this deceit is that not only is it untrue, it’s the exact reverse of the truth:

Crimes against whites by others utterly overwhelm crimes by whites against others.
Whites have extended a hand of friendship and assistance to others, and have usually had it spat on, bitten, or swatted aside.
Peaceful white neighborhoods have ceased to be peaceful when non-whites have moved into them – and not because the whites have tried to drive them out.
Non-white racial and ethnic groups, though not united on other points, are utterly unanimous on this one: the “white devil” must be dispossessed and destroyed.
Despite all the above, any hint of protest, much less counter-organization by whites is denounced as illegitimate, inherently racist, and an expression of hatred.

This isn’t exactly new. More than thirty years ago, a young woman of no small intelligence nor achievement told me that should my neighborhood experience racial admixture of the sort well known to promote disorder and loss of property values, it would be my moral duty to remain here and endure it, because...well, just because. She could not articulate any objective reason; it was entirely a matter of her opinion.

At one of his recent campaign appearances, Democratic presidential aspirant Martin O’Malley was shouted down for suggesting, in response to the chants of “Black Lives Matter” agitators, that all lives matter. Bernie Sanders has had to cope with something similar. Persons who dare to suggest that contemporary whites have no responsibility for the statistical differences between whites’ aggregate wealth and achievement and the wealth and achievement of other races and ethnicities are routinely branded as racists, haters, and persons who want to bring back slavery.

This mick-wop honky has had quite enough.

We on the Right have often complained that we lack conservative politicians with actual spines. In reflecting on that notion, it struck me that our politicians, while not a perfectly representative sample of our ranks, nevertheless are drawn from it. Thus, an increase in our overall Backbone Quotient – BQ? – would surely elevate that of our elected officials. (At the very least, we should be trying our best to raise the “lower end” of the bell curve.)

Racial/ethnic matters are a significant venue for such improvements. Today, virtually no one in public office or seek to enter it is willing to say, publicly, any of the following:

Violent crimes and crimes against property are overwhelmingly committed by non-whites.
Neighborhoods characterized by disorder, squalor, and violence are almost always non-white.
The quality of local schools is inversely proportional to their attendance by non-whites.
Non-white communities routinely shelter the lawbreakers among them against public justice.
Demands for “free stuff” emanate almost exclusively from non-whites and their mouthpieces.
Non-whites who point out such facts are demonized: “Oreos,” “Uncle Toms,” “race traitors,” etc.

Despite all that we have the phenomenon of black racialist groups demanding that a few states be separated off into a new all-black nation...which, however, would be supported by funds from the rest of the country. We have groups such as Aztlan and La Raza demanding open immigration from the south, and that the American Southwest be returned to union with Mexico. Newest on the scene are the exclaves dominated by Middle Eastern Muslim “immigrants” and “refugees” where the writ of law does not run and it is unsafe for whites to tread.

But don’t you dare to say that white lives matter...that the Knockout Game, a.k.a. “polar bear hunting,” is a real phenomenon...that illegal aliens from south of the border commit huge numbers of violent crimes, whether against one another or against whites...or that the degradation of our public facilities correlates strongly with the invasion of nearby neighborhoods by non-whites.

It’s been said more times than anyone could count that it’s impossible to address a problem you aren’t willing to name. Someone must name it. It appears that the mantle has descended on me:

The problem is non-whites.

It’s time for a countermeasure. Indeed, it’s possible that we’re already too late. Nevertheless, I propose a blatant, in-your-face approach that makes plain that American whites will stand for no more:

Restore The Rights Of American Whites!

Those rights include all the following:

Freedom of association, including the freedom to discriminate in buying and selling.
Freedom of enterprise, including the right to hire, fire, promote, and demote upon arbitrary criteria.
Repeal of all laws that distinguish any racial, ethnic, or religious group from any other, regardless of context.
The elimination of “stakeholder” laws and judicial presumptions that award privileges to recognized groups.
The right to form proprietary communities protected by enforceable covenants, including covenants that restrict residency according to race or ethnicity.

Note that none of the above propositions would create legal privileges that only whites would enjoy. Indeed, the condition of the country at this time is such that only whites are, de facto, denied any of the above rights. Blacks and Hispanics can form race or ethnicity-based groups and associations without fear of legal penalty. Black employers can hire blacks exclusively without worrying about what the EEOC will say, and of course the same is true for Hispanics and Muslims. Though the laws would appear to weigh as heavily on non-whites’ discrimination against whites as the reverse, they’re not enforced when the target would be a non-white business or organization.

It’s time not merely to halt the locomotive of racial-ethnic degradation, but to reverse it. If non-whites want the fruits of the American blessing that whites experience, let them earn those fruits on the same plane as we did. Those who’d prefer not to make the effort can choose among the other continents of the world...assuming those lands would have them.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

The Urgent Need To Discriminate

I’ve written about this before. I meant it then, and I mean it now. In light of some recent developments, it’s acquired overwhelming force.

A couple of weeks ago, Ashe Schow wrote about the current feminist pogrom against college-aged men:

     If a student has been wrongly accused of sexual assault on their college campus, how are they supposed to prove their innocence?...
     After what [Emma] Sulkowicz claimed was a brutal rape in which she was pinned, beaten and choked before being raped, she sent [Paul] Nungesser numerous messages asking to hang out, even telling him she loved him. Nungesser tried to get those messages introduced as evidence during his Columbia University hearing, but was denied. Nungesser, who has since become the victim of a public campaign of defamation by his accuser, was exonerated anyway....
     A similar situation played out at Vassar College when Peter Yu introduced Facebook messages showing his accuser apologizing to him for the evening. She apologized for leading him on and said that she had "a wonderful time" with him. But a year later, when Yu produced these messages for the disciplinary panel, his accuser claimed they "did not correctly reflect her feelings" because she was in a state of "shock and disbelief" about the encounter. The disciplinary committee bought her claim and expelled Yu.

Clearly, these “disciplinary committees” exercised no discipline over their own procedures. To steal a phrase from Joseph Schumpeter, they had the sentence of death in their pockets, and they were going to pass it regardless of any and all developments. Nor are Nungesser and Yu outliers; when it comes to accusations by womenof sexual assaults by men, the trend on university campuses is exactly as they experienced it.

Meanwhile, universities are experiencing an accelerating imbalance of young women in their enrollees. Marriage-minded young women complain that eligible young men are avoiding them. Employers are finding new and ingenious ways to avoid hiring young women, regardless of their credentials. And Friday nights find quite a lot of young single women sitting at the bar surrounded entirely by...other young single women.

In other words, young men are learning to discriminate against young women.

Discrimination works when it’s tried. Here’s a case where it badly needs to be tried:

     It just got surreal. George Washington University Law School Professor John Banzhaf filed a human rights complaint to the D.C. Office of Human Rights against Catholic University for hindering Muslim students’ free exercise of their faith due to the “excessive” amount of “Catholic imagery” on the campus. It seems that this man – who teaches at a different school across town – thinks that Catholic University’s adherence to the cultural aspects of Catholicism (we have a lot of artwork, Crucifixes, and statues in every nook and cranny) keeps muslim students from praying the required five times a day.
     Banzhaf, who already has a pending lawsuit against the university over ending its policy of allowing mixed-gender dormitories and has a history of filing civil rights suits on such topics as childhood obesity and smoking, filed the complaint alleging that Muslim students are not given their own prayer rooms.
     He alleges that the university, “does not provide space – as other universities do – for the many daily prayers Muslim students must make, forcing them instead to find temporarily empty classrooms where they are often surrounded by Catholic symbols which are incongruous to their religion,” according to the Tower, Catholic University’s student newspaper.

Let’s leave aside this idiot Banzhaf’s obvious hatred for Catholic institutions and the Catholic faith. What makes allegations of his sort possible at all? That there are Muslim students at Catholic University! And why, pray tell, is that?

A number of Catholic institutions have succumbed to the lure of increased revenue by admitting non-Catholic students. Some have even hired non-Catholic faculty and staff. As an example of arrant insanity, this would be hard to top – and given current trends in labor law and nondiscrimination law, it will be very hard to undo. But monetary considerations aside, it will require Catholic University and similar institutions to brace themselves for a necessity that will no doubt pain many: the need to say to a non-Catholic applicant for enrollment or employment that “You don’t qualify.” Upon being asked why, the sole adequate answer will be the one all of America has been inhibited against uttering:

“We discriminate in favor of Catholics.”

And there must be no exceptions granted.

Riots in Ferguson. Riots in St. Louis. Riots in Baltimore. Massive looting and property destruction. And all the participants, to within the limits of measurement precision, have been black.

Whites don’t riot. Even the highly disruptive “Occupy” demonstrations were never riots. Whites don’t assault random passers-by on public streets. Neither are whites inclined to rally around a convicted murderer because of his race. (See also this recent case.) In just about every situation where distinctions on the basis of race occurs, those distinctions operate in Negroes’ favor and against Caucasians, regardless of any and all other considerations.

At this point, even the most diehard, race-is-a-social-construct / I-don’t-see-skin-color leftist is aware that concentrations of Negroes are highly dangerous to non-Negroes. When the black population of a district passes a certain level, crime rates rise, conditions for ordinary commerce deteriorate, and white flight begins. As this happens even in left-liberal-dominated coastal cities – indeed, it’s most pronounced in exactly such cities — the claim that it’s only “racist conservatives” doing the flying is ridiculous on its face.

What are we to make of this? Yes, there’s a strong argument that left-liberal policies give rise to the sort of cultural accretions that correlate with local deterioration...but so does race. Given that the politicians are elected by the local populace, the only credible responses are to disperse the populace or to confine it behind an impassable fence. Both constitute discrimination -- discrimination in defense of life and property. If this is forbidden, our rights to our lives and our property are shams. But then, the very people doing the forbidding are also working to deprive us of the instruments of self-defense, aren’t they?

Discrimination has become a moral, social, and political imperative. Sorting among one’s personal associates isn’t yet illegal, thank God. But most other forms of discrimination are either banned outright or have been made torturously difficult. Indeed, with its “diversity” programs the federal government, which now controls approximately one-third of all spending in the United States, has added financial incentives to the maintenance of a “diverse” work force.

Yet it must be so. There remain ways to do it. Some of those ways are gaining adherents by the day. And they are finding that their lives, their states of mind, and often their fortunes are being improved thereby.

Discrimination isn’t bigotry; it’s a response to conditions. And it works.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Concurrence At Last

Now and then, I find myself hammering a point that other people simply don’t get. The symptoms range from mute incomprehension to outrage (at me). The modal response is somewhere around “What do you mean? That can’t be right.”

So it’s been with the point I’ve strained to make about the evil of “compelling government interest:”

Probably the most common approach to the teaching of "political science" in our institutions of "higher learning" -- really now, you should know those are sneer quotes without having to ask -- is the authoritarian-allocation model. In this conception, the quest for political power is a contest over who shall be awarded the sovereign's privilege of licensure: the power to say who may do any given thing, who may use any particular resource, and who shall be exempt from all such laws. Underneath this model lies the assumption that there is no higher moral standard that would preclude the sovereign's arbitrary allocation of privileges. In other words, the sovereign is above all conceptions of absolute right and wrong....
Most members of our political class accept the authoritarian-allocation model as fully applicable to the United States. They dismiss Constitutional constraints as "obsolete;" many of them will admit it with the cameras rolling. Neither does the clash with our concept of individuals' rights bother them overmuch; they have a number of dodges with which to evade it, most prominent among them the notion of "compelling government interest." However they rationalize it, they see the proper sphere of government as the licensure of all things: decreeing who may do what, and with whom, and for how much, and under what circumstances, for any and every human activity under the Sun.

Licensure and “compelling government interest” are interdependent; each requires the other to sustain it. In any analysis of the consequences of accepting those notions as valid, the emphasis should lie upon the government’s privilege of forbidding under threat of punishment. The power to say “you may” arises wholly from the power to say “you may not” – and to enforce the dictate at gunpoint.

But why no government can validly claim to have “interests,” compelling or otherwise, seems to elude most people. The core of it is that in the American Constitutional system, a government is an agent: a hireling charged with specified responsibilities and allowed to engage in certain delimited activities in discharging them. The relationship is exactly parallel to a homeowner who engages a landscaper to trim his hedge. The job is defined by the homeowner, and the landscaper is to do that and nothing else.

Imagine that the landscaper sees himself as having “interests” that include turning the homeowner’s hedge into a topiary. Would the homeowner be justified in becoming upset? Would he have a good case for refusing the landscaper his fee for that “service?” If the answers strike you as obvious, ask yourself why claims of “compelling government interests” should be treated any differently.

It was with great joy that I stumbled this very morning upon this essay by Will Grigg:

The nation-wide convulsion of collectivist rage triggered by enactment of the Indiana religious freedom act illustrated that “civil rights,” as currently defined, requires the immediate punishment of any business owner who exercises the right to refrain from commerce. Yes, self-styled proponents of “tolerance” can succumb to the temptations of punitive populism, just like their counterparts on the Right.
     An even more compelling illustration of the totalitarian mindset that typifies what is now called “civil rights” was offered by Idaho’s HB 2, more commonly known as the “Add the Words” bill. If it had been enacted by the state legislature, HB 2 would have added “sexual orientation” of various kinds to the state’s Human Rights Act as a protected category with regard to discrimination in employment and “public accommodations.” It also would have explicitly criminalized – perhaps for the first time anywhere in the Soyuz – the act of reserving one’s right to refuse service.
     Section 67-5909 (5) (b) of the legislation would have made it a “prohibited act” for “a person” to “print, circulate, post, or mail or otherwise cause to be published a statement, advertisement, or sign which indicates that the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages of a place of public accommodation will be refused, withheld from, or denied an individual or that an individual’s patronage of or presence at a place of public accommodation is objectionable, unwelcome, unacceptable, or undesirable.”
     If HB 2 or a future measure employing the same language were to be enacted, a business owner who posted the “right to refuse” sign could not only be sued, but dragged away from his property in handcuffs. A critic of the measure could likewise find himself being prosecuted for publishing a letter to the editor, a Facebook post, or a blog comment urging business owners to exercise the right of refusal.
     Punishing the peaceful expression of such opinions would be justified, according to the civil rights commissariat, because government has a “compelling interest” in preventing discrimination – even at the expense of individual liberty....
As an abstract fiction without body, parts, or passions, the state cannot have a legitimate “interest” in anything. Indulging, for a moment, the contrary view, the state’s interest in self-preservation would always dictate the expansion of power, and the corresponding curtailment of liberty. This shouldn’t be considered surprising once it’s understood that the “compelling state interest” doctrine had its origins in the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision Korematsu v. United States – which upheld the mass internment, in military custody, of Japanese-Americans who had broken no law.

Please read it all.

The “compelling government interest” doctrine, under which any individual right can be abridged, modified, suspended, or simply ignored, can be used to justify any action by government, regardless of its consequences. Who, after all, gets to define such interests? It certainly isn’t you or I.

The notion is entirely antithetical to constitutionalism, under which a government’s sphere of action is constrained to specified subjects and further limited by individuals’ rights. Had the Founding Fathers foreseen “compelling government interest” being put forward to rationalize the outrages we suffer today, they’d have given up on the whole Constitutional project as being too good for a people who’d kneel before such a lie.

But we’ve accepted it. And it has swallowed us whole.

I’ve written that the Republic, as defined by our Constitution and the legal tradition we inherited from our English origins, has fallen. If there’s a single, most culpable actor in this tragedy, it would be our judiciary, which invented the “compelling government interest” notion to justify the mass internment of West Coast Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Will Grigg understands. To have encountered another commentator who grasps this critical point has lifted my spirits. More, he appreciates the infinite scope of that evil doctrine, which is now being used to suppress individual rights in every venue from “anti-terrorism” to “civil rights.” It’s the root of a great many evils. It must be ripped out of our soil for us to have a chance at freedom once again.

I’ve also written of the right to discriminate. That right is indistinguishable from our more commonly understood rights. It comes into best focus when applied to freedom of association. If we forfeit that freedom when we engage in commerce, then we never had it in the first place. Neither do we have the right to engage in commerce as we choose; that devolves to a case of licensure, in which the privilege of doing business is bestowed or withheld by a government, according to conditions set by a legislature or a court. If that implies a right to keep you from earning the living that sustains your life or the lives of your loved ones, so be it. The Omnipotent State’s interests always come first, don’t y’know.

Think about it.

No doubt some leftist will seize on the above sentiments and immediately accuse me of bigotry: “You hate blacks and gays! You want to discriminate against them!” Time was, I’d have immediately said, “No, I don’t.” The years have taught me the folly of that approach. Today I reply, “So what if I do?” The apoplexy this often causes my accuser is entertaining enough to sell tickets.

Americans’ rights are gone. We’ve given ground before the encroachments of government and the relentlessness of the Left’s propaganda, such that merely an accusing word is enough to start us backing away from the defense of our rights. The underlying malady is the desire for others’ approval: the need to be seen as “nice guys” even by those who hate us passionately and always will.

It’s time to revive the prickly persona that has no truck with others’ interference in our preferences and choices. Along with that must go a certain truculence, even if the Left’s bien pensants should vilify us for it. Why should we care what they think of us? Aren’t our rights infinitely more important?

It might be late in the year for it, but here’s a new resolution for 2015 even so: This year, be a prickly son-of-a-bitch, and proud of it.

Will Grigg sees the necessity. Do you?

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

War Assets

The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney lays it out for you:

After millennia of marriage being uncontroversially a union between one man and one woman, and after a decade of electorates in most states (and President Obama in 2008) upholding that traditional definition, the Left has used the courts to redefine the institution. People are fired for having taken the losing side. On college campuses, the current fights are about banning even the articulation of traditional views.
Amidst this culture-war dynamic, the Hobby Lobby decision and Indiana's RFRA don't represent any slide down a slope towards religiosity or individual liberty. Instead, our culture is speeding down the icy Left slope of the cultural mountain, and a few conservatives are now dragging their hands on the ice to slow the acceleration — and the Left is crying that this will send us catapulting back uphill.
Religious liberty is the terms of surrender the Right is requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these?
But no. Tolerance isn't the goal. Religious conservatives must atone for their heretical views with acts of contrition: Bake me a cake, photograph my wedding, pay for my abortion and my contraception.

Please read it all, and reflect on this: even during the years when virtually every young man was drafted when he reached 18 years of age, the Selective Service Act permitted exceptions on the grounds of “conscientious objection.”

Some total wars are more total than others. One side in this war intends to leave no survivors.

Remember Donald Rumsfeld saying, some what ruefully, that “you go to war with the army you have” -- ? Well, as it happens, that observation only applies at the very start of a war. If the war is at all protracted, “the army you have” can change dramatically, and in several ways. Look at the transformation of Britain’s army over the course of World War I for an excellent example.

Few of us in the Right would have predicted that the Left would succeed in turning victim status into a war asset. Yet it is so – so much so that even after having won on the legal battlefield, the Left’s forces continue to wield that status as a most potent weapon. It’s the bayonet with which they’re busily killing off our wounded.

Indeed, victim status is so greatly cherished by the Left that even to speak against it is regarded as intolerable. Take note of what the despicable Ed Schultz, having somehow inveighed Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson onto his contemptible program, feels he must do to prevent his opponent from scoring with the audience:

It’s not just on college campuses that the Left seeks to prevent the expression of contrary views. And it will get much worse before it gets better.

John Conroe’s remarkable recent novel Forced Ascent contains an early, high-impact depiction of a confrontation between protagonist Chris Gordon, who is literally an angel sent among men to protect us from being overrun by demons, and representatives of the federal government:

    “What we have is a national threat to security wielding unknown abilities or technology, operating at random inside the borders of the United States with no checks or balances. Mr. Gordon here has served his country well over the last few years, but there is nothing preventing him from going off the deep end and assaulting that very same country. How do you think the people sworn to protect this nation from any and all threats feel about a rogue operator who can do the things he can do? It’s frankly worse than allowing test tubes of Ebola to be carted about at random by any federal employee that wants one,” Alexis said.
    “Again… what is it you want?”
    “We want controls in place to ensure Mr. Gordon’s compliance,” she said.
    “And those are?” Darion asked while my stomach got tight and twisted.
    “We want young Miss Velasquez in Federal custody. We want a… monitor implanted in Mr. Gordon’s body to track and isolate him. We want him shadowed by government agents at all times.” She sat back, watching us for reaction. I had plenty but I somehow managed to control my initial reaction—or more importantly, Grim’s response. The images in my mind were bloody. Very, very bloody.
    “No, no, and no,” Darion responded. “Why would Mr. Gordon acquiesce to these ridiculous demands?”
    “Because failure to comply will constitute a declaration of intent to commit further acts of terrorism and war against the United States,” McFeeney interjected. He paused for dramatic effect, which was ruined when footsteps thundered down the hallway outside accompanied by howls of pre-teen laughter.
    “And once you’ve decided you’re at war with my client, how do you see that playing out?” Darion asked, smiling at the sounds of the kids.
    “The only way it can, Darion. With the death of Mr. Gordon and all he holds dear. Nobody can hold out against the full weight and power of the United States Government.”

Mind you, Gordon had committed no “acts of terrorism.” He’d exorcised demons, executed werewolves and vampires that had conspired to wreak slaughter among humans, and had destroyed a corrupt, quasi-governmental organization that had kidnapped several innocents, his goddaughter among them. That was of no interest to the federal government; what it wanted was control of his powers. The rest of the novel depicts the consequences of Gordon’s refusal to accept the federal leash.

So also with the Left. If you refuse its leash, its minions will bend all their efforts to destroying you, one way or another. And at this time, the Left is in full and unopposed control of the federal government of the United States.

There is only one countermeasure to the Left’s steady elimination of every right except the rights to sodomy and abortion. It’s a costly one, one that most persons – even most persons reading this screed – will recoil from, on the grounds of self-preservation.

We must rehabilitate and reinvigorate discrimination.

To discriminate is to apply a standard and make a consequent choice. It’s to say “That isn’t acceptable,” and to act on one’s verdict. It’s the ultimate expression of individuality, for no one can set your standards for you but you.

Do you make love to your spouse but not to your garbageman? You’ve discriminated against your garbageman.
Do you prefer lettuce and spinach to kale and collared greens? You’ve discriminated against the growers of the latter vegetables.
Do you drink wine but not beer? You’ve discriminated against Amstel, Coors, Heineken and Anheuser-Busch.
Do you choose your own friends? You’ve discriminated against people you find insipid or annoying.
Do you prefer FOX to MSNBC? You’ve discriminated against Leftist propaganda.

This is anathema to the Left. You’ve deviated from its dogma. You’ve dared to chart your own course. You’ve proclaimed yourself a free man. Who could possibly know what you might choose to do next? Off with your head!

John Conroe’s bit of fiction above is coming ever nearer to reality as we speak, except that every free man in America sits in place of Chris Gordon. And none of us have the powers or longevity of an angel. As far as I know, anyway.

They who worship power and are determined to have it all – the very definition of the Left – cannot and will not tolerate your individuality. What if it were to infect others? Who knows what might follow? Their entire program could totter and fall. You must be brought into line; failing that, you must be eliminated as a threat to the body politic.

Take it seriously, folks. This is what they intend. It’s what they’ve always intended. And it’s become so clear that to deny it constitutes a willful refusal to see the world around you.

Resist while it’s still possible. No matter the cost.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

A Thought For Thursday

[This morning’s reading brought me two exceedingly striking articles. I dithered over which one should serve as the launching pad for today’s tirade, but only for a moment. I’ve decided to save the one with wider scope and farther-reaching implications for tomorrow. I promise you: it won’t spoil between now and then. -- FWP]

Hearken to Kevin Williamson:

One of the remarkable aspects of the recent spate of infantile left-wing protests that caught Jim Geraghty’s attention is that they are directed at private life and private spaces rather than at public institutions and public affairs. One expects protests at city hall; in New York, we even endured the unseemly spectacle of one of those shut-down-traffic protests conducted by the city council itself, as though its members did not do enough to inconvenience the residents of that city. Protests in front of the police station or the (hideously fascist-looking) Federal Reserve building are part of the normal course of affairs in a democratic republic with free speech and a strong tradition of lively discourse....
In New York City, protesters invaded the Pershing Square Café across the street from Grand Central Terminal, which is one of the more diverse spots in heavily segregated Manhattan, catering as it does to commuting 53-year-old lawyers from Fairfield County, who check any number of different demographic boxes.
The message these protests send is that there is no private space — and, therefore, no private life — so far as this particular rabble is concerned. It’s the familiar Trotsky conundrum: You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.

Does this plaint sound at all familiar?

Do you know what the victimists fear above all else? Being ignored. It’s why they put so much time and effort into getting in front of every microphone, every camera, and every so-called journalist in the world. If a sufficient preponderance of us were simply to ignore them, their influence would drop to approximately zero. Indeed, the power of that tactic – what Arthur Herzog called in The B.S. Factor the “mass yawn” – is so staggering that it can even nullify state and federal laws, without recourse to the political process....
The political class and its hangers-on fear exactly the same things as the victimists: being ignored. Were they to become aware that no one is paying any attention to their enactments and decrees, they would soon slink away. Some might even enter productive trades, perhaps as cheap prostitutes.

(Dear Lord, please strengthen me against the rising inclination to post a simple “I told you so” here each and every morning. It’s so wearying to be out in front of the curve all the time. Yours truly, Francis W. Porretto, Curmudgeon Emeritus to the World Wide Web.)

The pole star of the politician is the same as that of the political activist: politicization. Both of them want to destroy any notions the rest of us might have about whatever matter they/re hot and bothered about being a matter for private decision-making, in which politics and government have no place. After all, how could they possibly be significant if we refuse to allow them to coerce us about a matter around which they’ve wrapped their hearts and souls?

Ignoring them is getting harder all the time. But that’s not their fault; it’s ours.

Quite a long time ago, at the late, much lamented Palace of Reason, I penned an article about a friend of a friend – a hairdresser – who reported being at her wits’ end because of customers whose behavior would once have gotten them the “bum’s rush,” with neither apology nor consequences. I mentioned an old sign that once appeared in every commercial establishment, but which one never sees these days:

We Reserve The Right
To Refuse Service To Anyone

The reason those little signs are no longer commonplace is that it’s illegal to refuse service to the members of various state-protected groups. Indeed, the enforcers of that law – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – are so vicious and so relentless that there’s almost no behavior short of felony assault that the law will concede as a justification for refusing service. Worse, even when the justification is indisputable the shopowner who tries to enforce his will personally will always be on the dirty end of a lawsuit – civil, criminal, or both.

It’s often been said that “Hard cases make bad law.” There is some truth in the concept, but at least as often it’s the attempt to make law to redress some condition that’s generally deemed undesirable that elicits the hard cases. That’s given rise to an alternative maxim: “Bad law makes for hard cases.”

What constitutes a “bad law” is the question before us.

Let’s return to Kevin Williamson’s article for a moment:

During the Civil Rights Movement — the real one, not the ersatz one led today by Jesse Jackson et al. — politics did genuinely intersect with brunch. On one side of the issue were people who argued that the social situation of African Americans at the time was so dire and so oppressive that invasive federal action was necessary. On the other side were well-intentioned conservatives such as Barry Goldwater and any number of writers for this magazine, who argued that if the reach of Washington were extended into every mom-and-pop diner in the country, it would constitute a step toward the abolition of private life, that the natural and inevitable extension of the principle at work would ensure that rather than being treated as private property, businesses reclassified as “public accommodations” would be treated more like public property, that the greasy snout of politics eventually would stick itself into every last precinct of what had been considered the sphere of privacy beyond the public sector.
As it turns out, both sides were right.

That last sentence undermines an otherwise near-perfect exercise in punditry. It’s impossible that both sides could be right, by the very nature of things. Either a “mom-and-pop diner” is private property or it isn’t; you can’t have it both ways. Williamson’s desire to find some way of accommodating two inherently contradictory positions is untenable. It expresses a desire not to offend that the conflicting demands of the “two sides” have made impossible.

The politicization of commerce didn’t start with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, of course. It has much deeper roots than that. But every stroke in that direction has weakened the most important protection of individual rights this country possesses: the principle of unfettered private discretion over one’s private property.

And every last speck of it was deliberate.

”Bad law” is an envelope that subsumes many more specific sub-categories. However, laws that should not have been made in the first place because they infringe on private rights are surely included therein. The problem here is twofold:

A strong consensus among the citizens that “something must be done” about some situation;
Politicians’ eagerness to politicize whatever they can get their claws around.

When I wrote about the importance of the black market a few days ago, I thought principally in terms of specific goods and services that political forces had chosen to ban, control, or restrict by regulation. Yet there’s a form of “black market” that’s arisen in response to supposedly well intentioned “anti-discrimination” statutes. It poses the greatest of frustrations to the politicizers, because it’s inherently beyond their reach. It’s the exercise of “consumer discrimination:” individuals’ personal decisions to live here rather than there, to work at this firm rather than that one, and to patronize or not to patronize a commercial establishment according to the personalities and characters of the frequenters thereof.

Is there a racial correlation? Of course. Is that deplorable? Not necessarily. Think about it:

Would you willingly drink in a tavern whose other patrons habitually view you as hostile?
Would you willingly work among persons who consistently treat you with contempt?
Would you choose to live in a neighborhood overwhelmingly populated with such persons?
Had you the means to avert all those conditions, wouldn’t you use them?
Would the skin colors or ethnic heritages of those hostile, contemptuous persons matter to you?

Only a completely totalitarianized nation can overcome “consumer discrimination.” It must dictate every decision made by every one of its subjects. It must leave them no power to resist. It must punish attempts to deviate so surely, swiftly, and harshly that the very thought of nonconformity is all but erased from the nation.

I doubt there are any left-liberals among the regular readers of my screeds, but if there are, tell us all, please: What do you, whose political allies are constantly screaming that “the personal is the political,” propose to do about any of that? And what will you say when the goring of oxen gets around to yours?

Think it over.