Required reading from around the web of the best, most interesting, or most though provoking things we’ve read:
Boyer: Black pastor calls Trump more ‘pro-black’ than Obama
“’This is probably going to be … the most pro-black president I’ve seen in my lifetime,’ Mr. Scott said Wednesday in an Oval Office meeting with the president. ‘This president actually wants to prove something to our community, our faith-based community and our ethnic community. The last president didn’t feel like he had to.’ Mr. Scott said of Mr. Obama, ‘He felt like he didn’t have to prove it. He got a pass. This president, this administration is probably going to be more proactive regarding urban revitalization and prison reform than any president in my lifetime.'”
Read more at the Washington Times.
Zmirak: Do the Koch Brothers Want Socialism? No? They’ve Got a Funny Way of Showing It
“No, the Kochs are libertarians of some expansive sort, who don’t make clear what limits (if any) they put on their anti-government zeal. So I can’t say if they’re full-on anarcho-capitalists, . . . […] . . . we conservatives, as opposed to libertarians, want to limit immigration. Why? For a list of reasons that ought to appeal to libertarians capable of thinking about the real world in the long term. Since I’m talking about political prudence, not shooting the breeze in a dorm room, let me specify that before each of the following phrases you should insert, ‘Here, today, in America, and for the foreseeable future….’ 1.Immigrants vote for bigger government and more wealth transfer — from us, to them. You know how the Vandals stripped Rome of all its treasures? Imagine it proceeding in slow motion, under cover of law. 2.Immigrants benefit from . . . 3.We have a welfare state. It’s not going anywhere . . . Now to tariffs.”
Barron: Genocide Junction
“In New York City, street co-namings—in which a thoroughfare takes on an additional, ceremonial name in honor of a distinguished figure—rarely generate much fuss, and their approval is typically pro forma. But yesterday, a city council committee voted to co-name a street in Brooklyn after Jean-Jacques Dessalines, emperor of Haiti after the island won its independence from France in 1804. […] Dessalines named himself Governor-General-for-Life and decided to wipe the slate clean. Heeding the words of his personal secretary Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, framer of the Haitian Act of Independence, who declaimed, ‘we should use the skin of a white man as a parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen,’ Dessalines ordered the murder of virtually every white man, followed soon afterward by all white women and children, in the new nation. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people were butchered in a few months.”