DEI Ethics Train Wreck

Progressive Poison Potpourri…[UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Imagine: that woman blathering such nonsense in the clips above is considered a Democratic Party “star.” By what possible measure can blacks be called the creators of democracy in the U.S. ? What color is the sky on the planet where I.C.E. is as AOC describes it? Meanwhile, the podcaster, Ilana Glazer, just nods and agrees with everything the illiterate socialist Congresswoman says.

I won’t make a habit of focusing on just unethical progressives in posts like this, I promise. But the party and ideology of nascent totalitarianism and its Axis allies had a particularly unethical week, and attention should be paid.

1. Virginia Democrats, led by House Speaker Don Scott and Attorney General Jay Jones (you know, the one who said the he believed killing the children of political adversaries could be justified?), filed a motion asking the state supreme court to pause its ruling from taking effect while they appeal for an emergency hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. Good luck with that. They have to know their Hail Mary to SCOTUS is futile (among other reasons, it is doubtful that SCOTUS has jurisdiction), but they are doing this solely to be able to complain later that the Supreme Court is partisan and needs to be “packed.” I’m sure the Justices will be impressed by a motion that misspells Virginia as “Virgnia” and, below that, Senator as “Sentator”…

2. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), concerned about the “humanitarian crisis” in Cuba, traveled to the Communist country last month and says she spoke with foreign ambassadors about getting oil to Cuba despite US sanctions. This is illegal. The Logan Act, rarely used but still on the books, bars unauthorized individuals from negotiating with foreign governments in disputes involving the United States. Conservative commentator Andrew McCarthy, a former U.S. Attorney, said this week that he thinks the ballot box is the way to punish Jayapal and not prosecution, but Jayapal’s voters are actively hostile to the current government of the United States, just like she is. Such figures as Jesse Jackson, John Kerry and Jimmy Carter have defied the Logan Act with impunity, and should not have been allowed to get away with it. Jayapal presents an opportunity to revitalize the law.

3. Tennessee’s House just passed a redrawn congressional map to eliminate the only Democrat seat in the state by eliminating a district that was racially gerrymandered, an act that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional. Democrats are ethically estopped from complaining about such moves—not after their foiled outrageous attempt in Virginia and the current rigged maps in New England, which make GOP representatives all but impossible. But they will complain anyway, even when it makes no sense. The sole majority black district in Tennessee didn’t even elect a black Democrat to the seat, but the Axis is calling the new map “racist” anyway.

4. Here’s an interesting chart…guess which side of the ideological spectrum is less tolerant of opposing political views? (I know you know…)

Nice!

5. Here’s another:

Getting rid of DEI is like getting rid of bedbugs, but bedbugs are not as insidious.

6. Actor Mark Hamill posted the vile meme and message below. It demonstrates how sick the Left has become that any public figure would dare publish something like that about an American President. In a healthy and ethical political environment, condemning such a sentiment would be bipartisan and unanimous, even if it didn’t follow close on the heels of another assassination attempt.

Comment of the Day: “The New York Times Is Shocked—SHOCKED!—That Anyone Would Think It Discriminates Against White Males!”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

A short COTD for a change—Michael R., whose first comment was on this post in 2009, not long after Ethics Alarms was launched, has made a trenchant observation that seems obvious once you read it, but had never occurred to me in this degree of clarity.

His comment follows yesterday’s post about the New York Times being sued for discriminating against a white, male job applicant. The paper is denying it, of course, but as I asked in the post, “Does anyone believe that the woke, left-biased, victim-mongering, knee-jerk Democratic New York Times, after declaring that its staff was “too white” and “too male” has not been systematically discriminating against whites and men?”

Interestingly, Ann Althouse offered a poll to her readers on exactly that question…

…and here are the results as I write this:

Michael’s observation slapped me across my metaphorical face with the realization that approving of “good discrimination” is the result of the societal embrace of the Golden Rationalization, “Everybody does it,” in epidemic proportions. This is ironic, because the same unethical reasoning is what supported slavery and, after that, routine anti-black discrimination and prejudice for so long.

I worked in the administration of an institution that was all-in on “affirmative action”-–note that this is one of the great cover-phrases of all time, like “pro-choice,” allowing something that is unethical and illegal to be framed as something else—in the late Seventies when it took the culture by the throat. The institution was Georgetown Law Center, which is still committed to the self-contradictory policy Michael R.’s comment focuses upon: you may recall that its Dean essentially dismissed a new faculty member for daring to suggest that Justice Jackson, the DEI nomination of Joe Biden, was taking the place of more qualified candidates.

There was once a utilitarian argument for affirmative action; indeed I made it myself once upon a time. But a nation founded on equal justice and individual responsibility cannot maintain integrity while accepting any form of racial and gender discrimination without end. The fact that so many of our friends, relatives and colleagues can’t figure this out points to a widespread lack of ethical analytical skills. It is, I think, the same faulty and unethical reasoning that has spawned the rationalization of illegal immigration.

Here is Michael R’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The New York Times Is Shocked—SHOCKED!—That Anyone Would Think It Discriminates Against White Males!”

* * *

I have tried to explain why racially discriminatory programs are wrong to people at my institution, but it just doesn’t work. It is impossible to get them to understand that they can’t discriminate based on race. Most of them have grown up in a world where the courts have ruled that race-based discrimination is permissible. Explaining to them that it was illegal the whole time is just incomprehensible. I mean, it does seem implausible that every single federal and state court in the entire country ruled that the law that said you can’t discriminate based on race ruled that you could discriminate against SOME races. Explaining that they never made it legal, they just ruled it was permissible makes it worse. How can judges give people permission to violate the law for 60 years?

Remember, the Milgram experiment showed that as few as 10% of the population is capable of critical thinking. Most of those people are dismissed as troublemakers by society for their crime of critical thinking.

The New York Times Is Shocked—SHOCKED!—That Anyone Would Think It Discriminates Against White Males!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

A white male New York ‘Times’ employee has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging the paper had discriminated against him by not giving him a promotion despite his superior qualifications, because he is a white male. Yesterday the EEOC filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the ‘Times’ arguing that the paper’s pledge to satisfy its DEI goals are being translated into “unlawful employment practices.”

Which, of course, they are, if the color of one’s skin and one’s pronouns are considered as crucial in determining promotions.

The Times was first to break the news of the suit but did not name the employee who made the complaint. “Reporters at the paper have been scrambling to figure out the employee’s identity, driven in part by bafflement that one of their own colleagues would sell out the paper to the administration, which has used tools of the federal government to attack the press,” says New York Magazine.

Really! So the Times feels that loyal Times workers should support “good discrimination” and allow the paper to skirt the law, even when they are the victims of illegal employment practices, because to do otherwise is to support the Evil Trump administration.

In World War Eleven such people were called “Good Germans.”

This is one sick culture at the New York Times.

Nikita Stewart — the Times’ then-real-estate editor who has since been promoted to metro editor — “deviated from normal hiring protocol” in January 2025 to hire someone without experience editing real-estate coverage to work as her deputy, the suit alleges. The white man who was bypassed had “considerable experience with real estate news,” a requirement included on the public job listing for the position.

Wow. A female editor named Nikita is at the center of his “to each according to their needs” tale! You can’t make this stuff up.

In 2021 the Times announced a “Call To Action,” which stated that “people of color—and particularly women of color—remain notably underrepresented in its leadership,” the suit claims. A company can address that perceived imbalance by recruitment efforts, but—and I speak from experience—placing a racial and gender thumbs on the metaphorical scales is virtually unavoidable.

Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha called the suit “politically motivated.” Gee, what a surprise. “Our employment practices are merit-based and focused on recruiting and promoting the best talent in the world,’’ Ha said in a statement. “We will defend ourselves vigorously.”

You know…like Harvard denied that admitting black students with lower grades and test scores than Asian applicants was discriminatory.

Does anyone believe that the woke, left-biased, victim-mongering, knee-jerk Democratic New York Times, after declaring that its staff was “too white” and “too male” has not been systematically discriminating against whites and men?

Another Really Bad Trump Idea: “The National Garden of American Heroes,” Part II.

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Part I is here, and you should read it first.

Warning: My head exploded several times while writing this part. Also: For some reason WordPress insists on listing the names weirdly. I tried to fix it once. I’ll keep trying. Sorry.

One of the stunning aspects of the proposed list of 250, other than its general incompetence, is that there was so much DEI pollution of the various categories. For example, there are very few, if any, respectable legal scholars who regard either Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Thurgood Marshall as belonging among our most admirable jurists. Marshall was the first black Supreme Court Justice, but that alone doesn’t make him a hero. Why is his trail-blazing credentials sufficient to get him a slot as one of the 250 “heroes,” but Ginsburg gets the nod over the first female Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor? What landmark ruling did Ginsberg produce.

This is a terrible list. I would hope (probably in vain) that a well-educated freshman at a state college could do better. Well, on with the critique…

4. Jurists: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Robert H. Jackson, Thurgood Marshall, William
Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia.

Comment: Ugh. In addition to the absurd inclusions (Rehnquist? Why?), the omissions are striking and unforgivable. John Marshall (no relation) is the most important and influential Chief Justice as well as the longest serving. Marbury v. Madison is the basis of the Supreme Court’s modern power. Where are the acknowledged giants of the Court: Benjamin Cardozo, Louis Brandeis, Hugo Black and both Harlans? Earl Warren was probably the second most influential and consequential Chief Justice, and the Warren Court, liberal as it was, still hold the record for transformative rulings. I’m not a big Oliver Wendell Holmes fan, but even his detractors (like Popehat’s Ken White) would concede that he was a major legal theorist who deserves to be listed among the greats. Moreover, nobody but a legal illiterate would believe that only SCOTUS members are great judges. Judge Learned Hand was dubbed “the Tenth Justice” and “the greatest judge never to be appointed to the Supreme Court.” His opinions and quotes are standard fare in law school. Judge Richard Posner, more recently, was an acclaimed legal thinker; so was Robert Bork, robbed of his place on the Supreme Court when the Democrats decided to violate a “democratic norm.”

Military Heroes and Patriots, defined as “Defenders of freedom who risked everything on the battlefield to preserve the Union and protect the innocent.”

1. Revolutionary & Early Era: Crispus Attucks, Joshua Chamberlain, David Farragut, Nathanael Greene, Nathan Hale, Henry Knox, Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Marquis de La Fayette, Paul Revere, Robert Gould Shaw.

Comment: I see Paul Revere turned up here. If he’s here, so too should William Dawes, who shared the task of alerting town a around Boston that “the British are coming!” Why is Crispus Attucks any more of a hero than the Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick, and Patrick Carr, who were also victims in the Boston Massacre? Oh, right, he was black. Got it. Race equals heroism. Similarly, why is Shaw on the list for losing an obscure battle with black union soldiers? Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and Hancock deserve the honor more. So, in fact, does George Armstrong Custer, as I explained here. Andrew Jackson won the most decisive military battle in U.S. history against crazy odds at the Battle of New Orleans. And what are non-Americans doing on the list, when deserving Americans are missing?

2. World War Leaders: William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Jimmy Doolittle, Gabby Gabreski, William Frederick “Bull” Halsey, Jr., Douglas MacArthur, GeorgeMarshall, George S. Patton, Jr., John J. Pershing, Matthew Ridgway, Hyman Rickover, Norman Schwarzkopf, Maxwell Taylor.

Comment: Where’s Admiral Raymond Spruance, who won the Battle of Midway? Where’s Dusty Kleiss another hero in the same battle, as the dive bomber who managed to hit the Japanese fleet with sub-par airplanes? Omar Bradley had far more to do with the U.S. victory than McArthur. Why are the officer heroes of D-Day omitted, like General Theodore Roosevelt Jr, and Gen. Norman Cota? Didn’t Trump watch “The Longest Day”?

2.Medal of Honor & Valor: Roy Benavidez, Desmond Doss, Audie Murphy, Alvin C. York

Comment: I get it, the only Medal of Honor recipients who count are the ones who have movies made about them.

3. Athletes and Competitors (Champions who demonstrated the American virtues of discipline, perseverance, and sportsmanship): Muhammad Ali, Herb Brooks, Kobe Bryant, Roberto Clemente, Lou Gehrig, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Jim Thorpe, Cy Young.

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Open Segregation And Discrimination In A (Of Course) California School District

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I want to hear someone try to defend this.

The Daily Caller reports that the Albany Unified School District in California hosted a trip to Virginia for “young men and women of color.” They visited Historically Black Colleges and Universities, while discussing “social justice,” according to documents obtained by parental rights group Defending Education. The local Board of Education trip approved the trip at a cost of $42,845.

“This unique mentoring program encourages Albany High School young men and women of color to develop social, personal, and academic success skills,” the Board’s statement announced. “Students gather in a safe, supportive, and empowering environment to voice their needs and challenges. The students engage in enriching discussions on social justice, education, leadership, mental well-being, and self-awareness. This mentoring program is transforming the lives of young men and women of color to make a significant global impact in society.”

The favored students also visited the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial and the Black Heritage Trail. But wait! There’s more…

“AUSD’s 2025-2026 Local Control and Accountability Plan names “Young Men of Color and Young Women of Color Programs” that aim to “provide social emotional supports to most underserved students.” The programs are part of a $1,257,234 “social emotional/mental health” support effort.

“The same plan details the district’s intention to provide staff with “professional development” programs centered on “culturally responsive/anti-racist pedagogy.” These teaching practices are necessary to support “student groups who are persistently and historically underserved,” the document states.

“Another document from 2026 includes a goal of “Recruit[ing] and Retain[ing] a Diverse, High Quality Staff,” DE found. The Superintendent Report detailed plans to “strengthen inclusive hiring,” expand “equitable recruitment pipelines,” and implement “affinity-based supports.” The report mentioned a “Black Teacher Project” to help in these race-based hiring and retention efforts and suggested the district would track staff demographics as an indicator of success.”

Questions:

  • How can a school district get away with flagrant racial discrimination like that in the 21st Century?
  • Are there no white families at all in that district? If there are, what the hell is the matter with them? Why would they permit such biased treatment of their children…in a program they are paying for?
  • Are there no “parents of color” in that district with the integrity to protest a policy that is divisive, illegal and discriminatory? 
  • Does California secretly lobotomize its citizens? Is Weenie juice secretly put in the water?
  • How can educators so smugly described a purely discriminatory educational exercise without any ethics alarms ringing?

I don’t understand this story at all.

What’s the Matter With “Kindness Is Everything”?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Oh, just everything.

This lawn sign message (and it’s on bumper-stickers too) was referenced in a sympathetic blog post about the ridicule being heaped onto Kristi Noem’s cross-dressing husband Byron. I will write about poor Byron later, if I can work up some enthusiasm for the job. Right now I’ll focus on the fatuous message above.

Kindness is not “everything.” It’s not even close to everything. Anyone who publicly declares such nonsense is either stating something they don’t believe in order to be nice (or seem nice), shamelessly virtue-signaling, or is too stupid to trust with sharp objects. Ethical living, thinking, inter-personal relations and problem-solving requires an acknowledgement of all the ethical values and virtues and a carefully learned and practiced system of balancing them.

Consider the Six Pillars of Character. None of those virtues designated by the Josephson Institute of Ethics are “everything,” and many, though legitimately important ethical consideration in the right context, have proven to be catastrophic when societies consider them to be “everything.” Perhaps the most blazing example is loyalty. Loyalty was the engine of the Third Reich. Even honesty isn’t “everything”; there are situations in which honesty is disastrous.

I find it significant that kindness didn’t even make the cut when the Josephson folks were compiling their “pillars” and the components of each. It could easily be included in the “Caring” pillar, which isn’t #5 in the hierarchy by accident.

“Kindness” is a favorite obsession in the Age of the Great Stupid. Kindness rationalizes open borders, “restorative justice,” and, naturally, “diversity, equity and inclusion.” It also undergirds irresponsible socialism, the destruction of personal responsibility and accountability, and the forgiveness of conduct that should not be forgiven or forgotten. Kindness was exploited to allow Joe Biden to be a zombie President.

No, kindness isn’t everything, or even the most important thing. I recommend caution and suspicion toward anyone who extols kindness to the exclusion of the other ethical values. The Ethics Alarms “Brel” designation comes to mind, awarded to those who embody the French troubadour’s memorable quote, “If you leave it up to them, they’ll crochet the world the color of goose shit.”

The Women’s History Museum Mess

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ugh. I won’t call it an ethics train wreck, because this is really another subset of the nation’s victim-mongering/tribal/white male vilification problem as well as the already running “DEI Ethics Train Wreck” and the “Trans Activism Ethics Train Wreck.”

Of course we have to have a Women’s History Museum. There are four historically “marginalized” groups, and women are the largest and longest suffering of them all. D.C. already has huge museum dedicated to African Americans, and there is a Smithsonian museum called the National Museum of the American Indian. Women have every right to feel snubbed in the current obsession with group identification. You know an LGBTQ+ museum on the Mall will be next: how could it not be?

Conservatives who argue, as one did in the comments to a recent online item about the museum, “[The museum] continues to foment the balkanization of America. The accomplishments of women are just that: accomplishments. Their fruits are enjoyed by all, not just by those of the gender/race/religion, etc of the person who made the accomplishment” are trying to lock the barn door after the horse has escaped and won the Kentucky Derby. This is “National Women’s Month.” The Democrats had a national convention celebrating “The Year of the Woman” (with Bill Clinton as a keynote speaker, but never mind…). Half of the arguments for voting for Hillary and Kamala was their lady-parts. We’re stuck with U.S. women seeing themselves as a special, separate, aggrieved and superior group for the foreseeable future, probably forever.

But there is a problem: the party that at least pretends to be the “party of women” can’t figure out what a woman is. This week House Democrats blocked legislation to establish the “Women’s History Museum” because of an amendment attached by Republicans stating, “The Museum shall be dedicated to preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women in the United States.”

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Harvard Grade Inflation Ethics and the DEI Train Wreck, Part I: A Depressing Protest From Students “Of Color”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

[This is a long post, but I urge you to read it all the way through. I cannot imagine a more powerful rebuttal to the advocates of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”]

Last October, in “Harvard’s Self-Indicting Grade Inflation Report,” I wrote about the school’s embarrassing report that revealed that 60% of the grades handed out at the supposedly elite college (my alma matter, and my sister’s, and my father’s, where my mother was Dean of Housing once-upon-a-time) are now As, making Harvard resemble Garrisons Keilor’s imaginary Minnesota community where “all the children” seem to be are “above average” even though that’s impossible.

In a prescient comment (as is often the case), AM Golden wrote in part, taking off from a Dean Amanda Claybaugh’s statement that it was desirable to “ produce a broader distribution of grades,”

That’s the problem. They don’t want to admit they accept unqualified applicants because many of those applicants will be disproportionately minorities. Returning standards to what an elite institution should have will mess with the faculty push for D.E.I. The standards have to stay low if the experiment is to be prioritized over pure academics. They have set too many precedents to easily back away now…

They have created bubbles where remote learning, mask wearing, protesting for the correct causes and making equal outcomes are virtues valued over a solid education. Backing up now will cause mass revolt on campuses. Like the news media, the colleges will be accused of caving to Trump. The asylum has been run by people who should have been inmates for so long that the actual inmates can’t be helped.

Sometimes I think Ethics Alarms is the only online community where clear-eyed vision dependably resides. For right on cue, as Harvard announced a long term effort to start grading seriously again, a coalition of “of color” Harvard students sent this open letter to the campus:

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Unethical Quote of the Day, (Also Stupid): Theater Critic Nuveen Kumar

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“But I don’t think it’s necessarily antiwoke to tell an all-white story or to relegate nonwhite characters to the margins, if that’s where they fit the creative intentions.”

—Former Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar in the paper’s “Whitewashing ‘Wuthering Heights.'”

Oh, well that’s really big of the critic, don’t you think? How generous of him! He is willing to concede that a director might still be regarded as a good person if he or she doesn’t cast actors “of color” (you know, like the critic) to play characters written as white, visualized by the playwright as white, in a story obviously about white people!

Yes, this fatuous, offensive statement came late in an essay that was already obnoxious, with the biased and reductive headline, “Whitewashing ‘Wuthering Heights’.” [Gift link!] The Post post was defending, sort-of -but- not-really, Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” film, in which Heathcliffe, Emily Bronte’s hormonal romantic anti-hero, is played…

…by a white actor. Never mind that previous film adaptations have cast Heathcliff as white, notably the classic starring Lawrence Olivier in the role, probably because he was the best actor alive at the time.

Yes, it is true that the ethnicity of Heathcliff has always been a matter of debate: with Bronte describing him as “dark-skinned,” a “gypsy,” and a “little Lascar,” a term for South Asian sailors. The idea is that he is an outsider and at the bottom of the social ladder; that certainly would justify casting a black, Indian or other non-white actor, but certainly doesn’t mean he has to be played that way. (I would not think that casting Heathcliff as Swedish would work, but you never know: I could see one of the Skarsgaard boys pulling it off.)

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BREAKING: DEI Bias Eats The A.P.’s Brains

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Why would the Associate Press feel the world needs this “news” when Savannah Guthrie’s mother is still missing?

The Associated Press is troubled that there are so many white athletes at the Winter Olympics. No, it really offered a new story that says this. No I am NOT kidding. The apparently woke-mad Chris Nisi complains in “Europe’s rising diversity is not reflected at the Winter Olympics. Culture plays a big role” [Note: “Culture plays a big role”= “Bulletin: Water is Wet.”]…

Immigration from Africa and the Middle East has transformed the demographics of Europe in recent decades. And while the growing diversity is reflected in many sports such as soccer — Sweden’s men’s national team has several Black players including Liverpool striker Alexander Isak — it hasn’t made a dent in winter sports…At the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Sweden is sending a team made up almost exclusively of ethnically Swedish athletes, with NHL player Mika Zibanejad, whose father is from Iran, a rare exception. That hardly reflects the diversity of the Nordic country: About 2 million of its 10 million residents were born abroad, about half of them in Asia or Africa, according to national statistics agency SCB.

The lack of athletes of color at the Winter Olympics — and in winter sports in general — has been a recurring theme in the U.S., which is sending one of its most diverse teams to the Games. It hasn’t gotten the same attention in Europe.

The Olympic rosters of France, Germany, Switzerland and other European winter sports nations look a lot like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation seen in their soccer or basketball teams…”

 

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