It's Not Reparations, It's Revenge...

Democrats frequently talk about reparations for black Americans, compensation for slavery and Jim Crow.  Indeed, House member Cori Bush recently proposed $14 trillion as a good place to start.

Any reparations plan would be extraordinarily complex. First, if reparations are to be paid, to whom would they be paid?  To every one of America’s 45 million blacks? (2020 Census)  Including the 4.5 million blacks who immigrated after Jim Crow was gone?  Should the 33 million black Americans aged 50 or below who have only lived after passage of the Voting and Civil Rights Acts?  How about black families whose ancestors lived in northern states where slavery was largely outlawed before America was a nation and Jim Crow never existed?  How about blacks from states like California and Idaho who had neither slavery nor Jim Crow?  Or those of mixed origins with one black parent?  Is one black grandparent sufficient or would it have to be at least 2 of 4?  Do black families who earn $200,000 a year still qualify for reparations?  How about America’s 1.5 million black millionaires?   

The next question is, if indeed reparations were to be paid, who would pay them? America has approximately 250 million white people. Would all of them have to pay? Even those whose ancestors arrived after passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts or whose ancestors arrived after the Civil War, as many Italians and Irish did? Do the 155 million or so who are 50 or younger and were born after Jim Crow was history? How about those descended from one of the 360,000 white Northern soldiers who lost their lives fighting to end slavery? Or those who live in states that never had slavery or Jim Crow? Do the whites of Wyoming, where the black population is 0.9% pay the same as Louisiana where it’s 31%? 

Once we’ve nailed down who’s going to get reparations and who’s going to pay them, then we have to figure out how much.  For the sake of argument, let’s take Bush’s $14 trillion.  That works out to $311,000 to every black American. Again, for argument’s sake, let’s say that all 250 million of the whites would be responsible for making the reparation.  If required to make that payment, that would involve every single white person (including babies and retirees) to write a check for about $56,000.  That’s unlikely to be feasible given that the average median white household income in the US is $78,000.

So, if writing a check is out of the question, maybe setting up a payment plan, sort of like a mortgage.  Spreading the $56,0600 out over 15 years at today’s 6.7% interest rate would make for a monthly payment of $494 per white person. That doesn’t seem too unreasonable, but what about unemployed whites or those on government assistance?  Do they pay?  What about white kids too young to work?  Do they pay or do their obligations accrue until they turn 18 or get their first job?  Then of course, who do they make those checks out to?  Do the white people get to choose which black people they pay?  Or do they make the payment to a pool to be distributed by some upstanding organization that represents black people like the NAACP or BLM or the National Action Network? Are the payments tax deductable? Maybe let the IRS collect the money and have the government distribute it. Would the government need to set up a Department of Reparations to keep the money separate from the rest of the government’s funds? Or maybe the government can pay the whole sum up front and bill the white people. Would individual black people have claim on individual white people’s property if they didn’t or couldn’t pay?  Would jails become debtor’s prisons full of people who can’t pay?

Assuming all of that gets figured out, are new black babies entitled to reparations?  If yes, for how long? Will black babies born in 2075 still be eligible for payments and white ones still obligated to pay? Is it in perpetuity or will it only last 100 years?  If new black babies are not eligible, how would mom explain to junior that he doesn’t get the $311,000 his brother did just because he was born 12 months later?  If a black woman is pregnant when the agreement is made, does she collect for only herself or for her baby too? 

At the end of the day reparations are made for some wrong done… but what if the result of that wrong left the progeny of the person wronged better off than had the wrong not been done in the first place.  Is it possible that reparations aren’t really due?

Approximately 400,000 blacks were brought to the United States as slaves. We assume that had they not been sold into slavery they would likely have stayed where they lived. So, one might ask, would the progeny of those slaves have been better off in those home countries than they are here as a result of their ancestors being sold into slavery?  First, let’s look at incomes. We’ll look at the per person median income (PPMI) in the top 10 modern nations encompassing the places from which those blacks were taken. (see nearby chart)

The average among those 10 nations is $950 per year.  This compares to a median income for black Americans of $13,108 per person. ($19,306 average American X .67)

But of course money isn’t everything, right? How about life expectancy?  In those same 10 nations the life expectancies average 61.6, compared to the United States where the average life expectancy of black Americans is 75.1 years. 

	PPMI	Life Expt.
Angola:	$665	62.3
Congo (DR):	$392	62.4
Cameroon:	$1,245	60.9
Nigeria:	$825	52.9
Guinea:	$876	60.7
Sierra Leone:	$765	60.1
Gambia:	$1,383	63.8
Liberia:	$753	61.1
Mauritania:	1,760	64.5
Senegal:	$844	67.6
Average:	$950.80	61.6
Black Americans	$13,108	75.1

So black Americans have incomes that are 13 times higher than individuals living in the nations from which slaves were brought to America. They also have life expectancies that are 14 years, or 22% longer. What’s more, Americans have freedoms found in none of those countries; they also have levels of entertainment, transportation, food, shelter, leisure, medicines, job opportunities and democracy that citizens of those nations can only dream of. 

As such, it appears that black American descendants of slaves are actually far better off because their ancestors left Africa in bondage and landed in the United States.  Indeed, had their ancestors been taken to Brazil, where the largest number of blacks landed, they might not have survived to procreate because death rates were staggeringly high, or to the middle east where the men were castrated and babies born to black slaves were killed at birth, which explains a dearth of blacks in the middle east despite importing more slaves than the Americas. 

But the relevant progeny for this discussion were brought to the United States, and it appears that they are much better off than the descendents of those who were left behind.  If that were not the case, one would expect that blacks unhappy with America would willingly emigrate to the nations from which their ancestors came. But that never quite happens does it? Which begs the question, given that no one alive today was either a slave or owned slaves and most of the progeny of slaves are exponentially better off than they would have been had their ancestors not been taken to America in the first place, exactly why are reparations warranted?

In fact, they’re not, and that’s the point.  It’s not reparations that are being demanded, it’s revenge, which is a completely different thing altogether…

Democrats are the Nigerian Prince Scammers of American Politics, and their Voters are the Dupes

 According to the American Heritage dictionary, this is the definition of Stupid: 

1.  Slow to learn or understand; obtuse.

2.  Tending to make poor decisions or careless mistakes.

3.  Marked by a lack of intelligence or care; foolish or careless.

That applies to a lot of Americans… Democrat voters in general and in particular a majority of blacks, college students and white college educated women. 

Notice I said Democrat voters, not Democrat politicians.  Democrat politicians may be many things, hypocrites, liars, traitors and more, but they’re not stupid as defined above. Why?  Because they do exactly what they need to do in order to win and gain power and fortune. 

There’s perhaps no better example than Joe Biden… the man is a congenital liar .  Plagiarism has been a problem since he was in college and was actually the reason he withdrew from his first presidential campaign.  Indeed, Biden is a lying machine!  He claimed to have gone to college on a full scholarship, earned three degrees and graduated in the top of his class.  All lies

Biden’s career of lies only become more consequential and destructive as he ran for president in 2020.  Every campaign is full of hyperbole like “I’m going to cut taxes” or “I’ll be the education president”.  But with Biden the lies went far beyond white lies.  He told the American people the story of his son Hunter’s laptop was Russian propaganda, that he never discussed business with his son and perhaps most depressingly of all, once he became president he went on TV and told the country that “White supremacists” are the most dangerous threat to the nation.  All lies. 

But Joe Biden is not stupid, although even before dementia began to set in he probably wouldn’t have qualified for Mensa.  He may have never been the brightest bulb, but he was and is smart like a fox when it comes to accumulating money and power.

Not that there’s anything wrong with accumulating money and power.  Most Americans would like to be financially secure and have the power to improve the lives of those around them and perhaps beyond. But there’s a difference between grifting for a living and doing an honest day’s work.

The question is however, how does one guy of marginal intelligence get “elected” to the most powerful job in the world? Easy, Democrats are the Nigerian Princes of American politics.

We’re all familiar with the Nigerian Prince schemes. You get an email telling you that some prince has millions of dollars tied up in an American bank but they can’t get the money without paying some fee or tax, which, because of some visa application hiccup they can’t pay. If however you’ll just pay the $10,000 tax for them they can get their money and will send you millions. Seems legit…

Any normal person would read the email, often filled with misspellings and outlandish claims, and delete it as an obvious scam. But there are a certain number of people who will take the bait and don’t quite figure out that it’s a scam until their bank accounts are empty, or worse!

But here’s the thing, those misspellings and grammatical mistakes and outlandish claims aren’t a bug, they’re a feature! The whole point of the exercise isn’t to garner responses from millions of people who will do even a minimal amount of due diligence and discover the obvious fraud.  That would waste the culprit’s time and make the whole endeavor too time consuming to be profitable.  No, they make the email and the claims so obviously ludicrous that the only people who respond are those sufficiently gullible to end up forking over tens of thousands of dollars. The victims of these schemes may be rather dim, but the thieves are anything but.  They’re highly sophisticated in understanding how the human mind works and they are experts at manipulating it.  If they weren’t, the scam never would have taken off and tens of thousands of victims around the world wouldn’t be out of millions of dollars. 

Now replace the Nigerian Prince scam with Democrat party propaganda and you begin to see exactly what is going on. The Democrat party, along with their comrades in the media and academia and the regulatory state are the grifters sitting behind the computer screen spamming America with outlandish claims and promises of fortune, knowing that a certain element of the population are sufficiently gullible to believe them.

For fifty years Democrats told American women that men were superfluous to raising children but now that’s moot because men can have babies, genetic men are real women and prepubescent children are mature enough to consent to sex change operations. They tell us with a straight face that the “Woman of the Year” is a guy who used to be a mediocre men’s swimmer but who dominates when competing against real women.

For decades they told black Americans Democrats were their champions when even a modicum of research would reveal that it was the Democrats who started a war to keep blacks in chains, fought the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, started the KKK, wrote Jim Crow laws, and filibustered the Civil Rights Act. It was the Democrats whose policies destroyed the nuclear black family and eviscerated cities like Detroit, Chicago and others that were once engines of black advancement.  It was the Democrats who called for defunding the police and for “equity” in the justice system, severing the connection between actions and consequences and leaving the blood of thousands of black Americans on streets across the country.  And perhaps most treacherously of all, it was Democrats who told blacks that America is a systemically racist nation where they had no chance for success, sparking the worst racial tension in America in two generations.  And proving they disdain black voters, they tell black Americans their lives are at risk because of racist whites when every black person in America knows they have far more to fear from black males, and it’s not even close.  

Democrats constantly tell the middle class they’re being shafted because the rich didn’t pay their fair share, in reality the top 10% of income earners pay 71% of all federal income taxes while the bottom 50% pay a mere 3%.

They also tell us the border is secure while we watch thousands of people simply walk into the country and call anyone who notices a racist. 

Finally, in 2020 when Americans went to bed with Donald Trump ahead in the polls in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan only to wake up the next morning to find that Democrat run cities had stopped counting the votes and then magically when they restarted Biden was ahead.  Again, with straight faces they tell us a guy who couldn’t fill a phone booth for his rallies beat a guy whose supporters overflowed football stadiums across the country and the guys we see on video walking around with flags inside the Capitol on Jan 6^th represent the biggest attack on America since 9/11.

The Nigerian Price scammers are pikers when compared to the Democrats. All they want is empty someone’s bank account.  Democrats want total control over everyone’s lives.

When the gullible give their money to the Nigerian Prince scammers it’s only their bank accounts that are being emptied, but when gullible and stupid voters give their votes to Democrats they’re undermining the Republic for the entire population.  The difference is, most of the marks who fall for the Prince scam learn their lessons and rarely make the same mistake twice while the marks who vote for Democrats continue to do it regardless of the damage they do.  There’s a word for that.

A Caliphate foothold in America and Barack Obama’s ignorance about the Crusades, the Inquisition and American History

Barack Obama’s relationship with Islam is definitely strange, at least as relative to that of most Americans. The United States may not be a Christian nation, but it is has always been a nation of Christians in that the overwhelming majority of the country has always been Christian, and remains so today. Given that 0.6% of the United States’ population is Muslim, most American’s familiarity with and knowledge of Islam comes from reading and what they see on TV. Neither can give someone the same familiarity with Islam as would be felt had the grown up with the faith as part of their family and their neighborhood. As shallow as is most of America’s familiarity with Islam today, before 9-11 it was even more so.

But of course September 11 did happen. Watching the scenes of revelers in the West Bank and other places cheering the attacks and thinking back on the first WTC attacks, the USS Cole, the embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi… Americans could have easily come to the conclusion that Islam was at war with the United States. But they didn’t. In fact, after September 11 President Bush was quite clear that that was not the case. And the predicted wave of attacks against Muslims across the country never materialized.

In fact, although there were some isolated attacks, just the opposite occurred. Prayer events where Imams were invited to speak took place across the country. Muslims were interviewed on TV and radio programs seeking to understand the religion and the motivations behind the attacks. In 1942 the hero of the left locked up 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps while in 2001 the bête noire of the left encouraged Americans to embrace Muslims.

Then in 2008 something remarkable happened. Americans elected to the presidency someone who, although ostensibly Christian, was the son of a Muslim, who grew up in a Muslim country, who attended a mosque (irregularly) and who was educated in a Madrasa.  That, in a country where only 50 years before serious questions existed as to whether or not a Catholic could be elected.

All of this is to simply say, America knows that it’s not at war with Islam.

That being said however, apparently Islam is at war with much of the world… and in some places, with itself. Of the 31 active wars going on in the world today (those with at least 100 causalities per year) fully 20 of them involve Muslims on one side or the other… or both. That’s 65% of the conflicts while Muslims make up 20% of the world’s population. At the same time, 29 of the FBI's 30 most wanted terrorists are... Muslims. 

Which brings us back to Barack Obama and his unwillingness to call the Islamist terrorists Islamist terrorists. While most Americans understand that not all Muslims are terrorists, they recognize the demonstrable fact that Islamic terror is a real thing, a real threat, and are simply puzzled by Obama's obfuscation on acknowledging the obvious.  But he has given Americans much to be puzzled about when it comes to his perspective on Islam.

In 2007 candidate Obama, after reciting the Arabic call to prayer (apparently with a perfect accent) he told a reporter for the NY Times that that sound was “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

In 2009 after Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 soldiers and injured more than 30 at Ft. Hood, Texas, while yelling Allahu Akbar – a thread that seems to run through such attacks – Barack Obama told the country this was simply “workplace violence”.

In 2010 Charles Bolden, Barack Obama’s head of NASA told Al Jazeera that one of the president’s three mandates for NASA was: “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

In 2012, following the attack on Benghazi which killed 4 Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Barack Obama’s State Department spent $70,000 on ads in Pakistan denouncing the US made anti-Islam video the administration falsely blamed for the attacks. He further spoke at the UN, not in defense of free speech, but to suggest that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

Finally there is the President’s recent comments equating Islamist terror (although he refuses to use the term) with the Crusades, the Inquisition and slavery & Jim Crow in the US. Of the many things that Barack Obama has said that have puzzled Americans about his perspective on Islam, this might be the most egregious. It shows he has no understanding of history, either Christian or American.

The Crusades were a largely defensive effort as part of a centuries long geopolitical struggle that saw the Muslims stopped at Tours, France in 732, saw the Umayyad Caliphate control Spain from the 7th to the 11th centuries and saw the Ottomans turned back from Vienna in both 1529 and 1683.

In stark contrast to Islamic terror, the Inquisition was “not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions.” This was necessary because prior to the Inquisition local nobles were responsible for passing judgment on heresy and arbitrarily convicted both the innocent and the guilty, often for reasons that had nothing to do with the church and everything to do with political expediency. The Inquisition was the Church’s attempt to eliminate such injustices.

Finally there is slavery and Jim Crow. What Barack Obama doesn’t bother to mention is that from before there was a United States Christians across the colonies fought slavery in the name of Christ. Indeed abolitionists existed throughout our history and Christianity was its driving force. That slavery became a blemish on American history is unfortunate, but it was economics that kept men in bondage, not Christianity, after all the Kansas–Nebraska Act had nothing to do with Christ. So too with Jim Crow. It was culture and economic power that separated the races in the south rather than religion. While some may have used Christianity as an excuse to support such laws, there was always a significant and vocal fight from Christians against such unequal treatment, including in the South. And it was Christianity that Martin Luther King harnessed to inspire the nation to bring the system down.

Barack Obama’s obdurate unwillingness to call Islamic terror by its name stands in stark contrast to his seeming eagerness to characterize a wide swath of activities and events in America as racist. Given that everything from 9-11 to videotaped beheadings to the burning people alive in cages has played itself out right in front of our eyes under the cry of Allahu Akbar, the former makes Americans wonder if Barack Obama is not perhaps some kind of Manchurian Candidate who seeks to soften American resistance to some future caliphate foothold. At the same time his seeming eagerness to immediately insert race into everything from votes against him to the Cambridge police dustup to the Michael Brown incident makes many Americans wonder if Barack Obama is not a modern version of Aesop’s Boy Who Cried Wolf, who sees racism around every corner, regardless of the facts.   

At the end of the day a leader doesn’t necessarily have to be of the same party or color or race or religion of those he leads. But he does have to share their basic values and understanding of the world if he desires their continued attention and engagement. With the Yoga like contortions he persists in engaging in in order to avoid calling Islamist terror what it obviously is and Islamic terrorists what they are, more and more people are beginning to wonder about Obama’s view of the world and view of America.  They understandably wonder how much that view - coming from a guy who didn't even know you're supposed to put your hand over your heart during the national anthem, something most 5th graders know - dovetails with theirs.  It’s about time.