History – Dean Cook

End Affirmative Action and DEI In Employment

In 1963, President John Kennedy made a televised appearance and urged legislation similar to what would become the Civil Rights Act. After Kennedy was assassinated, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. (https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/civil-rights-act)

The act was the most sweeping legislation on this topic since Reconstruction. It covered many areas, and is broken down into eleven titles. For instance, Title I has to do with voter rights, Title VI concerns federal funding, and Title VII concerns employment. A major intent of the act was to end Southern legal policies concerning public accommodations, voting, and businesses. However, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went far beyond this, as it did not just abolish certain state laws in the South, but also regulated private action by private businesses and individuals. (https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/civil-rights-act)

Opponents of the Civil Rights Act said it would, amongst other things, lead to a system of racial quotas in hiring. They said businesses would have to hire a certain percentage of each race, regardless of the merit or ability of those persons to do the best job. Proponents of the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act assured the nation it would not institute racial quotas for the hiring of employees. (https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-rights/archive/1964-civil-rights-act-then-now/) However, subsequent Supreme Court decisions said that “voluntary affirmative action”, that is open discrimination against whites in hiring, was just fine.

Currently, the courts say any private employer is free to implement voluntary affirmative action programs that are claimed to assist blacks and other minorities. This has been the law of the land since 1979, when the US Supreme Court decided United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193 (1979).

United Steelworkers concerned a collective bargaining agreement between a union and an employer, which said that 50% of employees in a training program would be black “…until the percentage of black craft workers in the plant is commensurate with the percentage of blacks in the local labor force.” (Id.) Weber, a white employee, sued, pointing out that the policy violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The plan, instituted by the labor union and the employer, was considered by the court to be voluntary, and not one that was required by government. The Supreme Court held that since it was voluntary, and was aimed at helping blacks, it did not violate Title VII.

The Court pointed to the Legislative History of the Civil Rights Act, which indicated it was aimed at helping black people:

“Congress’ primary concern in enacting the prohibition against racial discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was with ‘the plight of the Negro in our economy.’ 110 Cong.Rec. 6548 (1964) (remarks of Sen. Humphrey).” (Id.)

In other words, the Supreme Court in United Steelworkers said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was there to help black people, not to create a “colorblind” society, or to create “racial equality in the workplace”.

The Court in United Steelworkers also dismissed a provision in the Civil Rights Act that seemingly prohibited racial quotas, in an act of what I’d call “linguistic jujitsu”:

“Nothing contained in this subchapter shall be interpreted to require any employer, employment agency, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee subject to this subchapter to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex, or national origin employed by any employer, referred or classified for employment by any employment agency or labor organization, admitted to membership or classified by any labor organization, or admitted to, or employed in, any apprenticeship or other training program, in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in any community, State, section, or other area, or in the available work force in any community, State, section, or other area.”(42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(j))

The court basically focused on the language: “…to require any employer…to grant preferential treatment…on account of any imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race….in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such race…in any community, State, section, or other area, or in the available work force in any community, State, section, or other area.”

The Court said no one was “requiring” the employer in United Steelworkers to grant preferential treatment to blacks, who were underrepresented in the workforce, in comparison to the number of people living in that area. In this case, the business in question was located in Gramercy, Louisiana, whose local workforce was 39% black. Prior to the implementation of this program, the workers in the business in question, involved in that particular type of work, was only about 1.83% black. (Id. at 198)

It’s doubtful that any court, anywhere, ever, would allow an “affirmative action” program to stand, if the situation were reversed. That is, imagine if the population of a city were 39% white, but only 1.83% of a company’s workforce were white, and the company instituted a program to increase white hiring. (I’m not sure if this would ever really happen, but perhaps if some basketball team decided to have a special program to increase white basketball players?) Not only would such a policy be struck down by the courts, the business would likely be burned to the ground by an angry mob of protestors, but I digress.

Probably the above scenario I present, of a black imbalance of workers over whites, also could never occur because the Court in United Steelworkers went on to say that there were limits on when a voluntary affirmative action plan like that one would be upheld. The Court said the plan in that case was designed to “...to break down old patterns of racial segregation and hierarchy…” (Id. at 208), it did “…not unnecessarily trammel the interests of the white employees…” (Id at 208), and the plan was a temporary measure, and would only continue until black employees as a percentage of workers, were the same as the percentage of blacks in the local population.(Id. At 208).

Like it or not, since 1979, employers have been free to “voluntarily” discriminate against whites, in favor of blacks, as long as they could show it had to do with breaking down “old patterns of racial segregation”, did not “unnecessarily trammel the interests of whites”, and so long as the measure was “temporary”. This is what many companies have done, too. For instance, Larry Fink of Blackrock said that he was instituting an aggressive “diversity program” in order to get rid of “…a bunch of white men…”. (https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/blackrocks-larry-fink-rattles-employees-amid-political-posturing) (Fink and his defenders would, of course, say that I’m mischaracterizing what he said, but he was aiming to reduce the number of white workers by replacing them with less qualified minority workers, since a profit-oriented business would naturally hire the most qualified, regardless of race, in order to maximize shareholder value and profits.)

There are indications in the legal system, and in the culture, that preferential treatment for black employees in hiring could be coming to an end, however. This has already occurred, “de jure” if not “de facto”, when it comes to affirmative action programs in college admissions.

In the Summer of 2023, the US Supreme Court issued its opinion in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. This opinion declared illegal any sort of racial preference system for any entity receiving federal financial assistance. Most universities and colleges today receive such financial assistance through student aid programs like Pell Grants or Federal student loans, as well as through research grants and other tax breaks:

“The clearest example of Title VI-covered federal financial assistance is money provided through federal grants, cooperative agreements, and loans. An entity may receive grant money directly from an agency or indirectly through another entity. In either case, the direct recipient as well as the secondary or subrecipient are considered to have received federal funds. In other instances, the funding may be directed to the funding beneficiaries but another entity ultimately receives the funding. For example, a college or university receives federal financial assistance indirectly where it enrolls United States military veterans for whom the federal government provides tuition payments.” (https://www.justice.gov/crt/fcs/T6manual5)

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 says no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/regulatory/statutes/title-vi-civil-rights-act-of-1964)

Additionally, even without the existence of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, a state government cannot prefer one race over another without likely running afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. The majority opinion of Justice Roberts spent a lot of time analyzing the actions of Harvard and UNC based on the equal protection clause of the 14th, but, as far as I can tell, it was simply assumed that Harvard was a state actor. At footnote 2 to the majority opinion, Justice Roberts says:

“Title VI provides that ‘[n]o person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.’ 42 U. S. C. §2000d. ‘We have explained that discrimination that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment committed by an institution that accepts federal funds also constitutes a violation of Title VI.’ Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 244, 276, n. 23 (2003). Although JUSTICE GORSUCH questions that proposition, no party asks us to reconsider it. We accordingly evaluate Harvard’s admissions program under the standards of the Equal Protection Clause itself.”(SFFA v. Harvard, 20-1199, decided June 29, 2023, footnote 2, Roberts opinion, emphasis.)

The opinion’s equal protection clause analysis makes more sense with respect to the University of North Carolina, which is clearly a state actor. It would seem to me that Harvard’s program was struck down more because of Title VI, not the equal protection clause, but the Robert’s footnote 2 makes it clear this is based on past precedent, which no one asked the Court to reexamine in that case. (Whether this makes any difference in future analysis of affirmative action programs at private versus state public universities, time will tell.)

The relevant facts in SFFA v. Harvard concerned the admissions processes at Harvard and University of North Carolina, which ensured that race was a major determinant in whether a significant percentage of black and hispanic students were admitted to these universities. Since there is only a certain number of students admitted every year, if black and hispanic students are being admitted because of their race, and not their qualifications, it meant there were other non-black, non-hispanic students not being admitted, who otherwise would have been admitted, based on academic qualifications alone. (In other words, this was a “zero-sum” situation. The only way for one student to “win”, and be admitted, was for another student to “loose” and not be admitted.)

In a six to three decision, the Harvard and UNC admissions programs were found to be illegal by the Supreme Court. As noted, much of Justice Robert’s majority opinion centered around an equal protection analysis under the 14th Amendment, which more clearly applied to UNC. His opinion noted that any exception to the equal protection clause must survive what is called “strict scrutiny”. Under this two-step test, the racial classification must be used to “further a compelling governmental interest”, and second, must be “narrowly tailored” to achieve that interest. In practice, almost nothing will survive strict scrutiny analysis by a court, meaning almost all governmental distinctions based on race are illegal:

“Outside the circumstances of these cases, our precedents have identified only two compelling interests that permit resort to race-based government action. One is remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute. See, e.g., Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, 551 U. S. 701, 720 (2007); Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U. S. 899, 909–910 (1996); post, at 19–20, 30–31 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). The second is avoiding imminent and serious risks to human safety in prisons, such as a race riot. See Johnson v. California, 543 U. S. 499, 512–513 (2005).3) (SFFA v. Harvard, 20-1199, decided June 29, 2023.)

In a 1978 case, Regents of University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court had said that promoting a racially diverse student body could be a “compelling governmental interest”, such that certain affirmative action programs could survive strict scrutiny. As the majority in SFFA v. Harvard noted, this was the opinion of Justice Powell, while the rest of the majority wrote their own opinions about why the program in Bakke was legal:

“In a deeply splintered decision that produced six different opinions—none of which commanded a majority of the Court—we ultimately ruled in part in favor of the school and in part in favor of Bakke. Justice Powell announced the Court’s judgment, and his opinion—though written for himself alone—would eventually come to “serv[e] as the touchstone for constitutional analysis of race-conscious admissions policies.” Grutter, 539 U. S., at 323….No other Member of the Court joined Justice Powell’s opinion. Four Justices instead would have held that the government may use race for the purpose of ‘remedying the effects of past societal discrimination.’ Id., at 362 (joint opinion of Brennan, White, Marshall, and Blackmun, JJ., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). Four other Justices, meanwhile, would have struck down the Davis program as violative of Title VI.” (Id., emphasis added)

In essence, Bakke was a tie, with one judge, Powell, breaking it in favor of the affirmative action side, but for a reason other than “remedying the effects of past societal discrimination”.

The majority opinion in SFFA v. Harvard also discussed another case, Grutter v. Bollinger, from 2003, in which the affirmative action program of the University of Michigan law school was upheld. In that case, the court endorsed Justice Powell’s position from Bakke, that racial diversity was a compelling governmental interest. Interestingly, the court in Grutter, as part of Justice O’Connor’s majority decision said:

“We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” (Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 343 (2003).)

So, the Grutter court punted on the issue, and said they’d uphold such programs for now, but not at some point in the future.

The majority opinion written by Justice Roberts in SFFA v. Harvard used strict scrutiny analysis to find that affirmative action programs for state universities like the one at UNC were illegal:

“For the reasons provided above, the Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”(SFFA v. Harvard, 20-1199, decided June 29, 2023.)

The majority opinion did allow for one caveat. It said that:

“...nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” (Id.)

This is why I said that affirmative action was made illegal “de jure” if not “de facto”. Every university, including Harvard and UNC, will now increase black and hispanic enrollment through the use of essays, where the applicant makes a note of the fact that they are black or hispanic, and ties it in to some way they once were allegedly discriminated against and overcame it. (This will probably generate a whole cottage industry of essay-writers and “editors” that will assist black and hispanic students with this task, or they’ll just use Chat GPT to make something up.) The Court did note that this was not a license for backdoor race discrimination:

“…universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”(Id.)

But, showing that universities are doing this will become very fact-specific in litigation, and will be difficult and expensive to show, unless a “smoking gun” can be found, like whistleblowers coming forward stating that they were instructed to admit black students based on their essays.

Solely based on its facts, SFFA v. Harvard has nothing to do with employment law or employers engaging in “voluntary affirmative action”. But, the Gorsuch/Thomas concurrence suggests that there might be future movement by the Supreme Court towards overruling United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, and a finding that employer “voluntary affirmative action” is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Unlike the Roberts majority opinion, the Gorsuch concurrence, joined by Thomas, focuses on an analysis of the legality of the UNC and Harvard affirmative action programs from the perspective of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

“Today, the Court holds that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not tolerate this practice. I write to emphasize that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not either.” (SFFA v. Harvard, 20-1199, decided June 29, 2023, Gorsuch concurrence.)

What is important about the Gorsuch concurrence from the standpoint of employment law is that Gorsuch believes that Title VII, the law on employment discrimination, should be read the same as Title VI, the law on federal funding to universities and other institutions:

“If this exposition of Title VI sounds familiar, it should. Just next door, in Title VII, Congress made it “unlawful . . . for an employer . . . to discriminate against any individual . . . because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” §2000e–2(a)(1). Appreciating the breadth of this provision, just three years ago this Court read its essentially identical terms the same way. See Bostock, 590 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 4–9). This Court has long recognized, too, that when Congress uses the same terms in the same statute, we should presume they “have the same meaning.” IBP, Inc. v. Alvarez, 546 U. S. 21, 34 (2005). And that presumption surely makes sense here, for as Justice Stevens recognized years ago, “[b]oth Title VI and Title VII” codify a categorical rule of “individual equality, without regard to race.” Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U. S. 265, 416, n. 19 (1978) (opinion concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part) (emphasis deleted).”(SFFA v. Harvard, 20-1199, decided June 29, 2023, Gorsuch concurrence, emphasis added.)

After indicating that Title VI and Title VII have similar terms, and should be presumed to have the same meaning. Gorsuch then went on in his concurrence to find that affirmative action programs in education, where the educator receives federal funding, are illegal. In fact, he stated that they are even more illegal under Title VI than they would be under just the equal protection clause, because the strict scrutiny standard might allow for some limited exceptions, while Title VI does not:

“In other respects, however, the relative scope of the two provisions is inverted. The Equal Protection Clause addresses all manner of distinctions between persons and this Court has held that it implies different degrees of judicial scrutiny for different kinds of classifications. So, for example, courts apply strict scrutiny for classifications based on race, color, and national origin; intermediate scrutiny for classifications based on sex; and rational-basis review for classifications based on more prosaic grounds. … By contrast, Title VI targets only certain classifications—those based on race, color, or national origin. And that law does not direct courts to subject these classifications to one degree of scrutiny or another. Instead, as we have seen, its rule is as uncomplicated as it is momentous. Under Title VI, it is always unlawful to discriminate among persons even in part because of race, color, or national origin.”(SFFA v. Harvard, 20-1199, decided June 29, 2023, Gorsuch concurrence, emphasis added.)

The Gorsuch concurrence in SFFA v. Harvard invites other lawsuits under Title VII against employers that use “voluntary affirmative action” or other “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” policies to discriminate against whites or males. In fact, I think the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, could rule, long before the US Supreme Court ever does, that Title VII should be read the same as Title VI under SFFA v. Harvard, and declare many affirmative action and DEI programs illegal.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is considered one of the more “conservative” in the nation, which means there is already an ideological bent in that court that would disfavor affirmative action and DEI programs. Ironically, in United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, the 5th Circuit found in favor of the white Plaintiffs. (“A divided panel of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed, holding that all employment preferences based upon race, including those preferences incidental to bona fide affirmative action plans, violated Title VII’s prohibition against racial discrimination in employment.”, United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193, 200 (1979).) This indicates that the 5th Circuit would probably prefer to see United Steelworkers of America overruled, and could use the Gorsuch and Thomas concurrence from SFFA v. Harvard to take up the issue. Even though the 5th Circuit cannot directly subvert the United Steelworkers decision themselves, they could use the reasoning in SFFA v. Harvard to perhaps limit United Steelworkers in some meaningful way.

The desire amongst some Circuit Judges on the 5th Circuit to use Title VII to outlaw affirmative action programs by employers is already there. For instance, in Hamilton v. Dallas County, as part of his concurrence to an en banc decision, one Judge said:

“Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect every American against every form of prohibited discrimination—not just certain favored classes against certain disfavored forms of discrimination. For decades, however, the judiciary has distorted the Act in various ways to protect some Americans, while excluding others.” (Hamilton v. Dallas County, No. 21-10133, August 18, 2023, James C. Ho, Circuit Judge, concurring, emphasis added.)

Hamilton v. Dallas County involved an allegation of sex discrimination under Title VII. The Dallas County Sheriff’s Department had instituted a sex-based policy to determine when employees who monitor prisoners in jail would get their two days off per week. Men could select full weekends off, that is both Saturday and Sunday. Female deputies could pick either two weekdays off or one weekend day plus one weekday. (For instance, a woman could pick Friday and Saturday, or Sunday and Monday, but a woman could not pick Saturday and Sunday off.) The reason for this was it was believed that it would be unsafe for all the men to be off during the week and that it was safer for the men to be off on the weekends. (Hamilton v. Dallas County, No. 21-10133, August 18, 2023, footnote 2.) (The exact reason the County of Dallas believed this, I don’t know, and I don’t know how meritorious this argument was.)

The district court granted Dallas County’s motion to dismiss under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), meaning the case was dismissed quite early, soon after the lawsuit was filed. Based just on the pleadings of the Plaintiffs, the trial court found that there was insufficient factual basis in the Plaintiff’s pleadings to support a plausible claim for relief, and dismissed their case. (Basically, even if what the Plaintiffs said in their pleadings was completely true, they would still lose.) The Plaintiffs then appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. The reason for the early dismissal turned on a policy in the Fifth Circuit called the “ultimate employment decisions” requirement. Basically, this said that an adverse employment decision action for Title VII employment discrimination claims turned on whether the discrimination involved an “ultimate decision”, such as hiring, granting leave, discharging, promoting, and compensating an employee. An employer was not going to be found liable in the Fifth Circuit merely for taking a discriminatory action that didn’t affect one of these “ultimate decisions”. So, mere changes to employee work schedules, for instance, would not be an “ultimate decision” and therefore could not form the basis of a Title VII claim in the Fifth Circuit. In essence, it limited the scope of Title VII in employment discrimination. In an en banc decision, the Fifth Circuit overruled itself and discarded the ultimate decision rule as having no basis in the text of the Civil Rights Act:

“Nowhere does Title VII say, explicitly or implicitly, that employment discrimination is lawful if limited to non-ultimate employment decisions. To be sure, the statute prohibits discrimination in ultimate employment decisions—’hir[ing],’ ‘refus[ing] to hire,’ ‘discharg[ing],’ and ‘compensation’—but it also makes it unlawful for an employer ‘otherwise to discriminate against’ an employee ‘with respect to [her] terms, conditions, or privileges of employment….Restricting liability under the statute to ‘’ultimate employment decisions such as hiring, granting leave, discharging, promoting, or compensating’’34 renders the statute’s catchall provision all but superfluous. This we cannot do.’”(Hamilton v. Dallas County, No. 21-10133, August 18, 2023, emphasis added.)

In his concurrence Circuit Judge James C. Ho went on to say that not only was Title VII not limited to “ultimate decisions”, but the plain textual reading of the statute also meant that its protection was not limited to any particular racial group or groups. He cited, with favor, Justice Department positions that various DEI and affirmative action policies would also violate Title VII:

“As the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department noted during en banc oral argument in this case, if “a law firm is having a lunch to do CLEs and you have a policy that says we’re only going to invite women but not men to this CLE lunch, that’s of course actionable, and that’s of course a term, condition, or privilege of employment” under Title VII. Audio of Oral Arg. 23:00–23:29. The Justice Department agreed that “a lot of law firms do that.” Id. at 25:35. It also noted that “work assignments . . . happening on the basis of race” are likewise actionable under Title VII. Id. at 27:12–20.”(Hamilton v. Dallas County, No. 21-10133, August 18, 2023, James C. Ho concurrence.)

Note that Circuit Judge Ho said that a law firm continuing legal education program for only women would violate Title VII in the Fifth Circuit because it is a “..term, condition, or privilege of employment…”, and he also, implicitly, says it still violates Title VII, even though it is aimed at men. Presumably, a meeting of black associates or partners at a law firm that was limited to only black associates and partners would also violate Title VII in Judge Ho’s, and the current Justice Department’s, opinion. He also noted that work assignments are happening on the basis of race, and should be considered illegal under Title VII. For instance, I could see a company sending a black sales representative to meet with a black buyer, which would be a violation if this viewpoint prevailed. Or, in the entertainment industry, perhaps, a producer is assigned to television shows with black audiences or black record artists solely because the producer is also black. All of this would (and should) be made illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Circuit Judge Ho invited future litigation against corporate DEI and affirmative action programs by also saying:

“The Justice Department is not alone in expressing these concerns. See, e.g., Andrea R. Lucas, With Supreme Court affirmative action ruling, it’s time for companies to take a hard look at their corporate diversity programs, Reuters, June 29, 2023 (“Title VII bars . . . a host of increasingly popular race-conscious corporate initiatives: from providing race-restricted access to mentoring, sponsorship, or training programs; to selecting interviewees partially due to diverse candidate slate policies; to tying executive or employee compensation to the company achieving certain demographic targets; to offering race-restricted diversity internship programs or accelerated interview processes, sometimes paired with euphemistic diversity ‘scholarships’ that effectively provide more compensation for ‘diverse’ summer interns.”); U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, Cotton Warns Top Law Firms About Race-Based Hiring Practices, July 17, 2023.” (Hamilton v. Dallas County, No. 21-10133, August 18, 2023, James C. Ho concurrence.)

There is a rich (dare I say, “diverse”) number of potential corporate and business targets out there for a Plaintiff’s attorney to choose from. Imagine all the DEI programs major corporations have implemented over the past fifteen to twenty years. There is also a lot of evidence out there, since many of these corporations have not even tried to hide what it was they were doing. They openly discriminated against whites and males as a badge of honor. “The Lost Generation” by Jacob Savage, published in Compact magazine on December 15, 2025, discusses blatant discrimination against white males in favor of women and minority candidates in media, journalism, TV and film, and academia. All of these companies should be sued.

The courts, and the Fifth Circuit in particular, are ready to start taking claims of employment discrimination against white males seriously. I personally believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all subsequent acts, should be repealed. This is because I believe in freedom of association and freedom of contract. I believe I have an inalienable right to associate with anyone, or to not associate with them. I believe others have the same right. I don’t believe I owe any minority, or group of minorities, anything. Certainly not my time or association. The only thing I owe to people of other races is the same thing I owe anyone: to respect their rights to life, liberty, and property. In a truly free market, with actual capitalism that respected rights to property, freedom of contract, and association, the owner of a business would be free to racially discriminate or not, as they choose. (I think that those businesses that did racially discriminate for irrational reasons would lose profits as a result, but that is their decision to make.)

The reality is that if capitalism, freedom of contract, and freedom of association were legally instituted tomorrow, there would likely be plenty of affirmative action for minorities by companies that would choose to engage in such discrimination against whites. Does anyone really doubt that these leftist businessmen with white guilt, like Mark Zuckerberg or Sergi Brin, wouldn’t? I think affirmative action is unjust and bad for everyone, including black people, but you certainly should be free to discriminate against whoever you want, if it’s your property and your business.

But, in the meantime, while these laws still exist, I fully support the extension of the principles in SFFA v. Harvard to Title VII employment discrimination matters. We should end all affirmative action and DEI programs in all companies by force of law, as long as the law exists. Until the Civil Rights Act is repealed, everyone, both black and white, should feel the pain equally.

W. Dean Cook

How To Think About The Assassination Of Public Speakers Expressing Political, Cultural, or Philosophic Viewpoints

On September 10, 2025, public speaker Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at a university in Utah. The best evidence available today says he was shot with an old-style bolt-action rifle from about 200 yards by a sniper on a roof. (I won’t say the probable murderer’s name, as that is giving him too much attention.) Reliable news sources like the Wall Street Journal report that the shooter said he committed this murder because he viewed Charlie Kirk’s ideas as “hate”: “’I had enough of his hatred,’ [the shooter] allegedly responded. ‘Some hate can’t be negotiated out.‘” (Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2025) The shooter thought he could murder someone for expressing what he considered to be “hate”. He shot Kirk through the neck, with Kirk’s blood spurting out like a geyser in front of thousands of people, who will now be traumatized by that event, to say nothing of Kirk’s family and friends. (I had the misfortune of seeing a close up of the video of his death, which sickened and horrified me.)

The response from the more irrational portions of the left-wing mob has been horrific, but not particularly surprising to me. The celebration videos online are awful, but I also think most people behaving this way are just random people on the Internet, not major public speakers or intellectuals. I will not waste time addressing those who are either mentally ill, or moral monsters.

What I do want to spend time addressing is a more subtle way of minimizing or dismissing this murder. How should we think about the murder of Charlie Kirk, if civilization, rationality, and moral decency is our objective? If this is one’s goal, the only thing to be said about Kirk’s murder is: “This is a vicious, unprovoked murder, that I condemn without question, reservation, or qualification, and the murderer must receive the maximum penalty allowed by law.”

If someone says anything like: “I don’t agree with Charlie Kirk’s murder, but I didn’t agree with him on some things.” They are implicitly saying he deserved to get murdered. (Whether the speaker realizes it or not.) It implies that in the speaker’s mind, they are at least entertaining the notion that someone deserves to get killed for expressing their views through speaking or writing. That’s okay if you are not sure about whether force should ever be used to stop someone from expressing their beliefs on politics, religion, morality, or philosophy. But, if you have such doubts, you have no business calling yourself an intellectual, a reporter, a teacher, a lawyer, or a politician. You should not speak on these topics, if you are that uncertain of the baseline value that force should not be used against people solely because of their spoken or written words that express political, philosophical, or religious beliefs. If you do insist on speaking, and say things like I’ve been hearing and reading, about how “…Charlie Kirk didn’t deserve to die, but I also disagree with him…” then you should be judged, and judged harshly, as either evil or an ignoramus.

Imagine if someone were sexually assaulted, and someone said: “I don’t agree with how they dressed, but no one deserves to be raped.” What they are implicitly saying is that they aren’t sure in their own head about that issue. That’s okay if they aren’t, but they have no moral business having a forum, such as a newspaper, a television station, or a YouTube channel, when saying such things. Morally, private newspapers and private TV channels should not give them a forum to express such views. (Obviously, the government has no business being involved in censoring people, even when they express bad ideas.)

We wouldn’t rightfully say of someone murdered, who said 100% truth: “He didn’t deserve to die because he spoke only truth.” That would imply his right to life is tied to the truth of the ideas he holds, when it is not. His right to life has no connection to the contents of his mind. One also wouldn’t rightfully say: “He didn’t do enough good things [however you define that] so he deserves to be murdered.”

If we are to live in a civilized society, whether someone states 100% truth or 100% lies must be irrelevant to their right to live. How they live their life, and what they believe, short of your need to act in emergency self defense against force, doesn’t justify intentionally killing them.

In the past, what I’ve heard from people on the left is: “Don’t blame the victim of a crime.” (For instance, when a woman is sexually assaulted.) First of all, I think this aphorism can be used as a verbal club to attack anyone who points out that you should take some care in how you live your life, and who you associate with. If you hang out with dangerous felons or drugs addicts, you’re more likely to end up the victim of a crime. I think what this saying means in a rational context is something like this: We don’t look for trivial rationalizations about the actions of the victim to minimize or excuse the actions of criminals. Even if the victim was imprudent , that in no way excuses the rights-violation by the criminal. The criminal must still receive full moral condemnation, and the full weight of the law. In this case, we can’t even say Charlie Kirk was imprudent. He wasn’t hanging out with dangerous felons, for instance. He was speaking at a college. No one on the left has trotted out the “Don’t blame the victim” line in the case of Charlie Kirk. I wonder why?

I think saying anything but unequivocal condemnation for the murder of Charlie Kirk is what Ayn Rand and her close associates called context dropping:

“Context-dropping is one of the chief psychological tools of evasion.” (The Virtue of Selfishness “The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests”, found in Ayn Rand Lexicon)

“Whenever you tear an idea from its context and treat it as though it were a self-sufficient, independent item, you invalidate the thought process involved. If you omit the context, or even a crucial aspect of it, then no matter what you say it will not be valid . . . .A context-dropper forgets or evades any wider context. He stares at only one element, and he thinks, “I can change just this one point, and everything else will remain the same.” In fact, everything is interconnected. That one element involves a whole context, and to assess a change in one element, you must see what it means in the whole context.” (The Philosophy of Objectivism lecture series, Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Objectivism lecture series, Lecture 5, found in Ayn Rand Lexicon.)

The whole context of the murder of Charlie Kirk is this: A man was violently killed while speaking his ideas in public, where the shooter expressly said he did it because Kirk’s ideas were ‘hateful’. You would have to drop the context of: the individual right to life; the right to free speech; and the desire to live in a civilized society, if you gave anything but unqualified condemnation of this shooting as monstrous and evil.

I cannot remember the last time a person was killed solely for expressing ideas in the United States of America. (When they weren’t a politician with political power.) The only historical example I can think of is Martin Luther King. This is the historical, cultural, and moral context of the murder of Charlie Kirk. He was assassinated for expressing his ideas. This must be condemned, without any analysis of his ideas. To do otherwise is to implicitly sanction murder on the basis of belief.

What If Nicole Brown Had A “No Interracial Dating” Policy?

“Interracial couples represented as many as 17.9% of substantiated events, and these couples were 1.5 times more likely to mutually assault each other than ethnic minority couples, and twice as likely as White couples to experience a mutual assault.” (Martin BA, Cui M, Ueno K, Fincham FD. Intimate Partner Violence in Interracial and Monoracial Couples. Fam Relat. 2013 Feb 1;61(1):202-211. doi: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00747.x. Epub 2013 Jan 22. PMID: 23554541; PMCID: PMC3611980., https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3611980/ )

The new Netflix documentary about the Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman murders is worth a watch. It went through the investigation and trial in a way that made sense, and even made sense of the jury verdict, even if you don’t agree with it. (Which I don’t.)

I want to look at a particularly telling scene in the video. It was an interview by someone in Nicole Brown’s family. The interviewee talked about when Nicole first started dating the person that she would eventually marry, divorce, and later be murdered by. The interviewee said that Nicole told her mother over the phone that she was dating a black man, apparently checking to see if that was going to be a problem with her family. Her mother is reported to have said something to the effect of: “That’s okay.”

Her mom would clearly get the “I’m not racist” seal of approval from the majority of people living in our society since the 1960’s. (Whatever “racist” means, which I’m not sure at this point.)

A few days later, I was driving in my car, thinking about the documentary when a thought occurred to me that was completely novel. I am a product of the mainstream public education system in the United States, and I’ve lived in “respectable” middle class culture here my whole life, so I tend to have a lot of biases and unchecked premises based in that culture, even though I am well into middle age. In other words, I’m just as capable of having “blind spots” in my thinking, thanks to left-wing and egalitarian brainwashing, mostly from the public schools. Anyway, my new thought was this:

“What if Nicole’s mother had responded differently when Nicole told her she was dating a black man? What if Nicole’s mom had responded more like someone from 1940’s Alabama than someone from 1980’s Los Angeles?”

What if Nicole’s mom had said: “If you date a black man, you’re cut off and disowned. We’ll never speak to you again.”

Her mom and dad would have been called “racist” if it got out. There’s also no guarantee Nicole would have listened to them, although it clearly mattered to her, since she “tested the waters” with her parents by letting them know in advance over the phone.

If Nicole had listened to them in this hypothetical case, she probably wouldn’t have died. (Most likely some other white woman would have died, since there are plenty today that would marry a rich, famous football player. I’ll never understand the stupid obsession with football and sports.)

I can hear it now: “There are plenty of white women that get murdered by their white husbands. You’re being ‘racist’. Blah, blah, blah.”

Those people might have a point, except there are studies showing that intimate partner violence is higher amongst interracial couples. We can opine about the causes of this. I’m sure a leftist will say it’s all a legacy of slavery, and really white people’s fault that Nicole’s ex-husband nearly cut her head off. From a personal standpoint, of who you should date, it doesn’t really matter what the reason is or whose “fault” it is that the statistics show what they show. What matters in the dating world today is that one should at least be cognizant of the statistics when thinking about dating interracially. One should at least consider the dangers.

I’m sure someone will also say: “Logical fallacy! Fallacy of division! I’m going to date them, and get to know them, and then, if it turns out that they are dangerous, I’ll just stop dating them, you racist.”

Except, at that point you’re in a relationship with that person, and when you go to break it off with them, they might view you as “theirs”, just like Nicole’s ex-husband viewed her as “his”, and he then killed her in an obsessive rage of jealousy. (Such was the motive theorized by the Netflix documentary.)

Also, keep in mind, it doesn’t matter to me what you do in the end. Virtue-signaling people who do things on the basis of being “progressive” and “open minded” deserve their leftist ideology, I think.

Privatize Public Property To Help Stop Fires in Los Angeles

The fires of January 2025 in Los Angeles have been historic. The scope of destruction is like nothing I have ever seen from fire in my lifetime. Eighty to one hundred mile per hour winds turned the area into something that looked like an apocalyptic hellscape. A combination of man-made and natural phenomena were the cause of the fires.

A recent Wall Street Journal article identifies one factor that made the fires worse than they otherwise would have been. State and Federal land near people’s houses often remained unmanaged and uncleared of brush and other vegetation that created more fuel for the massive fires:

“Barry Josephson enjoyed a peaceful life in his hilltop home in the Pacific Palisades, save for one constant worry: the highly flammable brush that clogged the surrounding government-owned land.” (“How L.A. Bureaucracy Made It Harder to Clear Flammable Brush: A mishmash of government agencies failed to keep public lands safe from deadly wildfires, residents say”, The Wall Street Journal, by Jim Carlton, Mark Maremont and Dan Frosch Jan. 18, 2025 5:30 am ET; https://www.wsj.com/us-news/climate-environment/how-l-a-bureaucracy-made-it-harder-to-clear-flammable-brush-683f953e?st=MGTcv2&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink)

Much of the native vegetation in Southern California is prone to fire because it has evolved to use fire as a means of reproducing itself. The build-up of such vegetation is therefore a build-up of fuel for fire. The more there is of it, the worse the resulting fire. A landowner who did not clear his property of vegetation would be no different than a landowner who stored up kerosene or some other flammable substance on his property over time.

The Wall Street Journal documents how the lack of private property rights exacerbated the fires in Los Angeles, which probably led to the unnecessary loss of life and property.

Why did State and Federal land managers fail to clear out the excess vegetation on public land? In essence, the Wall Street Journal article says that different bureaucracies all had input into how public land was managed:

“In the Palisades, the city and county of Los Angeles, the state parks department, the California Coastal Commission, and the National Park Service all have a say in what happens on land surrounding residential areas.” (Id.)

The result was that basic responsibilities of landownership were often not taken because everyone, and no one, owned the public land:

“The delays were caused by a slow-moving tangle of government agencies that own or regulate Los Angeles’s undeveloped land and are tasked with mitigating wildfire risks, according to a review of public records and interviews by The Wall Street Journal.” (Id.)

Nearby private landowners often had to beg government agencies to do something about the excessive growth of public land. When nothing was done, private landowners would sometimes undertake to clear public land, despite the risk of being fined or arrested for doing so:

“Impatient with government bureaucracy, including a $150 fee for permission to remove brush from state parkland, some of Josephson’s neighbors cleared it on their own.” (Id.)

In other words, not only was the government failing to clear public lands of fuel for wildfires, but it often prohibited neighboring private landowners from doing so. (Such is the insanity of “Progressive”, Democratic California government.)

By breaking the law, and clearing out this land of excess vegetation, they may have saved portions of Pacific Palisades in the process:

“They might have saved some of their homes. Of 81 houses in the vicinity, Josephson said 54 are still standing amid the wreckage of this month’s Palisades fire, including his. It is particularly remarkable because investigators believe the blaze could have started a few hundred feet away, around a popular hiking destination known as Skull Rock.” (Id.)

The argument is often made that government is needed to solve “negative externalities” like air or water pollution. But, this demonstrates that the only entity creating “negative externalities” in Pacific Palisades was the State of California and the Federal Government. Their failure to engage in basic vegetation management exacerbated this natural disaster.

But why would government managers of public lands fail to manage public property like this? The answer lies in the nature of property rights.

In her 1965 article, “The Cashing In: The Student ‘Rebellion’”, originally found in “The Objectivist Newsletter”, Ayn Rand spoke about the use of public university buildings and facilities by “student rebels” to undercut freedom of speech. Students at Berkley in the 1960’s began shouting obscenities indoors, and “occupying” university buildings, claiming that they had the right to “freedom of movement” and “freedom of speech” on the University.

Ayn Rand noted that the waters were muddied by the fact that the universities were taxpayer-funded. In a sense, everyone, and no one, owns the public universities. Therefore, there are conflicting claims between those who want to learn in their classrooms, and those who claim the right to, for instance, obstruct the entrance to the classroom with their bodies as part of a protest. When there is a taxpayer-funded “public space”, such as a university, road, or sidewalk, such clashes and conflicting claims will be inevitable. It is only on the basis of private property rights that human beings can live together without such conflict:

“It is only on the basis of property rights that the sphere and application of individual rights can be defined in any given social situation. Without property rights, there is no way to solve or to avoid a hopeless chaos of clashing views, interests, demands, desires, and whims.” (“The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’”; Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand, Kindle Edition, Pg. 293 of 366; http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/property_rights.html )

This conflict on public university campuses exists to this very day. In the Spring of 2024, we saw supporters of terrorists in the Middle East “occupy” campuses at universities such as UCLA, and begin to ethnically cleanse the campus of “Zionists”, i.e., Jewish students:

“…protesters created a ‘Jew Exclusion Zone’ where in order to pass ‘a person had to make a statement pledging their allegiance to the activists’ view.’ Those who complied with the protesters’ view were issued wristbands to allow them to pass through, the complaint says, which effectively barred Jewish students who supported Israel and denied them access to the heart of campus.” (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-rules-jewish-students-says-ucla-cant-allow-barred-accessing-camp-rcna166529)

Regardless of what one thinks of the goals, motives, and desires of the “pro-Palestine protestors” on the UCLA campus in 2024, a satisfactory resolution of the issue was impossible due to the nature of so-called “public property”. Everyone is forced to pay for UCLA through their taxes, including the Jewish students and the pro-Palestine students. UCLA will either have to curtail the freedom of the pro-Palestine protestors to associate with who they want, or it will have to curtail the freedom of Jewish students to move about the campus freely without making “loyalty oaths” to Hamas. (My support of people’s freedom to verbally voice support for Hamas and dissociate from Jewish people should not be construed as my agreement with that viewpoint. I only support their right to freedom of association.)

As Ayn Rand noted in 1965, it is only on the basis of property rights that individual rights can be defined in any given social situation. The elimination of property rights eliminates the ability of people to take the actions necessary to maintain their lives. Just as the creation of a “public university” that is “public property” creates intractable social conflicts between students with differing religious and cultural viewpoints, so too does the creation of “public parks” and “public land” create incurable conflicts.

State and Federal parkland near homes and buildings was often not cleared because everyone, and no one, owned that property. Homeowners were often not permitted to clear brush, and no one at the governmental entities controlling these parks had any incentive or authority to do so.

If this parkland had been owned by private individuals, then they would have cleared the brush themselves. The owner would not want his own land to burn, and even if he didn’t care, he would have to fear lawsuits from those with adjoining land that could be damaged by keeping his property in a dangerous condition. Even if the adjoining landowner had abandoned the property, nearby homeowners could have obtained injunctive relief to abate the fire nuisance, or just done it themselves. (Since they would not be damaging the property, they would not have to fear a damages award in trespass, and if the property is abandoned by its owner, then it is subject to adverse possession law in which the neighboring landowner acquires ownership by improving it.)

Moving forward, what should be part of the solution to the problem of improperly managed public lands in California? They should be sold to the highest bidder, with the new owner(s) having full rights of ownership over the property. The new landowners would have the right to develop or do with the land as they will, only subject to the same general laws as other landowners, such as the law of nuisance.

Private owners of this formerly public land would have the right to develop it, or maintain it as parkland. They would also have the correspondent obligations to maintain it in a manner that does not facilitate wildfires. If a fire starts on this land as a result of the negligent failure to manage vegetation, then the owners would be liable in a lawsuit. (Preemptively, the owners of the nearby structures could seek injunctive relief against landowners who create hazardous fire conditions on their land through the common law of nuisance.)

There are other political and cultural problems that California would have to address to mitigate or reduce such fires in the future. This is just one piece of the puzzle. Privatization of land would at least eliminate the lack of accountability that comes from “public property”.

The 2024 Cuban Blackouts

On November 15, 1973, Fidel Castro made a speech to the Cuban Worker’s Congress. Reading over the transcript is very revealing of the fundamental philosophy and motivations of his regime in Cuba, which still exists to this day.

In the speech, he said that Cuba was not yet ready for the “communist principle” as Karl Marx had defined it. What did Castro mean by this phrase?

“This is an essential matter in the construction of socialism and our revolutionary and socialist workers understood that. In discussing that principle we have been discussing an essential and key principle of revolutionary ideology. That every one contribute according to his ability, that each one receive according to his work is a principle, an inexorable law in the construction of socialism. When we learn to understand this principle thoroughly we are penetrating the depths of political thought, we are penetrating the depths of revolutionary thought and we learn to distinguished it from another principle of the communist society established by Karl Marx: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” (Speech by Fidel Castro, at the closing ceremony of the 13th Congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers on 15 November, 1973 (“Nov. 15, 1973 Castro Speech”), emphasis added, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1973/19731116.html)

In essence, Castro distinguished “socialism” from “communism” by distinguishing it from Karl Marx’s statement that communism means: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”:

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” (Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm)

Castro said that the “principle of socialism”, as contrasted from this “principle of communism” is that “…every one contribute according to his ability, that each one receive according to his work…”(“Nov. 15, 1973 Castro Speech”), emphasis added.)

Why did Castro believe they couldn’t operate under the “principle of communism” in 1973 Cuba? Because the Cuban people were not “ready” for communism:

“Many events demonstrate to us that we are not yet prepared to live in communism. Aside from the fact that in order to live in communism it is not only necessary to have a communist consciousness but to have abundant wealth spring from man’s work…” (Nov. 15, 1973 Castro Speech)

Castro says that the people are “ready” to live under “communism” in some areas, such as, supposedly, education and health care. But in other areas, they are not “ready”. An example of an area where the Cuban people were supposedly not “ready” was electrical production:

“We can continue and ask how much fuel are we wasting? How much in the way of raw materials are we wasting? How much electricity are we excessively consuming? It is clear that with (?light patrols) and simple appeals to people’s consciences, we are not going to save on electricity. I raise this issue because the electricity problem is an unpleasant one which we will have to face. It is an unpopular problem, but we have to face it. [applause] We substantially reduced the rate of an electric company–I do not exactly recall which. The electrical octopus was using a rate which encouraged the use of electricity. The rate on the first kilowatts was higher and it dropped as you used more.

With our revolutionary inexperience we were improvident. We reduced the company’s rates by half and we were left with the same condition which encouraged more consumption. I say we were improvident because we should have thought of the day when the electric system would not be the property of an electrical octopus but the property of the people. Now the electrical octupus belongs to the people and the people have to pay for the consequences of any electrical waste.” (Nov. 15, 1973 Castro Speech)

In essence Castro said here that Cuba is consuming more electrical power than is produced because the rates charged to people are very low, or even zero. Basic economics teaches that when a price ceiling is set on a good or service, there will be shortages because demand outruns supply. (https://fee.org/resources/price-controls-and-shortages/) This is why you would see breadlines in the old Soviet Union, and grocery stores with empty shelves. The profit motive to produce more is eliminated, and no one is incentivized to produce more. In the case of electrical production, the result of charging insufficient rates for electricity, or giving it away for free, is that people will not economize, and there is no incentive to produce more, so there will be constant blackouts in the power grid.

Castro blamed the Cuban people for not being “ready” for communism:

“…a study of an endless number of facts clearly demonstrates that our society, our people do not have the culture necessary for communist life–aside from the fact that an economy sufficiently developed for communist life is lacking.” (Nov. 15, 1973 Castro Speech, emphasis added.)

In other words, communism, and the goals of communism are noble, but the Cuban people are just not quite “good enough” for it. Someday, the people of Cuba would be “ready” for Communism, so operating under the “socialist principle” was just going to be temporary:

“It is a matter of making rectifications because we are socialists [applause] and because we want to be communists [applause–crowd chants Fidel, Fidel and rhythmically applauds for 30 seconds] and because we will never renounce the communist objective or our revolution and the development of our revolutionary consciousness…”(Nov. 15, 1973 Castro Speech, emphasis added.)

What is the “communist objective” it is, as Marx said: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” (Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”)

Why, according to Castro, is the “communist objective” desirable? Because Castro and his minions “…will continue, above all, to uphold altruism, selflessness and man’s solidary spirit.” (Nov. 15, 1973 Castro Speech, emphasis added.)

Castro went on in his 1973 speech to say, almost paraphrasing Geroge Orwell, that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” at least while it’s necessary to operate under the “socialist phase”, where everyone is not equal, rather than the “communist phase”, in some future paradise, when everyone will be equal. In particular, Castro said it would be necessary for certain “administrators” to receive more for their, supposedly, “important work” than others:

“This is another example of why we should develop a savings policy in all aspects, and especially with regard to fuel. It is here that the workers movement can give us extraordinary help. Wherever fuel is being wasted be it a farm, or a factory, or any place these are realities which our workers have to face. But a study of an endless number of facts clearly demonstrates that our society, our people do not have the culture necessary for communist life–aside from the fact that an economy sufficiently developed for communist life is lacking. Realistically, very realistically, we must implement the formulas which apply to this phase of our revolution, and implement in every aspect–not only in distribution, not only in wages, but also in administration— all the formulas which are applicable to the socialist phase of the revolution. [applause]” (Nov. 15, 1973 Castro Speech, emphasis added.)

In other words, the people involved in “administration”, that is Castro, and his gang of communist thugs in Cuba, would need to receive more money, bigger houses, nicer cars, and more political power, because what is more important than bringing about eventual communism? If everyone must “…contribute according to his ability…” and everyone must temporarily “…receive according to his work…”, who, according to Castro and his cronies, was doing more valuable work than them? Aren’t they the ones (supposedly) trying to bring about eventual communism, which is everyone’s goal?

Castro’s 1973 speech is more than 50 years old. Surely progress has been made in moving the country towards “true” communism, hasn’t it? Has Cuba come closer to being “ready” to operate under the “communist principle” of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs?

In October of 2024, Cuba experienced a days-long blackout throughout the country. I became aware of this by watching YouTubers in Cuba who were documenting their experiences during the blackout. (This seems to be not without risk. I assume these amateur videographers could be arrested and jailed for bringing the regime there into disrepute. I consider these YouTubers to be quite courageous.) What the blackout shows is that the Cuban people, in general, have probably gotten poorer, not wealthier. The recent Cuban energy crisis suggests the answer to whether Cuba is more “ready” for communism than it was in 1973 is: No.

Of course, the Cuban regime, and its left-wing apologists have a retort to why Cuba is suffering from blackouts. They’ve had the same scapegoat for the past 50+ years: The United States and its supposed “blockade” on Cuba.

First of all, it’s not a “blockade”. The United States has imposed an embargo on Cuba. A “blockade” is when a country uses its navy to prevent entry or exit from a country, thereby preventing trade and the movement of people by military force. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blockade) An “embargo” is where a country simply prohibits its citizens from trading with a particular country. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/embargo) It does not use military force to prevent other countries from trading with the embargoed country.

The “US is imposing a blockade on Cuba” myth is so prevalent on social media that it was fact checked by a left-leaning organization, and found not to be true:

“Cuba can trade with other countries of its choosing — if those countries are willing as well. Some of Cuba’s trading partners include China, Spain, the Netherlands, Canada, Mexico and Brazil, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. Venezuela was one of Cuba’s key trade partners until its ability diminished amid its own economic turmoil. Cuba’s main exports include rolled tobacco, raw sugar, nickel, liquor and zinc. Top imports include poultry meat, wheat, soybean meal, corn and concentrated milk.” (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/19/facebook-posts/cuba-can-trade-other-countries-heres-some-context/)

The United States has simply chosen not to trade with Cuba. (Whether the United States, from the perspective of its own national interest, should impose embargoes is a debate for another time.) An important question to ask these leftist apologists for Cuba is: Why is Cuba’s survival so dependent on trading with the arch-Capitalist enemy, the United States? Shouldn’t socialism make it economically much stronger than the US? Cuba can trade with much of Europe, Latin America, Canada, and China. Can’t it get whatever it needs in trade from China, Iran, and Russia? If not, why not? What is it about these countries that makes them less productive than the United States?

But, the most important question of all is this: If Cuba can have the material prosperity the United States enjoys, and end the embargo, just by adapting capitalism, why not just do that? Why’d they make the people of Cuba suffer under shortages and blackouts for the past 50+ years?

The regime in Cuba must believe either, or both, of these two things:

(1) Cuba will eventually have even more prosperity in the future by not giving in and adopting some sort of semi-free-market economy here and now, and/or;

(2) Adapting more free markets and individual freedom runs so contrary to their worldview, philosophy, and morality that it is simply unthinkable, even if it means many must suffer and die. In other words, the Cuban regime believes that the only proper system is “…from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs…”, and they will kill every last person in Cuba to achieve it.

The first explanation for why Cuba does not adopt free markets and a free society has pretty much been shown to be false with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Soviets waited 75 years, suffered terrible hardship, human rights abuses, and deaths, but the prosperity promised by Karl Marx never came. People living under communist regimes could wait 200 years, and prosperity would never arrive because it is a system that is contrary to human nature. It is contrary to what the individual needs to survive and function. Since ‘society’ is nothing but a number of individual human beings, any system that crushes the individual, ultimately disintegrates when it runs out of productive victims.

But, prosperity is not what really matters to the Communist. What matters is that everyone receive equal results for unequal effort. The second motive of the Cuban dictators, “…from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs…”, doesn’t require prosperity. It only requires forced redistribution of the production by the able to the unable. At the end of the day, Cuba is poor not because of any (imaginary) “blockade” or embargo, but because they follow a morality that destroys productiveness. At root, the Cuban regime is committed to a morality that crushes the individual spirit, and prohibits people from furthering their own lives and pursuing personal happiness.

The leadership of the Cuban regime are not looking for prosperity for the people of Cuba. They are only looking to achieve “pure communism”, a system that destroys the individual in favor of “selflessness”, and that will someday, somehow, “work”. Since socialism and communism will never “work”, in practice, it means the leadership of the Cuban regime will continue to cling to power -and use whatever repression of the people is necessary to maintain that power, forever. (Unless the Cuban people someday decide they have had enough, and put an end to it.)

How can Cuba achieve prosperity? Only by rejecting the idea of “…from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs…” In turn, this requires them to reject altruism, that is, they must reject the sacrifice of the individual’s life for some ‘greater good.’ They must recognize that ‘society’ is nothing but a number of individuals, and that each person has an inalienable right to pursue his own happiness. I’m not even saying they have to institute pure capitalism as described by Ayn Rand. (Not even the United States is that good, yet.) It just means they need to depose the current leaders of the Cuban regime, probably by force, and institute a freer government. A government that recognizes basic individual rights, with free and fair elections, rule of law, and, in economics, a generally free market, like the United States.

Only then will Cuba’s periodic blackouts end.

“The Thin Blue Line” on Netflix

“The Thin Blue Line” on Netflix is an old documentary about an even older murder case in Dallas County, Texas. In the late 1970’s Randall Dale Adams was convicted of murdering Dallas police officer Robert Wood. It was asserted by the prosecution that Adams had shot Officer Wood after being pulled over by the later.

In reality, there was compelling evidence that another person, David Ray Harris had shot Officer Wood. This included the fact that Harris had been bragging to other people that he had shot Officer Wood. Harris later claimed at trial that he hadn’t shot Officer Wood, and had only been bragging to his friends to seem like a bigshot cop-killer. Additionally, although the state does not have to show motive for murder, Harris had the only logical motive to kill Officer Wood. Harris was driving in a stolen car when it was pulled over by Officer Wood. Randal Dale Adams would have had no reason to kill the police officer, and likely wouldn’t have even known that the car was stolen. Randal Dale Adams claimed that he was not even in the car at the time of the shooting, because he had been dropped off by David Ray Harris earlier that night.

So why was the State so intent on prosecuting Randal Dale Adams, rather than the more obvious suspect, David Ray Harris? Randal Dale Adams was in his mid-twenties at the time of the murder, while David Ray Harris was only 16, and not eligible for the death penalty. It’s likely that the Dallas Police Department, the Dallas County District Attorney, and the State of Texas wanted to put someone to death for the murder of a cop, even if it was the wrong person.

Randal Dale Adams was convicted and sentenced to death. His appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was unsuccessful in overturning his conviction or getting him a new trial. His execution was scheduled for May 8, 1979. Three days before that, the US Supreme Court reversed the conviction on a procedural matter unrelated to the factual finding of guilt. This would require a new trial on guilt/innocence before Mr. Adams could be executed. In order to avoid a new trial, which would likely have brought to light new evidence of innocence, the Dallas County District Attorney was able to secure the commutation of his death sentence to life in prison. This obviated the need for a new trial on the procedural irregularity, since the US Supreme Court opinion only applied to death penalty cases. As a result, Randal Dale Adams then spent more than a decade in prison until “The Thin Blue Line” came out.

While conducting interviews of David Ray Harris, who was on death row himself at that point, for the murder of another person, the producers of the documentary recorded David Ray Harris giving what almost amounted to a confession, stating that Randal Dale Adams did not kill Officer Wood.

Additionally, the producers of the documentary conducted interviews of the witnesses who had claimed to see Randal Dale Adams behind the wheel of the car before Officer Wood was shot. They had been driving by on the road when Officer Wood had first pulled over the car the night of the murder. It turned out that the witnesses were not very credible, had reasons to lie, or just flat-out stated to the documentary producers they didn’t actually see Randal Dale Adams. One female witness, Emily Miller, seemed like total scum. She was either lying because she wanted to collect reward money, or she simply convinced herself that Adams was the man she had seen, even though she had not been able to pick him out of a lineup earlier. (I would think this would have been brought up by the Defendant’s attorney on cross examination?) It also turned out that Emily Miller had her own legal problems. Her daughter was being investigated for a robbery, so she might have been trying to curry favor with the DA and Police for the sake of her daughter. (She had also recently been fired from her job for stealing from the cash register.) Additionally, on a motion for a new trial, after the first trial, the Dallas County District Attorney engaged in prosecutorial misconduct and withheld evidence that could have exonerated Randal Dale Adams, ensuring that he went to death row.

As a result of the newly unearthed evidence and the negative publicity on the DA and Dallas Police, Randal Dale Adams got a new trial in 1989. The Dallas County DA then dismissed the case, and Mr. Adams was a free man after 12 years of incarceration and nearly being executed by the State of Texas. Try to imagine what it would be like to be an innocent person, convicted of a crime you didn’t commit, waiting on death row to be killed by the State. The police didn’t believe you, the DA didn’t believe, you, the judge didn’t believe you, and the jury didn’t believe you. For all intents and purposes, the human race is against you, and wants to see you dead. In reality, you didn’t do anything to deserve any of it, and you will die soon. The situation is too horrible to contemplate.

All around, it was a total miscarriage of justice. Why would the Dallas County District Attorney and the Dallas Police Department want to convict the wrong man? Most likely because they couldn’t give David Ray Harris the death penalty because he was only 16. (Although I wondered if someone in a position of power was protecting him for some reason?) In their minds, the public needed to see someone being executed for the murder of a police officer, either because it would satisfy the public’s sense of justice, or because it would deter others from shooting a cop. Whether the Defendant actually did it was a secondary consideration for them. As a result, Randal Dale Adams was three days from his death sentence being carried out, and only avoided that because of a procedural irregularity the US Supreme Court found.

The Police, the jury, the DA, the judge, the Court of Criminal Appeals, and the public all seemed to be okay with executing Randal Dale Adams, who, in my mind was likely innocent. Unlike 99% of all other exonerations I’ve read about, I think Randal Dale Adams probably didn’t do it. Usually, I think when people who spent time in prison are let go because of newly discovered evidence, it’s not because they’re actually innocent. It’s simply a case of new evidence coming to light that creates some reasonable doubt as to their guilt, and it’s better to let them go than take a chance keeping them in prison for a crime they possibly did not commit. I agree that it is better to let probably guilty, but possibly innocent, people go since I don’t want to see innocent people in jail or executed. Guilt always needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt, and if anything creates reasonable doubt, you’ve got to let them go.

But, the fact that everyone failed, or willfully chose to hide the truth, in the case of Randal Dale Adams has been the last straw for me. If there were a hell, the prosecutor in his case belongs there. I’ve changed my mind about the death penalty. When I was younger, I was willing to take a chance with the possibility of executing an innocent person. Life has taught me that about 50% of the police, judges, and prosecutors are either incompetent or maliciously negligent in their duties. Additionally, juries in many counties in Texas have the attitude of: “Don’t bother with presenting the evidence, just tell me where to write ‘guilty’ on the jury charge.” As an advocate of capitalism and the free market, I recognize that government is highly inefficient and often corrupt. I think death can be a just punishment, as it stops criminals from committing more crimes permanently, but many government officials are not sufficiently competent or virtuous to ensure that the innocent are not executed. There are people who definitely deserve death, but not at the cost of innocent lives.

Ōoku: The Inner Chambers (Review)

In this alternate history series on Netflix, a plague strikes Edo Period Japan that only kills men. As a result, all but a small percentage of men in Japan die. (Around 25% of the male population is left.) The plague continues to kill young men subsequently born, keeping the male population level low. (I assume the mothers of young men with immune fathers are perhaps passing on genes that do not confer immunity, causing continual death for several generations.)
The animated series explores the radical social and political changes that occur in early-modern Japan as a result. Women must become the primary producers economically, and also take control of the reigns of government, with a series of female Shoguns from the Tokugawa family in charge of Japan’s political system. (The underlying political system is essentially the same -with a Shogun in charge, and a figurehead Emperor with no real power. Women simply run it.)
The first episode is set about 80 years after the plague, with a well-established, primarily female society. Men are still rare, and can sell their sexual services, similar to how some women do in real life. Lower class women cannot afford a full-time husband so they will pay a man for sex in the hopes of getting pregnant. The more powerful and wealthy women can afford a full-time husband. The most powerful woman of all, the female Shogun, has a harem of young men at her palace. The first episode centers around one such young man and his eventual rise to become the primary concubine of the new female Shogun.
The following episodes all seem to be a flashback, and explain how this female-centric Japanese society came to be soon after the plague started.
The premise of a plague that kills most of the men is not new. I saw an episode of ‘Sliders’ from the 1990’s that had the same premise. (https://sliders.fandom.com/wiki/Love_Gods ) But, combining this premise with the setting of Edo Period Japan really captures the imagination of anyone who has studied Japanese history, like myself.

Japan has been experiencing a declining population and this series seems like commentary on this national conundrum of depopulation and negative birthrates.

I highly recommend this series.

Sex and Romance in “We The Living”

The sexual relationships in We The Living primarily revolve around those between Kira and Leo and Kira and Andrei. (Although there are subplots concerning sexual relationships with other characters, such as that between Irina and Sasha and Pavel Syerov and Comrade Sonia.) Here I will go over those two major relationships in the novel.

Kira meets Leo randomly after she left her cousin Victor on a park bench. Victor had made his own sexual advance on Kira in the park, which she had rebuffed. I’m assuming first cousin marriage was not considered incest or taboo in this time and place. Being from the Southern United States, this is also not unheard of in my own culture, although the science seems to indicate this is not a good idea. http://gap.med.miami.edu/learn-about-genetics/have-questions-about-genetics/if-cousins-get-married-are-they-at-risk-of-having-children-with-genetic-con

For no good reason that I can discern, Kira had gone on a carriage ride with Victor, even though she clearly dislikes him. I found this a little perplexing, since I don’t know what would motivate Kira to do this. She clearly doesn’t care about pleasing her family. All I can guess is that she went out of sheer boredom at spending another evening with her family. Kira and Victor eventually end up at a park.

Kira is making her way home after Victor’s failed romantic overture at the park when she accidentally wanders through the section of town where women in the local sex industry are on the street looking for customers. Leo has gone there looking to hire a sex worker, and mistakes Kira for one. Kira experiences “love at first sight” when she sees Leo. She goes with him, apparently intending to have sex with Leo:

“’Why are you looking at me like that?’ he asked. But she did not answer. He said: ‘I’m afraid I’m not a very cheerful companion tonight.’

‘Can I help you?’

‘Well, that’s what you’re here for.’ He stopped suddenly. ‘What’s the price?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t much.’

Kira looked at him and understood why he had approached her. She stood looking silently into his eyes. When she spoke, her voice had lost its tremulous reverence; it was calm and firm. She said: ‘It won’t be much.’

‘Where do we go?’

‘I passed a little garden around the corner. Let’s go there first -for a while.’” (Pg. 61)

Sex for money, or for other reasons besides sexual pleasure, comes up several times in the novel. Later in the story, Kira offers herself to a random wealthy man for money to get Leo medical care. When she tells him how much she needs, he tells her other sex workers don’t make that much in an entire career. (Pg. 226) In the end, Leo becomes a gigolo. A major subplot is the relationship of Kira’s cousin Victor to Marisha, Kira’s communist neighbor. Marisha is in love with Victor because she was a lower-class person before the civil war, but remembers how her mother used to clean the house of an aristocrat with a good looking son that she fell in love with. Victor reminds her of that good looking aristocratic son. Victor pretends to be in love with Marisha so that he can marry her for status in the communist party. This is a sort of parallel to Kira pretending to love Andrei. In the case of Kira, her actions would generally be regarded as noble, or at least, excusable under the circumstances. In the case of Victor, his actions would generally be seen as ignoble.

Leo eventually realizes Kira is not a sex worker, but he is as fascinated by her as she is by him. They agree to meet again at the same location in a month. The month passes and they meet for the second time. Leo kisses the palm of her hand, and they agree to another meeting in a month. Leo then unexpectedly shows up at Kira’s school a few days or weeks later, and they have a more intimate encounter under a bridge, by a river. They agree to meet in a week, and when that rendezvous occurs, Leo tells Kira he is leaving the country by boat. Kira agrees to go with him, and they have sex for the first time on the boat. The boat is stopped by a military patrol led by Stepan Timoshenko, one of the good communists in the novel. Timoshenko lets Kira go, and also manages to get Leo released a few days later. Soon after that, Kira’s family finds out she’s been sleeping with a man out of wedlock and kicks her out of the house. (Although Kira intended to live with Leo, regardless.)

Around that time in the novel, background is given on Leo’s childhood and adolescence. We learn that his first sexual encounter was at sixteen with an older, married woman. Leo had numerous other sexual relations with women in his late teenage years. The end of the flashback to Leo’s backstory ends with what I thought was a rather curious description of him:

“The revolution found Admiral Kovalensky [Leo’s father] with black glasses over his unseeing eyes and St. George’s ribbon in his lapel; it found Leo Kovalensky with a slow, contemptuous smile, and a swift gait, and in his hand a lost whip he had been born to carry.”(Pg. 139)

In my previous blog entry on We The Living, I noted this “rulers and ruled” idea running through the novel, and this is another example of it. Rand does not seem to present this attitude of Leo in a negative light. She seems to present it as desirable or virtuous, which, again, seems incongruous in comparison to her later works. Also note that this aspect of Leo’s personality plays into Kira’s earlier interest in a fictional young overseer in a play who is whipping the serfs. (Pg. 47-48) Kira likes men who use a certain level of physical force on others, and Leo is the type who likes to use that physical force.

At this point I will note my own evaluation of Leo, which is that I do not care for him. He sounds like he was a womanizer before he met Kira. He never asks Kira to marry him, while Andrei asks her to marry him the first time they have sex. In the end, he becomes a gigolo and gives up Kira for a life of being a male sex worker. The whole point of “We The Living” is that life is unbearable under Communism, but I don’t consider Leo’s way out of a corrupt system to be particularly noble. Andrei had the right idea when he put a bullet in his own brain.

If I knew a woman in real life who was in love with a guy like Leo, I’d have to ask the question: “Why?” What did he have going for him, other than his looks? He’s a womanizer, an alcoholic, and believes he has a right to order his social inferiors around. I have to think Leo would end up cheating on Kira under capitalism, as much as communism. Kira seemed to think she could “save” Leo, like he was her “project boyfriend”. Near the end, when it is clear that Leo is dead in spirit, if not in his actual physical body, Kira has the following thoughts:

“He had left home often and she had never asked him where he went. He had been drinking too often and too much, and she had not said whether she noticed it. When they had been alone together, they had sat silently, and the silence had spoken to her, louder than any words, of something which was an end. He had been spending the last of their money and she had not questioned him about the future. She had not questioned him about anything, for she had been afraid of the answer she knew: that her fight was lost.” (Pg 439)

Soon after that, during their breakup scene, Kira says the following:

“She turned and looked at him calmly, and answered: ‘Only this, Leo: it was I against a hundred and fifty million people. I lost.” (Pg. 443)

These scenes present strong evidence that Kira believed that her love could save Leo. The desire to fix men is a common attitude of women, especially young women. I also think it’s a mistake. With that said, a reader needs to keep in mind that both of these people are about eighteen years old, so there is possibly a “maturity factor” at play here, for both of them. Although, even at eighteen, I was not a hard-drinking, womanizer with a desire to dominate others, so is it just a matter of immaturity?

The other major sexual relationship in the novel is between Kira and Andrei. With one exception, I like everything about Andrei, on a personal level. He lives in spartan living quarters. (I’m a fan of minimalism and living on as little money as possible.) He’s studying to be an engineer. He tries to eliminate “sentiment” and just be his work. (That can be taken too far, but it’s better than the hordes of teenagers who sit around playing X-Box and smoking pot all day.) To me, this character is a sort of “proto-Hank Reardon”. Even though he has a somewhat “monkish” exterior, when Andrei falls for Kira, he falls hard. Unlike Leo, Andrei knows how much he loves Kira, and isn’t afraid to say it:

“‘Because, no matter what happens, I still have you. Because, no matter what human wreckage I see around me, I still have you. And -in you- I still know what a human being can be.’

‘Andrei,’ she whispered, ‘are you sure you know me?’

He whispered, his lips in her hand so that she heard the words as if she were gathering them, one by one, in the hollow of her palm: ‘Kira, the highest thing in a man is not his god. It’s that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence…’” (Pg. 335)

This scene happens in the last third of the novel, when Andrei is beginning to doubt what he has believed. The doubt comes from what he sees as the corruption of the other communists around him, like Pavel Syerov, but it also comes from his affair with Kira. For the first time in his life, he is in love with a woman, and it is someone that he knows opposes communism. He is honest enough to express a level of vulnerability and doubt that most people would lack the self-confidence to do. Like I said, there is a lot to like here, but he’s also a communist and a member of the secret police. (That’s a pretty big “but”.)

Ayn Rand did everything she could to make this character sympathetic, and she succeeded for me. At one point, Rand describes the following scene, soon after Andrei and Kira have sex for the first time:

“The street light beyond the window made a white square and a black cross on the wall above the bed. Against the white square, she could see his [Andrei’s] face on the pillow; he did not move. Her arm, stretched limply against his naked body, felt no movement but the beating of his heart.” (Pg 233)

For Rand, nothing is an accident. The symbol of a cross on the wall above the bed seems like a reference to the crucifixion story in the Bible. Andrei is almost “Christ-like”. When I say that, I mean in the sense of total devotion to someone or something, even at great cost, which is what I think the story in the Bible means to the modern mind. Near the end, after Andrei learns why Kira was really with him, and he has saved Leo from being shot as an illegal speculator, Leo says he isn’t happy that Andrei saved him. Andrei asks “Why?”, and Leo says the following to Andrei:

“Do you suppose Lazarus was grateful when Christ brought him back from the grave -if He did? No more than I am to you, I think.” (Pg. 421)

Again, an explicit reference to Andrei as Christ in the Bible.

Andrei gives every penny he earns to Kira after they start their affair. (He believes she’s using it to support her family, but she’s actually using it for medical treatments for Leo. This is why Kira is pretending to be in love with Andrei.) Later in the novel, after Andrei learns the truth, he risks everything to save Leo out of love for Kira. This is reminiscent of Sydney Carton from “A Tale of Two Cities”, who goes to the guillotine during the French Revolution to save the husband of the woman he loves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Carton

Kira’s relationship with Andrei is interesting. She initially encounters him at her engineering school, where Andrei is a student, and also an officer of the branch of the GPU at the university. She is at a meeting of students to elect student council members. During the course of that, the “Internationale” is sung:

“For the first time in Petrograd, Kira heard the ‘Internationale.’ She tried not to listen to its words. The words spoke of the damned, the hungry, the slaves, of those who had been nothing and shall be all; in the magnificent goblet of the music, the words were not intoxicating as wine; they were not terrifying as blood; they were gray as dish water.

But the music was like the marching of thousands of feet measured and steady, like drums beaten by unvarying, unhurried hands. The music was like the feet of soldiers marching into the dawn that is to see their battle and their victory; as if the song rose from under the soldiers’ feet, with the dust of the road, as if the soldiers’ feet played it upon the earth.

The tune sang of a promise, calmly, with the calm of an immeasurable strength, and then, tense with a restrained, but uncontrollable ecstasy, the notes rose, trembling, repeating themselves, too rapt to be held still, like arms raised and waiving in the sweep of banners.

It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength.

Everyone had to rise when the ‘Internationale’ was played.

Kira stood smiling at the music. ‘This is the first beautiful thing I’ve noticed about the revolution.’ she said to her neighbor.

‘Be careful,’ the freckled girl whispered, glancing around nervously, ‘someone will hear you.’

‘When this is all over,’ said Kira. ‘when the traces of their republic are disinfected from history -what a glorious funeral march this will make!’

‘You little fool! What are you talking about?’

A young man’s hand grasped Kira’s wrist and wheeled her around.

She stared up into two gray eyes that looked like the eyes of a tamed tiger; but she was not quite sure whether it was tamed or not. There were four straight lines on his face: two eyebrows, a mouth, and a scar on his right temple.

For one short second, they looked at each other, silent, hostile, startled by each other’s eyes.

‘How much,’ asked Kira, ‘are you paid for snooping around?’

She tried to disengage her wrist. He held it: ‘Do you know the place for little girls like you?’

‘Yes -where men like you wouldn’t be let in through the back door.’

‘You must be new here. I’d advise you to be careful.’

‘Our stairs are slippery and there are four floors to climb, so be careful when you come to arrest me.’

He dropped her wrist. She looked at his silent mouth; it spoke of many past battles louder than the scar on his forehead; it also spoke of many more to come.

The ‘Internationale’ rang like soldiers’ feet beating the earth.

‘Are you exceedingly brave?’ he asked. ‘Or just stupid?’

‘I’ll let you find that out.’

He shrugged, turned and walked away. He was tall and young. He wore a cap and a leather jacket. He walked like a soldier, his steps deliberate and very confident.

Students sang the ‘Internationale,’ its ecstatic notes rising, trembling, repeating themselves.

‘Comrade,’ the freckled girl whispered, ‘what have you done?’” (Pg. 73-75)

Through the course of the novel, their friendship grows, then Andrei suddenly starts avoiding Kira, and she cannot figure out why. As she grows more desperate to obtain medical care for Leo, she eventually seeks out Andrei, with the intention of asking him for money for Leo. (Andrei is unaware of Kira’s involvement with Leo.) When she goes to his apartment, Andrei confesses his love for her, and tells her he had to stop seeing her because he knew he had the power to force her to have sex against her will. As a member of the secret police, Andrei knew he could go to Kira’s house with his men, take her away, and rape her with impunity.

This actually happened in the Soviet Union. Lavrentiy Beria, head of Stalin’s Secret Police, would pick up women against their will, drive them to his house, and rape them. Women who refused were arrested and imprisoned. Women would also agree to sex to free family members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria

Andrei also knew that Kira would despise him after that, which he couldn’t stand the thought of. To avoid the temptation, he decided to stop seeing her, and avoid her altogether. Andrei tells Kira he’d give her everything he has if he thought it would make Kira love him, but he knows she doesn’t because she hates everything he stands for. Kira realizes that if she pretends to be in love with Andrei she can get the money she needs to save Leo, so she lies and tells Andrei she is, in fact, in love with him, and they sleep together:

“’I can! I love you.’

She wondered how strange it was to feel a man’s lips that were not Leo’s.

She was saying: ‘Yes…for a long time…but I didn’t know that you, too…’ and she felt his hands and his mouth, and she wondered whether this was joy or torture to him and how strong his arms were. She hoped it would be quick.”(Pg. 233)

The exact nature of the relationship between Kira and Andrei eludes me in certain respects. She did feel affection and friendship for Andrei before she pretended to be in love with him. For instance, she worries about his welfare when he tells her he just got back from putting down a peasant rebellion in the countryside. Andrei says three Communists were killed by peasants, and Kira says:

“‘Andrei! I hope you got them!’

He could not restrain a smile: ‘Why, Kira! Are you saying that about men who fight Communism?’

‘But… but they could have done it to you.’” (Pg. 165)

It makes me wonder about how much she enjoyed sex with Andrei? Did she have orgasms with Andrei? There are scenes that seem to indicate she does not:

“His [Andrei’s] hands closed slowly, softly over her shoulders, so softly that she could not feel his hands, only their strength, their will holding her, bending her backward; but his lips on hers were brutal, uncontrollable. His eyes were closed; hers were open, looking indifferently up at the ceiling.” (Pg. 244)

But, later, when Kira is going to see Andrei, there is the implication that she likes the sex with him:

“…Her body felt pure and hallowed: her feet were slowing down to retard her progress toward that which seemed a sacrilege because she did desire it and did not wish to desire it tonight.” (Pg. 381)

What I got from this passage was that Kira did have orgasms from sex with Andrei, and even looked forward to it on occasion, but she felt guilty about it.

Also mixed in with Kira’s feelings towards Andrei appears to be a desire to punish him, or make him a sort of “stand-in” for the whole communist system that Kira, and those she loves, have suffered under. For instance, the first time Kira takes money from Andrei she seems to feel a bit of guilt:

“She wondered dimly how simple and easy it was to lie.

To Andrei, she had mentioned her starving family. She did not have to ask: he gave her his whole monthly salary and told her to leave him only what she could spare. She had expected it, but it was not an easy moment when she saw the bills in her hand…” (Pg. 235)

But, that moment of guilt quickly passes, as this passage goes on to say:

“…;then, she remembered the comrade commissar and why one aristocrat could die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics -and she kept most of the money, with a hard, bright smile.” (Pg. 235)

(The comrade commissar was an official in an earlier scene who refused to give Leo medical treatment, and mentioned something about how so many had died, so what was one aristocrat to the Soviet Union.)

In this scene, its like Kira felt momentary remorse at taking Andrei’s money under false pretenses, then she remembers that he has helped to bring about that system under which Leo and others would die, and she takes almost all of his money, as a sort of passive-aggressive punishment against him, as representative of the whole system.

It seems that Kira enjoys making Andrei suffer a little, as punishment, but it is a sort of cruelty, with occasional bursts of compassion. In one scene, Andrei is complaining about not being able to see Kira much. She has also told him never to come to her parent’s house, where he thinks that she lives, ostensibly because her family is uncomfortable with communists, but really so that he will not discover Leo:

“But he was smiling again: ‘Why don’t you want me to think of you? Remember last time you were here, you told me about that book you read with a hero called Andrei and you said you thought of me? I’ve been repeating it to myself ever since, and I bought the book. I know it isn’t much, Kira, but…well…you don’t say them often, things like that.’

She leaned back, her hands crossed behind her head, mocking and irresistible: ‘Oh, I think of you so seldom I’ve forgotten your last name. Hope I read it in a book. Why, I’ve even forgotten that scar, right there, over your eye.’ Her finger was following the line of the scar, sliding down his forehead, erasing his frown; she was laughing, ignoring the plea she had understood.”

Later in the same scene, Kira explains that she has come to see Andrei early because she cannot see him that night, as initially promised. Andrei is unhappy about it, thinking he will not get to have sex with her:

“ He was whispering, his lips on her breast: ‘Oh, Kira, Kira, I wanted you -here- tonight…’

She leaned back, her face dark, challenging, pitiless, her voice low: ‘I’m here -now.’

‘But…’

‘Why not?’

‘If you don’t…’

‘I do. That’s why I came.’

And as he tried to rise, her arms pulled him down imperiously. She whispered: ‘Don’t bother to undress. I haven’t the time.’” (Pg. 249)

A woman punishing a man with this sort of “passive aggressive behavior”, and/or cruel words that she knows will hurt him is fairly common in life. Women don’t typically use violence to get vengeance. They use manipulation combined with male sexual desire to give a man his comeuppance (real or perceived). For most men, there’s nothing more painful than a woman you’re in love with not responding to your love, or spurning your signs of affection with cruel words or actions. This behavior also shows up in a later novel of Ayn Rand’s very prominently. In “The Fountainhead”, the character of Dominique Francon pretty much makes a career out of using her beauty and the power of her sexuality to make men miserable, namely Peter Keeting and Gail Wynand, although they’ve both done things that merit disapproval. https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/fountainhead/character/dominique-francon/

Andrei and Kira’s sexual relationship is one of the few times I can think of that Rand shows sex from a male perspective. There are only two times that I can think of where she “gets in inside the head” of a male character, concerning sex. One time is Reardon in “Atlas Shrugged”. Reardon thinks about how he wanted to have sex with Dagny Taggart the first time he saw her on the train tracks. I think there were also some other times he thinks about sex with Dagny, but I cannot find the relevant passages now. (Something about how he felt when he would leave her body after an orgasm.) Andrei’s perspective on sex with Kira is also presented:

“He could forgive her the words, for he had forgotten them, when he saw her exhausted, breathing jerkily, her eyes closed, her head limp in the curve of his arm. He was grateful to her for the pleasure he had given her.” (Pg. 249)

In response to a papal declaration, “Humanae Vitae”, Rand delivered a speech called “Of Living Death”. The Pope’s encyclical concerned sex and procreation, and how good Catholics should view sex. During the course of the written version of her speech, Rand responded to a portion of the Pope’s encyclical that if a man viewed a woman as a mere instrument of his selfish enjoyment, instead of as a means for reproduction, then he would no longer love and respect her. In response to this, Rand said:

“I cannot conceive of a rational woman who does not want to be precisely an instrument of her husband’s selfish enjoyment. I cannot conceive of what would have to be the mental state of a woman who could desire or accept the position of having a husband who does not derive any selfish enjoyment from sleeping with her. I cannot conceive of anyone, male or female, capable of believing that sexual enjoyment would destroy a husband’s love and respect for his wife -but regarding her as a brood mare and himself as a stud, would cause him to love and respect her.” (“Of Living Death”, Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason: Essays In Objectivist Thought)

I was curious about how Ayn Rand viewed the male perspective on this. As a woman, it was going to be easier for Rand to present a female perspective, which is why I assume she usually did present sex from the female character’s viewpoint. Did she think that a rational man would want to be an instrument of his wife’s selfish enjoyment? Based on what is presented here about Andrei’s perspective on sex with Kira, specifically, his feeling grateful that he had given Kira pleasure, I think this must be what she thought was the rational male perspective. (This would make sense given her views on the “trader principle” of justice.)

The relationship between Kira and Leo and Kira and Andrei proved to be both entertaining, and enlightening. I recommend that you read the novel yourself, if you haven’t already.

Whoopi Goldberg On Systematic Nazi Mass-Murder

I was rather surprised to see this controversy, since I think Whoopi Goldberg is correct:

“‘Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people,’ she said on The View on Monday.” https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/feb/02/whoopi-goldberg-suspended-from-the-view-after-saying-holocaust-isnt-about-race

Jews living in Germany at the time of World War II can’t really be called another race, in my opinion.

Mein Kampf asserts that they are another race. If you read it, you’ll see that Hitler saw the perceived racial difference as the reason for regarding Jews as a danger to the German people. But, I don’t see any evidence that would justify treating Jews as a different race.

I think the concept of “race” is most likely a real concept, that is based in reality. I’m not an expert, but it is my understanding that forensic anthropologists can determine a skeleton’s likely ancestry with high probability by examining their skull. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26270337/ (Although there is debate, about the accuracy of this type of determination. So my certainty on this issue is not 100%. https://www.science.org/content/article/forensic-anthropologists-can-try-identify-person-s-race-skull-should-they )

I think the outrage here derives from the modern notion that race is “socially constructed” or that it isn’t a real thing. In this view, the white majority is simply imposing something on black people that doesn’t exist for purposes of exploiting them.

I think a lot of that debate turns around how “race” is defined. I’d say I define it as something like: “Where most of your ancestors originate from in the last 10,000 years.” Biological populations can have a lot of variations, but biologists seem to have no problem identifying a plethora of sub-species within other animal groups besides human beings. For instance, there are 9 sub-species of Tiger, and they all look the same to me, as a non-biologist. https://www.livescience.com/29822-tiger-subspecies-images.html So, why is it controversial to recognize that people whose ancestors are mostly from Africa, Asia, or Europe are different sub-species? (Especially when its fairly easy for me to tell the difference just by looking at them, but I see no difference with Tiger sub-species.)

I will also acknowledge that I am not 100% certain on this issue. Much of what we consider “race” may, in fact, have no basis in biological reality. It’s largely a scientific issue to be decided by scientists, but I suspect the issue is not being honestly addressed due to the fear by scientists that they will loose funding or jobs if they come up with answers the political left doesn’t like.

The danger of Mein Kampf doesn’t lie primarily in Jew hatred, but in the fact that it advocates collectivism:

“It took centuries and a brain-stopping chain of falsehoods to bring a whole people to the state of Hitler-worship. Modern German culture, including its Nazi climax, is the result of a complex development in the history of philosophy…

If we view the West’s philosophic development in terms of essentials, three fateful turning points stand out, three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century.

The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)” ( The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, Peikoff, Leonard)

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/fascism-nazism.html

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?kn=the%20ominous%20parallels%20by%20leonard%20peikoff&sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-TopNavISS-_-Results&ds=20

So, at worst, Whoopi Goldberg is guilty of saying something that is likely true (Jews are a not a separate race), which is based in a premise (race is something biologically real), that deserves more study. It certainly doesn’t justify suspension from her TV show. (But, these are the times we live in.)

The Ethical Status of Kyle Rittenhouse

“She looked out at the country. She had been aware for some time of the human figures that flashed with an odd regularity at the side of the track. But they went by so fast that she could not grasp their meaning until, like the squares of a movie film, brief flashes blended into a whole and she understood it. She had had the track guarded since its completion, but she had not hired the human chain she saw strung out along the right-of-way. A solitary figure stood at every mile post. Some were young schoolboys, others were so old that the silhouettes of their bodies looked bent against the sky. All of them were armed, with anything they had found, from costly rifles to ancient muskets. All of them wore railroad caps. They were the sons of Taggart employees, and old railroad men who had retired after a full lifetime of Taggart service. They had come, unsummoned, to guard this train. As the engine went past him, every man in his turn stood erect, at attention, and raised his gun in a military salute.” (Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged: (Centennial Edition) (p. 242). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition, emphasis added. )

I was rather surprised with the negative reaction some people closely associated with the Ayn Rand Institute had for Kyle Rittenhouse, back when the story of his self-defense shooting first came out last year. I watched a great deal of the videos of the shooting and events leading up to it, and was fairly confident he had acted in self-defense. Most of the criticism coming out of Objectivist circles seemed to center around the fact that Rittenhouse went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and, in some sense, “put himself” into danger, such that he had to shoot three people.

In my experience, the people associated with the Ayn Rand Institute have an aversion to guns, in general. My perception is they will “grudgingly” acknowledge some right to keep and bear arms, but many of them clearly have a distaste for guns. This may have to do with their cultural backgrounds. Most ARI people appear to be from the north-eastern United States, California, or foreign countries. They aren’t used to armed civilians. I don’t particularly hold this against them, but I think it plays into their perception of self-defensive shootings, like the case of Kyle Rittenhouse.

Is it wrong to go someplace where there is lawlessness and defend property? Certainly Ayn Rand must have thought there is some such right in certain circumstances, or she wouldn’t have had the teenage sons of Taggart Transcontinental Railroad employees guarding the tracks of the John Galt Line. (This situation is, admittedly, a little different from that of Kyle Rittenhouse, since he appears to have had little association with the property he was defending. More on that, later.)

Is Kyle Rittenhouse a vigilante? Perhaps. Is that wrong?

What is a “vigilante”? An online source says it is:

“A member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their community without legal authority, typically because the legal agencies are thought to be inadequate.” (https://www.bing.com/search?form=MOZLBR&pc=MOZI&q=define+vigilante)

Is Vigilantism always unacceptable? I am not convinced of that. When the legal system breaks down in an emergency, extraordinary actions can be taken to defend life and property. In essence, a riot is an emergency return to a state in which there is no government. A state of anarchy is a form of tyranny:

“Tyranny is any political system (whether absolute monarchy or fascism or communism) that does not recognize individual rights (which necessarily include property rights). The overthrow of a political system by force is justified only when it is directed against tyranny: it is an act of self-defense against those who rule by force. For example, the American Revolution. The resort to force, not in defense, but in violation, of individual rights, can have no moral justification; it is not a revolution, but gang warfare.” (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/revolution_vs_putsch.html )

During a riot, what a rational person faces is the abrogation of law, which means the abrogation of the state’s protection of individual rights. In such circumstances, one faces not tyranny by the state, but tyranny by a gang of criminals. In such an emergency, one can take extraordinary measures to defend one’s life and property. That said, I think that once order is restored, one must also be prepared to face trial for any excessive force used under the circumstances. (But, what is “excessive” under those circumstances is probably also different.)

I do not think Kyle Rittenhouse could be described as a “vigilante”, because Kenosha was in a state of anarchic tyranny. But, if one insists on calling him a “vigilante”, then, during an emergency, vigilantism, within certain limits, is probably justified.

Was there no police support for what Kyle Rittenhouse was doing?

There does appear to have been actual police support for Kyle Rittenhouse and the others in his group, at least amongst the “rank and file” cops. Those cops made no effort to remove Rittenhouse or the group he was with, and gave them water and verbal support:

“‘About 90 minutes into the livestream at 11:30 p.m. — 15 minutes before the fatal shooting — the following exchange with police occurs as Rittenhouse and another armed man walk outside a business.

Police officer (over a loudspeaker): ‘You need water? Seriously. (unintelligible) You need water?’

Rittenhouse, raising his arm and walking toward the police vehicle: ‘We need water.’

Police officer: ‘We’ll throw you one.’

Rittenhouse then walks out into the street amid several police vehicles, holding his hand in the air for a water bottle. An officer surfaces from a hatch at the top of the police vehicle and tosses a water bottle to a person located just out of the camera’s view, where Rittenhouse would likely be standing based on the preceding footage.

Police officer: ‘We got a couple. We’ve got to save a couple, but we’ll give you a couple. We appreciate you guys, we really do.‘”
(https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/29/fact-check-video-police-thanked-kyle-rittenhouse-gave-him-water/5661804002/)

How would I describe Kyle Rittenhouse?

“‘Don’t be shocked, Miss Taggart,’ said Danneskjöld. ‘And don’t object. I’m used to objections. I’m a sort of freak here, anyway. None of them approve of my particular method of fighting our battle. John doesn’t, Dr. Akston doesn’t. They think that my life is too valuable for it. But, you see, my father was a bishop— and of all his teachings there was only one sentence that I accepted: ‘All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’….Even John grants me that in our age I had the moral right to choose the course I’ve chosen. I am doing just what he is doing— only in my own way.…'” (Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged: (Centennial Edition) (p. 757). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.)

I wouldn’t recommend that anyone do what Kyle Rittenhouse did. Furthermore, I discourage it. I would not go into the middle of a riot to defend the property of strangers, and I wouldn’t recommend that anyone else do it. That said, John Galt didn’t think Ragnar Danneskjold should attack the relief ships for the “people’s states” of Europe, but he didn’t condemn Ragnar for it. He said Ragnar had a right to do what he was doing, but he didn’t think it was, in some sense, “prudent”. That is my position on Kyle Rittenhouse going to a riot to defend the property of others. He had the right, but it was, in a word, “quixotic“:

“Exceedingly idealistic; unrealistic and impractical.”
https://www.bing.com/search?form=MOZLBR&pc=MOZI&q=quixotic

My perspective as a forty-seven-year-old is different from that of a seventeen-year-old, however. Young men can be so committed to doing good that they may act rashly or imprudently. I cannot say for certain I wouldn’t have done the same when I was a teenager. As such, I will never speak ill of Kyle Rittenhouse.

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