Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘reparations’

Hugh Hewitt Op-ed: Ambitions, hopes, dreams, aspirations, boys playing girls’ sports, and reparations


By Hugh Hewitt Fox News | Published October 17, 2024, 5:00am EDT

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/ambitions-hopes-dreams-aspirations-boys-playing-girls-sports-reparations

Vice President Kamala Harris has so over-used her talking points about “growing up in a middle-class family” and about her “love of the American people and our “hopes, dreams, ambitions, and aspirations,” that they have become punch lines to jokes. That’s not a good macro-political sign for her presidential campaign. And neither are some of the numbers emerging from the smaller demographics she must have to win. One of those smaller units of the American electorate are the Arab Americans generally, and in Michigan specifically, and the news isn’t great for Team Harris there either. 

In early October, the Arab American Institute released its poll of Arab Americans on the upcoming presidential election. The “top line” takeaway was very surprising: “Trump and Harris [are] in a virtual tie with Arab American voters (42-41%), with 12% supporting third-party candidates.”

I asked former President Trump why he was doing this well with this demographic, especially at the same time as his support among Jewish Americans is increasing?

“Because I want to see everything get worked out,” he replied. “I want peace,” he continued. “I don’t want to see people killed. I want peace, and they [Arab Americans] know that. And the Jewish people know that. And both sides like it and know that I can get peace.”

Video

That’s a good answer, and perhaps it does account for a good chunk of some Arab Americans voting Trump, but the same poll revealed that when “asked to rank their top issues, the following were the top three for Arab American voters: jobs and the economy (39%), Gaza (26%) and gun violence (21%).” Turns out that this demographic cares the most about the same issue the entire electorate cares the most about: The economy. There was no cross-tab provided on how the 39% break down between Trump and Harris, but my guess is that, as with the electorate as a whole, Arab Americans who are worried about inflation and their jobs break for Trump.

NEW POLL SHOWS HARRIS, TRUMP SPLITTING TWO KEY STATES

Then there are the issues that very few pollsters ask about and which this poll didn’t. The first is “transgender rights” which can mean a lot of things to different people. But to at least many millions of voters it means this: Boys who identify as girls playing in girls’ sports and using girls’ locker rooms. The second issue not often polled is “reparations.” This issue was introduced into the campaign just this week when Vice President Harris was asked about reparations by podcaster “Charlamagne tha God” and the Democrat nominee declared the issue “needed to be studied.” 

Kamala Harris in Michigan
The Harris campaign has distanced itself from the controversy.  (AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

“Americans view the prospect of reparations mostly negatively,” according to a 2021 Pew Research Study. “Three-in-ten U.S. adults say descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, such as given land or money,” Pew reported. 77% of Black Americans support reparations while only 39% of Hispanic Americans and 33% of Asian Americans do. (Arab Americans were not broken out in the polling.)

What about the first issue mentioned above? A super-majority of all Americans—69% according to Gallup—believe that “transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender.” But the Biden-Harris Administration has proposed new Title IX rules that have been widely viewed as mandating the right of transgender athletes to compete in the sports reserved for the biological category they identify with. To most voters that probably means “boys who identify as girls playing girls sports.” 

While Harris has not spoken to this specific issue, she has adopted the very controversial position of taxpayer payment for prison inmates seeking to transition from one sex to another. (The Trump campaign has made Harris’s on-the-record support for these taxpayer payments part of their ad rotation.) 

It is a guess, but a safe one, that conservative family cultures of the sort typical for Arab Americans—Muslim, Christian or agnostic—largely reject both reparations for Blacks and the idea of biological boys playing in girls’ sports. 

That’s an informed guess because the Arab American Institute polling demonstrated that Arab Americans are in fact like most Americans on what matters most. Don’t be surprised when the post-election exit polling reveals that Arab Americans ended up supporting Trump in roughly the same percentage as all Americans and that they viewed Vice President Harris as simply too radical to take a chance on. 

Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM HUGH HEWITT

Category:

Opinion, Political

Tagged with:

California Scuttles Reparations Bills As Supporters Denounce a Political Bait-and-Switch


By: Jonathan Turley | September 3, 2024

Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/09/03/california-scuttles-reparations-bills-as-supporters-denounce-a-political-bait-and-switch/

We have previously discussed (here and here and here and here) the push for reparations in California that has been touted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats for years. After the Democrats campaigned on the issue in past elections, I wrote a column about how this bill had come due after years of delay for study and recommendations. The legislature, however, just stamped the bill “return to sender” and shelved the two reparations bills with the reported support of Newsom. The reaction is not surprising that there has been a bait-and-switch by Democrats on the issue.

Last week, the California legislature did approve proposals allowing for the return of land or compensation to families whose property was unjustly seized by the government and issuing a formal apology for laws and practices that have harmed Black people. However, the two bills to establish a fund for reparation payments – Senate Bills 1403 and 1331 – were tabled. State Sen. Steven Bradford blamed Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the result, stating that the governor made clear that he would veto them.

Newsom signed a $297.9 billion budget in June that included up to $12 million for reparations legislation. However, that is a drop in the bucket given the billions demanded and it is not clear how the money will be spent. Adding to the anger is the fact that the legislature approved a bill to allow undocumented persons to receive no-interest loans of up to $150,000 to cover down payments on new homes.

It is now unclear what will happen next, though sponsors are saying that they will continue to push for legislation green lighting reparation payments. Some congressional Democrats have pushed for similar federal reparations and passed a bill out of the House Judiciary Committee in 2021 that failed to receive a floor vote. BET founder Robert Johnson has called for $14 trillion in federal reparations.

As discussed earlier, there are a host of legal and practical questions over the reparation payments that will have to be resolved. Even with passage, the bills would likely face constitutional challenges.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

If Anybody Should Pay Reparations for Slavery, It’s The Democrat Party


BY: WINSTON BRADY | MARCH 06, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/06/if-anybody-should-pay-reparations-for-slavery-its-the-democrat-party/

Slave shackle
If anyone should pay reparations to black Americans for the injustices of slavery, it should be the institutions that preserved slavery’s legacy.

Author Winston Brady profile

WINSTON BRADY

MORE ARTICLES

The call for reparations attracts more supporters every day. Even Disney has joined the cause, weaving the issue of monetary payments to the descendants of slaves into a storyline on the “The Proud Family” series on the company’s streaming service. But what generated the most controversy was one episode in which the show’s protagonists perform a song entitled “Slaves Built This Country” after they discover the founder of their town was a slaveholder.

Setting their frustrations over racial injustice and hardship to music, the cartoon children sing that slaves “made your families rich from the southern plantation, to the northern bankers, to the New England ship owners, the Founding Fathers, former presidents, current senators.” Catchy though the song may be, the children leave out one prominent beneficiary of slavery, one in the best position to provide the reparations called for: the Democratic Party.  

One may argue for or against reparations on many different grounds. At its heart, supporters for reparations say that freed slaves never received any kind of compensation for their hardship from their owners. Thus, the descendants of slaveowners owe financial restitution to the descendants of their slaves, which would alleviate income inequality and atone for slavery, America’s “original sin.” Opponents of reparations argue one group of people, who did not commit the original wrong, should not be forced to make restitution to a group who indirectly received the wrong. From this angle, reparations seem more like “legal plunder,” a term coined by the French economist Frédéric Bastiat. Such an act “takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.”

But if the supporters of reparations are right and that some restitution must be made, it becomes obvious who should do it: the Democratic Party. Indeed, it is an objective fact that the Democratic Party is intimately tied to slavery and segregation. The Democratic Party was founded by Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, himself a slaveowner, and Martin Van Buren, a New Yorker who owned at least one slave and exploited enslaved labor. More importantly, Van Buren’s plan gained the support of southern politicians for his policies in exchange for his support of the “peculiar institution” of plantation slavery. Such politicians became so numerous they had a name: doughfaces, since their characters lacked all substance.

This pattern continued through the end of the Civil War and the early 20th century. After the Civil War, Democratic politicians in the southern U.S. supported segregationist policies that brutally infringed upon the rights and dignity of African-Americans. 

As a result of this history, the Democratic Party should provide reparations, not the descendants of one class deemed politically expendable. Still, you may say, “that was the Democratic Party of the mid-19th century. So much has changed since then that the current officeholders and politicians could not possibly bear any blame for what their forebears did.” This is true, but it is also true of the American people.

Today, the American people are not directly responsible for slavery, segregation, Indian removal (also Van Buren), and a host of other injustices for which prominent Democrats ask for reparations. Moreover, the American people are being forced to pay for more spending programs, up to and including reparations. How is it any fairer to ask the American people to accept another raise in their taxes to fix a problem the progenitors of the Democratic Party started? Shouldn’t that be at least acknowledged? 

They acknowledge institutionalized racism, but they entirely ignore the fact that they were the ones who institutionalized it. The Democratic Party, as a private institution, is in the best position to provide reparations for the evils of slavery and segregation they did so much to perpetuate. If the Democratic Party admitted its wrongdoing and offered financial compensation to the descendants of slaves, it would immediately remove reparations as a possible unwise and unreasonable expansion of government. Moreover, the Democratic Party, with its expansive network of donors and connections that includes local community and civic leaders, could far more effectively handle the distribution of reparations itself.

If the Democratic Party really wants to move the country past the legacies of slavery and segregation, it should acknowledge its role in promoting them. If there are any groups in the U.S. that should provide material assistance to black Americans to make amends for the injustices committed against them, it should be the institutions that committed those injustices. The Democrats, the self-proclaimed “party of the people,” and not the people of the United States themselves, should bear that cultural and financial responsibility.

Winston Brady is the Director of Curriculum and Thales Press at Thales Academy, a network of classical schools with campuses in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina. A graduate of the College of William & Mary, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Winston writes on the intersection of history, politics, and culture, as seen through the lens of classical wisdom and virtue. He lives in Wake Forest with his wife Rachel of ten years and his three boys, Hunter, Jack, and Samuel, all of whom will one day learn Latin.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Pocahontas Now Wants GAY REPARATIONS – No, This Isn’t Satire


Written by Wes Walker on June 24, 2019

URL of the original posting site: https://clashdaily.com/2019/06/pocahontas-now-wants-gay-reparations-no-this-isnt-satire/

It’s like they’ve looked at their rabid base and decided ‘whoever promises to give away the most free crap wins’… and now they’re desperate to outspend one another.

Well, since the Democrats have already promised to give away more money than the nation will ever see, why not add one more promise to the pandering pile?

A report by the Joint Committee on Taxation released Tuesday estimated that taxpayers who were in same-sex marriages prior to the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013 would be eligible for up to $57 million in refunds. Warren introduced a version of the bill in 2017.

Same-sex couples in nearly 10 states were permitted to legally marry on the state level prior to the Supreme Court’s 2013 United States v. Windsor decision, which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and permitted these couples to file joint federal tax returns.

At the time, the IRS said same-sex married couples could file amendments to their tax returns for the previous three years — the same amount of time for opposite-sex couples. However, gay couples in several states, including Warren’s home state of Massachusetts, had been legally married for more than three years before the Windsor decision.
Source: NBC

The fact that she’s making this promise in a State that had no safe drinking water when the Democrats were running the show only adds to the ridiculousness of her announcement.

With all the issues facing the nation at the moment — including nations from 52 countries having been apprehended slipping across the Texan border, unfunded liability obligations that are about to bite us in the ass, and a Congress that has weaponized their oversight capabilities in the service of the destruction of their political opponents, she is demonstrating the basic Leftist instinct — tack to the left and appease the outrage class.

Does she really believe this is THE burning issue that needs to be addressed? Or is she just desperate to make people forget that she’s the brunt of every “23-and-Me” DNA joke going.

And it’s just a ‘coincidence’ that she’s unveiling this announcement in June — right?

Sure it is.

Did she have any proposals about compensation being paid to groups that were unlawfully targeted and harassed by the IRS because they were the political enemies of the Obama Administration?

Of course not.

This is an exercise in kissing ass, politically speaking. Nothing more.

But maybe you see it differently. The comments are open.

Have at ‘er.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud