This is a bit different from the usual Ethics Alarms quiz.
Over at Dorf on Law, a site I had forgotten about, Eric Segal poses twenty questions about how Constitutional Law should be taught from this point going forward. They are:
Education
Nah, The Democratic Party Hasn’t Become Openly Anti-Semitic! It’s Just That One of Its Biggest Allies Wants To Erase Jews From the Holocaust…
When I read about this, I was certain that some NEA-hating conservative news source was exaggerating. Nope. It is right there in black and white, as you can see above in the entry from the National Education Association’s newly released 2025 handbook. My brain found this so shocking that it refused to explode as it should have, and just went into a safety shutdown. I can’t account for the last three hours…
The nation’s largest teacher’s union is a massive contributor to the Democratic Party, a major reason why public education has deteriorated into ideological indoctrination, and a force for ill in American culture and society. It was, for instance, substantially responsible for the disastrous decision to close the schools in the midst of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck. Now it has openly proclaimed its hostility toward not just Israel, but the Jewish people.
The handbook, the NEA’s guide for the union’s nearly 3 million members, describes the Holocaust as having “12 million victims… from different faiths.” As unquestioned historical sources make undeniable, “The Final Solution” was at the core of Hitler’s extermination project. The NEA says the union will “promote the celebration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day” by “recognizing more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.” This section is on the page before the one shown above:
The NEA then promotes “Nakba” education, which describes Israel’s founding in 1948 as the “forced, violent displacement” of 750,000 Palestinians. The document further pledges to teach that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” and defends educators’ and students’ “free speech in defense of Palestine.” In case the graphic above is too hard to read, here are the key sections:
States one news source, “Critics argue the NEA is promoting a one-sided, revisionist history while ignoring the central role of Jews in the Holocaust.” This would warrant a “Ya think?” except that I have used my quote for today in the previous post. Where’s the “argument”? That is exactly what the NEA does in the handbook, and the position goes beyond unethical into evil. The group is obviously proud of its position and confident that the Democratic Party and the public supports it.
Did you know that the Republicans and Donald Trump are Nazis?
Now what? Here is what…
If the Only Value of Colleges Now Is Credentialing (Since They No Longer Educate) What Good Is a Credential With This Low A Bar To Obtain?
The answer is “Not much, if any.”
In a June 18 op-ed, Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classical Learning Test (CLT), revealed that in 2024 the College Board made sweeping changes to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) to “dumb them down.”
Among the “improvements”: the Reading and Writing section of the test was shortened from between a required 500-750 words to 25-150 words, or approximately the length of a social media post. The College Board’s reasoning? The ability to read longer passages, it insists, is “not an essential prerequisite for college.”
The exam, the Board explains, now “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.” This goal required, for example, eliminating passages from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to prevent the unfair penalizing of “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.”
Yeah, you wouldn’t want to prevent a student who can’t comprehend our Founding documents from getting a college degree. Accordingly, the optional essay was also eliminated entirely, presumably because not being able to organize one’s thoughts and communicate them clearly is no longer a prerequisite for being regarded as intelligent, able, and wise.
Torres accused the College Board of “catering to students’ declining performance and social-media-induced attention-control issues.”
Ya think?
Comment of the Day: “Return of the ‘2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck’”
AM Golden invades the realm of Ethics Alarms long-form historical ethics commenter Steve-O-In NJ with an epic Comment of the Day, and a thing of beauty it is indeed. The post also brings back many memories I would rather have left buried. Here it is, in reaction to the essay, “Return of the ‘2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck'”:
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This is a 60-plus year process in the making. Barry Goldwater ran a fairly incompetent campaign but he absolutely had the news media biting at his heels the entire time. They gushed about Bobby Kennedy in ’68, they took potshots at Nixon. By the time Reagan came along, he faced hostility from a large segment of the press and Hollywood. In the meantime, Brain Trusters infiltrated the universities and encouraging the student protest movements instead of explaining how our Constitution was designed to work, culminating in a culture 50 years later that understands its country so poorly that it gets its news from Jon Stewart who is able to ignorantly proclaim that the Constitution doesn’t say that protests have to be peaceful.
In the election of 1992, Arsenio Hall ranted in his monologue when President George H.W. Bush said he probably wouldn’t appear on Hall’s show after Gov. Bill Clinton did, yelling about what made Bush think Hall wanted him on his show. Open hostility over who may or may not be a guest on Hall’s show paved the way for the venom spewed on every Late Night show today.
Believe all women? Not if they accused the first “black” President, Bill Clinton, of sexual harassment and even rape. “Anyone can drag $100 through a trailer park,” right? Bubba was caught with his pants down and allowed us to be caught with ours down on 9/11/2001 when he blew off an offer to hand over Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the culture wars were heating up and Americans were becoming concerned about the country’s direction.
George W. Bush – faced with a supremely hostile news media and entertainment industry – endured screeds about stolen elections, fake Presidencies and two mocking cable television shows (“That’s My Bush!” and “Lil Bush”) before he gained some respect after 9/11, but never really got the credibility he deserved. In pop culture, far too many Bush-deranged Harry Potter fans believed they saw the myopic Ministry of Magic’s denial that the evil Voldemort had returned in the efforts by the Bush administration to urge vigilance in watching out for terrorists. Ah, remember when J.K. Rowling was the voice of truth? The damage to the American public’s understanding of the Constitution, particularly the Judicial branch, continued apace
Bob Dole and John McCain were treated as racist, sexist old men who would put this country into a Nazi theocracy; Mitt Romney was framed as a racist, sexist and religious nut who would send this country into a weird Mormon Nazi theocracy. All three were all virtually Hitler.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama was the be all and end all of existence. He who could do no wrong—and could not be touched because he had black skin and anyone who criticized him was a racist—took full advantage by damaging America on the world stage and inciting racial divisiveness on a scale that hadn’t been seen in 50 years.
When Donald Trump was campaigning in 2016, the news media covered him incessantly. It now appears that they wanted him to be the nominee because, in the words of Stephen Colbert on the day my family and I sat in his audience in NYC on a hot July day as he did a riff on how corrupt Hillary Clinton was, “Hillary so corrupt the only candidate she can beat is Donald Trump!”
It turned out she couldn’t even do that.
So the forces that had been coming together for 60 years—the biased news media, the leftist entertainment industry, progressive-dominated academia and other elite, corrupted professions coalesced into a single so-called Resistance Movement. Trump says people coming through our border with Mexico aren’t all angels, they accuse him of saying all immigrants are criminals. Trump says not everyone protesting in Charlottesville was a racist Nazi, he’s accused of “bothsidism” and pestered endlessly about condemning white supremacy even though he did condemn it. Trump is falsely accused of colluding with a foreign power, leading a big chunk of the population to believe his Presidency is the result of another stolen election.
One More Reason To Despise The Unethical American Bar Association…
The Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative pubic interest law firm, commissioned research that demonstrated how the American Bar Association pressures law schools to adopt race- and sex-based hiring and admissions preferences using the threat of withholding its accreditation. The ABA oversees U.S. law school accreditation—this should stop—and abuses its power and woke biases to dictate law school discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity and gender in violation of Title VI and the U.S. Constitution. The report is titled,“Unconstitutional Accreditation Pressures Force Law Schools to Discriminate against Faculty and Students.”
Revisiting “I Don’t Understand This ‘Niggardly Principle’ Story At All…Or Maybe I Do and Am Just Afraid To Accept the Truth”
The Rest of the Story: I’m reposting this essay from almost exactly a year ago because the Free Press has a disturbing update on Holden Hughes (“He Was Falsely Accused of ‘Blackface.’ It Derailed His Life.”), one of the boys whose 2017 selfie was used by an unidentified woke ethics villain to have the children tarred as racists during the George Floyd Freakout in 2020. That ethics villain was an ideological compatriot of my friends who are raving about MAGA and Trump today. That is their “side.”
He’s an adult now, but Holden’s life plans were seriously derailed when the private school he was attending expelled him, not because he really was wearing “blackface” in that photo (he and his friends were smeared with green anti-acne facial masks) but because the woke head of the school believed that appearances mattered more than reality. Last year, a successful law suit by his family against the school ended in a one million dollar verdict for him and another one of the boys. That was just money, however, the damage remained
Everyone should reflect on this cautionary tale (which the mainstream media scrupulously avoided reporting on, and you know why) when the Trump Deranged claim that progressives defend democratic values and deplore ideological bullying. The piece ends,
Last year, shortly after the lawsuit was settled, he started dating a girl he liked. On their second date, he told her about his past and after that, he said, she stopped responding to his texts. He told me that it’s hard to accept that “something completely out of my control kind of inhibits that relationship from going farther.” But he can’t change the past.
“It’s my life, and there’s no avoiding that. It made me who I am today.”
Throughout the entire ordeal of the last five years, Holden told me he would remind himself: “I know who I am. I know my values. I know the real story.” He knows the other story—the one that isn’t true—will continue to haunt him. “I don’t think it’s ever gonna leave me,” he said. But he wanted to speak to me because he believed that putting his story in print, knowing it would be on the internet forever, would be cathartic. For him, it is a chance to finally set the record straight, after trying to hide the lies for so long.
“I am not ashamed of anything that happened,” Holden said. “I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. I make them every single day, but doing an acne face mask in eighth grade was not one of them.”
Here is the post, from May 11, 2024:
Now get this: In 2017, three 14-year-old California teens, two of whom, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, were about to begin attending St. Francis High School, a Catholic private school in Mountain view, were modeling anti-acne medicinal face masks that involved smearing dark green goo on their faces. (One of the boys had severe acne and his friends put the stuff on their own faces in an act of support). The teen who wasn’t headed to the private school snapped a selfie because the boys thought they looked funny. A similar photo taken a day earlier indicated that they had tried white medicinal face masks as well.
A student at St. Francis found the image online and uploaded it to a group chat in June 2020. Not only was the George Floyd Freakout in full eruption, but the photo was circulated on the same day that recent SFHS graduates had posted on Instagram a satirical meme pertaining to Floyd’s demise, so the school was “triggered.” The gloriously woke student who decided to publicize the greenface photo claimed that the teens were using blackface; “another example” of rampant racism at the school, he posted, and urged everyone in the group chat to spread it throughout the school community—you know, to cause as much anger, division and disruption as possible.
I can’t find the name of that charming kid. He’ll probably be Governor of California some day.
Soon after this seed was planted, the Dean of Students at St. Francis Ray called the Hughes’s and Aaron Hartley’s’ parents to ask them if they were aware of the photograph. They explained that the teens had applied green facemasks three years earlier, long before the non-racial Minnesota incident that had no demonstrable racial significance and definitely no relevance to blackface. The parents added that the teens’ use of the acne medication had “neither ill intent nor racist motivation, nor even knowledge of what “blackface” meant.”
Popcorn Popped! Can’t Wait to Watch Zohran Mamdani Try To Spin His Way Out of THIS…
When I first saw the headline, I assumed that it had to be from Brietbart or one of the other untrustworthy conservative news sources that I will no longer peruse. But it was the New York Times that yesterday evening ran a story headline,“Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application.” The piece tells us, as a high school senior in 2009, Mamdani, the presumptive Democratic candidate for NYC mayor, applied to Columbia University after claiming that he was “Asian” and “Black or African American” on his admission form. The story adds the obvious:
“Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.”
Comment of the Day 1, “All That Jazz” Edition: “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”
The recent essay about the efforts of an apparently bonkers music school to apply DEI policies to the jazz world was really a “Bias Makes You Stupid” post, and perhaps I should have framed it that way. After all, nobody, no institution, no profession, no workplace “needs” DEI discrimination. As my father would say, the nation and society need DEI “like a hole in the head.” In fact, DEI is a metaphorical hole in the head of the nation allowing core American principles to leak out.
I found Sarah B’s Comment of the Day, prompted by Chris Marschner’s comment regarding the correlation between jazz improvisation ans mathematics ability, both fascinating and, as usual with Sarah’s comments, illuminating. (I also found the context of her use of the phrase “toot my own horn” brilliant. )Here it is, in response to the post, Does Jazz Really Need DEI?:
…
As a woman musician and mathematician (my husband would claim engineers aren’t mathematicians, but the lay person sees no difference), I think there is one aspect of Jazz that you are forgetting. I tried Jazz and not only do I hate the sounds of Jazz (I like Chopin, Beethoven, and Holst as my personal preference), but I also found the emphasis on improvisation impossible. I cannot improvise music, or anything really. I have no skill at making up music, though if you give me sheet music not horrendously above my level, I’ll play it for you, at least with adequate practice. I can sing nearly anything (in my range) that you can throw at me in at least seven different languages, and with a little time, I can do them from memory. I have a repertoire of several hundred songs that I can pick up and perform adequately on a given day without much more than a little warmup. I read soprano and bass clefs before I read English (my only language). I dabble in 7 instruments, with 2 of those mastered “enough”.
All of this is not to toot my own horn. I have much I could do to improve my music, but I have other priorities and I am happy at “good enough”. However, with all this musical study, I have found that while I can do a lot, I CANNOT improvise, nor can I make up my own lyrics. This means that Jazz musicianship is beyond my reach. It takes a different type of mind than mine to be a good Jazz musician, and not just someone who knows the math and the theory. There is another element besides musical and mathematical thinking, that of a certain type of creativity.
Ethics Quote of the Week: Prof. Glenn Reynolds
“Most of the economic benefit of colleges and universities, and especially of elite ones, is distributional in nature — that is, wealth flows toward people who have the credentials they offer, but the credentials don’t actually promote wealth, they just get you past the gatekeepers.”
—-Conservative law professor and pundit Glenn Reynolds on his substack essay, “What is College Good For?”
Essentially Reynolds, who is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law can be fairly called a representative of our system of higher education himself, so his searing critique deserves some attention an thought. I appreciate the essay because I have long held the conviction that college itself is a fraud on the American people, distorts our power and economic structure away from merit and talent and toward wealth, elitism and purchased credentials that don’t mean what they pretend to mean, and a lifetime of experience as a student, graduate, employer and organization creator and leader supports and continues to confirm that conclusion.
Reynold is right. His analysis would have been right 40 years ago, when I stood up at a D.C. conference of “educators” and asked why all the discussion had focused on secondary school and college diplomas being essential to get “well-paying jobs”and none of it—literally none—about making our rising generations curious, competent, diligent, literate, analytical, creative, erudite, better thinkers and better citizens. The whole conference room booed me! It’s one of my most cherished memories. It also was signature significance regarding the fraudulent nature of the American education system.
Prof. Reynold gets it, and, not to diminish his essay, but it shouldn’t be so hard to get. The scam continues to thrive because the people who haven’t been to college don’t realize what a waste of time, resources and money it is in so many ways, and those who use the degrees as golden ticket credentials don’t have the integrity to admit the truth.
Reynold begins,
Here Is How Arrogant and Delusional Harvard Is: It Really Thinks It Can Prevail In Public Opinion Over The President of the United States…
The Harvard Alumni Magazine arrived yesterday. Above is the cover and the illustration for its feature section about the University’s “resistance” to President Trump’s completely reasonable, responsible and justifiable demands that the most visible, influential, prestigious and wealthy university in the United States stop dedicating itself to undermining American values, indoctrinating students in anti-American biases, provide intellectual diversity on its faculty, cease discriminating against whites, males and Asians, and stop enabling flagrant Jew hatred on campus.
To Harvard’s credit, the alumni magazine makes a pass at even-handedness, even highlighting an alumnus who writes that “no private institution has a right to demand that taxpayers fund discrimination, exclusion and intolerance.” But most of the issue is devoted to familiar anti-Trump victim-mongering, including an essay extolling the work of a non-binary (or something) professor “whose data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.”
“Authoritarianism” has joined “sexism,” “racism,” “violence,” “insurrection” and other rhetorical weapons of the Left as infinitely flexible accusations steeped in double standards. A President who uses his constitutional powers to pursue policies the Left opposes is an “authoritarian.” A President who weaponizes the legal system to imprison and persecute his political opposition is not—as long as he is a Democrat.
I mean, just to pull a fantastic hypothetical out of the air…
Ethics Alarms 