During a segment of today’s episode “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler discussed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s recent comparison of blacks to disabled people, and how race-based districting actually harms black candidates who may want to seek higher office.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Jack Fowler: Victor, let me read the headline here. It’s from the Daily Mail. “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argues for a race-based redistricting.” This was the Supreme Court. They had a hearing. Well, let me just read this. “Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday”—that would have been about a week ago from when this podcast is up—“compared efforts to draw congressional districts along racial lines, compared it to the way disabled people were granted easier access to buildings after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law.” That’s quoting her.
“‘The idea of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is that we are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system. Right?’ Jackson said as she questioned a lawyer representing Louisiana voters who argued that the court-ordered creation of a second majority-black district in the state violated the 14th Amendment by prioritizing racial composition in its boundaries. ‘They’re disabled,’ the justice said of minority voters in the state.”
Victor, are blacks disabled? The Supreme Court justice thinks so.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I don’t know what they mean, but I think a lot of people’s problem with DEI and affirmative action is there’s no time limit on it. And I guess that’s what Brown was trying to say, that once you state that blacks are permanently disabled, as if it’s a physical condition, then you’re going to have permanent set-asides.
But that was never the point. Even most of the Supreme Court justices who voted for affirmative action to be continued said they felt that in 20 years it would be no longer needed. When you look at undergraduates today and most of the elite universities, they’re proportionate, according to race. If you look at women, they graduate, I think, it’s about 54% of all [Bachelor of Arts] are women. And in law schools and medical schools now, there’s a majority of women students more than men. If you look at the Stanford website, I don’t know how accurate it is, as I said, but it was 9% white males.
So, as I said before, if you look at per capita income levels in the United States, I think so-called whites are No. 8 or 9 of people who identify, as … you know, [Zohran] Mamdani, Indian Americans areNo. 1. And then a group of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arab Americans, they are higher.
So, the whole idea of DEI is frozen in amber. It’s stale. It doesn’t adapt to change. There’s other problems with it, but it doesn’t show that class and race are no longer identical. And that you’ve got all these people who are claiming that they’re completely disabled or disadvantaged when … I was looking down at my phone because in the four biggest cities, I think in the United States: New York was Eric Adams was mayor—black. Los Angeles, Karen Bass—black; Chicago, Democratic Brandon Johnson—black; and then, Philadelphia, Cherelle Parker—black. And I could go down to San Diego, Dallas, you name it. And the majority of the biggest cities in the country are black mayors.
And so, the point is, did they have racially gerrymandered? No, they didn’t. They didn’t have racially gerrymandered districts. As I understand, it was just a citywide vote. Why do we have them in the House at this late date in the civil rights movement?
And, you know, it’s to the disadvantage of black Americans to have these racially created concentrations on the basis of race because when you have two or three black candidates running for Congress in these overwhelmingly black Democratic districts, you get kind of an auction or a competition to see who can be the most radical, the most authentic, the most black.
And then when that happens and that person gets elected, that’s the end of their political career. That’s the end of it. Now, they may be speaker like Hakeem Jeffries or Jim Clyburn, third ranking in the party after a number of years. But they’re not going to be elected senator or national candidate. And the only way you can really be—black, white—a national candidate, you have to be a governor or a senator.
Kamala Harris ran as a senator.
So, what they’re doing is they’re taking black politicians and they’re putting them on record with a whole history of easily verifiable written and oral statements. And it’s going to be very hard for them in a state race where the blacks are only 10% or 15% or 20% of the population to have a so-called black radical or firebrand.
That’s why Barack Obama, the best thing that ever happened to him, he lost that congressional race. I think it was to Bobby Rush. He was not considered an authentic black radical like his opponent was in that congressional race, who was a former Black Panther. And that liberated Obama to go appeal, at least superficially, as a moderate. And he was elected to a statewide race.
That explains why there’s a larger percentage of blacks in the House than the Senate, because they have these specially carved out districts, which basically make it very hard for them to run for the Senate. So, I don’t know why Ketanji Brown, who I think—nothing to do with their race—but what she’s said and written, she is the weakest Supreme Court justice we’ve had in a generation.
She’s way out of her league. She was the one that in the confirmation could not define, remember, a male or female. And it’s sad, but she’s way out of her depth. And to say that blacks are disabled, it makes no sense. And so, if you’re just going to keep on saying that or assuming that, it was very revealing because I think she tried, she basically summed up a lot of the left-wing black leadership’s assumptions about blacks: that they are disabled. And I don’t think most people feel that’s true.
But in the reparations, I guess the California Legislature and Gavin Newsom does, because he just passed the second phase of reparations. We’re anywhere from $20 to $50 billion short on the budget each year. We’re going to have to make massive cuts.
And he’s now basically saying to the state, “I want to take 5% of the resident population, and I want to give them money for something that happened, about eight to nine generations ago, somewhere else other than the California state, which was a state during the Civil War. But it was a free state that fought the Confederacy and was opposed to slavery and did not ever allow it within its confines. And I want to give money to African Americans, but I don’t know how to define them. I don’t know if you’re one-third or one-fourth or one-eighth or one-fifth or two-fifths or three-fifths, whether you qualify.
“I do not know how long you have to have lived in California. Did you hear about reparations and moved from Utah and therefore you count? We have no idea how to define a long-standing African American. We don’t know who qualifies. Does Willie Brown, the former mayor? Does Kamala Harris, who’s half Indian?”
It’s when you get into that racial realm of privilege and bias and prejudice as the Old South determined, you endure a labyrinth because ultimately you have to have rules.
And once you make the rules, they’re ridiculous. Even the Third Reich did not know how to define Jewish people. Was it one-quarter, one-fifth? And so, they had all of these secret little genealogists that were working with the Nazi hierarchy, because every once in a while, a top Nazi’s rival for power or influence with the Hitler inner circle, the accusation would go, “His grandmother was Jewish, his wife is half Jewish,” and then they would go hire a genealogist and go to [Hermann] Goring or somebody and try to get an exemption.
But it was a ridiculous situation. Why would you have to have a yellow star to identify a Jew if, according to your ideology, they were so inferior and different that you could spot them a mile away? You wouldn’t have to have. And the answer was they had to put a star because they looked just like us. And they talked just like us in Western Europe.
And many of them were fully assimilated, were not observant Jews.
Fowler: They fought, died in World War I alongside us.
Hanson: Yes, that’s another story. The Iron Crosses at Auschwitz that were in a big box where people wore them, thinking that they would be given exemptions because they had been heroic German soldiers in World War I. So, if you go down that route that Ketanji Brown Jackson wants to go on, you have to have a whole system.
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