New Jersey Legislature's Monstrous Interference into the State’s Giant Pension Fund

NJ public employees and retirees be aware: You are about to be thrown under the bus by your elected representatives, on the absurd rationalization of "the fight against climate change." 

As Steven Rodas and Derek Hall report for NJ.com in N.J. could divest its $92B pension fund from fossil fuels. What it means financially and for climate change:

New Jersey would join a growing list of states to divest its pension fund from fossil fuel companies if a long-stalled bill crosses the finish line in Trenton this fall.

The legislation (A1733), now in its fourth iteration after it was first introduced in 2017, has gained new momentum in recent weeks as the fight against climate change intensifies nationwide. It will be considered Thursday by the state Senate’s environment committee.

This is a purely political move. There is no economic, scientific, or financial justification for this order. 

Morally, this is monstrous. Energy is the industry that powers every other industry. Therefore, the availability of reliable, cost-effective energy is vital to every aspect of our lives. Fossil fuels provide 80% of that energy, and will continue to be needed for decades to come, as it continues to grow both in the U.S and worldwide in the current absence of any viable alternative or competition. By joining in the suicidal movement to starve the fossil fuel industry of investment capital, the legislature is courting with a monumental human catastrophe that would dwarf any problematic climate side effects of burning fossil fuels.

But it is also illegal. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the people managing pension funds in America are fiduciaries. This is what the department explains under the heading Fiduciary Responsibilities

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) protects your plan's assets by requiring that those persons or entities who exercise discretionary control or authority over plan management or plan assets, anyone with discretionary authority or responsibility for the administration of a plan, or anyone who provides investment advice to a plan for compensation or has any authority or responsibility to do so are subject to fiduciary responsibilities. Plan fiduciaries include, for example, plan trustees, plan administrators, and members of a plan's investment committee.

The primary responsibility of fiduciaries is to run the plan solely in the interest of participants and beneficiaries and for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits and paying plan expenses. Fiduciaries must act prudently and must diversify the plan's investments in order to minimize the risk of large losses. In addition, they must follow the terms of plan documents to the extent that the plan terms are consistent with ERISA.  They also must avoid conflicts of interest. In other words, they may not engage in transactions on behalf of the plan that benefit parties related to the plan, such as other fiduciaries, services providers or the plan sponsor.

Fiduciaries who do not follow these principles of conduct may be personally liable to restore any losses to the plan, or to restore any profits made through improper use of plan assets. Courts may take whatever action is appropriate against fiduciaries who breach their duties under ERISA including their removal.

[emphasis added]

I don’t see how this conclusion can be avoided: Fossil fuel divestment is a major violation of the NJ pension managers' fiduciary responsibility. The fossil fuel industry is a major component of the common stock investment universe, and provides 80% of American energy. It is the industry that powers every other industry, and thus provides an indispensable product crucial to everyone’s short and long-term well-being. This obviously includes NJ public employees and retirees.  It follows that fossil fuels are crucial to a diversified portfolio, and thus a major component of investors' long term financial health. By cutting fossil fuels from its investment portfolio, the NJ pension fund is being forced to act against its sacred fiduciary trust to act only on the best interests of its public employee and retiree clients. 

The NJ legislature's coercive political interference in NJ's public employee pension fund injects a major conflict of interest into the management of the plans, another ERISA violation. It is explicitly forcing the pension fund investment managers to ignore an entire industry. This is outrageous. How can this order possibly be reconciled with the fund’s ERISA and fiduciary responsibilities? 

The entire NJ legislature should recuse itself from any power to micro-manage or affect in any way the investment decisions of the pension plan managers, who are legally duty-bound to comply with ERISA requirements specifically and to honor their moral responsibility to present and future retirees more generally.

Related Reading:

When Climate Dogmatism Meets Energy Reality

The “Divest-Invest Philanthropy” Movement and its Statist Roots

 RELATED: Protecting Oil Companies’ Rights is Not a Government Subsidy

Biden Told of ‘Threat to American Democracy’; No Mention of the Threat to American Republicanism

In Historians privately warn Biden that America’s democracy is teetering, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, and Tyler Pager reported in early August for The Washington Post:

President Joe Biden paused last week, during one of the busiest stretches of his presidency, for a nearly two-hour private history lesson from a group of academics who raised alarms about the dire condition of democracy at home and abroad.

One person familiar with the exchange said the conversation was mostly a way for Biden to hear and think about the larger context in which his tenure is unfolding. He did not make any major pronouncements or discuss his plans for the future.

“A lot of the conversation was about the larger context of the contest between democratic values and institutions and the trends toward autocracy globally,” the person said.

Most of the experts in attendance have been outspoken in recent months about the threat they see to the American democratic project, after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, the continued denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results and the efforts of election deniers to seek state office.

Note, first, that the Jan. 6 attack is packaged in with the “denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results.” 

But do they belong together? No. Outrageous as the continuing 2020 election denial is, the freedom to scrutinize and criticize election processes and results is vital to electoral integrity. If fraud or irregularities are suspected, it is the duty and right of the observer to speak up. Now, the Republicans who still question the 2020 results have been proven wrong time and again, and should be condemned for continuing the charade. But they in and of themselves are not a “threat to democracy.” The continuing “denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results” is not of the same nature as violently storming the Capitol building, as overblown as a threat to the democratic process the storming is portrayed as. Republicans’ continuing denials are a political tactic, just as Democrats’ continuing claim of the election denials as a “threat to democracy” is a political tactic. Our democratic process is not under threat because some Republican still think the 2020 election was “stolen.”

What’s genuinely threatening is thart, in the whole article, there is not one mention of “the American Republic.” Yet our free republic certainly is under threat. And it’s coming from the Left in the form of their denial of inalienable individual rights.The Democratic Party is perfectly content with authoritarianism, as long as it’s democratic authoritarianism; i.e., imposed by elected officials and voting majorities.

And then they have the nerve to channel Alexander Hamilton:

[Sean] Wilentz, prizewinning author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln,” has also voiced alarm in recent months about the state of the country. “We’re on the verge of what Hamilton in ‘The Federalist’ called government by brute force,” Wilentz told the Hill last month.

The Founders were well aware of the power of democracy to slip into “government by brute force.” If Wilentz had actually read the Federalist Papers, he would have known that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution were concerned about the potential rise of three forms of tyranny, the one, the few, and the many; in other words, autocracy, aristocracy, and democracy. As James Madison wrote in Federalist #47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

And full-blown, total democracy is fundamental to the Democratic Party. From its founding in 1828, the Democratic Party has reinterpreted the American Founding as a democracy, not a limited republic. Consistent with democracy, the new party supported slavery as long as it is imposed democratically -- i.e., either unilaterally across America by representatives or by a popular referendum at the state level. 

They haven’t changed their stripes. It still holds, as Joe Biden has declared in a Georgia speech, that “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” This premise is not a miss-speak. Biden’s Justice Department has sued Georgia based on the same premise. Said Attorney General Merrick Garland, "The right of all eligible citizens to vote is the central pillar of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow." “We are still, at our core, a democracy,” Biden lectured in his MAGA speech, reiterating the his reactionary assertion that “the most fundamental freedom in this country [is] the freedom to vote and have your vote counted”—essentially repudiating the Founder’s Declaration of the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as most fundamental. A society in which all of our rights, including the right not to be held in bondage, are subject to a vote is not a free society. It is a totalitarian state, and 100% contrary to the fundamental American principle of individual rights as inalienable, meaning outside the scope of any electoral power to violate.

I have said that the Democratic Party and the Left generally is the gravest threat to Americanism today, at least in the medium term. The Democratic Party is what its name explicitly declares. It is anti-American Republic. It is a democracy party through and through. It is and has always been the central domestic threat to the American Republic.

RELATED READING:

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Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right. 

The Dangerous Totalitarian Premise Underpinning the Justice Department’s Suit Against Georgia’s New Election Law

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

America; Democracy or Republic or Both--Why it Matters

Senator Mike Lee is Right: America ‘is not a Democracy’

Rights and Democracy

Constitutional Republicanism: A Counter-Argument to Barbara Rank’s Ode to Democracy

Jesse Jackson’s Big Lie: ‘American Democracy is Under Siege’.

Rights are Inalienable, Not an Electoral Privilege

QUORA: ‘With the current worldwide heat crisis (July 2022), how can anyone doubt the reality of climate change?’

 QUORA: ‘With the current worldwide heat crisis (July 2022), how can anyone doubt the reality of climate change?’

I posted this answer, slightly edited:

Those who “see” climate change in this year’s summertime heat waves affecting some areas simply don’t know what they’re talking about. Heat waves no more prove the reality of climate change than religionists who “see” God in the heat waves (or any other weather events) proves the existence of God.

Of course, the Earth’s average global temperature is slowly warming. The warming, in turn, alters weather patterns in some areas, causing gradual, long-term shifts in some climates. But the mental linking of every news-worthy weather event to climate change is an indoctrination tactic geared toward a political agenda. An example of this tactic is Big Media’s coordinated world-wide, one-sided propaganda campaign, called the Covering Climate Now initiative. The purpose of this media cartel, dishonestly parading under the honorable label of “journalism,” is “a project . . . aimed at strengthening the media’s focus on the climate crisis.” It’s a virtual given these days that any news report on extreme weather events will include “climate change” or “climate crisis” in the report, without any causal fact that links climate change to the event. Such a one-sided campaign ignores the genuine human catastrophe that would follow from the efforts to “fight climate change” by stifling economic growth and the reliable energy needed to power it.

As this question demonstrates, climate change has taken on faith-based, quasi-religious overtones. 

And it’s not only not helpful. It’s downright dangerous, because it leads people to support policies of energy deprivation that restricts peoples’ access to the reliable low-cost energy needed to protect themselves from heat and other weather extremes. Although some of these extremes may be marginally more intense, nothing currently happening in weather is unprecedented or anything resembling a “climate crisis.” In truth, what is not being recognized is the enormous human progress on commanding climate dangers that fossil fuels and freedom have enabled, and the danger the crusade against fossil fuels means to continuing progress, especially in light of the equally vociferous campaign against nuclear power. The issue is not “the reality of climate change,” which no one disputes. The question I would ask is “In light of this summer’s heat waves, how can anyone doubt the vital human necessity of reliable cost-effective energy, such as fossil fuels and nuclear power?”

I’ve posted other answers on this subject:

QUORA: ‘Why is there such strong pushback on climate change at the same time as we are seeing overwhelming proof of weather extremes in the USA?’

QUORA: ‘Why, even if the evidence is overwhelming, do many deny the risks our planet is running with climate change?’

QUORA: ‘What is, in your opinion, the best solution to climate change without destroying the economy?’

Related Reading:

Ida, the Catastrophist’s Latest Stopped-Clock ‘Prediction’

QUORA: ‘What is, in your opinion, the best solution to climate change without destroying the economy?’

The Collectivist Left Media Launches Major ‘Climate Crisis’ Propaganda Campaign

Our Alleged 'Climate Crisis' is No Longer, Thanks to Fossil Fuels

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century--Ronald Bailey

Biden’s Right: America Faces a Grave Threat. Contra Biden, It’s Not Primarily From ‘MAGA Republicans'

In a fiery midterm campaign speech, President Joe Biden warned earlier this month of a grave threat to “American democracy.” He pointed the finger at “MAGA Republicans” as the source of that threat. As CNN reported:

“As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault,” Biden said. “We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.”

Biden attempted to separate Trump’s most loyal followers from the Republican Party as a whole. And as he concluded, he sought to strike a more upbeat note, saying it was still within voters’ power to rein in the nation’s darkest forces.

But the heart of Biden’s address was a ringing alarm bell about what he called “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards. Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy. No right to contraception, no right to marry who you love,” he said, striking on cultural issues Democrats believe can help them win in November.

Most news coverage focussed on Biden’s attack on Donald Trump-supporting MAGA Republicans. 

But they missed “the elephant in the room,” the much greater threat exposed in Biden’s speech—his reiteration of the reactionary, anti-American ideology of Biden and his own party, that “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” That premise is the outright rejection of the revolutionary concept of inalienable individual rights, a denial of the very foundation of the American republic.

From what I have observed, most, as I’ve said, missed this critical significance of Biden’s diatribe, including prominent conservative voices like those at Fox News, which incessantly replayed Biden’s attacks on Trump and MAGA. 

Most, but not all. At least one notable observer got it right—Jacob Sullum, writing for Reason. Sullum’s prescient piece is Trump Disregards Democracy, While Biden Ignores Its Dangers: The president's attack on the "extreme ideology" of "MAGA Republicans" elides the tension between majority rule and individual freedom. In a particularly important passage, Sullum correctly observes:

Biden says "the freedom to vote and have your vote counted" is "the most fundamental freedom in this country." The Framers saw things differently. They understood that unconstrained democracy, like unconstrained autocracy, poses an intolerable threat to liberty. The constitution they produced is chock-full of provisions that check the will of the people, including limits on the federal government's powers, requirements for passing legislation, and explicit recognition of rights that the people's representatives must respect, no matter what the majority demands.

Amen!

Sullum goes on to point out how Biden twists and shreds the words of the U.S. Constitution to back up his reactionary claim. Pointing out the hypocrisy of Biden’s Democratic Party, and echoing what I’ve observed earlier, Sullum observes:

Based on Biden's words and deeds, we have a pretty good idea of what he believes about the proper size and scope of government. He thinks politicians selected by "the People" can do whatever they want, provided they do not impinge on the specific freedoms that he values. When it comes to abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage, the majority does not rule. But when it comes to nearly everything else, the people's will—or, more realistically, Biden's perception of it—prevails.

In fact, Biden’s own democratic ideology make even the rights to abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage alienable by elected representatives. That’s exactly what the Supreme Court did in overturning Roe v. Wade—It sent those rights into the hands of state legislatures, where Biden’s “the freedom to vote" will have the power to strip away the rights to abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage. If the vote is "the most fundamental freedom in this country," then no right is safe or sacrosanct from tyrannical elected legislatures, including the right not to be enslaved, no matter what Biden’s preferences.

I suggest reading Sullum’s article in it’s entirety. It’s a gem in America’s philosophically challenged culture.

The main beef I have with Sullum is that I think he significantly understates the Biden threat relative to Trump. But that's a minor quibble. I posted Sullum's article on Facebook, with this preamble:

Biden's attack on "MAGA Republicans" masks the much more dangerous totalitarian democracy espoused by him and his party. In truth, the Democratic Party has been a reactionary force against Americanism since its founding in 1828, when it came into being on a platform that included the "right" of majorities to vote minorities into slavery—exactly what you'd expect under democracy fundamentalism. The Democrats' hypocracy concerning abortion aside, a party that embraces the principle that "the freedom to vote is the most fundamental freedom" is an enemy of a free society and of America.

Sullum's analysis coincides in most respects with my long-standing views and of my take on Biden vs. Trump. Trump, whom I despise and would find it hard to vote for again, is nonetheless clearly the lesser of two evils hands down. I will renounce voting altogether before I'd ever vote Democrat.

RELATED READING:

Joe Biden—the Real Protégé of Jefferson Davis

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

The Dangerous Totalitarian Premise Underpinning the Justice Department’s Suit Against Georgia’s New Election Law

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right. 

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur

America; Democracy or Republic or Both--Why it Matters

Tom Moran Warns of the Long Term Danger of a Presidential ‘Climate Emergency’ Declaration

In 2020, as America grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, I worried that President Donald Trump’s invoking of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to cope with the the Health Emergency would be a dangerous precedent that could clear the way for a Democratic President to declare a “Climate Emergency,” giving the federal government totalitarian executive powers. 

Alas, President Joe Biden is getting pressure from Congressional Democrats to do just that — declare a Climate Emergency in order to impose draconian Leftist climate change policies that he can’t get through Congress.  

Fortunately, Biden is resisting the idea, so far. And pushback is developing, including from some on the Left. Tom Moran, editorial page editor for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, strongly condemned the idea in no uncertain terms. In No, don’t declare a climate emergency, Moran warned about a power that “could quickly spin out of control.” “The threat of authoritarian rule by unchecked presidents,” Moran presciently observes, “is easy to see.”

To be sure, Moran includes the obligatory Leftist Chicken Little panic mongering hyperbole about climate change. “the climate crisis is spinning out of control as Congress fiddles.” “The climate crisis is causing chaos and suffering across the globe and promises to get much worse.” And the like.

But, paradoxically, the fact that Moran is a card-carrying climate catastrophist gives his warning all the more credibility. He rightly sees the threat of American authoritarianism to be a much greater danger than anything climate change can throw at us. 

And as I viewed Trump’s DPA declaration as the crucial precedent, Moran reaches back further:

Three years ago, President Trump declared a state of emergency so he could use money from the defense budget to start building his wall along the Mexican border.

The reason was simple: He lost the political fight in Congress, so he used these powers as an end-run around our democracy. Another norm broken.

It was the first time the emergency laws were abused like that, historians say. The laws were intended to help a president cope with true emergencies that could not wait for Congress, like hurricanes, pandemics and invasions. Using it to defy the will of Congress was new.

Moran consults Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice:

“What Trump did with the emergency powers is exactly what Congress said he couldn’t do,” said Goitein.

Now, progressives want to break the same norm, and are pressing President Biden to declare an emergency over climate change, having lost the fight in Congress. It’s another end-run.

“I understand the temptation,” Moran says,

But Goitein, at Brennan, warns that this could quickly spin out of control, that if Biden declares an emergency over climate, a Republican president could declare an emergency over, say, abortion, and impose a nationwide ban.

“When Trump did this, you could argue it was an aberration, because he was an anomaly in every way imaginable,” she says. “But if Biden now uses it this way, to get around Congress, that would really shatter the norm.”

Philosophically, this is the kind of good political thinking that we rarely see any more. On this issue, Moran is channeling the same reverence for the importance of principles as the Founding Fathers.

The Founder' reverence for principle is demonstrated in these excerpts from James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments". In his dramatic defense of religious liberty in opposition to Virginia's proposed tax to support the Christian Church, he said:

[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. (Emphasis added.)

The principle James Madison was referring to was the one underlying a Virginia law, known as “A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion”. He understood that once any governmental “department of power overleap[s] the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people, . . . there is no way to contain that power, because . . . the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience . . . is held by the same tenure with all our other rights.” (Emphasis added.) Madison elaborates on this crucial point:

Either we must say, that they may control the freedom of the press, may abolish the Trial by Jury, may swallow up the Executive and Judiciary Powers of the State; nay that they may despoil us of our very right of suffrage, and erect themselves into an independent and hereditary Assembly or, we must say, that they have no authority to enact into the law the Bill under consideration.

Notice the broad sweep of the rights that Madison saw threatened by a single religion-funding bill in a single state. The same can be said about a single climate change emergency declaration, whether at the federal or state level. The principle behind a climate emergency declaration threatens all of our rights.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Tom Moran is no equal to the Founding Fathers. That said, keep Madison's wisdom in mind as you read this editorial, and you can appreciate the power of Moran’s warning.

Moran offers more examples of the consequences of the abuses of presidential emergency declarations, including George W. Bush’s broad violation of Muslim-Americans’ rights under a national security declaration following 9/11: 

But if this norm is broken, presidents of both parties could claim emergency powers that are more far-reaching, Goitein warns, especially when a president declares a national security emergency.

“The real scary ones give a president the power to shut down communications facilities in an emergency, and to freeze assets and block financial transactions,” she says.

Which, if Goitein is correct, was exactly what was done to Muslim Americans. 

If I read Goitein’s premise correctly, she is basically saying there are effectively no limits on what the executive branch can impose under emergency declarations. What can political authorities not do as justified under the alleged need to “fight climate change?” Sounds like totalitarian powers to me—or at least as close to totalitarian as a president can get away with. And if the recent COVID pandemic is any indication, politicians can get away with quite a lot of usurpations of our liberties. 

Perhaps that’s why, as Moran points out, “Congress is considering reforms, like imposing tight time limits on emergency powers unless Congress votes to extend them.” 

That’s encouraging. “In the end,” Moran concludes, 

the emergency declaration seems like a political stunt, a way for Democrats like Booker to signal their concern and militancy, to answer the frustration in the party.

But it wouldn’t help much in the climate fight, and it would weaken our democracy. That’s a bad deal.

It sure is a bad deal—and, I will add, for our republic.

Kudos to Moran for clarifying the immense dangers inherent in any climate emergency declaration. I hope Biden will heed it.

Related:

‘Climate Emergency’: A Nonsensical, and Dangerous, Misuse of Words

As We Endure Through COVID-19, Dems Gear Up for ‘Climate Crisis’ Authoritarianism

Did Trump’s Defense Production Act Invocation Clear the Way for the Democrats’ ‘Climate Crisis’ Authoritarianism?

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

Rand Paul, Title 2, and the Importance of Principles

U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, the Fed, ‘Diversity’, and Racism

N.J. 's Democratic Senator Robert Menendez recently voted against a second term for Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve Board chairman, saying the Fed has a “serious diversity problem.” As  Jonathan D. Salant (NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) reported in the New Jersey Star-Ledger,

In voting no, Menendez criticized the absence of Latinos from the top echelon of the nation’s central bank, which sets economic policy independent of the White House and Congress. It sets monetary policy and can raise or lower interest rates to help the economy or bring down inflation.

So Menendez would deny Powell his job because of his genetic lineage. This is textbook racism. But that's "diversity" in today's common usage—a disguise for pure racism.

If there was any doubt that Menendez, and the philosophy he adheres to, are racist, this next passage should remove that doubt.

“I have repeatedly sounded the alarm on the Fed’s serious diversity problem,” Menendez said. “Just last January, I expressed directly to Chair Powell how outrageous it is that the voices of one- fifth of the citizens of America are repeatedly drowned out when the Fed is making critical decisions on economic policy. Yet under Powell’s leadership, the Fed continues to miss critical opportunities to appoint Latinos at the highest levels of its leadership.”

The implication here is that all 62 million Latinos think alike, based solely on their common genetic lineage. But genetics doesn’t determine a person’s ideas or opinions. Each person’s reason and free will determine that. Who can claim to speak for one- fifth of the citizens of America, Latino or otherwise? The fact that there are 62 million American Latinos does not mean they all agree.  

There is no collective “voice”, because there is no collective racial brain. Those premises are again racist. People can individually agree on an issue, and a single person with a like opinion can be said to speak on their collective behalf, based on their individual volitional perspectives. 

But no one can be said to be the “voice” of any group based solely on their genetic lineage, skin color, or bloodline. There are plenty of prominent Italians out there. Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito is Italian, like me. But does he speak for me? Absolutely not in that horrendous leaked draft opinion on Roe v. Wade, as I made plain in my post In SCOTUS’ Draft Opinion Overturning Roe Abortion Ruling: Double Standards of Left and Right Exposed. And the fact that he doesn’t represent my views, or if there were no Italians on the Supreme Court, does not mean my “voice” is “drowned out”—not so long as we have free speech in America. That I’m writing this is proof of that. My voice does not depend on the “diversity” of the members of any government board.

I’m disgusted and morally outraged at the depth to which the diversity fraud has penetrated American culture, politics, and discourse. It has made racial considerations on myriad issues almost ubiquitous. Politicians like Menendez feed that hideous trend.

America’s fundamental identity is individualism, which makes racial diversity as it is usually used today—that is, applied to thought and life outcomes—reactionary and anti-American—and racist.

Related Reading:

SEC’s Boardroom ‘Diversity’ Rule Is Racist, Unnatural, and Politically Motivated

The Racism of “Diversity” by Peter Schwartz for Capitalism Magazine

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

DelBarton Student’s 'Diversity' Initiative, Though Well-Meaning, is Based on Counter-Productive Premises

The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’

From 'Diversity Maps' to Forced Integration: Obama's Racist Housing Policy Masks the Real Problem—Lack of Free Markets

Don’t Allow the Left to Own ‘Diversity’

RELATED: The NJ Star-Ledger’s Racist Rant