Thread by @bgmasters

A federal judge in Nevada just struck down the law that makes it a crime for deported illegal aliens to illegally reenter the country.

This is an obvious law that any self-respecting country should have, but the judge found it… you guessed it… racist!

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

This is a case study in the intellectual sickness of America's ruling elite.

It goes without saying that the ruling is horrible. (It even calls itself "unprecedented"!) Read it: s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2104…

The legal theory here is so bonkers even far-left Judge William Simon rejected it (Simon previously enjoined President Trump's immigration policies and gave the ACLU special riot passes in Portland). Worth a read, if you can look past the virtue-signaling. webshare.law.ucla.edu/CILP/Machic_de…

The real question isn't whether the new opinion is wrong (it is), but how a federal judge could have written it in the first place.

The answer is motivated reasoning. To put it simply, this is the kind of result a judge only reaches because he or she really, really wants to.

But *why* would a judge want to strike down this statute (which, by the way, is the single most prosecuted federal crime)? Why does a federal judge want to find that the law is racist, so as to stop the United States from punishing people who repeatedly violate its borders?

It's not (necessarily) that the judge is personally hostile to the very idea of border enforcement. Rather, it's important to realize that this is a *systemic* problem within our overwhelmingly progressive national elite.

“Racism" doesn't really mean anything to our elites, it's just the magic word they use to justify and increase their own power. If something is "racist," that means someone somewhere in the web of progressive institutions is empowered to fix it, or should be hired to fix it.

This reality *systemically skews elite culture's "racism"-detection heuristic.* Elite culture functionally accepts false positives (seeing racism where there is none) far more readily than it accepts false negatives, or true negatives for that matter.

The overall result is a collective cultural pathology similar to an autoimmune disorder, where the immune system loses the ability to distinguish healthy tissue from pathogens, and so ends up attacking well-functioning organs. That is how progressive "antiracism" works.

When progressive elites act out this pathology, their motives feel pure on the inside -- they're just fighting "racism"! -- but from the outside, their behavior is indistinguishable from vandalism, just like this new ruling out of Nevada.

There's a decent chance this decision gets reversed on appeal, even in the left-wing Ninth Circuit. But you can never be sure. Now that even one federal judge has ruled this way, it will be harder for other liberal judges to hold the line of legal sanity.

Even judges feel the tug of the ever-growing "antiracist" consensus, it’s now deeply embedded in our culture.

That's how, in a very short time, crazy legal theories can go from "creative but untenable" to "one or two cases support it" to "everyone who's not evil believes this."

In any case, the problem is much deeper than a bad judge here or there. The problem is an elite culture that cannot be relied on to rationally evaluate claims of racism.

The only long-term fix is a complete and total shutdown of wokeness and CRT and all they imply.