Philanthropy, Non-Profits and Charity

Virginia’s Democrats Push More Viewpoint Censorship From The Left (Psst: That’s Unethical. Also Illegal.)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia has signed into law a bill that ends tax exemptions for Confederacy-honoring organizations in the state.

Huh. Funny, I thought the Democratic Party was the one that was running on a platform of protecting civil right, like freedom of thought, association and speech from that eeeevil, fascist Republican king, Donald Trump. Did I get that mixed up somehow? I guess I did.

“The signing by Ms. Spanberger on Monday is the culmination of a years long Democrat-led push to shake off the state’s legacy as the capital of the 11 Southern, slaveholding states that seceded from the country in the 1860s,” sayeth the New York Times in a sympathetic news story [Gift Link]that again proves there is no Democratic Party initiative so indefensible that the Times won’t try to spin it into virtue.

Awww, is Virginia all sad because of its history, and trying to erase it so nobody remembers? Tough. History is history and facts are facts. It is totalitarians and the followers of Orwell’s Big Brother who try to alter the past to confuse the public. Virginia was at the very center of the Civil War. Its citizens and soldiers were courageously trying to defend their “country” as they understood it. Those alive today who see those patriots as worthy of praise, study and honor have a fully defensible position, and even if it weren’t defensible, it is as worthy of non-profit status as any other position.

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Oh For Heaven’s Sake! The Answer To This Question For “The Ethicist” Is EA Rationalization List #13…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Too bad Prof. Appiah doesn’t read Ethics Alarms…

A particularly clueless inquirer of the Times Magazine advice columnist “The Ethicist” asks…

“I volunteer for a small nonprofit organization picking up free food from pantries and delivering it to an impoverished local community. Recently I learned that one of the directors of the organization lied to food pantry personnel to obtain more food for our clients. The pantry normally allocates one bag of food per week for each family. Our director said we were delivering to twice as many families, so each family actually received two bags a week. When asked to provide the names of the clients we were delivering to, our director gave fake names.

“I’m uncomfortable with lying to sister organizations so we can procure more food than our families would receive under the established rules. And I worry that the extra bags for our families mean that other needy clients don’t get what they need.

“When I discussed this with another volunteer, they reminded me that one bag of food could never feed our large client families and that the director’s intentions were good. Please help me sort this out.”

Both the fact that anyone would ask such a question and that a philosophy professor thinks enough readers wouldn’t know the answer makes me again wonder if I’m wasting my life trying to advance the cause of ethical decision-making.

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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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