Former Senator Jim Webb was something of a wallflower during last week’s Democratic debate, though not because he didn’t want to get out on the floor and dance. He said afterward that he believes the debate was rigged to favor Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, leaving the lesser known candidates—himself, Martin O’Malley, and Lincoln Chafee—confined to the sidelines. When the floor was his he seemed perturbed and complained that he wasn’t getting as much time as the leading candidates. “In that kind of environment, it was either going to be Mr. Angry or a potted plant,” said Webb after the debate.

Some might argue that Webb didn’t get as much time as Clinton and Sanders because they’re top tier and he’s not. Certainly that’s true though it begs another question—why isn’t Webb top tier? He is, after all, a one-term senator, former Harvard fellow, author, journalist, and former Secretary of the Navy. The answer, I believe, is because the party has moved so far to the left. Try as he might to fit into the new Democratic Party, he's still something of a puzzle piece borrowed from another puzzle.

Jim Webb seemed more than a little incongruous standing on the stage next to the top contenders. The frontunner is Hillary Clinton, a former friend and acolyte of the Machiavellian political theorist Saul Alinsky. Raised in Chicago, she studied at Wellesley and Yale during the turbulent sixties and seventies. She defended the Black Panthers when they murdered one of their own on a suspicion that he was an FBI informer. After serving as first lady of the United States, she carpetbagged to New York to fill a vacating US Senate seat. Her most serious challenger is New York-born Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist and senator from Vermont, the most left-wing state in the Union. He’s actually tacking to the left of the Alinsky fangirl and it seems to be working.

Clearly this isn’t your father’s Democratic Party. In 2015, the leading Democratic candidates are left and far left. This is the party that booed the Boy Scouts at their 2000 convention and God Himself at their 2012 convention. It’s really that bad.

Is it any wonder then that Webb, a gun-owning Marine Corps veteran of Scots-Irish descent hailing from a southern state, doesn’t fit in? There’s something recognizably American about Webb, and that doesn’t sit well with the Democratic base. Many of their recent candidates have had a European air about them, and a few have seemed downright extraterrestrial.

Webb is no conservative, mind you, and I wouldn’t vote for him to walk my dog, but he was the most moderate candidate on the stage that night. When Clinton and Sanders were trying to one-up each other with who could articulate the most egregious offense against the second amendment, Webb actually defended Americans’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms. When asked if “all lives matter” or “black lives matter,” Webb dissented from the group and said that “Every life in this country matters.” Whoa! No wonder he’s going nowhere in the jackass party, spewing hate speech like that. When Webb was asked which of his enemies he’s most proud of, he recounted an incident in Vietnam in which he killed an enemy soldier who tossed a grenade at him. He was engaging in a little well-deserved bragging, of course, highlighting his war hero credentials to win a few votes, though I don’t think he’ll win many with today’s Democrats. Most of them perceive that kind of talk as mere machismo.

Part of Webb’s problem is that his party is obsessed with identity politics. When seeking the Democratic nomination it helps to belong to some kind of victim class—to be a woman, a minority, or to sleep with people of your own sex. Being white and male doesn’t get you any points. Working class roots counts for something, though less and less with each passing year.

If you don’t fall into one of the recognized victims categories, the only way to create buzz among Democrats is to veer way, way left. That’s basically the Bernie Sanders approach. Sanders even quit the party and became an independent because he found the Democrats to be too cozy with big business. Which they are, of course. Though he still caucuses with the Democrats and seeks the nomination of their party, his stand against the Democratic Party earned him a lot of respect among the moonbat community.

Jim Webb has no future in this party because the wing he represents—blue collar whites—is shriveled and dying. He’s made a point to stick up for that demographic group, arguing for example that affirmative action should consider economic circumstances rather than race. He contends that Democrats aren’t attuned to poor people’s problems when those poor people are white.

When running for Senate in 2006 Webb leveraged his support among Virginia’s substantial white working class to secure victory in a very close race. Webb is himself of Scots-Irish descent, though not from Appalachian Virginia. As the son of a career Air Force man, Webb grew up all over and thus can’t call anywhere home. He is nonetheless at ease speaking to southerners and the white working class, guys who drink macrobrewed beer in a can and guys who kill their dinner with a bow. He can walk into an American Legion and swap war stories with veterans at the bar. Joe Sixpack can relate to Jim Webb in a way that he cannot relate to a guy from Vermont who wants to take his legally purchased, fully licensed firearm.

But much like the late Rodney Dangerfield, Jim Webb “don’t get no respect!” in today’s Democratic Party. It’s almost as if their famed “big tent” is a sham, as if they apply “purity tests” to their candidates.

The problem with Jim Webb is that he’s outlived his usefulness and no one has the heart to break the bad news to him. The poor schlub made his entrance in 2006 when the Democrats desperately needed real life war heroes. They had had two bad election cycles in 2002 and 2004, due in part to the fact that fresh memories of 9/11 made many Americans unwilling to trust national security to the Democrats. Luckily for them the political winds were starting to shift as Americans’ patience wore thin with the sputtering Iraq War. The Democrats knew that if they were ever to turn an unpopular war to their advantage they would have to field candidates who could never be accused of being wimps and whose admiration for the military was beyond reproach. They needed square-jawed, red-blooded American men with honorable military service and the medals to prove it. In short, they needed Jim Webb.

But that was nearly ten years ago. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan both kinda-sorta over, the Democrats are free to be themselves again—angry women, effete men, elitist northeasterners, and gun grabbers.

Sorry Jim Webb, but there’s no room in this party for your kind. There used to be, in an age long since passed, but not anymore. Welcome to the Democratic (Socialist) Party. Like a container of spoiled sour cream that’s been hiding in the back of the fridge since who-knows-when, you’re past your expiration date. Prepare to be discarded.

Read more at http://patriotupdate.com/jim-webb-dont-get-no-respect-in-todays-dem...

MSNBC host Chris Matthews and a panel of guests sneered at Appalachian whites last week on Matthews’s Hardball show. Speaking to Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, Matthews said, “You had a piece in your paper the other day, about the Scots-Irish down in Southwestern Virginia. They’re white. Weren’t they kind of the people that went to the mountains? When they immigrated to the United States they went right to the rural areas. And they got an attitude!” No one on Matthew’s panel betrayed the slightest self-consciousness when speaking in condescending tones about the white working class. It’s hard to imagine any of them speaking the same way about blacks with “attitude” living in urban areas.

“There is part of that white community that—they missed—they didn’t get to go to good colleges or college,” Matthews continued. “They feel like the Democrats have been focused on the elites and the minorities and they’ve been missed somehow.”

That’s because they have. Those working class whites Matthews speaks of, commonly known as “bitter clingers,” are making a slow but justifiable exit from the Democratic Party. When Democrats take a stand against coal, when they bring in boatloads of legal and illegal immigrants, when they make it difficult to exercise second amendment rights, when they support racial discrimination against whites (“affirmative action”), the message that the white working class hears is “not welcome.” And for good reason.

Liberals, who dominate the party and the media—two institutions that are often difficult to distinguish—have employed an effective pincer maneuver against the American majority. They launch their attack from above and below, appealing to the rich, but also to perpetual wards of the state, or what I call “the non-working class.” Liberals will never admit that such a class exists. Perpetual wards of the state are, in their estimation, still part of the working class…even though they don’t work.

It should be noted here that the white working class is not exclusively rural, Appalachian, or even southern. There are white working class people in all fifty states as well as in urban areas. The dwindling Irish Catholic population of South Boston is a good example of working class whites who are neither rural nor southern, though they have traditionally voted Democratic just the same.

This tight-knight, church-going community, whose sons went off to Vietnam in proportions far exceeding their numbers, were shocked to learn, in 1974, that their community would be torn apart by federally-mandated busing. This intra-Democratic fight pitted working class whites against wealthy liberals. The architects of the plan, if they had any kids at all, sent them to private or suburban schools, thus shielding them from busing. Many of those Southie-born Irish have since fled the city and changed party affiliation. South Boston has never been the same.

The relationship between the Democrats and the white working class is nuanced, to say the least. The Democratic Party is their traditional home and some working class whites continue to vote the ticket, if only because they’re descended from a long line of Democrats. Many liberals, particularly white male liberals, like to brag of their working class background, even if they jettisoned it long ago or it never really existed in the first place. See Bruce Springsteen and Michael Moore.

Even Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to grant marriage licenses after the Supreme Court invented a right to same-sex marriage, was elected as a Democrat. Davis was falsely tagged as a Republican in a recent New York Times story. The reporters in this instance assumed that she was a Republican because New Yorkers can’t imagine a person like Davis voting Democrat. It’s weird, I know. In Kim Davis’s neck of the woods, “Democrat” is not synonymous with moonbat leftist.

The party apparatus still wants the white working class’s support because a vote’s a vote and a win’s a win. Unfortunately, these working class whites tend to be more moderate which poses a problem for the urban elite who dominate the modern liberal establishment. They don’t want to tolerate a contingent within the party that might temper its platform. The Democratic Party is consequently roiled by a quiet civil war that no one wants to acknowledge. Don’t be fooled for a moment, however, into thinking that the war is fought between the liberal elite and the white working class. The white working class doesn’t have enough clout in the party to stand as a belligerent in this conflict. It’s a war between those who still want to make a bid for the white working class vote and those who find them so embarrassing that they’d prefer to send them packing.

Hillary Clinton made a bid for the white working class vote in 2008 and she’s been paying for it ever since. The media are actually quite critical of Mrs. Clinton, treating her almost like a Republican. The Clinton email server saga has not been dismissed as a “phony scandal” as most Democratic scandals are. Why might that be? My theory is that Hillary made the fourth estate very angry in 2008 when she campaigned against their preferred candidate, Barack Obama, and she has not yet earned her way back into their good graces.

The Clinton campaign made an effort to appeal to more traditional Democrats—a category which includes, but is not limited to, the white working class—while the Obama campaign courted the youth vote, minorities, and unabashed progressives. It was a big gamble on Hillary’s part and she lost. There just weren’t enough traditional Democrats in the party in 2008 and there are even fewer today. The party of the Kennedy brothers and Daniel Patrick Moynihan is now the party of Valerie Jarrett and Terrence Bean.

Perhaps Hillary thought she could replicate her husband’s successful campaigns of ’92 and ’96. Now there was a man who could speak to white working class audiences, probably because that’s where his roots lay. Hillary, however, is a Chicago girl from an upper middle class background. In 2008, Hillary found out that she couldn’t ride to victory with Clintonian overtures to the white working class, either because they weren’t that enthused about her, or because the demographics of the party had shifted. Both factors were probably in play.

Hillary lost more than just the nomination. She lost the adoration of the liberal elite which she still hasn’t won back. They won’t forgive her for pandering to what they perceive to be the worst elements of the party—the Kim Davis wing, the Southie Irish wing, the bitter clingers.

The Democratic Party is suffering from something of an identity crisis. A vestigial constituency group truly embarrasses them to the point that they often can’t hide their disdain when speaking of them, yet they still need their vote. The party is sharply divided as to whether this demographic group, which is already halfway out the door, is worth keeping.

Read more at http://patriotupdate.com/democrats-to-the-white-working-class-we-hate-you-please-vote-for-us/

Are the French stingier with welfare benefits than Americans? A new study  from the Cato institute says yes.

According to the study, a single parent raising two children in the United  States can expect to receive slightly more in public assistance per year than in  France and slightly less than in Sweden. The authors of the study are quick to  point out, however, that Medicaid payments were not included in their  calculations for the purpose of making a meaningful and roughly equivalent  comparison. All of the European nations to which the United States was compared  offer health care on a universal basis, whereas our Medicaid program is offered  only to people whose annual income falls beneath a certain threshold. If  Medicaid payments were counted as public assistance, the United States would  place third in the rankings behind only Denmark and the UK.

Whether our massive welfare spending is a good thing or a bad thing is a very  debatable point. I know some people would say that money spent on “human  needs”—as if that’s all it ever goes to—is money well spent. I would counter  that “human needs” aren’t nearly as important to the average liberal Democrat as  sustaining a poverty-stricken political fiefdom. They buy power with other  people’s money and expect the rest of us to stand in awe of their supposed  generosity.

But before we have that debate it would be nice if welfare advocates would at  least acknowledge that they’ve gotten their way most of the time and that the  United States is, for better or worse, a European-style welfare state that just  happens to be located across the ocean. That’s the reality of the situation and  reality is always a good starting point for further discussion.

Welfare benefits vary from state to state, of course. In my travels I’ve seen  that poor people in Texas, for example, really seem poor; or at least they don’t  have much money for luxuries. The poor in my state of Massachusetts, however,  live pretty well on the dole. I was not at all surprised to discover that only  Hawaii and the District of Columbia offer more robust benefits packages than the  Bay State.

Come to Massachusetts’ post-industrial inner cities and you’ll see satellite  dishes sprouting like mushrooms from the government-subsidized housing. No one  would be caught dead without their iPhone. They spend almost three hundred  dollars a month on their pack-a-day cigarette habit and they prefer top shelf  liquor. That’s how “poor” people live in Massachusetts. It’s not exactly a “Feed  the Children” commercial.

But Massachusetts is not representative of the nation as whole. Fair enough.  Although welfare spending is uneven across the nation, thirty-five US states  have combined benefit packages greater than the European Union mean. In eleven  states, welfare benefits exceed the pre-tax income of a first year teacher, and  in a majority of states welfare pays more than a minimum wage job.

Yet liberals blame a lack of social spending for nearly everything from crime  to disparate educational outcomes.

When a black criminal in Ferguson, Missouri was killed after robbing a store  and attempting to murder a policeman, the culprit was lack of social spending.  If only the black neighborhoods weren’t so shamefully neglected, they argued,  this wouldn’t have happened.

This explanation might make more sense if it weren’t for the fact that we’ve  been dousing black ghettoes with a cash firehose for the last five decades. From  the dawn of the War on Poverty until 2014 the American taxpayer shelled out $22  trillion (in constant 2012 dollars) in anti-poverty programs. Our current  national debt is about $18.4 trillion by the way, which gives you an idea of  where all that money went.

It’s a form of national suicide, a rather peculiar phenomenon that deserves  some explanation. Ever since the Watts riots happened fifty years ago this  summer, American politicians have sought to “invest” in poor inner city  neighborhoods. As “investments” go, it’s been about as lousy as buying  confederate currency in 1864. The War on Poverty was launched the same year that  Watts went up in flames but that didn’t prevent Detroit and Newark from burning  in 1967. Nor did it prevent the nationwide urban conflagration of April 1968.  Looting and rioting returned to Los Angeles in 1992. Ferguson exploded in 2014,  followed by Baltimore in 2015, followed by more Ferguson rioting on the one year  anniversary of Michael Brown’s attempted murder of Darren Wilson.

Paying people not to riot clearly isn’t working.

How about academic performance? Can the differences between rich and poor, or  black and white, be chalked up to a lack of social spending? One of the more  common arguments is that hungry kids can’t learn. Let’s examine that.

We live in a country in which a majority of public school students qualify for free or reduced school lunches. The program was sold as a means of solving precisely this problem of underperformance among hungry children. When the solution was tried and found wanting it was of course expanded to include breakfast in many schools and even dinner in a few. Meanwhile, the kids’ parents are also afforded SNAP benefits, or any of the other fourteen federally subsidized food assistance programs. Heaven knows what the parents do with all that food while their children eat three meals a day at school. If the kids are still hungry, and some may be, it’s probably because they’re tossing Michelle Obama’s nasty lunches in the trash, a real problem in many schools.

These facts absolutely never penetrate the liberals’ bubble. They revel in  asking snappy questions that contain the implicit assumption that we as a nation  have almost no social safety net to speak of. Here are a few:

“Why is that we always have plenty of money for the military but not  for basic human needs?” Answer: the military budget, though expensive,  has been constantly decreasing, adjusting for inflation, since the end of World  War II. We call on today’s military to do more with less. Welfare on the other  hand is always growing. The inflation-adjusted $22 trillion that we’ve spent in  the War on Poverty is more than three times the combined cost of all wars since  the Revolution. The War on Poverty is undeniably the most expensive we’ve ever  waged, and the longest.

“Why can’t we be more like Europe?” Answer: We are like Europe. Our welfare state is on par with theirs and it’s killing us.

“Why do people go hungry in a country as rich as ours?” Answer: Very few actually do, but even those who don’t have enough to eat can’t  blame a lack of programs or appropriated funds. There are state, federal, and  local programs, not to mention private charities.

A rational discussion cannot begin with an irrational premise. The idea that  somehow our country adheres to a philosophy of rugged individualism is absurd.  We hand out other people’s money like it’s going out of style. Our social safety  net is deep and wide. The moment we acknowledge this stubborn fact is the moment  we can begin a useful dialogue. I’ll be waiting with bated breath.

Read more at http://patriotupdate.com/facing-facts-were-already-a-european-style-welfare-state/

Would you feed your dog chopped up babies? Geraldo Rivera would.

The ’stache-sporting commentator clashed last week with Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld concerning the recent Center for Medical Progress (CFP) tapes which revealed top-level Planned Parenthood officials negotiating prices for harvested fetal organs. Geraldo didn’t find the tapes particularly shocking and quickly became indignant that anyone would.

The exchange began when Geraldo asked Gutfeld, “Are you saying that women should not have the ability to consent whether or not their aborted fetus will be used for research?” Gutfeld said they shouldn’t, to which Geraldo replied, “That’s crazy.” After much talking over each other, Geraldo asked “What if I want to make it dog food?”

Yes, dog food. He actually said that.

I think what Geraldo meant is that it’s nobody’s business what a woman wants to do with her aborted child. I don’t think that it’s a misrepresentation of Geraldo’s views to use the word “child” either, as several comments he made in the course of the debate seem to imply that he believes the thing being ripped from a woman’s womb is in fact a child. So Geraldo concedes that we’re discussing baby corpses here, he’s just not bothered by it.

Like a lot of people, I reeled in disgust at Geraldo’s callous remark but I also found myself wondering why. We’re now so far down the slippery slope that the peripheral issue of how to use the byproducts of abortion moves front and center. The rest has all been decided.

Is it any wonder that Planned Parenthood’s phalanx of defenders have argued that the CFP videos are much ado about nothing? Its organ harvesting is always conducted with the woman’s consent, they claim, and is always done on a not-for-profit basis. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that neither of these two assertions is even true, that’s still a pretty shoddy defense. The Nazis didn’t make money on their organ harvesting either but that didn’t make it right.

But alas, there is a great gulf in this country between what is right and what is legal. In America you can legally kill an unborn child and legally sell her liver, brain, and heart; but if you charge one penny more than the costs of procurement and shipping, that’s a crime! What a silly point to quibble about—Planned Parenthood says that they don’t charge more for butchered baby parts than what it costs them, and it’s on the rest of us to prove they’re lying. (Watch the videos—it’s all about the money.) Lost in the shouting and cross-talk is the fact that they kill children.

Which makes Geraldo’s indifference almost understandable. Who cares what we do with the “products of conception” once we’re done sucking them out with a shop vac? Now is not time to get squeamish. We have to do something with our truckloads of mashed baby, so why not sell it to Alpo? It’s better than keeping it in jars in Kermit Gosnell’s refrigerator.

But people tend to get themselves in a tizzy when we creatively repurpose dead baby parts. Here’s a small example that I think illustrates the public’s unease with using aborted children for the betterment of humanity—last year, it was reported that Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) was using fetuses to heat hospitals across the UK. The 15,000 incinerated fetuses were part of a “Waste-to-Energy” plan that used medical refuse and ordinary trash as a fuel. And who could be against that, except perhaps some sadist who delights in people dying of hypothermia? As it turned out, some people got their knickers all in a bunch and the NHS quickly put a stop to the practice—not the killing of babies, mind you, but the burning of their corpses for heat.

The NHS’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals, Sir Mike Richards, seemed oddly fixated on the wrong issue, namely that no one asked the mothers for permission. Said Sir Richards, “I am disappointed trusts may not be informing or consulting women and their families. This breaches our standard on respecting and involving people who use services…”

So there’s the real scandal—women didn’t consent to burning their children like firewood. But why should anyone ask them? To even pose the question implies that dead babies are somehow different from other kinds of medical waste.

Dead babies have also been used to generate electricity. The Covanta Waste-to-Energy facility in Oregon discovered in 2014 that it too was burning “products of conception” purchased from British Columbia. The hacked-up children were mixed in with ordinary trash and were thus unknown to the plant officials who bought garbage en masse from Canada.

Like the NHS, Covanta also acted swiftly to halt the burning of unborn children, though I don’t understand why. Who are they to deprive us of an abundant renewable resource? We could even construct a baby sludge pipeline from Canada directly to trash-burning reactors here in the States. Think of it like Keystone XL, only Obama wouldn’t veto it. Energy independence is national security!

What if dead babies could make those wrinkles around your eyes vanish? Surely that be a worthy use for something that’s just going to be thrown away anyway. The Swiss cosmetics manufacturer Neocutis admits that it used an aborted fourteen week fetus in the development of one of its rejuvenating skin creams. From its website: “A small biopsy of fetal skin was donated following a one-time medical termination and a dedicated cell bank was established for developing new skin treatments. Originally established for wound healing and burn treatments, today this same cell bank also provides a lasting supply of cells for producing Neocutis’ proprietary skin care ingredient Processed Skin Cell Proteins.”

Well that’s a relief. So they only used one dead baby to get the project started. No more dead babies will be necessary. I’m at a loss to explain why it’s morally acceptable to use one dead baby to look young and beautiful but not a pile of them.

Geraldo's dog food proposal isn’t that much different than what we already do with the unwanted waste of our copulations. We don’t yet feed aborted kids to Fido but we do use them to keep warm, to pamper our skin, and to keep the lights on. And why shouldn’t we? It’s pretty gross, for sure, but that argument is rather anemic. No compelling reason remains why we shouldn’t go full Swiftian and put our abortion byproducts to use as fertilizers, lubricants, soaps, and in any number of yet unfathomed applications. If we can go about our daily lives without thinking about the abortion clinic we drive past every day, we can also choose not think about the dead babies keeping us warm through the winter months.

A society that kills the unborn has already conceded the moral argument against abortion. If killing the unborn is not immoral, then who can find fault with feeding their corpses to dogs? Certainly not us.

Read more at http://patriotupdate.com/who-are-we-to-say-that-aborted-children-dont-belong-in-dog-food/

Watching the Left eat its own would be funny if it weren’t so scary. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, US Senator from Vermont and a self-described socialist, was shoved aside and silenced last week while speaking at a campaign rally in Seattle. The party-crashers were members of the Black Lives Matters movement and they came to lecture the crowd on its own racism. Sanders yielded the microphone to an angry, rambling black woman before fleeing the stage entirely. 

Within twenty-four hours, his campaign released a new platform addressing “racial justice.” It was obvious that Sanders was striking a conciliatory tone for not having been sensitive enough to black issues sooner.

The Sanders platform calls for “police forces that reflect the diversity of our communities.” While that may be boilerplate Democrat-speak, it’s not an innocuous policy proposal. Besides the fact that it’s proven difficult to achieve, forcing racial proportionality on police departments comes with its own perils.

“Looking like the community” is very important to liberals, and not just on the police force. They consider it to be of the utmost importance that the fire department, the president’s cabinet, and even the military “look like” the constituencies they’re supposed to serve. Apparently firemen put out fires better when there’s a Jew, an Italian, and a Puerto Rican on every fire engine. Don’t ask me why.

Diversifying a police department is easier said than done. City officials often mistakenly assume that police forces aren’t “diverse” enough because no one has yet laid out the welcome mat for minority applicants. They soon discover that recruiting minorities, particularly blacks, is arduous. Besides the fact that many young blacks don’t want to become what they despise, they often don’t meet basic qualifications. As NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said in June, “We have a significant population gap among African American males because so many of them have spent time in jail and, as such, we can’t hire them.”

Bratton touched a nerve with his remark but he also spoke the truth. One reason there aren’t more black police officers is standards—moral, legal, and academic. Police departments across the country have chosen to lower standards just to recruit blacks. Some departments have stopped requiring applicants to know how to swim while others will hire applicants who didn’t even finish high school. Departments often accept lower civil service exam scores from minority applicants. And it’s still not enough.

Proponents of “diversity” also blithely brush aside another issue—namely that their rhetoric is strongly suggestive of a quota system. Quotas were found to be illegal in Regents of California v. Bakke (1978), a landmark affirmative action case.

The man at the center of the case was an engineer and Vietnam veteran named Allan Bakke. He’s also white. While in his mid-thirties, Bakke decided that practicing medicine was his true calling in life so he quit his job with NASA and applied to medical schools. He could not secure a spot, despite his high test scores and obvious intelligence. After discovering that he was far more qualified than many of the black and Hispanic applicants who had been accepted under the minority quota, he decided to sue the University of California.

Bakke took his case all the way to the Supreme Court and won. The judges’ decision hinged on the quota system, which they ruled unconstitutional. Unfortunately, it was a very narrow victory, benefiting mostly Bakke himself. He was admitted to medical school and achieved his dream of becoming a doctor. Today he’s an anesthesiologist in Minnesota.

On the whole, however, it was a good day for affirmative action. The court ruled that a public university may consider race as one factor among many in its admissions considerations. Quotas, on the other hand, are verboten. Ever since Bakke, affirmative action supporters have meticulously avoided the “Q” word, without ever giving up on the idea. These days, public officials usually speak of “goals.” But what is a goal except a quota by another name? If, for example, Ferguson PD sets a goal for itself that it will reflect the demographics of the community it serves, that necessarily means that 67.4% of the officers will have to be black. Hiring decisions will have to be adjusted to meet that goal.

That’s called a quota and it’s illegal. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

There’s another problem with police departments reflecting the communities that they serve and it becomes apparent when looking at communities that have very low minority populations. Can a small town that is almost entirely white refuse to hire minority officers because they don’t “look like the community?”

I think most people would say no, and so would I. But there’s a disconnect there. Why is “looking like the community” so vitally important in some communities but not in others? It seems that police departments have to be colorblind when colorblindness benefits minorities, and color conscious when color consciousness benefits minorities. In short, they have to be color conscious when deciding whether or not to be colorblind.

A case in point can be found in Granville, Massachusetts, a picturesque New England town that looks like something from a Norman Rockwell painting. Despite being 98.69% white, Granville hired an Hispanic police chief in 2005.

And no one cared. That’s not because the people of Granville are a bunch of hippy liberals. Granville is in fact the most conservative town in the state, according to Business Insider. The people of Granville didn’t bat an eye because they don’t feel entitled to a police force that looks like them. That idea is part of the larger black entitlement complex that they, as white conservatives, neither share nor understand.

It bears mentioning that Chief Jose Rivera, while he served as Granville’s Chief of Police, was the only full time officer in the department. That’s how small Granville is, and how safe. Should a town that’s almost 99% white be served by a (full time) police force that’s 100% Hispanic? I don’t have a problem with it, but then again I’m not a liberal. I don’t concern myself with racial bean-counting.

If lily white communities like Granville are going to be prohibited from hiring officers with an eye toward the racial makeup of their community, and highly “diverse” communities like Ferguson are going to be required to do exactly that, then someone will have to delineate a threshold between the two. At what point must a community shift from an ostensibly colorblind hiring process to an obligatory color-conscious hiring process? Ten percent minority? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?

I think we already know the answer to that question. All of that jive about “looking like the community” is a one-way street. If it helps blacks, great. If it doesn’t, it’s dropped like a bad habit. I call that black privilege.

“Diverse” police forces are not the answer to all that ails us. Besides the fact that recruiting blacks is more difficult than might be supposed, there are legal and moral issues to consider. Standards must be lowered and qualified people must be passed over.

The first clue that Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine is afraid of religious liberty is that she writes for the New York Times Magazine. The second clue is that the headline of her column places religious liberty in sneer quotes: “What are the Limits of ‘Religious Liberty?’”

As in, so-called religious liberty. Religious liberty exercised by people she doesn’t like. Therefore, not real religious liberty.

And to think that journalists used to act as bulwark against governmental tyranny. These days we can count on the press to be several steps ahead of the government in its zeal for violating our most basic freedoms. If Emily Bazelon actually cared about our constitutional rights she would ask the opposite question—namely, what are the limits of government coercion? The fact that she doesn’t tells us a lot.

Why exactly does she believe that the right to decline a business transaction is somehow not protected by the free exercise clause of the Constitution? What makes this kind of exercise different than say, refusing to serve in the armed services during wartime, or refusing to serve ham in a kosher deli? I think the substance of her objection can be found in two sentences—“Women who have been refused abortion services report feeling judged and mortified. Gay couples turned away by wedding vendors say the same.”

And we wouldn’t want anyone to feel “judged and mortified!”

There are a number of problems with this argument. Let’s start with the fact that the moment we accept it there is absolutely no reason to believe that the government will not force doctors to perform abortions or churches to perform same-sex marriages. We can’t have a doctor who refuses to perform abortions because women might feel the sting of judgement. Furthermore, if Adam and Steve are turned away by the local pastor, they will undoubtedly experience the same feelings of judgement and mortification as if they had been turned away by the local florist. Either religious freedom includes the right to make other people feel bad or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, then neither the florist nor the pastor is safe.

Another problem is that anyone declined service for any reason could claim to be “judged and mortified.” I’m sure Chuck Netzhammer felt “judged and mortified” when he ordered a confederate flag cake, superimposed with the words “heritage not hate,” from Walmart, and was refused. In fact, I know he was. “I am highly offended, distraught, and in tears…”said Netzhammer.

I’m sure liberals would argue that that’s different because Walmart didn’t refuse to do business with a class of people, it’s merely refused to make a certain type of cake. But very few of these cases involving discrimination on the grounds of “sexual orientation” really do involve anyone refusing to do business with an entire class of people. They involve business owners who don’t want to take part in the celebration of what they consider to be sinful.

Take, for example, Aaron and Melissa Klein of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, the recent victims of draconian punishments at the hands of the Oregon Labor Commission for their refusal to make a cake for a same-sex commitment ceremony. They did not have a no homosexuals policy. They had even done business in the past with the two homofascists who sued them and ruined their lives. They never refused to do business with people who are same-sex attracted—which is all the law requires—or even with people who act on those attractions. They refused to participate in celebrations of homosexuality.

But back to Chuck Netzhmammer. Of course his order was not declined for any demographic trait, just as the homosexuals who sued the Kleins were not. But that’s not the relevant question. What we should be asking is whether he felt “judged and mortified.” Yes indeed. He was judged as a horrible racist in need of some thought reform. Walmart nonetheless had every right not to fill his order because it’s their bakery and they are under no obligation to worry if he feels butt-hurt about the whole ordeal.

The third problem with Emily Bazelon’s argument is the most troubling. Never in a million years did I believe we would get to the point that actual adults—Americans, no less—would make a serious argument that hurt feelings trump constitutional rights.

That day is here. The ACLU announced in June that it would no longer support the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) at the federal or state levels. The new policy position was articulated by Louise Melling, the organization’s deputy legal director. Melling essentially argues that religious freedom must never include the right to engage in economic transactions on a voluntary basis because people are somehow harmed when they are turned away. Baloney, I say. All of the harm is done to the party who is forced to engage in the economic transaction under penalty of law. If Party A does not want to do business with Party B, Party B can go elsewhere. He is not harmed in any way.

But Melling argues that there is real harm done…to people’s feelings! “People turned away by an inn or bakery suffer the harm of being told that their kind isn’t welcome,” she writes.

Um…so? She’s clearly implying that we as Americans lack the right to tell someone else that their kind isn’t welcome. Her statement represents a sea change in the ACLU’s philosophy which used to take a strong stance in favor of our first amendment rights, even if it hurt people’s feelings. A telling example is the one they always trot out to prove that they aren’t a bunch of left-wing hacks. In 1977, the ACLU took the side of a Nazi group that was denied a permit to march through Skokie, Illinois, a city with a substantial population of Holocaust survivors. The ACLU maintained that supporting the Nazis’ constitutional rights in no way amounted to supporting their abhorrent ideology. I agree.

But I’m not sure that today’s ACLU would take that case and if they did they would be hypocrites. Why? Because the clear message of the march was “Your kind is not welcome.” The ACLU used to believe that conveying such a message was within our rights but they’ve recently had a change of heart and decided that we all have a right to feel welcome. That right cannot be secured without the kind of heavy governmental coercion heretofore found only in novels about the dystopian future. And Canada.

Not everyone has this right, of course. Chuck Netzhhammer can still be made to feel that his kind isn’t welcome because he’s a poor white southerner. But homosexuals’ delicate feelings are always and everywhere protected.

This trend of elevating some people’s feelings over other people’s rights is absolutely terrifying. The government can’t make us be nice to each other and it shouldn’t try. All of our rights are on the chopping block. Expect hate speech laws in the British or Canadian tradition, an end to parental rights, and a governmental invasion of your church. As the late George Carlin once said, “When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.”

Smiley face fascism is here and it’s up to us to fend it off.