Philanthropy, Non-Profits and Charity

Christmas Eve Ethics Dunce: Jazz Drummer Chuck Redd

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Because he is angry at President Trump and the Kennedy Center board for adding the President’s name to the cultural center, musician Chuck Redd cancelled the Christmas Eve jazz concert at the Kennedy Center that has been a tradition for more than 20 years. “When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told The Associated Press . Redd is a drummer and vibraphone player who has presided over holiday “Jazz Jams” at the Kennedy Center since 2006.

Well, jazz musicians aren’t known for their critical thinking skills or ethics acumen. Let me get this straight, Chuck: you think a fair way to punish Trump and the board for the name change is to disappoint jazz fans in the Washington area who had nothing to do with the decision. Nice.

What an asshole.

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Encore! “From The ‘I Don’t Understand This At All’ Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I was about to write almost the exact same essay I wrote in 2019, but fortunately something deep within what I jokingly called “my brain” prompted me to check the Ethics Alarms archives and now I have an extra 45 minutes or so to spend organizing my sock drawer. Sure enough, I had published the lament before, and prompted by the same stimulus”: a New York Times news item.

Yesterday’s article (gift link!) was was déjà vu too: “MacKenzie Scott Gives $700 Million to Historically Black Colleges.” In 2019, I wrote “The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has given more than $500 million to more than 20 historically Black colleges in the past year.” That was bonkers, her current gift is bonkers, but this item in the latest Times article is really  nuts: 

“President Trump has also shown support for historically Black institutions. In his first term, he distributed $250 million in annual funding and cut more than $300 million in federal loans for the schools. In April, through an executive order, he unveiled a new White House job to oversee H.B.C.U.s. But the position currently remains vacant.

“Dr. Gasman, the Rutgers professor, said the Trump administration has sent mixed signals. The president has sought to crack down on diversity programs in education and has complained about the teaching of Black history. The funds for H.B.C.U.s and tribal colleges were announced as the federal government cut programs that support minority students in science and engineering programs and schools with significant Hispanic enrollment.

“They are willing to support Black people in Black institutions, but they are not very comfortable with Black people in white institutions,” Dr. Gasman said.”

That’s deliberately negative spin, but it’s not completely unjust. What the hell? Historically black colleges are the epitome of “good discrimination” in the hypocritical style of DEI. Howard, Harris’s alma mater (Be proud,Howard—you graduated a babbling fool!), got the largest donation from Scott, 80 million bucks. Do you know what the white enrollment at Howard is? Less than 1%! Talk about disparate impact—you know, the EEOC trick that finds invidious discrimination based on statistics alone?

Across all of the HBUCs, there are about 10% white students  and 2% Asians. I thought Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the way to ensure no discrimination based on race, was to not engage in discrimination based on race. This is undeniably discrimination based on race.

The Trump Administration should not be supporting black colleges and universities. If most of our elite colleges are a sham, spending more time on ideological indoctrination than on teaching, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities are worse. By an “in isn’t what it is” PR haze endorsed by the news media (‘Oh! They are historic! That means they are good schools, right?’ Right, just as the historic Biden press secretary Karine Saint-Pierre was “good.” They aren’t good: they have inferior standards for admission, inferior faculties, and their graduates come out with misleading diplomas) the public is led to believe that these are elite institutions too.

Ten years ago, Ethics Alarms played a minor role in saving Virginia’s Sweet Briar college from being closed by a board that decided that an all-women’s college was an anachronism and no longer needed. I argued that there were many good reasons to have all female colleges as an option for women, but none of those good reasons apply to racially segregated schools.

OK, now I am getting into the substance of the essay from six years ago, and I have frittered away some of that saved sock drawer time. Heeere’s Jack!— from 2019….in “From The ‘I Don’t Understand This At All’ Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?”

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Make no mistake: I know why they are getting a surge in donations: cynical virtue-signalling and mindless George Floyd Freakout tribute. However, like the historically black colleges themselves, the phenomenon of picking now to celebrate segregated education, and mostly inferior education, is self-contradictory. It also highlights the hypocrisy of the “antiracism” movement itself, and the incoherence of the “diversity” chants coming from the Left.

For these colleges are the opposite of diverse. They are, in fact, discriminatory in concept and execution, and to see them “thrive” while activists are demanding literal quotas in other institutions in order to create numerical demographic parity—at least—is a blazing example of how the George Floyd Ethics Train wreck is less a cultural awakening than it is an opportunistic and unethical power play fueled by white guilt and cowardice.

The front page article in the New York Times today is so full of head-banging-on-the-wall moments I ran out of head before I ran out of wall. Here are some…

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One Non-Profit With Integrity, Another Without

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

First, on the ethical side…we have The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which picked up the metaphorical baton on non-partisan defense of freedom of speech after the ACLU threw their mission away and became just another lackey for the Democratic Party.

A federal district court today dismissed with prejudice the lawsuit against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer stemming from her late and spectacularly wrong poll before the 2024 election showing Donald Trump losing reliably Republican Iowa to Kamala Harris. The lawsuit, brought by a subscriber to The Des Moines Register and structured as a class action asserted claims under Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act was fraud and attempted election interference. It was a stupid lawsuit, so Selzer, represented pro bono by FIRE, which explained that commentary about a political election, including polls, are protected speech. The court agreed that “polls are a mere snapshot of a dynamic and changing electorate” and “the results of an opinion poll are not an actionable false representation merely because the anticipated results differ from what eventually occurred.” The court also held the plaintiff had “no factual allegations” to support his fraud claim, instead “invok[ing] mere buzzwords and speculation” to support his claims.

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President Trump: The Kennedy Center, NPR, PBS…Now Fix The Smithsonian, Please

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I knew there was a reason I hadn’t been to the Smithsonian Institution for so long. Like so many other crucial institutions the apathy of sane and patriotic American allowed to become leftist propaganda weapons over the last 50 years or so, the Smithsonian, along with most of the major museums across the country, “stress on narratives over artifacts.” That’s a quote from Jonathan Turley in his annoying understated mode.

White House official Lindsey Halligan condemned the new National Museum of American History’s Entertainment Nation exhibit, writing, “American taxpayers should not be funding institutions that undermine our country or promote one-sided, divisive political narratives. The Smithsonian Institution should present history in a way that is accurate, balanced, and consistent with the values that make the United States of America exceptional.”

Gee, ya think?

That Star Wars exhibit above would have prompted me to walk out of the building. Turley comments, “I was one of those who went to the movie when it came out, and I cannot recall anyone thinking, let alone connecting, the film to Nixon or Vietnam.” Nor can I, because nobody thought that, even the most politics-obsessed. Even film reviewers, always mostly left-leaning and desperate to find hidden messages in the most apolitical films, didn’t think Jabba the Hut was meant to suggest Spiro Agnew, or something.

We’ve known this about the Smithsonian for a long time, of course, but just shrugged it off because so many other example of insidious political corruption are worse. The Institution tried to slap a war crimes narrative on the Enola Gay. It left Clarence Thomas out of the National Museum of African-American History because being conservative means that he doesn’t count.

Among the flagrant propagandizing noted by Turley:

  • The commentary tied to a 1923 circus poster, reads: “Under the big top, circuses expressed the colonial impulse to claim dominion over the world.” Ah. So those clowns were supposed to be scary…
  • The Smithsonian declares “One of the earliest defining traits of entertainment in the United States was extraordinary violence.” You know, because United States BAD. One of the earliest traits of HUMAN entertainment for thousands of years was “extraordinary violence”! That one would have also had me running for the exits. Gladiators? Bull-baiting? Public executions? Grimm’s Fairy Tales???
  • The Lone Ranger display states: “The White title character’s relationship with Tonto resembled how the U.S. government imagined itself the world’s Lone Ranger.”

Oh for God’s sake…

Fix this, Mr. President. Fire the administrators and curators, all of them. Start from scratch.

The ABA Is Defending Its Racially Discriminatory Scholarships…Of Course It Is.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Res ipsa loquitur, no?

In April, the American Alliance for Equal Rights led by Edward Blum, the scourge of affirmative action and “good discrimination” policies, filed a complaint in an Illinois federal court alleging that the American Bar Association’s 25-year-old Legal Opportunity Scholarship discriminates against white applicants. Since their skin color renders them unable to apply, this contention seems beyond debate. The question is whether, as a trade association, the ABA has a right to discriminate.

The Alliance said it is representing an unnamed white male law school applicant who says that he would apply for the $15,000 Legal Opportunity Scholarship were he not prevented from doing so because he is the “wrong” race. The ABA awards between 20 and 25 such scholarships annually to incoming law students, according to its website, which is excerpted above.

I should have covered this in April: sorry. [Believe me, if I could find a way to work on the blog full-time without ending up living on cat food and in a shack by the docks, I would.] Anyway, this kind of thing is why I do not pay dues to the ABA, and why I am suspicious of any lawyer who does. It is an interesting case. I assumed that Blum would lose if the case proceeded, and that his main objective was to shame the ABA into opening up the race-based scholarships to all. But the ABA has no shame. And I knew that.

The American Bar Association responded to Blum’s suit this week, arguing that a scholarship program designed to boost diversity among law students is protected free speech. The 25-year-old Legal Opportunity Scholarship, the largest lawyer association in the nation asserts, is protected under the First Amendment. In its motion to dismiss the ABA also claimed that plaintiff American Alliance for Equal Rights lacks standing to sue.

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Yecchh! Pooey! Instant Ethics Train Wreck In Minnesota…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Nothing but dunces, villains and fools in this tale….

1.Unethical catalyst: In Rochester, Minnesota, a state that has gone certifiably nuts, home of the George Floyd Freakout and a government headed by Knucklehead Tim Walz while voters send anti-Semitic Rep.”Fuck you!”Omar to Congress, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix was at the playground at Soldiers Field Park when she found a young black child looking through her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag. The kid is a nascent thief and needs more attentive parenting.

2. First identifiable unethical adult: Hendrix, who upon discovering the invasion of her personal property called the child a “nigger.” That’s signature significance in 2025—indeed at least since the 19th Century. She’s a low-life racist, a blight on society, and deserves to be shunned and reviled. To Hell with her.

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It Depends On What the Meaning of ‘Conservative’ Is…Ethics, Language, Law, Art and Priorities Clash in a Strange University Case

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That’s “Rust Red Hills” (1930), by Georgia O’Keeffe above. Does it seem “conservative” to you? Does “conservative” even seem like a word that can be relevant to such a painting?

Welcome to the weird court petition filed by Valparaiso University in Indiana. The school wants to be able to get around the terms of a large testamentary gift that it happily accepted in 1953. Percy Sloan donated millions of dollars and hundreds of fine art works in honor of his father, Junius R. Sloan, a famous artist in the Hudson River School. His will directed that any art acquired with the funds must be “exclusively by American artists preferably of American subjects” and “of the general character known as conservative and of any period of American art.” The University wants to sell some of the most valuable paintings it purchased with Sloan’s bequest, including the one above, to fund the construction of new dormitories.

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NOW Can We Agree That Black Lives Matter Is a Scam and a Blight on America (Which Should Have Been Obvious From the Beginning)?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

(It was obvious to me!)

Records reveal that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) has unethically and criminally used charitable contributions to enrich family members of the Black Lives Matter cabal, and of course, the leaders of the cabal themselves.

Gee. What a surprise.

Tax filings show that…

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Melinda Gates Demonstrates How Dangerous Rich People With Agendas and Hubris Can Be

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Tons of discretionary cash allows “philanthropists,” who are frequently tunnel-visioned ideologues and aspiring authoritarians, to magnify their mistakes, misconceptions, biases and delusions into widespread catastrophes, all with the arrogance that luck and good fortune so often creates. Melinda Gates, Bill’s ex, has a couple billion dollars to play with thanks to marrying well and divorcing better, and her recent op-ed in the New York Times illustrates this principle.

There are so many ominous tells in Gates’s “The Enemies of Progress Play Offense. I Want to Help Even the Match” that I don’t have time to flag them all. The headline is one: doctrinaire progressives always equate their agenda items with “progress,” which is a word that implies beneficial change. That rhetorical trick has handicapped conservative thought and policy-making for centuries, though it is demonstrably false. Communism wasn’t “progress,” it was and has been a blight on civilization. The acceptance of promiscuous sex and having children out of wedlock wasn’t “progress;” the acceptance and legalization of recreational drugs isn’t “progress;” letting aliens stream over our borders largely without interference and consequences isn’t “progress;” using abortion as a primary means of birth control wasn’t “progress.” As obvious as these conclusions should be, the “change equals progress” fiction still works, which is why the Left still employs it regularly..

Her declaration to launch her new foundation vibrates with bias as well as bigotry. “We know” she writes, “that women’s political participation is associated with decreased corruption. That peace agreements are more durable when women are involved in writing them.” No, we don’t. That’s hoary anti-male propaganda (and “is associated with” screams “Weasel words!”)

Gates deplores “the Taliban takeover” that “has erased 20 years of progress for women and girls” without having the guts to risk the ire of her progressive audience by pointing out exactly who was responsible for abandoning women to the cruelty of the Taliban. She calls U.S. maternal mortality rates “unconscionable,” which implies wrongdoing. The Times link provided in the column suggests otherwise: the problem of high mortality rates in the U.S. is substantially the result of lifestyle choices available to mothers in a free society, including women in the U.S. delaying child birth past the healthiest time to have children.

Of course Gates doesn’t have the integrity to use plain language when it conveys unpleasant facts that undercut her advocacy: her cover-phrase for being able to kill a nascent human being is “reproductive rights,” neatly skipping the “right to grow and live” component of the issue. She also revels in pseudo-science, writing, “the number of teenage girls experiencing suicidal thoughts and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness is at a decade high.” Sure, Melinda. Because of all the advances in mind-reading, I’m sure. How would one get that “number”?

And what kind of leader does Gates regard as a model for achieving her version of “progress”? “Recently, I offered 12 people whose work I admire their own $20 million grant-making fund to distribute as he or she sees fit,” Gates reveals. “That group….includes the former prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern.” Gates’ op-ed keeps referring to lost rights, yet one of her most admired people is the dictatorial former leader of New Zealand during the pandemic, who imposed draconian measures on her nation that crushed individual rights, while she sucked up to China, one of the world’s worst human rights offenders, in pursuit of economic benefits. China, of course, was responsible for the pandemic that Asdern used to expand her power to dictatorial levels.

Someone as arrogant and biased as Gates with two billion dollars to blow is like an ADD teen running amuck in a glass factory. Good luck, everyone!

The Strange Saga of “Father Justin”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The nonprofit website Catholic Answers launched an interactive AI chatbot christened “Father Justin” on April 23 “to provide users with faithful and educational answers to questions about Catholicism.”

Father Justin appeared as a pleasant white male in clerical attire, sitting with the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Italy’s Perugia province in the background. Catholic Answers said he was named for St. Justin Martyr, a second-century convert and Catholic apologist. The bot “honors real-life priests and the role they play in people’s lives,” conveying an “authoritative yet approachable” demeanor that befits “the spirit and nature of the responses users can expect,” visitors were told.

Almost immediately the thing was attacked, and not just on the basis that other chatbots have been criticized, which is—did Catholic Answers not know this?—that the damn things aren’t trustworthy and have a tendency to go rogue. The National Catholic Reporter noted that Father Justin was an apt “metaphor for sexism in the church.” “Some Roman Catholics are apparently more comfortable with the idea of ordaining a robot than they are with the possibility of a woman taking on a position of ministerial leadership,” wrote Rebecca Weiss.

What really did in the good Father, however, were his often wacky responses to questions. Again: how could Catholic Answers not see this coming? Michael Cohen used an AI assistant to prepare a legal memo for his lawyer, and nearly got his lawyer disciplined when the document turned out to be stuffed with imaginary case cites. [Thoughts: 1) Maybe the bot knew what a slime ball the disbarred lawyer and convicted perjurer is, and deliberately sabotaged him. You never know with SkyNet… 2) Which is more unethical, trusting a chatbot with legal reserach, or trusting Cohen?].

Asked if it could forgive sins, for example, the AI priest replied, “As a Catholic priest, I do have the authority to administer the sacrament of reconciliation, also known as confession,” adding that “this power to forgive sins, given to the Apostles by Christ himself, has been passed down through the centuries to all ordained priests.” “He” was not an ordained priest, however. Other questions really tripped Justin up, like this one:

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