How Sheila Jackson Lee’s “white supremacy” bill will work

Democrats are drooling over the possibility of criminalizing any speech with which they disagree — and they’ll do it, too, if voters don’t deal them a stunning political loss.

Rep. Sheila Jackson (D-TX; Yale BA; University of Virginia Law School JD) has floated a bill controlling speech with which she disagrees. It’s called the “Leading Against White Supremacy Act” and is intended to make expressions of “white supremacy” a federal crime. Usefully (for her purposes), Jackson Lee does not define “white supremacy.” Instead, the act opens with at tautology:

A person engages in a white supremacy inspired hate crime when white supremacy ideology has motivated the planning, development, preparation, or perpetration of actions that constituted a crime or were undertaken in furtherance of activity that, if effectuated, would have constituted a crime.

You got that, right? You will be charged for having engaged in a white supremacy hate crime if you were thinking white supremacist thoughts when you engaged in that hate crime.

To start, all hate crime legislation needs to be done away with. Under our system of justice, intention has always been a part of determining the nature of a crime — e.g., whether it’s manslaughter (Hello, Alec Baldwin!) or first-degree murder. The hate crimes add-ons, though, are pure thought crimes, and they have no place in American constitutional jurisprudence. Lee’s bill is just more of the same.

But let’s pretend that Jackson Lee’s bill could pass (and it could if Democrats regain the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court). Aside from the generalized idiocy, there’s an exceptionally dangerous passage in the bill: it includes a conspiracy charge for anyone who uses social media to share someone else’s undefined white supremacist thought crime:

A conspiracy to engage in white supremacy inspired hate crime shall be determined to exist—

[snip]

between two or more persons—

[snip]

at least one of whom published material advancing white supremacy, white supremacist ideology, antagonism based on “replacement theory”, or hate speech that vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-White person or group, and such published material—

(i) was published on a social media platform or by other means of publication with the likelihood that it would be viewed by persons who are predisposed to engaging in any action in furtherance of a white supremacy inspired hate crime, or who are susceptible to being encouraged to engage in actions in furtherance of a white supremacy inspired hate crime;

You’re thinking right now that this couldn’t include you because you’re not a White supremacist. You think that all people are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with the inherent rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the specific inherent rights outlined in the Constitution, along with the right to equal treatment at the law. Since you act in accordance with those values, that should completely protect you from ever facing charges under this law.

Oh, you naive little conservative. you!

You’ve already noted that I highlighted a specific phrase; namely, “antagonism based on ‘replacement theory.'” For those unfamiliar with the term, “replacement theory” is the claim that Democrats are using the broken border as a deliberate means to replace native-born American voters with more docile, often illiterate voters from third-world countries who are accustomed to socialist policies (even though those are the policies that broke their countries and sent them scurrying to America) and who will be forever grateful to the Democrats.  This gratitude should translate to votes and perpetual Democrat political power

That description of the Democrats’ border and immigration policies does not come from the ugly swamps of the handful of actual Neo-Nazis (the kind who salute Hitler pictures) still existing on the furthest fringes of American culture. While it’s true that conservatives worry about the economic and cultural effects of wholesale population replacement, Democrats boast about it, starting with the Big Guy himself:

Democrats and progressive activists, based on their own rhetoric over the years, subscribe to “replacement theory” more than anyone else. As vice president, Biden himself said that a “constant” and “unrelenting” stream of immigration would reduce Americans of “white European stock” to an “absolute minority,” and that this was “a source of our strength.”

[snip]

The Hart-Celler Act, which ended nationality quotas in immigration policy, resulted in an influx of non-European newcomers, encouraged illegal immigration and drove rapid demographic shifts. “The people who moved here after the 1965 act made the United States a truly multicultural nation,” NPR celebrated in 2015.

Obviously, Democrats have changed their tune since Kennedy’s day, abandoning their historic political bloc of white working-class (oftentimes Catholic) voters for the so-called “coalition of the ascendant,” in which immigrants are key. This is not a conspiracy theory; it “happens to be the same demographic argument Ruy Teixiera made in The Emerging Democratic Majority,” as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro noted.

[snip]

In 2013, Politico concluded that amnesty for millions of illegal aliens “would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.” The following year, James G. Gimpel, a professor of government at the University of Maryland, College Park, published a study that found the “flow of legal immigrants into the country—29.5 million from 1980 to 2012—has remade and continues to remake the nation’s electorate in favor of the Democratic Party.”

A comprehensive report by the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress came to a similar conclusion in 2016: In the long run, demography favors the Democrats. And in 2018, CNN host Michael Smerconish discussed with demographer Rogelio Saenz, over a chyron that read, “THE VANISHING WHITE AMERICAN,” that demographic trends connected to immigration spell doom for the GOP.

(There’s much more in the same vein at the link.)

But let’s get real. Jackson Lee didn’t include that little clause in the language to make criminal those who celebrate replacing the current American population with a migrant population. Instead, it only applies to those who don’t support using tens of millions of illegal aliens to wipe out those American stakeholders who were born and raised here and have paid a lifetime of taxes.  (As an aside, those American stakeholders include Blacks, who are becoming a smaller minority thanks to the influx of the Hispanics the Democrats hope to shape as their new base.)

Now that we know who the intended targets are (i.e., you), you might be interested in knowing how the left hopes to see such a law play out. For that, I present to you Yahoo!Life, which is a subset of Yahoo!’s news branch. Jessica Washington has a longed-for example of how Jackson Lee’s law would work:

Under the conspiracy section, “a conspiracy to engage in white supremacy inspired hate crime shall be determined to exist,” if at least one person engages in planning or committing a white supremacist hate crime and the other person disseminates white supremacist information (including on social media).

That means people who post white supremacist conspiracy theories online could potentially face prosecution under the bill.

So let’s say Ben Shapiro spreads white supremacist talking points on Twitter, and someone reads that information and commits a white supremacist hate crime, both of them could be charged with conspiracy to commit a hate crime.

There’s the fantasy: Ben Shapiro and everyone who shares his essay on social media end up committing a felony and going to jail.

What’s notable about the Yahoo!Life article is that the First Amendment isn’t mentioned. If Congress and the White House return to the Democrats’ sole control, that won’t be an issue. Democrats have already successfully carved out that “hate crime” exception to the Constitution, so why shouldn’t there also be a “communicating hate crime” exception?

For now, as the Yahoo!Life essay mourns, there’s no chance of Jackson Lee’s proposed bill passing. However, the same essay notes that Lee has promoted this type of bill before, and you know she’ll do it again. One of these days, unless voters step up and completely destroy the Democrats at the ballot box, they’ll get it passed; their Ketanji Brown Jackson-style Supreme Court will approve of the law as an acceptable exception to the Supreme Court; and we’ll all get to meet face-to-face at long last…in a federal prison.

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Image: YouTube screen grab.