Sunday, 23 May 2021

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Pro-Military Democrats? Please

Posted: 23 May 2021 03:23 PM PDT

(John Hinderaker)

One of the more curious spectacles of recent years is the Democrats’ periodic attempt to appear patriotic and pro-military. Everyone who pays attention knows that they are indifferent, at best, to American military power, and most of the time they don’t try to hide it. But now and then they see an opportunity to fly a false flag; sometimes, as in this case, the results are humorous.

Start with Ted Cruz pointing out that “wokeness” is probably not the key to an optimal military force:


I think most of us would readily agree that a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea. But Democrats tried to twist Cruz’s words, bizarrely attacking him as anti-military. To which he responded:


A case in point is Brian Williams, formerly an alleged journalist and now a Democratic Party spokesman at MSNBC. Williams accused Senator Cruz of promoting Russian propaganda and of being pro-Russia:


This was too much. Cruz responded with a Twitter thread that left Williams a smoking ruin:


Is anyone dumb enough to fall for the Democrats’ nonsense? I doubt it. Everyone knows that: 1) It is Republicans who want the U.S. to be strong militarily. 2) It is Democrats, not Republicans, who think it is terrific for the Army to be “woke.” And 3) Wokeness is not the key to an effective military force. In short, the Republicans win this one, which is why Democratic Party mouthpieces like Jake Tapper and Brian Williams try so hard to distort what is going on.

Via RedState.

Not dark yet, cont’d

Posted: 23 May 2021 04:26 AM PDT

(Scott Johnson)

Bob Dylan’s celebrates his 80th birthday tomorrow. When he snagged the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago, I pulled out all the stops by posting a big set of my favorite covers of his songs. I don’t have any stops left to pull, but I’m adding a few covers this morning in honor of his milestone birthday tomorrow.

In my estimation Dylan is first and foremost a songwriter. See, for example, Raymond Foye’s interview with Clinton Heylin about his deep dive into the Dylan archive. He somehow absorbed the folk, rock, country, and blues traditions as a precocious young man growing up in Hibbing and then recapitulated them in his own voice many times over while adding a twist of modernist poetry to the mix. I want to take the liberty of posting notable cover versions of some of my favorite Dylan songs that you may not have heard before, at least in these versions.

I first tuned in to Bob with Freewheelin‘ (1963). I went for him in a big way with “Like a Rolling Stone” and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965. I saw Bob perform live with the Band in a three-hour half acoustic, half electric show on a Friday night at the old Minneapolis Auditorium in November 1965 (thanks, Dad). The show was sold out, but Bob had just released some first-row tickets that we bought at the box office.

As it turned out, we had better seats than Bob’s mother, Beatty Rutman, who was sitting with our friends the Applebaums about two-thirds of the way back in the auditorium. I wondered what she was thinking when Bob played “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” that night.

I later got a chance to chat with Mrs. Rutman at a party the Applebaums threw at St. Paul’s old Hillcrest Country Club in the mid-1970’s. Beaming with a mother’s pride, she gladly talked about Bob. She brought up Bob’s divorce, the subject of Bob’s great Blood On the Tracks in 1975. She told me Bob had outgrown his wife.

This is only to say I’ve been a fan for a long time, but I have drifted away from his music for long periods. Hearing many of these covers had the effect of bringing me back to him with renewed respect and gratitude. The covers also demonstrate the incredible breadth and depth of his impact over the past 60 years. He holds down his own constellation in the Cosmic American Music.

Except in the case of Dion’s cover (recorded in 1965, released in 2017), I hope to have posted these recordings in order of their date of release. The chronological order of release is the only discipline I imposed on myself in assembling this selection. I note that 1968 was a big year for Dylan covers. It may have been the best thing about that otherwise horrible year. I also note my surprise at how many covers by Rod Stewart I have fastened on. That’s just the way it is.

All in all, we haven’t even scratched the surface and I’m badly dating myself with this selection. However, these covers have all struck a deep chord with me over the years. As I have continued to think about it, the list has become an expanding universe. Omissions reflect the limitations of my knowledge and taste as well as my memory. Without further ado, we gratefully present…

From the first notable album of all-Dylan covers, Odetta’s version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”

When Judy Collins met Dylan after her set at Gerde’s in 1961, she introduced herself to him, so she thought. However, Bob reminded her that he had sat at her feet when she first sang in Central City, Colorado. He said he had been singing at a little bar up the highway in Cripple Creek, when he was still Bob Zimmerman. She wasn’t necessarily buying the story, but he seems to have played at a bar in Central City or Cripple Creek in the summer of 1960. In her (terrific) memoir Sweet Judy Blue Eyes (pages 167-168), she pointedly observes of Dylan at the time she connected with him at Gerde’s: “The songs were incubating.”

Judy was present at the creation of a great one when it hatched. In October 1964, both Bob and Judy were staying with Dylan manager Albert Grossman in Woodstock. She was awakened at about 3:00 a.m. by Dylan’s singing in his room at the bottom of the stairs. She put on a bathrobe and crept down the stairs to listen outside his room as Dylan finished his work on “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “sang, over and over, the lyrics and newly found melody[.]” She recalled: “When he came down at noon, rubbing sleep from his eyes and running his hands through his rumpled hair, I told him I wanted to sing the song I had heard on the stair.” Those lyrics, she writes, “struck my heart.” Back in New York, she recorded the song along with two other Dylan covers for her Fifth Album (1965).

The Byrds launched Dylan into the top 10 with their brilliant version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” that summer. The Byrds originally introduced “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” on Turn Turn Turn at the end of the year. You can hear Roger McGuinn’s ringing 12-string and the Byrds’ beautiful harmony parts in the chorus — they begin with the chorus. Pick a part and join in.

Dion DiMucci included “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” on Kickin’ Child. It was one of three Dylan covers on this incredible “lost album” of 1965 (released in 2017). I think Columbia Records ended up putting it on Dion’s Wonder Where I’m Bound. Van Morrison’s cover of the song with Them is also worthy, but this is my favorite of the covers with which I’m familiar.

In 1966 Judy Collins plucked “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” from Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited for In My Life. The striking instrumentation was arranged and conducted by Joshua Rifkin, to whom Judy devotes a few pages in her memoir. She writes that Rifkin’s orchestration “would have knocked the socks off Dylan had he been wearing any.” The song lacks a chorus. The tale of woe keeps a-rollin’ in Judy’s deadpan delivery.

Richie Havens made me hear the beauty in “Just Like a Woman” on his debut album that year.

The Byrds covered “My Back Pages” on 1967’s Younger Than Yesterday. For some reason, I keep telling myself, “I’m younger than that now.”

In 1968 the Band gave us our initial glimpse of the songs Dylan had been working on in Woodstock after his motorcycle accident. He wrote “Tears of Rage” with The Band’s Richard Manuel.

In his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan himself testifies that he thinks more highly of the Johnny Rivers cover of “Positively 4th Street” than he does of his own hit version. Indeed, he goes so far as to say (pages 60-61): “Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite.”

I’m afraid Bob wouldn’t appreciate my compilation of covers here. He writes in his praise of Rivers: “Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere…” Coming from Bob, this seems a strange criticism. He frequently renders his own most popular songs unrecognizable in live performance. The “left-field” critique seems more apt in his own case. Preeminent Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin warns us to treat Chronicles as fiction. I don’t want to apply the warning to this passage, but I wonder.

In the passage Bob credits Rivers with having “the mandate down–the attitude and melodic sense to complete and surpass the feeling I had put into it.” And finally: “When I heard Johnny sing my song, it was obvious that life had the same external grip on him as it did on me.” That sounds like the truth to me. His “Positively 4th Street” cover comes from the excellent Realization (1968).

The Byrds returned to Dylan in a big way for Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Lloyd Green contributed the signature pedal steel part on “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” It’s a love song complicated only by the humor.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience recorded a monumental cover of “All Along the Watchtower” for 1968’s Electric Ladyland. Jimi garbled the lyrics, but he nailed this timeless admonition: “Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” All the rest is allegory.

Joan Baez looms large in Dylan’s career. We have to go to her all-Dylan double album Any Day Now for “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word.” Forgive the cliché, but “she owns the song.” When Baez came through Minneapolis to play the State Theater on her farewell tour in 2016, she opened the show with this song.

I think Baez’s a capella reading of “Tears of Rage” from the same album is stunning.

Dylan inspired the Brits to explore the riches of their folk tradition. Fairport Convention repaid their debt to Dylan on a cover of “Percy’s Song.” It comes from their 1969 album Unhalfbricking. That’s Sandy Denny on the lead vocal.

Rod Stewart began his career in music as a folk singer, but he made a name for himself as the vocalist extraordaire with the Jeff Beck Group. In 1970, on his second solo album, Rod grabbed me by the ear and brought me back in awe to Dylan with his tender version of “Only a Hobo.”

Rod also covered Dylan’s “Wicked Messenger” that year on his first album with Faces (once he joined, they were no longer Small). They give it a menacing arrangement that brings out an essential element of the song.

Rod covered “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” on his third solo album the following year.

The Flying Burrito Brothers covered “To Ramona” on their self-titled album of 1971. WUMB’s Albert O declared it a favorite on his annual Bobfest last year. Unlike “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” this is a complicated love song, or a love/hate song. Ex-Byrd Chris Hillman turns in the fine vocal.

Rod Stewart revisited Dylan yet again on the 1972 album Never a Dull Moment. Below is his cover of “Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind.”

Dave Mason had played the acoustic guitar parts on Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower.” In 1974 Mason covered it under his own name. Hendrix’s cover is a tough act to follow, but I think Mason holds his own.

Bruce Springsteen’s cover of Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” turns it into an anthem that rings my chimes, as in the live version below with the E Street Band in 1988.

I first heard Nanci Griffith’s cover of “Boots of Spanish Leather” playing as background music in a small store on Grand Avenue in St. Paul. I wondered who was singing. I reflected that I’d never heard anyone cover the song before. I realized I love the song. Bob himself plays harmonica on it and gets in the last lick. Everything about Griffith’s cover brought me up short. I tracked it down on her fantastic Other Voices, Other Rooms album of 1993. She’s holding Truman Capote’s 1948 novel with that title on the cover.

Dylan can be funny and touching at the same time. Shawn Colvin brilliantly brings out the humor and the pathos in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” on her 1994 Cover Girl collection. I was thrilled to see Shawn perform this live during her four-night run at the Dakota in 2018.

Tim O’Brien came out with his set of all-Dylan covers titled Red On Blonde in 1996. He concluded the set with “Lay Down Your Weary Tune.” Seeing Tim at the Dakota in 2019, I found that the song has made its way into his live show. The song cuts so close to the bone of Dylan’s minstrelsy that it merits a replay in this lineup.

Tim recruited the bluegrass great Del McCoury to sing high harmony on his cover of “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Dylan drew on his life on the road to convey his artistic ambition by indirection. I love the acoustic accompaniment O’Brien and the O’Boys give it.

Dylan recorded “Ring Them Bells” for the celebrated 1989 album Oh Mercy, produced by Daniel Lanois. The song seems to me to hark back to “Chimes of Freedom.” The Irish artist Mary Black joined Joan Baez on the live version below for Joan’s live double album of the same name on 1995.

Younger artists continue to appreciate the artistry of Dylan’s work. Nickel Creek covered “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” on 2005’s Why Should the Fire Die?

Sarah Jarosz is a younger artist who also appreciates Dylan. She performed “Ring Them Bells” live in a Nashville studio for the 2013 Sugar Hill Records compilation The Americana Sessions. Jarosz beautifully conveys the spiritual yearning in the song. I don’t want this one to stop and I want to hear it again as soon as it’s over.

“Not Dark Yet” and “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” are counterparts on Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (1997). Jimmy LaFave was a wonderful interpreter of Dylan who covered “Not Dark Yet” in his characteristically emotional style on 2007’s Cimarron Manifesto. LaFave died four years ago at the age of 61, way too young. “I was born here and I’ll die here, against my will…”

Lucinda Williams covered “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” on a 2011 compilation. It is one poignant song.

Joan Osborne also covered “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” on her 2017 collection Songs of Bob Dylan. When we saw her at the Dakota in 2019, the song was on her setlist.

Emma Swift released her Dylan tribute album Blonde on the Tracks in August last year. Swift is an Aussie who moved to Nashville to pursue her career. The disc features British singer/songwriter Robyn Hitchcock and Wilco’s Patrick Sansone on guitars. Sansone also produced.

The disc compiles a loving set of Dylan covers with a retro sound. Swift devoted herself to covering Dylan to climb out of the Slough of Despond. You can almost hear her pulling herself together in “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” from the Dylan double album Blonde on Blonde.

Swift also covers “You’re a Big Girl Now,” from Dylan’s Blood On the Tracks. Infrequently covered, it’s one of my favorite Dylan songs. The artwork in the video below is inspired by Milton Glaser’s classic portrait of Dylan commissioned by CBS Records. I still have the postcard with Glaser’s portrait that I picked up somewhere along the way many years ago.

Bob, thanks and happy birthday.

Not dark yet

Posted: 23 May 2021 03:27 AM PDT

(Scott Johnson)

Tomorrow is the birthday of Minnesota native son Bob Dylan; he turns the ripe old age of 80. It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. We’re going to celebrate him as long we’re both still around to enjoy the occasion. He is a remarkable artist, self-invented, deep in the American grain.

A few years back I visited Dylan’s old home at 2425 7th Avenue East in Hibbing. The house is a small two-story residence with a one-car attached garage on the side. The house is exactly two blocks from Hibbing High School, Dylan’s alma mater. A Dylan fan must be somewhere in the chain of title. The garage door had the cover of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album painted on it.

Howard Sounes’s Dylan biography Down The Highway does a good job of capturing the Hibbing period of Dylan’s life. Sounes’s research is impeccable, including his discussion of Dylan’s teen-age friendships with Larry Kegan and Howard Rutman in the Twin Cities.

I wonder how Dylan could have absorbed all the strains of American popular music in a town as remote as Hibbing. The radio was apparently Dylan’s indispensable source, but the development of his gifts seems incredibly unlikely. How could he have formed the ambition to become “Bob Dylan” from his roots in Hibbing? The town must have provided some encouragement, even if it also provided the impetus for him to move on and not look back. The people he left behind there remain incredibly nice.

In his illuminating City Journal essay on Pete Seeger — “America’s most successful Communist” — Howard Husock placed Dylan in the line of folk agitprop in which Seeger took pride of place. Husock’s essay is an important and entertaining piece. Dylan is only a small part of the story Husock has to tell, however, and Husock therefore does not pause long enough over Dylan to observe how quickly Dylan burst the confines of agitprop, found his voice, and tapped into his own vein of the Cosmic American Music. Looking back on his long career, one can discern his respect for the tradition as well as his ambition to take his place at its head.

On 1964’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ album, Dylan looked back and “apologized for past misdemeanors” (as Sounes puts it), but also looked ahead to his break from the folk movement in “Restless Farewell,” the album’s closing song. (Joan Baez sings it in the video above.)

The song represents Dylan’s take on the Scottish folk song “The Parting Glass.” Appropriating the tradition for his own uses, Dylan announced: “I’ll bid farewell and be down the line.” Later that year he turned his songwriting in a personal direction with Another Side of Bob Dylan, his last folk album.

Ben Macintyre notes:

Dylan set words to music in a way that no one had done before. He refused to be pigeon-holed by the folkies, the protesters or the rockers. He borrowed and synthesised from the literary, artistic and actual worlds like a musical magpie, and he skillfully evolved his own mystique. And he kept going, even when his listeners booed or complained or, like the enraged Pete Seeger in 1965, threatened to chop off his sound cable with a hatchet at a folk festival in Newport because he had defected to electric sound. At a British concert, we see a furious folkie leaping to his feet and shouting “Judas!” Dylan is defiant: “You’re a liar…Play it ****ing loud,” he instructs the band.

That last moment comes from Dylan’s legendary concert of May 1966 documented on Volume 4 of Columbia’s Dylan Bootleg Series (and can now be viewed on YouTube). The concert was misattributed to the Royal Albert Hall when it surfaced on bootleg albums in 1970, though it has now been identified as having taken place in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall — in the interest of history, of course.

Macintyre briefly sums up Dylan’s self-education:

In 1960 Robert Zimmerman, a gawky Jewish boy from Minnesota, hitch-hiked to New York City. He came to join the burgeoning folk music circuit, but he also came to read, hunkered down on the sofas of his bookish new friends in Greenwich Village. “I read all of Lord Byron’s Don Juan and concentrated fully from start to finish,” he wrote later [in Chronicles, Volume One]. “Also Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan.’ I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I’d been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture.”

Gogol, Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, Thucydides (“a narrative which would give you chills”), Tennessee Williams, Bertolt Brecht, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells: all were piled into the wagon, alongside the music of Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams, and the films of Marlon Brando and James Dean. He spent nights studying the American Civil War at New York public library and consuming newspapers: “What was swinging, topical, up to date for me was stuff like the Titanic sinking, the Galveston flood, John Henry driving steel…this was the news that I considered, followed and kept tabs on.”

By the time of Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, Dylan was singing: “I need a dump truck to unload my head.”

In an interview with Rolling Stone back in the ’70’s Dylan identified Elvis’s take on “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” (video below, originally buried on the Spinout soundtrack) as his favorite cover of any of his songs. He told Rolling Stone it’s “the one recording I treasure the most.”

He might not answer the question the same way today. Dylan has written hundreds of songs and other artists have covered his songs thousands of times since then. You can’t go wrong with this one, however, adapted from the arrangement Odetta gave it on the first album of all-Dylan covers in 1965 (other than an obscure 1964 album by Linda Mason, as Richie Unterberger reminds me). On Elvis’s cover you can hear strains of folk, country, blues and gospel music. You can hear America singing.

Criticizing the Squad Is Not Permitted [Updated]

Posted: 22 May 2021 07:16 PM PDT

(John Hinderaker)

Alpha News is Minnesota’s scrappy alternative news service. Scott serves on Alpha’s board, and my organization both supports and collaborates with Alpha. Today Alpha reported that Facebook has threatened to ban its page for posting a cartoon that Facebook found offensive:

Facebook has threatened to ban Alpha News from its platform for publishing an anti-Hamas cartoon.

The Alpha News Facebook page now has "reduced distribution and other restrictions" for publishing a cartoon from syndicated cartoonist A.F. Branco, whose political satire is shared widely by conservative outlets, including Fox News.

The cartoon in question was critical of Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for their commentary on the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

That, of course, is the point. You can criticize Hamas on Facebook, but you can’t criticize the Squad. This is the cartoon:

Some liberals might argue that the Squad is anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, but not pro-Hamas. I don’t agree, as I wrote here. But at a bare minimum, charging the Squad with being apologists for Hamas is fair comment. Certainly Facebook allows all kinds of commentary supportive of the Squad, Hamas and Palestinian activists (i.e., terrorists and rioters). This is consistent with the fact that Democrats are far more likely to be pro-Hamas than pro-Israel.

So, what is the point? Many conservative news organizations, activists and pundits have invested a great deal, over the last decade, in building Facebook followings. Facebook, like Twitter, has been a good and generally easy way of reaching an audience. But there is a fatal flaw: those platforms are run by left-wingers who seize any opportunity to suppress conservative speech and put their thumb on the scale in favor of the far left.

Relying on these platforms was a shortcut to getting an audience, and it is easy to understand why so many chose that path. But those conservatives are now hostage to their political opponents. As I have said before, I think the conservative migration to social media was a mistake. Here at Power Line, we are on the free internet. No one can “moderate” our posts or subject our writing to some vague set of standards enforced inconsistently by no identifiable human being.

If we want to criticize the Squad, there is no one to stop us. In my opinion, conservative organizations and commentators should consider abandoning their social media platforms, and migrating back to the free internet. Or else stake a claim on platforms that are committed to free speech and do not discriminate against conservatives. Like Parler, which has been viciously suppressed by liberal Big Tech organizations but has survived, and is now being run by my friend George Farmer.

In the meantime, conservatives who stay on Facebook can expect discrimination, unless and until effective state legislation can bring such discrimination to a halt.

UPDATE: A reader sent us this image of a graphic and Facebook’s response to a user’s complaint about it. It illustrates the Left’s total lack of balance when it comes to Israel and its enemies. I haven’t researched it, but our reader assures me that it is genuine:

Two court defeats for racist policies

Posted: 22 May 2021 07:13 PM PDT

(Paul Mirengoff)

There are enough destructive and unlawful woke policies going forward these days to keep dozens, if not hundreds, of public interest law firms working full time. I’m happy to report on two recent court successes (for now) in cases challenging such policies.

In Texas, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor has issued a temporary restraining order sought by a restaurant owner against the Biden Small Business Administration. The owner challenged the Biden administration’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund which gives priority to businesses owned by women, racial minorities, veterans, and other "socially and economically disadvantaged" groups. Judge O’Connor enjoined the SBA from giving such preferential treatment based on racial and gender classifications.

The plaintiff, owner of the Greer's Ranch Café, claims to have lost nearly $100,000 in revenue during the coronavirus pandemic. He presented evidence that, because he is White, the entire $28.6 billion in the Restaurant Revitalization Fund might be depleted before his application for relief will be considered.

Team Biden argued that its discriminatory program can survive strict scrutiny — the standard under the Fourteenth Amendment for judging racial classifications — because it remedies "the effects of past and present discrimination." The court rejected this contention. It stated:

[The government’s] evidence largely falters [because]. . .it lacks the industry specific inquiry needed to support a compelling interest for a government-imposed racial classification. While the Court is mindful of. . .statistical disparities and expert conclusions based on those disparities, "[d]efining these sorts of injuries as 'identified discrimination' would give . . . governments license to create a patchwork of racial preferences based on statistical generalizations about any particular field of endeavor." Croson, 488 U.S. at 499; see also Adarand, 515 U.S. 200 (extending Croson's holding to the federal government). "Racial classifications are suspect, and that means that simple legislative assurances of good intention cannot suffice." Id. at 500.

Thus, the Court concludes that the government has failed to prove that it likely has a compelling interest in "remedying the effects of past and present discrimination" in the restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The other case arises from Virginia. It’s a challenge to the race-based admissions policy of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) — rated the best public high school in the country last month by U.S. News and World Report.

The Fairfax County School Board scrapped the standardized test that TJ used to select students objectively (and that probably helped make the school as good as it is) in favor of a system that distributes the vast majority of slots to the top 1.5 percent of students at each of the county’s middle schools.

The new policy disfavors Asian-Americans. Thanks to the objective test-based admissions policy the School Board has now discarded, they make up more than 70 percent of TJ’s student.

Accordingly, a group of Asian-Americans sued the School Board. It moved to dismiss the lawsuit. But Senior Judge Claude Hilton, a conservative who has been on the bench since 1985, denied the motion.

Judge Hilton was not persuaded by the School Board’s claim that the policy is racially neutral. It may be neutral on its face, but, said Hilton, “Everybody knows. . .that it’s designed to affect the racial composition of the school."

Everyone does know that. And adapting a facially neutral policy for the purpose of favoring members of one race at the expense of another is intentional discrimination.

Literacy tests for voting in the Jim Crow South were sometimes facially neutral. So was the poll tax. But the intent behind these devices was to exclude Black voters and to preserve political control by Whites.

Judge Hilton’s ruling means the Asian-American plaintiffs can proceed with their case. It doesn’t mean they win.

A trial will likely take place, at which plaintiffs can present evidence that the change in admissions policy was motivated by race. It’s my understanding that public statements of school board members provide ample evidence of this.

In the meantime, Judge Hilton declined to enjoin admissions based on the new policy for the upcoming school year. He found that such an injunction would be too disruptive at this relatively late date.

I understand this ruling and it may be correct. However, racist admissions policies are sufficiently pernicious that a very strong showing of “disruption” should be required before they are allowed to remain in effect even for one school year.

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