authentic frontier gibberish

Trinity College’s Authentic Frontier Gibberish

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Trinity College has the gall to charge over $72,000 per academic year to students, and yet passes woke, divisive, fact-free mumbo-jumbo (aka. Authentic Frontier Gibberish) off as “education.”

“Unsettling the White Gaze” appears on the school’s anthropology course schedule for spring 2027, and is described thusly:

“White supremacy and racial capitalism structure our world, setting in motion the systems of domination that Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly describes as a ‘racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation’…Students will learn to turn their anthropological gaze upon whiteness itself and understand its insidious modes of self-and-other construction thus destabilizing its ocular power to define others. We will pay special attention to how the white colonial gaze has operated in the liberal discipline of anthropology and explore ethnographic methods for studying whiteness and white supremacy,”

Oh. What??? And who the hell is Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, and why should what she says matter to me any more than what, say, Adam Sandler says? [I just checked. It shouldn’t matter. She’s an obscure anti-white ideologue. Dropping in an appeal to authority using an obscure race-baiting academic is pretty desperate; then again, would any respectable scholar say something like “racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation” ?

Not to pile on too much, but gaze at her faculty photograph. A professor choosing to radiate such ‘tude—“Bring it on, whitey!” is to be avoided at all costs.

Ugh.

Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, teaches “Unsettling the White Gaze,” and she is obviously an Authentic Frontier Gibberish master herself. She describes herself as a “white, disabled, trans anthropologist whose work focuses on how criminalized people who use drugs envision and experiment with abolitionist horizons of transformation, healing, self-determination, and solidarity beyond incarceration and forced-cure.” She also explains that she “participates in abolitionist, harm reduction, and transformative justice organizing projects in NYC and beyond.”

Okaaaaaay…

If students are willing to sign up to take such self-evident crap and parents will pay for it, there’s not much that can be done. There were really silly, obscure courses at my college too, but they weren’t political indoctrination courses. These offenses to common sense and democratic society won’t dry up and blow away until there is sufficiently competent secondary and primary education to ensure college freshman have a sufficiently solid foundation in critical thinking to recognize a course like this one for what it is: pseudo-social science contrived to fulfill a political agenda.

SCOTUS Reaches The Only Fair, Factual, Logical, Ethical, and Legal Decision Regarding Biological Males in Women’s Sports

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Late yesterday, while everyone was concentrating on the Supreme Court’s rejection of the President’s Executive Order on birthright citizenship, the Court upheld two state laws barring the participation of biological males “identifying” as female (a.k.a. “transgender females”) in girls’ and women’s sports teams. Although the 6-to-3 ruling involved upholding laws in West Virginia and Idaho, 25 states also restrict biological males from cheating in women’s sports, and the decision represents a decisive splash of ice water in the faces of those who support one of the silliest and most unpopular of the Woke Left’s delusions.

Of course it is unfair, dangerous and absurd to allow individuals who have gone through puberty as males to compete with girls and women in sports involving strength and speed, and where size and weight are an advantage. That the radical Left insists otherwise (because life ought to be different than it really is, a prime driver of so much progressive cant) should be one of the most damning tells on the whole ideology as well as strong evidence that the Democratic Party has jumped Fonzi’s metaphorical shark. The Democrat-stuffed U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 9th and 4th Circuits struck down sensible “no biological males in female sports” laws, but it was inconceivable that their biased and partisan reasoning would prevail at the U.S. Supreme Court. Sure enough, it didn’t.

West Virginia v. B.P.J. should have been a unanimous, 9-0 decision, but the Left’s fealty to the LGBTQLMNOP++ wing of the Democratic party is so strong that the three knee-jerk progressives on the Court just couldn’t manage it. Before noting Justice Kavanaugh’s majority opinion which didn’t need a judge, a legal scholar or a lawyer to write, just, you know, someone reasonablyintelligent with functioning eyes and brain cells, I have to begin with the Authentic Frontier Gibberish of Justice Jackson. Again. She wrote a remarkable dissent which, perhaps in a SCOTUS first, makes a persuasive argument for the opinion she’s railing against in its incoherence and “Don’t confuse me with facts my mind’s made up!” obtuseness. Seriously: what the hell is she babbling about?

“But there is reason to doubt the soundness of the concession that Title IX’s reference to “sex” means only sex assigned at birth….A transgender woman penalized for being perceived as aggressive has experienced discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ just as much as a cis-gender woman has, no matter that the transgender woman’s behavior matches expectations of her sex assigned at birth. Either way, the institution has imposed its gender-based expectations upon her. And either way, the institution may have violated Title IX. In short, the majority is wrong to suggest that the term ‘sex’ in Title IX ‘ cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.’ Title IX makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose; it cares not just about sex assigned at birth but also about individuals’ ability to match (or not) their gender presentation to their gender identity…”

No wonder Jackson infamously said in her confirmation hearing that she could not define what a woman is. After reading that mess, neither can I. I’m not sure I can understand English any more, either.

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Most Inexcusably Incoherent Statement In A Report: The Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The sentence:

“The correct ask in this report is not the ask of an institution being condemned. It is the ask of an institution being held to its own standard by people who still believe it can meet it.”

That authentic frontier gibberish—I’m still not sure what it means, and I’ve read it a dozen times—is in “A Narrowing Gate, Jewish Enrollment at Harvard and its Peers | 1967-2025,” a report by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance. The report found that that Jewish undergraduate enrollment at Harvard University has dropped to about 7% in 2025, its lowest level since before World War II and the lowest among Ivy League schools with reliable data.

I was going to write about the report itself, but if Jewish alumni of Harvard end up writing like that, maybe its a good thing not as many Jewish students are attending Harvard.

This is the Executive Summary. The report seems to be implying that anti-Semitism at Harvard has to be the reason for the unexplained drop, because none of the other possible factors it identifies explain it. Apparently Jewish applications to the school haven’t fallen off sufficiently to cause a 50% reduction, though I don’t know why. On national television Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay told a Congressional committee that she considered anti-Jewish demonstrations in Harvard Yard to be acceptable free speech, and was unable to articulate a basic truth, which is that anti-Semitic demonstrations on a college campus constitute unethical and intolerable conduct that creates a hostile environment for Jewish students. Gay’s eventually firing for scholarly misconduct (not mealy-mouthed acceptance of campus enmity toward a minority) could not have provided aspiring Jewish applicants much confidence.

We also learn from the report that Jewish alumni had to gather the data for the report because Harvard no longer compiles data on Jewish students.

All of that is interesting, but when I read that statement, I lost interest in examining the report further, and lost any confidence in the people who prepared it. Maybe it’s a hangover from listening to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for four years and Donald Trump for a decade, but if someone can’t communicate clearly, I can’t have confidence that they are thinking clearly either.

Authentic Frontier Gibberish of the Month: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“Is treating someone transgender, but does not have, because of the medical interventions and the things that have been done, who does not have, uh, the same, uh, threat to physical competition and safety and all the reasons the state puts forward – that’s actually a different class, says this individual. So you’re not treating the class the same. And how do you respond to that?”

That was Joe Biden’s DEI Supreme Court nominee, who couldn’t define what a woman is during her confirmation hearing, talking like Kamala Harris during oral arguments over the challenge to two state laws banning biological men from competing in women’s sports.

What an embarrassment. Do any blacks think it really is helpful to overcoming racial bias in this country to have a babbling dope, also a flagrant partisan hack, as one of two African Americans on the High Court? To look on the bright side, at least Jackson relieves the only Hispanic on the Court, the consistently ludicrous “Wise Latina,” Sonia Sotomayor, from being the most obviously unqualified judge on the panel.

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Month: Georgia Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Tim Levier, by his own admission in a Devil’s Advocate mood, gifted Ethics Alarms readers with the a bold defense of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the anti-merit fad that has kept affirmative action on life support quite a bit after its expiration date. If EA had such a designation as “The Silk Purse” award, this would win it. I applaud the effort, so here it is, the Comment of the Day on the post about an absurd word salad extolling DEI in Georgia. I may be back after Tim has his say…I haven’t decided yet.

***

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

I don’t know what mood I’m in but I’m up for a little “Devil’s Advocate” today. Let’s give it a go.

I have many thoughts regarding the DEI space – but one point I’d like to make clear is that the concensus often focuses on how to measure and demonstrate improvement on a quantitative scale when DEI often, in my opinion, is more important from a qualitative standpoint.

In the rush to “prove” and “show results”, the drivers of the movement are seeking and promoting changes in outcomes rather than the root causes related to opportunity. In so doing, they may “move the goalposts” to arrive at a certain outcome. Reasonable people know instinctively that this is bad, as articulated in Charlie Kirk’s hypotheticals about adding white Americans to the NBA or whether black commercial airline pilots demonstrated the same skill, knowledge, and experience as their peers or were they a beneficiary of reduced expectations. The “rigging” of the outcomes complicates perceptions of DEI and creates negative emotions among the opponents of the measures.

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Pro Tip: Don’t Extol Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse Because It Will Make You Look Like An Idiot [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

For your early morning reading pleasure, I give you Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s 4,568th (approximately) unhinged rant about climate change and how evil conservatives are destroying, oh, everything. I saw this dog’s breakfast “liked” and “loved” on Facebook by smart people who should know better, and am hoping against hope they didn’t actually read the thing.

Whitehouse is Little Rhodey’s senior U.S. Senator, Democrat of course, and his speech this week on the Senate floor (several members had to be hospitalized after they rolled their eyes too hard) was reflexively praised by “The Nation,” which employs far, far, FAR left lunatic Elie Mystal as an editor.

[Digression: You remember Elie, don’t you? He can only appear in public now on MSNBC without being chased by men in white coats carrying butterfly nets. He was too extreme for the left-biased legal gossip rag “Above the Law,” which published his radical nonsense before he went completely bonkers. Elie has opined that all black jurors should always vote to acquit black defendants no matter hwo guilty they are. Nice. (I wonder what the ABA would say if juries paid any attention to him?) More recently he called for foreign nations to issue sanctions against the U.S.]

Read it. Or at least try. I dare you. I double dare you. First, it is garbled, rambling and incoherent (not unlike this), perhaps not quite Authentic Frontier Gibberish, but too close to be tolerated from a U.S. Senator. Second, and this has always been true of his rants, Whiethouse obviously doesn’t understand climate change science at all, like all hysterics who want the U.S. to spend trillions and cripple the economy based on speculation. This country can’t slow down climate change, whatever it is, without the vast majority of the world joining in and they won’t, don’t and can’t. This includes giant countries India and China. Does Whitehouse really not comprehend this, or is he just pimping for a world dictatorship? Oh, who knows? There is no justification for paying any attention to him, ever.

Whitehouse has, for example, repeatedly said that Americans who oppose the climate change “consensus” should be imprisoned. To this, law professor/pundit Glenn Reynolds responded,

“First, this man should be voted out of office as soon as human possible.  His ignorance is dangerous. Second, the state bar should require him to undergo at least 100 hours of mandatory continuing legal education on the subject of constitutional law, with emphasis on the First Amendment. Newsflash: joining together to discuss common interests and even–gasp!–funding research, white papers and lobbying efforts to advance one’s perspectives on an issue isn’t illegal; its free speech.”

It should be no surprise that Whitehouse implies that the Texas flood is the result of evil Republicans and Donald Trump not caring about our planet slowly burning up, though there is no evidence of the tragedy being caused by climate change (or DOGE cuts). [Added] I just saw this…

Awwww. Too BAD, Senator!

But he has other villains to finger: “dark money” that elects those evil Republicans (funny, getting far more money in donations than Donald Trump didn’t seem to help Kamala Harris any); “creepy billionaires,” and a “captured Supreme Court.” In fact, I can’t let this pass; here is that part of the rant:

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When You Are Running For President, I Suspend the Julie Principal…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Kamala Harris’s tendency to answer questions with circular, redundant nonsense, known around Ethics Alarms as “Authentic Frontier Gibberish” in honor of “Blazing Saddles'” Gabby Johnson, was mostly left alone during the last four years due to the application of the “Julie Principle.” The Julie Principle comes into play when an undesirable or annoying  characteristic or behavior pattern in a person or organization appears to be hard-wired and part of their essence.  In judging such a person or entity, it is useful to keep the lyrics of Julie’s song from “Show Boat” (“Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man O’ Mine,” lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein Jr., music by Jerome Kern) firmly in mind, when she sings…Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly…I’ve gotta love that man til I die…Can’t help lovin’ that man of mine! To constantly harp on something the individual can’t change ultimately becomes pointless and cruel, and hence unethical.

When one is a major party’s nominee for President, however, Julie Principle privileges must be suspended. When one is a nominee for President who was spared the vetting, competitive nomination process, debates and primaries every other major party nominee has been required to conquer for almost 200 years, Julie Principle privileges really have to be suspended. And when your strategy is to try to avoid as many unscripted, competent and unbiased interviews as possible before election day so voters will know as little as possible about you, Julie Principle privileges really, really, really have to be suspended.

Thus we must ponder how Harris responded to a question at a National Association of Black Journalists panel discussion yesterday, before an audience strongly inclined to support her. Moderator Tanya Mosley of Philadelphia radio station WHYY asked the elevated Veep where she draws “the line between” Israel’s “aggression and defense” in the Israel-Hamas war.

Harris began by saying there was “a lot to unpack” in the question (Translation: “Huminahumina…”) then said that the Jewish state “has a right to defend itself.” Since Mosley was obviously asking how Harris squares that mantra with her demand that there be an “immediate and permanent cease fire,” she pressed Harris for a real answer. And the real answer was…

“No, no, let me finish! It’s important to put it in context, which is what I’m doing, and I’ll get to that. There must be stability and peace in that region, in as much as what we do in our goal is to ensure that Israelis have security, and Palestinians in equal measure have security, have self-determination, and dignity. That there be an ability to have security in the region, for all concerned, in a way that we create stability, and—let us all also recognize—in a way that ensures that Iran is not empowered in this whole scenario in terms of the peace and stability in the region.”

Oh.

This is called “faking it,” and not very well at that.

From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Is KAmala Smart? Is There A Very Good Reason Why She Is Afraid To Give Unscripted Interviews? A Plausible Answer To Both Questions…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Here is how the Democratic presumptive Presidential selection answered an ambush question from a reporters yesterday in Pennsylvania when she apparently couldn’t run away fast enough, or something. The question: “You unveiled your economic policies last week. Can you explain how you’re going to pay for those? And can you give us a sense of what other policies you want to unveil?”

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Authentic Frontier Gibberish of the Month: IOC President Thomas Bach

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“We have said from the very beginning. If someone is presenting us scientifically a solid system how to identify men and women who were the first ones to do it? We do not like this uncertainty. We do not like it for the overall situation. We do not like it for nobody. So we would be more than pleased to look into it. But what is not possible … is someone saying ‘this is not a woman’ by looking at somebody or by falling prey to a defamation campaign.”

Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it? This is the caliber of intellect and clarity of thought those leading the Olympic Games are able to display when explanations are in order. No wonder we get…oh, heck, why bother?

For some reason his statement reminded me of “Green Eggs and Ham.” “I do not like you, Sam-I-Am. I do not like green eggs and ham.” Personally, I don’t like, or trust, officials who can’t make more sense than this, and more grammatically, behind a microphone.

Ethics Quote of the Month: Blogger Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“[T]his display of the Vice President’s mental capacity and self-awareness is a warning that extends beyond basketball. It’s deeply disturbing…”

—Ann Althouse, assessing an epic Kamala Harris word salad so stunning that t set off even more ethics alarms than her inane babbling usually does

That’s what I get for giving Harris the benefit of The Julie Principle. I figured, hey, the poor woman is over her head, she’s obviously a dolt, she spews jabberwocky compulsively—what’s the point in complaining about what she can’t change? And then she goes and vomits up this Authentic Frontier Gibberish:

“Do you know — OK, a bit of a history lesson — do you know that the women’s teams were not allowed to have brackets until 2022? Think about that, and… talk about progress, you know, better late than never but progress. And what that has done, because of course — you know, I had a bracket, it’s not broken completely, but I won’t talk about my bracket. But you know what? How we love — we love March Madness, even just now allowing the women to have brackets and what that does to encourage people to talk more about the women’s teams, to watch them, now they’re being covered. You know, this is the reality. People used to say, ‘Oh, women’s sports, who’s interested?’ Well if you can’t see it, you won’t be. But when you see it, you realize, Oh….”

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