Wednesday Racing/Open Thread: $1M Thermal IndyCar, Justice Jackson Goes Ham On Speech, Mexico Won't Take Our Newly-Armed Deportees

All subscribers welcome

Believe it or not, dear readers, there are weeks when I worry there won’t be enough to fuel a proper Open Thread — but this isn’t one of them.

12 cars enter, very few will leave

What’s the most quintessentially American form of motorsport? I’d suggest that it’s figure-8 racing, that absolutely deranged staple of local ovals from California to Connecticut. It rewards a certain sort of insane bravery, or perhaps brave insanity, over any other human quality — and there’s no chance the crowd will go home without enjoying a wreck or two.

I’ve never seen an open-wheel figure-8 race, but when it comes to raw stupidity and risk this upcoming weekend’s $1,000,000 IndyCar Challenge at the Thermal Club has got to be the next worst, or best, thing. Those of you who have driven Thermal will immediately understand why — and I’ll clue the rest of you in right now: it’s the most schizophrenically designed road course in history. Parts of it seem designed to destroy cars for the sin of leaving the pavement by just ten or fifteen feet, while other parts have more runoff than COTA. This race will be on the “Twin Palms” layout, three miles in total, incorporating the BMW Performance Center track and the original south course. Using modern “MS Paint” technology, I’ve highlighted three places that strike me as a GREAT PLACE to break an Indycar in half:

Note that they’re only letting 12 cars compete — or maybe those are just the 12 drivers who have never seen the Thermal Club. I suspect it’s going to be compelling TV, especially if the F1 race turns out to be a bit processional. How can you watch it? I can’t figure that out. The IndyCar subscription service appears to not be accepting new customers. Their website seems to suggest you’ll be able to see qualifying on Peacock and the race on NBC. I’m going to try to watch, and we will absolutely talk about it a week from now.

I’m sorry, Miz Ketanji Brown Jackson?

Before we get into the free-speech case heard by the Supreme Court over the past week, let’s talk about the “bloodbath”. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump said, when discussing Chinese automaker BYD’s plans to build a plant in Mexico:

Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re going to get that, you’re going to not hire Americans, and you’re going to sell the cars to us? No. We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars. If I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath, for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars.

The tame media immediately fired up their scariest headlines for this: CNN said “Trump warns of ‘bloodbath’ for auto industry and country if he loses the election” and they were probably the least unhinged reporters on the subject. If you happened to be Extremely Online during the day that followed, you had the privilege of watching news get reshaped in real time, as Democrats “responded” to Trump’s “threat”. Various Blue mouthpieces on social media decried the use of the word, at which point various Red mouthpieces pointed out that Biden used the phrase to describe the prospect of a 2020 primary in which he — the horror! — might have to defend his record against Bernie Sanders.

I think it’s possible here to be both put off by Trump’s choice of phrase, which probably comes from the overuse of “bloodbath” in the faux-masculine investment-banking and commercial-real-estate industries, and to be concerned by the gleeful rapidity with which a supposedly impartial media made sure everybody heard the phrase without context.

Now on to Justice Jackson, who had a “bloodbath” moment of her own on Monday during hearings for the case now know as Murthy v. Missouri. The purpose of this case is to determine if the feds broke the law when they actively pressured social media to “de-amplify” content with which the current administration does not agree, particularly with regards to COVID-19. In particular, the argument is being made that the feds used potential revocations of, or changes to, Section 230, which prevents Internet platforms from liability related to content they host, as a tool with which to lean on social media in a way they didn't feel comfortable with when contacting legacy media.

Justice Jackson then posed a hypothetical question — and you can read all the arguments here if you want all the context:

JUSTICE JACKSON: Suppose someone started posting about a new teen challenge that involved teens jumping out of windows at increasing elevations. This is the challenge. And kids all over the country start doing this. There's an epidemic, children are seriously injuring or even killing themselves in situations. Is it your view that the government authorities could not declare those circumstances a public emergency and encourage social media platforms to take down the information that is instigating this problem?

After some back and forth, the plaintiff’s counsel responded like so:

I think they absolutely can call and say this is a problem, it's going rampant on your platforms, but the moment that the government tries to use its ability as the government and its stature as the government to pressure them to take it down, that is when you're interfering with the third party's speech rights… remember that the third party here is completely absent from the conversation. The third party whose speech is being targeted and ultimately censured is absent from this discussion.

Twelve pages later, after some clarification by plaintiff’s counsel that they have 20,000 items of documentation showing the Biden Administration pressuring social media, Justice Jackson returned to the well:

JUSTICE JACKSON: So my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods. I mean, what would -- what would you have the government do? I've heard you say a couple times that the government can post its own speech, but in my hypothetical, you know, kids, this is not safe, don't do it, is not going to get it done. And so I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information.

This was widely reported as “Ketanji Brown Jackson is an absolute moron who doesn’t understand the entire purpose of the First Amendment is to hamstring the government”. Matt Taibbi was particularly concerned:

That a line about “the First Amendment hamstringing the government” was uttered by one Supreme Court Justice is astonishing enough. Listening as none of the other eight pointed out that the entire purpose of the First Amendment is to “hamstring” government from interfering in speech was like watching someone drive a tank back and forth over Old Yeller.

Plaintiff’s counsel later on told The Free Press,

“It went about as I predicted it would,” she said, sketching out what she saw to be the dynamics on the bench, with three sympathetic justices (Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas), three swing votes (Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John Roberts), and three skeptics (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Brown Jackson). 

Let me state for the record that the very existence of Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has a total four years of her adult life not suckling on the public-employment teat to her credit, on the Supreme Court is a matter of real concern for me. I think she is a deliberate vector of anarcho-tyranny, fighting professionally for much of her career to defend and even coddle the worst criminals among us while ceaselessly calling for more restrictions on the rights of normal citizens. In this case, however, I can see the logic behind her line of questioning. You could almost boil it down to the following (not really) witty scenario:

“If the government knows there is a fire in a crowded theater, doesn’t it have the right to grab the microphone in the projection room and tell everyone? And if someone starts yelling that there is no fire, can’t the government silence that person?”

Jackson’s very human concern is that the government not be prohibited from disseminating crucial information — and, therefore, discouraging harmful misinformation — during times of crisis. If the Chinese started flying bombers over Los Angeles, wouldn’t the Feds be justified in silencing the people who claimed they were airliners?

She’s not being an idiot here. She understands the First Amendment as pertaining to political speech, and there being certain tests that must be passed for it to apply. And she, being a hard-line Blue person, is taking the absolute maximum view possible of those tests. If your view of the COVID-19 vaccines differs from that of the government, is that protected political speech?

What I’d suggest in response is that such a view in 2020 was the very epitome of protected political speech — you’re literally disagreeing with the government, which is the basis of the First Amendement — and as such must be protected even if it costs the lives of innocent people. Without that, we don’t have a United States of America. Period.

But if Miz Jackson gets her way, and the court decides that COVID-19 “misinformation” (which, uh, turned out to be mostly correct) isn’t protected speech, then I say we go back and apply that elevated test to… pornography, violent television, Netflix, you name it. There’s nothing political about PornHub or the Netflix soft-core stuff. It can be explicitly banned on a local level. My township could make the possession of a Playboy punishable by whipping, at which point I’d have to offer my Mrs. Christian Horner May 1998 issue to the ACF readership.

Wait a minute, bigot, you’re thinking, Justice Jackson is laying out a standard for public harm that justifies government intervention. Oh, you think the pornography and media industries don’t cause public harm? That they aren’t complicit in everything from underage rape to human trafficking? Yeah, right.

Don’t look for either of the above scenarios to play out. Instead, the activist court will “discover” a new right the government has to squash dissenting opinions on vaccines and/or Critical Race Theory, something like that. The game is largely rigged, and the agents of the State will forever increase their power until we are crushed beneath their telescreens and boots. On that much, Matt Taibbi and I are in full agreement.

Go for your guns, but you can’t go home again

remember, in the movie he’s undocumented

Good and bad news on the gun-rights front this week. The good news: an Obama appointee, U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, agreed that a Chicago resident had a right to purchase a handgun, possess it, and even fire it in the direction of looters! My God, Chicago is just like Florida now!

The bad news? The petitioner is Heriberto Carbajal-Flores, what we must call an “undocumented citizen” nowadays. Maybe it’s not so bad, really. One can’t help but have some sympathy for the man, who endured God knows what to get to Chicago, of all places, only to find in 2020 that “during a period of violent civil unrest”, people were trying to loot and rob him. So he did the natural as-seen-on-TV thing by bucking a couple shots in their direction.

Now here’s the interesting thing: how did he get arrested? I can’t find out, but it would be highly ironic if the same police who proved so feckless during the 2020 riots in Chicago were fearless in grabbing this fellow out of his home for weapons possession. Did someone snitch him out after the riots? Or was he arrested while firing at the looters? In that case, couldn’t the cops have just arrested the looters before Heriberto Carbajal-Flores fired at them, assuming they were around? See my comment above regarding anarcho-tyranny.

This is one of those rare legal rulings that has the potential to infuriate everyone. A quick check of Redditor-style sites has people fuming that gun rights are being extended, while The Federalist is fuming that gun rights are being extended to illegals. To its hysterical credit, the Federalist finished their piece by noting that DACA recipients can now join the LAPD — so in the near future it’s possible that an illegal immigrant might arrest you for breaking the law.

After some brief consideration of the matter, I’ve come to the following hasty conclusion, which you may feel free to ridicule: Heriberto Carbajal-Flores should never have been allowed in the country. And he should have been deported upon his arrest, regardless of the reason. But, if this country is going to make a policy of treating illegal immigration as a civil matter, it is dangerous and exclusionary to deny otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants the right to own a gun. Doing so turns them into prey animals, most often for their fellow illegals who have fewer scruples about following any law. Any other opinion on this matter is a de facto slippery slope to hunting illegal aliens for sport or profit.

That being said, if you come across the American border holding a rifle, you’re technically an invading soldier, and should be treated as such. End of rant.

Now for the funny part: Mexico has informed the USA that it won’t be accepting any repatriated migrants, gun-waving or not, in a response to the Texas SB4 law that allows Texan law enforcement to also enforce (via deportation) immigration law. Naturally, the Biden Administration is very insistent that Texas not enforce any immigration law, since doing so would interfere with the Biden Administration’s painstaking non-enforcement of immigration law. This week, the Mexicans chimed in:

Mexico reiterates its legitimate right to protect the rights of its nationals in the United States and to determine its own policies regarding entry into its territory. Mexico recognizes the importance of a uniform migration policy and the bilateral efforts with the United States to ensure that migration is safe, orderly and respectful of human rights, and is not affected by state or local legislative decisions. In this regard, Mexico will not accept, under any circumstances, repatriations by the State of Texas.

Like Shakespeare’s Henry V, who loved France so well that he would not part with a village of it, Mexico loves their citizens in the United States so much they aren’t going to let a single one of them come back. The question is how this will be enforced. If Texas brings the deported people to the Mexican border, and prohibits them from re-crossing into Texas, will the Mexican authorities physically prevent those people from entering Mexico? Using how much force? What if the migrants are all legally armed? After all, if they’re in possession of a firearm when they’re arrested for deportation, they now have a federal right to get that gun back. Couldn’t the migrants invade Mexico? And if they did, would that be considered an American invasion of Mexico, or a civil war? Would your opinion on that be entirely dependent on whether you think undocumented citizens are, in fact, citizens?

Situations like this are why the 4Chan edgelords of the alt-right use “Clown World” to describe the global situation in The Current Year. The most improbable situations seem to happen again and again. Like the European Union resolution enacted last week, instructing Russia to return the 91.5 tons of gold sent to it by Romania during World War I. Dmitry Medevev responded on social media by telling Europe to “fuck off” — but even if every last man, woman, and child in Russia supported the return of the gold, wouldn’t it violate the EU embargo against Russia to accept the gold? I mean, if you’re going to accept the gold, why not take a little bit of natural gas and oil while you’re at it? Send in the clowns!