Wednesday, October 31, 2018


October 31, 2018






MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey




BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, the Constitution, and the Immense Subterfuge of the Left and the Neocons



Friends,

The Leftist hyenas howled…the wimpish, scaredy-cat Republicans wailed…the television pundits, both on the Mainstream channels and on Fox, and, yes, even locally, seemed ready to shed tears of anguish punctuating their uncontrolled outrage: what had Donald Trump done this time to cause such extreme perturbation? What had he done this time to increase their unleashed hysteria and self-consuming madness?

Watching any of the so-called newscasters on CNN, MSNBC or on the other major networks frothing-at-the-mouth, you would have thought that their pious and frenetic condemnations could not get more severe. But, yes, Joe Scarborough over on MSNBC could only expectorate multiple, blustering word clusters, all of which contained loaded phrases about Donald Trump like “full blown racism,” “appeals to white supremacy,” “undermines and attacks our democracy,” each more emotional as he went along. Finally, that Trump was not really “our” president, but in fact an interloper—and if that be the case, then almost any type of resistance is permissible.

You get the drift. These are the very same folks who have been telling us since the pipe bomber and the anti-semitic attack in Pittsburgh last week that the president is completely responsible for the “climate of hatred and fear,” but who do all they can to stoke that out-of-control bonfire.

And locally that pompous social justice warrior disguised as an announcer, David Crabtree of WRAL-TV in Raleigh, who wears his nugatory Episcopalianism on his sleeve, could hardly restrain himself. His eyes, however, betrayed both his anger and his abject fear….

But what was it that Donald Trump had done this time?  What had inspired such “fear and loathing” in all those denizens of the lunatic Left…and, yes, in the Establishment GOP (including a fatuous and obviously self-serving, utterly stupid statement by outgoing House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan)?

Very simply, the president had said he was seriously considering issuing an Executive Order to both clarify the application of the 14th Amendment and, essentially, end birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens who come across the US border and then produce offspring who, then, as if by magic become American citizens.

Recall that the amendment was enacted after the War Between the States to guarantee the rights of citizenship to manumitted slaves and their offspring. And, indeed, there is a serious legal question about whether the amendment itself was ever legally and legitimately ratified. But be that as it may, it has applied ever since 1868.

Here is how Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

As I watched David Crabtree in his most officiously sanctimonious manner lecture his television audience about the president’s desire to clarify the amendment’s actual legal application, like other members of mainstream commentariat he quoted the first section thusly: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Notice the difference; notice the essential phrase he left out, either by mistake or by direction: “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

It’s a key phrase, critical to understanding what the authors of the amendment intended and what for nearly 100 years was settled law up until the 1960s when leftist lawmakers got into the act simply by de facto practical applications. In other words, between the very clear and forthright intention of its authors that the 14th Amendment only applied to slaves and their offspring born in the United State who are necessarily “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” and the slyly imposed practice we now have which enables a foreign woman to illegally slip across the Rio Grande and have a child who then, mutatis mutandis, becomes a citizen and an “anchor baby,” permitting its illegal relations to all come across—between these two interpretations and applications there is an absolute irreconcilable difference.

The key figures in drafting the amendment at the time were clear: Senator Lyman Trumbull, pivotal in the drafting the 14th Amendment, declared “subject to the jurisdiction” meant subject to “complete” jurisdiction of the United States, and “[n]ot owing allegiance to anybody else.” Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, responsible for the critical language of the jurisdiction clause, stated that it meant “a full and complete jurisdiction,” that is, “the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now.” In other words, a non-citizen simply by giving birth on this side geographically of the Rio Grande did not produce a new citizen of the United States.

And you can see why the advocates of open borders who wish to obliterate national boundaries, the social justice warriors and Democratic activists trolling for potential dependent voters, and the brain-damaged modernist Christians would so ferociously oppose a strict constitutional interpretation.

Despite the shrieks of the open borders crowd and the frenzied left, and despite the groans of the Chamber of Commerce-bound establishment Republicans (and various Fox pundits and scribblers for National Review and other neoconservative and globalist publications), President Trump has expressed an idea whose time has come, in fact, is far overdue. At the very least, an Executive Order would force the courts, including the Supreme Court, to take a serious look at an historic abuse of our immigration system and the definition of American citizenship.  Of course, Senator Lindsey Graham plans to introduce legislation, so he says, to do the same thing that the president promises—but Graham has a history of favoring amnesty, which makes his motives at least suspect. And, more, does anyone in his right mind, any rational person, actually believe that Congress, part of which is controlled by the hard Left, and much of the rest by GOP big donor cheap labor advocates, will actually get off its duff and enact such legislation? Not likely.

So, here’s hoping that President Trump will follow through and issue his Executive Order, and then let the ACLU and far Left howl and the wimpy Republicans wail.

We’ll see you in court, gentlemen.

Two articles offer more background, both historical and legal, on this question, and I pass them on to you: a short legal summary by Professor John Eastman, one of the first scholars in recent times to discuss the legal question seriously; and the second by columnist Ann Coulter who back in 2015 fleshed out some of the implicit issues involved.






October 30, 2018 | 6:55pm | Updated

President Trump’s comments are not even set to air until this weekend, but already they have created a firestorm of commentary, most of it ill-informed.

It is not “within the president’s power to change birthright citizenship,” claimed Lynden Melmed, former chief counsel to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, echoing the views of many in the legal academy. Birthright citizenship is mandated by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and therefore can only be “changed” by constitutional amendment, not by mere executive order or act of Congress, or so the argument goes.

That view depends on reading the 14th Amendment as actually mandating automatic citizenship for anyone and everyone born on US soil, no matter the circumstances. Temporary visitors, such as tourists, students and guest workers, can unilaterally confer citizenship on their children merely by giving birth while here, is the claim.

That view has given rise to the cottage industry known as “birth tourism.” Worse, under this view, citizenship is automatic even if the parents overstay their visas and become illegally present in the United States. Worse still, such citizenship is automatic for children born of parents who were never lawfully present in the United States in the first place.

In a nation such as the United States, which is rooted in the idea that governments are formed based on the consent of the governed, the notion that foreign nationals can unilaterally confer citizenship on their children as the result of illegal entry to the United States (and therefore entirely without our consent) is a bit bizarre.

It rewards lawlessness, undermining the rule of law. It deprives Congress of its constitutional authority to determine naturalization power.

And it essentially destroys the notion of sovereignty itself, since a “people” are not able to define what constitutes them as a “people” entitled, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, to “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

That the 14th Amendment settled the question without ever explicitly addressing it is even more bizarre.

The actual language of the 14th Amendment actually contains two requirements for automatic citizenship, not just one. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States” — that’s the birth-on-US- soil part — “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It is that second requirement, “subject to the jurisdiction,” that is the source of much confusion today, because to our modern ear, that just means subject to our laws.

That is one meaning, of course, but not the only one, and not the one that the drafters of the 14th Amendment had in mind. For them, being merely subject to our laws meant that one was subject to our “partial” or “territorial” jurisdiction. It was a jurisdiction applicable to “temporary sojourners” — what we today call temporary visitors. It was not the kind of jurisdiction that was codified in the 14th Amendment. For that, a more complete, allegiance-owing jurisdiction was required.

We don’t need to speculate about this, as the authors of the 14th Amendment were asked directly what they meant (albeit not in the context of illegal immigration, since there were no restrictions on immigration at the time). When asked whether Native Americans would automatically be citizens under the clause, Sen. Lyman Trumbull, a key figure in the drafting and adoption of the 14th Amendment, responded that “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States meant subject to its “complete” jurisdiction, “[n]ot owing allegiance to anybody else.”

And Sen. Jacob Howard, who introduced the language of the jurisdiction clause on the floor of the Senate, contended that it should be construed to mean “a full and complete jurisdiction,” “the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now.” And the “now” that he was referencing was the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided that “All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”

So President Trump is not proposing to “amend” the Constitution by executive order. He is proposing to faithfully enforce the Constitution as written, not how it has erroneously come to be interpreted in the last half century. It’s long overdue.

John Eastman is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and constitutional law professor at Chapman University.

-------------------------------------------------


Ann Coulter: FOX NEWS Anchored In Stupidity On 14th Amendment





Ann Coulter  August 19, 2015, 5:54 pm



Based on the hysterical flailing at Donald Trump—He’s a buffoon! He’s a clown! He calls people names! He’s too conservative! He’s not conservative enough! He won’t give details! His details won’t work!—I gather certain Republicans are determined to drive him from the race. These same Republicans never object to other candidates who lack traditional presidential resumes—Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain, to name a few. I’m beginning to suspect it’s all about Trump’s opposition to mass immigration from the Third World.

Amid the hysteria, Trump is the only one speaking clearly and logically, while his detractors keep making utter asses of themselves.

By my count—so far—Fiorina, Chris Christie, Rick Perry and the entire Fox News commentariat are unfamiliar with a period of the nation’s history known as “the Civil War.” They seem to believe that the post-Civil War amendments were designed to ensure that the children of illegal aliens would be citizens, “anchor babies,” who can then bring in the whole family. (You wouldn’t want to break up families, would you?) As FNC’s Bill O’Reilly authoritatively informed Donald Trump on Tuesday night: “The 14th Amendment says if you’re born here, you’re an American!”

I cover anchor babies in about five pages of my book, Adios, America, but apparently Bill O’Reilly and the rest of the scholars on Fox News aren’t what we call “readers.”



Still, how could anyone—even a not-very-bright person—imagine that granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens is actually in our Constitution? I know the country was exuberant after the war, but I really don’t think our plate was so clear that Americans were consumed with passing a constitutional amendment to make illegal aliens’ kids citizens. Put differently: Give me a scenario—just one scenario—where guaranteeing the citizenship of children born to illegals would be important to Americans in 1868.

[….]

 “Luckily,” as FNC’s Shannon Bream put it Monday night, Fox had an “expert” to explain the details: Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox’s senior judicial analyst. Napolitano at least got the century right. He mentioned the Civil War—and then went on to inform Bream that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to—I quote—”make certain that the former slaves and the Native Americans would be recognized as American citizens no matter what kind of prejudice there might be against them.”



Huh. In 1884, 16 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, John Elk, who—as you may have surmised by his name—was an Indian, had to go to the Supreme Court to argue that he was an American citizen because he was born in the United States. He lost. In Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not grant Indians citizenship.



The “main object of the opening sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the court explained—and not for the first or last time—”was to settle the question, upon which there had been a difference of opinion throughout the country and in this court, as to the citizenship of free negroes and to put it beyond doubt that all persons, white or black … should be citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.”



American Indians were not made citizens until 1924. Lo those 56 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, Indians were not American citizens, despite the considered opinion of Judge Napolitano.

Of course it’s easy for legal experts to miss the welter of rulings on Indian citizenship inasmuch as they obtained citizenship in a law perplexingly titled: “THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924.” 



Yeah, Trump’s the idiot. Or as Bream said to Napolitano after his completely insane analysis, “I feel smarter just having been in your presence.”

The only reason the 14th Amendment doesn’t just come out and say “black people” is that—despite our Constitution being the product of vicious racists, who were dedicated to promoting white privilege and keeping down the black man (Hat tip: Ta-Nehisi Coates)—the Constitution never, ever mentions race. 



Nonetheless, until Fox News’ “scholars” weighed in, there was little confusion about the purpose of the 14th Amendment. It was to “correct”—as Jack Nicholson said in “The Shining”—the Democrats, who refused to acknowledge that they lost the Civil War and had to start treating black people like citizens.



On one hand, we have noted legal expert Bill O’Reilly haranguing Donald Trump: “YOU WANT ME TO QUOTE YOU THE AMENDMENT??? IF YOU’RE BORN HERE YOU’RE AN AMERICAN. PERIOD! PERIOD!” (No, Bill—there’s no period. More like: “comma,” to parents born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States “and of the state wherein they reside.”)



But on the other hand, we have Justice John Marshall Harlan II, who despite not being a Fox News legal expert, was no slouch. He wrote in the 1967 case, Afroyim v. Rusk, that the sponsors of the 14th Amendment feared that:

“Unless citizenship were defined, freedmen might, under the reasoning of the Dred Scott decision, be excluded by the courts from the scope of the amendment. It was agreed that, since the ‘courts have stumbled on the subject,’ it would be prudent to remove the ‘doubt thrown over’ it. The clause would essentially overrule Dred Scott and place beyond question the freedmen’s right of citizenship because of birth.”



It is true that in a divided 1898 case, U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court granted citizenship to the children born to legal immigrants, with certain exceptions, such as for diplomats. But that decision was so obviously wrong, even the Yale Law Journal ridiculed it. The majority opinion relied on feudal law regarding citizenship in a monarchy, rather than the Roman law pertaining to a republic—the illogic of which should be immediately apparent to American history buffs, who will recall an incident in our nation’s history known as “the American Revolution.”



Citizenship in a monarchy was all about geography—as it is in countries bristling with lords and vassals, which should not be confused with this country. Thus, under the majority’s logic in Wong Kim Ark, children born to American parents traveling in England would not be American citizens, but British subjects.



As ridiculous as it was to grant citizenship to the children born to legal immigrants under the 14th Amendment (which was about what again? That’s right: slaves freed by the Civil War), that’s a whole order of business different from allowing illegal aliens to sneak across the border, drop a baby and say, Ha-ha! You didn’t catch me! My kid’s a citizen—while Americans curse impotently under their breath. As the Supreme Court said in Elk: “[N]o one can become a citizen of a nation without its consent.”



The anchor baby scam was invented 30 years ago by a liberal zealot, Justice William Brennan, who slipped a footnote into a 1982 Supreme Court opinion announcing that the kids born to illegals on U.S. soil are citizens. Fox News is treating Brennan’s crayon scratchings on the Constitution as part of our precious national inheritance.

Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is America’s most-cited federal judge—and, by the way, no friend to conservatives. In 2003, he wrote a concurrence simply in order to demand that Congress pass a law to stop “awarding citizenship to everyone born in the United States.”

The purpose of the 14th Amendment, he said, was “to grant citizenship to the recently freed slaves,” adding that “Congress would not be flouting the Constitution” if it passed a law “to put an end to the nonsense.”

In a statement so sane that Posner is NEVER going to be invited on Fox News, he wrote: “We should not be encouraging foreigners to come to the United States solely to enable them to confer U.S. citizenship on their future children. But the way to stop that abuse of hospitality is to remove the incentive by changing the rule on citizenship.”

Forget the intricate jurisprudential dispute between Fox News blowhards and the most-cited federal judge. How about basic common sense? Citizenship in our nation is not a game of Red Rover with the Border Patrol! The Constitution does not say otherwise.

Our history and our Constitution are being perverted for the sole purpose of dumping immigrants on the country to take American jobs. So far, only Donald Trump is defending black history on the issue of the 14th Amendment. Fox News is using black people as a false flag to keep cheap Third World labor flowing.




Monday, October 29, 2018


October 29, 2018





MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey



Who is Really Responsible for the Violence We See in Our Society?



Friends,

Over the past week, since the badly-constructed pipe bombs that were sent to various Democratic Party leaders and to certain national Leftist personalities—none of which went off, and since the hate-filled rampage by a crazed anti-semite at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh, the mainstream media, and including many of the supposed “conservative” commentators at Fox, have been all a-twitter with demands that President Trump “lower the volume.” From Ed Henry to the vaunted “Fox All Stars” that visit our television sets nightly, from Jonah Goldberg and A. B. Stoddard and so many more, there has been a demand that somehow the president implicitly  must “do his part” to refrain from “inciting the violence.”

Of course, what the Fox pundits are attempting is to establish an equivalence between what Donald Trump has said on the campaign trail, his colorful language and his use of playful imagery, and the far more dour and angry radical advocacy and language of those on the Left. In this way, they think, if both Right and Left are properly chastised, then the “bad language and incitements” from our side (the “Deplorables”) can be offset: thus, both Right and Left, in this narrative, need to “refrain from inflammatory language,” and specifically, President Trump needs to stop using his tried-and-true and very popular images: no more “lock her up.”

Thus, those Fox pundits earnestly implore him to cease his verbal response against “fake news” and against the blatant and outright misrepresentation and lies foisted off nightly not just by mainstream media, but by much of the entertainment industry (e.g., just take a look at late night television), academia (hundreds of shrill calls for violence by Leftist faculty against conservatives, e.g., Berkeley and dozens of other colleges), and the vast campaign to foment violence against conservatives on the Internet.  Somehow Donald Trump, simply by responding to his unhinged enemies, bears some, perhaps equal responsibility for what has happened in the past week or so.

And for mainstream media, President Trump bears the major share of responsibility. It is almost as if he were the one who carelessly wrapped the faulty pipe bombs and placed them in the mail; it is almost as if he was the man standing behind the vicious and deranged shooter who invaded the Pittsburgh synagogue. (The shooter is actually a violent anti-Trumper, but you won’t hear that from most of the media.)

So goes the Leftist template: it is the president, through his language who is responsible; not those hundreds of “non-mobs.”

“Non-mobs”? Well, you see, CNN, MSNBC, and the mainstream have banned the use of the word “mobs”—the folks engaged in what we would call “mobs” (e.g., the take-over of streets in Portland, Oregon, by Antifa, who then assaulted elderly drivers, or the violent toppling of the Durham, NC, Confederate monument) were, to quote Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, “exercising their constitutional right to assemble and demonstrate.”

Got that?

But it is far more serious. For the language and, most importantly, the intent of the forces engaged in this debate are far different. There is, in fact, no equivalence between what the Left has been spewing forth—and doing—since Donald Trump was elected in November 2016, and the president’s response to it. And the Fox—and other conservative—pundits are dead wrong, both morally and politically, to accept such an equivalence.

Almost from the beginning of the Trump presidency the forces of the Deep State, that is, the Washington-on-the-Potomac and New York axis establishment, have responded with a fury unequaled in American history—save, perhaps, for the critical months of late 1860 into early 1861, and we know how that ended. And it has not just been by their language but by their actions, hundreds of unhinged and unleashed “mob” actions, many of which have bordered on real violence, and not a few that were violent.

The list now amounts to hundreds of violent assaults by the minions of Leftist ideology. Just consider these recent instances and statistics (most not reported by mainstream media):

--“Rap Sheet: ***70*** Acts of Media-Approved Violence and Harassment Against Trump Supporters,” July 5, 2018: https://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2018/07/05/rap-sheet-acts-of-media-approved-violence-and-harassment-against-trump-supporters/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20180705




-- “Violence Against Right Escalates as Media Amp up Hate-Rhetoric Against Trump,” September 12, 2018: https://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2018/09/12/violence-against-right-escalates-as-media-amp-up-hate-rhetoric-against-trump/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20180912




-- “Resistance Makes Rape Threat to Susan Collins Staffer over Kavanaugh Vote,” September 12, 2018: https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/09/12/resistance-makes-rape-threat-to-susan-collins-staffer-over-kavanaugh-vote/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20180912




-- “Leftist Vandals Smash Windows, Deface Doors of Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan, Threaten More Violence and Revolution,” October 12, 2018: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/10/12/photos-metropolitan-republican-club-in-manhattan-targeted-by-vandals/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20181012




Yet all through 2017 and most of 2018 the mainstream media has either ignored these provocations, or, at best, given them minor coverage, short shrift, downplayed them, passing them off on page 37 in a small, insignificant column in The Washington Post or The New York Times, or simply not reporting on them at all. But now it literally spends a week with blaring “news alerts,” screaming headlines 24/7, and accusations comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler [see in particular, The Washington Post, “Don’t Compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. It Belittles Hitler,” September 13, 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/13/dont-compare-donald-trump-to-adolf-hitler-it-belittles-hitler/?fbclid=IwAR3qT394zKItigb988OtNESFVxYMWey-lXU-N1hyjvE-gmD5U1yTMoMndKk&noredirect=on&utm_term=.82e3dfb88479]. And informing us in ominous and frightening tones that our president is directly responsible for the “climate of hate” and for an “environment that foments violence” and for “threatening our democracy.”

All the while, for nearly two years, it has been those mavens of the media, those overpaid and woefully under-talented Hollywood icons, those mentally-corrupted academics, those fanatical mobs of #Resistance and #MeToo demonstrators, and those sexless and brain-dead feminists, who are the responsible ones, those who have initiated and zealously enacted a violence-prone and violence-producing condition in this nation.

What Donald Trump has done is reply; and he has done so with humor and ridicule. No, he has not asked the Deplorables to—quoting Maxine Waters and other leading Democrats—“get in the face” of his opponents, to follow them home, to bang on their doors, to follow them into restaurants and shout them down…. He has not asked his supporters to take over entire streets in Portland and assault passersby. And when a Leftist attempted to assassinate Republican congressmen at a baseball game, it was not Donald Trump who was responsible; nor was he responsible for sending highly poisonous Ricin in the mail to prominent Republicans, nor for the violent attacks and trashing of the GOP headquarters in Manhattan or Orange County, North Carolina, nor for a re-enactment of Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, in which the role of Caesar is played by a Donald Trump look-a-like who is brutally murdered.

Yet the response of those new paragons and arbiters of moral rectitude at CNN and MSNBC, at the Times and the Post, is--in their most insufferable pose—to pronounce an anathema on the president and his supporters, as if it came down as a voice from Mount Olympus.

At the very same time, in the middle of the coverage last week, came this: The New York Times ran an article fantasizing about the assassination of the president [https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2018/10/25/new-york-times-publishes-fantasy-about-trump-getting-assassinated/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20181025] [October 25, 2018].

Apparently, the editors at the “old grey lady” see no inconsistency between their withering attacks on Donald Trump as a provocateur and responsible for violence, and their own blatant incitements to assassination.

There is, of course, a larger issue here. President Trump’s attacks on the media and his leftist opponents are always laced with his unique brand of humor, that New Yorker “you’se guys are idiots!” style of over-the-top braggadocio and insults that make us smile and laugh. We get that. Even his recent aside about “body-slamming” a reporter (while he was in Montana) was uttered humorously, metaphorically, with a broad smile on his face…and was understood by his supporters that way.

Of course, there are always a few nuts out there; but those few deranged folks are always out there, and nothing Donald Trump says in his rollicking campaign rallies will either dissuade them from committing what they hope to commit, or convince them to be law-abiding citizens.

The difference is this: those folks who have supported the president, those “Deplorables,” are mostly average hard-working, God-fearing, go-to-church-on-Sunday, “normal” people. By nature they are “conservative” in the way they live. They do not get out in the streets; they do not gather in mobs. Even when pleaded with to demonstrate for some truly worthy cause (e.g, pro-life), most of our folks do not. Such action—demonstrations, marches—are not inbred in our DNA. We were not raised that way; we usually have too much going on in our own families, in our work, in our lives. And the idea of spending time ranting and raving or beating on poor auto drivers, or gathering to scream profanity and pull down historic monuments, is foreign to us.

When Donald Trump uses colorful language, we laugh and we smile. It’s imagery we can identify with. We’ve been frustrated for years that the Establishment takes us for granted, abuses us, manipulates us. But our revenge was at the ballot box back in 2016; it is not in sending fatal Ricin to our enemies or attempting to assassinate Democrats, or fantasizing about killing Obama.

That is the difference, and it is what distinguishes us from the unleashed lunatics on the Left and who now dominate the Democratic Party. And we don’t need pundits, including those on Fox, who show up nightly to lecture us (and the president) that we are responsible for the violence of this past week.

No. What has happened is not Donald Trump’s fault; he did not cause it, he is not responsible for it. Two years of Leftist over-top-madness are.

Wednesday, October 24, 2018


October 24, 2018




MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey



Who Is Anita Earls…and Why Does Her Election Present a Real Danger to Jurisprudence?



Friends,

In a previous installment in the MY CORNER series, October 19, 2018, “Who Should We Support in the November 6, 2018, Elections?”  [https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/10/october-19-2018-my-corner-by-boyd.html], I offered a list of candidates I endorse running for political office in North Carolina, for General Assembly—State House and State Senate, and for Court of Appeals, and, perhaps most importantly, to the North Carolina Supreme Court. That list was compiled from several other lists: from Grass Roots North Carolina, from the North Carolina Values Coalition, gun rights groups, and from the NC Heritage PAC (which defends the monuments and symbols of our veterans, especially our Confederate veterans).

Today I wish to turn specifically to the race for the contested seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court.

There are three candidates: incumbent Associate Justice Barbara Jackson, Chris Anglin, and Anita Earls. What is very intriguing about this race is that while Justice Jackson is the conservative Republican candidate, Chris Anglin—who only a short time prior to the election was a Democrat—is also running as a Republican. Part of the problem is due to Republicans in the NC General Assembly, who anticipating the possibility of multiple Democrat candidates, did away with the primary. However, state Democrats turned the table, and in response got Democrat attorney Anglin to quickly register as a Republican and then file under the deadline as a Supreme Court candidate:

Enter Chris Anglin, a little-known Raleigh attorney. Shortly after the primary was canceled, the registered Democrat became a registered Republican. He filed to run for Supreme Court a few weeks later, with help from longtime Democratic consultant Perry Woods. [https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article220316565.html]

Thus on the ballot for November 6 two GOP candidates appear: Associate Justice Jackson and Democrat interloper, Chris Anglin—a faux Republican! And, thus, the chances of conservatives retaining that pivotal seat on the state’s highest court are greatly lessened.

But, just who is Anita Earls, the highly-touted Democratic candidate who could well become the critical swing vote on the Court?

Ms. Earls, daughter of a biracial mixed marriage, is the founder of a “community organizing” pressure group, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice [SCSJ] and was its executive director from 2007 until 2017 [https://earls4justice.com/about-anita-2/]. From 2000 until 2003 she served as the director of the Voting Rights Project for the group Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law, which was founded back in 1963 and included various Socialist and pro-Communist organizers. 

In short, she is a “social justice warrior attorney” who has been deeply immersed in community organizing, and, specifically legal action on such issues as redistricting (to leverage support for Democrat-leaning areas) and voter identification (she opposed voter ID regulations, even the most reasonable). In 2011 she received the NAACP Civil Rights Champion Award [https://earls4justice.com/about-anita-2/].

Until 2017 Earls served as executive director of the SCSJ. Here are their stated goals:

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice promotes justice by empowering minority and low-income communities to defend and advance their political, social and economic rights. We view local social justice struggles from a global, international and human rights perspective, and believe it takes a holistic, collective and interdisciplinary approach to address issues at their core, bring sustained structural change, and alter power relations. We use the combined skills of lawyers, social scientists, community organizers and media experts to help underrepresented people develop strategies to achieve their visions for themselves and their communities. Our five main program areas are voting rightsenvironmental justicecriminal justice, and youth justice.   [https://www.southerncoalition.org/program-areas/]

And, of course, she favors strict gun control and believes that our courts must vigorously combat “white supremacy” and “racism” (which is just about anything any Republican advocates).  In other words, her views and platform—whether she admits it or not—are distinctly Marxist in origin, and come almost directly out of the post-Marxist playbook (and by that I mean views which go well beyond, much farther to the political and social Left of older Socialists and Communists). 
Ms. Earls is running slick television ads, but what she doesn’t tell us is about her background and the history of the organization, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, that she founded and ran for ten years. Nor does she inform us of the nearly $500,000 that her group received as a pass-through funding from globalist billionaire and Marxist George Soros and his Foundation to Promote Open Society. 
The election of Anita Earls would be disastrous for North Carolina jurisprudence and the traditional rule of law in this state.  But too many Tar Heels—too many of our fellow citizens—know only what they know about this critical election from short television ads. And that could well spell disaster.

It is time our fellow citizens understood what was at stake in this election—and just who is Anita Earls.

Here is a comprehensive breakdown of financial support given to the SCSJ and its projects. For regular, hard-working citizens of North Carolina, this should be shocking, but how many know of it?

Please help get the word out.



MAPPING THE LEFT


Southern Coalition for Social Justice

Group

Southern Coalition for Social Justice is an extreme radical left-wing group that promotes “community organizing” to effect economic, social and political change. Anita Earl, Executive Director of the SCSJ, was a member of the State Board of Elections before resigning to sue the state over the 2010 redistricting maps. Over fifteen percent of the group’s grant money comes from two extreme liberal political groups – Foundation to Promote Open Society (George Soros group) and the Z Smith Reynolds Foundation. SCSJ belongs to the following networks: Democracy NC, Moral Mondays and Blueprint NC. Blueprint NC is the group that gained infamy with their strategy memo that directed their members to “eviscerate, mitigate, litigate, cogitate and agitate” the state’s leadership in 2013.

The SCSJ has taken a prominent role in the fight against voter photo ID and other needed and commonsense reforms to our election laws. They have also taken a leading role in lawsuits to stop the most recent redistricting maps ultimately upheld by the U.S. Justice Department and the North Carolina Supreme Court.

Financials: Source IRS 990s 



Year
Revenue

Expenditures

Net Assets
2016
$2,440,198

$2,419,420

$1,842,697
2015
$2,918,692

$1,785,917

$1,821,929
2014
$1,420,540

$1,274,788

$689,144



Scroll down to view People Connections and Funders 



People Connections:

Person
Position
Time
Board Treasurer
Current
Senior Staff Attorney, Voting Rights
Current
Staff Attorney - Criminal Justice
Current
Board Member
Current
Executive Director, Founder
Current
Board Member
Current
community Organizer
Current
Board Member
Current
Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fellow
Current
Deputy Director
Current
Senior Staff Attorney
Current
Senior Staff Attorney - Criminal Justice
Current
Board Member
Current
Communications Director
Current
Staff Attorney - Voting Rights
Current
Board Chair
Current
Staff Attorney
Current
Staff Attorney - Criminal Justice
Current
Staff Attorney - Voting Rights
Current
Board Member
Current
Fellow
Current
Board Member
Current
Staff Attorney - Criminal Justice
Current
Board Member
Current
Youth Justice Project Co-Director
Current
Youth Justice Project Co-Director
Current
Community Organizer
Current
Office Manager
Current
Board Vice Chair
Current
Staff Attorney - Criminal Justice
Current
Staff
Former
Board Member
Former
Office Manager
Former
Policy Analyst/Researcher
Former
Attorney
Former
Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fellow
Former
Communications
Former
Attorney
Former
Legal Fellow
Former
Board Member
Former
Senior Policy Analyst
Former
Soros Justice Fellow
Former
Equal Justice Works/AmeriCorps Legal Fellow
Former
Researcher
Former
Deputy Director
Former
Community Organizer
Former
Equal Justice/AmeriCorps Legal Fellow
Former




This group funded by:

Funder
Year
Amount
Description
2017
$300.00
General support
2016
$842.00
General support
2016
$32,000.00
Mass incarceration
2016
$66,550.00
Pass-through grants from Americorps/CNCS
2016
$20,000.00
General support/ social justice
2016
$100,000.00
For Youth Justice Project
2016
$200,000.00
For general support
2016
$15,000.00
2016
$5,000.00
General support
2016
$15,000.00
Civil/social justice
2016
$5,000.00
2016
$225,000.00
For general operating support
2015
$300,000.00
for general support
2015
$178,000.00
For program development
2015
$20,000.00
For program development
2015
$25,000.00
For policy, advocacy and systems reform
2015
$5,000.00
2015
$300,000.00
For policy, advocacy and systems reform
2015
$15,000.00
For policy, advocacy and systems reform
2015
$10,000.00
For policy, advocacy and systems reform
2015
$100,000.00
For general support
2015
$3,000.00
For policy, advocacy and systems reform
2015
$20,000.00
For general support
2015
$8,000.00
For policy, advocacy and systems reform
2015
$15,000.00
2015
$375.00
2015
$3,000.00
2015
$20,000.00
2015
$50,000.00
For policy, advocacy and systems reform
2015
$50,000.00
For policy, advocacy and systems reform
2015
$11,750.00
2015
$18,000.00
2015
$625,000.00
For general operating support
2014
$700,000.00
General support
2014
$10,000.00
2014
$20,000.00
For general support
2014
$3,000.00
For policy, advocacy and systems reform
2014
$2,500.00
2014
$30,000.00
2014
$30,000.00
2014
$187,500.00
For general opperating support
2014
$125,000.00
For general operating support
2013
$5,000.00
2013
$5,000.00
2013
$20,000.00
For general support
2013
$60,000.00
Program development For SCSJ to fight the NC General Assembly omnibus voter suppression bill by filing two state court cases: one will challenge the photo ID requirement to vote and the second will challenge the shortening of early voting elimination of same-day registration and ending out-of-precinct provisional voting
2013
$10,000.00
2013
$30,000.00
2013
$35,000.00
Program development For NC Voting Rights Litigation Project
2012
$700,000.00
General/operating support; Continuing support; Program development For general support to promote justice by empowering minority and low-income communities and for redistricting litigation and election administration efforts
2012
$175,000.00
General/operating support; Continuing support For core support
2012
$15,000.00
2012
$23,500.00
General/operating support
2012
$350,000.00
Program development To improve policymaking for vulnerable and at-risk children at all levels of government through community-based support and litigation that ensures fair representation in redistricting
2012
$200,000.00
General/operating support For general operating support
2011
$400,000.00
General/operating support; Continuing support; Program development For general support to promote justice by empowering minority and low-income communities to defend and advance their political social and economic rights
2011
$480,000.00
Program development For the Fair Redistricting Collaborative a project of three organizations -- Southern Coalition for Social Justice Southern Echo and One Voice -- to protect the voting strength of black immigrant citizen and marginalized voters through non-partisan efforts
2011
$100,000.00
General/operating support; Continuing support; Program development For general in the amount of $5000000 and project support in the amount of $5000000 to support the community organizing project
2011
$60,000.00
Program development For The Fair Redistricting North Carolina project to seek to achieve the fair representation of African-American low-income and other traditionally under-represented voters This request is to support additional legal staff needed to pursue a legal challenge to the unconstitutional legislative and congressional redistricting plans enacted by the NC General Assembly
2011
$25,000.00
Program development For Promoting Energy Efficiency in North Carolina Project
2010
$500,000.00
General/operating support For general support to promote justice by empowering minority and low-income communities to advance their political social and economic rights and for racial equity and economic human rights project
2010
$432,500.00
Seed money For start-up support for Community Census and Redistricting Institute to develop pool of redistricting experts and train community organizations to participate effectively in the redistricting process
2010
$100,000.00
Continuing support; Program development To provide small grants to local community-based organizations in Florida and North Carolina to conduct census outreach to ensure full participation in 2010 Census
2010
$150,000.00
Research For the Why We Count Census Outreach Project to minimize the undercount of traditionally hard to count populations in targeted Southern states to ensure accurate 2010 Census
2010
$75,000.00
General/operating support For general operating support
2010
$31,500.00
General/operating support For general operating expenses
2009
$150,000.00
Program development; Research To develop research agenda for 2010 census and implications for marginalized populations and design training for cadre of experts to help communities engage in the redistricting process
2009
$10,000.00
2008
$400,000.00
General/operating support For general support to bring innovative and highly successful model of community lawyering to South to effect social economic and political change
2008
$260,000.00
Program development; Research To engage community organizations and social justice advocates in efforts to ensure that low-income and minority communities in South are fully and accurately counted in 2010 Census
2008
$100,000.00
General/operating support For general support to promote justice by empowering minority and low-income communities to defend and advance their political social and economic rights




                                    February 11, 2024     MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey Descent into Madness: Dostoevsky and the End of...