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A good fraction of the '60s civil rights infrastructure was oriented at states refusing to protect certain classes of citizens.
So much of our legalese is based on assumptions of how to deal with black-white issues in an 85% white country but completely become unworkable when we now have 100 oppressed minority groups. We can look the other way on some American constitutional rights to throw some bones to the 15%. Laws to deal with the Klan now get extended to basically everyone since everyone finds a way to be the oppressed.
We don’t actually have a Chesterton fence for dealing with a multicultural society in the US plus the sudden invention that everyone has their own sex.
Affirmative Action or hate crime laws can functional work when its goal is make sure ADOS gets 5% of Harvards Freshman class or for making sure a lower class person doesn’t do explicitly racists stuff.
No, what you need is simply to enforce the law fairly.
If you're a flaming racist, you only want that law to apply when victims are black; if you're a flaming sexist, you only want that law to apply when victims are women. This is modern Blue tribe thought in a nutshell- DR3 is trivially correct[1].
Now, you can't write an explicitly discriminatory law like that in 1960s America[2], but if you control the institutions, you can have that- you simply fail to enforce the law against women or blacks. But right now, they don't have the institutions, and the law is being
restoredapplied fairly for once in a very, very long time[3].And this, right here, is what the reformers voted for.
Most of what the Daughters of the Confederacy are protesting against right now is ultimately what the law of the land (by which they justify themselves) says. You can't have an underclass/slaves/permanent non-citizens because it damages the national social fabric, and the Daughters are pro-slave because it means they don't have to pay to fix some other fundamental problems in society they're on the high side of at the moment. You also can't be a flaming racist for similar reasons, and the Daughters are all hardcore racists (it doesn't matter that they're technically racist against themselves- they don't see it that way, and why not judge them by their own standard?).
[1] The fundamental contradiction in Blue thought: the tribe whose founding myth comes from fighting for universal human rights is actively working to destroy them for wholly selfish reasons. A symmetric contradiction in Red thought is also present, of course, as their tribe has a founding myth that comes from fighting against universal human rights to be just, but finds itself actively working to impose them now in the framework that defeated "fighting against universal human rights".
[2] Most other countries that have enshrined "finger on the scale" in law in this way are neither America nor was it the 1960s when they passed them. They tend to be dominated by more conservative moral impulses than the US is. Probably an HBD thing, since the people that aren't like that have been self-sorting into the US anyway for the last 200ish years.
[3] Which leads to stuff that looks... really weird from traditional perspectives, like in this case where you have a black man acting indistinguishably from the groups that, 50 years ago, would have been doing the same thing to him for what, in his heart, is the same crime (re: MLKKK of South Park).
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I disagree, as I was telling @The_Nybbler neither the race nor the color of the hood being worn by those looking to disrupt a church service has any legal bearing on the matter. At least not per the letter of the law.
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So do you address this with another civil rights act?
No need for another Civil Rights Act when the original is fit for purpose.
Per the official docket, Don Lemon along with three others; Trahern Crews, Georgia Fort, and Jamael Lundy, have been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury on charges of violating US Code Title 18 - 241, "Conspiracy against rights". Specifically the free-exercise clause of the first amendment in regards to the congregation of Cities Church of St. Paul MN.
USC 18-241 reads...
Based on clips from Lemon's own livestream I'd say they have him dead-to-rights.
I'm remembering my post last year about how Trump can (lawfully) strike back in the sort of protest-fueling excesses of the Democratic civil war.
I don't think anyone needed to goad Don Lemon into doing something stupid- he hardly needs the help- but for all that the recent Mineapolis shootings gave Trump/ICE a political black eye, I think they've also demonstrated the sort of political solvent effect of the democratic civil war as factions nominally unify against Trump, actively compete for the kudos of opposing Trump, but also stand to benefit for when Trump turns on one or another faction for its excesses.
In just the last few weeks, after all, the most recent Dem VP has functionally ended his political career and said he'll never run for election again, a government shutdown effort couldn't even form various party members said nope so fast, various Democratic governors and AGs have had widely divergent stances on opposing ICE, with the relatively hardcore anti-IC AGs getting minimal political support from 2026 establishment frontrunners like Newsom. Rather than nation-wide anti-ICE riots following two shootings, the best the party is managing is another No Kings nationwide protests, which are almost certainly going to try and enforce a peaceful protest persona as a contrast to the anti-ICE tactics of MN.
This isn't a verdict of victory or defeat one way or another, but I think it is demonstrative that the party conflict is dynamic, and more importantly dynamic in a way that does give the Trump administration a number of legal ways to go after not-so-edge actors, even with many hostile/oppositional judges in the judiciary. And these cases, in turn, are probably going to catch not-so-minor players in the Democratic Party civil war, shaping the trajectory in ways some people will not only try to capitalize on, but set conditions for.
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