Fire Hydrant of Freedom

3rd post:

One of the most important political developments of 2023 was the growing pushback against “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Those DEI programs and the ideology that underpin them are under siege politically and legally, and they are losing. They had grown rapidly, thanks to a mixture of support, indifference and timidity. But that began to ebb last year and will continue to recede in 2024.

The wounded patient was wheeled into the intensive care unit when the Supreme Court undermined a crucial foundation for DEI and related affirmative action programs. The decision came in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a similar case against the University of North Carolina. SCOTUS ruled the universities were illegally discriminating when their admissions favored some minorities and effectively penalized others. Neither public nor private universities had the right to do that.

Those lawsuits were brought against universities on behalf of Asian-Americans, but their victory has reverberated through the world of corporations, non-profits and government agencies. That’s not surprising since those institutions have a host of programs and practices similar to those at Harvard and UNC. They, too, discriminate in hiring and promotion, in hopes their “affirmative” policies will create more inclusive, racially-diverse workplaces. One question sure to reach the High Court is whether these programs are illegal.

The programs also raise practical questions. One is whether they actually achieve their aim of creating more inclusive workplaces. Or do they create more hostile, racially-divided ones and wider public resentment beyond them? Another question is whether institutions committed to these programs can find ways to work around the court decisions and hide their efforts.

The policies used to pursue these goals are sometimes called “reverse discrimination” because they benefit groups, primarily African-Americans, who had long been subjects of pernicious discrimination, segregation, and, indeed, racial hatred.

The terminology of “reverse discrimination” is outdated and misleading. We live more than half a century after the tectonic changes of the mid-1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson and a supportive Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and a series of massive government programs, many of them meant to assist historically-disadvantaged groups. After that long span, the beneficiaries today are the children and grandchildren of those who were harmed by segregation and Jim Crow laws.

The losers are not just the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the beneficiaries of that invidious system. They are often the descendants of people who didn’t live in America during those years. If those descendants are subject to bias today, it is not “reverse discrimination.” It is “discrimination,” plain and simple.

This unadorned description is true no matter who benefits or loses from today’s bias, whether it is based on race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or anything besides merit. Restoring this ideal of equal treatment and equal opportunity would return American to its long-cherished ideals.

Those ideals are far different from equal outcomes, misleadingly called “equity,” as mandated by some government agency. In fact, the switch from America’s traditional goal “equal treatment” to the socialist aspiration of “equity in outcomes” is an ideological sleight-of-hand.
It is true, of course, that America often fell painfully short of its highest ideals. Sometimes it abandoned them entirely, as it did in Jim Crow laws, segregation in housing, employment and public accommodations, and, worst of all, chattel slavery. But our country will not come closer to achieving our ideals or creating a “more perfect Union” by turning its mistakes on their head. It certainly won’t do that now, after several decades of pursuing major programs to remedy past injustices.

Increasingly, that’s the conclusion the public and courts have reached. The left disagrees, and that includes nearly all intellectuals.
The rising resistance to affirmative action and race-based discrimination will have a crushing impact on DEI programs. It will reach well beyond universities to affect corporations, non-profits, and government agencies at the city, state and federal levels. All of them have similar programs. All are at risk.

The widening gyre of the SCOTUS decision has already begun to affect practices at these other institutions. Take the Small Business Administration, which has a loan program known as 8(a). Originally designed to help all disadvantaged people, the SBA decided years ago that some applicants would automatically qualify as “disadvantaged” if they were black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American. That rule would designate the founder of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, as disadvantaged. He is worth about $16.7 billion.

A federal court struck down the SBA’s formulaic approach last summer. The agency temporarily suspended loan applications until it could come up with new rules and application procedures. When it issued them two months later, the message was that potential borrowers had to show how each one had been “disadvantaged.”

SBA has updated the application by adding a plain language fillable questionnaire for applicants to identify social disadvantage. Firms continue to have the option to prepare a social disadvantage narrative.

That’s right: the government is now asking for “social disadvantage narratives,” to be judged by mid-level federal bureaucrats.
The court ruling that upended the SBA minority-loan program is just the beginning. The SCOTUS decision on university admissions will unleash a torrent of legal disputes. Individuals will file suits claiming they lost jobs, admissions, scholarships or promotions to less-qualified candidates because they came from the “wrong” race. Corporate and government programs directed at minorities will be challenged when they include race-based criteria. Ultimately, the courts will have to flesh out the implications and limits of the Supreme Court ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

These cases, plus rising public resistance to DEI, are bound to have a far-reaching impact since the disputed programs are embedded in so many organizations. They are part of a broad push to create more diversity by hiring and promoting the “right kind of minorities,” particularly African Americans. Asian Americans were apparently not the right kind, as the evidence they presented in court showed convincingly. There is an equally strong push to admit favored minorities to academic programs, both as students and faculty. The controversy arises when they fall below the standard metrics used for other candidates. (Many, of course, surpass those metrics and don’t need “affirmative action.”)

Since it is illegal to use race as a basis for hiring, admission and promotion, the institutions that hope to continue using it, as many do, will have to evade detection. They are already working hard to do just that. That’s why thousands of universities have made standardized tests for academic merit “optional.” The officials who handle admissions don’t want courts looking over their shoulders and limiting their autonomy. They certainly don’t want to leave a damning statistical trail if they practice illegal discrimination. Covering up that trail is a major reason standardized tests are now optional. Without them for every candidate, it is harder for courts and litigants to compare the qualifications of those who were admitted and those who weren’t.

It is easy to see how some individuals are helped and others harmed by these efforts to increase “diversity, equity and inclusion.” But it also important to see how these efforts reshape the institutions that implement them. One of the most important is that they create large, entrenched and expensive bureaucracies. The goal of those bureaucracies is to set detailed regulations and then enforce those rules. They are typically given the investigative authority and coercive power to do it.

Since universities have been the focus of so much of this controversy, it is worth considering how DEI programs impact them specifically. The short answer is two ways. One is costly administrative bloat. The other is ideological meddling in every aspect of campus life, from student activities to academic matters that were once the exclusive preserve of faculty.

DEI administrators gain additional power because other administrators agree with them. These fellow administrators typically endorse DEI goals, oppose race neutrality and buttress their colleagues’ authority rather than contesting it. Senior university officials almost always go along, either because they agree or because they know that opposing it would end their upward trajectory. As politicians used tell patronage workers in the old city machines, “You need to go along to get along.” That advice still works for deans and provosts.

Of course, DEI bureaucracies are not the only reason why so many universities are weighed down with more administrators than students or faculty. Far from it. The main reason is that universities, like all institutions, must comply with a tangle of complex federal regulations, nearly all of them established, implemented and enforced by yet another set of bureaucrats —those in Washington.

The result is a pervasive regulatory web on every campus, requiring hundreds of administrators to ensure compliance and provide the federal government with data to prove it. That web is even thicker at university research hospitals, which grew out of the biological sciences and soon became profit centers in their own right.

For now, there is little hope of significantly reducing this blob of government regulations and the bureaucracies associated with them. But there is one important exception: programs involving DEI and affirmative action. Opponents of those programs now believe they can be cut. Supporters see the same trend and fear it means the loss of opportunities for historically-disadvantaged groups.
This debate won’t end soon, but the bureaucracies that implement these race-based programs might. DEI is still alive, but it’s on feeding tubes in the ICU. Its initials might soon be transposed to “die.”

By
Charles Lipson
Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma professor of political science emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security, and a Spectator contributing writer.

https://thespectator.com/topic/code-red-dei-is-in-the-icu/

Well, you seem to have a sense of mission here so go for it on the condition that you double post them on the War on the Rule of Law thread as well 

I certainly am annoyed that a putative premier law enforcement agency so often ends up with its tit in a wringer with few in the media connecting those dots. But yes, I’ll cross post.

Well, my concern is that we already have quite the volume of threads of fairly substantial specificity-- which often traps me into playing thread nazi haha.

For what it sounds like what you want to accomplish, may I suggest that you cull through the various material of FBI malfeasance on that thread and file them for your personal use as you see fit?

Well sure, assuming I can find them, which is why I was seeking a place to aggregate as, given the FBI’s role in the false Trump is a Russian stooge claims, FISA falsehoods and all the attendant constitutional questions arising there, various entrapment schemes (back in the day GM and I were at odds re several septuagenarians or something in Missouri or somewhere that got sucked into something similar I’ve since had trouble finding info regarding on the outcomes front), the FBI’s entanglements in the various impeachment boondoggles, this Michigan stuff, J6, et al there would seem to be a fair amount of material that’s out there, yet unassembled and hence not viewed in a manner where commonalities, patterns, players, etc. can be compared and commented on.

Then again a dime will get you a dollar if there ISN’T some federal stooge already tracking things here and noodling on some means to use it as a means of career advancement guised as legit law enforcement, applied in a one-sided manner albeit. Perhaps a thread thumbing its nose at the utter hypocrisy of it all might prove to be more than such a creature could bear….

2nd post. Great piece tearing down the work of Gay’s thesis advisor and source for many of her “scholarly” methods:

https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-king-has-no-clothes-claudine?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR05BRLGmtbTZRrQj8lXVi-_ZTrg6y2YNtXqt4zi5lYZcopmvi0K7gdpNDI

A fine deconstruction of the whole Gay/Harvard mess:


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Conversation

Bill Ackman
@BillAckman
In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel.  Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. 

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.

After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.

The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.

The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.

These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.

When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.

The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.

DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.

You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe.

To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.

Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.

And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.

I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.

America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.

Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.

An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.

The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.

I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on
@X
 that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.

When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement.  I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community.

I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more.

I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities.

In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock.

Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.

While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.

I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.

All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.

This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty.

The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.

The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?

One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate.  The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.

Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university.  It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.

The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.

Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.

The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.

The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?

In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.

The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.

The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.

And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.

It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.

The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.

According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.

Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.

In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.

So what should happen?

The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.

The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.

The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.

The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.

Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?

Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus. 

Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.

These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.

A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com, which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.

A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.

Today was an important step forward for the University.  It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.

We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.

This could likely be folded into an existing thread, but I’d like to start cataloging FBI-specific malfeasance as, it seems to me, they have morphed into a champions of the status quo as preferred by the Democratic Party, an organ of the Deep State, and generally an agency that regularly violates constitutional protections to political ends, as this piece demonstrates.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/01/03/the_fbi-tainted_whitmer_kidnap_plot_youve_heard_next_to_nothing_about_1001971.html

If anyone is aware of other posts re FBI malfeasance please pass ‘em on so I can add a link to ‘em here.

Of course they did:

https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/12/report-chinese-spy-balloon-used-u-s-internet-provider/

I don’t know what to make of this. The epidemiological side of the house well demonstrated the truth is not something they are capable of offering or operating within, and clearly someone from that side of the house is whispering in select ears, who knows to what end.

Do the spooks have some virus that turns what looks like the impending collapse of Ukraine’s military into something less unpleasant come the next presidential election? Wouldn’t put it past ‘em, but this certainly is deniable at this stage and kinda begs the question: if this is a biologic solution to a military problem what keeps it contained, contained among the Rooskies, contained where a response is concerned if the Rooskies believe it was an attack, contained when whatever wildcard some fool failed to account for rears its head.

Bottom line, with the MSM and the current administration having chucked anything resembling integrity, let alone the ability or desire to traffic in truth, I gotta suspect there’s more here than meets the eye:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2023/12/21/mouse-fever-what-to-know-about-the-virus-mowing-down-putins-soldiers-fighting-in-ukraine/?sh=7e5a7bd03e5d

They both don’t share their data:

https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/12/harvard-president-claudine-gays-research-data-now-under-scrutiny/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=harvard-president-claudine-gays-research-data-now-under-scrutiny

Utterly frosts me that utterly debunked claims and their peddlers, rather than being laughed out of the game, are still seeking to turn tricks:

https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/18/meet-lawyer-michael-dreeben-the-man-behind-three-major-anti-trump-operations/?fbclid=IwAR2C-zm-xtMQCgq69bo1rP5m8G0gOY8DX7S8Ar_COxHesbmiTd69aUNs7Sc

 https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1736545520678572535

Oh my. Keep your powder dry.

The Greenies run their mouths about those rotten hydrocarbons, and do whatever they can to increase the cost of their use, but if they were succeeding coal use would be diminishing rather than rising. At the end of the day the ones they impact the most are the poorest among us. Their mothers must be proud:

https://joannenova.com.au/2023/12/more-coal-burned-on-earth-in-2023-than-ever-before-in-human-history/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=more-coal-burned-on-earth-in-2023-than-ever-before-in-human-history

This could be filed a lot of places, but due to its sweeping nature and comprehensive scope I’ll drop it here:”

https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/the-epic-bullshit-of-catastrophic?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR2BSn_yzNweux2qlqkCRtd1g5Kq3D06U05kzEpQUyX8jgX3qQBsisCGXQQ

Steve McIntyre (SM) is not a household name, but ought to be. Over the years I’ve posted his material, particularly his debunking of the whole “hockey stick” bit of sky-is-falling fun where he and a partner whose name eludes me at the moment, upon being told that NASA prophet of doom James Hansen would not provide the dataset/source code behind spike in world temps claim, backward engineered the code and demonstrate it to be false, a tale well worth looking at his Climate Audit site, where he continues to hold Church of Anthropomorphic Climate Apocalypse feet to the fire, exposing all their dubious CACA tenets.

Well he’s now pointed his gaze toward 2020 voter fraud, with the results being worth following:

https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1324884540624678912

Not interesting of itself, but for what it bodes.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/11/1084926/human-brain-cells-chip-organoid-speech-recognition/

Cool stuff if you’ve some sort of gross debilitation. Not so much if you are tied to a chair and being sweated by an intelligence agency:

https://singularityhub.com/2023/12/12/this-mind-reading-cap-can-translate-thoughts-to-text-thanks-to-ai/

… to start your Sunday. Surprised he’s retained 37%.

Is Joe Biden in free fall?
The Hill News / by J.T. Young / December 17, 2023 at 09:11AM

As bad as polling has been for Joe Biden recently, it just got significantly worse on Thursday. 

In addition to overall polling, two specific polls — one by Rasmussen and one by Bloomberg/Morning Consult — shed new light on what could be an ominous new trend for Democrats. If true and a trend, then there is no light at the end of the tunnel for Biden next November.

National polls were already bad for the incumbent president. According to Real Clear Politics’s Dec. 14 average of national polls, Biden trailed GOP frontrunner Donalf Trump 44.1 percent to 47.3 percent. He also trailed in twelve of the fourteen polls used to make that average; Biden led in only one — and that by a scant 1 percent — and was tied in the other. On Nov. 14, the same RCP average showed Trump ahead by just 0.8 of a percentage point; on Aug. 14, Biden led by 0.7 of a percentage point. For an average of national polls, these are large changes in a short time. 

The impact of today’s Trump lead is only compounded by the fact that Biden won in 2020’s popular vote by 4.4 percentage points, even as he squeaked out an Electoral College victory by winning six states by less than 3 percent of their popular vote. That effectively means that Biden is actually 7.6 percentage points behind where he needs to be to beat the former president again in 2024.

So, what specifically made this generally bad news even worse for Biden?

On Dec. 14, Rasmussen released their poll of likely voters (that is, voters indicating they will be more likely to vote than just registered voter polls). In a head-to-head matchup, Trump led Biden by a staggering 10 percentage points: 48 percent to 38 percent. In Rasmussen’s results on a three-way matchup that included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a configuration that favors Biden by dropping third-party candidates Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who will likely draw more votes from Biden — Trump still led by 8 percentage points: 40 percent to 32 percent, with 16 percent for Kennedy. 

The kicker according to Rasmussen: “This is a reversal of our November survey, when Biden led by four points, with 46% to Trump’s 42%. The new survey also shows stronger support for third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”

A Dec. 14, Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll takes the bad news to another level of specificity by tracking voters in the six battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin — that Biden narrowly won in 2020 to secure his Electoral College victory. 

In a head-to-head matchup, Trump led in all six of these states, his narrowest lead being 2 percentage points in Pennsylvania and his largest lead being 6 percentage points in Georgia. In a five-way matchup that includes Kennedy, West and Stein, Trump still leads in all six of these battleground states, with his narrowest lead being 1 percentage point in Pennsylvania and his largest lead being 7 percentage points in Georgia.

Mind you, Trump does not need to carry all six states to win in 2024; he needs to flip just 35 electoral votes to do so. Pennsylvania and Georgia alone would do it, as well as other combinations that do not require Trump to win Pennsylvania. 

All this bad news raises the specter of an even worse verdict for the president and his party: Is Biden in free-fall? In other words, is a consensus starting to coalesce against Biden that time cannot correct? 

The election is less than 11 months away. These latest polls raise the possibility that momentum is starting to feed on itself and becoming a self-fulfilling verdict on Biden’s presidency. It further raises the question as to what could change such a verdict if it is indeed being shaped. 

It is hard to see an issue out there that could go right for Biden in the coming months that he must not first take responsibility for having made wrong in the first place: foreign policy fiascos; a tepid economy and torrid inflation; excessive spending deficits and debt; an open-border immigration policy; an extremist environmental approach.

One last look at these latest polls offers one more revelation: Biden is perilously close to 37 percent. Why is 37 percent important? That is the percentage of voters who self-identified as Democrats in his 2020 victory. Today’s polling numbers warn that Biden could be edging closer to retaining only his base. Or, put another way: that Biden has lost the rest of the country. 

J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.

Chiefio is well worth following:

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2023/12/13/ukraine-losing-elections-compressing-distancing/

BBG very interesting.

I am trying to pull up whether the water vapor released by last yrs underwater volcano in Tonga is responsible for the recent warming

I remember the description of Tonga in the Washington Post forecast it would increase temperatures worldwide by few degrees.

Of course, now the libs seem to be certain it would not cause this: 

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/did-the-tonga-eruption-cause-this-years-extreme-heat

I really don't know who to believe and who is honest or simply juggling the "data"

Data on the Tonga eruption is very difficult to come by, I suspect because that data doesn’t gird alarmist narratives.

BBG:  Do I remember correctly that Brennan was a member of the Communist Party at some point?

I have heard the same, go figure. There was a time when a Marxist leading the CIA would be seen as a Very Bad Thing, these days the fact causes the MSM to stifle yawns.

Jordan Petersen lays out the “logic.”

The way the new world functions

Natalie Solent (Essex) · Culture Wars · Middle East & Islamic · Totalitarianism · UK affairs

In a Telegraph article ostensibly about the pro-Hamas protests, Jordan Peterson describes the emerging new system:

If you are successful, in any guise, by any standards of comparison whatsoever, then you are a victimiser. If you are not, you are a victim.

A rigid moral claim accompanies this act of starkly black-and-white comparison: there are, as well, only two forms of acceptable and laudable moral conduct or reputation. If you are a victim, or an “ally,” you are with no further effort goodness incarnate. This is supposed, on “philosophical” grounds, to be self-evident, following as it does so deservedly in the wake of your loudly trumpeted compassion. If you are a victimiser, however, look the hell out: you are evil incarnate, and inescapably so: a predatory parasite, rightly subject to the most brutal of treatment. Indeed, the terrible treatment you thereby experience does nothing but redound to the credit of your so-Godly-and-compassionate persecutors.

If you are a victimiser, after all, you have no moral standing whatsoever. No punishment is therefore undeserved, or sufficiently severe. This is true even if you are “only” a member of a victimising group, and have done nothing wrong other than that, because “individual” is a category that within the postmodern philosophy no longer exists.

If you are a victim, by contrast, any and all moral outrage is justified, worthy and laudable – even morally required – even if you are merely a self-aggrandising, vindictive and hypocritical “ally” of some marginalised group. The fact that such latitude in reactive or vengeful action fully opens the door to the worst possible actions by the worst imaginable narcissists and psychopaths is also something rapidly glossed over or ignored by the vengeful ideologues of the postmodern Left – most likely because it is an outcome most intensely desired in the their most resentful fantasies.

Look: points the Republicans should hammer on at every opportunity.

Wokesters Without Endowments

Could it be that progressive leftists are running out of other people’s money? Perhaps not yet on a number of famous campuses, but wokesters without gargantuan endowments seem to be having an increasingly hard time funding radical politics in a world of competing priorities.

Rich Kremer reports for Wisconsin Public Radio, which is staffed by employees of the University of Wisconsin-Madison:
The Universities of Wisconsin will have the opportunity to give pay raises to its 34,000 employees and build a new $347 million engineering building in Madison under a deal approved Wednesday by the Board of Regents. But the universities will also freeze DEI staffing through 2026 and eliminate or refocus about 40 positions focused on diversity.

The vote was the second in five days by the board, and follows a months-long stalemate between the board and Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who blocked funding for the raises over objections to campus diversity, equity and inclusion programs and staffing...
In a statement after the vote, Vos said “Republicans know this is just the first step in what will be our continuing efforts to eliminate these cancerous DEI practices on UW campuses.”

Speaking of the fight against cancers, imagine the possibilities for life-enhancing innovation if Wisconsin can now move beyond simply freezing DEI positions and instead convert all of them to new openings in medical research. Reasonable people might argue that the political activists should be replaced entirely by mathematicians, but this is the sort of healthy debate that should flourish on a vibrant campus driven by courageous curiosity.

Meanwhile on the West Coast it’s now looking nearly impossible to fund what would have been the country’s most expensive and unjust experiment in civic wokeness. Jose Martinez reports for CBS News in San Francisco:
The future of African-American reparations in San Francisco is facing an uncertain future after Mayor London Breed announced that a proposed office won’t be funded due to budget cuts.

The office would have been a precursor to attempting to redistribute money from people who never owned slaves to people who were never enslaved. It wasn’t just the principle of such a plan that was troubling, or the difficulty of trying to precisely define the level of ancestral guilt or victimhood within the great American melting pot. It was also the money. In March this column noted the work of a city-appointed reparations committee and asked:

How massive would this new race-based spending scheme end up being? “The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals,” reported the AP at the time.

But Lee Ohanian, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, examined the work of the committee and wrote in January:
I have analyzed some parts of this proposal and estimate that its cost, presented on a per-household basis, will be nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.

He warned that “this estimate may be too low” but provided a ballpark number of recipients set to receive the proposed payouts:
Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.
Speaking of Texas, it would surely become the new home for much of San Francisco’s current population if this proposal is ever enacted.
As for the San Franciscans who haven’t left yet, both opponents and supporters of reparations now seem to be getting fed up with the results of municipal governance. Mr. Martinez of CBS reports:

Marquis Muhammad, a long-time resident and business owner in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, expressed frustration over the pace and approach of African-American reparations in the city.

“I am a victim... so you see me out here with my products right here on Fillmore…I’ve been here since 1999 and my customer base has moved out of the city,” said Muhammad.

Perhaps what’s most in need of repair are the incentives to stay in places like the City by the Bay. The remaining voters seem to be catching on. Joel Kotkin writes at UnHerd:

Is sanity finally returning to America’s blue cities? The places that incubated inept policies such as “defund the police” and “sanctuary cities”, but welcomed open-air drug use, are beginning to have second thoughts. In Seattle, Portland and San Francisco... lawmakers are looking at ways to curb public drug use — a move that has been symptomatic of a wider pushback against progressive policies.

Take Houston as a different example. This week, progressives lost two-to-one in the mayor’s race, electing a moderate Democrat, John Whitmire, and rejecting Barbara Lee, one of the reliably far-Left Democrats in Congress. In addition, the city elected more conservatives and moderates to the city council.

In Houston, as elsewhere, crime was cited as by far the city’s biggest issue. It was also behind the defeat last month of a Soros-backed prosecutor candidate in Pittsburgh’s district attorney race and in Seattle’s contest for city attorney, which a Republican won.
For years this column has been trying without success to find an example of a great civilization built by progressive leftists. One hates to sound like a pessimist but the project now seems doomed to failure.

James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival” and also the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi.”

I sure hope this has legs:

Rob Cunningham | KUWL.show
@KuwlShow
🚨GEORGIA FRAUD CONFIRMED🚨
Georgia Governor
@BrianKempGA
’s Legal Team has formally notified Georgia SOS Brad Raffensperger 
@BradForGASOS
 of Recording and Publishing Factually False Results concerning the 2020 Presidential Election, to include 17,852 INVALID “VOTES” recorded from
@FultonInfo
 County, ALONE!
17,852 INVALID “VOTES” were more than 4,000 “votes” MORE than necessary for
@realDonaldTrump
 to have won the State of Georgia in 2020.
🔥🏛️🔥🏛️🔥🏛️🔥🏛️🔥🏛️🔥🏛️
* NOTICE OF PUBLIC MEETING *
* Tue/Wed, Dec. 19 & 20, 2023 *
* Georgia State Capitol Building *
ALL interested members of the public are invited to attend.
🔥🏛️🔥🏛️🔥🏛️🔥🏛️🔥🏛️🔥🏛️
Executive Summary Video of Findings & Evidence is here: https://rumble.com/v4190x7-joe-rossi-on-the-2020-election...…

Perhaps misfiled as this piece takes issue with the pathological science, but if correct what’s presented here sure poops on the alarmist parade.

The real villain.

Many factors determine the weather at any given time and place on the globe: water cycles, air masses, jet streams, weather fronts, elevation, and topography are among them. The more these natural factors are examined, the less credible the environmental narrative -- that man’s use of fossil fuels is the most significant factor in those changes -- appears to be. If you believe, as I do not, that human-emitted CO2 is the principal driver of climatic warming, you have to downplay the importance of other natural phenomena.

Take volcanos. This year through October, there were 67 confirmed eruptions from 66 different volcanos around the world. This is not an unusual amount of volcanic activity -- it has been fairly consistent for two centuries -- though the population increases near volcanos and better reporting sometimes obscures that fact. Here's what The Smithsonian has to say on the matter:

The best evidence that these trends are apparent rather than real comes from the record of large eruptions, whose effects are far reaching and less likely to escape documentation even in remote areas. Their constancy over the past two centuries is a better indicator of the global frequency of eruptions than the improved reporting of smaller eruptions.

The volume of volcanic CO2 emissions has been substantially underestimated. Because naturally-emitted CO2 and Co2 emitted as a result of human activity have the very same isotopes, it is impossible to distinguish the source and has not been accurately assessed for a number of reasons. For example, the amount of CO2 from volcanic action cited over and again is based on an analysis of only seven active volcanoes and three seafloor emitting volcanos (o.oo.1 percent of earth’s volcanic features). Recent studies indicate massive amounts of C02 are emitted from non-erupting volcanos, such as Greenland’s Katla volcano.

A recent study, authored by Hermann Harde, a professor of Experimental Physics and Materials Science at Helmut-Schmidt-University in Hamburg, indicates that CO2 emissions from volcanos and other natural causes are six times higher than man-made sources. Not only is the data relied on to argue against this phenomenon surprisingly inaccurate, the claim of higher human-sourced CO2 relies on a fiddling of the record of how long these emissions remain in the atmosphere.

 According to a new study, the claim that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driven exclusively by humans relies on a made-up, disparate accounting model, with the residence time for natural emissions three to four years (which is consistent with actual observations), but CO2 from human sources is claimed to have a residence time of 50 to over 100 years. [emphasis, links added]

The 15 to 30 times longer residence time for human emissions is an imaginary conceptualization that is wholly inconsistent with (1) bomb tests (1963) and (2) seasonal CO2 variations found in real-world observations. Human emissions account for under 5 percent of the total from all sources, natural and anthropogenic.

I suppose the climate change crowd’s response is to conduct a worldwide search for enough virgins to throw into volcanos to keep them from belching and oozing CO2 into the atmosphere, but how far removed from this supposition is from the rest of their schemes?

Clarice Feldman is a retired attorney living in Washington, D.C. During her legal career she represented the late labor leader Joseph ("Jock") Yablonski and the reform mine workers against Tony Boyle. She served as an attorney with the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations, in which role she prosecuted those who aided the Nazis in World War II. She has written for The Weekly Standard and is a regular contributor to American Thinker.

Vivek turns the narrative on its ear, much to CNN’s dismay:

https://x.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1735153884270584292?s=61&t=L5uifCqWy8R8rhj_J8HNJw