I didn’t write a Friday column because I’ve been up in Maine visiting an old grad school buddy. My following of the news has been pretty spotty since Wednesday, and I even missed the end of Pride Month.
But as Independence Day approaches, I’m feeling some renewed pride in my country, and enjoying watching the fireworks over the Supreme Court judgments this week, during which common sense and judicial sanity went 3-0. (USA! USA!)
The coverage has been perfectly on-brand for the left: never talk about the specifics of the case, or the law, or precedent. Instead, give a feelings-based dramatic performance, going long on hyperbole but sprinkled with made-up – and also completely irrelevant – statistics.
(“According to the good people down at the Human Rights Watch, America is more racist now than during slavery or Jim Crow Days,” or “The leading cause of Death for African-American men is being shot as they walk out of Bible study by marauding Klansmen police.”)
Because we’re in such a dispiriting pre-primaries season, it was especially encouraging to get the three final rulings of this session. On the other hand, it’s more than a little depressing that anyone even needs to say the findings of those cases out loud, let alone have a years’ long legal debate over them:
It’s wrong for the government to racially discriminate against people, in college admissions or anywhere else.
It’s also wrong to quasi-enslave people who own businesses, by forcing them to create products or services that involve endorsing beliefs that they do not hold.
No, a president shouldn’t be able to just transfer half a trillion dollars in college debt from the millions of students and families who signed up for it, to the hundreds of millions of Americans who did not.
Are those really that hard to understand, or argue? Judging by the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the left, apparently.
And you can’t help but love it when clueless ideologues undermine their own arguments with their vitriolic statements.
For decades, the supporters of affirmative action (or, to call it by its real name, institutional racism) have asserted that the policy only makes the slightest of differences, by giving only the tiniest of advantages to minority applicants who are almost identically as qualified as their Asian or white competitors.
And now those same people are ranting as if this ruling means that no black or Hispanic students will ever get into a good school again.
If you’re saying that some minorities will never be able to compete with other minorities or whites without a huge governmental thumb on the scale, you’re arguing that those races are inferior. If that’s what you believe, go to your nearest mirror, stand directly in front of it, and see if you can spot the racist.
One tantrum-y reaction to the Creative 303 case was to call for refusing to serve Christians, which is both stupid and hilarious. A popular tweet summed up that witless argument best: “Perhaps gay stylists, designers, caterers and planners should start withholding services from Christian conservatives, and see where that goes.”
It’s hard to top one tweeted response: “Idiot. No Christian walks into a salon, announces they’re Christian, and then demands that the gayest dude there sculpt the face of Jesus on their dome.”
Which is of course true. The point is not that businesses can refuse to serve customers who are gay or atheist or Christian – they still legally cannot – it’s that they can’t be forced to produce messages that they don’t agree with.
A better analogy would be this: Say that your whole family has voted Democrat since the 1820s, and you want to honor great-great-grandad’s legacy by getting a KKK cake to celebrate Nathan Bedford Forest’s (D-the Confederacy) birthday. So you go down to your local African-American baker, and force them to bake that cake for you.
Can you see the problem there, Skippy?
Having said that, I still tend to agree with the idea that hateful lefties should try the “ban the Christians” approach. Because I for one would love to know which business owners hate my guts – because of my religion, my race, or just because they can’t stand hilarious geniuses with firm jawlines and animal magnetism who enjoy mocking them.
I don’t want to give any hateful Christophobes a single dollar’s worth of business, and I would appreciate them advertising their vile bigotry, so I can be sure to go elsewhere.
For that matter, if there are any self-proclaimed “Christians” who want to refuse serving black people or anyone else – that was NOT the case with Creative 303 or the cake baker who was bullied in earlier cases – they should be able to advertise their creepy prejudice too, so that we can all avoid their businesses.
The college debt ruling was especially satisfying, given the complete bankruptcy (you see what I did there?) of the would-be grifters’ – students and college administrations included – ridiculous arguments.
I was raised in the Midwest in the 1800s, where your word was your bond, and you paid your debts. These adult children signed up for loans and promised to pay them back. I’m sorry if they overpaid, and I know that many of them did. (Everybody who got a grievance studies degree, for example, definitely overpaid. Because those degrees are worth literally nothing.)
But the only choices now are either that people who took out loans are required to pay them, or else people who did NOT take out those loans are required to pay them.
Reading the reactions of many disappointed borrowers is instructive, if depressing.
One article bemoans the fact that many borrowers are “left wondering: Where do we go from here?”
I immediately thought of the old saying that many of us heard from our parents or grandparents: There’s a great place to go when you’re in debt. TO WORK!
One typical borrower is Graeme Strickland (25) who graduated from UNC in 2020 with $30K in loans. He’s very disappointed with what he calls a “culture war” involving this issue, and says, “And like, this is my income. This affects the money I’m able to spend on groceries.”
No kidding, Graeme. But you’re talking about, like, our tax money, which you spent on, like, your own stuff. And if you don’t, like, pay it back, you’re going to be affecting the money we’re able to spend on groceries, too.
Strickland graduated three years ago, but he “has yet to consider loan payments or interest.” But now that Biden’s power grab has failed, he “has resigned himself to his new debt-laden reality.”
What a novel concept! After sitting around for three years not even thinking about his loan payments, he has now grudgingly resigned himself to reality?
I can barely imagine what a world would be like in which Democrats would resign themselves to reality. Other than that Liz Warren would admit that she’s whiter than The Sound of Music and immediately leave public life in disgrace. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
Or consider Ariana Cuellar (31), a case study in learned helplessness who graduated 10 years ago, but still has $30K in unpaid loans. She might have majored in drama, judging from the way she reacted to the news that Uncle Sugar isn’t going to pay off her loans for her:
“I will never be able to get rid of these loans. I think even if we got that $10,000 worth of forgiveness, unless the interest rates are changed, I will not be able to get out from under it.”
She’s absolutely hopeless about her chances to pay back even $20K, EVER! Even though she has likely paid more than that in car payments, cable bills and eating out in the last 10 years.
The “journalist” reporting on this plays into Cuellar’s self-pity, saying that “the winding road to the SC’s decision has worn her out.” Because what could be more exhausting than sitting around for years NOT paying your loans?
But it’s worse than you think. Because Cuellar is losing faith in the system.
“I lost faith in any sort of justice. I don’t feel like it’s going to get better. I don’t trust the government to take care of us.”
First, it’s not “justice” for you to be allowed to be a deadbeat.
Second, you don’t trust the government to take care of you? GOOD!
You’re 31 years old! The government’s not your parent or your pimp, and you’re not a child or a hooker. You’re supposed to take care of yourself, and that means taking responsibility and paying your own bills and debts.
Seriously, you’re never going to have a fulfilling and successful life and career if you listen to politicians and bureaucrats promising to do for you what you can and should do for yourself.
Bureaucrats like Carolina Rodriguez, who “spends her days talking to borrowers… at New York’s Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program (EDCAP).” I would have gone with DUNCE-CAP as the acronym there, but okay.
Rodriguez complains that borrowers feel “defeat and resignation,” and reports that, “Most borrowers she speaks to these days are more focused on other paths to forgiveness, such as Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) and income-driven repayment (IDR) plans.
Good lord! First these naïve borrowers relied on a serial liar like Biden to pay their bills for them. When that didn’t work, they look to plan B (another loan forgiveness plan), and then to Plan C (yet another partial loan forgiveness plan).
I wonder if they’ll ever arrive at a plan – maybe Plan Z? – to actually work hard and pay off their loans themselves. Because that plan might be just crazy enough to work!
And that is just one more reason that we all must say…
Biden delenda est!
“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Graeme “Super-Victim” Strickland, 2024!
Martin Simpson 