DEI

What Virginia Democrats Consider “Moderate”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Virginia was told by the local news media that Democrat Abigail Spanberger was a “moderate Democrat,” and enough suckers believed that spin that she was easily elected Governor over GOP candidate Winsome Sears. On the way to her “moderate” rule, Spanberger refused to condemn the Democratic candidate for Attorney General when text messages came to light in which he appeared to condone violence and murder as legitimate political tools. (He was elected too.)

Spanberger is only moderate in a political world where the middle-of-the-road Democrat cheers the death of Charlie Kirk, wants the Second Amendment repealed, thinks illegal immigrants are the salt of the earth, want men to be able to slaughter women in athletic contests by waking up one morning and deciding they are women, and think “hate speech” should be prohibited by law. Thus it is that the now Democrat-dominated Virginia legislature has filed bills that will likely reach her desk and that…

  • Bans future attempts to clean up voter rolls (HB111)
  • Makes it illegal for state agencies distributing federal dollars to NGOs to investigate whether they’re engaged in fraud (HB1369)
  • Makes it illegal to hand-count ballots (HB968)
  • Allows mail-in ballots to be counted one week after election day (HB773)
  • Allows for absentee ballots to be received and counted for three days after election day (HB82)
  • Eliminates the requirement that large last-minute campaign contributions have to be publicly reported at least 24 hours before election day (HB1348)
  • Removes the State Board of Elections’ ability to dispatch law enforcement officers to collect vote tallies from a locality that refuses to publish them (HB1321)
  • Joins the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact for allocating Virginia’s electoral college votes in presidential elections (HB965)
  • Automatic restoration of voting rights for felons after they’re released from prison
  • Allows for votes to be cast “electronically through the internet” (HB493)
  • Creates public funding of political campaigns at the local level (HB162)
  • Abolishes all mandatory minimum sentencing for rape, manslaughter, assaulting a law enforcement officer, possession and distribution of child pornography, and all repeat violent felonies (HB863)
  • Makes it harder for judges to deny bail, even in the case of things like aggravated assault, armed robbery, and drug trafficking (HB357)
  • Gives convicted murderers, rapists, and terrorists a chance to get out of prison early (HB853)
  • Drastically reduces the criminal penalty for robbery (HB244)
  • Bars prosecutors from mentioning a criminal’s prior convictions during the guilt phase of a trial, even if it’s for the same crime (HB1070)
  • Transfers the Department of Juvenile Justice from the Secretary of Public Safety’s purview to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (SB21)
  • Reduces the amount of time that the Commonwealth can compel a convicted criminal to pay court fees from 60 years to 10 (SB180)
  • Taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries (HB1245)
  • Bans most discretionary state contracting under $100K from going to businesses owned by White men and allows state agencies to award contracts to women or minority-owned firms that are 5% more expensive than a bid from a business owned by a White man (HB61)
  • Punishes VMI for adopting an anti-DEI stance (HB1374 & HB22)
  • Abolishes all Confederate-themed license plates (HB1344)
  • Eliminates the tax-exempt status for all Confederate history groups (HB167)
  • Renames Columbus Day to “Indigenous Peoples Day.” (HB858)
  • Makes it illegal to approach within 8ft of somebody within 40 feet of an abortion clinic (SB137)
  • Enshrines the Axis narrative about January 6 and teaches it in public schools (HB333)
  • Allows localities to adopt rent control measures (HB1177)
  • Increases the sales tax in Northern Virginia, adds an additional sales tax for home deliveries, raises the car tax for electric vehicles, and imposes new sales taxes for streaming services, concerts, gym memberships, nail salons, barber shops, tanning beds, tattoo parlors, dry cleaners, shoe repairs, carpentry, painting, plumbing, electrical, HVAC.

But wait! There’s more!

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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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Does Jazz Really Need DEI?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I would say that DEI has more rapidly than most reached the final evolutionary stage noted by philosopher Eric Hoffer, who famously observed that every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. The problem with that is that DEI was never a great cause to begin with. However, it has definitely entered its racket stage, and maybe its certifiably insane stage. Behold…

Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice—no, I’m not making that up— at Boston’s Berklee College of Music has issued the results of a study that claims to show that because “male-identified jazz educators” outnumber “female-identified counterparts” six to one, it is proof that jazz “remains predominantly male due to a biased system.” The Institute’s website asks,“What would jazz sound like in a culture without patriarchy?” One wag’s answer: “Probably like nothing at all.”

Indeed most jazz musicians and composer are male. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if any variation from demographic equality proves bias, oppression and discrimination in your DEI worldview, then this phenomenon is sinister. Researcher Lara Pellegrinelli PhD is an “ethnomusicologist” who contributed to the study. She blathers, “To identify each jazz faculty member by gender, we examined the pronouns we encountered in these sources—and found only “he” and “she” in reference to the educators in our study. This is why we use the terminology “female-identified” and “male-identified” for our data, as opposed to sex assigned at birth or the descriptors “female-identifying” and “male-identifying,” which suggests a more active process of participant self-identification.”

Oh.

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The Latest Evidence That However Much Contempt You Have For Harvard, It’s Not Enough….

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The conservative Washington Free Beacon launched a thorough investigation into the ways Harvard University has deliberately sought ways to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling that affirmative action policies at colleges and universities are illegal and unconstitutional. (You didn’t expect the Axis media to do that, did you?) Last week, the project resulted in a damning report of how the Harvard Law Review engaged in—is engaging in—outright racial discrimination in selecting staff, authors and articles:

The law review states on its website that it considers race only in the context of an applicant’s personal statement. But according to dozens of documents obtained by the Free Beacon—including lists of every new policy adopted by the law review since 2021—race plays a far larger role in the selection of both editors and articles than the journal has publicly acknowledged.

Just over half of journal members, for example, are admitted solely based on academic performance. The rest are chosen by a “holistic review committee” that has made the inclusion of “underrepresented groups”—defined to include race, gender identity, and sexual orientation—its “first priority,” according to resolution passed in 2021.

The law review has also incorporated race into nearly every stage of its article selection process, which as a matter of policy considers “both substantive and DEI factors.” Editors routinely kill or advance pieces based in part on the race of the author, according to eight different memos reviewed by the Free Beacon, with one editor even referring to an author’s race as a “negative” when recommending that his article be cut from consideration.

“This author is not from an underrepresented background,” the editor wrote in the “negatives” section of a 2024 memo. The piece, which concerned criminal procedure and police reform, did not make it into the issue.

Such policies have had a major effect on the demographics of published scholars. Since 2018, according to data compiled by the journal, only one white author, Harvard’s Michael Klarman, has been chosen to write the foreword to the law review’s Supreme Court issue, arguably the most prestigious honor in legal academia. The rest—with the exception of Jamal Greene, who is black—have been minority women.

Nice. What does the race of an author have to do with the quality of legal analysis, which is what law review articles are supposed to be? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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“War Is Peace”: Kareem Abdul Jabbar on D.E.I…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On the 78th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking of Major League Baseball’s color barrier, the Los Angeles Dodgers, successors to the Brooklyn Dodger franchise that brought Robinson into the big leagues, hosted its traditional annual commemoration of the culture-altering event. For some reason Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, L.A. Lakers legend, was on hand to give a speech, and as a smart and articulate social commentator instantly proved that bias makes you stupid by saying,

“Trump wants to get rid of DEI. And I think it’s just a ruse to discriminate. So I’m glad that we do things like this, to let everybody in the country know what’s important. They also tried to get rid of Harriet Tubman. But that didn’t work. There was just uproar about that. But you have to take that into consideration when we think about what’s going on today.”

Oh.

A few points: D.E.I. is explicit discrimination, just of the anti-white male variety. How could banning clear discrimination be a “ruse to discriminate?” Would Kareem support DEI in the NBA when he was playing, which would have meant inferior white players taking the jobs of better black players in the interests of diversity? Why would a smart individual say something so self-evidently Orwellian?

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Ethics Dunce (Again): Georgetown Law Center Dean William Treanor

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

[Psst! It’s Georgetown University Law Center, not “school.” The Hill and other lazy publications keep calling it the law school, which was what the institution’s name was before it moved from the Georgetown campus (in Georgetown, a picturesque section of D.C.) to Capitol Hill near all the courts, including the Supreme Court. If you saw the place, you would know that “center” is an appropriate description. The name was the inspiration of then Dean Paul Dean, visionary, a respected lawyer and talented fund-raiser. He was also a good friend of mine as well as a cherished mentor]

William Trainor has been criticized on Ethics Alarms before notably during this fiasco, when he punished an incoming faculty member, Illya Shapiro, for daring to question Joe Biden’s wisdom of narrowing his choice of Supreme Court nominees to fill a vacancy to women of color, the same criteria that worked out so, so well with Kamala Harris. Following the lead of his radically indoctrinated students (it’s supposed to be the other way around), the GULC dean suspended Shapiro pending…well, something, and then after letting him twist slowly in the wind for months, finally let him back into the fold whereupon Shapiro quite properly told him to take his job and shove it, as I would have under like circumstances.

There were other instances when Trainer allowed his institution to be more woke than responsible; he is largely the reason my Law Center diploma is turned face to the wall in my ProEthics office. Here is an episode that didn’t directly involve the Dean but that occurred on his watch.

Now comes another skirmish. Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin sent a letter to GULC last month asking if the Law Center had eliminated its commitment to DEI. “At this time, you should know that no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship, or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize DEI will be considered,” Martin wrote.

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Rachel Maddow’s Self-Indicting Message on MSNBC’s Firing Joy Reid

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As EA noted in last night’s post, MSNBC finally fired Joy Reid and ended her nightly racist, unhinged rants on the network. For this it deserves no special credit or plaudits, for Reid was objectively terrible, getting worse as her Trump Derangement raged, and should have been fired years ago….for this head-exploding incident, for example.

On yesterday’s episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Maddow told us all we should need to know…. about Maddow…with this outburst:

“Joy Reid’s show “The ReidOut” ended tonight. And Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether and that is very, very, very hard to take. I am 51 years old. I have been gainfully employed since I was 12. And I have had so many different types of jobs you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But in all the jobs that I have had, in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call and I understand that, but that’s what I think. I will tell you, it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two—count them, two—non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend, and that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible. And I do not defend it.”

All righty then! There we have it: a full-throated endorsement of racial quotas, discrimination in hiring and career advancement, and double standards. For a special bonus, Maddow endorsed the practices and conduct of an unethical and untrustworthy former colleague, which means that Maddow is unfit to appear on any respectable news organization’s broadcasts.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“When you are flying on an airplane with your loved ones, which every one of us in this room has, do you pray that your plane lands safely and gets you to your destination, or do you pray that the pilot has a certain skin color?”

—Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, during yesterday’s press briefing that focused on the tragic Reagan National Airport collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Blackhawk helicopter.

Leavitt, the youngest Presidential paid liar in the history of the position (See? She’s “historic” too!), issued more powerful, well-expressed and memorable statements in her first week than her DEI predecessor did during her entire tenure. That fact, which couldn’t escape even the most biased of the reporters in the room, made her Ethics Quote of the Week more striking. [The transcript of yesterday’s briefing, is here.]

The astounding thing to ponder is that there probably are hard-wired woke fanatics who would prefer to plummet to their deaths in a plane flown by a pilot of the “right” ethnicity.

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Curmie’s Conjectures: Too White A Christmas?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

by Curmie

[Curmie raises so many casting ethics issues that fascinate me in this post that I’m going to announce right now that I’ll post a veritable “Part II” tomorrow, although it will be “Jack’s Conjectures”, or something. Not that I disagree with anything the esteemed Ethics Alarms featured columnist writes here, because I don’t. Here’s a clue about one issue I’ll be covering which Curmie only hints at: for a cast to be sufficiently “diverse,” do the BIPOC members have to obviously LOOK like they are “of color”? I’m thinking of performers like Jennifer Beals, the late Olivia Hussey, and Jessica Alba—JM]

Jack and I exchanged a couple of emails about this story, which I first saw on the OnStageBlog back around Thanksgiving, when this was still news.  I’m pretty sure both of us wanted the other to write about it.  So, a little late, here we go…

The case involves the casting of the Christmas-themed musical Elf at Broadway at Music Circus in Sacramento.  OnStageBlog’s founder Chris Peterson often gets what Curmie’s grad school mentor would call “foam-flecked,” and his editorial here is no exception.  But he does have a point.  Sort of.

The company came under criticism when they announced the cast list for Elf; although a number of the leads were non-white, the entire chorus (seen above) looks pretty vanilla, white-passing if not literally white. Actress (or is she a “social media manager for major hotel brands”?) Victoria Price is one of those who led the charge, pointing to the difference between the Broadway ensemble and the one in Sacramento, and noting that any comments critical of the casting were being deleted.  (I assume she’s telling the truth about this.)

Tony nominee Amber Imam joined the fray, writing that Price’s criticism of both the casting and the removal of negative comments was “absolutely right.  A show that takes place in NEW YORK CITY cannot… CAN NOT have an ensemble that LOOKS LIKE THIS!!!  Do better.  Have you learned nothing?????”

The company’s CEO Scott Klier issued a response that made the situation much, much worse: “cover-up worse than the crime” worse.  Here’s part of it:

“Inclusivity has been and remains my casting and staffing goal for every production. I fell short of that goal for ELF. There is an uncomfortable truth here: Our industry as a whole has largely failed to attract, train and foster the artists necessary to meet today’s demand, and I fear this conversation will continue until it does. It will unfortunately take time. The painful reality of ELF’s casting process was that both the casting submissions and audition attendance revealed few candidates of color and, while those few were undoubtedly talented, they did not meet the dance, music and acting criteria set by our team.”

Hoo boy… Claiming inclusivity as a “goal” and then going 0-for-15 at fulfilling it?  Blaming other people while admitting the decision was yours?  Admitting there’s a “demand” and then ignoring it? 

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Yet Another Candidate For My Proposed New Standard For Disbarment…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, has joined the large cadre of fools who seem to seriously believe former President Donald Trump has a strong similarity to Adolf Hitler. After the assassination attempt on July 13, Caraballo posted on Twitter/”X”: “Trump is going to use this as his Reichstag moment to crack down when he’s elected.” See?

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