Amanda Prestigiacomo reports on a horrendously immoral, anti-American, and racist policy imposed on the residents of Oakland, California by its mayor, Libby Schaaf, and its city government. In Democrat Mayor Giving $500 A Month To Families Of Color To Shrink ‘Racial Wealth Gap’, Prestigiacomo explains that poor white families are excluded from the program.
Democratic Mayor Libby Schaaf of Oakland, California, announced a new program Tuesday that would give $500 a month no-strings-attached checks to some low income families of color, though low income white families are expressly excluded.
Starting this spring, about 600 randomly selected families of color in Oakland will receive $500 checks each month for at least a year and a half. The included families will have to make less than $30,000 annually and have at least one child.
And, again, they cannot be white.
“To qualify, families must have at least one child and make less than 50 percent of the area median — about $59,000 annually for a family of three,” The Washington Post detailed. “And they must be Black, Indigenous or otherwise identify as people of color.”
It’s not your standard forced redistribution of wealth, legalized theft. It is not just racist. The ugly hand of egalitarianism tops off this program. The phony “problem” of economic inequality is being applied:
“There are huge [wealth and income] gaps between people of color and our white residents,” Schaaf told The Washington Post, seemingly rationalizing the express exclusion of poor white people. “With the limited resources of this pilot, we would like to understand better how we can understand these disparities as well as address overall poverty.”
How do mere statistical disparities justify stealing money from taxpayers to hand out to people who didn’t earn it? They don’t, any more than the money in your wallet justifies a burglar’s robbing you. While this program is voluntarily funded—
The money comes from a $7 million fund raised through the Oakland Resilient Families program, according to the New York Post. The program is “100% funded through philanthropic donations,” the City of Oakland noted in a March 23 announcement.
—this is a trial balloon that advocates hope will serve as a model for a federal program.
Schaaf’s program is ostensibly intended to be temporary, but the Democrat makes clear that she’d like the program to be adopted federally.
“The federal government is the only one that can provide an entitlement to meet whatever need there is,” said Schaaf.
People could spend their money any way they want, of course. But the federal connection is one reason why this program should be called out. Another is that no United States governmental entity should ever be involved in this or like programs. Despite the philanthropic funding source, the government is bound by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Just as a government cannot favor one religion over another, the government cannot discriminate based on skin color, as this program does. The private Oakland Resilient Families can discriminate, of course. Racial discrimination is evil, but private individuals have that right. Not so, governmental entities. While I’m not a constitutional expert, and there are narrowly defined allowances for governmental racial discrimination, my view is that by actively promoting this program, the Oakland government is violating the U.S. Constitution and likely the California State Constitution.
This is more evidence of the racism of the Anti-Racists. That this Oakland program is racist and violates the14th Amendment guarantee of equality before the law requires no further commentary. And it is only one of many similar mostly Democratic policies coming down the pike. (Vermont’s vaccine distribution program, though superficially “justified” for medical reasons, is racially biased. President Biden’s Covid relief bill contains an explicitly racist farm subsidy program. And Marin County, California, has a racist guaranteed income program similar to Oakland’s, but that includes public (taxpayer) funding.)
This is not merely another welfare state forced transfer program, which are meant, at least on paper, to lift the poor. Oakland is not even about reparations, which carry an element of plausibility and arguability—actual victims of racist government policies should be compensated. More deeply, this is egalitarianism in action. Egalitarianism holds that equality of material and spiritual outcome is the fundamental moral value and standard of good and evil, regardless of individual attributes, achievements, character, or moral standing. These individual diversities and many others that affect individual outcomes, natural as they are, are irrelevant to the egalitarian. Human beings are devoid of souls, or their souls are irrelevant, according to egalitarianism. They are hollow shells. Statistical group disparities, or “gaps”—collectivism—is all that matters. Justice has no place in the egalitarian universe. Yet, no one has ever offered a rational argument in favor of the premise that inequality in, say, income and wealth (aka "wealth gaps') is in any respect problematic, or that equality of any kind other than equal rights before the law is good.
Programs like Oakland's are meant to equalize people's lives, as an end in itself. This is unnatural and, I submit, evil. That's egalitarianism—evil stripped naked of all pretense. It begins with theft and ends in Killing Fields.
The 19th Century Abolitionists fought a long hard ideological “cold Civil War” against the remnants of slavery in America, culiminating in a long and bloody hot Civil War that finally eraticated slavery in the South. But the anti-slave forces didn’t stop there. They solidified their victory over slavery with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments—the Civil War Amendments—clarifying the intent of the “glorious liberty document” by explicitly guaranteeing full citizenship and equality before the law for the emancipated slaves and all Americans regardless of color or economic status. The Civil rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. fought, and won, the battle against race-based Jim Crow laws. The racist, egalitarian Oakland program is a direct rollback of at least the 14th Amendment, and more broadly the spirit of the Civil War Amendments, as well as a repudiation of the Civil Rights Movement. This is not only Jim Crow 2.0. The ghost of the Confederacy hangs over the Oakland government and this anti-American program. For shame.
Related Reading:
Racism— by Ayn Rand
The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’
The Racism of the Anti-Racists: Dr. Jill Biden, Wanda Blanchett, and Dr. Bob Harris
The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: San Diego’s ‘Educators’
The Racism of the 'Anti-Racists': 'This New America' - Apartheid?
The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: The NJ State Budget
An Anti-Racist Education for Middle Schoolers by ROBBY SOAVE for Reason
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