The next generation will have its own conceptions of liberty. It will interpret the principles of the Constitution, enduring as they are, differently than this generation has interpreted them. Change is unstoppable. And to the extent Bruen and decisions like it try to stop that change, they will not last long. The only question is how long the People will let them remain.
– Judge Carlton Reeves
United States v Bullock
This week’s featured post is “Courts are still in session“.
This week everybody was talking about the heat
July 4 and 5 weren’t just hot days, and they didn’t just set records for the highest global average temperature ever recorded. They were the hottest days in the last 125,000 years.
And the problem isn’t just the heat, it’s how fast the climate is changing. Here’s the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s graph of the last 2,000 years’ global temperatures relative to some long-term average.
The speed is important: If the climate changes over thousands or tens of thousands of years, species can migrate and interbreed and adjust. But if the same change happens over 100 years, many will just go extinct.
and court decisions
The featured post covers the injunction against Biden officials communicating with social-media companies, a Mississippi judge’s argument against originalism, and an appellate court letting Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care take effect.
In addition, more commentary on last week’s Supreme Court rulings has appeared.
The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer exposes “The Most Baffling Argument a Supreme Court Justice Has Ever Made“: Clarence Thomas’ concurrence in the decision that struck down affirmative action.
Being an “originalist”, Thomas has to align his interpretation of the 14th Amendment — that it’s colorblind and does not allow race-conscious laws — with the same Congress’ reauthorization of the Freedman’s Bureau to look out for the interests of the former slaves.
To square this circle, Thomas insists that the term freedmen was a “formally race-neutral category” and a “decidedly underinclusive proxy for race.”
Thomas is correct that not all Blacks in the former Confederacy had been slaves (only about 90%, Serwer says; today, not all Black people are applicants to universities). But since only Black people could have been enslaved, everyone understood that a “freedman” was Black. So Congress did indeed pass a law to help Black people.
[Thomas’] efforts at reconciliation ultimately illustrate the extent to which “originalism” is merely a process of exploiting history to justify conservative policy preferences, and not a neutral philosophical framework.
Which is more or less the same thing I was saying last week.
You might expect that this responsibility to read the text closely would limit the power of judges to insert their own views into the law, but as practiced by the current justices, it does the exact opposite. Understanding how words were commonly understood at some point in the past is a job for historians, and the justices are not historians. Nor do they typically respect the consensus of the people who are historians.
Instead, we are treated to excursions into history that — voila! — always reach the desired result. If you’ve ever delved deeply into history yourself, you should understand how unlikely this is. History, researched honestly, frequently jars your preconceived notions. But the conservative justices are never jarred off their favored course.
Like almost every other week, there’s a new story about Clarence Thomas living the high life, and his rich “friends” footing the bill.
Jamelle Bouie points out something significant in John Roberts’ opinions in race cases: He never talks about racism itself.
I want to highlight Chief Justice Roberts’s avoidance of racism as a prime example of “racecraft,” the term coined by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields to describe the transmutation of a set of actions (racism) into a set of qualities or characteristics (race).
Racecraft, the Fieldses write in “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America,” “transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.”
Linda Greenhouse takes a long-term look at what John Roberts has accomplished for conservatives:
To appreciate that transformation’s full dimension, consider the robust conservative wish list that greeted the new chief justice 18 years ago: Overturn Roe v. Wade. Reinterpret the Second Amendment to make private gun ownership a constitutional right. Eliminate race-based affirmative action in university admissions. Elevate the place of religion across the legal landscape. Curb the regulatory power of federal agencies.
These goals were hardly new, but to conservatives’ bewilderment and frustration, the court under the previous chief justice, the undeniably conservative William Rehnquist, failed to accomplish a single one of them.
18 years later, Roberts has achieved them all.
In the featured post, I compare the ambiguity of the social-media injunction to that of anti-critical-race-theory laws, where the proposed applications of the law seem at odds with its text, leaving teachers wondering what is actually legal.
The problem is that it’s almost impossible to interpret anti-critical-race-theory laws so that they simultaneously
- make sense
- apply to something real.
A recent flap in Oklahoma illustrates the point: Given Oklahoma’s anti-CRT law, can schools teach about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which White mobs invaded a prosperous Black suburb, massacred hundreds of people, and burned 35 blocks of buildings?
Yes, says state superintendent of schools Ryan Walters, but only if you do it right. I quote at length here to be scrupulously fair to Walters:
I would never tell a kid that because of your race, because of the color of your skin, or your gender or anything like that, you are less of a person or are inherently racist. That doesn’t mean you don’t judge the actions of individuals. Oh, you can. Absolutely, historically, you should. ‘This was right. This was wrong. They did this for this reason.’ But to say it was inherent in that because of their skin is where I say that is Critical Race Theory. You’re saying that race defines a person.
Several commentators interpreted Walters as saying that the massacre wasn’t really about race, or at least, that we shouldn’t tell the kids that it was. That would be a crazy point for Walters to be making, but that’s not how I read his words.
To me he seems to be saying that teaching about the massacre only goes wrong if you teach that the White rioters were driven to violence by some inherent flaw in their DNA, i.e., some racist gene that White students in the class likely share. (My initial reading seems consistent with the way Walters followed up: “I am referring to individuals who carried out the crime. They didn’t act that way because they were White, they acted that way because they were racist.”)
So if I make that interpretation, I have to agree with him: Blaming some inescapable quality of whiteness would be a terrible way to teach the massacre. It might even convince some White kids that they are “less of a person” because of “the color of their skin”. So in my interpretation, Walters’ answer passes the “make sense” requirement.
But then we hit the second horn of the dilemma: Has anyone in the entire history of Oklahoma schools ever taught the massacre that way? Has any teacher ever told his or her class that White people are genetically inclined to massacre Black people? I haven’t read every anti-racism book out there, but I’ve read a lot of them. And I’ve never seen anything like that account of white-on-black violence.
Summing up: If you define CRT in such a way that it’s obviously objectionable, then your ban doesn’t ban anything that is actually taught. Conversely, if you define CRT so that it applies to things that are actually taught, then it’s not all that objectionable.
Teachers, principals, and superintendents don’t want to take the risk of interpreting the laws literally, because that means the legislature was just wasting its time and didn’t actually intend to ban anything. And so they are left to imagine what the law will mean in practice, and to self-censor accordingly.
and Moms for “Liberty”
You probably didn’t pay much attention to the Moms For “Liberty” national summit in Philadelphia a little over a week ago, which drew most of the top Republican presidential candidates, including Trump and DeSantis.
One night’s keynote speaker was less famous: right-wing talk show host Dennis Praeger. But I think this quote explains a lot:
God made order out of chaos, and the left is making chaos out of order. The notion that there is no such thing as a male or a female human being is chaos. It is a gigantic lie, but it is more than a lie, it is chaos. … [O]rder reflects God, the Creator.
One of the things I always wonder, when MFL-type people respond with near-violent anger to trans youth or drag queens or some other manifestation of gender ambiguity is “Why do you care?” If somebody you perceive as a guy wants to express his liberty by wearing a skirt or eye shadow, or holding hands with another guy, what’s it to you? How does that ruin your day?
I think the Praeger quote explains it: An authoritarian world with clear rules and clear categories comes with an implicit promise of safety for those who obey and conform. So that nonbinary kid on the subway whose gender you can’t quite identify — it’s not that they’re going to attack you themselves. It’s that they represent a crack in the “safe” world order, a manifestation of Chaos. And as those cracks grow, who can predict what demons will spill into the world?
Of course, obedience and conformity are the exact opposite of the Liberty the group is supposed to stand for. But I guess Moms For Obedience and Conformity just doesn’t have the same ring.
Anyway, this explains how Trump can say weird stuff like “Democrats hate God” — as he did in his conference speech — and not be sedated and sent to a mental ward for his own protection. It’s all part of the “spiritual warfare” that increasingly justifies right-wing violence.
Some background: MFL has largely followed the model of the Tea Party from 2009-10: a group organized around local chapters that can expand rapidly because it has access to large amounts of dark money, making it a blend of grassroots and astroturf. Peter Greene describes it like this:
While the movement is not exactly fake, it’s not exactly real, either. Conservatives who argue that this is just a grass roots groundswell are ignoring the deliberate moves made to ramp up this controversy, most notably by Christopher Rufo
Leading anti-wii groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education are operated by professional communications folks and seasoned political operatives, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t activated and harnessed actual anger and upset among people on the ground.
Historian Nicole Hammer places them in the tradition of 20th century right-wing women’s groups.
These mothers’ movements, from the WKKK, to massive resistance to Save Our Children, all relied on the image of mothers protecting children. But they were in service of a much larger political project: shoring up traditional hierarchies of race and sexuality. They were about motherhood and education, but as a means to an end. Moms for Liberty operates in precisely the same way, building on this century-long tradition. The book bans, the curricula battles, the efforts to fire teachers and disrupt school board meetings — little here is new.
and you also might be interested in …
Who could have anticipated this? Launching Trump’s “Truth Social” Twitter clone involved a securities fraud that has led to an $18 million civil settlement with the SEC. How does such a straight-shooting, tell-it-like-it-is guy keep winding up in the middle of fraud? Just bad luck, I guess.
In the previous section, I discussed the conservative tendency to see liberals as demonic. I confess I’m tempted to do something similar when I see articles like this one: “House Republicans target the Pentagon’s use of electric vehicles“.
The generals note some tactical advantages of electric vehicles: They’re quieter and cooler, so they’ll be harder for the enemy to detect.
But of course, electric jeeps and tanks would also make the world a better place by limiting carbon emissions, and that can’t be tolerated.
Paul Waldman interprets the “Freedom” Caucus’ attempt to expel Marjorie Taylor Greene: Greene and the Caucus have conflicting views on how to gain and wield power.
Soraya Chemaly discusses Josh Hawley’s book on masculinity, which I have not yet steeled myself to read. One trait I’m coming to appreciate in arguments is a willingness to restate what the opponent gets right, as Chemaly does here:
A recent study conducted by Equimundo Center for Masculinities and Social Justice indicates that Hawley’s onto something and identifies the important connection between manhood and a sense of purpose. While boys and men in America are diffusely struggling to understand masculinity and changing gender roles, the study finds, one cohort of boys and men is not struggling to find meaning: those with the most conservative and traditional beliefs.
The challenge, Chemaly rightly (IMO) observes, is to come up with a vision of male purpose that doesn’t assume male dominance, as traditional beliefs do. I mean, me-running-everything is a vision of my purpose that I can easily accept, but I don’t see why anyone else should accept it.
The increasing gender equality of recent decades has upset a vision of male purpose that relies on male dominance. One solution — Hawley’s (though he would probably deny it) — is just to undo it all and let men dominate again. That’s conceptually simple, but I can’t believe there’s nothing better.
and let’s close with something scenic
I love photo contests. It’s not just the beauty or poignancy of the image itself, but also the fantasy of traveling to exotic locations, finding the perfect spot, and knowing exactly when to push the button.
So while I have no idea who Prince Albert II of Monaco is, I am grateful to his foundation for establishing an environmental photography award. This year’s winners were announced last month. Here’s a shot of an ice cave in Iceland.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
You are sliding into left-wing extremism, Doug. It is fundamentally illiberal to judge a large group of people. It’s wrong to judge black people or white people, or any people, in this way. Your compassion, your desire for justice, has been distorted to lead you to make this grave error.
It’s wrong to judge those people who committed a mass murder? Really.
Ah, the latest right-wing trope used to deny racism has found its way to TWS.
By denying that groups of people behave in ways that many of the members of those groups would not if they acted only as individuals in isolation, it’s a short step to deny that such a thing a systemic racism exists. Oh, sure, there’s an actual racist or two still wandering around, but the general environment of racism which motivates the mob to group behavior is rendered a fiction, and thus there’s no need to for political solutions to address it.
There’s a grave error here, all right, but it’s not being made by the editor of this site.
Yes Thomas Paine is right. Two wrongs does not make right. Skin color is irrelevant it’s a protection against ultraviolet harmful rays of the sun and in the Arctic was not needed but in Alkebulan Africa was needed.
Finnic people were white but colonized by Swedish King Erik and British Bishop Henry 1153 then lost to Russian Tsar 1809 who had slavery until 1853 and exported to Iran and Turkey.
Egyptian Arab general sold female black slaves and black boy eunuchs to Harems of Fellow Arab Muslims.
Slave name came from “Slav” when tribal wars created prisoners sold as slaves in the mediterranean.
Let’s set the record straight. Colonizing anybody by force was wrong and inhumane but we have more human trafficking today than the slavery back then before Britain and France, America and Russia and others abolished it, regardless of who owned or who was owned.
Having visited more than 150 countries we 8% of 8 billion Nato countries live a life the 92% can only dream about and Gallup says 70% wants to move of them 3 billion here.
All Abrahamic religions have been tools to control, and yes white colonialists indeed saw color of skin as inferior intellectually and otherwise.
Science had proved that up to 80% intellect is inherited giving advantage to the people who were educated and nurtured earlier, but as brain is complex, a child can inherit only the IQ components of parents and grow up much smarter than their parents.
NYU study just showed that Omega 3 fatty acid fish oil given to any pregnant mothers increased IQ component and learning languages, reading books as well and parental engagement increased IQ also and we know two parent families result in better lives for their children.
I posit a healthier diet and parental choice of better education, better living conditions and conditions of two parent engagement will in two generations make America great for everybody regardless of origin religion and skin color.
The generation born after 1993 are mostly color blind and inclusive, there will always be evil racists like Communist China harvesting body parts of Falun Gong.
I’m confused both by your response and by Melissa’s response to you.
What part of what Doug wrote on this post is leading you to your conclusion?
There is no discussion about “whites” or “blacks” or “jews” or “gays” or “asians” or any other large group, that ends well. Those are labels not people, and refer to enormous heterogenous groups of individual people with both good and bad within them, with personal and historical pressure both for and against them. There is no philosopher in history (although perhaps a few racist theologians) who have asserted a principle of justice where one can judge guilt based on skin color. The last time such an idea was taken seriously in the west – blood libel against the Jews – it led to pogroms. The Enlightenment stopped this, and here we are undoing that progress.
This willful ignorance of what wokism is, what it wants, what it stands for, what it opens up, scares me. Muder says he doesn’t know of anyone who teaches black history in a way that alienates and demonizes white children. It’s common. It’s a big part of today’s extreme left, which is becoming more mainstream. Good people of all identities are scared to speak out against this lest they be called “racist” or “uncle tom” etc. See below for an example.
I don’t speak just in defense of unfairly maligned white people. I also speak in defense of minorities (of which I am one) who’s best defense against racism is the simple, color-blind, fair principle that RACISM IS WRONG. You are justifying racism itself every time you attack people for being “white”, and I daresay that pendulum is going to swing back, hard. I am Jewish, and I was bullied by racists in school. Now I’m “white” and get bullied by leftists. And now my children are likely to be degraded and dehumanized by woke leftist teachers in public school. I cannot express how angry this makes me.
https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/supreme-court-affirmative-action-ruling-white-guilt-rcna92063
If demonizing white children is common, maybe you could give an example.
South Africa after Mandela
What type of evidence will you accept? If I give news reports, they will inevitably be from Fox and the Daily Mail, and you’ll reject them as biased. Even if you do accept them, you’ll say that it was a fluke, a one-off and the ideology was misunderstood by those individuals. You’ll say it was anecdotal.
Ironically, ALL of these objections could have been used (and I daresay were) by segregation apologists in the 50’s and 60’s. (“Show me a black school that’s less than a white school!”)
You do not respond to my link to Ja’han Jones’ screed, published on MSNBC, stating outright that affirmative action is about white guilt. Do you believe that these ideas about whiteness somehow stops applying below a certain age, and that people who agree with him think that kids shouldn’t feel guilty for who they are? Do you think these ideas are not shared by lots of people, especially young, recent graduates from ivy league schools?
You’re like a moderate in 30’s Germany saying, “Yeah, I know the Nazis are anti-semites, but what examples are there of discrimination against kids in school?” It is sufficient to show the ideas have entered the zeitgeist, and you can assume they are popping up everywhere.
https://summit.news/2022/02/02/teacher-made-white-elementary-school-children-apologize-to-black-kids-for-their-skin-color/
BBC 4 teaching kids about privilege https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I3wJ7pJUjg
Aba and Preach reacting to “What are we doing to white people” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPmTbB690dw This one is about the zeitgeist, not about kids in particular.
Try doing a google search for “demonizing white kids” yourself.
Frankly, I feel dumb for writing this. I feel like I’ve been had. Like the Trumpian who asks, “When did Trump lie, even once?” or who demands “Prove me wrong” when they claim Trump is the best President ever. It takes 10x the effort to refute BS claims and when you fall for it, they win.
Chances are, you’re just going to ignore this, or write a single line response, probably calling me a racist. Because if you do anything other than that you risk apostasy, being called a heretic, er I mean racist, and nothing could be worse than that.
I’m not familiar with post-Mandela South Africa, but I was hoping for an American example, i.e., something anti-CRT laws would prevent.
It seems you deleted my comment where I provided examples.
Josh, Not intentionally. Comments with numerous links go into a queue for approval, and I often forget to check it. It’s been approved now.
Josh, Thanks for the examples. At least I have some idea now what you’re talking about.
I can’t say I’m convinced, though. The making-white-kids-apologize example is cringey, if it really happened that way. Parents summarizing their kids’ summary of what happened in class is often not particularly reliable. And there are always going to be individual teachers who go overboard in any direction, so even if that example happened, I’m not convinced such exercises are “common”. Teachers who assign that kind of exercise should get corrected by their principals; I don’t see the necessity of passing laws to stop them.
I’ll tell you what kind of example would impress me that this is a real problem: if popular books about teaching anti-racism recommended doing that kind of exercise. That’s what I’ve looked for and haven’t found.
The BBC example doesn’t alarm me at all. That seems like a reasonable exercise to communicate what the concept of “white privilege” means. I don’t think the white kids are being demonized by it.
Cringey? Teaching children to hate themselves and each other because of race is “cringey”? This double-standard of yours is transparent, and insofar as mainstream progressivism embraces overt racism directed at white people, I daresay it threatens the entire movement. Which is too bad, because socialized healthcare and reduced military spending sounded nice. If every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings, every time a progressive attacks white people for their race, or covers for someone else doing that, a moderate has been pushed to the right. Because if I’m given a stark choice between embracing fools who love fascists, or fools who hate my kids because of their race, I’ll pick the fascists. And I think most parents will make the same decision if push comes to shove. If I had to guess, I’d say that the best way to usher in a “Handmaid’s Tale” dystopia is exactly this: push an ideology so abhorrent to white people and men that even the moderate white men say “Enough!” and start pushing back by joining the only opposition that exists. It is sad, dangerous, and totally unnecessary – if only moderates like yourself would grow a pair and stand up against these racist ideas.
As for the BBC video – the metaphor is rotten. And I bet the effect is awful too. If the metaphor was accurate, then the East India Company would be the largest company in the world; the Sumerian Empire would be the biggest and most dominant government; and so on. Being in the lead doesn’t mean you’re in the lead forever; things change, of their own accord. And the stark fascist undercurrent of that example – the woman standing there doling out privilege or taking it away – goes unmentioned. It ignores the simple truth that this view of the world is racist to its core, and the people who want to change the world to correct injustice are assigning to themselves the power to give and take as they see fit. None of it makes sense, and I feel as helpless and hopeless as I did when Trump came to power. I cannot understand how so many smart, caring, capable people can be taken in by utterly detestable people or ideologies.
I’m done now. I’m blocking your website (for myself) and never coming back. I wish you luck.
I’ll assume you’re not listening any more, but in case you are: It’s a shame you can’t discuss this topic without hyperbole. I have still zero examples of people who “hate my kids because of their race”.
Climate
The precession of the equinoxes are coming to a midpoint in March 2100 and 12,960 years later Polaris will be replaced by Vega as the North Star.
These 25,920 year long cycles of wobbling of our planet puts pressures on the rifts between the tectonic plates, where many of the known 20,000 sea floor volcanoes are located, act as vents of heat emissions that affect the climate again like it once did 13,000 years ago, when 14,500 to 13,000 the Antarctic Cold Reversal Climate Change resulted in worldwide floods and Tsunamis.
Britain became an island nation losing its land connection to Europe.
Indias first civilization sank into the Arabian Sea.
In China a long population gap resulted and in America indigenous civilization in both north and south were destroyed.
In 2023 a new technology submergible took pictures under the “Doomsday Glacier” in the Antarctic and proved it was melting from underneath, thus not by the human caused CO2 emissions that makes this natural phenomena worse.
Rationally only replanting a large area with trees and alternating food crops to absorb this CO2 food of vegetation, like the Sahara Malala plan suggest can impact it.
The raw-materials for batteries for electric cars already pollutes and harms in Africa more than the climate, as does NY shipping plastic to China to be recycled that is dumped in the sea there in Asia.
Most Scotus decision are 9-0 > 40
Vote Coalitions
Supreme Court Decision Terms, 2000-2016
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
9-0
8-1
7-2
6-3
1.
5-4
8-0
Coalitions
7-1 6-2 5-3
Grandma told me two wrongs does not make one right.
My twenty years of history research and travels has made it clear that 2,500 years of history is a big lie and 4,000 years of Abrahamic religions was used to perpetuate the lie by colonialist the last 500 years.
My own white ancestors were slaves under the Russian Tsar. The fact that the ice age had covered Europe until 19,000 years ago it had left it as an empty area for everybody to claim and the most ruthless became the kings and popes.
But should the white pigmentation be reason to blame me for what a Muslim Arab Egyptian general 632 did when ruthlessly capturing black slaves to ship women and live castrated boys as eunuchs to fellow Muslim to their harems? Or what a Portuguese shipper did getting these slaves in Africa from one place to another and then to Brasíl? How could my ancestors as slaves themselves in the russian empire have stopped this?
How could the wealth of the direct ancestors of that general or sea captain be today retrieved and did the ancestor have any way to stop great grandpa from being inhumane?
Instead we should look forward – at a wealthy western world buy Sahara, plant trees to absorb CO2 and food crops to export without duties to the west and create jobs for Africans and give all suppressed people a share of equity in this company as compensation?