In news of a shocking — except it isn’t — nature, California Governor Gavin Newsom has demurred on the notion of his state cutting million-dollar-plus reparation checks to its black residents. Newsom said in a statement on May ninth:

… dealing with the legacy of slavery “is about much more than cash payments.”

“The Reparations Task Force’s independent findings and recommendations are a milestone in our bipartisan effort to advance justice and promote healing. This has been an important process, and we should continue to work as a nation to reconcile our original sin of slavery and understand how that history has shaped our country.”

While the Democratic governor applauded the task force’s work, he declined to endorse any specific recommendations, though he pledged to continue to “advance systemic changes that ensure an inclusive and equitable future for all Californians.”

That is one of the more impressive word salads recently uttered. As best I can translate it, it comes out to, “We ain’t doin’ nuttin’ for you but vote for us anyway, mmmkay?”

The reparations lunacy has been covered here in detail. From me in December 2022:

How Newsom handles the matter will speak volumes, as his lust for higher office is no secret. The intense opposition to reparations not only among whites but non-black minorities who have suffered more significant discrimination in California, which was never a slave state (Japanese internment camps during World War Two, anyone?) yet have risen above to be free and full societal participants reaping capitalism’s (gasp!) rewards, will not go away because media simps wish it to be so. This matter is far from closed.

Mike Miller wrote in March 2023:

Just me, or does anyone else see an opportunity, if the Freedmen’s Bureau 2.0 becomes a reality, for fraud to abound?

Just three words should put this whole thing into proper perspective: Black Lives Matter.

As I reported last Wednesday, the BLM movement shook down corporate America for $83 billion, and even more “shockingly” [sarc], the whereabouts of that “moral blackmail” money has been hard to trace. Even a former BLM activist-turned-conservative called the so-called “reparations” plan nothing more than “selling oppression.”

Could it happen, in this case, with the so-called “reparation” funds, on a much greater scale? Of course, it could.

And in May 2023, Matt Philbin applied some master strokes of sarcasm to the topic.

If California pays reparations, it’s only a matter of time before the Federal Government does. And, although none of my four grandparents came to the U.S. until the 1920s (and never went further South than Coney Island), I welcome it.

That’s right. I want to pay my fair share, just as soon as Great Britain pays reparations for what it did to my ancestors in Ireland. Catholic Laws, Penal Laws, Corn Laws, famine, land dispossession, violent crackdowns – Cornwallis was far more brutal in Connacht than he ever was in Virginia. And while I don’t know exactly how my family forbearers were impacted by all that, I would welcome a grant from reparations scholars to take a research trip to the old country, there to scour parish records and land deeds and ask around at quaint village pubs and seaside golf links.

But I doubt the Brits are going to fork the pounds over until they get reparations from the Normans, and the Danes, and, heck, even the Romans. But Roman descendants in Italy really can’t afford to pay reparations unless the Gauls, the Visigoths, and the Vandals pay for sacking the Eternal City. Maybe the Eastern Roman Empire could … nope. The Turks would have to pay reparations — if they could get theirs from the Arabs …

VIP members here (and if you’re not one, get on board!) should check out Jeff Charles’ March 2023 dissection of the reparations fallacy.

It is amusing watching, once again, progressive politicians striking a pose as light-bearers to the oppressed, yet under so little as rudimentary scrutiny showing themselves to be nothing more than dead battery-powered flashlights of the false gods. They have known from the beginning reparations are shadowplay with zero chance of coming to fruition.

In society’s decline from the Greatest Generation to the Grievance Generation, the concept that someone or something out there is responsible for personal failings has never been more evident than demanding money for offenses committed against ancestors who returned to dust long before the present populace was born. You can neither rewrite nor stage a do-over for history. Racism is abhorrent and inexcusable. But so is sitting in mud you made yourself and complaining you’re getting dirty.