See also: Narrative Collapse: Is Charlottesville’s James Alex Fields The Next George Zimmerman?, August 15, 2017, August 15, 2017

I don’t believe James Alex Fields Jr., 22, got justice from the U.S. court system, and I certainly don’t expect he will get mercy. [Man convicted of killing Heather Heyer in Charlottesville attack asks judge for 'mercy' by Alan Suderman, Associated Press/WJLA, June 22nd 2019] And I further believe that, to a considerable extent, this is the fault of his court-appointed defense attorneys, Denise Lunsford and John Hill.

Fields will be sentenced on Friday, June 28, for the (unconstitutional in my opinion) federal “hate crimes” to which he pleaded guilty, reportedly to avoid the death penalty—on top of his state conviction for the murder of Heather Heyer, etc., for which he already has been sentenced to an incredible Life plus 419 years.

According to AP’s Suderman:

…Fields' attorneys highlighted his difficult upbringing, but with much of the details redacted from public viewing. He was raised by a paraplegic single mother and suffered "trauma" by growing up knowing that his Jewish grandfather had murdered his grandmother before committing suicide…

On December 7, 2018, Fields was convicted of First-Degree Murder, “five counts of aggravated malicious wounding, three counts of malicious wounding and a count of leaving the scene of an accident,” and sentenced to life plus 419 years. And that was just for starters. [Neo-Nazi James Fields gets life in prison, plus 419 years, for killing protester at Charlottesville rally by Tamar Lapin, New York Post, December 11, 2018]

On March 27, 2019, Fields pled guilty in federal court to 29 out of 30 “Hate Crime” charges [Avowed neo-Nazi pleads guilty to federal hate crime charges for deadly car attack in Charlottesville by Justin Jouvenal and Paul Duggan, Chicago Tribune-Washington Post, March 27, 2019.]

As a Jew and an American, why should I even care about the fate of a neo-Nazi?

Let there be no mistake: I do think James Alex Fields Jr. is a neo-Nazi.

However, last I heard, being a neo-Nazi is not a capital offense.

So here’s why I care:

• America is supposedly a nation of laws, not men. Those laws apply to neo-Nazis, as much as everyone else;
• The Leftist and “conservative” Main Stream Media have adopted the tactic of reducing everyone who opposes white genocide to the disenfranchised status of “neo-Nazi,” “fascist,” “white supremacist,” “xenophobe,” etc.—including yours truly.
• James Alex Fields Jr. and the other Unite the Right demonstrators went to Charlottesville to exercise their First Amendment rights. Various parties, above all, Antifa and Charlottesville Police Chief Al Thomas, conspired to violently deprive them of said rights. Those parties, not Fields, are responsible for the death of Heather Heyer.
• Fields is a victim of a totalitarian campaign uniting a nationwide terrorist organization called Antifa and complicit prosecutors and judges, aided and abetted by Establishment “conservatives.” Unite the Right was one of the few groups willing to fight said campaign.

Officially, Fields enjoyed the presumption of innocence. Officially, prosecutor Nina-Alice Antony had to prove three elements:

Earlier, by Steve Sailer: Knitting Community Bans Trump Supporters In Name of Inclusivity

Fun fact: I've been crocheting since I was 10, when my Tita Lisa taught me the magic of granny squares. Fellow yarn nerds will understand the heavenly bliss of spending hours at Hobby Lobby or Walmart immersed in a sea of alpaca, mohair, angora, super bulky and super saver skeins for blankets, baby clothes, hats, headbands, scarves, bookmarks and potholders. (Yes, I've made them all!) I passed on the tradition to my artsy teenage daughter; teaming up on a Christmas afghan for my dad last year was one of my favorite ever projects.

Are you surprised? You shouldn't be. Creativity and crafting transcend political ideology—or so you might think.

This week, Ravelry.com, one of the internet's most popular gathering sites for crocheters and with a reported 8.5 million users, publicly smeared and ejected conservative members who support President Donald Trump—all in the name of protecting their preciously "inclusive" safe space. Excluding to include. Welcome to opposite world. On Sunday (there's no rest for vengeful social justice warriors), Ravelry's founders announced:

"We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry. This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content."

The progressive operators at Ravelry declared that every right-winger on the fiber arts forum who supports our commander in chief is really just a KKK domestic terrorist wielding sharp needles instead of flaming crosses and nooses. It doesn't matter whether you support the White House because you are pro-borders, pro-life, pro-entrepreneur, pro-limited government, anti-collectivist or anti-socialist.

I watched President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign kickoff in Orlando, Florida, while here in Mexico. Mexican analysts’ much-calmer analysis was quite the contrast to June 2015, when Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower and vowed to build a wall (How quaint that now seems!) Yet something else might be at work: Solid majorities of Mexicans think like Trump on immigration, the polling data show, and favor closing the border with Guatemala and deporting Central American illegals.

After Trump’s announcement four years ago, the Mexican chattering class went berserk and presented him as Mexico’s No. 1 Enemy. The mindless Trump-bashing went on for some time. But his time, those same elites delivered a much more measured message with no frothing at the mouth. In contrast, U.S. elites are still frothing over an election they lost fair and square!

What changed? I attribute the shift to five factors:

• TRUMP IS PRESIDENT: Mexico’s diplomatic relationship with the U.S. is by far its most important. Politics and diplomacy are about finding common interests, not about liking people. So Mexican officials have gotten used to the reality that Trump is president and they must deal with him.
• MEXICANS LEARNED THAT TRUMP’S BARK IS WORSE THAN HIS BITE: Like Americans, Mexicans have seen Trump fail to clamp down on illegal immigration in the ferocious way he promised.
• THE AMLO PRESIDENCY: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (“AMLO”) was Mexico’s perennial far-left candidate. During the 2018 Mexican election, we heard dire predictions that he would be in constant conflict with Trump. But that hasn’t happened. Indeed, he goes out of his way not to start trouble with Trump, not least because he wants the U.S. to pitch in lots of money for the massive international aid and development project he has proposed. And remember, as I reported in my coverage of Mexico’s election: The (relatively) right-wing Ricardo Anaya, not AMLO, was the biggest Trump-basher of the campaign. 
• DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE ON THE BORDER: Most illegal aliens entering the U.S. used to be Mexicans. Now, about 70 percent, S. border officials say, are Central Americans who enter through Guatemala, then traverse some 2,000 miles of Mexico to our southwest frontier. Grassroots Mexicans aren’t happy about it, but more on that later. Mexican analysts marveled that Trump portrayed Mexico as an ally in stopping illegal immigration. In 2015, he portrayed Mexico as the enemy.
• THE TARIFF THREAT: Trump’s recent tariff threat scared AMLO. He sent his very competent foreign affairs team, led by Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, to negotiate a deal in which Mexico committed to crack down more on non-Mexicans passing through to the U.S. There’s no guarantee it will follow through long term. But it is an opportunity to slow or stop the Camp-of-the-Saints invasion, which sent 144,278 illegals across the border in May alone [Southwest Border Migration FY 2019, CPB.gov] Of course, Trump must stay focused on the situation.

Bottom line: AMLO wants a good relationship with the U.S. and is willing to deal with Trump. The two meet in September, a confabulation that AMLO is linking, Bloomberg reported,  to the evaluation period in the tariff-immigration deal:

George Will's latest book is called The Conservative Sensibility. In the Washington Post, Notre Dame law professor Patrick Deneeen calls it a "defense of conservatism that veers toward liberalism."

He's not kidding, I looked inside it. There's a whole section that blames black problems on "redlining", which in this case refers to the FDR Administration's refusal to guarantee mortgages in black neighborhoods, that could come straight out of Ta-Nehisi Coates book.

And it's in a section defending and justifying the "Affirmative Action" created by Lyndon B Johnson.

Lyndon Johnson, the greatest presidential benefactor of African-Americans since Lincoln, advanced the nation’s thinking on June 4, 1965, at Howard University in Washington, D.C. There he delivered the most consequential speech on race ever given by an American president, and perhaps the most important ever given by a white American. Johnson’s crucial contention was that “freedom is not enough.” He declared:

“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as your desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, and bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.”

The subsequent pursuit of even incomplete fairness—there can be no other kind—has been generally noble and in many ways successful. It also has been an arduous tutorial in the truth of Michael Oakeshott’s axiom that attempting the impossible is inherently corrupting.

It would have been helpful—wholesomely disconcerting and embarrassing—if Johnson had given an example of how the federal government itself had closed to African-Americans “the gates of opportunity.” Created in 1934, the Federal Housing Administration invented and enforced “redlining,” explicitly steering new mortgages away from black buyers to maintain the racial homogeneity of neighborhoods. A 1946 FHA manual said: “Incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.” And: “Properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” And: “Appraisers are instructed to predict the probability of the location being invaded by . . . incompatible racial and social groups.”

Invaded. During World War II, when a developer sought FHA guarantees for proposed housing on the last of the farmland still within the sprawling city of Detroit, the FHA initially refused because the development would be contiguous with a black neighborhood. The developer proposed a solution: I will build a wall. It would be between his development and the incompatibles. He did; you can see it today. Mollified, the FHA guaranteed mortgages on the white side.

Almost half of all postwar suburban homes built in the United States had FHA mortgage guarantees. From 1934 through 1962, whites received 98 percent of those guarantees.

Wills footnote for these claims about FHA discrimination is: "Duggan, “Mayor Mike Duggan Keynote Address,” 2017."

Duggan is the white mayor of what's left of Detroit. His speech, in which the historical facts about the FHA may have been properly checked by his staff, is about how what happened to Detroit is white people's fault. [Duggan confronts Detroit racial history in Mackinac speech, by Chad Livengood, Crain's Detroit Business, June 01, 2017]

I wouldn’t put all that in a book based on the word of one politician, but whatever.  

So let's talk about what the underwriting policy of the FHA was about. Underwriting is about being careful with money, in this case the public money of the United States.

For example, I Googled the phrase “properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes” and discovered the text of the 1936 Federal Housing Administration, underwriting manual. The context, unmentioned by either Duggan or Will, is this:

"If a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in values." [Emphasis added]

So here’s what’s going on, apparently unclear to anti-redlining black pundit Teh-Genius Coates, and the New Model George Will: FDR’s Federal Housing Administration was not in the business of keeping the black man down, it was in the business of being fiscally responsible for government guaranteed loans. If they guaranteed a $10,000 mortgage on a house in a white neighborhood, and ten years later when you have to foreclose it’s a $4,000 house in a black neighborhood, the Federal Government was out the difference.