To say that last week was a bad week for progressives and their culture war would be an understatement of mammoth proportions. Already melancholy with the debauchery and decadence of "pride" month coming to a close, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of constitutional rulings that gutted decades of entrenched leftwing jurisprudence.
A year after the court ruled that feticide is not a protected constitutional right, they put an end to LGBT coercion that violates the rights to conscience, struck down the government's flagrantly illegal attempt to transfer student loan debt from the borrower to third-party taxpayers, and crushed institutional racism enshrined in collegiate admission practices.
While the rulings touched off widespread panic on the Left, it was the repudiation of so-called affirmative action that prompted some of the most eye-popping progressive reactions. Here were the five worst in ascending order.
5. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren:
Imagine O.J. Simpson bemoaning the failures of the American legal system. Or Bill Clinton calling out Donald Trump's moral character flaws. Or the ladies from The View discussing the prominence of uninformed voices in our political discourse. That's the same lack of self-awareness that is being exhibited when Senator Warren comments on racial preferences at Harvard or North Carolina.
Elizabeth Warren notoriously identified her race as "American Indian" on forms she submitted to the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, the Association of American Law Schools, and had it listed that way on her Texas bar registration card. She is not "American Indian," but lied about her race in order to use affirmative action policies to gain an unfair advantage in the hiring process.
What she's saying is bad, but that she's saying anything is worse. If there's one person in the country who should sit this one out, it's Liz Warren.
4. The New York Times editors:
I could be wrong, but if memory serves me, it was George W. Bush that coined the phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations." It's a great (and sad) description of how so many on the Left treat ethnic and racial minorities in our country, but I've known more than a few people who don't fully understand what it means.
I always attempt to explain that it means you have low levels of bigotry residing in your heart if you think one group of people are not capable of achieving what another group of people are capable of achieving. It would have been much quicker for me to say, "Oh, just think ‘New York Times.'"
Here they are, in black and white, indirectly admitting that they believe blacks and latinos are inferior to whites and Asians and can't compete. Yikes.
3. Erica Marsh
NOTE: I reserve the right to switch this one out with a current honorable mention if, as reports now suggest, the account is a fake bot account.
An even bigger yikes goes to "proud Democrat and Biden field organizer" Erica Marsh, who melted down the internet with this galling response. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt. Everybody says or types dumb stuff that comes across in a way that they didn't intend. But how is something like this even in your heart enough in the first place that it could come out through your keyboard?
Blacks can never succeed if they are judged solely on merit? That's white-sheets level on the racism scale. It led to one of the most astounding ratios I've ever seen on Twitter.
2. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
Justice Brown Jackson, who hasn't exactly distinguished herself as one of the court's most thoughtful justices, was originally selected to her position after President Biden announced she would not have to compete for it against 93% of the candidate pool. Why didn't she have to? Because she met the racial and gender criteria that was sought. That's not just affirmative action, that's typecasting; it's a form of quota.
Whether it's because she benefitted from it herself, Ketanji Brown Jackson favors locking, as her colleague Clarence Thomas explained, "blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste." Thomas calls her efforts, "an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood."
What Jackson seems to (somehow) miss, is that the admissions statutes and processes that the court was reviewing actively discriminated against Asian (a minority group) applicants by preventing them admission regardless of merit.
1. Justice Sonia Sotomayor
No matter how morally imprudent Brown-Jackson's dissent was, nothing could compare to the embarrassment of her colleague, the supposed "wise Latina," Sonia Sotomayor. Admittedly, when I first read her opinion, I couldn't help but recall left-wing legal expert Laurence Tribe's leaked memo that warned fellow liberals that Sotomayor was "not as smart as she seems."
Anyone who writes that they would prefer using feelings and emotions to determine the constitutionality of a law rather than using the Constitution to do so is simply not fit for a post at this level. Besides, precisely what does the esteemed justice want society to overcome? The Constitution? The system of checks and balances?
One might think that in a post-January 6th world, where the Left can't go a day without discussing what they say was a presidentially-fomented insurrection, that they might themselves frown upon a Supreme Court justice-fomented one. But as she – an officer of the government – engages in a performative tantrum encouraging citizens and institutions to skirt and disregard the majority decision of the court, I'm left wondering something.
Maybe Sonia Sotomayor herself ends up being the best argument there could ever be against race-based considerations in hiring.
