Our support for reparations, explained

The Friday Letter / No. 434 / Good Friday / Easter on Sunday / Passover ends at sundown Sunday

This is a risky but critically important stand. We support reparations.

Last August, Black Lives Matter rioters caused at least $60 million in damage in Chicago when they burned and looted local businesses. They injured 13 police officers.

“I don’t care if someone decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store, because that makes sure that person eats,” said Ariel Atkins, a BLM organizer. “That makes sure that person has clothes. That is reparations. Anything they wanted to take, they can take it because these businesses have insurance.”

And you wonder why we can’t reason with Chicago voters, why they always vote for Democrats?

In February, Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee – mired in a fierce, perpetual battle with Rep. Maxine Waters for the title of stupidest Member of Congress – introduced H.R. 40, which would transfer money from the pockets of people who had nothing to do with slavery to people who had never been slaves.

This is cemented in the Democrat Party platform. “White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday said the president supports the essence of the bill,” the Washington Times reports. “She would not say whether the president backs reparations.” Just for fun, let’s pretend he does.

If we pay reparations to people who were never slaves, it seems reasonable that somebody – that is, the party responsible – should pay reparations to people who are slaves today, slaves in the United States of America.

That somebody is the cartels that bring untold thousands of illegal aliens into the country at the invitation of Joe Biden and his puppeteers. They collect enormous fees and then sell their client/customers into slavery, especially children, when they can’t pay. If, by some weird configuration you get most of your news from the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR who also read the Friday Letter (probability 1:1411)),  you may be confused.

The radical Black Lives Matter arm of the Democrat Party wants you and me to write a check to people we don’t know to people whose ancestors – some but not all of them – were slaves. Not their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents, but people from more than a century and a half ago, people they didn’t know, either.

Any justifiable reparations should benefit actual victims. No descendant of a mid-19th century slave can make a valid claim of harm.

Such irony. A radical, Marxist presidential administration promises to pay reparations for the sins of its own political party while it openly invites foreign criminals to use our country as a marketplace for 21st century slave trading.

Broken windows, broken lives

A Superior Court judge in Moreno Valley, Cal., called Robert A. Luebs ruled that the punishment for two boys who murdered their middle school classmate will be 150 hours of community service because at age 13 they could not possibly have understood what they were doing. Somewhere we recall reading that a child begins to think logically at age 7, but we could be wrong. Maybe their mothers forgot to come clean about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.  

Society may never fully understand how a judge could make a ruling like that. It wasn’t as if three kids got into a playground scuffle and one of them knocked his head on the pavement. Diego Stolz had been bullied for a very long time, going back to the previous year in 7th grade. The guardians who raised him after his parents died complained repeatedly to the vice principal at Landmark Middle School, Kamilah O’Connor. She ignored their complaints. Eventually after one incident she suspended the future killers – for three days.

Of all the things that might enrage a parent, unpunished bullying has to be high on the list. School bureaucrats often dismiss this obnoxious behavior as part of the middle school experience, but in this case the consequences were catastrophic.

James Wilson and George Kelling introduced the Broken Windows concept in 1982. Disorder caused by minor crimes, they posited in a piece at the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University, “leads to increased fear and withdrawal from residents, which then allows more serious crime to move in because of decreased levels of informal social control.”

Serious crime declined in New York City in the 1990s after Rudi Giuliani told police to enforce minor laws like vandalism and public urination. All of that was erased when the leftists took over.

Ignoring broken windows led to mayhem last summer in Seattle, Portland, and other U.S. cities. Allowing ill-bred middle school boys to taunt a classmate for years with no response by the government school bureaucrats led to a homicide. If you have spent some time in public high school classrooms, as I have, you have to be nodding your head right now. You get it.

Diego Stolz’s aunt and uncle guardians filed a wrongful death suit against the Moreno Valley Unified School District. A report from KTTV-TV in Los Angeles says the asking price could reach $100 million.

Let’s hope so. Sometimes the only way to get a bureaucrat’s attention is to starve him. Shedding $100 million from the Moreno Valley Unified School District would be a good start, and parents could start looking elsewhere for ways to educate their children.

Short takes on the news

Kelly Tshibaka resigned as commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Administration to challenge anti-Trump three-term Senator Lisa Murkowski next year in the Republican primary,  bringing in several Trump campaign leaders and a Murkowski staffer. . . . CBS White House reporter Kathryn Watson isn’t asking many questions about Biden’s wealth destruction and redistribution scheme, but she’s determined to sniff out the guilty party – it’s either Major or Champ – who pooped in the hallway outside the Diplomatic Room. “It’s unclear which dog is responsible for it,” she tweeted. Expect a Pulitzer Prize nomination any day now. . .

Susan Rice will lead mail-in ballot drive

Susan Rice, Obama’s national security advisor and now Biden’s domestic policy chief, will lead the drive to strip states of their constitutional power to regulate their elections.

Working with congressional Democrats to enact H.R. 1, Rice will have charge of enforcing the proposed law’s unconstitutional provision that would allow nationwide mail-in voting, prohibit state laws that require signature matching on absentee ballots, and prohibit states from requiring any form of identification to vote. The House-passed bill is now before the Senate.

Rice is perhaps best known for her role in lying about the Sept. 12, 2012, attack on our embassy in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four American diplomats. Following the attack she went on five Sunday morning TV shows and falsely claimed that an anti-Muslim video was responsible for causing a spontaneous attack. In fact, the video had been seen by practically no-one, and the attack by the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Sharia was planned well in advance.

Rice also had a role in the exchange of five Islamic terrorist prisoners for a U.S. Army deserter who had been held five years by the Taliban.

Article 1 Section 4 of the Constitution gives the states exclusive power to regulate elections, and if H.R. 1 becomes law, it will surely draw a constitutional challenge. Mail-in balloting and so-named ballot harvesting – where election operatives gather blank ballots from unsuspecting, mostly elderly and uninformed voters and fill them out themselves – are major provisions of H.R. 1. They are seen as a way for Democrats to strengthen their hold on future elections.

Quotes for today

“This is a back door death tax.” – U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, to Hugh Hewitt
“The death tax Democrats are coming.” – Hewitt, in response