California governor Gavin Newsom has announced he plans to give $233,000 in reparations to each black Californian, at a cost of half a trillion dollars. This taxpayer-funded largess comes on the heels of California’s projected $25 billion budget deficit, with state revenue now 41% below expectations due in part to lost tax-revenues from rich residents––who pay half of state income taxes–– fleeing California’s 13.3%, the nation’s highest rate, on incomes over a million dollars.
Such fiscal fecklessness has long been a tradition in California. The reparation scheme, however, would be an irresponsible expenditure given the numerous other spending on progressive pet projects such as free kindergarten for 4-year-olds, stipends for transsexuals, and free health care for immigrants legal or illegal. And don’t forget the $1.5 trillion in public pension debt, and the white-elephant high-speed rail project that has already cost $105 billion since 2010, with completion nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, an ongoing water crisis, crumbling highways, mismanaged forests fueling wildfires, and a vulnerable electrical grid remain neglected.
But the larger issue is the incoherence and injustice of reparations per se. First, there’s the problem of who will receive the payments. Would the children of black immigrants, like Barack Obama or Kamala Harris, whose ancestors were not enslaved in America, be eligible? Isn’t their beef with the British? Will reparations be means-tested, or will the affluent be included in the largess? And what about mixed-race citizens. Will they get a reduced payout?
More important, the idea that people today, none of whom were enslaved, should be given taxpayer money from people who never owned a slave, is to regress to a more barbaric form of justice in which generations of descendants inherit the guilt of the malefactors. True justice is when “the doer suffers,” as Aeschylus put it, not his distant, multigenerational offspring. Making others pay for something they never did is the epitome of injustice.
Especially when they or their ancestors came to this country decades after slavery was ended. In the U.S. are millions of immigrants or descendants of immigrants who cannot justly be held responsible for American slavery. In California particularly, which entered the Union as a free state, there are 15.38 million ethnic Hispanics who emigrated from countries guiltless of American slavery, but who under Newsom’s reparations scheme would see their tax-dollars transferred to 2.25 million black Californians.
This redistribution from one group of citizens that never personally practiced slavery, to another that never personally endured it, would no doubt widen California’s growing ethnic divide. And it’s morally questionable for people to treat their ancestors’ sufferings, which they have never experienced, as a fungible asset to be exploited for their own interests, whether pecuniary or political.
Then there’s the question of who was responsible for developing the African slave trade. British “Royal Watcher” Hilary Fordwich recently was asked about the calls in Great Britain for the Royal Family to pay reparations for colonialism and slavery. Fordwich stunned CNN’s Don Lemon by asking in turn about the “supply chain” that provided the slaves purchased in Africa by Europeans. She also reminded Lemon that Great Britain was the first state to abolish slavery in 1833, and used the Royal Navy to enforce its ban on slave-trading. As Fordwich wondered, why aren’t the historical sellers of Africans into slavery as liable for reparations as the historical t buyers?
Of course, identity politics based on racial grievances doesn’t want to confront the more complex history of slavery, especially the Arab-Muslim slave trade that supplied the lion’s share of the human “inventory,” without which European slavery would have been considerably reduced.
Larry Elder a few years back raised this issue from an interview with Ghanaian professor John Azumah, author of The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa. Azumah summarized the reality of Arab-Muslim slavery:
“While two out of every three slaves shipped across the Atlantic were men, the proportions were reversed in the Islamic slave trade. Two women for every man were enslaved by the Muslims.
While the mortality rate of the slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as 10%, the percentage of the slaves dying in transit in the Tran-Saharan and East African slave market was a staggering 80 to 90%.
While almost all the slaves shipped across the Atlantic were for agricultural work, most of the slaves destined for the Muslim Middle East were for sexual exploitation as concubines in harems and for military service.
While many children were born to the slaves in the Americas, the millions of their descendants are citizens in Brazil and the United States today. Very few descendants of the slaves who ended up in the Middle East survived.
While most slaves who went to the Americas could marry and have families, most of the male slaves destined for the Middle East were castrated, and most of the children born to the women were killed at birth.
It is estimated that possibly as many as 11 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic, 95% of which went to South and Central America, mainly to Portuguese, Spanish and French possessions; only 5% of the slaves ended up in what we call the United States today.
However, a minimum of 28 million Africans were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East. Since at least 80% of those captured by the Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave markets, it is believed that the death toll from 1,400 years of Arab and Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been as high as 112 million.”
The point is not to mitigate Western slavery with a specious tu quoque argument. Slavery in any form is fundamentally evil, full stop. Race-based slavery made it even worse than it was in antiquity, where everybody was one kidnapping or lost war away from bondage. Rather, the point is to expose the selective outrage and politicization of slavery to serve partisan ends, all the while ignoring how the U.S. fought a bloody civil war to end slavery at the cost of 110,000 Union soldiers who died fighting it.
Azumah’s data complicate the simplistic melodrama of white America’s unique racist sins that fuels the reparations movement. This brings us to the political purpose of reparations––to serve the tendentious and empirically challenged idea of “systemic racism” that locates racism in social, economic, and political structures, and in cultural institutions that can never be reformed by human effort and will, but must be “fundamentally transformed,” always in a leftward direction.
Moreover, as Jason Riley summarized in the Wall Street Journal, this causal role given to slavery or “systemic racism” ignores the improvement in black lives that happened even before the Civil Rights movement and the end of Jim Crow segregations:
“Between 1890 and 1940, for example, black marriage rates in the U.S. where higher than white marriage rates. In the 1940s and ’50s, black labor-participation rates exceeded those of whites; black incomes grew much faster than white incomes; and the black poverty rate fell by 40 percentage points. Between 1940 and 1970—that is, during Jim Crow and prior to the era of affirmative action—the number of blacks in middle-class professions quadrupled. In other words, racial gaps were narrowing. Steady progress was being made. Blacks today hear plenty about what they can’t achieve due to the legacy of slavery and not enough about what they did in fact achieve notwithstanding hundreds of years in bondage followed by decades of legal segregation.”
The race-lobby must marginalize this real and measurable progress that the U.S. has made in dismantling legal segregation, which was actually systemic racism; protecting voting rights and providing opportunities for black Americans; and turning white supremacy into a toxic fringe belief with little national or even regional influence––not to mention black Americans’ remarkable achievements Riley catalogued. That improvement is why we have so many hate-crime hoaxes, something that wasn’t necessary back in the days of brazen racist violence and tyranny.
This truth about racial improvement is inconvenient for the those who profit politically and fiscally from keeping racial grievances and victimization alive. Hence complex history is turned into simplistic melodrama, and the decline in cultural and political white supremacy is obscured by lurid tales of a plague of “hate crimes,” police officers wantonly slaughtering black men, and racist “dog whistles.” Back in the day, racists didn’t need “dog whistles” to communicate their hate. To think that today racists are communicating in a verbal codes shared with other racists is itself proof of how marginalized racist beliefs have become.
But ignoring such facts neutralizes the troubling questions raised above about culpability for slavery and redress for its victims’ descendants. Slavery may be gone, race-tribunes admit, but occult racism is forever, as is the universal “white privilege” created by the “systemic racism” spawned by slavery.
Finally, we can wonder why deep-blue states like New York and California, and white progressives are so eager to push the reparations movement, especially in California, where progressive policies on energy, schools, and housing have reduced the black population to half the national average.
As usual, as well as virtue-signaling, cultivating and rewarding political clients may explain Newsom’s interest in promoting reparations. He is clearly planning on a run for president someday, and now that the Dems have replaced Iowa with South Carolina––a state that is 26% black–– as the site of the first primary election, reparations is a way to pander to that constituency, one of the Democrat party’s most critical. Just ask Bernie Sanders, whose second attempt to secure the Democrat nomination for president died in the South Carolina primary after Congressman Jim Clyburn endorsed Joe Biden.
Once again, to understand any policy, start by identifying who benefits. It certainly won’t be those it proclaims to help.
When Gavin Newsome gives HIS money to black people I will give mine.
When Gavin Newsom gives HIS money to black people, I will NOT give mine….that’s because I live in Idaho. Ha, ha ha, you stoopid Commiefornians!
Not all of us in CA are commies. Some of us are victims of our Dirtbagocrat government.
I no longer live in California. But if i did, just because Newsom wants to give money, he can go right ahead. But his plan is to give away Californian public money. So he will force everyone to give whether they agree or not.
Besides the obvious inanity of this, if it every happens the result will be for even more money when it fails to provide so call universal equity
I’m a California resident. California is broke. The reparations BS is all happy talk to gin up votes. Besides, where is any twosome Newsom going to get the money? Certainly not California residents who are already overtaxed.
If anyone should pay for this it should be democrat voters and particularly the rich and wealthy liberal hypocrites in this state. And for the record, California was never a slave state.
The US taxpayers will end up paying it.
No, you won’t. You and your ancestors weren’t responsible for their ancestors’ suffering and you owe them nothing. My own ancestors were too busy running away from Cossacks to have even heard of America or black people during the antebellum period; weren’t yours, too, or are you from a different branch of our family?
Hey, everybody, isn’t it obvious that the radical left is trying to do EVERYTHING they can to incite violence, from reparations to transgender madness to defunding the police to rampant homelessness to drag queen hours for kids to out-of-control violence and crime in blue cities to fiscal mismanagement to out-of-control illegal immigration to massive inflows of illegal drugs killing hundreds of thousands to to stolen elections and much, much more? It’s all being done on purpose.
The left wants conservatives to go nuts so they can lock them up like Jan 6 AND confiscate guns with some sort of emergency order because THEY HAVE CONTROL OF THE MILITARY AND THE DOJ. They are doing everything they can to provoke violence before the election.
We don’t have to have a civil war. We need snipers at ballot drop-off boxes during the night when it is plain Dems operatives are engaged in stuffing and ballot harvesting in the middle of the night. And we need snipers at trans demonstrations. Believe me, these Soros-paid criminals would disappear real fast after a couple get ta ken out. And we need a Night of the Long Knives because there are really a very small number of people pulling the levers of corruption never seen before in the history of our nation. We are seeing evil at an unprecedented level in the history of our nation. As the prophets warned in the Bible—-REPENT!
It’s never going to happen. They’re just humoring blacks to get their votes.
A friend of mine saw a bumper sticker a few decades ago in the deep South that said, “if we knew it was going to be this much trouble, we would have picked the cotton ourselves.”
lol! lol! lol! lol! lol!
I won’t. Screw Gaylord Newscum and all black racist parasites.
Gavin Newsom is a depraved psychopath.
The electorate in California are equally depraved and psychopathic.
The California demography has changed for the worse over the past 50 years.
Hopefully, a great earthquake, flood, and fire will simultaneously engulf California and take care of the situation …. permanenetly.
California is literally, figuratively, functionally and financially broke–period. So where is “Any Twosome Newsom” going to get the money? Who is he going to swindle, cheat or rob?
By the way, “Uncle Sugar”, the federal government for you folks in flyover country, is also broke so he can’t borrow the money from them.
Here’s an idea, California state issued Reparations IOU’s!! Fully redeemable when the state is no longer broke! (in about 5,000 years!)
By the way, California was never a slave state. If reparations is owed it’s owed to the indigenous Indians here in California whom the Spaniards abused and mistreated.
Reparations for black Californians? Uh-huh. Buy a lotto ticket. Otherwise, STFU and go whine to someone who actually gives a damn. I don’t.
What’s half a trillion? Pocket change, We print that every few months. Give it to them and be done with it. Newsome knows this is his ticket to the White House. He may be evil but he’s brilliant.
Certain tradesmen, legal and illicit, will experience quite a windfall.
That’s a key point, it would be an indirect subsidy to those tradesmen.
Everyone who objects will be considered racist by the leftist elites and that justifies their systemic racism claim.
Why does California keep electing Newsom types? In all fairness, they deserve what they got.
This is what happens when you don’t have a border and the Silicon Valley takes root in your state…a super-majority. Good luck to you when that happens.
Santa Clara Valley. They haven’t made microchips here since the 1980s.
It does suck here, though.
Answer: Because most of Commiefornians are the lowest common denominator among us, or rank Marxists.
Not all of us. Many of us are unrepresented victims.
Rigged elections.
Yes. Most Californians are sane. The elections here are as fake as national elections.
Republicans are allowed on the ballot anymore
Little Fidel illegally changed California’s voter rules during Covid. We now have 100% mail in ballots, ballot drop boxes put out 1 month before the election (so as to give the ballot box stuffers plenty of time), mail in ballots that can be returned with only an X on the voter signature line, and mail in ballots can be harvested from voters who are “unable” to walk to the mailbox to mail their own ballot. Also, all illegals are registered to vote by the DMV when getting their driver’s license. Therefore. Cal. is guaranteed to be a commie cesspool until the end of time.
The solution: divine intervention to destroy this evil or destroy this evil ourselves using Goodnight Irene’s method stated above.
Theft and rip off. Plain and simple.
Does anyone remember a few years ago when the Feds gave reparations to ex-black farmers who had been discriminated against by the Dept. of Agriculture? No one even imagined there were so many ex-black farmers in the country!!
It was called the “Pigford” settlement. It later became known as “Pigford 1” when, after awards had been given to more people than the number of black farmers in the U.S., Obama instituted “Pigford 2.” I’m sure somewhere in the bowels of the Dept. of Agriculture they’re working on “Pigford 3.”
And the beneficiaries are greedy pigs.
Will Newsom next do reparations for all the Asians and whites who have had their education and careers attenuated as a result of affirmative discrimination policies and programs over the past half century? Just kidding.
This can be financed through the pelt trade.
We simply skin White people, and put the wares into the global marketplace. Tattoos, of course, are of real value here.
A free market solution that works.
Shades of Jonathan Swift!
They didn’t need those tatts anyway. Seriously.
I hate tattoos on women, especially cheap ones on their tits and butts.
I see from your photo here that you must be a tattoo inspector of females.
A thousand amens to that! I say nothing. I just push it to the back of my mind.
To all black people: I believe there is still time to move to California.
“Don’t bother to examine a folly-ask yourself only what it accomplishes.” — Ayn Rand
Absolutely brilliant, not. You are damn fool for even bringing up such an idiotic remark by your girlfriend.
She’s dead, Jim. Let it go.
Shallow leftists like Ken-doll Newsom are always generous with other people’s money.
Dumbass Californians keep voting for this fool, even as the prick ensures the state will remain a tinderbox for wildfires.
He lost that recall bid. Massive vote fraud kept him in office. Trust me, most of us Californians hate his guts.
You know the old story that if you split all of the money in circulation with every individual in this country in 10 years it would be accumulated by about 10% of the population. I bet in a few years most of the money given away to repreations will be gone and those receiving will be right back where they were.
Yup, in the hands of the elites via drug dealers.
No, the money returns to those who know how to manage it. Those who don’t know how to handle eventually return to being poor. We see this regularly with lottery winners.
That’s true, they would be better off learning good money management skills than receiving reparations.
Or learning not to be criminals.
And the former recipients will cry, “systemic racism!” and demand more,
Excellent point Lightbringer, they are never satisfied, they always want more.
Just like lottery winners.
Using the government to steal money from the people is what Newsome & the Left does. IF this was actually reparations, it would be taken ONLY from the guilty & given ONLY to those harmed. Most citizens & their ancestors immigrated to this county AFTER slavery was no longer practiced. Stealing money from people, who recently arrived to pay to other people who recently arrived, strictly on the basis of their race is RACIST & unjust!
Furthermore, it is the Africans who enslaved the black slaves, AND THEN sold them to those who sold them in the colonies & states. THEY are the ones who would owe reparation, if indeed anyone does. Taking money from people who are guilty of nothing to pay to people who never even saw a slave much less were slaves is absurd, unjust & ought to be illegal!
One might add that few White southerners owned even a single slave, and that many slave-owners were wealthy free blacks or Indians, particularly Cherokees. So even if a white family was in this country prior to 1865, there is absolutely no reason to believe that their ancestors ever owned slaves. In fact the original slaves in this country WERE white — English and Irish. So let’s place the guilt where it belongs.
Actually, the vast majority of Americans are native born and always have been. Check the US Census and other historical records.
Liberals have already said that under their diversity agenda one may identify himself in any manner that one chooses. Therefore, even though I am as white as Newsom, I will start to identify myself as black as soon as the checks are being mailed out. Maybe even go to court and have my birth certificate changed from white to black, just to seal the deal. Why wouldn’t everyone in Cal. do this?? Let’s see; 40 million people in California times $233,000/head = slightly more than what the genius was planning on spending!!
I thought the same thing.
I’d like to ask Gov. Newsom and his fellow Reparationists whether they’d support a lawsuit in The Hague ruling that present-day Egypt should now pay every Jew–or at least every Jewish citizen of the State of Israel, or the surviving descendants of those murdered in the more-recent Holocaust–“Reparations” for the 400 years of slavery the Israelites suffered 3,000 years ago under the Pharaoh?
Or would that, somehow, be “different” and “too long ago” as they dig back for excuses to bankrupt us with their sniveling, concocted grievances?
newsome needs something to take his mind off reparations , perhaps a giant earthquake . then he won’t have any cash to splash around on buying votes and californians will get their just desserts for voting for a fool .
We didn’t vote for that unctious scumbag.
California has changed so much under Newsome, I don’t go there anymore. It’s a combination of people who are woke, those who are complacent, fraud in elections, and buying off minorities for the left. The once nice streets have turned into slums with tents all over the cities, Nobody wants to walk down streets like this or be bombarded with feces. You won’t get good policies with depraved people running the government,
There are a lot of tents here in San Jose and many of the derelicts are quite aggressive.
Newsom Go Away
Providing it was the Democrats who Bought, Sold, Traded, Abused Slaves and separated Families it should be the Democrat Party alone that should pay reparations and from their own Bank Accounts No Taxes
Serious response: it’s disheartening to see so many commenters believe elections are fair and the outcomes represent not fraud and manipulation but the choices of all the people.
Now here’s my solution, every citizen takes a dna test. Most American Blacks are only partially so. That’s their percentage of this windfall. All history is then divided into Marxist bad and good lists. If your ancestor is an oppressor, you pay. If an oppressed ka-ching, you get paid. I got this idea from a place called Wannasee.
An awful lot of black Americans are part victim and part victimizer. Will they be forced to pay themselves?
If they can stop killing each other, maybe.
How about the Russians demanding reparations from the Turks for all the SLAVS who were kidnapped and sold into slavery? That’s where the word “slave” comes from. How about the Europeans demanding reparatioms from Morocco for all the Europeans, including Napoleon’s cousin by marriage, who were kidnappef by the Barbary pirates?
PeeplesRepublic or KKKalifornia introduces new spelling for marxist wealth redistribution
This is driven by pure greed. There is no more powerful motivator in politics, as Marx understood; logic has no part in it, nor has any sense of morality. It’s all just gimme, gimme, gimme, a concept that any two-year-old would easily understand.
Reasonably accurate.
If this proposal ever becomes law, the number of people fleeing California will quadruple.
Since it was the Democrats who Sold, Bought Traded Slaves and Separated Families its the DNC that should pay not John and Jane Doe
Communists are brilliant at getting people to bankroll their own defeat. If reparations were made it would be to those harmed by those who harmed them. It would need to be proven that it did indeed happen & that these people had been slaves or slave owners. Most of the citizens now days immigrated here long after all of that was over with & thousands of US citizens had died in a civil war that ended slavery. THAT should have been reparations enough.
Those actually responsible were the Africans who originally enslaved & then sold these people. The British Crown forced slavery on the colonies until they could free themselves & work on cleaning up the economic mess that ending the slavery business would cause. They did it though & are NOW being blamed for the entire thing by our enemies who get by with it because citizens no longer know US history & believe enemy propaganda. The Betsy Ross flag was the flag the colonists fought the slavers under, to form the US & stop slavery to give all citizens freedom. They were the people who freed slaves., Read your dam history as it was not what your enemies claim it was.
I’m of English ancestry. A medieval-literature professor in college told my class about Pope Gregory the Great watching a parade of Romans back from the conquered England dragging through the Forum in Rome white-skinned English slaves. England had the tribes of Saxons, Jutes and Angles.
Pope Gregory asked about these slaves with such white skin.
He was told, “They are Angles.”
Because of their white skin, Gregory said, “Not Angles but angels. Go send missionaries across the sea to convert those Angles to Catholicism.”
So my English ancestors were enslaved by the Italians! When are the Italians going to pay me reparations??!! When?!
That was circa 590. Justice delayed is justice denied! So surely my reparations should far exceed Gavin Newsom’s.
The only real reparations should be for all those who lost heir place of business to those mobs of filthy Looters Rioters and Arsonists and all those who finance their Criminal acts and when they claim their Looting Back them we should be allowed to start shooting back at the Thieves
Not just that but old Sawdust for Brains Newsom wants new Amendment in the Constitution about Guns
Will the amount given to the individual and all his ancestors in the form of welfare, food stamps, free health care, free or ĺow housing costs, free tuition, etc., be deducted from the total amount of the reparation? That would substantially reduce the amount of reparation and in many cases money would be owed to the government. In other words, reparations have already been paid and, in too many instances, squandered.
Newsom the Nit-Wit just like all typical Liberal Democrats finds more ways to buy votes for his corrupt Democratic Party
Depraved psychopath woke leftist dem lunatic Newsom just threw his hat into the 2024 Presidential race.
As president he will do for the rest of the Nation’s blacks what he is promising for black Californians.
Governor Nusance proving to be a total idiot and typical Liberal Democrat no signs of Intelligence at all
Someone needs to remind Sawdust for Brains Nuisance that California was a Free State previous to the Civil War and it was his on Democrat Party that held Slaves
I am so “Blacked Out” I can hardly speak.
Two percent of American citizens owned slaves. Mostly in the south.
I had two: what would be considered uncles fight in the “War.” One perished in that Georgia ditch called “Andersonville.” His brother returned to Wisconsin profoundly disabled due to injuries.
My remaining 3/4 ancestors arrived around 1900. They were loggers in northern WI.
Hey you, reparations folks. Tell me what I owe you.
I, all of us, are still paying the 1960s “Great Society” bill. You have your reparations.
The only explanation for what goes on in California is that it takes a longer time for daylight to reach it than it does for the rest of the country.
Gavin Nuisance is a bigger Dunderhead then Moonbeam Brown and Biden the Blunder
easy fix. everyone identify as black. who is going to argue how you identify? if any debate ensues the whole premise of how you identify is at risk. myself, think i will identify as black twins and get the double dip.
Newsom the nuisance dips in his hand and grabs out a handful of G-Notes from the Publics Money Bim
Reparations unless paid by individuals connected to individuals based on very specific acts is not constitutional.. Reparations otherwise is no different from civil war. whether or not violence occurs. Reparations are violent plunder.
Its a bait and switch maneuver, like Bidens student loan bailout BS -, it will never get through the legal challenges, but it scores Gruesome Newsom points at the polls. Then youll gave all tgese fake blacks like Kamala Harris the Indian, who will be coming out of the woodwork. Joe and Hunter will claim to be black, as will millions if others. Califirnia will be gloided wuth bla k fortune seekers, like thd old gold rush days… And Gavin Gruesome will have fled to China by then..