Despite the state diving into the red after it spent federal COVID subsidies, high-profile figures in the California "reparations movement" have not slackened in their push for the scheme since I reported on the movement back in December. In fact, one "reparations" pusher says that the current proposal of $223,000 handed to each government-chosen recipient isn't "enough" -- and it turns out that the head of the "Reparations Task Force" has implied that she agrees.
Scott Whitlock reports for Fox News that Reverend Tony Pierce, head of The Black Wall Street Project, made something of a spectacle of himself Friday in San Diego, becoming agitated, slightly nonsensical, and loud as his time at the mic expired.
"‘How will reparations be paid?’ he added. 'Immediately!'
After being told that his time is up, Pierce yelled at the audience, ‘And $200,000 is not enough! $223,000 is not enough!’"
And it might not have been his encounter with the time constraints that prompted Reverend Pierce to lose any connection with reality. Just before that bit of bluster, he actually advocated for the so-called “reparations” money storm to be so expansive that it shower cash on non-residents.
"There should be no residency requirements for California! We have to encourage our people to come back to California! What better way to encourage our people to come back to California if we have no requirements?"
Which seems to be only fitting, for a proposal that literally would see the state take from people who haven’t harmed anyone – thus making them victims – and give it to people who have no specific claims of harm against them.
As I noted in December, California came into the U.S. as a non-slave state, which might be one of the reasons that this “Task Force” is claiming its “reparations” push is for “descendants of slaves” (again, California was not a “slave state”), and because of what they amorphously claim are “decades of discrimination,” and “gaps in housing policies” theoretically ascribed to racism (the Task Force doesn’t distinguish between government or private housing policies) going back a hundred years.
Related: California's Mulling Over $220k 'Reparations' Payments For Black Residents | MRCTV
But I also noted that person-on-person injury is supposed to be handled through a Common Law tort claim for damages, and:
“Beyond the fact that none of these potential “recipients” of “reparations” was injured and, therefore, cannot be made whole through these fictitiously termed “reparations”, there is the fact that, even if one were to believe that the descendants of slaves deserve to have the state make slaves out of people today, such that these new slaves – the taxpayers – will hand over big sums of cash for things they never did, the history of slavery is such that virtually every individual in any race can claim that, at one time or another, his or her ancestors were enslaved or preyed-upon. Where does this ‘original sin’ for slavery concept end?”
I also offered keen observations from Dr. Thomas Sowell, who noted:
“Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.”
Even the likely etymology of the term “slave” broadens one’s perspective on how widespread and ancient the terrible crime of slavery has been. As AtlasofEnslavement notes:
“(A) large number of Slavs are said to have been captured in battles with armies from the Eastern Roman Empire and taken away as slaves. From the 9th century on, the name of the people and the legal status became mixed. The name of the Slavs may have been given to slaves as a result of the long-distance slave trade. According to this theory, this trade increased significantly in the early Middle Ages, when large numbers of Slavs were ‘on the market’.”
In fact, as Paul Ferrell reports for The Daily Mail, Pierce has been “advocating” since at least December for the proposed recipients of this government-extracted graft to receive more, which is stunning, from a Christian perspective.
In addition to being the “Black Wall Street” CEO, Pierce is man of the cloth, a reverend, yet he appears to think that it’s not only morally acceptable for the state to steal billions from people who never did anything wrong, he seems to think it is morally imperative for the state to hand that out to people who never were wronged by said taxpayers, and he seems to believe that it is morally acceptable for the proposed recipients to accept the ill-gotten cash. Yet his audacity actually was trumped early on in the life of this celebrated “Task Force.”
Indeed, as Leslie Eastman reported January 8 for Legal Insurrection, Reparations Task Force Chair Kamilah Moore said economists on the panel estimated that black Californians descended from slaves were owed $1 million each in reparations.
This lower, $223,000 per-person, idea is, perhaps, the Task Force’s “bargain?” Claims by mafia dons that they are “cutting deals” for the victims living in their turf aren’t much different.
But the larger lessons are three-fold.
First, if these “reparations” are supposedly for real person-on-person criminality – not the amorphous term “discrimination” -- those people have not been identified, and most of them long, long ago passed away.
Second, if these are “reparations” for state activity, again, most of the victims are long gone, and calculating how their progeny might, or might not, have been harmed or helped by the state action is nearly impossible.
But that brings in the third lesson, which is more fundamental. If the culprit supposedly is the California government, going back a century, then that means those who did not want to pay for the government to engage in its activity – those who didn’t vote for one or another, or all, of the politicians who took office to promote those policies, and who didn’t want to pay for the policies to be enforced by tax-funded police and judges, et al – those people cannot be implicated. They were slaves to the state.
They also cannot be found.
As it is today, government has always been what 19th Century French economist Frederic Bastiat said it is: “That great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”
The statuses of victimizer and victimized merely depend on who is in control of this non-stop machine of enslavement.
Related: 'Slavery Reparations' Madness Spreads From Cali To Boston | MRCTV
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