California's Mulling Over $220k 'Reparations' Payments For Black Residents

P. Gardner Goldsmith | December 6, 2022
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Many leftist policy positions are so bald-facedly absurd or grounded in collectivist hypocrisy that they’re “lay-ups” – easily refuted, easily exposed. Often, the people pushing them actually expose their own hypocrisy, such as can be seen with Canadian Prime Minister and Lockdown Lord of the North Justin Trudeau now doing a 180 and praising Chinese lockdown protesters, or leftist “journo” Naomi Klein slamming the Canadian Freedom Convoy participants a year ago, but praising the Chinese freedom fighters now. Any sign of a mea cupla? Any hint of trying to set things right with the people you’ve defamed, mislabeled, and worked to undermine? Are their fans at all ready to reassess their devotion to these hypocrites and reconsider their adherence to these destructive policies on the domestic front?

One might think this was a “lay-up” – but the answer is, NO – most are still buying the hyperbole from the hypocrites. Likewise, one would think that a new political scheme being pushed by California Governor Gavin Newsom would be a double-lay-up.

But, despite unconstitutionally locking down businesses and engaging in his own lockdown/mask hypocrisy after adopting the false guise of a “pandemic paladin,” Newsom still is embraced by many of his old fans. And, despite its absolutely baseless, immoral, and illogical nature, many of those same people are applauding his sparkling new push for the absurdity of so-called “reparations.”

Fox News’ Timothy Nerozzi reports that the California government could pay each black resident of the state $200,000 in what the politicians and their ideological kin call “reparations.”

In other words, the governor and his allies want to force taxpayers who never did anything wrong to hand over huge chunks of their earnings to the state, which then will hand that out to people who never were wronged by said taxpayers. This ought to be not just a lay-up, but, to further the basketball parlance, this is a slam-dunk.

Yet, it’s got a lot of backers, and Newsom is, again with the basketball terms, trying to drive with it to the hoop.

“Newsom has aggressively pushed his plan to provide financial reparations to Black Californians whom he says must be financially compensated for decades of discrimination.

The California Reparations Task Force says that under the initiative, qualifying Black residents in the state could qualify for $223,200 per person.”

Really? Upon what is this “Task Force” basing its claim of “discrimination” and then calculating the compensation, not to mention the larger question of how they can prove that already-preyed-upon taxpayers are at fault?

Nerozzi continues:

“The task force drew its ballpark number by examining gaps in housing and speculating the approximate amount of wealth lost between 1933 and 1977. The state panel says that Black Californians lost $5,074 per year under previous housing policies.”

So, this is tangentially about slavery, and its “legacy” in, what? California entered the union as a Free State. Are we talking CA government policies regarding housing? Which policies would those be? Property tax policies that have enslaved people? Zoning policies that always restrict the rights of property owners to peacefully use their land and make it hard for new housing units to be affordable? Or would that be the recent Newsom-pushed and passed policy of forcing new homes in CA to be fitted with solar panels, which also puts cost burdens on new home construction?

Or… are they making their claim based on what they might deem “insufficient” welfarist policies that haven’t already taken “enough” from some to create low-rent or free housing for others?

Related: Majority of Americans Reject Dem Slavery Reparations Agenda, Poll Reveals | MRCTV

It’s all in an “interim task force report” that, itself, is very ambiguous. But one theme emerges for those who apply a bit of logic to their observations. Which is the fact that this policy, itself, is racist. First, it assumes that CA residents who are “descendants of free or enslaved Black people in the country at the end of the 19th century” all are part of one mass, not individuals.

As I have noted for MRCTV, tort law is based on British Common Law, and, according to the Common Law, a tortious claim of injury is individual-specific, person-to-person. Even if groups of people try to make claims under the “class action” model that contemporary western nations have devised, each member of a group/class suit must show that he or she belongs in the group being represented – each must show he or she has been harmed.

Being the grandson or nephew of a person who was “harmed” by slavery – and even being descended from someone who was FREE at the end of the 19th Century is, under this proposal, a justification to claim specific victim status?

Sorry. No.

Moreover, this “task force” says it is justified to claim “victim” status based on the California government’s nebulous narrative of “insufficient” housing for a living black person or his or her ancestors going back to the late 1800s? Why just that skin color? What about Chinese immigrants? What about folks from Mexico, or Hawaii?

And that brings us to the second major problem. Beyond the fact that none of these potential “recipients” of “reparations” was injured and, therefore, cannot be made whole through these fictitiously termed “reparations”, there is the fact that, even if one were to believe that the descendants of slaves deserve to have the state make slaves out of people today, such that these new slaves – the taxpayers – will hand over big sums of cash for things they never did, the history of slavery is such that virtually every individual in any race can claim that, at one time or another, his or her ancestors were enslaved or preyed-upon.  Where does this “original sin” for slavery concept end?

As Dr. Thomas Sowell has noted:

“Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.”

And, thanks to Sowell and other scholars, more Americans have become aware of the likely etymology of the very term, “slave”, as AtlasofEnslavement notes:

“(A) large number of Slavs are said to have been captured in battles with armies from the Eastern Roman Empire and taken away as slaves. From the 9th century on, the name of the people and the legal status became mixed. The name of the Slavs may have been given to slaves as a result of the long-distance slave trade. According to this theory, this trade increased significantly in the early Middle Ages, when large numbers of Slavs were ‘on the market’.” 

So, regardless of the publicity, regardless of the soft way so many pop media outlets might spin this Newsom scheme, it’s absolutely obvious that this is just a redistribution of wealth operation, enslaving some to hand cash to others.

In fact, since California is expected to have a return of its massive deficit next year, this slavery will become more evident… as newborns arrive into a state where they will be part of a giant, government-run plantation, working to pay Newsom and their masters, who already have decided for them that they are the “bad guys” who harmed others before they even were conceived.

Related: Rumble Of Reparations: Several Cities Make Moves On Reparation Measures | MRCTV

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