Kamala Harris Should Defend South Bend

Update (11/1/2024): Welcome Weekly Dish readers! If you like Andrew’s style of nonpartisan liberalism and willingness to defy the polite consensus in favor of giving an honest opinion, you may like my podcast The Mind Killer. It’s a “slow news” podcast which releases every two weeks. We cover all the stories that actually matter and ignore the ones that don’t. The hosts have plenty of disagreements, but we have in common a bias in favor of individual freedom and a skepticism of government action.

The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 120 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

Episode 120 - WTF DOJ?

A few episodes ago, I warned that a Trump election win would lead to another big surge in wokeness because he validates the worst fears of the woke left and inspires people to “resist” by doing the opposite of what it is he wants. I still stand by that, because I think wokeness is by and large a cultural phenomenon.

But as we covered earlier, it’s also sometimes a legal one. In the interests of so-called “equity,” the Biden Justice Department has seemingly declared war on the concept of job requirements. This is now three separate police or fire departments that tried to implement some kind of standards for knowledge, intelligence, and fitness that the Justice Department has attacked.

This isn’t entirely an imaginary issue. In the Jim Crow South, literacy tests were often used as a thinly veiled attempt to exclude nonwhite people from public life. If your goal is to be racist or sexist, it’s not that hard to come up with some pretextual “job requirements” that are unrelated to job performance but exclude people of a certain race or sex. 

But that’s not what’s happening here. The tests that are administered by these departments are testing things you actually need to know to do the job. The questions are all about scenarios you might encounter while doing your job, and test skills such as basic math, written communication, and reading comprehension which are directly relevant to an officer’s job. The fitness tests are there because police and fire jobs are often physically demanding! It’s not sexist to say that a firefighter needs to be physically capable of lifting up a fallen beam or that a police officer needs to be capable of pursuing and restraining a fleeing suspect

The Department of Justice website has a fact sheet on “Combating Hiring Discrimination by Police & Fire Departments.” Under the heading “what types of hiring tests or criteria may violate Title VII?” it just lists “written tests” and “physical fitness tests” with no elaboration. The message is clear that the DoJ’s preferred policy is to have no clear standards, and they will prosecute anyone who does. 

This is Harrison Bergeron-level bullshit. The simple fact is that in the aggregate, men are faster and stronger than women, and for whatever reason, in contemporary America, on average, Asians are more cognitively capable than Europeans, who are more capable than Hispanics, who are more capable than black people. That’s not a problem with a test. It may not be a problem at all. It’s just reality. And the DoJ is trying to deny that reality by outlawing standards that have a disparate impact by race, which is nearly all standards. The only way to keep the DoJ off your back is by eliminating all of your job requirements and making sure you’re properly balancing your workforce by race and gender. This is similar to how many schools are eliminating advanced classes and gifted programs because not enough black kids are getting into them. 

Maryland and Durham caved to the Justice Department, but thankfully, South Bend is fighting. Because the thing is, none of this is illegal. Title VII makes it very clear that employers can use job-related tests in hiring, and these tests are obviously and undeniably job-related. But as they say, often the process is the punishment, so most departments will settle in order to avoid litigating. If South Bend can maintain their backbone, they will win this case hands down, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get some good court precedent that will shut down this DoJ practice for good. 

For now, though, Kamala Harris has an opportunity to show that she’s saner than Biden. She should schedule a press conference where she and Pete Buttigieg (the former mayor of South Bend) defend the department’s hiring practices and condemn the heavy-handed action harassment from the Justice Department. She’s shown a remarkable willingness to push back against the woke left on some issues, and this would be a great opportunity to show how her administration would be different from Biden’s. The fact that she’s a black woman would blunt the worst of the backlash, and moderates would love that she’s showing independence from Biden’s legacy of constantly caving to the woke left. This is the sort of thing that could win her the election, and if she’s smart, she’ll seize this opportunity. 

Sadly, she almost certainly won’t. But hey, a guy can dream.