Race

From The “Eternal Vigilance Is The Price Of Liberty”: A Law Firm Is Caught Inflicting “Good Racial Discrimination” And Backs Down

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The scary part is that a major law firm really thought it would be legal to do this, or perhaps knew it wasn’t legal but thought it could get away with it anyway.

The law firm Morrison Foerster, based in San Francisco, was sued for excluding non-minority students from its so called “diversity fellowships,”described as a program for first-year law students who are members of “a diverse population that has historically been underrepresented in the legal profession,” such as black, Hispanic, Native American and LGBTQ+ individuals. The plaintiff in the suit was the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER), founded by same conservative activist who brought the lawsuits that resulted in the Supreme Court finally declaring affirmative action in college admissions what it had always been: unconstitutional racial discrimination.

A few weeks after the lawsuit was filed, the firm removed all references to race from the program page on its website, an implicit statement that “OK, you caught us. Never mind!” The program now is described as

designed to recognize “exceptional first and second-year law students with a demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion in the legal profession.” In other words, the firm is substituting viewpoint discrimination for racial discrimination.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Education Secretary’s Play List

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Wow. What an idiot.

Here are some sample lyrics from the songs our Education Dept. Secretary loves:

“Out o’ town, put it down for the Father of Rap And if yo’ ass get cracked, bitches, shut your trap. Come back, get back, that’s the part of success.”

“Fuck all you hoes. Get a grip, motherfucker!”

“My my, I’m big huh, I rip my prick through your hooters I’m sick, you couldn’t measure my dick with six rulers”

Secretary Cardona can listen to, read and love whatever he chooses, but his tweet—he quickly deleted it, of course, after multiple social media commenters explained to him that the tweet called into question his priorities and judgment—is a red flag to parents who don’t want their children to be immersed in a sexually-obsessed culture when they need to learn academic skills. This is the official who is overseeing U.S. education policy, and he saw nothing inappropriate about endorsing songs with lyrics like “Fuck all you hoes.”

THIS Is MSNBC!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Upset by Donald Trump’s mugshot, one of MSNBC’s racist hosts (it has several), Joy Reid, indulged herself in a full hate-rant meltdown, saying on the air,

“As a teenager living in New York, I’ve said it before, this is why I never watched ‘The Apprentice.’ I despised Donald Trump. He signified the rich white guy in Manhattan that absolutely hated and despised me. I still remember he made five teenagers my age  take a mug shot.  I despised Donald Trump because to me he signified the rich white guy in Manhattan that absolutely hated and despised me, my cousins, my friends”…So, people like Giuliani, and people like Trump, persecuted black and brown people in New York. It’s what they did for fun. It’s what they did for pleasure. They enjoyed it. They enjoyed lording over people who had nothing, who had no million-dollar lawyers. Who couldn’t change lawyers at the top of a hat and get a different hip-hop lawyer in the next day when they’re tired of one. Who couldn’t go to make their case on Fox, or a Newsmax, who had nothing, and who Donald Trump loaded his everything over. And still, people who looked like them, put him in rap longs. It was indignity, to me, that something I loved, a culture I loved, lionized that. To me, this is justice. The fact that Manhattan didn’t give him a mugshot, I thought was offensive. I thought that the feds, we know it looks like, he was the president of the United States. Okay, offensive. Everyone else had to take them. This case, and I think Fani Willis is a hero, she’s a national hero, because she, more than any other prosecutor in this country, and I respect Jack Smith, and I respect all the prosecutors that are doing this. She is the only one who said, these wealthy, powerful, privileged men and women are just American citizens and when they break the law, they will take that picture.”

No hate, bias, and fantasy here! Say what you may about Fox News and CNN, the other two outrageously untrustworthy, incompetent, biased and unethical broadcast news outlets (NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS are merely untrustworthy, incompetent, biased and unethical), at least they eventually dumped Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo and Brian Stelter. There was a time when MSNBC had standards too: it fired Keith Olbermann when he went too too far (he always went too far), Melissa Harris Perry, another toxic anti-white racist, and Martin Bashir, but that was before Donald Trump ran for President, and MSNBC became the “anything goes” channel.

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Oh-Oh, I May Have To Apologize To Michael Savage…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Michael Savage (real name: Michael Weiner) is in his eighties now, and his exposure is limited to out-of-print books (he wrote 40 of them) and podcast that can be easily avoided. I used to stumble across his syndicated rant show on the car radio in D.C. now and then, and I was repeatedly horrified, not just that enough Americans would listen to his mad white nationalism to provide him with a living wage, but that there were people who thought like him at all. Savage is a misogynist, mocks autism, wants to eliminate all immigration to keep the U.S. as white as possible, and generally represents the worst pathologies of conservatism, allowing the news media to use him a template to smear anyone to the right of Barack Obama. In the early 2000s his theme was that liberalism was a mental illness; he even published a book about that theory. Like so much of Savage’s bile, that position seemed especially ominous to me, an echo of both fascism and the Soviet treatment of dissidents. I alluded to this obsession of Savage’s in a 2009 essay on the old Ethics Scoreboard, writing,

Zealots on both the Left and the Right, rather than make an honest effort to challenge the views and assumptions of those on the other side, increasingly opt to smear their character with broad and crude generalizations. Democrats and liberals hate America, and want to destroy everything that is good and decent. Republicans and conservatives are fascists and hypocrites. Liberals are evil: they encourage the killing of babies and the destruction of the family. Conservatives are evil: they secretly lead lives of sexual excess and mad fetishes. This mode of public debate could be laughed off as self-evidently ridiculous, except that individuals held in high regard by millions engage in it routinely. Listen to conservatives Michael Savage (whose writings claims liberalism is a mental illness) or Marc Levin on your radio. Or read one of newly-seated Democratic Senator Al Franken’s books, before he realized that accusing all Republicans of being fat, venal and stupid was a serviceable road to power.

That was a correct assessment then and is correct now; the problem is (and calling it just a “problem” is, as Jonathan Turley would say, “problematic”) that the two polar extremes have largely now taken over national discourse. Their excesses are just as repulsive (or should be), but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone with influence who can act as a counterweight.

But I digress…the original inspiration for this post is that Michael Savage’s assertion that “liberalism is a mental disease” appears to be coming true. Witness Ryan Polly, whom , a hospital system of over 20,000 employees, MaineHealth, has chosen to place in a position of power in its organization. Polly is a vice president of DEI there” the fact that any organization actually spends money to create a bureaucracy around the latest leftest fad is itself evidence of a metastasizing cultural malady, but Polly is special. According to a Fox News report, he hosted an antiracist prayer service in which white attendees were made to apologize for their internalized racism, because, Polly teaches, all whites (like him) are racists.

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Future Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Pennsylvania Congressional Candidate Salem Snow

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Salem Snow is a social worker running for Congress in Philadelphia as a Democrat. He’s a Black Lives Matter fan, and describes himself as a “Leftist” and “aggressively pro-worker.” Of course he includes his pronouns in his Twitter profile. That’s all dumb enough, but he also tweeted this:

You watch: he’ll probably get elected. Is this a great country, or what?

Incidentally, it’s unethical to look that smug in a photo when you write something as stupid as that tweet.

How Can We “Trust The Science” When It’s Distorted By Activist Scientists? Audubon’s Bird Scam

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

How? We can’t. Next?

The National Audubon Society, the famous non-profit dedicated to the conservation of birds and their habitats, wants to make the U.S. “bird safe” by shaming homeowners into “turn[ing] off unnecessary lights at night” and “clos[ing] blinds, [and] curtains,” along with other precautionary measures. Businesses should install bird-safe glass, for example, which has patterns that make it more visible to birds. This, the Audubon’s ornithologists claim, will save the lives of “up to a billion birds a year.” The group told WBAL-TV viewers in Baltimore that “lighting and reflectivity, specifically during migration for birds, is a really dangerous problem and kills up to one billion birds in North America per year.”

Sure. Advocacy groups love fake statistics, and this one screeches “Made-up!” like a bald eagle in heat. That “up to one billion” number is partially based on a 2014 abstract estimating that between “365 and 988 million birds” are killed annually by “building collisions” in the United States. Of course, since the objective isn’t to fairly communicate facts but to support the extreme positions of single-issue activists, the Society chose the highest estimate, already probably polluted by confirmation bias, and rounded up. The society used estimated bird collisions with walls to assess the deadliness of windows alone. In addition, the fake number mixed in ball park estimates that North America has lost 3 billion birds since 1970, and oh, let’s say a third of those died in “building collisions.” Yes, let’s.

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You Can Make Your Own Decision, But I Won’t Be Patronizing Best Buy From Now On…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A whistleblower revealed the above screen shot of an internal Best Buy company memo regarding “management leadership academy programs” with the O’Keefe Media Group. The programs are a partnership between Best Buy and global management consultant McKinsey & Company, and, as you can see in the third bullet point under “Candidates must meet the requirements below,” white employees need not apply.

That’s illegal and racially discriminatory, or course, But to be fair, this is “good racism” in Woke World.

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Ethics Dunce (But We Knew That): The American Bar Association

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The ABA’s House of Delegates this week approved a resolution urging law schools to give either academic credit or monetary compensation to their students who serve as editors of law reviews or other academic journals. This is right in line with the logic that has college football and basketball plantations paying their student athletes, who already are getting scholarships and often diplomas they couldn’t justify based on their academic skills. Paying or otherwise compensating students who serve as law journal editors is just as reasonable, which is to say that it isn’t reasonable at all. In fact, the proposed practice, which some law schools already embrace, is unethical.

Reuters, in its news article about the ABA’s most recent intrusion into matters they ought to steer clear of, inadvertently explains why this concept is wrong-headed. It notes that these positions are “sought-after credentials that can bolster a law student’s job prospects.” Exactly, which means that students would gladly pay the law schools to get them. Being appointed as a law journal editor is its own reward: why should the recipients be paid for it too? Indeed, if the ABA’s reasoning applies, why only the editors? The other members of the law journals staffs are also providing valuable services to the school, its alumni, and the legal profession. They should be paid as well, or, to put it another way, none of the law journal staff should be paid, including the editors, just as student athletes shouldn’t be paid.

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Friday Open Forum, With A Question…

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

A few posts fewer than usual this week, even after (mostly) being relieved from the burden of dealing with last week’s paired “Attack of the Trolls” and “The Return of the Banned Commenters.” Sorry. Maybe today’s Open Forum can cover some of the important ethics topics I missed.

I’ve been laboring over a tricky ethics report on a tough issue, and it has literally been keeping me awake at night. I did have a “Eureka!” moment yesterday, while walking Spuds. Does that make any part of my dog-walking duties legitimately billable time?

Meanwhile, the various pundits on the Left and Right—are there any from the center?—all are annoying me. I’ve encountered several conservative writers who can’t resist mocking Chris Christie’s weight while attacking him on other grounds. (“Just drop out and get back to the buffet,” one advises the former N.J. governor this morning.) On the other side of the great divide, Charles M. Blow, arguably the biggest asshole in the New York Times stable of them, actually wrote a column rationalizing the brawl in Montgomery, Alabama, in which a mob of blacks attacked a handful of whites who were arguing, then fighting, with a riverboat co-captain who was trying to clear a berth for his vessel. Since the man is black, this made the the episode presumptively a racist incident, though there is no evidence that the same jerks who attacked Damien Pickett wouldn’t have behaved in exactly the same, Cro-Magnon manner if he had been white like them. Wrote Blow: “Black people coming to the defense of that Black man wasn’t just a specific thing that happened at one place and time; it was also a departure, in some ways, from the most memorable images in a history that includes centuries of Black-targeted brutality, which traces the journey of Black people in this land that became the United States.”

Is everybody an asshole?

The Mike Brown Lie, Back By Popular Demand

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yesterday, August 9, was the nine year anniversary of one of the many distorted, exploited and incompetently reported race-related incidents that have hurled the United States decades backwards in race relations. It was on August 9, 2014 that hulking thug Michael Brown was shot and killed by policeman Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in self-defense after Brown escaped custody, tried to take Wilson’s gun, and charged him with all of his 300 pound bulk. But because the 18-year-old’s pal and partner in crime told the credulous media that Brown had put his hands up and cried “Hands up don’t shoot!” before the fatal shot, Brown’s death was reported as an execution by a racist cop. This, in turn, resulted in horrific riots in Ferguson, full-scale social justice virtue-signalling by the mainstream media (like the 2014 display by CNN’s hacks above, referencing both the Brown shooting narrative and the death of Eric Garner), and a boost to the fortunes of the racist Blacl Lives Matter movement, which had been launched by another falsely reported tragedy, the death of Trayvon Martin.

Even though Barack Obama’s untra-partisan and race-obsessed Attorney General, Eric Holder, would have loved to show that Darren Wilson had murdered Brown, it was once again demonstrated that, as John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” His  DOJ found that there was no credible evidence to back up the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative. To the contrary, forensic and eye-witness evidence made it clear that Brown, who had just committed a petty theft and intimidated a shop-owner, punched Wilson after the officer arrested him, tried to grab pistol in the patrol car, and after he had bolted from the vehicle charged at Wilson, precipitating the fatal shooting. A grand jury exonerated Wilson, whose career was destroyed and life was ruined, but he was just a white cop, so c’est la vie! Continue reading →