Opinion

The Reparations Grift Is Finally Collapsing 

   DailyWire.com
TORONTO, ONTARIO - SEPTEMBER 09: Dr. Ibram X. Kendi speaks onstage during Netflix's "Stamped From The Beginning" world premiere during the Toronto International Film Festival at TIFF Bell Lightbox on September 09, 2023 in Toronto, Ontario. (Photo by Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for Netflix)
Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for Netflix

Until recently, it was hard to think of a post-George Floyd innovation that failed more quickly, or more spectacularly, than the “defund the police” movement.

As homicide rates ballooned by more than 30%, cities like Los Angeles, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, New York, Austin, and Oakland reinstated funds for police departments. They had all made a big show of cutting police funding, only to realize that in fact, police actually serve a purpose. And then there were the stories of various politicians, including congressmen, who called for defunding the police — only to demand police protection when they needed it. So, the whole idea of defunding the police was a BLM-inspired debacle that seemed hard to top.

But now there’s a contender, as hard as that might be to imagine. It was less than a year ago that a so-called “reparations task force” in California announced a plan to pay $1.2 million to every descendant of a slave, or of a “free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.” In all, that proposal would cost something like $800 billion to implement, which is more than double California’s entire state budget. But nevertheless, there was optimism that this would actually happen. After all, this task force had spent around two years crafting this proposal, so they were pretty confident they could see it through. Watch:

So they say they’re not taking the money from taxpayers and redistributing it. They claim instead that they’re “returning” stolen money, even though the taxpayers didn’t take it in the first place. Imagine applying this logic to all of the Europeans who were sold as slaves in North Africa, or all of the white people who are killed by black people every year in the United States — which is a very disproportionate number. Are all of the descendants of these white victims entitled to reparations from all black people, as well?

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

Proponents of reparations never had a good answer to that question. In fact they didn’t have answers to any questions at all, including how they were going to pay for all of this. So, fast forward a few months, and it turns out the descendants of slaves will not be getting paid in California. The whole idea became so overwhelmingly unpopular in California that even Gavin Newsom — who never misses a chance to genuflect before the BLM altar — wasn’t a fan. So after considering the proposals of the reparations task force, California lawmakers recently introduced a series of 14 bills — and cash payouts to the descendants of slaves are not included in any of them. But they’re still calling these bills “reparations.” Watch:

Well, this is embarrassing. Hopefully no descendants of slaves went out and spent a million dollars in the past couple of months, thinking they’d get reimbursed. Turns out that’s not happening. Instead they’re getting rid of solitary confinement and prohibiting “discrimination based on hairstyles.” It’s a bit of a step down, you might say.

As you’d expect, the most reprehensible anti-white racists in the country were deeply disturbed by this news. Semi-prominent race-baiter Tariq Nasheed was particularly furious. He wrote: “This package does NOT include any cash payments to Foundational Black Americans at all. It’s a 111 page nothing-burger, dipped in nothing-sauce.”

That’s true, for the most part. And it’s not often that this guy says anything true. Still, buried in these 14 proposals are a few very bad and unconstitutional ideas, including reimplementing affirmative action and other race-based initiatives.

One California assemblyman who supports these bills, Corey Jackson, actually wants to amend California’s Constitution to permit laws that would, “increase the life expectancy of, improve educational outcomes for, or lift out of poverty specific groups based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or marginalized genders, sexes, or sexual orientations.” In other words, he wants to be able to pass laws that would only help non-whites, which currently would violate both the California and U.S. Constitutions. That’s what they’re focusing on in California, a state that has no shortage of real problems. They desperately want to turn the state into Rwanda and accelerate its decline even further.

At the same time, it’s very clear that they’re going to fail. The reparations grift is indeed collapsing. That’s because the reparations grift, and the whole race hustle scam, depends on instilling and maintaining a deep sense of guilt in white people. But you can’t keep an entire race of people crippled by undeserved guilt over ancient history forever. Eventually that guilt turns to exhaustion, and the exhaustion into resentment or indifference. That’s when the scam blows back on the scam artists.

We’re seeing this more and more. For example I recently tweeted a statement that’s completely uncontroversial to anyone with a baseline understanding of world history. I wrote: “Slavery is world history. White people did not invent it, and were not the first to practice it, but were the first to abolish it. The last place in the world to still have legal slavery was Africa. It wasn’t fully legally abolished on the continent until 1981.”

Pretty much everyone agreed with that post, because it’s obviously true. Slavery was an unquestioned fact of life across the entire world for thousands of years. In fact, for thousands of years nobody even thought to question the institution. The most enlightened minds might have suggested that slaves should be treated humanely, in some circumstances. But nobody rejected slavery fundamentally, as a concept. This was the case, again, everywhere, among all people, for millennia. 

White Europeans were the first ones to argue that slavery as an institution should not exist at all, and that the slaves themselves have the right to be free. The unique relationship between slavery and Europeans is that Europeans are the first ones who figure out that it’s wrong. That’s just a fact. It can’t be denied. If I should be blamed for slavery because white people participated in it, then I should also be thanked because white people abolished it. So where is my thank you note?

This is all kind of obvious to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of history. Which explains one prominent dissenter to my tweet, who has no understanding of history at all: Henry Rogers, a.k.a. Ibram X. Kendi. Here’s what he wrote: “The ultimate White savior statement.”

That’s obviously a meaningless reply, but since Henry Rogers is supposedly a serious academic and not a fraudster, I figured I’d follow-up. I asked Rogers if he’d like to have a live, on-camera conversation about the issue. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he would jump at the chance. After all, he’s an academic with a PhD. I’m a podcaster with a high school diploma. He could easily school me in a debate, couldn’t he? Surely he’ll jump at the chance, right? Wrong.

Kendi replied to my challenge two days later with this: “Many historians have already explained why your statements about slavery are wrong. It would be a huge waste of my time repeating what has already been shared with you.”

There you have it. He doesn’t have to debate me because “many historians” have already said that he’s right. Who are these historians? Don’t worry about that. There’s many of them. That’s all that matters. And why should their opinion preclude us from having a conversation on the topic? Well, don’t worry about that either. In any case, the reaction to that conversation was overwhelmingly hostile — to Ibram X. Kendi. Everyone recognized exactly what was going on. This “esteemed antiracist academic” — who runs an entire antiracist center at a major university, and who managed to burn through $40 million in grant money in just a couple of years — can’t allow his claims to be subjected to any scrutiny. Even scrutiny from a high school educated podcaster. Because he’s an intellectual lightweight, and his ideas are as hollow and weak as he is.

That’s yet another sign that the “antiracist,” reparations grift is collapsing. So is this footage from UCSF, which is supposedly one of the leading universities and hospitals in the United States. They rang in Black History Month by inviting a black supremacist named Dante King to campus. Watch:

He goes on like that for a while. You hear a lot about “genocidal” rhetoric from the Left. But this is actual genocidal rhetoric. White people are “psychopaths,” says Dante King. They’re genetically inferior. Again, this is someone lecturing at an institution that trains doctors and treats patients. That can’t make white patients at UCSF too comfortable right now.

If you’re not familiar with King you should know that he offers an 8-week course on “diagnosing whiteness” for the low price of $1,200. It’s not clear how much UCSF paid for this lecture. They’re a public university, so presumably they used taxpayer money for it.

This is the reality of living in California these days. Even if the reparations bill fails, public institutions will find ways to take your money to spread anti-white race hate. But you can tell from the response to this footage — which went viral immediately — that people are fed up with this propaganda. Just like the FAA footage I aired on this show last week, someone on the inside had to draw attention to this video. There are whistleblowers who are tired of these race hustlers. The more the race scam collapses, the more whistleblowers will come forward.

The only remaining support for race propaganda comes from the largest corporations in the country. They’re still committed to forcing this on us. If you were watching the Super Bowl last night, particularly the pre-game, you probably noticed that. The NFL invited a woman to sing what’s known as the “black national anthem,” which of course is a contradiction in terms. There is no “black national anthem.” There is one national anthem. Any country that has multiple national anthems for different demographic groups isn’t really a country. It’s a collection of different countries, split up along ethnic lines, and it will fall apart very quickly.

But ensuring that this country falls apart is precisely the goal of the largest news outlets in the United States. So before the game, CBS interviewed the woman who sang this “black national anthem” at the Super Bowl, whose name is Andra Day. Watch:

Change is “scary,” she says. “If you’re not changing and growing then you’re dying.” And everyone at CBS pretends that’s the most intelligent thing they’ve ever heard. But it doesn’t even come close to making sense. She’s basically saying we need racially segregated national anthems just for the sake of changing something. And then at the end, she implies that somehow this will lead to unity. We will be unified by having separate anthems. Even though the whole point of singing the anthem — the one national anthem — is to show our unity.

But the point of this revival of “the black national anthem” is to take us back to the pre-civil rights era. This is not progress; it’s regression. That’s what this is a deliberate callback to. It’s when the NAACP first started pushing the song, after an NAACP official wrote it. For the past three years, the NFL has been trying to equate this with the actual national anthem. The implication is that we’re back where we were in the early 1900s. It’s like when Joe Biden says it’s “Jim Crow on steroids” to require voter ID. They are desperate to convince us that we’re living in a white supremacist hellscape, which is nonsense.

But again, it’s falling flat. Andra Day performed this “black national anthem” before the commercial break, before the teams came out, and several minutes before the national anthem. And, to the extent that people responded to it at all, it was panned on social media. No one thought it was inspirational or unifying or whatever. This is the response all of the post-BLM, post-George Floyd ideas are receiving now, from defunding the police, or implementing reparations. 

What this means for race hustlers like Henry Rogers is that they’re going to have to find new jobs soon. What it means for the rest of us is that, at long last, our moment of national racial insanity might eventually come to an end.

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The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  The Reparations Grift Is Finally Collapsing