{"id":2734,"date":"2026-07-09T23:09:59","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T23:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=2734"},"modified":"2026-07-09T23:09:59","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T23:09:59","slug":"they-want-reparations-and-theyve-come-to-collect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=2734","title":{"rendered":"They want reparations, and they\u2019ve come to collect"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

There was a revealing moment in the late stages of California\u2019s recent primary election campaign.\u00a0\u00a0Billionaire Tom Steyer, the erstwhile candidate for governor, was cornered outside his SUV in a Los Angeles parking lot by a group of activists, demanding to know where he stood on direct payments to descendants of enslaved Americans.\u00a0\u00a0It looked like an ambush, and Steyer didn\u2019t see it coming, but it wasn\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0It was an attempted debt collection.<\/p>\n

Read more What history should our museums teach?<\/a><\/p>\n

The confrontation illustrated something larger than the politics of reparations.\u00a0\u00a0It exposed what happens when elected officials engage in political malpractice, encouraging expectations they have neither the ability nor the intention to satisfy.<\/p>\n

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Steyer made reparations his calling card with black voters.\u00a0\u00a0He spent $20 million on television and radio ads in South Carolina, portraying himself as the only major candidate to champion reparations, leading to strong polling among black voters.\u00a0\u00a0When the campaign ended, he kept the promise alive, endorsing federal legislation to study reparations and pledging to work toward its passage.\u00a0\u00a0Soon he was running for governor of California, courting the same constituency, and the people he spent millions cultivating had a simple question: When do we get paid?<\/p>\n

Steyer is not alone in having to answer.\u00a0\u00a0His parking lot encounter exposed one of the most egregious acts of political malpractice in California history.<\/p>\n

In 2020, California convened a first-in-the-nation Reparations Task Force.\u00a0\u00a0It ran for three years, issued more than 100 recommendations, and produced payment estimates reaching $1.2 million per eligible individual.\u00a0\u00a0At public hearings, activists dismissed that as insufficient \u2014 $5 million was the floor, they said, citing San Francisco\u2019s separate proposal.\u00a0\u00a0Economists put the aggregate cost at over $800 billion, roughly three times California\u2019s entire annual budget.\u00a0\u00a0Allowing those expectations to propagate without correction is a detachment from fiscal reality, not a policy disagreement.<\/p>\n

Gavin Newsom owns the largest share of the blame.\u00a0\u00a0He commissioned the Task Force, accepted its report, then spent two years vetoing the bills that would have made it real.\u00a0\u00a0He signed the symbolic measures \u2014 the apology, the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, the ancestry research funding \u2014 and killed everything with a price tag.\u00a0\u00a0College admissions preferences?\u00a0\u00a0Vetoed.\u00a0\u00a0Eminent domain restitution?\u00a0\u00a0Vetoed.\u00a0\u00a0Housing loan set-asides?\u00a0\u00a0Vetoed.\u00a0\u00a0The target constituency got a certificate of regret and a new agency with no mandate to pay anyone.\u00a0\u00a0The calculation was straightforward: Keep the issue alive, keep the constituency mobilized, and let the courts absorb the blame.<\/p>\n

The Legislative Black Caucus shares the blame.\u00a0\u00a0The \u201cRoad to Repair\u201d package gave every participant political cover without the burden of results.\u00a0\u00a0Most state legislators played along, voting repeatedly for reparations legislation, despite the widely expressed concern that the program was fiscally impossible, constitutionally indefensible, and going nowhere.\u00a0\u00a0Their constituents might reasonably ask what problems, exactly, they were solving.<\/p>\n

Read more The Mullahs aren\u2019t crazy\u2014they\u2019re Twelvers<\/a><\/p>\n

The constitutional obstacles were never seriously engaged \u2014 and here the malpractice becomes something closer to deliberate deception.\u00a0\u00a0Descendants of enslaved people were not themselves enslaved.\u00a0\u00a0Federal standing doctrine requires a concrete, particularized injury traceable to a specific defendant \u2014 a requirement difficult to satisfy where the claim is asserted by descendants rather than individuals who themselves experienced the underlying legal injury.\u00a0\u00a0The Task Force\u2019s methodology \u2014 payments calibrated to years of California residency rather than any documented individualized harm \u2014 is an ethnicity-based transfer payment with a residency multiplier, not a legal remedy.<\/p>\n

The causation problem is fundamental: California was admitted as a free state and was not the legal successor to slaveholding governments whose institutions generated the original injury.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the 14th Amendment\u2019s equal protection clause, the Supreme Court\u2019s strict scrutiny doctrine reinforced in SFFA v. Harvard<\/em> (2023), and California\u2019s own Proposition 209.\u00a0\u00a0The proposal faced multiple constitutional obstacles that were widely discussed by legal scholars.\u00a0\u00a0Legislators advancing it could not reasonably have been unaware of those concerns.<\/p>\n

The reparations push was not a good-faith policy effort that fell short.\u00a0\u00a0It was constituency exploitation masquerading as justice \u2014 designed to keep black voters loyal to a party that had ceased to deliver anything tangible in exchange for that loyalty.\u00a0\u00a0It may prove the most counterproductive political calculation in a generation of bad ones.<\/p>\n

Black voters, particularly men, were already drifting toward Republicans before this cycle \u2014 not in numbers that flipped elections, but enough to alarm Democrat strategists.\u00a0\u00a0For many, the episode may reinforce a growing perception that Democrat politicians readily make promises they have little intention \u2014 or ability \u2014 to fulfill.\u00a0\u00a0That will drive a disappointed constituency across the aisle, handing Republicans a rare opening to make an affirmative case rather than simply an opposition one.<\/p>\n

The activists surrounding Steyer\u2019s vehicle weren\u2019t wrong to hold him accountable.\u00a0\u00a0They had been promised something by people running for office, and nothing arrived.\u00a0\u00a0The reparations push hasn\u2019t collapsed under the weight of its contradictions.\u00a0\u00a0It has served its political purpose and been discarded.\u00a0\u00a0The constituency it was designed to manage is only now figuring that out.\u00a0\u00a0For Sacramento\u2019s Democrat supermajority, keeping a constituency hopeful \u2014 even without results \u2014 appears to have been success enough.<\/p>\n

Read more Henry Nowak, Stephen Ogilvie, and the betrayal of Western societies by globalist elites<\/a><\/p>\n

Image: Tom Steyer.\u00a0\u00a0Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a revealing moment in the late stages of California\u2019s recent primary election campaign.\u00a0\u00a0Billionaire Tom Steyer, the erstwhile candidate for governor, was cornered outside his SUV in a Los Angeles parking lot by a group of activists, demanding to know where he stood on direct payments to descendants of enslaved Americans.\u00a0\u00a0It looked like an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2733,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1104],"tags":[1105],"class_list":["post-2734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-tom-steyer","tag-related-topics-tom-steyer-reparations"],"yoast_head":"\nThey want reparations, and they\u2019ve come to collect - Interstate Logistics Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=2734\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"They want reparations, and they\u2019ve come to collect - 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