RUSH: The Supreme Court today, this is pretty big. ‘The Supreme Court today rejected integration plans in two major public school districts but left the door open for using race to assign students in limited circumstances,’ and that’s because of a concurring opinion written by Anthony Kennedy. It’s a 5-4 decision here, Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court’s judgment. ‘The decision in cases affecting schools in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle could imperil similar plans in hundreds of districts nationwide, and it further restricts how public school systems may attain racial diversity. … Yet Justice Anthony Kennedy would not go as far as the other four conservative justices, saying in a concurring opinion that race may be a component of school plans designed to achieve diversity.’So we have to be careful. Kennedy writes this concurring opinion saying that this school district went too far, but at times race can be a factor. So he pulled an O’Connor here. We won the case, but what Kennedy’s concurring opinion means is that we’re not quite sure how deep the precedent goes, but it still is big.
Dingy Harry, the left, has gone bonkers over this. Harry Reid made the following statement today in response to the decision. ‘The Supreme Court decision in the school desegregation cases is appalling. Ever since Brown v. Board of Education, it has been settled law that the Constitution requires racially mixed schools. Today’s decision turns Brown upside down and ignores decades of constitutional history. If this isn’t judicial activism, I don’t know what is.’ (Laughing.) Folks, I love this. This is judicial restraint that has reined in judicial activism and the left knows it, and they are bonkers out there. ‘The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,’ said the Chief Justice John Roberts in his opinion.
Now, in a further illustration of the value of this program, what is at stake here? What was this all about? The notion here that diversity makes great communities, that diversity, putting people that are not like each other in whatever way, why, that is what strengthens our society. Well, is it? Robert Putnam is a Harvard political scientist, is the author of a book called ‘Bowling Alone.’ John Leo wrote the piece here. Putnam is ‘very nervous about the release of his new work. Understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating impact on social capital, the fabric of associations, trust and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. … What he fears – correctly – is that his work on the surprisingly negative impact of diversity will become part of the immigration debate,’ even though he finds that in the long run people do forge new communities and new ties.
‘His study found that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups. Trust, even of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. The problem is not ethnic conflict or worse racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: ‘In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ – that is, to pull in like a turtle.’ In 41 sites studied in the U.S., the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This was true in communities large and small, from Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Boston to Yakima, rural South Dakota and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70-80 percent. … Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations,’ he says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend ‘to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.’ Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings ‘may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.” And I, frankly, think that was the goal.
I think the left is trying to destroy the distinct American culture, and I think all the forced busing and the race-based quotas, affirmative action, is designed to create agitation among people. I think it’s designed to put people in situations of drama and angst, because it’s said that you’re racist or bigoted or sexist if you just want to hang around with people you like. Now, this article is not about the schools. They did this study worrying about the impact on immigration and immigration debate, and he’s afraid that his research would harm the amnesty side, so he was afraid to release it. He eventually did, but he was afraid of the outcome. The point that I’m trying to make here with all this is that if you take the school ruling today from the United States Supreme Court, and the whole point of all of this putting people together, busing them away from their homes, making sure schools have, quote, unquote, diversity, if it can happen in communities, it can certainly happen anywhere else. So the idea, the whole premise here that diversity works, that diversity — and you know that that’s a huge liberal premise. They love this, because they love victims, and they love minorities and they want to punish majorities, wherever and whoever they are. And because the majority, they fear has the right to hang with who they want to hang with, buy what they want to buy, to do what they want to do, it’s just not right. So they want them to have misery in their lives as well, as though the majority never does have misery in their lives, but liberalism is all about spreading misery equally, and they call that fairness, or equality or what have you.
‘Putnam has long been aware that his findings could have a devastating impact on the immigration debate. Last October he told the Financial Times that he delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.’ So he knew what he had, but he didn’t want to release it ’til he could come up with ways to compensate for it, with other suggestions and ideas. ‘He said it ‘would have been irresponsible to publish without that,’ a quote that is likely to raise eyebrows. Academics are not supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.’ So the notion that diversity is a net positive on the way cultures and societies work has been disproven by a Harvard political scientist. I wanted to share that with you today. I had it in the stack a couple days. I wanted to share that with you in light of the Supreme Court decision today because race-based assignments to schools is nothing more than the left trying to achieve diversity. Whether it works or not, it’s just judging things the way they look, not how they work. It’s judging them on their intentions and their big-heartedness and their goodness as good people, rather than judging the results of what they do.