Kentucky Representative Sarah Stalker says white children need the opportunity to feel bad about their skin color in K-12 educational settings. pic.twitter.com/Oq85uKEpKD
What this says about her party and its ideological moorings is obvious. So is what it tells us about anyone who would vote for someone like this to have any power or influence over our society. We have had the “gotcha!” privilege debate here extensively in the 20-teens, and it was insufficiently slapped down to prevent the DEI and “presumed racism” pathogens.
The ethics mystery is why anyone white swallows this crap? I can see the advantages to minorities, since they can, by accepting it, absolve themselves of all failures, misdeeds and shortcomings. However, whites (and men) who fall for this argument are agreeing to be metaphorically hobbled, like Kunta Kinte in “Roots.” Worse, they are endorsing the hobbling of their children too.
I get why extreme, ruthless, unethical progressives push such garbage: it’s a means to an end, and the end is power. I do not understand why anyone privileged with a functioning brain and critical thinking skills tolerates officials like Stalker, never mind actually voting for her.
I know, I know: Ethics Alarms’ annual “Remember the Alamo!’ posts usually don’t start until February. But an important Alamo story with ethics lessons reaching beyond the legendary Texas battle is in the news, and attention should be paid.
Kate Rogers had been leading the $550 million renovation of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick reviewed a copy of her 2023 PhD dissertation on museums affecting history is taught in schools. “Personally, I would love to see the Alamo become a beacon for historical reconciliation and a place that brings people together versus tearing them apart, but politically that may not be possible at this time,” her dissertation stated. Patrick asked her to resign as CEO of the Alamo Trust based on that sentiment, and Rogers refused. declined. The next day, Patrick publicly called for her resignation. This time, Rogers complied.
This week, Rogers sued, alleging wrongful termination. The theory: forcing her to resign for what she wrote in her dissertation was a violation of her free speech rights. The dissertation wasn’t the whole story, however. On her watch, a social media post from the Alamo Trust had prompted this letter…
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.
“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.
So much of the nation’s cultural health and societal values rely on our fulfillment of the duty to remember. Thanks to our incompetent and unethical education system and the increasing estrangement of American history from our popular culture, recent generations share so little important historical and cultural touchpoints as Americans that effective cross-generational communication is becoming impossible. Television could be a nostrum for this dangerous phenomenon, if only finding the constructive and informative programming were not a task akin to finding, as the saying goes, a needle in needle stack.
I was thinking about this after I stumbled upon the 2022 Starz documentary, “Right to Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution,” a two-part series that I only saw because I am briefly getting Starz free on DirecTV. I missed it entirely when it was new, and have never read or heard anything about it. I haven’t seen the whole series yet either, and only watched an incomplete stretch of Episode One. But that was enough to trigger several thoughts, and to make me schedule a serious viewing of the whole thing from beginning to end.
Well, I’m defeated! Two rich and lively threads this week have produced more Comment of the Day-worthy commentary and more essays worthy of guest columns than I can possibly do justice to without them swallowing the blog.
I’m sorry. For the first time ever, I am reduced to linking to the post that sprung these exchanges, and sending interested readers to them rather than my reposting them all.
The first: Friday Open Forum, Halloween Edition. Last week’s open forum was especially lively with many topics covered, but the epic thread, started by Extradimenensional Cephalopod, began with “Premise: The United States institutes a universal basic income of $1000 per person per month, except for people who opt to remain in existing welfare programs.” Many engaged, including Sarah B, AM Golden, Old Bill, CEES VAN BARNEVELDT and Michael Ejercito.
The second: Unethical Quote of the Month: Un-Named California Lawyer. The most prolix combatants in the discussion of slavery reparations are jdkazoo123 and Chris Marschner, but there is enlightening commentary by many others as well.
Ethics Alarms thanks and salutes everyone involved in both of these discussions. They are exactly what I hoped to inspire when I started Ethics Alarms.
Gail Herriot is Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights since 2007. She is a conservative, so much of the civil rights racket (“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Eric Hoffer) objects to her existence.
Herriot recently posted the following jaw-dropping letter that she received from a member of the California Bar:
Dear Ms. Heriot,
This letter serves as a formal cease and desist demand regarding your ongoing, public, and targeted efforts to undermine and harass the Black community and its advocates for equity, in direct violation of state and federal civil rights laws and your ethical obligations as a member of the bar.
Your activities—including those publicly associated with the California Foundation for Equal Rights (CFER) (among others) and campaigns explicitly opposing Black-focused equity —constitute racial targeting and harassment under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 1981, and applicable state hate crime and anti-discrimination statutes. Such conduct is not protected expression when it rises to the level of coordinated intimidation or bias-based obstruction of legally protected programs. It is particularly egregious that your public campaigns have focused solely on efforts benefiting the Black community, while remaining silent on or even supportive of state and federal allocations to other racial or ethnic groups.
For example: In 2021 and 2022, the State of California directed substantial funding—over $165 million—to AAPI anti-hate initiatives, a commendable effort to address rising hate incidents against Asian Americans.
In 2024, the California Legislature authorized over $300 million in support for Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish community, recognizing their suffering and need for continued support.
Despite these allocations, your campaigns have not targeted or criticized these initiatives—only those aimed at repairing centuries of harm done to Black Americans, who remain the most frequent victims of race-based hate crimes nationwide according to federal data. Your selective and racially targeted opposition to Black equity initiatives, combined with your public standing as an attorney, member of a federal civil rights commission and educator, magnifies the discriminatory impact and constitutes a pattern of bias-based harassment under both state and federal law.
Accordingly, you are hereby ordered to immediately cease and desist from any further direct or indirect harassment, public misinformation, or racially targeted advocacy directed toward the Black community or programs designed to support it. Continued actions of this nature may result in:
Formal referral to state bar disciplinary authorities for violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct concerning bias, harassment, and discrimination; and
Referral to appropriate civil rights enforcement agencies for investigation under state and federal hate crime and civil rights statutes.
Please provide written confirmation within ten (10) business days that you have received this notice and that you will comply fully with its terms.
I started writing this as a comment to the lively thread that has followed last night’s post, but decided to make it a separate post because the discussion raises its own ethical issues.
The Kirk denigration since the Turning Point USA founder’s death resembles that old kids game “telephone.” You would whisper a statement into the ear of the kid next to you who would pass it along down a line of ten or more and finally compare the original message to what the last one in the line heard. Hilarity usually ensued, as the vagaries of oral communication and the reception thereof resulted in “Mikey has a crush on Sue Brandeberry” turning into “Nike is suing someone who smeared crushed berries on its brand.” “Telephone” is a benign interpretation of a lot of the slander and libel against Kirk’s character and legacy; the non-benign interpretation is that people are just lying.
In the thread, a respected commenter here sparked some angry responses by answering my repeated question in the original post [“What did Kirk do or say that could possibly justify these freakouts?”] thusly: “At a guess, it might be his statement that passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake that might have been an issue. Or his highly uncomplimentary statements about Martin Luther King Jr and the approval of his assassination. Freedom of speech and all that.”
I have heard or read several equivalent versions of that answer since Kirk’s death, and they are worth clarifying and discussing.
“Not the Bee” is a conservative commentary site that, in the spirit of The Libs of TikTok, highlights supposedly outrageous news from the political Left. It is already on thin ice with me as a source of ethics stories, in part because its tendency to mix politics with Christian proselytizing is an irritant. Another problem, which the issue at hand illustrates, is that apparently in the proprietors’ jaundiced eyes, the Right can do no wrong.
In this story, much discussed in the Axis media (of course), it was revealed that a disturbing number of leaders in the Young Republican organization are preening, juvenile assholes who think praising Hitler, joking about rape and killing Jews, and making racist slurs is funny or acceptable. These were captured in a leaked series of group chats that, it is fair to day, did not cast the future leadership of the GOP in an encouraging light, nor did it help disabuse progressives of their incessant narrative, highlighted by the previous sort-of President…
…. that Donald Trump, MAGA, conservatives and the Republican Party are aspiring fascists driven by “toxic masculinity.” I wrote of the revelation in part, “Smoking guns are no less damning whenever they surface. Politico writes, “The chat offers an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.” I don’t see how anyone can quibble with that.”
So Not the Bee, said, in effect, “Hold my beer!” “The primary point of debate is not whether the comments were morally wrong, but whether or not it should be a national news story,” it intoned. What? It certainly is a national news story, as it casts a harsh and appropriate light on the culture in some of the dark corners of the conservative movement and the mind of its participants as well as its leadership. So did the reaction of NTB, which mirrors the reflex instinct of the Axis, which is that any scandal involving Democrats is a “nothingburger.” You know, like Hunter Biden’s laptop, evidence that Obama helped orchestrate the Russian Collusion hoax, evidence of witnesses called by Liz Cheney et al. to suggest Trump incited the J-6 riot being coached, Fulton County’s DA using her pursuit of Donald Trump to fund a tryst with her adulterous lover, Joe Biden being accused of rape by a Senate staffer, more recently the astounding number of progressives who cheered the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and so on, ad infinitum.
The case, Louisiana v. Callais, involves the question of whether Louisiana’s congressional map violates the 15th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because it clearly includes two districts with boundaries based on race. The objective was to create two majority black districts. In other words, use race as the reason for determining Congressional districts.
Justice Jackson’s head-exploding argument? Giving blacks special advantages in the matter of representation was like making special accommodations for the handicapped under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Black Americans, you see, are permanently handicapped because of the crippling effects of slavery (which ended 160 years ago) and Jim Crow (which ended 100 years later, about 60 years ago.)
“So going back to this discriminatory intent point, I guess I’m thinking of it, of the fact that remedial action absent discriminatory intent is really not a new idea in the civil rights laws. And my kind of paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA,” Jackson said.
“Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities,” the DEI Justice explained. “And so it was discriminatory in effect because these folks were not able to access these buildings. And it didn’t matter whether the person who built the building or the person who owned the building intended for them to be exclusionary; that’s irrelevant. Congress said, the facilities have to be made equally open to people with disabilities if readily possible. I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here. The idea in Section 2 is that we are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system. Right? They’re disabled. In fact ,we use the word ‘disabled’ in [Milliken v. Bradley]. We say that’s a way in which these processes are not equally open. So I don’t understand why it matters whether the state intended to do that. What Congress is saying is if it is happening … you gotta fix it.”
Got it! American blacks are permanently disabled. This is the rote justification for affirmative action forever, DEI (which Jackson understandably has an affection for), and reparations for slavery. It is a jaw-droppingly demeaning characterization of black Americans, and pure stereotyping.
Her “logic” also misses an obvious and crucial point: when the 1964 Voting Rights Act was passed, the U.S. was just barely leaving the Jim Crow era. Brown v. Bd of Education was only ten years old. Inter-racial marriage was still illegal in many states. Progressives and race-hucksters like Jackson refuse to acknowledge that there has been massive progress in race relations since 1964, and they deny that progress because it means giving up their own benefits from the phenomenon of presumed racism. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Jackson’s statement marks her as a racketeer.
That quote from Jackson is damning (and it bolsters the EA case that Joe Biden was the worst POTUS ever, since he appointed this partisan hack) and should be headline news, but it’s not. Gee, I wonder why… Over at SCOTUS blog, the new proprietor, Amy Howe, provides what she represents as a thorough analysis of the oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais without mentioning Jackson’s outrageous theory at all. So far, I have only seen it mentioned on conservative blogs and news sites. In fact, I was driven to Breitbart, a site I banned for being biased and untrustworthy, to find the full quote.
Is Jackson the worst SCOTUS Justice ever? I think she’s worse than Sotomayor, which is pretty amazing, but no, I’m sure there have been worse ones in the Courts dim past. But she is pretty assuredly the worst Justice in my lifetime, and that would include the execrable Harry Blackmun, who inflicted Roe v. Wade on the nation as well as the indefensible majority opinion declaring that baseball, alone among professional sports and billion dollar private businesses, should be immune from the antitrust laws. Harry was an mediocre judge in over his head thanks to a Peter Principle Nixon appointment, but he was at least smart enough not to claim that being black was the equivalent of being disabled.
Waay back in 2012, Ethics Alarms presented “The Knight Scale,” described as a “ten point scale for rating the outrageousness of race-card sightings.” I named the scale after a race-baiting L.A. blogger who insisted that the cartoon above, suggesting that First Lady Michelle Obama was taking on imperial airs as the Obama departed for yet another lavish family vacation, was “racist.”
” Race-baiting has been one of the primary features of public discourse embedded in our culture by having a black President, was well as one with so many unscrupulous race-obsessed supporters and so much evidence of incompetence and dishonesty to try to defend. Its widespread use, tacitly approved if not orchestrated by the White House, has also contributed to the vastly deteriorating race-relations in the U.S., along with the racial distrust and anger fueling it. I have stated, and strongly believe, that this will be, above all else, Barack Obama’s legacy. The tragedy this represents cannot be over-stated. I am offering now and belatedly a revised Race-Baiting Scale, running from 1, the least offensive and significant form of race baiting, to 11, the worst and most unethical. Two notes: 1) All entries are based on the assumption that no actual racist or bigoted conduct has occurred, and 2) It is stipulated that all actual racist conduct or bias is unethical and should be called out and condemned.”
Here is the current version of Ethics Alarms Race-Baiting Scale (I’m retiring “Knight”). The race-baiting flagged in the previous post is a classic #11.
Ethics Alarms 