“I will strive to promote health equity. I will actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”
No, this is not a sick joke. No, I am not making this up. Yes, our institutions of higher education really are in the clutches of maniacs who think this kind of indoctrination is part of their job.
I’m afraid I don’t know enough about fencing to comment as intelligently as I need to regarding this episode, but I’m going to charge on anyway…
USA fencer Stephanie Turner was scheduled to face Redmond Sullivan at the Cherry Blossom Fencing Tournament held at the University of Maryland. As the match was about to begin, however, Turner “took a knee” and removed her mask, signifying that she would not compete against Redmond the Division 1A Women’s Foil event. Redmond, you see, is a formerly male fencer who has recently “identified” as female. Turner had decided that as a matter of principle she would not compete in women’s fencing against a “man.” “I saw that I was going to be in a pool with Redmond, and from there I said, ‘OK, let’s do it. I’m going to take the knee’,” she explained
After her protest, Turner was slapped with a “black card” signifying that she was suspended and out of the tournament.
“I knew what I had to do because USA Fencing had not been listening to women’s objections,” Turner said. “I took a knee immediately at that point. Redmond was under the impression that I was going to start fencing. So when I took the knee, I looked at the ref and I said: ‘I’m sorry, I cannot do this. I am a woman, and this is a man, and this is a women’s tournament. And I will not fence this individual.'”
U.S. Fencing responded with a wokey, weaselly statement undoubtedly drafted by the DEI Dept.:
Here it is: “Can Male Authors Publish Books Under Female Names?”
Well, of course they can, but the real question is little better. “I’ve recently heard some sharp comments from friends about male authors publishing books under female names. The pseudonyms are sometimes gender-neutral, but in genres dominated by women, readers assume that these writers are women too,” blathers “Name Withheld.” ” I know there are historical examples of the inverse: female writers using male names or gender-neutral names that are assumed to be male. But are these equivalent? Whatever difficulty male authors may face in majority-female literary genres today cannot compare to women’s historical struggle to live a public life. Is it unethical for these male authors to present themselves this way?”
The Pentagon has eliminated lower physical fitness standards for women in combat units via an order by Defense Secretary Hegseth announced yesterday. All physical fitness requirements for combat arms positions will now be be “sex-neutral.” Well, a) GOOD!, and b) Why did anyone ever think it made sense to have it any other way?
The New York Times, being pathetic, spins like crazy to make the order sound mean and discriminatory as well as harmful. The order “is likely to significantly reduce the number of women who meet the requirements,” the paper sniffles, and is “likely to hinder the recruitment and retention of women in particularly dangerous military jobs.” So what? The military sets standards for being qualified for combat, and having different standards for different groups is the epitome of DEI idiocy. Hegseth “argued that women should not be allowed in combat units if they could not meet the same fitness standards as men,” sayeth the Times. Why would he have to argue that at all? What’s the counter-argument? I don’t see one.
On June 3, 2022, the young protestor above tied her neck to the net during a tennis match at the French Open, with her shirt reading “We Have 1028 Days Left” sending the critical message to the world that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had decreed that if massive de-carbonization was not implemented before that (literal!) deadline, it would be too late to save the planet from a climate change apocalypse.
The 1,028th day was last week, Thursday March 27, 2025. Does that young woman feel ridiculous? She should. Now, she probably is one of those fanatics who won’t procreate because children are bad for the environment, but if she does, her kids will have a ball with that photo. I know I would have, just as if there was a photo of my mother as a teen dressed as a banana, or my father with dicks on his face after having them drawn on while he was asleep.
The Totalitarian Left in the U.S. has been citing “science” to justify irresponsible policies for years, indeed decades, and accountability is at hand. If the science of climate change is so “settled,” why are all the predictions and deadlines proven ridiculously false? Even our currently under-educated, critical thinking deprived rising generations are smart enough to figure out a con when they see, well, when they see the same con over and over again. Here’s an article about how the Great Barrier Reef that we were told was being destroyed by global warming (Science!) has more than doubled in a decade and its size and health is the highest ever recorded.
I admit it: this post is putting the cart before the horse. I need to complete a post about the leftist lawyer freak-out over Trump targeting ostentatiously anti-Trump, anti-Republican, pro-Axis law firms by handing them the just desserts for their abandonment of legal ethics and core professional principles to pander to the Democratic Party’s cabal over the past 15 years or more. But I am a bit short of time and energy right now, and Professor Vermeule, that rarity of rarities, a conservative Harvard professor, has done some of my work for me.
Last week, more than ninety members of the Harvard Law School faculty issued a joint letter supposedly concerning the “rule of law,” but actually embracing the same double standards and anti-Trump bias I have been witnessing from my lawyer friends on Facebook and especially in the online discussions among members of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers. It said in part,
“The rule of law is imperiled when government leaders:
single out lawyers and law firms for retribution based on their lawful and ethical representation of clients disfavored by the government, undermining the Sixth Amendment;
threaten law firms and legal clinics for their lawyers’ pro bono work or prior government service;
relent on those arbitrary threats based on public acts of submission and outlays of funds for favored causes; and
punish people for lawfully speaking out on matters of public concern.
While reasonable people can disagree about the characterization of particular incidents, we are all acutely concerned that severe challenges to the rule of law are taking place, and we strongly condemn any effort to undermine the basic norms we have described….”
This is disingenuous posturing by partisan academics pretending to be neutral patriots. Professor Vermeule called them out on their pretense, writing in part in an open letter to his own to students and the public,
“[A] long-withheld report from the Biden Administration directly contradicted the claims of climate change used to limit increased U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The suggestion is that this was an knowing effort to cap carbon admissions rather than carbon emissions. The impact that new U.S. LNG exports have on the environment and the economy was reviewed by U.S. Energy Department scientists and completed by September 2023. It appears that neither President Biden nor Secretary Jennifer Granholm liked the science or the conclusions. Rather than “follow the science,” they buried the report while allegedly making claims directly refuted by their own experts…The draft study, “Energy, Economic, and Environmental Assessment of U.S. LNG Exports,” found that, under all modeled scenarios, an increase in U.S. LNG exports and natural gas production would not change global or U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. It further found that it would not increase energy prices for consumers. Biden and Granholm reportedly buried the report and then announced a pause on all new U.S. LNG export terminals in January 2024, citing the danger to environmental and economic impacts.”
Gee what a surprise.
But seriously folks, anyone who is even faintly surprised at this development hasn’t been watching, listening or paying attention to either the “science of cliamte change” or the debate over energy policy. What is far from “settled science” is deliberately presented as a consensus. Policies that harm the U.S. economy and consumers have been regularly inflicted on the nation as pure virtue-signaling to the Left, with full knowledge that they can’t possibly have any effect on the world’s climate, present or future. And revealing that the Biden Administration engaged in public deception….well, this is a group that regularly manipulated government employment figures, Wuhan virus pandemic statistics and social media to control public opinion as much as as possible.
Heck, this is a group that hid who was really wielding power in the White House! Hiding a study that doesn’t support a Democrat-Progressive world view? Totalitarianism 101, and the Democratic Party is poisoned by a totalitarian-trending political culture now, as we repeatedly saw during the last four years.
My only problem with Turley’s analysis is that it is thinly sourced, because apparently only Fox News has covered the story so far. I searched for it at the New York Times site: nada. If the story is somewhere in the Times, then the news story is being buried like the study itself…or this is another example of the partisan divide in our unethical “journalism” making it impossible for the public to find out what’s really going on.
This story has been officially designated an Ethics Train Wreck, and I may have to post further on it yet. Once again, we are at the infuriating point where it is impossible to get an un-spun, un-distorted, straightforward explanation of what the issues are, with most conservative news sources downplaying the episode and most Axis sources gleefully “pouncing.” Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has hardly been candid, with the White House Paid Liar being particularly egregious in that respect.
While I generally agree with the flow of the commentariat here, I think there is a massive difference between what Hillary Clinton did, and what Pete Hegseth did, and that progressives are ethically estopped from being smug about this. I’ve shifted even more on this since the hearing yesterday.
First off, I think it’s helpful to articulate what people actually did:
With Trump officials, the President, his paid liar Karoline Leavitt stating, and both John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard swearing under oath that top US officials discussing operational details of plans to bomb Yemen before the operation miraculously did not contain any, classified information, The Atlantic today released much of the transcript as collected by editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a new article. I haven’t read the whole thing because I will not give a cent to The Atlantic, now one of the most notorious Axis allies. But the excerpts I have read elsewhere are hardly the discussions of favorite recipes for guacamole.
The Guardian, another hack Axis member, calls the texts “disastrous leak of sensitive information.” Fake news, via deceit. Because of dumb luck, the sloppy and unforgivable way an approaching attack was discussed had no “disastrous” effects except for the degree to which it showed incompetence and recklessness by Trump’s national security leaders, and the fact that the reaction of the Administration, including the President, has been to emulate the Democrats’ “It isn’t what it is” playbook should set off ethics alarms coast to coast.
In the interest of time—mine—I’m going to list the relevant developments and my observations as bullet points, with the full knowledge that I will be posting on this again, and probably soon. So here we go, into the wreckage…
Ethics Alarms 