How Exactly?
113 people commented on the Urban League's report. Not one of them read it. Here is the answer to the question six of them demanded.
A note before you read. This is Thursday, not Friday. Usually, you would be getting the Friday Binding. However, the OC Register story hit this afternoon, and I read 113 comments under the Facebook post and could not let it sit through the weekend.
I have been quiet this week because I have been thinking hard about where we are and what my job is inside it. That is Monday's piece. I will pick up the regular cadence from there.
— JW
“Sick of these old stubborn monkeys.”
That comment sits a few slots below this one:
“Did they bother to say how? Or just orange man bad?”
This was from the same thread, this evening. The Orange County Register posted the Associated Press story on the National Urban League’s fiftieth State of Black America report, and the readers produced 113 comments in about four hours.
I read each and every one of them before I wrote anything.
I determined that not a single comment refers to anything in the report.
Nothing about the Justice Department. Nothing about the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And nothing about Louisiana v. Callais, decided in April, which gutted the operating standard of the Voting Rights Act. Not the SAVE Act, which the AP story names by title. Nothing about homeownership, unemployment, the federal workforce, one figure, one page, or one line of the report.
However, six people demanded to know the mechanism. Roughly ten declared the report false outright.
They did not read the report.
I read every one of the 113 comments before I wrote a word of this. Not a single one refers to anything in the report.
Call it what it is
Marc Morial served as mayor of New Orleans for eight years and as a Louisiana state senator before that. A commenter called him “fat Albert.”
Really?
Another wrote “Black fatigue.”
The fatigue is all mine, pal.
Another reproduced a racial slur in full, presenting it as a historical quotation.
Another wrote that Africans and Muslims sold their own into slavery, under a post about federal civil rights enforcement in 2026.
Yeah, they wrote that.
Several wrote versions of the same sentence. Blacks do it to themselves; they hinder themselves; they have fatherless families. Then there was the black-on-black violence. Or, and the entitled mindset.
You can not claim these are edgy jokes, and they are also not political disagreement. They are the thing the report describes, posted in the comment section beneath a story about the report, by people who did not read it (ridiculous). The Orange County Register published an article asking whether Black Americans face structural barriers to advancement. Its own readers answered the question in four hours, in public, under the paper’s masthead, with no moderator anywhere in sight.
The comments prove the report.
This is also not ignorance
I want to be precise about what happened here, because the polite word for it is wrong.
Ignorance is not knowing. Ignorance is forgivable, and it is fixable, and it describes a condition rather than a choice.
Every one of these people had the document one click away. The Register put the link in the post. The AP story names the mechanism in its fifth paragraph. The full report and its executive summary sit on a public website with no paywall and no login. Reading the executive summary takes about fifteen minutes.
They chose the comment box.
Capacity failure? No, that behavior is contempt, and contempt is a decision. Somebody decided the document was not worth fifteen minutes and the comment was worth typing anyway. Somebody decided that demanding evidence and refusing to look at evidence could be the same act. Six people performed a standard of proof they had no intention of applying to themselves.
I spent twenty-three years in an institution that will not let you argue about an operation until you have read the order. Disagree with the order all you want. Skip it, and you are not in the conversation. That rule exists because people who argue about documents they have not read get other people hurt.
So here is the order. Read it. https://stateofblackamerica.org/reports/2026
Ignorance is not knowing. Every one of these people had the document one click away and chose the comment box. That is contempt, and contempt is a decision.
The mechanism
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division lost roughly 250 attorneys between January and the end of May 2025, about 70 percent of its lawyers. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon described her goal as turning “the train around and driving it in the opposite direction.” The division’s published mission statements now include protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation, keeping men out of women’s sports, and eradicating anti-Christian bias. Voting, education, and special litigation took the heaviest losses. Senator Peter Welch requested oversight hearings in April 2025 and again in October.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lost its quorum in January 2025 when two commissioners were fired. It could not issue guidance or approve major litigation until the Senate confirmed a third member in October. Andrea Lucas became chair on November 5. The commission has since deprioritized disparate impact claims and taken the position that disparate impact suits are unconstitutional.
Hold that one, because the thread gets it exactly backward. No court has held that diversity programs violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Students for Fair Admissions, Croson, Adarand, and Parents Involved addressed race-conscious college admissions, government contracting set-asides, and K-12 school assignment. An agency adopting an enforcement posture is not a court issuing a holding. Anyone who tells you different should be asked which case, which practice, which ruling, and should be expected to answer.
Louisiana v. Callais was decided April 29 of this year, six to three, Justice Alito writing. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act now requires evidence supporting a strong inference that a state intentionally drew districts to give minority voters less opportunity because of race. Section 2 operated as an effects test for sixty years. It is now close to an intent test, with a partisan-motive defense available to any state that wants it. Districts drawn to comply with Section 2 are now exposed to challenge as racial gerrymanders. Alabama is moving on two majority-Black Senate districts. Mississippi is redrawing its Supreme Court districts.
The federal workforce shrank by 271,825 employees between September 2024 and January 2026, a 12 percent contraction. Black Americans held roughly 19 percent of federal jobs while making up 14 percent of the population. Black women lost 95,371 of those positions in 2025, about a third of the total. Among Black women with bachelor’s degrees, labor force participation fell 3.5 points in one year.
Four claims. Every one verifiable from the Supreme Court’s own opinion, the Justice Department’s own website, and federal employment data. None of them require anyone to trust the Urban League about anything.
That took me an afternoon. It was available to all 113 of them.
Now the part that costs me something
I checked the Urban League’s numbers too. Two of them fail, and I am going to say so in the same piece where I defend the rest, because that is what checking means.
The report says the reconciliation law triggers roughly $500 billion in Medicare cuts from 2027 to 2034. The Congressional Budget Office did produce that estimate under statutory pay-as-you-go rules. Congress then wiped the $3.4 trillion PAYGO scorecard clean in the November 2025 law that ended the shutdown, which killed the trigger. A report published on July 30, 2026, states a canceled contingency in the present tense. That is eight months stale, and somebody should have caught it.
The report says 567,000 Black men lost jobs between November 2025 and February 2026. The arithmetic replicates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics series. Nearly all of it is a measurement artifact. BLS delayed its annual population control adjustment and folded it into the February 2026 release, which cut the measured employment level by about 1.4 million, and the agency warned against comparing February figures with earlier months. The December-to-January move alone accounts for 536,000 of the drop. There is also no October 2025 household survey, because of the shutdown, so the series has a hole immediately before the window opens.
The $87 billion in lost income paired with that number comes from the Center for Economic and Policy Research and measures something else: the annual cost of the employment gap across all Black workers in 2025. Setting the two figures side by side implies a causal chain CEPR never drew.
The claim that anti-diversity policy cost between 250,000 and 600,000 Black women their jobs in 2025 has an upper bound with no traceable source. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research found a net loss of 113,000. The Economic Policy Institute found the steepest one-year drop in Black women’s employment rate in 25 years, attributed the college-graduate losses mainly to federal layoffs, and stated plainly that why the damage concentrated on Black women remains an open question.
The wealth gap holds. The homeownership gap holds. The Civil Rights Division holds, the EEOC holds, Callais holds, the federal workforce numbers hold. The Medicare figure does not. The 567,000 does not.
Advocacy that cannot survive a fact-check hands Todd Udell a win he never has to read anything to collect.
Notice what I just did, though. I spent four paragraphs holding the organization I am defending to a standard, in public, in the same essay. Not one person in that comment section held anyone to anything, including themselves.
I held the organization I am defending to a standard, in public, in the same essay. Not one person in that comment section held anyone to anything, including themselves.
The ladder
The thread climbs, and each rung requires less knowledge of the document than the one below it.
Demand evidence without reading. Six comments. Then deny with no argument at all: fake news, a total lie, another lie, more liberal lies, no because it’s not true. Then attack the funding. “Just go see who Funds the Urban League... duh.” Then swap in a different cause, which is where the fatherless families and the entitled mindset arrive, relocating the argument to ground where the Civil Rights Division has nothing to say. Then reverse the charge: race hustlers, race baiters, “these clowns are the racist,” “the lying racists continue to promote hate and division.” Then attack the paper for printing it. Then cancel the subscription.
By the top of the ladder, the report has disappeared, and the argument is about whether a newspaper should have carried a wire story. Nobody needs to know what the story said to have that argument. That is the entire appeal.
Two commenters called the report a new narrative. The first State of Black America came out in 1976, written because Gerald Ford’s State of the Union and the Democratic response both skipped Black economic conditions. The New York Times called it “a profoundly depressing document.” Jimmy Carter adopted several of its recommendations after winning that November. The AP story gives that history four paragraphs.
They called a fifty-year-old annual publication new. The correction was one click away. Nobody took the click.
Two quotes, both broken
A commenter quoted Lyndon Johnson, reproducing a racial slur in full, on having Black Americans “voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” That line traces to exactly one source: Ronald Kessler’s 1995 book Inside the White House. Kessler got it from Robert MacMillan, an Air Force One steward, who said he overheard Johnson say it to two governors around the time of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. MacMillan was recalling the moment more than thirty years later. No contemporaneous record exists. Snopes rates it unproven.
Somebody published a slur in a public forum, under a newspaper’s name, on the strength of one man’s decades-old recollection. He did not check. He was not going to check. Checking was never part of it.
Two commenters invoked Charles Barkley. Barkley did say something close. On Michael Smerconish’s show in September 2019 he said Democrats “have been taking black people’s votes” and “only talk to black people every four years,” doing nothing in between. In the same stretch he said, “Neither one of these parties is doing a thing for poor people,” and that Republicans do not talk to Black voters at all.
They kept the half that indicts Democrats. One version had Barkley laughing at the idea that white people are to blame for everything that happens to Black Americans, which he never said, and which required inventing a claim about white people so it could be knocked down. The report names federal agencies and a Supreme Court decision. It names no race of person anywhere.
He did not check. He was not going to check. Checking was never part of it.
The subscriber
The longest comment came from a reader announcing she would cancel. It contains one accurate grievance wrapped around a demand that would end journalism.
The grievance: “I understand that you let go a lot of the local writers and now we’re looking at articles from people who don’t even live in this state.” She is right about that. MediaNews Group has cut Southern California newsroom staff repeatedly, and the Register runs far more wire copy than it did ten years ago. She is a paying customer describing a product that got worse.
The demand: “Just reflect the readership. Stop trying to put your thumb on the scale. It’s no longer true journalism when they do that. It’s propaganda.”
The story she is describing is an Associated Press report by Matt Brown that summarizes a document, quotes the organization that produced it, and quotes White House spokesperson Allison Schuster rebutting it at length. That is the standard construction, executed correctly.
Her position is that reporting the existence of a report is bias, and that the cure is for a newspaper to mirror its audience back to itself. She invoked a traditional journalism background while making that argument. Reflecting the readership is the one thing that background teaches you never to do.
She wants more local reporters and less reporting she disagrees with. Alden Global Capital gave her the first problem. She aimed at the Associated Press.
What this actually is
Two of the four answers above are voting cases. Callais narrowed the Voting Rights Act in April. The SAVE Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register, and it died in the Senate on June 4 by filibuster rather than by argument. Both will be settled by people who know what is on their ballot, in state legislative races and local ones, where the redistricting actually happens.
The 1976 report changed federal policy because a man running for president read it during an election year. That is the whole mechanism, and it has never been more complicated than that.
Somebody read the document.
One hundred thirteen people had the chance yesterday. Six of them demanded the evidence out loud. The rest called it a lie, or called the organization a hustle, or called a former mayor fat Albert, or typed a slur and hit post.
Todd Udell asked how exactly.
If he reads this completely, now he knows. He was never going to look.
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