This is unbelievable. Though on second thought, it is quite believable, given the rottenness of elite US professional culture:

An almost century-old federal law that makes it a crime for deported migrants to re-enter the U.S. was found unconstitutional by a judge who said its passage in 1929 was motivated, in part, by prejudice against Mexicans and other Latinos.

U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in Reno, Nevada, ruled Wednesday that the law, known as Section 1326, violates the equal protection guarantees of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

“The federal government’s plenary power over immigration does not give it license to enact racially discriminatory statutes in violation of equal protection,” she said in the 43-page ruling.

Du issued the ruling in the case of a Gustavo Carrillo-Lopez, who was indicted on one count of being a deported alien after his arrest in Nevada in 2019. He had previously been deported in 1999 and again in 2012, according to prosecutors.

Rather than deny the charge, which carries a two-year prison term, Carrillo-Lopez’s lawyers attacked the law itself, arguing that it had its roots in racism and cultural animus.

Read it all. 

Arizona candidate for US Senate Blake Masters has a pungent take — and a correct one. Excerpts:

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: https://t.co/arioztRPFe

— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) August 21, 2021

That last tweet is the key one of this very good analysis. Elites have tasked themselves with extirpating Evil (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.), and tend to grant themselves extraordinary mandates and powers to rid our society of Evil. If you say, “Hold on, wait a minute!”, you face cancellation. This happened to a friend of mine who stood up at her university and said that the post-George Floyd antiracism campaign there was going too far, and trampling on free speech. She was widely denounced as a racist, even a “Nazi,” and had to leave the university for a while to recover.

The standard conservative modus operandi in these cases is to highlight the insanity in something a liberal elite does, and expect that the liberal establishment will be shamed into correcting the problem. That quit working ages ago. So what does one do now? Elect more Republicans? Well, that’s a start, I guess, but even though that may be better than the alternative, is that really the answer?

Here you have a federal judge, an Obama appointee, who is working to dismantle America’s border in the name of antiracism. This is not some Mark Levin fever dream. This really happened. I believe too that this coming at a time when the credibility of America’s leadership class is being torn to shreds by the Taliban in Afghanistan is going to cause much more of a blowback than it otherwise would. It is remarkable when these Blobsters live up to their reputation. Did you see this the other day?

All the right-wingers who think that white elites are enamored of a “Great Replacement” theory, and who get called paranoid over it, can point to that from the notorious Beltway insider, and say, “Huh.”

A country whose elites refuse to let it control its borders is hardly a country, is it? You know which country doesn’t have this problem? Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

UPDATE: Reader Jonah R.:

This garbage starts to make sense when you realize it’s only a small but disproportionately influential segment of the American population, and that most of them are white and affluent and privileged, and deeply anxious about that fact, and therefore in a status competition with their white, affluent, privileged peers. But it’s a competition for the damned, because the claims and rewards are so ephemeral: Did you make the snarkiest tweet that day? Do you have something to contribute to the office chatter about some book they highlighted on NPR? Did you score “Hamilton” tickets? It’s a rat race with the goal of staying competitive in certain highly selective cultural industries like academia, media, museum curation, and even politics, where there are far more willing new applicants than there are positions to fill.

Case in point: In the past week or two there was a gigantic investigative report on the sports and pop-culture website “The Ringer” going into insane levels of detail about something most of us consider trivial: the guy who got the job–well, the executive producer who gave himself the job–as new Jeopardy host. The reporter must have spent 5,000 words digging through every episode of a frat-boy-like podcast he made nearly a decade ago and comments he allegedly made to young female co-workers at his previous job. The article, more in-depth than some White House reporting I’ve seen lately, is now being credited with getting the would-be host booted from his gig and, more importantly, getting him publicly shamed. The writer is now much in the spotlight this week, because she saved a supposedly beloved middlebrow cultural institution from being besmirched.

I wanted to see what kind of person cares this much about something as trivial as who the Jeopardy host is, so I spent five minutes on Google. The writer of the take-down piece is what I expected: white; early 30s; a graduate of one of the most elite private high schools in the Bay Area known for producing elite cultural influencers most of us have never heard of; graduate of the University of Chicago; book deal; snarky Twitter feed. And what does one do with all of that privilege, with the best education money can buy? Why, one embarks on a career in journalism devoted entirely to mastering the minutiae of popular culture on a website catering to other rich, white, educated, intellectually underachieving thirtysomethings.

Perhaps she’s a nice kid. Who knows? But this is who runs the culture now: Ambitious little career assassins looking to establish themselves among other people who care more about the host of Jeopardy and dopamine hits from getting laughs and “likes” in cyberspace than they do about many real-world issues. Young elites who have never put in a shift rolling burritos at Chipotle, worked in a warehouse, or shook the grease off a fry basket. What they do have is internships at All the Right Places, and a belief inculcated in them since their elite high school days that they’re the best and the brightest. And you can protect an upper-middlebrow institution like Jeopardy by taking down a would-be host based on his speech (who, after all, only went to lowly Pepperdine anyway), then go for it. Twitter, NPR, the New York Times, and all your friends will hail you as a hero, and you won’t hear the voice of anyone who thinks otherwise.

Normally the conflicts between these people wouldn’t matter that much to the rest of us, but they’re trying to get us to change our culture, our language, our politics, etc., with their top-down efforts. As much as they crave each other’s approval, they also hate each other and will always be trying to climb over each other, but they’ll unite against you, because they hate you more. By accident of geography, I’ve lived among these people for half my life, and getting them to see themselves clearly is impossible, but maybe I can help the rest of us see who they are: decadent, presumptuous, and far more privileged than they accuse the rest of us of being. In that sense they’re not much more different from any other cultural elite throughout history, but until now they’ve been better at pretending they’re not.

I heard this segment on NPR the other day in which host Ailsa Chang interrogated TV critic Eric Deggans about why this was such a big deal. They made it sound like he was the second coming of Harvey Weinstein. Then they played a clip of something horrible he said while hosting a comedy podcast years ago. He used the word “ho”. That’s it! Listen to the righteousness with which Chang signs off the segment — her emphatic, “Indeed!”

These are horrible people and they deserve to lose all the power they have in this culture.