Apparently a passenger was kicked off an Allegiant Airlines flight for wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon!” mask. he was told to remove the mask and replace it. He refused.
Let’s make this quick:
Rights
Ethics Hero (“Socking It To Georgetown University” Div.) #2: Federal Judge James Ho
As a graduate and former employee of Georgetown Law Center (and, though I say it myself, a living legend there), I have found the recent disgraceful episode where conservative scholar Illya Shapiro was suspended by the Dean at GULC for a tweet expressing the view that President Biden’s announced plan to make race and gender his primary criteria for filling Justice Breyer’s soon to be vacant seat on the Supreme Court particularly discouraging. (My JD diploma was already face to the wall for previous embarrassments, however.) I have been particularly disgusted by the failure of the GULC faculty to speak up in support of Shapiro in public, though other academics across the country have done so.
Thus it was with particular pleasure that I learned how Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, slated to speak at GULC yesterday on “Fair Weather Originalism: Judges, Umpires, and the Fear of Being Booed,” saw the obvious relevance of his topic to Shapiro’s ordeal and shocked his hosts by giving a different lecture than the one announced. He said in part,
Welcome To The Weirdest Ethics Quiz Ever: Biden’s New Deputy Assistant Secretary At The Department of Energy
No, I am not making this up, it is not a hoax, and I have verified the facts.
The latest Biden Administration hire is one Sam Brinton, the new Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy. Brinton announced his hiring on LinkedIn, writing that “In this role I’ll be doing what I always dreamed of doing, leading the effort to solve the nation’s nuclear waste challenges” and would “even be (to my knowledge) the first gender fluid person in federal government leadership.” Here’s Sam:
This is also Sam, in his drag queen persona “Sister Ray Dee O’Active.”
Sam says describing “her”: “I am the slutty one. And the nerdy one.” But Sam is more versatile still. That’s him on the left in the photo under the headline acting as a “handler” in the leather culture sub-set called “Puppy Play.” Handlers help human “puppies” like this good boy…
… behave like dogs while being treated as dogs, including, as far as I can determine, having sex while “being” a dog. Continue reading
Ethics Dunce, China Olympics Ethics Train Wreck Division: Mark Wrighton, President Of George Washington University
I wonder how the Board of George Washington University felt as it watched its newly hired President make a complete ass of himself. This is what is technically known as “a bad sign.” His botched and ominous response to his first test also may well be signature significance for a political correctness addled boob. We shall see.
Last week, well-conceived satiric posters, appearing to promote the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing until one looks closely, began going up on dorm doors and elsewhere around the Washington, D.C. university campus. The artwork pointedly depicts Chinese athletes in “events” representing human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government. In one poster, a biathlon competitor points her rifle at someone who is blindfolded and wearing the Uyghur flag. Another shows a snowboarder atop a surveillance camera. The posters were created by a Chinese dissident artist based in Australia.
The George Washington University Chinese Students and Scholars Association, a local chapter of a Chinese student group overseen by the Chinese Communist Party, reacted true to their corrupt culture while adopting one of the worst habits of ours. It attempted to censor the posters, calling them “seriously racist”—they learned that trick from Democrats here— and said the art “insulted China” in an email to students last week and a letter to university officials, including GW President Mark Wrighton.
“Racist” and “insulted China”—you know, like calling a pandemic virus that China unleashed on the world a Chinese virus was racist and insulted China. Indeed, The student group was most upset by the poster that shows a Chinese curler pushing a Wuhan virus instead of a curling stone. Good.
Ethics Hero: Luke Bunting ’22, Editor-in-Chief Of The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy
The battle over the punishment of Illya Shapiro for WrongThink—Imagine, he actually thinks excluding outstanding Supreme Court candidates by using racial and gender discrimination is unwise!—continues.
Luke Bunting, a 3L at Georgetown University Law Center who also edits one its journals, is stepping up where the GULC faculty has failed miserably. Echoing the legal academics and scholars across the country who have signed an open letter protesting the Law Center’s Dean, William Treanor’s effort to ingratiate the school with the censorious Woke and the race-baiting mob, Bunting has authored a similar letter for GULC alumni to sign. It reads,
Hump Day Ethics Jumps, Bumps And Lumps, 2/2/2022
Nothing like dancing camels to end a perfect day. If only this had been a perfect day…
Meanwhile, I’m so proud! Having told my undergraduate institution that it had so embarrassed me that I would not be attending my BIG reunion this Fall, which I once was looking forward to greatly, it was thrilling to see my law school alma mater, which I also worked for over the next four years after graduation (It liked me! It really liked me!), receive a major honor. Yes, The FIRE named Georgetown University Law Center one of the 10 Worst on its yearly list of educational institutions that do not adequately respect and bolster freedom of speech.
Congratulations, GULC! You’ve worked hard for this the last few years, and the honor is richly deserved.
1. Quit, Whoopi, but let me write your resignation letter. It is being reported that Whoopi Goldberg is furious that she was suspended by ABC for her dumb, ill-considered, offensive but provocative comments about the Holocaust on the dumb, ill-considered, offensive but provocative show “The View.” Her worst statement? I vote for “Well, this is white people doing it to white people. So, this is y’all go fight amongst yourselves.” That was part of her explanation of why the “Final Solution,” in which Hitler’s crazies decided to see the purification of the white race by exterminating “lesser races” like the Semites—just guess what would have happened to the Whoop’s people when Germany took over the U.S. by getting the A-Bomb first!—wasn’t about race. She feels, we are told,“humiliated” at being disciplined after she followed their advice to apologize. No, no, that’s not what Whoopi should quit over. Charles C.W. Cooke explains it well in “Whoopi Goldberg’s Suspension from The View Is Illiberal and Irrational” at the National Review. Meanwhile, many are asking the unanswerable question, how come Disney, who owns ABC, fired actress Gina Carano when she said on social media—not on TV, not under Disney’s banner, that the repressive political speech climate reminded her of Nazi Germany. The “Mandalorian” star was also dropped by talent agency UTA and Lucasfilms, leading some writers to compare her treatment to the Fifties blacklist. Whoopi got a relatively minor two-week suspension. Double standard there, obviously: Whoopi is a black progressive, Carano is a white conservative. Neither should be punished for an opinion unrelated to their competence at their job. If Whoopi quits, she could do some good by making it clear that it’s in defense of free speech and people being unafraid to speak freely. Continue reading
Ethical Quote Of The Week: Faculty Letter To GULC Dean Treanor In Support Of Illya Shapiro [CORRECTED]
So far, 106 professors from all points on the ideological spectrum have signed a letter to Georgetown Law Center’s Dean Treanor, telling him what should not have to be explained to a Top 20 law school dean: that “academic freedom protects [Illya] Shapiro’s views, regardless of whether we agree with them or not. And debate about the President’s nomination, and about whether race and sex play a proper role in such nominations more generally, would be impoverished—at Georgetown and elsewhere—if this view could not be safely expressed in universities.”
Shapiro, as discussed here, has been suspended (“put on leave pending an investigation”) by Treanor, and if past behavior by Georgetown Law Center is any indication, he is likely to be fired, forced to resign, or to have to humiliate himself by submitting to “sensitivity training” after a public confession of WrongThink.
Here is the letter, which appears to have been coordinated by the Foundation For Individual Rights in Education. Those seeking to add their names to the signatories can email facultyoutreach@thefire.org.
Disgracefully, no member of the GULC faculty has signed the letter to support their colleague—and the principles of freedom of expression and academic freedom at their own institution—as of this writing. Continue reading
It Reveals The Dire State Of U.S. Higher Education Culture That Dean William M. Treanor Of Georgetown University Law Center Isn’t The Most Unethical Law School Administrator Of The Past Year (It’s Close, Though…)
That distinction still has to go to Yale Law School Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Yaseen Eldik and Associate Dean of Student Affairs Ellen Cosgrove, who persecuted, and and threatened a student in this infamous episode last Fall. Their victim is a student, which gives them an edge over Dean Treanor whose target is Ilya Shapiro, GULC’s newly hired director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and vice-president of the Cato Institute.
Just two days ago, I described Shapiro’s foray into the debate over President Biden’s looming Supreme Court nomination, which will have to be a black woman because race and gender are more important to the Far Left than qualifications, ability and experience in the branch of the government that protects the Constitution, but mostly because Joe promised he would while in Full Pander Mode as he fought for his party’s nomination to oppose President Trump in 2020. Shapiro issued a series of tweets that were crystal clear to anyone reading them rationally and honestly, making his case that Biden should be nominating Justice Breyer’s replacement on the basis of qualifications, ability and experience. A careless choice of words, however—this was Twitter, after all—gave race-baiters and progressive censors an opportunity to pounce, and they did.
Shapiro was accused of being a racist (of course); the law schools black student association demanded he be fired (also of course); and GULC’s ostentatiously woke Dean capitulated to the anti-free speech and anti-academic freedom mob, announcing yesterday to me and other “alumni/ae”, as the marvelous Dean I worked for, the late David McCarthy always called them…
A Smoothie Incident In Connecticut
After the now viral video above made the rounds, James Iannazzo, 48, was arrested and charged with a hate crime following the outburst at Robeks in Fairfield, Conn. over the weekend. The Fairfield Police Department said that Iannazzo returned to the store after a smoothie he purchased caused his son, who is allergic to peanuts, to be rushed to the hospital from his home. Iannazzo apparently ordered the smoothie without peanut butter, but did not explain to employees that his son had an allergy.
The New York Post says he called a staff member a “fucking immigrant.” The Times says he called her an “immigrant loser.”
After the Merrill Lynch office where Iannazzo works was swamped in furious emails, he was fired from his job as an analyst. A spokesman for Bank of America, the parent company of Merrill Lynch, told the New York Times in an email,
“Our company does not tolerate behavior of this kind. We immediately investigated and have taken action. This individual is no longer employed at our firm.”
“When faced with a dire situation for his son, Mr. Iannazzo’s parental instinct kicked in and he acted out of anger and fear,” the father’s lawyer said. “He is not a racist individual and deeply regrets his statements and actions during a moment of extreme emotional stress.”
There are many troubling aspects to the matter.
Ethics Observations:
Ah-HA! The Zoom Trial Slap-Down I’ve Been Expecting…
What took so long?
Add one more bit of disruption to order, law and society inflicted by Wuhan Virus Weenie-ism.
The Missouri Supreme Court, in a January 11 decision, held that defendant Rodney Smith’s Sixth Amendment right to confrontation with witnesses against him was violated by two-way live video testimony about DNA evidence.
Of course it was. I’ve been wondering about this since the beginning of the pandemic lock downs. The witness who testified via video against Smith was a police lab employee. He testified that Smith’s DNA matched what was found on the 16-year-old girl who had accused him of sexual assault. The teenager recanted, making the lab employee’s testimony key to Smith’s conviction for statutory rape. Also key: Smith’s lawyer objected on the record to the Zoom testimony. Other defense attorneys have not been so protective of their clients’ right: I view not objecting as justifying an ineffective assistance of counsel appeal.
The Missouri court distinguished a U.S. Supreme Court case, Maryland v. Craig,that allowed one-way video testimony by child-abuse victims who would be traumatized if they could see the defendant. In Smith’s case, it held, the witness “was neither a victim nor a child,” and the trial court had made no finding that he was unavailable. Moreover, the admission of his testimony was not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, so the conviction must be reversed.
The guessing is that this issue will ultimately have to be decided by SCOTUS.
Two appellate courts outside of Missouri courts have reached dueling decisions on video testimony The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that two-way live video testimony did not violate a defendant’s rights, but you know, Minnesota. The Kentucky Court of Appeals, in contrast, upheld a decision denying a prosecutor’s request to allow a witness to testify remotely because of Wuhan virus phobia. “General concerns about the spread of the virus do not justify abridging a defendant’s right to in-person confrontation,” the court said.
Ethics Alarms 