THE GREAT AMERICAN MELTING POT:   For reasons that make sense once you think about them, the melting pot tended to work best in the Mountain West and the South where there were fewer immigrants.

BILL McGURN IN THE WSJ:  “California’s Never-Ending Race Preferences.”  (Why does this column feel like it’s my life story from circa 1995 (when I started working on Prop 209) to today?)

GOLDEN STATE FOLLIES:  “Inside San Francisco’s Racialist Slush Fund.“

YOU CAN HAVE CONFIDENCE IN ME:  I am starting a new (part-time) job in a couple of weeks.   My new employer did a background check on me (which may have been required by some state law).  I can now state authoritatively that I am not a sex offender.

That’s a relief.

ARE YOU IN SACRAMENTO OR ITS ENVIRONS?:  Please come to this ACA7 event (sponsored by America’s Future) if you are!  ACA7 (the latest effort to gut Prop 209) just barely made it through the Assembly.  I feel confident that we will stop it in the Senate if we can just force the members of the California Senate to focus for 5 minutes on how stupid this bill is.  Events like this one are intended to attract Senate staffers (and sometimes senators themselves), but we need as many people in attendance as we can get.  If you can make it, you can RSVP here.

Yes, I will be there.  It’s going to be fun.

KENIN SPIVAK:  “California Dreamin’ Isn’t What It Used To Be.”  Gosh, you can say that again.  Spivak writes about ACA7, which is what’s been taking up my time lately.

RED STATE/BLUE STATE:  While California legislators continue to try to overturn Prop 209 with their ACA7 bill, Iowa legislators are moving in the opposite direction.  The lower house there recently passed a bill that would repeal various affirmative action policies, some of which were adopted in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

JOHN FUND IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW:  Passing ACA7–the latest attempt to overturn California’s Proposition 209–would probably not be a smart move on the part of the Calif0rnia Senate. (More background on ACA7, which has now passed the Assembly on a party-line vote here.)

PETER WOOD REVIEWS SCOTT GERBER’S NOVEL:  “A Cancelled Professor Wrote a Thriller.”

BUT I’M HUNGRY:  “The Progressive War on Cheap Eats.”

THEY’RE BAAAACK!! AND NOW THEY WANT TO DISCRIMINATE BY RACE IN STUDENT FINANCIAL AID!!:  Legislators in the California Assembly are at it again—trying to gut Proposition 209, the history-making ballot initiative that amended the state constitution in 1996 to ban state-sponsored preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity.  And I literally mean “history-making.”  Paul Johnson’s History of the American People tells the story of America from the late 15th century to the end of the 20^th.  Somehow (bless him) he found a wee bit of room to discuss Prop 209. (As the co-chair of that 1996 campaign, I’m darn proud of that.)

This is the third time in six years that the Cal Legislature has moved to gut Prop 209’s ban on affirmative-action preferences.  In 2020, the Legislature put a referendum on the ballot to repeal Prop 209 entirely.  But it was THUMPINGLY defeated—over 57% of voters said NO—even though YES Campaign spent 14 times more than we did.  (I’m proud of having co-chaired that campaign too.)  In 2024, the Assembly approved a trickier version that would have empowered the governor to make an unlimited number of EXCEPTIONS to Prop 209.  But that version never made it past the Senate. Cooler heads prevailed there—largely because we descended on their offices, held rallies, and buried them in letters, emails, and tweets.

But they just can’t stop.  The newest effort would exempt public education from Prop 209’s coverage.  Given the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in the Harvard case, this bill does not try to exempt admissions in higher education.  But it exempts everything else.  The big-ticket items would be (1) discrimination in admission to programs for gifted and talented students at the Kindergarten-12^th grade level; and (2) discrimination in financial aid in higher education.

For years, universities all over the country—at least those not subject to Proposition 209 or one of its clones—have been giving African American students much sweeter financial aid packages than equally needy Asian American or white students.  The evidence of this has only recently come to light in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (2003).

Typically, the discrimination takes the form of giving outright GRANTS to African American students, while white or Asian American students get saddled with LOANS.  I have a hard time imagining that voters would approve of this.  But the Assembly bill has nevertheless made it through committee on a strict party-line vote.  It is expected to come to the Assembly floor soon.  And right now there’s not much standing in its way.

If this goes on the ballot, I think we’ll defeat it.  But it will cost millions.  If by some miracle, it passes, we should be able to defeat in court any policies adopted as a result.  But that, too, will cost millions and will take years of work by public interest attorneys.

I could use a little grassroots help on this.  I don’t need money.  Opposing legislation of this type is cheap; it’s when it goes on the ballot or ends up in litigation that it gets expensive.   I need emails and tweets directed at senators.  We only need to get four Democratic senators to see that this is a stupid waste of their time and money.  I’ll post how you can help (on the cheap!) soon.

PURR:  I sent my book manuscript–Why We Walk on Eggshells:  How Our Civil Rights Law Helped Bring About the Woke Era–And the Trump Era, Too–to the publisher on Friday.  I’m finished … except for the part about the editing process, which will certainly take up some time.  I hope to be able to post more on Instapundit.  My first thought was that I would be able to spend the day cleaning out my closets and then maybe get a manicure.  Dammit, I’m a girl, and girls ought to be allowed to do girl things now and then.  Alas, the California Legislature is again trying to gut Proposition 209, so that is likely to be my full-time job for a while.  With luck, we’ll be able to kill the bill (as we did in 2023-24 with help from Instapundit readers).  I’ll be posting about that soon.

The closets will have to wait … maybe until 2027.  But I am going to have a Dr. Pepper float to celebrate the book manuscript.

OUR CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL IS CRAZY:  “California Attorney General Sues Rady Children’s Hospital for Curtailing Gender-Affirming Care.”

Meanwhile a jury just awarded $2 million to detransitioner in win against gender surgeons. 

SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE:  “[San Diego] County Flags to be Lowered in Recognition of ICE-Related Deaths in Minneapolis.” (Paywalled, but the headline says it all.)

KENIN SPIVAK:  “The Campaign Against ICE Is All About Open Borders.”

GEORGE LEEF:  “University Retaliates Against Professor for Speaking His Mind.”  But the courts have intervened.

WOW!  THAT’S MORE THAN I THOUGHT:  “More than 60 Quit Heritage Over Roberts’ Failure to Condemn Antisemitism.”  I’ve had my doubts about Heritage’s direction for a while–too much unthinking activism, not enough careful thought.  In the last couple of months things have gotten much worse.

REST IN PEACE GRANDPA VICHA:  In 2021, Antoine Watson, crossed the street to shove 84-year-old  Vicha Ratanapakdee to the pavement, resulting in Ratanapakdee’s death.  Watson then went back to his car to fetch his phone and took pictures of what he had done.   There was no apparent reason for Watson’s action.  He didn’t know Ratanapakdee.  It was pure free-floating malice.  Watson is a monster.

His murder trial just ended in San Francisco.  The jury found him NOT guilty of murder in either the first or second degree, but guilty of involuntary manslaughter and guilty of using force likely to produce great bodily harm.  Not surprisingly, there is disappointment in the Asian community, and I’m not so thrilled about it either.

Watson’s crime was brought to the attention of the Commission on Civil Rights when the Commission was working up its report on “Anti-Asian Racism.”  Then as now, I wasn’t  big on the concept of “hate crimes.”  I don’t much care if an animal like Watson was motivated by his victim’s race or just by the desire to inflict harm on some random person (and the latter seems to have been the case).  First and foremost the duty of government is to protect people from violence.  In the early 2020s, it was failing spectacularly in that duty.  And things still aren’t that great.

What bothered me most about the Commission’s report is how it seemed to be interested only in scaring Asian Americans into believing that large numbers of their fellow Americans wanted to kill them because of their race.  It didn’t have much to say about how to stop those crimes or about crime in general and how to stop it.  Instead, the report seemed to be cynically focused on funding useless “bias training” (and on the ever-popular task of getting votes for Democrats).  Anybody who thinks Antoine Watson would have benefited from a little “bias training” is an idiot.   My Commissioner Statement for that report is here.  

TRANSGENDER WARS:  Two cases were argued before the Supreme Court today on whether “transgender women” (i.e. biological men) are entitled to compete on women’s teams despite state laws in West Virginia and Idaho that prohibit the practice.  I didn’t listen to the arguments, but I am told that at least two of the Justices and possibly more were specifically interested in the argument that Joe Bingham, Pete Kirsanow, Dan Morenoff and I made in our amicus brief on behalf of the American Civil Rights Project.  That argument was itself derived from a Comment that Pete and I filed with the Department of Education a few years ago.

One way or another, the Supreme Court should uphold the state laws that forbid such foolishness.  I personally believe that our analysis of Title IX is the correct one (though there are other arguments that get to the same result).

FORTUNATELY, I’M NOT A MEMBER OF THE CALIFORNIA BAR:  “California Restricts Free Speech.”

WHOOSH!:  Elon Musk’s Grokipedia is growing really fast and will soon surpass Wikipedia in number of entries.  It even has a “Gail Heriot” entry.  As Descartes might have put it, “I am grokipediaed, therefore I am.”  (A friend of mine reminded me of the Steve Martin telephone book scene in the Jerk.)

THINGS SEEM TO BE COMING TO A HEAD:  “Iran Supreme Leader Signals Upcoming Crackdown.”

MY TALK AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY:  Here’s a video of the talk I gave last month at Cornell.  The talk is titled “Why We Walk on Eggshells.”  I am ALMOST finished with a book of the same name that will be published by Encounter Books.  With luck, I’ll be able to blog a bit more once it’s done.