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Our ‘theater-kid occupied government’ routinely attains to new heights of absurdity, as shown in Ketanji Brown Jackson’s antiracist screed.
The travesty of last week’s Trump v. Barbara decision on birthplace citizenship is further highlighted by the fact that the five-vote majority consisted of nominally conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining with all three liberal justices.While Roberts authored the majority opinion, social-justice warrior Ketanji Brown Jackson could not restrain herself from penning her own 20-page concurrence to specifically target the erudite dissent of Justice Clarence Thomas. Jackson provides no serious intellectual response to the scholarly treatise Thomas produced, yet it is illuminating for other reasons. Recall this is the same woman who, her prestigious position on the court notwithstanding, in December 2024 performed onstage in a Broadway musical all about feminist and LGBT “empowerment.”
Our “theater-kid occupied government,” to borrow the hypothesis popularized online by John Doyle, routinely attains to new heights of absurdity, as shown in Jackson’s antiracist screed. Jackson’s concurrence is packed with language that reeks of her pervasive critical-theory framework, which sees all of history as a struggle between “oppressors” and “oppressed.”
Upon reading through it, one is shocked by the ubiquitous presence of CRT buzzwords and phrases such as “antisubordination reset,” “universalist approach,” “universalist vision of belonging and citizenship,” “racial reckoning,” “anticaste engine,” “equal dignity,” “shared humanity of all people,” “perfect equality of every human being,” “inequitable result,” and “universalist, antisubordination command.” These phrases could easily have been plucked seamlessly from the writing of Ibram Kendi or from the many amicus briefs filed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Ironically, when typing this article, Microsoft Word’s spell check did not even recognize “antisubordination” and “anticaste” as dictionary words. That didn’t seem to stop Justice Jackson.
In Jackson’s opinion, she views the 14th Amendment coming upon the heels of the Civil War as a “remaking of the soul of a Nation beset by rank, entrenched race-based prejudice and inequity.” Thus, to interpret the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment as only applying to citizens, or even only to those permanently domiciled here, is to revive the discriminatory, racist older America.
She deliberately takes issue with Justice Thomas’ argument that the citizenship clause was only meant to grant citizenship to freed slaves and was not intended to apply to foreigners on American soil who owe allegiance to a foreign government. As she puts it, “The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”
To interpret the citizenship clause as it was meant by its framers would be unacceptable. Who cares if illegal aliens from Latin America or Chinese birth tourists are subject to a foreign power? If America seeks to very reasonably exclude them from birthplace citizenship (consonant with the original meaning of the 14th Amendment), that is an exclusionary rejection of the radically inclusive vision Jackson would impose on the Constitution through her distorted reading. In her grand narrative of moral absolutes, echoing the 1619 Project, America’s story is a narrative of oppression, slavery, exploitation, and genocide; America’s only admirable features are its leftist crusades against oppression. America is only worthy to the extent it atones for its past sins by endless programs of antidiscrimination and reparations for the oppressed.
Furthermore, there is no evidence in her 20-page concurrence that Jackson sees or posits any limitation upon American citizenship. She sees the 14th Amendment as a rejection of any kind of discrimination whatsoever, giving us a “universalist, antisubordination command” based upon the “shared humanity of all people.” Anyone who happens to be born on American soil can be an American citizen, no matter how absurd the consequences. But why stop there? Isn’t it exclusionary to limit it to American soil? Why should the 8 billion people of the globe have to get to American soil to be born American citizens? Why can’t we just have global American citizenship to atone for America’s past sins of racism, colonialism, sexism, and so on? --->READ MORE HERE
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