Race

Unethical Quote of the Month: Un-Named California Lawyer

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

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.
 
Warmest Regards,

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Addendum: “And the Charlie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck Rolls On…”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

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.

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This Is How Websites Get Blacklisted on Ethics Alarms: “Not The Bee’s” #22 Rationalization Orgy

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“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.

Not The Bees’s device? Why, go right to #22 on the Ethics Alarms Rationalization List:

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Worst Supreme Court Justice Ever?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

During the oral argument at the Supreme Court regarding the constitutional challenge to Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, President Biden’s sole appointment to the Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, proved that the suspicions raised by some of her dissents that she is a knee-jerk progressive incompetent were well grounded. Are you ready? Heed Sam’s warning!

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.

Sears Cartoon Addendum: The Ethics Alarms Race-Baiting Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

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.”

I revised the Knight Scale in 2017, writing in my introduction that…

” 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.

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Ethics Quiz: FREEDOM

/ Jack Marshall / 74 Comments

Libs of TikTok…you know, that account that progressives call racist and homophobic and transphobic even though it only re-posts damning evidence of woke lunacy from TikTok and other platforms?…posted an email exchange between Arbor Creek Elementary Principal Melissa Snell and an (unnamed) individual in which Snell indicated that “Freedom” T-shirts were banned in her school.  “I just want to make sure that you have told your staff to not wear those ‘Freedom’ shirts to school anymore. Thank you.” Jonathan Turley confirmed that there is such a ban, though it may be temporary. Superintendent Brent Yeager confirmed the emails that Libs of TikTok had postedbut suggested that it was temporary as Snell “reviewed district practices.”

Turley says there is nothing to review.”I fail to see why Snell had to suspend the wearing of such shirts pending review. “This is clearly a content-based limitation on speech,” he writes.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Georgia Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

“Diversity involves recognizing, including, celebrating, rewarding and utilizing differences of gender, race, ethnicity, age and thought – sweetening and often strengthening the pot.”

—-The Georgia Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism in the document supposedly designed to give Continuing Legal Education trainers (like me) guidance in preparing seminars on “professionalism,” exemplary conduct that goes beyond the Rules of Professional Conduct to bolster public trust and the reputation of the legal profession.

What utter, illogical, embarrassing, unethical, woke garbage this is…and from a judicial commission no less! I dare anyone to defend it. The putative author is someone named Karlise Y. Grier, who is supposedly a lawyer, and lawyers are supposed to be trained in critical thought. Gee, I wonder if…[checking]….of course she is. Only the undeserved beneficiary of such nonsense could endorse it so fatuously.

I’m going to be teaching, not for the first time, a professionalism seminar for Georgia lawyers, who are among those in the few states that require special “professionalism” credits. I had to read, in due diligence, the guidelines for such programs in Georgia that almost took longer to read than the course will last (one hour) because it was full of bloated bureaucratic babble. It is a professional requirement for lawyers to write clearly, but most don’t, and this thing was a disgrace. Nothing was as bad as that paragraph above, though.

What does “recognizing” differences in gender mean, and what does it have to do with the ethical practice of law? (Hint: Nothing.) Lawyers should treat all clients and adversaries the same regardless of race, gender or other group characteristics. Is that paragraph saying that Georgia lawyers should be able to tell a man from a woman? Is this a problem in Georgia?

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Tales of The Great Stupid: Race-baiting Serena Williams Shows “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” Like Harmonious Race Relations

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Why in the world would Serena Williams, of all people, think it is necessary or appropriate to engage in public race-baiting? The woman is rich and famous, and became a national idol playing a sport that has an overwhelmingly white fan base. Never mind: Serena was triggered when she encountered a decorative cotton plant (reportedly fake) in an un-named luxury hotel. The retired women’s tennis legend, now 43, took a video of the vase holding a cotton plant on a table in the hallway, and asked her Instagram followers, “Alright, everyone. How do we feel about cotton as decoration? Personally for me, it doesn’t feel great.”

Yeah, you’re right, Serena, the New York hotel placed a cotton plant in the hallway to slyly remind you that 150 years ago black slaves were forced to pick cotton in states hundreds of miles away. I think you should organize a boycott and start a protest organization called Cotton Plants Matter.

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Charlie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck Update, 9/21/2025

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I have to say that I’m pretty sick of hearing and reading about Charley Kirk. The hagiography on the Right and the desperate spinning from the Left, which fears, with considerable justification, that the activist’s assassination will be a devastating tipping point that will doom their prospects in the 2026 election, are both relentless. The Kirk memorial service i is being compared to a state funeral, and that diminishes the tradition and the status of state funerals. Whatever Kirk was, he was not a national public servant. He wasn’t Charles Lindbergh either. The Democrats approached this level of creating exaggerated status when they held a Capitol Rotunda viewing for a Capitol police officer on the pretense that he was killed by the mob on January 6, 2021. He wasn’t, but the charade was all part of the coordinated effort to demonize Republicans, just as the deification of Kirk, a partisan organizer, is a Republican effort to show that the American Left approves of and encourages violence as a political weapon. (It does, you know.)

The obvious comparison is with George Floyd, but like most obvious comparisons, it’s not valid. To begin with, there really are good reasons to mourn Kirk. George Floyd was a blight on society, if an insignificant one. His ambiguous death was brilliantly exploited despite the fact that it signified nothing except that some cops aren’t very good at their jobs (we knew that). Floyd’s death didn’t result from racism or bigotry. Sure, the lifetime petty crook and drug addict’s life “mattered,” but it didn’t matter enough to him to do something positive with it. Also, to state the the most vivid distinction, conservatives didn’t use Kirk’s murder to go on a destructive nationwide “mostly peaceful demonstration” spree resulting in billions of dollars in damage, over 30 deaths, and the disruption of daily life for Americans who had nothing to do with Floyd’s demise.

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Addendum: Joy Reid’s Rant

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

This little factoid is too rich to pass up. As noted yesterday in the pot pourri post, the execrable racist Joy Reid had done an interview raging about how everything whites invented had been stolen from black innovators, focusing especially on music. “We black folk gave y’all country music, hip hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll, they couldn’t even invent that. But they have to call a white man The King. Because they couldn’t make rock and roll. So they have to stamp The King on a man whose main song, was stolen from an overweight black woman,” the former MSNBC star said.

The “overweight black woman” she was referring to was Big Mama Thornton, the original artist to sing “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog,” which she recorded on August 13, 1952. It was Thornton’s only hit record, selling over 500,000 copies. Elvis, of course, subsequently recorded the song and it became not only an even bigger hit, but his breakthrough record.

Mark Hemingway of The Federalist pointed out on “X” that, as usual, Reid didn’t know what she was talking about. For while Big Mama was black and was the first to sing the song, she didn’t write it. “Hound Dog” was written by the immortal Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who were as white as Elvis.

They wrote or co-wrote over 70 chart hits including many of Elvis’s most famous songs. Among their hits for other artists: “Stand by Me,” “Leader of the Pack,” “On Broadway,” and Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” Peggy was very white. Lieber and Stoller were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

Quoth Hemingway: “Reid is an idiot.” Yes, and she’s a racist idiot who makes anyone who listens to her more ignorant than they were when she started talking.