Unmasking The "Civil Rights" Scam

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Unmasking The “Civil Rights” Scam

The following is from: Charlie Kirk. Right Wing Revolution. How to Beat the Woke and Save the West. pp. 133 -139

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Unmasking The “Civil Rights” Scam

In June 1964, Goldwater delivered a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The subject was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As a senator, Goldwater had consistently attacked all forms of racial and religious discrimination. He had voted for civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960. But the bill before the Senate in 64, he said, was a bridge too far.

Goldwater's objection, specifically, was to Title VII of the act, which barred racial, religious, and sex-based discrimination by all large private employers. Goldwater's first objection was constitutional. Nothing in the Constitution even hinted at the federal government having such sweeping authority, he said, and so a law creating such authority, if upheld, would supersede the Constitution. But Goldwater then proceeded to make several additional practical criticisms of the law, and the impact he foresaw it having on American life in the many decades to come:

"Fifty years from now, if this law is passed, you will be permabanned from TikTok for saying that men shouldn't use women's restrooms. You will be demonetized on Youtube if you notice patterns to who commits the most violent crimes. You will lose your podcast deal if you say police should use force to stop looters. By the time this law has its full effect on the culture, you won't even feel comfortable shooting the sh*t with your bros in a frat basement or an Xbox lobby."

Okay, okay, Goldwater obviously didn't put it quite like that. But he wasn't as far off as you'd think! Here's what Barry did predict:

To give genuine effect to the prohibitions of this bill will require the creation of a Federal police force of mammoth proportions. It also bids fair to result in the development of an "informer" psychology in great areas of our national life—neighbors spying on neighbors, worker spying on workers, businessmen spying on businessmen, where those who would harass their fellow citizens for selfish and narrow purposes will have ample inducement to do so. These the Federal police force and an "informer" psychology, are the hallmarks of the police state and landmarks in the destruction of a free society.

The concept didn't even exist yet, but Goldwater had anticipated woke tyranny. Goldwater's vote made him a pariah to most of the country (though ironically, a young Hillary Rodham was a supporter). While he won the Republican presidential nomination a month later, he went on to lose the fall election to Lyndon Johnson in a gruesome landslide, winning just six states and losing the popular vote by almost 23 percent.

But sixty years later, I'm going to say something that you will never hear a modern Republican say, but it needs to be said if we want to reverse the woke virus on our nation. When it came to civil rights, Barry Goldwater was right.

I can't claim that this is an original thought of mine. Increasingly among conservatives, there has been a realization that so much of what ails America, and so many of the reasons that conservatives consistently, systematically lose one culture war after another, is rooted in the emergence of "civil rights law" in the 1960s.

The pioneer in making this observation was conservative writer and Claremont Institute senior fellow Christopher Caldwell, in his 2020 book The Age of Entitlement. In his book, Caldwell argues the ideology of civil rights has become so powerful that it has, effectively, replaced our original Constitution with a new one. Where we once had equality under the law, we now have affirmative action. Where we once had freedom of expression, we now have political correctness (and its successor, "woke"). Where we once had a restrained, limited federal government, we now have a regime of perpetual social reengineering. In the words of writer Helen Andrews, who reviewed Caldwell for the Claremont Review of Books, the 1964 Civil Rights Act has become "the law that ate the Constitution."

If you doubt the infinite adaptability of civil rights to any subject under the sun, consider the multifarious uses to which it has been put. Last year, the University of Missouri-Kansas City took down student art supporting the Hong Kong protests after pro-Beijing Chinese students complained it was discriminatory hate speech. The Second Circuit Court ofAppeals ruled that a New York ban on euthanasia violated the civil rights of patients who wanted to be euthanized by treating them differently than "similarly situated" patients who could arrange to die simply by refusing further treatment (the U.S. Supreme Court reversed). There are pavilion-sized homeless encampments on the streets of Los Angeles, employers can hire illegal immigrants with relative impunity, gay marriage is the law of the land—all because of civil rights law, directly or indirectly.

Political conflict in America, Caldwell says, is essentially a perpetual clash between those who believe in our official Constitution (conservatives) and those who follow our post-60s unofficial one (liberals).

"Affirmative action and political correctness were the twin pillars of the second constitution," Caldwell writes. "They were what civil rights was. They were not temporary. Affirmative action was deduced judicially from the curtailments on freedom of association that the Civil Rights Act itself had put in place."

That's all easy to say, but what makes the Civil Rights Act so powerful, and so immovable? It's actually not the text itself, per se. As Caldwell makes clear in his book, the creators of the Civil Rights Act believed that it only banned intentional and overt discrimination, and that it required equal treatment rather than equal outcomes. The plain text of the bill supports this.

Yet now, we live in a world where the government demands the exact opposite. Today, our government tells states, businesses, and schools that they must engage in reverse discrimination, attempting to engineer equal outcomes, or else they will run afoul of the law, and be vulnerable to devastating lawsuits.

So, what changed? It's precisely what Goldwater warned of. The Civil Rights Act empowered an army of bureaucrats to "interpret" the law. And, adhering to the latest left-wing values as bureaucrats tend to do, they utterly remade the law to mean the exact opposite of what it says—and the courts have played along.

Think back to Chapter 3: The left has taken civil rights and put it in drag!

DISPARATE IMPACT

The centerpiece of civil rights law as it exists today is a concept called "disparate impact." That concept has its roots in a little-known 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case, Griggs vs. Duke Power Co. Duke Power was a North Carolina electric company with five departments, four of them of which paid well and a fifth, "Labor," which paid poorly. During Jim Crow, blacks had only been allowed to work in the Labor department, but as segregation ended, Duke adopted a policy of allowing Labor employees to transfer to other departments if they either had a high school diploma or performed well enough on two basic intelligence tests. As it happened, blacks on average scored worse on the test, leading to a lawsuit. When the Supreme Court heard the case, it ruled that while Duke's test was outwardly neutral (and not even designed by the company), because it produced different outcomes based on race (a "disparate impact"), and simply testing employees' general ability wasn't sufficiently related to specific work duties, it violated the Civil Rights Act's ban on racial discrimination in employment.

Over the past half-century, Griggs has utterly remade every aspect of American life. It is, in essence, the Roe v. Wade of federally enforced, bureaucratic wokeness. Once it was allowed into federal law, disparate impact became the skeleton key that unlocked almost every facet of wokeness that we've seen since. In Chapter 2, I mentioned that wokeness is fundamentally bureaucratic. Disparate impact is by far the strongest factor creating that bureaucratic power. In the words of the Manhattan Institute's Gail Heriot, the doctrine of disparate impact "makes almost everything presumptively illegal." In a remarkable passage of a paper she wrote, Heriot describes the sheer insanity of what the law has become.

[D]isparate impact liability is incoherent. All job qualifications have a disparate impact. . . . On average, men are stronger than women, while women are generally more capable of fine handiwork. Chinese Americans and Korean Americans score higher on standardized math tests and other measures of mathematical ability than most other national origin groups. They are also more likely to hold a B.S., B.Eng., M.S., or Ph.D. in one of the hard sciences or engineering.

There is a lot more. South Asian Indian Americans are disproportionately likely to have experience in motel management than the rest of the population. . . . Native Americans are less likely to have access to high-speed internet service. They are hence less likely to learn of jobs that are posted only on the internet and less likely to be able to comply with requirements that job applications be submitted through the employer's web site.

As Thomas Sowell once said, "Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days."

Armed with disparate impact, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (the group charged with enforcing the Civil Rights Act) has spent half a century roaming America waging war against, in essence, anything its own bureaucrats decide is "racist." In 2012, the EEOC warned that companies could not categorically refuse to hire convicted felons because black Americans are more likely to have a felony conviction.

But notice the key fact: It's not that literally everything is illegal. Rather, what is illegal is always simply whatever EEOC decides. As Heriot puts it, "Since all job qualifications have a disparate impact on some group, all employer decisions are subject to second-guessing by the EEOC (or by the courts in the case of a private lawsuit)." It's a perfect recipe for tyranny: Woke bureaucrats have made everyone a criminal, and then they simply decide who they feel like prosecuting.

For example: Different races all graduate college at different rates, yet requiring a college degree for a job has never been targeted by the EEOC. Why? Because the EEOC has simply decided that such requirements are fine—probably because colleges are run by liberals. Yet at the same time, the EEOC looks very critically at any employer who simply gives job applicants a written test, with no degree requirement, because of the "disparate impact" of the test.

And so, in a roundabout way, civil rights law is driving students to spend tens of thousands of dollars getting degrees from woke universities, rather than going right into the workforce. Civil rights law is creating the college scam! Not even Goldwater could have predicted that one.

THE HR INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

But it's not just about Supreme Court rulings empowering the courts and federal bureaucracy to muck up your life. What you know today as "woke capital" is, substantially, the creation of this civil rights regime.

Most Americans believe that hormones and surgery can't magically turn a man into a woman, so why is this borderline impossible to say in a workplace? In fact, why is almost anything that goes against wokeness dangerous to say at any large American company? You know what it is: Human resources, and DEI.

But why does every company have such militant HR and DEI inside them? It's precisely because of what I said just above. Since the government can decide at any time to go after any organization for some policy with a "disparate impact," the way to avoid being targeted is to show slavish devotion to the cult of wokeism. Imagine a town run by a gangster where anyone who slobbers the gangster with praise is spared, but anybody who criticizes him gets murdered, and you start to get the idea.

And so, as the Soviets had commissars and Mao had his Red Guards, America has its DEI and HR professionals, monitoring every company for ideological offenses. When America was at its apex, these people did not exist. Companies were once able to hire and fire the way you would want to be able to do it if you ran a business (or the way you wish you could if you run one right now): By simply soliciting applications and hiring whoever seems like the best fit, by whatever criteria you think is best. It's a system that empowers business owners and entrepreneurs rather than parasitic government employees who have never worked a real job in their lives.

Now, that's all changed. In the 1950s, less than a third of American employers had an HR office. By the 80s, more than 70 percent did. In 1963, no companies had "equal employment opportunity" officers (the fore-runners of today's DEI staff). By the 80s nearly half of companies had one, and today a large company without DEI staff might as well be an Egyptian house without lamb's blood over the doorway, waiting for a visit from the federal government's Angel of Death.

Why do so many people fear being fired from their job for a single bad joke? Why are you forced to attend tedious workplace trainings every year that sound like political lectures and are designed to make you feel racial guilt for being white? It's because federal civil rights law is kept vague, and there is little standard for what corporations can do to comply other than show total loyalty to the unholy trinity of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. And so, companies have done that. In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's death, hiring for DEI roles increased by a whopping 55%. It wasn't because the world suddenly needed more do-nothing diversity hires. It was companies reading the zeitgeist, and making sure they weren't the ones caught not applauding for Stalin.

It all reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite writers, Theodore Dalrymple:

"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

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29 Sept 2024