George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck

There Is Still A Chance For Justice In the Sacrifice of Officer Derek Chauvin…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

When I posted on the shameful conviction of Officer Derek Chauvin in 2023 after trail that was biased from the start to its finsih, I led off with that climactic song from the musical “1776.” It seemed to me then that nobody did care, at least, not enough people in our corrupted and politicized justice system. I wrote in part,

“That the conviction of Derek Chauvin for murder was a frightening political act that trampled multiple constitutional rights of a single hated ex-cop (and later his three fellow police officers at the scene) has been increasingly undeniable. The justice system, the news media, the political system and the nation as a whole have apparently decided that Chauvin isn’t worth the effort to provide him with the basic rights and fair treatment that has been accorded to scores of murderers and thieves, and that is supposed to be the birthright of every citizen regardless of class, color or character.

“The U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision that I have to believe was dictated by public relations rather than law or justice, recently turned down Chauvin’s last ditch appeal, based on his claim that he was denied his right to a fair trial because of pretrial publicity and public safety concerns in the event of an acquittal. Of course he was. Public figures had declared him guilty during the trial. A mass outbreak of race-based rioting (and “mostly peaceful” demonstrations) across the country had been triggered by Floyd’s death, though no evidence was ever offered at trial that Chauvin was motivated by racism. The specter of the Rodney King riots that erupted in L.A. after the police accused in his beating were acquitted had to loom large in the jury’s minds, as well as the likelihood of potential alienation from their friends, families and colleagues if they allowed an arch villain, in the already clear verdict of the media and the mob, to escape mob justice….He is a convenient sacrifice to racial guilt among whites and aspiring political power among blacks. Facts are irrelevant.”

It was and is a horrifying failure of our justice system, and a horrifying example of how political violence can succeed. Now a new filing in the case raises hope again that Chauvin, who has been nearly murdered in prison, may yet be exonerated. If, as the document and its supporting documentation claims, the prosecution withheld important evidence from the defense and the jury, then Chauvin was denied due process even beyond the due process we saw him be denied in his first trial. That would mandate throwing out the verdict and giving him a new trial, one would hope in a jurisdiction not as incapable of sanity as Minneapolis.

Here is a summary:

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Encore! “From The ‘I Don’t Understand This At All’ Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I was about to write almost the exact same essay I wrote in 2019, but fortunately something deep within what I jokingly called “my brain” prompted me to check the Ethics Alarms archives and now I have an extra 45 minutes or so to spend organizing my sock drawer. Sure enough, I had published the lament before, and prompted by the same stimulus”: a New York Times news item.

Yesterday’s article (gift link!) was was déjà vu too: “MacKenzie Scott Gives $700 Million to Historically Black Colleges.” In 2019, I wrote “The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has given more than $500 million to more than 20 historically Black colleges in the past year.” That was bonkers, her current gift is bonkers, but this item in the latest Times article is really  nuts: 

“President Trump has also shown support for historically Black institutions. In his first term, he distributed $250 million in annual funding and cut more than $300 million in federal loans for the schools. In April, through an executive order, he unveiled a new White House job to oversee H.B.C.U.s. But the position currently remains vacant.

“Dr. Gasman, the Rutgers professor, said the Trump administration has sent mixed signals. The president has sought to crack down on diversity programs in education and has complained about the teaching of Black history. The funds for H.B.C.U.s and tribal colleges were announced as the federal government cut programs that support minority students in science and engineering programs and schools with significant Hispanic enrollment.

“They are willing to support Black people in Black institutions, but they are not very comfortable with Black people in white institutions,” Dr. Gasman said.”

That’s deliberately negative spin, but it’s not completely unjust. What the hell? Historically black colleges are the epitome of “good discrimination” in the hypocritical style of DEI. Howard, Harris’s alma mater (Be proud,Howard—you graduated a babbling fool!), got the largest donation from Scott, 80 million bucks. Do you know what the white enrollment at Howard is? Less than 1%! Talk about disparate impact—you know, the EEOC trick that finds invidious discrimination based on statistics alone?

Across all of the HBUCs, there are about 10% white students  and 2% Asians. I thought Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the way to ensure no discrimination based on race, was to not engage in discrimination based on race. This is undeniably discrimination based on race.

The Trump Administration should not be supporting black colleges and universities. If most of our elite colleges are a sham, spending more time on ideological indoctrination than on teaching, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities are worse. By an “in isn’t what it is” PR haze endorsed by the news media (‘Oh! They are historic! That means they are good schools, right?’ Right, just as the historic Biden press secretary Karine Saint-Pierre was “good.” They aren’t good: they have inferior standards for admission, inferior faculties, and their graduates come out with misleading diplomas) the public is led to believe that these are elite institutions too.

Ten years ago, Ethics Alarms played a minor role in saving Virginia’s Sweet Briar college from being closed by a board that decided that an all-women’s college was an anachronism and no longer needed. I argued that there were many good reasons to have all female colleges as an option for women, but none of those good reasons apply to racially segregated schools.

OK, now I am getting into the substance of the essay from six years ago, and I have frittered away some of that saved sock drawer time. Heeere’s Jack!— from 2019….in “From The ‘I Don’t Understand This At All’ Files: Why Should ‘Historically Black Colleges’ Be Getting A Surge In Donations?”

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Make no mistake: I know why they are getting a surge in donations: cynical virtue-signalling and mindless George Floyd Freakout tribute. However, like the historically black colleges themselves, the phenomenon of picking now to celebrate segregated education, and mostly inferior education, is self-contradictory. It also highlights the hypocrisy of the “antiracism” movement itself, and the incoherence of the “diversity” chants coming from the Left.

For these colleges are the opposite of diverse. They are, in fact, discriminatory in concept and execution, and to see them “thrive” while activists are demanding literal quotas in other institutions in order to create numerical demographic parity—at least—is a blazing example of how the George Floyd Ethics Train wreck is less a cultural awakening than it is an opportunistic and unethical power play fueled by white guilt and cowardice.

The front page article in the New York Times today is so full of head-banging-on-the-wall moments I ran out of head before I ran out of wall. Here are some…

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Revisiting “I Don’t Understand This ‘Niggardly Principle’ Story At All…Or Maybe I Do and Am Just Afraid To Accept the Truth”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The Rest of the Story: I’m reposting this essay from almost exactly a year ago because the Free Press has a disturbing update on Holden Hughes (“He Was Falsely Accused of ‘Blackface.’ It Derailed His Life.”), one of the boys whose 2017 selfie was used by an unidentified woke ethics villain to have the children tarred as racists during the George Floyd Freakout in 2020. That ethics villain was an ideological compatriot of my friends who are raving about MAGA and Trump today. That is their “side.”

He’s an adult now, but Holden’s life plans were seriously derailed when the private school he was attending expelled him, not because he really was wearing “blackface” in that photo (he and his friends were smeared with green anti-acne facial masks) but because the woke head of the school believed that appearances mattered more than reality. Last year, a successful law suit by his family against the school ended in a one million dollar verdict for him and another one of the boys. That was just money, however, the damage remained

Everyone should reflect on this cautionary tale (which the mainstream media scrupulously avoided reporting on, and you know why) when the Trump Deranged claim that progressives defend democratic values and deplore ideological bullying. The piece ends,

Last year, shortly after the lawsuit was settled, he started dating a girl he liked. On their second date, he told her about his past and after that, he said, she stopped responding to his texts. He told me that it’s hard to accept that “something completely out of my control kind of inhibits that relationship from going farther.” But he can’t change the past.

“It’s my life, and there’s no avoiding that. It made me who I am today.”

Throughout the entire ordeal of the last five years, Holden told me he would remind himself: “I know who I am. I know my values. I know the real story.” He knows the other story—the one that isn’t true—will continue to haunt him. “I don’t think it’s ever gonna leave me,” he said. But he wanted to speak to me because he believed that putting his story in print, knowing it would be on the internet forever, would be cathartic. For him, it is a chance to finally set the record straight, after trying to hide the lies for so long.

“I am not ashamed of anything that happened,” Holden said. “I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. I make them every single day, but doing an acne face mask in eighth grade was not one of them.”

Here is the post, from May 11, 2024:

Now get this: In 2017, three 14-year-old California teens, two of whom, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, were about to begin attending St. Francis High School, a Catholic private school in Mountain view, were modeling anti-acne medicinal face masks that involved smearing dark green goo on their faces. (One of the boys had severe acne and his friends put the stuff on their own faces in an act of support). The teen who wasn’t headed to the private school snapped a selfie because the boys thought they looked funny. A similar photo taken a day earlier indicated that they had tried white medicinal face masks as well. 

A student at St. Francis found the image online and uploaded it to a group chat in June 2020. Not only was the George Floyd Freakout in full eruption, but the photo was circulated on the same day that recent SFHS graduates had posted on Instagram a satirical meme pertaining to Floyd’s demise, so the school was “triggered.” The gloriously woke student who decided to publicize the greenface photo claimed that the teens were using blackface; “another example” of rampant racism at the school, he posted, and urged everyone in the group chat to spread it throughout the school community—you know, to cause as much anger, division and disruption as possible.

I can’t find the name of that charming kid. He’ll probably be Governor of California some day.

Soon after this seed was planted, the Dean of Students at St. Francis Ray called the Hughes’s and Aaron Hartley’s’ parents to ask them if they were aware of the photograph. They explained that the teens had applied green facemasks three years earlier, long before the non-racial Minnesota incident that had no demonstrable racial significance and definitely no relevance to blackface. The parents added that the teens’ use of the acne medication had “neither ill intent nor racist motivation, nor even knowledge of what “blackface” meant.”

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“Mostly Peaceful” Bullshit

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Guest Post by Mrs. Q

From your host: Ok, this is technically a Comment of the Day on the post, “Let Us Call the George Floyd Freakout What It Was.” I decided that it warrants guest post status for several good reasons. 1) We haven’t had a guest post for a while, and I am still seeking submissions. 2) The George Floyd aftermath disaster is one of the signature ethics outrages of my life, and is certainly worthy of more than one post saying so on its 5th anniversary. 3) I’m slyly trying to entice Mrs. Q to revive her featured column on Ethics Alarms, and 4) not for the first time, I like her take on a current ethics topic better than my own.—JM.

If anyone hasn’t had a chance to see this documentary, I’ll link it here: The Fall of Minneapolis | A Crowdfunded Documentary.

As some longtime readers here may remember, I am from Minneapolis and grew up literally at ground zero, where the Third Precinct, Auto Zone, and Minnehaha Lake Wine and Spirits were burned to a crisp. For three days and nights I watched others livestream on multiple cameras everything I knew from 4-14 years old go from vandalized to looted to burned from May 25th-28th. The first building they burned, was ironically, the last place I ever saw my black father work (it was a Snyders Drug Store then). I’d wait for him on the sidewalk in front of our four-plex, watching as he would step out the door of the building and head a half block home. Now that memory is infused with flames.

Then the riots went global.

What so many forget is that it was quite literally a war zone in Minneapolis. The documentary linked above illustrates what I witnessed. Areas were under siege and neighbors were trapped in their homes for days. It wasn’t just that crime increased, it was that the police could not help anyone. There were neighbor reports of rioters putting accelerants around neighborhoods, so people had to patrol their areas while putting themselves at risk for being attacked physically. I spoke with friends who had to flee in the early morning to get their families safe. And those who thought their BLM or Biden yard signs would save them were met with the same violence as everyone else.

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Let Us Call the George Floyd Freakout What It Was

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

…a cynical, dishonest, politically-motivated exploitation of an otherwise meaningless arrest gone wrong, fueled by a Machiavellian party, irresponsible journalism, and a biased justice system. The ethics train wreck was a disaster for race relations, law enforcement, and the nation as a whole.

I would typically say “Good job, everybody!” at this juncture, except I refuse to take any blame for this one. I saw Black Lives Matter for what it was from the beginning, and identified the phoniness of the George Floyd riots immediately. Too bad so few people read Ethics Alarms.

There should be accountability, but there won’t be.

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Ethics Quiz: The Symbolic Pardon

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I should have come up with this quiz without a nudge from Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk, but I didn’t. I am ashamed.

Conservative gadfly and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro called on President Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the white, former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murder in the 2020 death of George Floyd in a petition published on Shapiro’s website. (I don’t think it was murder, and I don’t think murder was ever proven, much less “beyond a reasonable doubt”.)

In his entreaty to the President, Shapiro declares, “We write to urge you to immediately issue a pardon for Officer Derek Chauvin, who was unjustly convicted and is currently serving a 22-and-a-half year sentence for the murder of George Floyd and associated federal charges.”

Shapiro accurately describes the incident as “the inciting event for the BLM riots,” which he says “set America’s race relations on their worst footing in recent memory.”

Most importantly, Shapiro says that the guilty verdict was tainted by the “massive overt pressure on the jury to return a guilty verdict regardless of the evidence or any semblance of impartial deliberation,” and that elected officials “pre-judged the outcome of the trial and took to national media to create pressure on the jury to go along with their preferred narrative.”

This, in my view, should be beyond dispute. I last posted on the way Chauvin was sacrificed in December of 2023, here. “Under these circumstances, there was no opportunity for blind justice to work, and a man is now rotting in prison because of it,” Shapiro concludes.

I concluded in part,

“The contrast between how Chauvin has been treated and the wall of protection erected around the black Capitol Hill cop who shot and killed an unarmed (white) January 7 rioter in 2021 is striking. From the beginning, the case against Chauvin lacked convincing intent, causation, or proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I keep seeing in various documentaries regarding other “true crime” stories rote statements by lawyers, prosecutors and judges about how in the United States, all citizens are presumed innocent and treated equally. If this equal treatment can be withheld from Derek Chauvin, and it has been, then it can and will be withheld by others who are deemed sufficiently unpopular. As [Professor Glenn] Loury writes, the result tells us that “the deep epistemic corruption at the heart of the affair will become, if it goes unchallenged, imperceptible to future generations, simply more evidence that the world is as the poetic truth has determined it to be.” Who will challenge it now? Who has the integrity and courage today to stand up for justice a “racist” who was profitably used as the excuse to advance such marvelous revolutionary movements as critical race theory and “diversity, equity and inclusion”?

Chauvin was convicted in two separate trials, state and federal, and is simultaneously serving a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights along with a 22.5-year state sentence for second-degree murder. He has tried to appeal his conviction numerous times, including to the Supreme Court. He has no plausible avenues to pursue now except a pardon.

Shapiro argues in a video that although Trump cannot pardon Chauvin in the state murder case, it is important for Chauvin be pardoned on federal charges anyway.

“Make no mistake—the Derek Chauvin conviction represents the defining achievement of the Woke movement in American politics. The country cannot turn the page on that dark, divisive, and racist era without righting this terrible wrong,” Shapiro said in the letter. Elon Musk, not knowing when he should “tend to his own knitting,” posted about Shapiro’s petition on Twitter/X yesterday saying, “Something to think about.”

OK, I’m thinking.

Your first Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of March, 2025, is…

Should President Trump pardon Derek Chauvin?

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At the University of Michigan, A Controversy Reveals Dishonesty and Hypocrisy Underlying the DEI Fad

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

If Donald Trump accomplishes nothing more in his next four years than ending the nation’s tolerance to open borders while fawning over “good illegal immigrants” and driving a metaphorical stake through The Great Stupid’s DEI fad, electing him will have been worth all chaos that will come along with it.

DEI thrives as a hypocritical way to discriminate against white men and shift to a society based on rewarding achievement, diligence and ability to one based on group membership. That makes it un-American to the core. At the University of Michigan, the “director of the university’s office of academic multicultural initiatives”—you know, DEI—spoke out at a conference of such officers the university to opine that her university was “controlled by wealthy Jews and that because Jewish students are “wealthy and privileged” the don’t need diversity services. “Jewish people have no genetic DNA that would connect them to the land of Israel,” Rachel Dawson was quoted as saying.

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Promoting Your Institution By Emphasizing the Most Negative Perspective On Its History: Good Plan, U.Va!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m not certain what to call this, and solicit your suggestions. Incompetence? Woke virtue signaling? Self-hate? Betrayal? Insanity?

The Jefferson Council, an organization of conservative University of Virginia alumni, has criticized the recent tone of the school’s student-run campus tours that are supposed to convince prospective applicants and their families that U.Va is the place for the graduating high school students to continue their education. The tour organization, the University Guide Service, has been alienating prospective students, the Council says, by immersing the hopeful, bright-eyed young idealists with a “woke version of U.Va history.”

The cheerful tale of the storied university’s origins, the alumni complain, begins by describing how the university’s land was stolen from the Monacan Indian tribe, then goes on to describe how the Rotunda (above) designed by Thomas Jefferson as the center of campus, was constructed by slave labor. They believe that a tour for prospective students should emphasize Jefferson’s positive contributions to the nation, like, oh, authoring the mission statement for this great democratic experiment, his indispensable contribution to securing American independence, his achievements as the third President of the United States, his brilliance and an architect and inventor, those little details. There was nothing unusual about using slave labor when the University of Virginia was established in 1819. Why would an institution emphasize that in a promotional tour?

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NOW Can We Agree That Black Lives Matter Is a Scam and a Blight on America (Which Should Have Been Obvious From the Beginning)?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

(It was obvious to me!)

Records reveal that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) has unethically and criminally used charitable contributions to enrich family members of the Black Lives Matter cabal, and of course, the leaders of the cabal themselves.

Gee. What a surprise.

Tax filings show that…

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The DEI-ing of Major League Baseball’s Statistics: Oh. Wait, WHAT?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Major League Baseball’s absurd and self-wounding decision to lump all of the old Negro League season and career statistics in with those of its own players is impossible to defend logically or ethically. Ethics Alarms discussed this debacle of racial pandering here, three days ago. What is interesting—Interesting? Perhaps disturbing would be a better word—is how few baseball experts, statisticians, historians, players and fans are defending this indefensible decision or criticizing it. As to the latter, they simply don’t have the guts; they are terrified of being called racists. Regarding the former, there is really no good argument to be made. MLB’s groveling and pandering should call for baseball’s version of a welter of “It’s OK to be white” banners and signs at the games. Instead, both the sport and society itself is treating this “it isn’t what it is” classic like a particularly odoriferous fart in an elevator. Apparently it’s impolite to call attention to it.

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