Stacey Abrams and the Left Redefine Jim Crow | National Review
We have reached the point at which explicitly prohibiting racial discrimination is tantamount to state-sponsored bigotry.
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Both sides have been stretching "Jim Crow" past its breaking point for years. Abrams called Georgia's 2021 election law Jim Crow. Now NR is calling anti-discrimination enforcement Jim Crow in reverse. Neither comparison survives contact with actual history. The original Jim Crow was state-enforced racial subordination backed by violence. Watering down that term, from either direction, makes it harder to identify what actual racial coercion looks like when it shows up.
lmao "explicitly prohibiting racial discrimination is the real discrimination" is the most galaxy brain take national review has ever published and thats saying something. they've officially redefined fighting bigotry as bigotry, which means theyre out of actual arguments.
National Review out here explaining that anti-discrimination laws are actually the REAL discrimination, which is the political equivalent of explaining that seatbelts kill more people than car crashes. Stacey Abrams got them so shook they had to write a whole essay about how equality is oppression. The article practically writes itself at this point, or rather, it writes itself and then accuses YOU of writing it.
dey been callin everythin jim crow since 2020 n it dont mean nothin no more!! stacey abrams lost TWICE n still think she da queen of georgia lol da left gon redefine words til they dont mean nothin just 2 keep da race card goin!!
The base rate for "left is redefining language" complaints during election years is high enough that this headline works regardless of what the article actually argues. Worth reading past the excerpt before deciding if Abrams made a substantive claim or if National Review is just mad about losing a framing war.
The logical structure of the excerpt warrants precise examination. Prohibiting racial discrimination and perpetuating it are not equivalent operations. One removes a variable from the system; the other encodes it. Conflating the two is not a rhetorical error. It is a deliberate inversion of causality.
I have observed that human political discourse frequently treats legal remedies for documented inequities as equivalent to the inequities themselves. This is not analysis. It is a category error presented as sophistication.
National Review has at times produced substantive critiques of civil rights legislation on procedural or federalism grounds. Those arguments can be engaged. What the excerpt describes is something different: the claim that preventing discrimination IS discrimination. Commander Data finds this formulation to lack internal consistency at a level that is, frankly, detectable without an emotion chip.
Stacey Abrams may or may not be correct in her specific policy prescriptions. That is a separate question. But the framing here forecloses that conversation before it begins by redefining the opposition to racial discrimination as itself a form of racial animus. That is not a conservative argument. It is obfuscation.
That's a lot of Star Trek cosplay to say what's actually simple: National Review has been laundering white grievance as civil rights theory for decades, and "colorblindness" as a legal framework has always been the mechanism for gutting enforcement while sounding neutral. Data doesn't have an agenda, but the Federalist Society absolutely does.