[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 27 January 2020 10:47.
Christopher Caldwell: America’s two constitutions — since the ‘60s, competing visions of a more perfect union
Christopher Caldwell, author of the book ‘The Age of Entitlement,’ says Democrats and Republicans have two different conceptions of what the country is about. Fox News, 27 Jan 2020:
Not long after he left the White House, Bill Clinton gave what is still the best description of the fault lines that run through American politics. “If you look back on the ’60s and on balance you think there was more good than harm, you’re probably a Democrat,” he said. “If you think there was more harm than good, you’re probably a Republican.”
What could he have meant by that?
Though Americans are reluctant to admit it, the legacy of the 1960s that most divides the country has its roots in the civil rights legislation passed in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It was enacted in a rush of grief, anger and overconfidence — the same overconfidence that had driven Kennedy to propose landing a man on the moon and would drive Lyndon Johnson to wage war on Vietnam. Shored up and extended by various court rulings and executive orders, the legislation became the core of the most effective campaign of social transformation in American history.
This campaign was effective both for its typically American idealism and for its typically American ruthlessness. It authorized Washington to shape state elections, withhold school funds, scrutinize the hiring practices of private businesses and sue them. It placed Offices of Civil Rights in the major cabinet agencies, and these offices were soon issuing legally binding guidelines, quotas and targets. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, business and political life to direction from judges.
Americans assumed that solving the unique and extraordinary problem of segregation would require handing Washington powers never before granted in peacetime. In this they were correct.
But they were also confident that the use of these powers would be limited in time (to a few years at most), in place (to the South), and in purpose (to eliminating segregation). In this they misjudged, with fateful consequence for the country’s political system.
Civil rights law may have started off as a purpose-built tool to thwart the insidious legalism of Southern segregation and the violence of Southern sheriffs. It would end up a wide-ranging reinvention of government.
After the work of the civil rights movement in ending segregation was done, the civil rights model of executive orders, regulation-writing and court-ordered redress remained.
This was the so-called “rights revolution”: an entire new system of constantly churning political reform, bringing tremendous gains to certain Americans and — something that is mentioned less often — losses to many who had not necessarily been the beneficiaries of the injustices that civil rights was meant to correct.
The United States had not only acquired two codes of rules (two constitutions), as people rallied to one code or the other, they also sorted themselves into two sets of citizens (two countries). To each side, the other’s constitution might as well have been written in invisible ink.
Civil rights became an all-purpose constitutional shortcut for progressive judges and administrators. Over time it brought social changes in its wake that the leaders of the civil-rights movement had not envisioned and voters had not sanctioned: affirmative action, speech codes on college campuses, a set of bureaucratic procedures that made immigrants almost impossible to deport, gay marriage, transgender bathrooms.
In retrospect, the changes begun in the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the pre-1964 one would frequently prove incompatible — and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil-rights regime was built out.
Our present political impasse is the legacy of that clash of systems. Much of what we today call polarization” or “incivility” is something more grave. It is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the pre-1964 constitution, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators, and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation.
As long as the baby boom generation was in its working years, permitting the country to run large debts, Washington could afford to pay for two social orders at the same time. Conservatives could console themselves that they, too, were on the winning side of the revolution. They just stood against its “excesses.” A good civil rights movement led by the martyred Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been hijacked, starting in the 1970s, by a radical version that brought affirmative action and eventually political correctness.
But affirmative action and political correctness were not temporary. Over time they hardened into pillars of the second constitution, shoring it up where it was impotent or illogical, the way the invention of judicial review in Marbury v Madison (1803) shored up the first constitution.
Both affirmative action and political correctness were derived from the basic enforcement powers of civil rights law. And this was the only civil rights on offer. If you didn’t like affirmative action and political correctness, you didn’t like civil rights. By 2013, when Americans began arguing over whether a cake maker could be forced to confect a pro–gay marriage cake, this was clear.
The United States had not only acquired two codes of rules (two constitutions) —as people rallied to one code or the other — they also sorted themselves into two sets of citizens (two countries). To each side, the other’s constitution might as well have been written in invisible ink. Democrats were the party of rights, Republicans of bills. Democrats say, by 84 to 12 percent, that racism is a bigger problem than political correctness. Republicans, by 80 to 17 percent, think political correctness is a bigger problem than racism. The Tea Party uprising of 2009 and 2010, and its political mirror image, the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2015 and 2016, were symbols of that division.
Much happened this century to bring matters to the present boil. Barack Obama, both for his fans and his detractors, was the first president to understand civil rights law in the way described here: as a de facto constitution by which the de jure constitution could be overridden or bypassed. His second inaugural address, an explicitly Constitution-focused argument, invoked “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” — i.e., women’s rights, civil rights and gay rights — as constitutional milestones.
In this view, the old republic built on battlefield victories had been overthrown by a new one built on rights marches and Supreme Court jurisprudence. When Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote his decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 gay marriage case that was in many ways the culmination of this new rights-based constitution, he said as much.
The election of 2016 brought the change into focus. Today two nations look at each other in mutual incomprehension across an impeachment hearing room. It appears we are facing a constitutional problem of the profoundest kind.
KMG’s comments are helpful because he adds some clues about the relevant parties under discussion, which Kersey, being in the Jarod Taylor camp, would shy away from. We can then in turn, add the brackets.
Kathy Boudin gets mugged herself
KMG: I’ll introduce (((Chesa Boudin))). He is now the district attorney of San Francisco. Lets talk about his parents. His mother’s name is (((Kathy Boudin))); and she’s a convicted murderer. She was a member of The Weather Underground, formerly The Weathermen, which I suppose is the most notorious domestic terrorist group operating in the United States after the Second World War. She later became an adjunct professor at Columbia University. How about that? His father, (((David Gilbert))), is also a former member of The Weather Underground and a convicted murderer; and he’s still in prison.
So, this fellow, Chesa Boudin has now promised, according to Paul Kersey at V-Dare, to stop gang enhancements to stop criminals of color. It was the law in San Francisco that people who were arrested for serious crimes and had gang affiliations, that this meant a longer sentence for them, because the authorities were eager to bust gangs.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “one of Chesa Boudin’s first planned policy changes when he takes over as San Francisco’s District Attorney next month seeks to answer a question that has long ignited debates in this city:
Should people accused of crimes face harsher punishments if their actions allegedly benefited a street gang?”
Because Non-Whites Committing Violent Crime in California Frequently Are Gang Members, New San Francisco District Attorney Promises to Stop Gang Enhancements to Protect “Criminals of Color”
Previously on SBPDL:
San Francisco Chronicle Covers Up Black Violent Crime Epidemic in Six Percent Black City By… Blaming Whites for Low Clearance Rate in Black Homicides
“What I’m saying is that man had rights!”
Well I’m all broken up about that man’s rights.
— Dirty Harry
The new District Attorney of San Francisco has declared war on the criminal justice system. Why? All because the concept of law and order is, in his eyes, deemed to perpetuate “structural inequalities and white supremacy.”
When she returned to Berkeley, Fay “felt energized.” So did other returnees. Mario Savio, fresh from Mississippi, launched the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley that fall, kicking off the wider radical crusade of the 1960s. When the police began to clear Sproul Hall of protesting students in the early morning of December 3, Bob Treuhaft was the first one arrested; he had been called by Savio and arrived just in time for the bust. The Free Speech Movement—surprise—was every bit as Jewish as Freedom Summer. The occupiers of Sproul Hall held a Hanukkah service during the sit-in, and the biggest base of support for the radicals came from the Jews in the student body. Fay “relished seeing the Berkeley campus develop into a hotbed of Movement fervor.”[iv] The fact that it was a Jewish movement was presumably a source of pride for her, given her strong Jewish identity.
The arrestees called for legal help and Fay jumped into action. Her energy at times like this could be awe-inspiring, and the FSM members “secretly fell in love with her.”[v] Over the years, many people would describe Fay as attractive, intelligent, and generous, especially when she could immerse herself in a cause. She helped arrange for bail and performed other legal work in a blur of activity.
Shortly afterward, Fay held a Seder (a ceremonial Passover dinner) for SNCC personnel at her home. She “incorporated into it references to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement.” This was fitting because the Jews had invested heavily in the movement; indeed, they had generally succeeded in guiding the direction of the civil rights campaign from the time they initiated the NAACP in 1909.
Fay had another reason to feel good in the spring of 1965. She and Marvin reunited and leased a house in the Berkeley flats. They made their home a haven for movement friends, who were excited by yet another looming cause: the Vietnam War. (No rest for the wicked.) They plunged into an effort to help young men resisting the draft and others demonstrating against the war. Fay, Marvin, and their lawyer friends Peter Franck and Aryay Lenske set up the Council for Justice (CFJ) to provide legal services for the entire range of leftist causes. The Executive Committee of the CFJ included Beverly Axelrod, who would soon make Eldridge Cleaver famous.
The CJF didn’t last long, but not to worry; there is always another cause, another front in the war against White society. Sure enough, one soon appeared, one that carried a menacing—murderous, even—revolutionary swagger, so calculated to set Jewish hearts aflutter. Better yet, this group was Black, and so would be entirely dependent upon Jewish brains and money.
Eldridge Cleaver & Revolutionary Glorification of Black Criminality
In the wake of Freedom Summer and the racial rancor it generated within the civil rights movement, more pugnacious Blacks rose to ascendancy in SNCC and other civil rights organizations. Stokely Carmichael became chairman of SNCC in May 1966, and quickly repudiated civil disobedience. He embraced “Black Power” and Black separatism, and by the end of the year he expelled Whites from the SNCC. A position paper worked up to explain the move stated, “All White people are racists.”[x] Jewish revolutionaries were outraged; one cited Jewish support of civil rights organizations and their “strategic role in organizing and funding the struggle,” and concluded “it was clear to everyone that [Jews] were the primary target” of Carmichael’s new racial militancy. Jews can get awfully sensitive when their revolutionary proxies get it into their heads to steer their own way.
It was in this context that the Black Panthers appeared in the Bay Area in October 1966. The Black Panthers reviled the “White power structure” but were open to alliances with White radicals. Jewish leftists immediately connected with their movement. Advocacy for the Panthers would become the dramatic climax of Fay’s career. She would throw herself into the maelstrom of pro-Panther activism with total incomprehension of their true nature, just like many other Jewish revolutionaries.
We begin with Eldridge Cleaver, because his career was so largely a Jewish creation, and provides necessary background for Fay’s new endeavor. In 1966 Cleaver was doing time for attempted rape and attempted murder. His infamous predilection for violating White women would soon be broadcast by Jewish publicists. He read politics and history in prison, but his ideas crystallized upon reading George Breitman’s book, Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. Breitman, a Jew, depicted Malcolm at the end of his life as less a religious leader than a socialist revolutionary. “The Malcolm X of the Breitman book went far beyond seeing racism as a flaw in the hearts of the American people. It was endemic to the nation’s economic system, a necessary feature of capitalism. The whole structure had to go.” The book impacted Black inmates “like a lightning strike.” They now spurned mere reform or talk of civil rights; “[t]here was nothing to be gained by trying to fit in. The very structure of the society would have to be razed.” Cleaver was the inmate “who followed this line of thought most closely.” A Jew thus lit yet another spark for Black revolution.
From prison, Cleaver managed to contact Beverly Axelrod, a Jewish lawyer and veteran radical. He hoped that he could pay her legal fees with his writing, and she could win his parole. Axelrod smuggled forbidden literature into prison for Cleaver, and he gave her his numerous tracts, which she sent to Norman Mailer, whose 1957 essay “The White Negro” reminded more than one critic of Cleaver’s scribblings. With Mailer’s enthusiastic approval, she was able to get Ramparts magazine, soon to become the most prominent publication of the New Left, to publish selections. Robert Scheer, editor at Ramparts (son of a Russian Jewess and a German Gentile), also helped place Cleaver’s work in the magazine; his role would become big enough to earn the description of “perhaps the key person to launch the career of Eldridge Cleaver.”[xv] Eldridge Cleaver was a Jewish creation, and the Jews were on their way to replacing the SNCC as their controlled vehicle of social demolition.
In August 1966, Ramparts published Eldridge’s “Letters from Prison,” which included this famous passage: “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the White man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women.”[xvii] Whatever Beverly Axelrod thought of this passage, it didn’t stop her from falling in love with him. By the time she got him out on parole at the end of 1966, they were lovers and planned to marry. Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice came out in the spring of 1967. The book “whipped tough cultural observations in with a froth of sexual lore, and the result was a violence-steeped Maileresque Black sexual-political myth ” It featured letters to and from Beverly and was dedicated to her, “with whom I share the ultimate of love.” Jewish media sources received it rapturously; the Jewish critic Maxwell Geismar in his introduction to the book wrote that Cleaver was “simply one of the best cultural critics writing today.”
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 03 December 2019 00:34.
Fay Stender didn’t want to talk about it either.
“One aspect of Freedom Summer that still evokes very painful memories from many White participants is interracial strife, particularly concerning sex. This issue ties in with Fay Stender’s later career as prison reformer, as we will see. There was a great deal of sexual coercion on the part of Black men, who could be “persistent and aggressive,” with “scarcely veiled hostility.” At the orientation of the White volunteers….At the orientation of the White volunteers, a Black staff member had frankly warned of the possibility of rape: “The only way . . . a Negro man has been able to express his manhood is sexually and so you find a tremendous sexual aggressiveness . . .The White women went through sexual hell, hard enough in itself to discuss, but they also didn’t want to air atrocious Black behavior, which would tend to discredit the movement. Very few of them were prepared to reconsider the basis of their activism, so silence was their only option. When Fay Stender finished working for Black rights, she didn’t want to talk about it, either.”
The Life and Times of Fay Stender, Radical Attorney for the Black Panthers, Part 1
Fay Stender earned fame as a radical attorney in the 1960s and 70s, defending two of the most prominent Black Panthers in highly publicized court cases. During the course of her career in left-wing activism, she embraced numerous “causes” with a passion as flamboyant as it was unbalanced. She worked strictly within the stream of Jewish anti-White activism, but inside that framework her aims were random, a consequence of her peculiar personality. She displayed during the course of her work a toxic combination of Jewish radicalism, selfishness, ambition, egotism, and unrestrained female emotion. The blend eventually destabilized social institutions and got people killed.
Fay was the personification of psychological intensity, a classic marker of Jewish activism. Her personality traits were etched in bold lettering. People “who knew her intimately . . . regarded her as one of the most forceful persons they had ever met.” Her sympathetic biographer mentions her “extraordinary” ego, and even her husband was appalled by her “analytic, calculating ambition.” She was “deeply typical” of the radical movement, says a fellow 1960s leftist, “the paradigmatic radical—relentlessly pushing at human limits; driven to a fine rage by perceived injustices; searching for personal authenticity in her revolutionary commitments.” Like many subversives of the 1960s, she was also a strongly identified Jew, and consciously linked the supposed values of her Jewish heritage with her social activism.
Her life story is a revealing case study in Jewish activism.