Fascists against freedom, unite

Everyone expects neo-Nazis to be thuggish and simpleminded. They’re losers who need a movement that tells them they are winners, so they troll for grievances and battles from which they can emerge as both morally superior and victims.

They hate freedom. Traditionalist Worker Party leader Matthew Heimbach even wrote a piece, “I Hate Freedom,” in which he explained, “Freedom is a word and a concept that everyone loves and enjoys because of the license that it gives us as a society; that is why freedom failed and that is why freedom must die.”

At noon on Sunday last week, the Traditionalist Worker Party had a permit to hold a rally on the state Capitol grounds in Sacramento. Some 30 white nationalists showed up. They were met by 400 counterprotesters. Violence erupted. According to news reports, 10 people were injured; two were in critical condition with stab wounds.

“Both sides were stabbed with something,” California Highway Patrol public information officer George Granada told me.

The counter-protesters hailed from such leftist groups as By Any Means Necessary and Antifa Sacramento. Antifa stands for antifascist, which is amazing because the bullies who were protesting against fascists seemed to have a lot in common — they’re also thuggish and simpleminded — with fascists. “NO ‘FREE SPEECH’ FOR FASCISTS!” Antifa Sacramento proclaimed.

Some counter-protesters showed up wearing black masks, which made it easier for them to beat people with wooden sticks and throw chunks of concrete at police and buildings without fear of prosecution.

California Assemblyman Jim Cooper heard about the violence and went to the Capitol to see for himself. He saw counter-protesters ready for a fight. And for no reason. The neo-Nazis, he told me, “were way outnumbered.” But the counter-protesters were “ready for action.”

By Any Means Necessary organizer Yvette Felarca told CNN that the Traditional Worker Party has no right to a public platform.

“They never should have gotten a permit to begin with.” she said. “The police were out here protecting them. One of our main chants is, ‘Cops and Klan go hand in hand’ because we know the police are out there to back them up.” Like Heimbach, Felarca constructed an argument in which people like her get to decide who has the right to free speech.

“They can get a permit, too,” Cooper said of the anti-activists. (By the way, Cooper is African American, so I doubt he’s sympathetic with the Traditionalist Worker Party’s agenda.)

Get their own permit? Not good enough. Counterprotesters want to decide who can and cannot speak. “If they trip and fall in the process, good,” Felarca said of the Traditionalist Worker Party folks. “We succeeded in shutting them down.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, keeps profiles on the Traditionalist Worker Party and Heimbach. I asked if the center tracks By Any Means Necessary, whose leaders condone violence, and not just against white nationalists. The answer is no.

An informal army of anarchists uses violence to muzzle unwanted speech. Masked and armed activists brazenly mobbed the Capitol to control who could speak in the public square. These “antifascists” are a threat to civil society. Like Heimbach, they have no idea what freedom is.

I shudder to think what they would have to do to get on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s radar.

Supreme Court decisions in affirmative action cases are the longest running fraud since the 1896 decision upholding racial segregation laws in the Jim Crow South, on grounds that “separate but equal” facilities were consistent with the Constitution. Everybody knew that those facilities were separate but by no means equal. Nevertheless, this charade lasted until 1954.

The Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases have now lasted since 1974. While the 1896 “separate but equal” decision lasted 58 years, the Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases have now had 42 years of evasion, sophistry and fraud, with no end in sight.

But now, in 2016, the supposedly conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy voted to uphold the Texas racial preferences. Perhaps the atmosphere inside the Washington Beltway wears down opposition to affirmative action, much as water can eventually wear down rock and create the Grand Canyon.

We have heard much this year about the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of the great Justice Antonin Scalia — and rightly so. But there are two vacancies on the Supreme Court. The other vacancy is Anthony Kennedy.

The human tragedy, amid all the legal evasions and frauds is that, while many laws and policies sacrifice some people for the sake of other people, affirmative action manages to harm blacks, whites, Asians and others, even if in different ways.

Students who are kept out of a college because other students are admitted instead, under racial quotas, obviously lose opportunities they would otherwise have had. But minority students admitted to institutions whose academic standards they do not meet are all too often needlessly turned into failures, even when they have the prerequisites for success in some other institution whose normal standards they do meet.

When black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math were admitted to M.I.T., where the other students scored at the 99th percentile, a significant number of black students failed to graduate there, even though they could have graduated with honors at most other academic institutions.

We do not have so many students with that kind of ability that we can afford to sacrifice them on the altar of political correctness.

When racial preferences in student admissions in the University of California system were banned, the number of black and Hispanic students in the system declined slightly, but the number actually graduating rose substantially. So did the number graduating with degrees in tough subjects such as math, science and engineering.

But hard facts carry no such weight among politicians as magic words like “diversity” — a word repeated endlessly, without one speck of evidence to back up its sweeping claims of benefits. It, too, is part of the Supreme Court fraud, going back to a 1978 decision that seemingly banned racial quotas — unless the word “diversity” was used instead of “quotas.”

Seeming to ban preferences, while letting them continue under another name, was clever politically. But the last thing we need in Washington are nine more politicians, wearing judicial robes.