The advance of black reparations in the United States has inspired a global movement to redress perceived historical injustices to all manner of aggrieved groups, John Murawski reports for RealClearInvestigations:
- The causes include gay reparations, climate reparations, colonial reparations, university reparations --– and Catholic Church reparations for officially sanctioning slavery and genocide in the New World.
- Some warn that reparations could open a bottomless Pandora’s Box, given history’s long catalogue of abuses against sex workers, polygamists, Jews, Catholics, Slavs, and the Roma, among a vast array of potential claimants.
- Already gay reparations have been won for victims of Gen. Francisco Franco’s Spain and Nazi Germany.
- Proposals have also been floated for reparations for abused psychiatric patients and aged-care patients as well as all women, whether they work or not, for the alleged income gap.
- California offers a dramatic example as it reviews a proposal that could pay in excess of $1 million each to some blacks, although people like Barack Obama not descended from 19th century free or enslaved blacks could be excluded while whites with black slaves in their lineage might cash in.
- Where does this all end? Skeptical pundits like to joke that fat, short and ugly people will be next in line.
- Conservative site Breitbart morbidly joked: “And dare we ask: Should there be compensation for victims of … abortion? Okay, okay, it might be hard to find anyone to compensate for that loss of life.”
Echoing the private financing of public elections that critics saw as heavily favoring Democrats in 2020, several of America’s richest foundations are pouring money into a similar effort now, Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations.
- A nonprofit called the Audacious Project, whose supporters include the Gates and MacArthur foundations, has committed $80 million to the Mark Zuckerberg-aligned Center for Technology and Civic Life, to provide grant funding to run local elections.
- The CTCL became a focus of controversy in 2020 when it helped direct hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Facebook’s Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to help run elections during the pandemic, which prompted ad hoc rule changes minimizing in-person voting.
- While the outside assistance was touted as nonpartisan, post-election analysis found that the so-called “Zuckerbucks” were distributed on a partisan basis that favored Democrats.
- The CTCL is sending operatives to local elections offices, examining practices and equipment, and acquiring the sorts of data coveted by political campaigns.
- Despite public claims of transparency, the center has refused to provide basic information about its operations.
- In response to concerns about the private money, 24 states and 12 counties have sought to prohibit elections offices from accepting it.
- But Democratic governors in three of the states – Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Michigan – overrode legislation banning it, stoking more concern that the grants are a ruse for partisan infiltration of elections offices.
Police inaction over firebombings and other attacks on pro-lifers has forced abortion opponents to take up the work of law enforcement by hiring their own private investigators, James Varney reports for RealClearInvestigations:
- CompassCare, whose Buffalo, New York, pregnancy clinic was firebombed, has teamed with the Thomas More Society, a libertarian legal nonprofit in Chicago, to hire their own P.I.'s.
- Neither group would identify the investigators hired nor give details on their numbers and duties.
- There have been 161 attacks on pro-lifers since the leak of the Supreme Court draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade last May.
- The step to hire the investigators comes at a time when many, especially on the right, are warning of the politicization of justice.
- They point to the armed raid of ex-president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and the SWAT team arrest of Trump adviser Roger Stone -- contrasting those heavy-handed tactics with police leniency toward the George Floyd rioters of 2020 and smash-and-grab retail thieves nationwide.
- Abortion foes accuse the Justice Department of one-sided enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. Dozens of anti-abortion activists were charged last year, chiefly for alleged offenses in previous years.
- Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told RealClearInvestigations that pro-life groups "have been left with no other option because of the blatant politicization of the Biden FBI and the Justice Department.”
In RealClearInvestigations, Richard Bernstein examines the striking public reluctance to even mention the ethnicity of antisemitic attackers unless they are white -- even though attacks by blacks and other minorities appear to have risen dramatically. Reason: Attention to such hate crimes doesn’t conform with the narrative of white “systemic racism.”
Bernstein writes:
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A groundswell of antisemitism has received wide notice across the country in recent years, but police authorities are vague about or don’t report the ethnicity of the perpetrators – although available evidence indicates many are young black men.
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Instead, media and politicians from President Biden on down have described antisemitism as almost entirely a sub-species of white racism, invoking the rioters in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, or the 2018 synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh.
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Rationalizations can be strained: When billionaire black rap entrepreneur Ye, formerly Kanye West, went antisemitic last year, black activist Shaun King explained in Newsweek, “you don’t have to be white to be a white supremacist.”
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There’s a new term for the underplayed hatred: “inconvenient antisemitism.”
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At universities, Jews are increasingly targeted, but on campus the explanation -- or excuse -- is leftist opposition to Israel’s policies.
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Assaults against Jews increased by 34% between 2021 and 2022, the Anti-Defamation League reports. It says the number of Americans “harboring extensive antisemitic prejudice” has reached “the highest level in decades.”
