Kenny Xu, an Asian-American civil rights advocate, says this:
"Wokism is basically an attack on Asian American achievement. It says, our hard work, our family values, that make us successful, we should be ashamed of. It’s an attack on our image, and it means Asian Americans don’t get respect in admissions or hiring." --Kenny Xu
Thoughts?
Prof. Kurt Lash has a very important forthcoming article on the State Citizenship Clause. Here is his Introduction:
I. Introduction
The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment declares: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof is a citizen of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This opening sentence contains not one, but two citizenship clauses. The first defines national citizenship. The second defines state citizenship. Although significant historical scholarship exists regarding the other provisions in Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, the State Citizenship Clause has been unstudied, unapplied and, quite often, unrecognized.
A close look at the history of the State Citizenship Clause, however, reveals its key purpose in the overall structure of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although today courts emphasize the “all persons” clauses (due process and equal protection), the majority of Section One addresses the status and rights of citizens. The National citizenship clause echoes the opening sentence of the 1866 Civil Rights Act and formally overrules the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott. The State citizenship clause goes further and addresses a critical omission in the 1866 Civil Rights Act. That Act defined national citizenship but left the status of state citizenship undefined and unprotected. The second citizenship clause remedies this omission and prohibits states from establishing a tiered system of citizenship where black Americans are treated as second class state citizens and denied the same civil rights granted to white state citizens.
Recognizing the role played by the State Citizenship Clause in securing the equal status of state citizens helps resolve a number of textual historical conundrums regarding the full meaning and structure of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment. For example, recent scholarship suggests that the original understanding of the Equal Protection Clause guaranteed nothing more than the equal application of laws protecting a person’s life, liberty or property. It appears this Clause did not prohibit states from discriminating on the basis of race in regard to the broader category of citizens civil rights. If so, then this means the original scope of the Equal Protection Clause was far narrower than the Supreme Court’s current interpretation and would not support the Court’s ruling in canonical cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia. The original understanding of the State Citizenship Clause, on the other hand, prohibits states from establishing a two-tiered system of state citizenship whereby civil rights and benefits are distributed differently on the basis of race.
The history of the State Citizenship Clause also sheds important light on the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause. The citizenship clauses define the status of national and state citizenship: Any person born in the United States is a citizen of the United States, and any United States citizen residing in a state is also a citizen of that state. The Privileges or Immunities Clause then declares that no state shall abridge the privileges or immunities of these citizens. These privileges include the rights secured by the status of national citizenship (for example, those enumerated in the Bill of Rights) and those rights secured by the status of state citizenship (local civil rights). Although whole forests have been felled in the effort to define the “fundamental” rights protected by the Privileges or Immunities Clause, the meaning of the Clause is both simple and easily enforceable. States cannot deny national citizens those rights secured by national law (including rights listed in the national Constitution) and states must extend local civil rights equally to all its citizens, regardless of race. The latter include all civil rights (not just “fundamental” rights), from the right to educational benefits to the right to skip down a public sidewalk.
This helps clarify a lot of issues we will be discussing.
Professor Phillip Hamburger's analysis concludes perhaps ("If tech execs cooperated with government officials, it might be a conspiracy against civil rights").
Money quotations:
Cooperation between government officials and private parties to suppress speech could be considered a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights. The current administration won’t entertain such a theory, but a future one might.
Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code provides: “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, . . . they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”
Government remains bound by the First Amendment even when it works through private cutouts. There would be no purpose to a Bill of Rights if government could evade it by using private entities to do its dirty work. As the Supreme Court put it in Frost & Frost Trucking Co. v. Railroad Commission (1926), “It is inconceivable that guaranties embedded in the Constitution of the United States may thus be manipulated out of existence.”
The First Amendment’s text confirms the unconstitutionality of such workarounds. Any “prohibiting” of the free exercise of religion violates the amendment. In contrast, a mere “abridging” of the freedom of speech is unconstitutional. The government thus violates the latter merely by abridging or reducing it.
The companies and individuals involved in the censorship need to decide where they stand. Perhaps it is time for them to distance themselves from the censorship. Are they comfortable with a conspiracy to violate civil rights? Even if that doesn’t bother them, are they willing to risk prosecution? They may assume, with some justification, that the Justice Department will hesitate to prosecute, even in a future administration. But would you bet the farm on that?
What are your thoughts?
Kenny Xu, an Asian civil rights activist, says this:
"We don’t need more white doctors. We don’t need more black doctors. We don’t even need more Asian doctors. We need the most qualified doctors, period. Even if the result is 'racially inequitable.'"
Do you agree or disagree? Why? What does inequitable mean in the quotation above?
When speaking of criminal law and the presumption of innocence, we often say it is better that 99 guilty people go free than for one innocent person to be wrongfully convicted.
To me, this is also true of free speech versus censorship. If the effort to censor "misinformation" casts some factual truths or political viewpoints into the censorship dragnet, that cost is too high.
