New York City’s ‘Commission on Racial Equity’ Commits $500K to ‘Reparations, Truth, Healing’ Amid Historic Budget Crisis
Plus, Democrats pounce on Supreme Court voting rights ruling, demand ‘term limits for justices,’ impeachment
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is pushing for new taxes to help close a multibillion-dollar budget deficit. But the city’s Commission on Racial Equity is doling out $500,000 for a “Reparations, Truth, Healing, and Reconciliation Network” that will help produce a study on reparations to black New Yorkers as well as a “Citywide Truth, Healing, and Reconciliation Plan,” records obtained by the Free Beacon show.
The commission’s latest “progress update”—sent to Mamdani on January 15 and obtained via records request—touts among its “achievements” $500,000 committed to “community groups” to participate in the network. Thirteen organizations will receive up to $20,000 to “host community conversations to discuss the development of a Reparations study,” while another 13 will receive up to $17,500 to “host community conversations yielding input on the early development of the citywide Truth, Healing, and Reconciliation plan” and “collect truth testimony from their community.”
“The spending reflects the extent to which pricey left-wing cultural priorities have become permanent fixtures in New York City government as Mamdani’s administration struggles to balance the budget,” our Peter Hasson writes. Both the reparations study and the “Truth, Healing and Reconciliation Plan” are required under New York City laws passed in 2024. The study will “recommend reparative measures”—including “financial or in-kind restitution”—for those affected by the “ongoing impacts of slavery,” while the “reconciliation plan” is meant to help New Yorkers “publicly name and acknowledge the past, present, and ongoing harms and traumas caused by and associated with slavery,” whatever that means.
Mamdani, though, is going beyond the statutory requirements in his embrace of the government’s equity shenanigans. As he struggles to close a $5.5 billion budget gap, his preliminary budget proposal allocates $4.6 million annually to the Commission on Racial Equity and another $5.6 million to a separate Office of Racial Equity. The combined total of $10.2 million is a $3 million increase from the $7.2 million the commission and office received last year.
Six days out from the third assassination attempt on President Trump and supposed bipartisan agreement that it’s time to tone down the rhetoric, Democrats are issuing predictably measured responses to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday that virtually all race-based gerrymandering is unconstitutional.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries says an “illegitimate Supreme Court majority” is engaged in “a scheme to suppress the vote and rig the midterm elections.” Illinois governor and aspiring 2028 presidential candidate J.B. Pritzker says the Court’s decision amounts to “voter suppression that will silence Black and brown voters.” Rep. Yvette Clark (D., N.Y.), the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, says it will lead to a “coordinated attack on black voters across this country.” These are not the extremists of the Democratic Party but members of the mainstream, though the two wings are quickly becoming indistinguishable.
The Free Beacon’s Ira Stoll provides a sobering rundown of the hyperbolic reactions and notes:
Barack Obama, who was elected senator from Illinois once and president of the United States twice without needing a racially tilted district, said the decision “effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act.” Obama said the decision “serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.”
Kamala Harris, who was elected statewide in California twice—once as attorney general, once as Senator—and also was vice president of the United States, all without requiring a racially tailored district, said the decision “guts the Voting Rights Act and turns back the clock on the foundational promise of equality and fairness in our election systems.” She said “the court’s decision is motivated by politics,” calling it “part of an agenda that conservatives set in place decades ago to steal power from everyday people and then cling to that power for generations.”
Stoll highlights as an antidote the response of Utah Republican Burgess Owens, who said, “I welcome the Supreme Court’s correct decision. The left has spent decades hiding their racial obsession behind the banner of civil rights. Today, that game ends. … Everyone who is a citizen of this great country should first and foremost be an AMERICAN. Regardless of race, religion, zip code, or income, we are all Americans and should be treated as such. The left has never believed that. Today’s ruling says they no longer get to act like it.” Amen.
The Washington Free Beacon gets results.
The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division is investigating what Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon described as a “deeply disturbing” scheme—first reported in the Free Beacon—in which the Oregon county that includes Portland allocates homeless services based on race.
“This is deeply disturbing,” Dhillon wrote on X in response to the report from our Aaron Sibarium. “Civil Rights will investigate, and if appropriate, take legal action. Equal protection means just that!”
Multnomah County records obtained by Sibarium show that public housing resources are doled out using a points-based system that “awards up to 5 points to non-white, non-straight applicants who speak English as a second language.” That’s more than the 4 points the system awards to a domestic violence survivor with a young child who has been homeless for over a year. The county says the system is “designed to prioritize … BIPOC households, LGBTQIA2S+, [and] people with disabilities.” We expect that will change soon.
And Harvard Business School has canceled an AI conference that was set to feature a keffiyeh-clad Israel-hater, Amjad Masad, in the wake of Ira Stoll’s coverage of the forthcoming event. Stoll writes, “The Washington Free Beacon article reported on social media posts by Masad. It also recapped an interview he gave to the San Francisco Standard in which he said his company had a deal with the government of Saudi Arabia but would not work with the ‘illegitimate and criminal government’ of Israel.”
Harvard has now canceled the event and issued the kind of statement to which we have become accustomed from the best and brightest in the Ivy League. “Our goal at the AI Institute is to ensure the School’s alumni and other leaders have the AI knowledge, skills, and tools they need in the flow of work. We have been monitoring registrations for [the] Leading With AI 2026 conference, and they have not met our desired threshold to effectively serve our mission. As a result, we have made the decision to pivot to alternative formats and approaches,” the note says, without identifying those formats or approaches. “We look forward to communicating more about our plans soon.”
Mr. Masad also blocked Stoll on X. Was it something we said?
Elsewhere:
Maine governor Janet Mills dropped her Senate campaign against left-wing insurgent Graham Platner, a major blow to Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer, who handpicked Mills for the race.
Schumer responded to the news by saying he will “work with the presumptive Democratic nominee Graham Platner to defeat” Republican incumbent Susan Collins—hardly a ringing endorsement. Platner, for his part, pledged to “start tearing down the system.”
Louisiana governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order delaying his state’s House primaries after the Supreme Court found that Louisiana illegally discriminated by race when creating majority-black congressional districts. A new congressional map is likely to net Republicans two seats.
Remember the Department of Homeland Security shutdown? It’s over now—the House passed a bill to reopen the department after 76 days, a move that came shortly after the third attempted assassination of President Trump spurred calls to fund the agency, which houses the Secret Service.
Happy Friday, our full lineup is below.
Rotflmfjao spending what they don't have is laughable and I doubt there's any former slaves in New York City
The freed slaves after the Civil War were given reparations. Land and a mule. Doesn't sound like much, but the freed slaves that took up the offer were free. Sad to say, there were some slaves that wanted to remain enslaved.