Author Topic: Western Civilization  (Read 13820 times)

G M

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #100 on: February 17, 2023, 11:34:34 PM »
Yes.

It will be hard to distinguish the collapse of competence and low grade sabotage by the fifth column elements among the six million illegals.

Just 6 million?

G M

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Immigrants address NYC's rat problem
« Reply #101 on: February 19, 2023, 05:43:02 PM »
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/127/516/560/playable/dc263e566085f92f.mp4

Don't worry, he's reading "Los papeles de federalistas" on his downtime.

Another proud American Immigrant!

His daughter should run for president!

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #102 on: February 19, 2023, 06:14:48 PM »
He is WORKING , , , in a city run by heritage Americans.

My father was the son of a shoe clerk immigrant.  He served in the Sea Bees in the Navy in the Pacific theater and become and builder and banker.  When his first son was ten years old he introduced him to the President of the United States.


G M

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #103 on: February 19, 2023, 06:26:34 PM »
He is WORKING , , , in a city run by heritage Americans.

My father was the son of a shoe clerk immigrant.  He served in the Sea Bees in the Navy in the Pacific theater and become and builder and banker.  When his first son was ten years old he introduced him to the President of the United States.

Post WWII, what percentage of Jews went to war vs. the icky rural southerners? How many coastal Jews signed up for combat units post, 9/11? It must have been a lot, right?

NYC run by heritage Americans? Really? This is 2023, not 1953.


Crafty_Dog

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #104 on: February 19, 2023, 07:12:45 PM »
We are in complete agreement about who really fights the wars.

Understand that I am razzing your argument that Governor Nikki, elected by the citizens of South Carolina, should STFU about a flag dedicated to slavery because her family has not been here enough generations.   

Not a worthy argument methinks.

As a born and raised NYC Jew into whose home congressmen, future mayor Koch, and powerful Dem politicians came for political meeting which my mother co-chaired I know REAL well, and quite a bit better than you I suspect, who are the people who run NYC-- and they meet your criterion of mullti-generational family presence earning the right to speak.  How many generations do you think the Mayor's family has been in America?  I'm guessing he would claim since 1619 haha.

As best as I can tell, your argument reduces to the great children of those who fought for slavery while waving the bars and stars who now wave the bars and stars get to tell the elected governor to STFU because , , ,  she is the child of legal immigrants?  Seriously?

G M

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #105 on: February 19, 2023, 08:02:39 PM »
"a flag dedicated to slavery"

You might want to talk to some of the people in your AO with deep roots there. I think you'll find very few that think their ancestors that fought for the Confederacy fought for slavery. I think you'll find the very same people have more than a few folded up flags that mark various American wars and "police actions" that represent members of their families that never marched home.

There is an old joke about how the US Army has a southern accent. Rural whites from the South and Intermountain West die at twice the rate of others in combat. Why? Because that is who signs up for direct combat slots in the US military.

Texas contributes more young men to SEALS than any other state.

Now, those that got sand in their boots the last 20 years are telling the next generation not to sign up and the US has a recruiting crisis.

Funny how that works.



G M

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G M

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I'd almost feel bad for the teacher...
« Reply #108 on: February 25, 2023, 10:03:31 AM »

G M

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Good thing that can't happen here! SA Grid edition
« Reply #109 on: February 26, 2023, 09:20:19 AM »
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1629707620792582146.html

SA was a first world country. What changed?


Crafty_Dog

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #110 on: February 26, 2023, 01:09:09 PM »
Racial Marxists took over from Racist Capitalists.

G M

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #111 on: February 26, 2023, 02:18:44 PM »
Racial Marxists took over from Racist Capitalists.

How is the infrastructure in the other sub-saharan African countries looking? The non-marxist ones?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOkrYW3vF0o

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #112 on: February 26, 2023, 07:56:26 PM »
This would be better in one of the Africa threads.

G M

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #113 on: February 26, 2023, 08:00:38 PM »
This would be better in one of the Africa threads.

I have tried looking for one. Which one would you suggest?

G M

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Crafty_Dog

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #116 on: February 27, 2023, 11:34:53 AM »
GM:  This thread would be a good one for that:  https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=2286.msg59656#msg59656

G M

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The ongoing collapse of society
« Reply #117 on: March 04, 2023, 06:37:13 PM »


Crafty_Dog

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ccp

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #120 on: March 10, 2023, 08:36:54 AM »
".to the derision of some here"

yes
the real reason is covid vaccines !   :wink:

Actually the plastic fertility possible connection is very interesting and may be part of entirely the cause

but again
"A 2018 study found that low sperm count was associated with metabolic alterations, cardiovascular risk, and low bone mass. Men with low sperm count also had a higher risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, and stroke."

I still think obesity is more likely to be causing this.
Obesity is spreading all around the world. - it follows the Western diet.

Just like Europeans wiped out 90 % of all Native Americans in all the Americas
inadvertently with disease we are killing everyone around. the world with Western diets - not on purpose .

Montezuma's revenge can also include syphilis .
Once thought to be spread from Europe to the Americas
was actually the other way around
after it syphilis infection remains were found in pre Columbian Indian bones.
It also seem to spread in Europe after 1492

suspected from Columbus voyage members who got infected
or the Indians they brought back with them.

"The first written records of an outbreak of syphilis in Europe occurred in 1495 in Naples, Italy, during a French invasion (Italian War of 1494–98)."




Crafty_Dog

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #121 on: March 10, 2023, 08:48:02 AM »
And would not low testosterone contribute to obesity?

ccp

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #122 on: March 10, 2023, 08:50:52 AM »
well it may be related to lower muscle mass

but obesity is a cause of low T

fat is considered an estrogen "organ" now

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #123 on: March 10, 2023, 09:38:34 AM »
OK.

Crafty_Dog

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PP: Murderland
« Reply #124 on: March 10, 2023, 09:50:05 AM »
The Republic of Murderland: Several Democrat lawmakers in Maryland must be imbibing some kind of insanity-inducing libation if a recent legislative proposal is any indication. Maryland Assembly Democrat Delegate Charlotte Crutchfield has introduced a bill dubbed the Youth Accountability and Safety Act, which would ban anyone under the age of 25 from being charged with first-degree murder. Crutchfield is not alone in her legal views, as several other Democrats have gotten on board her train to Murderland. According to the proposed legislation, anyone under the age of 25 who "happens" to murder someone while committing another crime such as rape, robbery, or carjacking could not be charged with first-degree murder, which in Maryland carries a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Crutchfield's argument is that those under the age of 25 have not reached full mental maturity. Meanwhile, state Democrats have pushed the legal voting age in five cities down to 16 and 17 years of age, and one county is advocating for eighth graders to be given the right to vote. So, too dumb to be held accountable for murdering another human being, but plenty smart enough to know who and what to vote for?

G M

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G M

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I wonder who might be involved…
« Reply #128 on: March 14, 2023, 02:06:45 PM »

ccp

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #129 on: March 14, 2023, 03:08:02 PM »
did you see the school sign flash during the video and what it said?

Imagine if Rev Al Sharpton showed up rather then ignore this, and explain this is not acceptable behavior and how people should behave ....

instead
of dictating to the media  that it is due to racism..........

just a dream - "I have a dream .........."


G M

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #130 on: March 15, 2023, 06:15:16 AM »
did you see the school sign flash during the video and what it said?

Imagine if Rev Al Sharpton showed up rather then ignore this, and explain this is not acceptable behavior and how people should behave ....

instead
of dictating to the media  that it is due to racism..........

just a dream - "I have a dream .........."

I doubt many of the middle school students know or care about Rev. Al.

G M

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The weakness and rot within Western Civilization
« Reply #131 on: March 15, 2023, 06:17:07 AM »
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grooming-gangs-iicsa-racist-fears-b2007649.html

Better to let muslim rape gangs rape your children rather than risk being called racist!


G M

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G M

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Crafty_Dog

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #134 on: March 21, 2023, 10:20:34 AM »
VDH nails it again.

G M

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MacIntyre: Anarcho-tyranny in the USA
« Reply #135 on: March 23, 2023, 09:37:54 AM »
https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/macintyre-anarcho-tyranny-in-the-usa

MacIntyre: Anarcho-tyranny in the USA

The city of Philadelphia has announced an agreement to pay a $9.25 million settlement in connection with the police response to protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020. While dozens were killed and billions of dollars of damage were done during the riots that raged across America for weeks in the summer of 2020, it is the participants themselves who will be paid restitution by the government.

Law and order in the United States have now descended to a level of anarcho-tyranny in which the government funds rioters with the tax money of their victims. The slow death of the rule of law in America would be ugly enough, but what we are witnessing instead is the twisted, grimacing corpse of a system that was once designed to protect the safety of Americans now being used to punish us for disagreeing with our political elites.



The breakdown of law and order is common in nations that are in a general state of collapse. As the Constitution reminds us, the primary duties of a government include establishing justice and ensuring domestic tranquility. A nation that delivers neither will usually exhibit a wider range of systemic failures that would doom the larger civic project.

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America, however, is perfectly capable of collecting taxes, surveilling its citizens, and fighting a proxy war against a nuclear-armed opponent in order to maintain a global empire. The destruction of rule of law by our leadership class does not seem to be a product of general incompetence, but a specifically engineered outcome designed to terrorize the average citizen. Conservative commentator Samuel Francis coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe a state that is still capable of performing most of its essential functions, but intentionally chooses to use the selective enforcement of the justice system to punish law-abiding citizens while rewarding the criminal actions of its political supporters.

The pandemic lockdowns and subsequent riots of 2020 put this phenomenon on full display. Churches that had been banned from opening during the lockdown had their windows broken by rioters who stormed through the streets. Schoolchildren, isolated and locked indoors as parks and beaches were shut down, watched BLM and Antifa burn and loot their way across American cities. Average citizens who were forced to view the funerals of their loved ones via Zoom watched large crowds of Biden supporters embrace and sip champagne in the streets after their candidate was declared the victor. Conservative leaders remained silent as pastors were arrested for holding religious gatherings while abortion clinics and liquor stores continued to operate as essential services.

No one learned a more brutal lesson about the nature of anarcho-tyranny than the January 6 protesters. The BLM and Antifa riots functionally received state endorsement, as law enforcement knelt in submission, politicians and celebrities raised money to bail out participants, and corporations made major donations while altering their logos to show solidarity. It seemed perfectly reasonable to those who gathered outside the Capitol that they would be able to enter the building, whose doors were in some cases opened for them by police, without penalty.

CNN may have described the BLM riots as fiery but mostly peaceful, but the Trump protesters received no such media cover. A story about murdered police officers was quickly fabricated from whole cloth, and no celebrities came to the aid of those arrested on January 6. Many still face trial on wildly exaggerated charges while their lawyers are denied access to critical exculpatory footage.

Sadly, this phenomenon is nothing new. In his original piece on anarcho-tyranny, Francis recalled stories of police officers arresting shop owners who armed themselves with the intent of protecting their stores during the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The same officers who arrested law-abiding citizens who intended to exercise their constitutional right to protect their property studiously avoided confronting rioters, even going so far as to pass by stores that were actively being looted.

Mark and Patricia McCloskey faced a similar fate after attempting to protect their home from a BLM mob that had smashed through the gates of their neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri. The couple initially had felony charges filed against them for using legally owned firearms to deter the mob from further advancing onto their property. Mark McCloskey pleaded down to a fourth-degree misdemeanor and was eventually pardoned by Missouri Governor Mike Parson, but the message was clear: There is no right to self-defense against the agents of anarcho-tyranny.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has no issue with arresting peaceful pro-life protesters, has claimed that his organization is unable to apprehend those who firebomb crisis pregnancy centers because they do so at night when it is dark. The same state security apparatus that just cannot seem to find a way to prosecute the associates of Jeffery Epstein instructs FBI agents to target Catholics who attend a traditional Latin mass because they may be prone to violent extremism.

The application of the justice system in the United States is so laughably corrupt and nakedly political that it would make the dictator of a banana republic blush. Federal agencies regularly collude with media giants and tech companies to interfere with American elections but refuse to provide the most basic level of safety and security to the citizens they theoretically serve.

While our ruling elites have no interest in restricting the dangerous narcotics dealers and human traffickers that pour over the southern border, they have plenty of time to prosecute Douglas Mackey, who has been charged with the very serious crime of posting memes on Twitter that make fun of Hillary Clinton. The FBI may have refused to prosecute Clinton herself for her repeated mishandling of classified information due to the political ramifications of such charges, but it seems like Donald Trump will not be granted the same courtesy.


According to Trump, a leak has revealed that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg intends to charge the former president in connection with hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels during Trump’s first campaign. While it is unclear when the Soros-backed prosecutor would move forward with those charges, Bragg specifically ran on the promise of prosecuting Trump, so his intentions are very clear.

Bragg has also declared his commitment to anarcho-tyranny by setting a policy of not seeking the incarceration of criminals except in the case of homicide, economic crimes, and a handful of felonies. Releasing violent criminals to harass law-abiding citizens while prosecuting political opponents on fabricated charges is not a contradiction; it is a political formula designed to secure power.

While the naked politicization of the justice system in the United States may deliver short-term victories for progressives, it feels a lot like stripping the copper wiring out of a house that one intends to demolish. In major American cities, taxpayer money is being funneled to those who organize left-wing political violence while the streets are made increasingly dangerous by the very civil servants charged with their safety. Opposing politicians and dissidents who mock the regime face ludicrous charges intended to terrify the rest of the population into silence.

Popular sovereignty and rule of law are supposed to serve as the bedrock justifications for the power granted to America’s ruling class, but it is difficult to brand people like Donald Trump and Douglas Mackey as threats to democracy if they are rotting behind bars for the crime of opposing the Democratic Party.


G M

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Crafty_Dog

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #139 on: March 26, 2023, 07:09:19 PM »
Unclear on your point?

Are you suggesting that race/ethnicity mixing is the problem here?  If the students were more uniformly of one group or another, that the behavior on display would be less?

Or is what we see simply the fascistic authoritarian impulse of the Progs in the thralls of collective militant enthusiasm?

Me?  I'm seeing a University at could be the beginnings of showing some spine.

G M

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #140 on: March 26, 2023, 07:12:28 PM »
Unclear on your point?

Are you suggesting that race/ethnicity mixing is the problem here?  If the students were more uniformly of one group or another, that the behavior on display would be less?

Or is what we see simply the fascistic authoritarian impulse of the Progs in the thralls of collective militant enthusiasm?

Me?  I'm seeing a University at could be the beginnings of showing some spine.

Just showing another sign of the collapse.

G M

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WSJ: DEI at law schools could bring down America
« Reply #142 on: April 04, 2023, 08:04:03 AM »
DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America
After the Stanford episode, Ilya Shapiro sounds a warning: The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution.
By Tunku Varadarajan
March 28, 2023 6:50 pm ET



Wokeness, or what used to be called political correctness, once seemed merely harebrained, the product of shallow ideas and immature passion. The common view was that undergraduates would outgrow it once they left campus and faced the rigors of the real world.

You seldom hear that anymore, as those ideas have run amok in culture- and economy-defining institutions ranging from news organizations and local governments to professional societies and corporate boardrooms. But Ilya Shapiro thinks we’re not alarmed enough about their influence in one important corner of academia: law schools. The professional ideologues who wield administrative authority on American college campuses want nothing less than to “change the American constitutional system,” Mr. Shapiro says. They pose a grave long-term threat to “the rule of law and inalienable rights, and even concepts like equal treatment under the law.”

Mr. Shapiro, 45, is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Hunkered down in the study of his Virginia home, he’s working on a book, “Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education,” that seeks to lay bare the process by which bureaucrats appointed to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” on campus have “perverted our system of legal education.”

A prime example was in the news as we spoke. Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter had invited Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to speak on campus. Confronted by a vicious leftist student mob, he asked administrators to intervene. Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for DEI, arose to deliver prepared remarks, which concluded: “I look out and I don’t ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ I look out and I say, ‘I’m glad this is going on here.’ ”

Mr. Shapiro experienced a different kind of DEI humiliation in January 2022. He was concluding his tenure as a vice president of the Cato Institute and due to start a new job as executive director of the Center for the Constitution at Georgetown’s law school. Then Justice Stephen Breyer announced he would retire. Mr. Shapiro tweeted that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the “objectively best pick” for the vacancy but President Biden had already disqualified him on the basis of race and sex. Mr. Shapiro opined that Judge Srinivasan “alas doesn’t fit into the intersectional hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”

The tweet, which Mr. Shapiro describes as “inartfully phrased,” prompted an inquisition at Georgetown. The university suspended him with pay while its Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action conducted a four-month investigation into his fitness for the job. In June the office issued a report exonerating him—but on a technicality with an unsubtle chilling effect.

Since Mr. Shapiro wasn’t yet on Georgetown’s payroll, the report found, the university lacked jurisdiction over his speech. But if he “were to make another, similar or more serious remark as a Georgetown employee, a hostile environment based on race, gender, and sex likely would be created.” In fact, Mr. Shapiro wrote in these pages, “it is the Georgetown administrators who have created a hostile work environment for me.” He quit and returned to the think-tank world.

If Mr. Shapiro were an English professor, one might put this down as a workplace dispute of marginal importance. But he has a point when he says law schools are different. They train “future lawyers and politicians and judges, and the gatekeepers to our institutions, to the rules of the game.” That game has the highest of stakes: “the rule of law, upon which American prosperity and liberty and equality sit.”

An illiberal takeover of medical schools, Mr. Shapiro quips, might be more “immediately dangerous, in the sense that you don’t have the best doctors treating people.” But some of the students who raged against Judge Duncan “are people who, in 20 years, are going to be joining the federal bench.” Sooner than that, “they’ll be occupying influential positions in state and federal government, bringing legal cases, becoming state legislators in some cases, or occupying the general counsel’s offices of Fortune 500 companies and the partnership ranks of big firms.”


Already, Mr. Shapiro says, partners at law firms “cower in fear of their associates, who question their firm’s representation of certain types of client and demand that statements be made by law firms after Supreme Court decisions and other developments in the political world.” A friend of his was a partner in the Houston office of a large global law firm. “She’s pro-life,” he says, declining to name the lawyer or the firm. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, various firm leaders asked her to handle some pro bono clients advancing pro-choice arguments. “She said she was too busy and didn’t make a stink over it,” Mr. Shapiro says. “Eventually, the managing partner of the Houston office said, ‘Well, I guess you’re pro-life. What’s the point of having a female partner who’s pro-life?’ ” She now practices independently.

Similar cases have been recounted in these pages. Former Solicitor General Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, then partners at Kirkland & Ellis, won a landmark Second Amendment victory last year at the Supreme Court. The firm responded by ordering them to drop the clients or resign; they walked. Hogan Lovell fired Robin Keller for saying that she agreed with the justices’ decision overturning Roe during an online conference call advertised as a “safe space” for female employees.

Much of this seems self-defeating. Would you hire an attorney who is made to feel “unsafe” by a Supreme Court decision? Wouldn’t a lawyer who heckled a judge in court go to jail for contempt? Maybe there’s still something to the idea that woke students are in for a shock after graduation.

“Professors are shying away from entire topics, not just a given perspective on a topic,” Mr. Shapiro says. They’re “just skipping over anything to do with rape or hate crimes, because they’re too sensitive. You try to write an exam question and there are too many red flags, too many tripwires.” These professors do “their students a disservice by not training them in how to advocate in the real world of courts. There, it’s not a conversation between the left and the far left.”

Mr. Shapiro says “nonprogressive” law professors were rare even 20 years ago, when he studied law at the University of Chicago. Critical legal studies, fashionable in the late 1980s and early ’90s, was “passé, a very small niche thing.” Since then, “what’s really changed is the bureaucratic explosion. And most of that bureaucracy is in this DEI space, which actively subverts the traditional educational mission of truth-seeking” with its “ideas of power dynamics and intersectionality, dividing people into oppressive and oppressed classes, and things like that.”

Pressure comes from without as well: In February 2022 the American Bar Association, which has sole authority to accredit U.S. law schools, passed a resolution demanding that they “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” At the same time, the Biden administration’s drive for racial equity “seems to be sprinkling political commissars throughout the government.” With a mordant optimism, he observes that those may be “the only kinds of jobs that law school graduates who refuse to engage ideas they don’t like and spew epithets at federal judges may be qualified for.”


But those jobs also have real-world power, the exercise of which could eventually cumulate into “regime change,” Mr. Shapiro warns. “I’m not trying to be hyperbolic or bombastic. If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates.”

These ideas are particularly fashionable on elite campuses, although Mr. Shapiro notes recent hostile incidents at lower-rated schools such as Texas A&M, the University of Kansas and UC Hastings (the last involving Mr. Shapiro himself). “There’s a higher quotient of activist types who would engage in disruptions and contribute to an illiberal atmosphere at a Yale than at a University of Iowa.” At top schools, “more people are getting that law degree to change the world, whereas at lower-ranked schools, they want to be lawyers. They want to make money and get a job and join the upper middle class.”

Is there any hope for elite schools? After Judge Duncan’s mobbing, Jenny Martinez, dean of Stanford Law School, issued a 10-page memo that strongly defended free speech and academic freedom, apologized to the judge and announced that Ms. Steinbach, the DEI associate dean, had been placed on administrative leave.

Mr. Shapiro would like to see more. He thinks universities need to enforce their policies against hecklers’ vetoes by disciplining those who violate them. Law schools can suspend students, even expel them in serious cases, and impose career consequences. “They can also report to a bar association,” Mr. Shapiro says. “All law schools have to sign off on a character and fitness assessment before a graduate can take the bar exam.” If a student has been “completely disruptive, and has demonstrated that he doesn’t have the character and fitness to be a lawyer, they can be adjudged not fit to sit for the bar exam”—with due process, including the right of appeal, of course.

Ms. Martinez did none of that. Her memo promised to institute “mandatory educational programming for our student body rather than referring specific students for disciplinary sanction” and to blur students’ faces when the university releases video of the event.

Mr. Shapiro says there have to be “exogenous shocks to really change things.” One approach might be to target the elite schools’ status. Judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch of the Fifth and 11th Circuits, respectively, announced in October that they won’t hire clerks from Yale until the school reforms its policies on free speech. “If any Supreme Court justice said that,” Mr. Shapiro says, “it would be a game-changer.” In an article for National Review, Judges Ho and Branch also called on Stanford to “identify the disrupters so that future employers know who they are hiring.”

Mr. Shapiro takes heart that “people who are not cultural warriors of the left or the right are starting to notice this stuff, and they don’t like what they see.” Lawmakers in 15 states have introduced bills to slash or abolish DEI offices and staff at public colleges, although none have passed so far. The backlash is still inchoate, and Mr. Shapiro believes the only solution is to purge “DEI bureaucracies that undermine the liberal values of academic speech and due process.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

G M

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Re: WSJ: DEI at law schools could bring down America
« Reply #143 on: April 04, 2023, 08:21:43 AM »
These little maoists may learn that a JD doesn't make one bulletproof.


DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America
After the Stanford episode, Ilya Shapiro sounds a warning: The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution.
By Tunku Varadarajan
March 28, 2023 6:50 pm ET



Wokeness, or what used to be called political correctness, once seemed merely harebrained, the product of shallow ideas and immature passion. The common view was that undergraduates would outgrow it once they left campus and faced the rigors of the real world.

You seldom hear that anymore, as those ideas have run amok in culture- and economy-defining institutions ranging from news organizations and local governments to professional societies and corporate boardrooms. But Ilya Shapiro thinks we’re not alarmed enough about their influence in one important corner of academia: law schools. The professional ideologues who wield administrative authority on American college campuses want nothing less than to “change the American constitutional system,” Mr. Shapiro says. They pose a grave long-term threat to “the rule of law and inalienable rights, and even concepts like equal treatment under the law.”

Mr. Shapiro, 45, is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Hunkered down in the study of his Virginia home, he’s working on a book, “Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education,” that seeks to lay bare the process by which bureaucrats appointed to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” on campus have “perverted our system of legal education.”

A prime example was in the news as we spoke. Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter had invited Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to speak on campus. Confronted by a vicious leftist student mob, he asked administrators to intervene. Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for DEI, arose to deliver prepared remarks, which concluded: “I look out and I don’t ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ I look out and I say, ‘I’m glad this is going on here.’ ”

Mr. Shapiro experienced a different kind of DEI humiliation in January 2022. He was concluding his tenure as a vice president of the Cato Institute and due to start a new job as executive director of the Center for the Constitution at Georgetown’s law school. Then Justice Stephen Breyer announced he would retire. Mr. Shapiro tweeted that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the “objectively best pick” for the vacancy but President Biden had already disqualified him on the basis of race and sex. Mr. Shapiro opined that Judge Srinivasan “alas doesn’t fit into the intersectional hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”

The tweet, which Mr. Shapiro describes as “inartfully phrased,” prompted an inquisition at Georgetown. The university suspended him with pay while its Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action conducted a four-month investigation into his fitness for the job. In June the office issued a report exonerating him—but on a technicality with an unsubtle chilling effect.

Since Mr. Shapiro wasn’t yet on Georgetown’s payroll, the report found, the university lacked jurisdiction over his speech. But if he “were to make another, similar or more serious remark as a Georgetown employee, a hostile environment based on race, gender, and sex likely would be created.” In fact, Mr. Shapiro wrote in these pages, “it is the Georgetown administrators who have created a hostile work environment for me.” He quit and returned to the think-tank world.

If Mr. Shapiro were an English professor, one might put this down as a workplace dispute of marginal importance. But he has a point when he says law schools are different. They train “future lawyers and politicians and judges, and the gatekeepers to our institutions, to the rules of the game.” That game has the highest of stakes: “the rule of law, upon which American prosperity and liberty and equality sit.”

An illiberal takeover of medical schools, Mr. Shapiro quips, might be more “immediately dangerous, in the sense that you don’t have the best doctors treating people.” But some of the students who raged against Judge Duncan “are people who, in 20 years, are going to be joining the federal bench.” Sooner than that, “they’ll be occupying influential positions in state and federal government, bringing legal cases, becoming state legislators in some cases, or occupying the general counsel’s offices of Fortune 500 companies and the partnership ranks of big firms.”


Already, Mr. Shapiro says, partners at law firms “cower in fear of their associates, who question their firm’s representation of certain types of client and demand that statements be made by law firms after Supreme Court decisions and other developments in the political world.” A friend of his was a partner in the Houston office of a large global law firm. “She’s pro-life,” he says, declining to name the lawyer or the firm. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, various firm leaders asked her to handle some pro bono clients advancing pro-choice arguments. “She said she was too busy and didn’t make a stink over it,” Mr. Shapiro says. “Eventually, the managing partner of the Houston office said, ‘Well, I guess you’re pro-life. What’s the point of having a female partner who’s pro-life?’ ” She now practices independently.

Similar cases have been recounted in these pages. Former Solicitor General Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, then partners at Kirkland & Ellis, won a landmark Second Amendment victory last year at the Supreme Court. The firm responded by ordering them to drop the clients or resign; they walked. Hogan Lovell fired Robin Keller for saying that she agreed with the justices’ decision overturning Roe during an online conference call advertised as a “safe space” for female employees.

Much of this seems self-defeating. Would you hire an attorney who is made to feel “unsafe” by a Supreme Court decision? Wouldn’t a lawyer who heckled a judge in court go to jail for contempt? Maybe there’s still something to the idea that woke students are in for a shock after graduation.

“Professors are shying away from entire topics, not just a given perspective on a topic,” Mr. Shapiro says. They’re “just skipping over anything to do with rape or hate crimes, because they’re too sensitive. You try to write an exam question and there are too many red flags, too many tripwires.” These professors do “their students a disservice by not training them in how to advocate in the real world of courts. There, it’s not a conversation between the left and the far left.”

Mr. Shapiro says “nonprogressive” law professors were rare even 20 years ago, when he studied law at the University of Chicago. Critical legal studies, fashionable in the late 1980s and early ’90s, was “passé, a very small niche thing.” Since then, “what’s really changed is the bureaucratic explosion. And most of that bureaucracy is in this DEI space, which actively subverts the traditional educational mission of truth-seeking” with its “ideas of power dynamics and intersectionality, dividing people into oppressive and oppressed classes, and things like that.”

Pressure comes from without as well: In February 2022 the American Bar Association, which has sole authority to accredit U.S. law schools, passed a resolution demanding that they “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” At the same time, the Biden administration’s drive for racial equity “seems to be sprinkling political commissars throughout the government.” With a mordant optimism, he observes that those may be “the only kinds of jobs that law school graduates who refuse to engage ideas they don’t like and spew epithets at federal judges may be qualified for.”


But those jobs also have real-world power, the exercise of which could eventually cumulate into “regime change,” Mr. Shapiro warns. “I’m not trying to be hyperbolic or bombastic. If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates.”

These ideas are particularly fashionable on elite campuses, although Mr. Shapiro notes recent hostile incidents at lower-rated schools such as Texas A&M, the University of Kansas and UC Hastings (the last involving Mr. Shapiro himself). “There’s a higher quotient of activist types who would engage in disruptions and contribute to an illiberal atmosphere at a Yale than at a University of Iowa.” At top schools, “more people are getting that law degree to change the world, whereas at lower-ranked schools, they want to be lawyers. They want to make money and get a job and join the upper middle class.”

Is there any hope for elite schools? After Judge Duncan’s mobbing, Jenny Martinez, dean of Stanford Law School, issued a 10-page memo that strongly defended free speech and academic freedom, apologized to the judge and announced that Ms. Steinbach, the DEI associate dean, had been placed on administrative leave.

Mr. Shapiro would like to see more. He thinks universities need to enforce their policies against hecklers’ vetoes by disciplining those who violate them. Law schools can suspend students, even expel them in serious cases, and impose career consequences. “They can also report to a bar association,” Mr. Shapiro says. “All law schools have to sign off on a character and fitness assessment before a graduate can take the bar exam.” If a student has been “completely disruptive, and has demonstrated that he doesn’t have the character and fitness to be a lawyer, they can be adjudged not fit to sit for the bar exam”—with due process, including the right of appeal, of course.

Ms. Martinez did none of that. Her memo promised to institute “mandatory educational programming for our student body rather than referring specific students for disciplinary sanction” and to blur students’ faces when the university releases video of the event.

Mr. Shapiro says there have to be “exogenous shocks to really change things.” One approach might be to target the elite schools’ status. Judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch of the Fifth and 11th Circuits, respectively, announced in October that they won’t hire clerks from Yale until the school reforms its policies on free speech. “If any Supreme Court justice said that,” Mr. Shapiro says, “it would be a game-changer.” In an article for National Review, Judges Ho and Branch also called on Stanford to “identify the disrupters so that future employers know who they are hiring.”

Mr. Shapiro takes heart that “people who are not cultural warriors of the left or the right are starting to notice this stuff, and they don’t like what they see.” Lawmakers in 15 states have introduced bills to slash or abolish DEI offices and staff at public colleges, although none have passed so far. The backlash is still inchoate, and Mr. Shapiro believes the only solution is to purge “DEI bureaucracies that undermine the liberal values of academic speech and due process.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

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Re: Western Civilization
« Reply #147 on: April 17, 2023, 01:24:10 PM »
If Western Civilization Dies, Put It Down as a Suicide
We are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit.
Gerard Baker hedcutBy Gerard BakerFollow
April 17, 2023 3:23 pm ET



A few years ago the then-boss of Goldman Sachs explained to me the main reason he thought the firm had risen to such a dominant position in global investment banking over the previous half century. At the start of that period, banking was still dominated by a blue-blood class. In London especially, where I began my career in finance, the City was a place in which, in a still heavily regulated market, a slot in one of the big institutions was a coveted ticket to a life of riches.


But the tickets were available mainly to men from the right sort of background. The rules for identifying and selecting these men were opaque. There was no formal bar on anyone from a particular socioeconomic status being admitted to the magic circle—that would have been crass and, even then, illegal. Instead a complex system of semiotics did the job of weeding out the riffraff. A flattened vowel pronunciation, a vulgar word for lavatory, the wrong sort of shoes, and you were excluded without even understanding why. In Britain, the system’s overseers had an acronym by which the untouchables were designated: NQOCD, for “not quite our class, dear.”

Goldman came along and cut through this thicket of asinine, self-perpetuating privilege. It simply hired the best people for the job, however they spoke, whatever they looked like. As long as you were smart, driven, ruthless and committed to making money and beating the living daylights out of the competition, you were in. It worked.

I was reminded of this when I read last week that employees at Goldman have recently been encouraged by their leaders to embrace a full rainbow range of “pronouns” when identifying themselves in communications, including such neologisms as “ze,” “zir” and “zemself.”


It’s a small thing, another little step down in the long, steady descent of Goldman, which I’m told still hires a good number of people of genuine talent, alongside the rising numbers of identity-box-checking drones who help enforce the unspoken rules of woke compliance. We might dismiss it as another piece of ludicrous public-relations messaging designed to keep social-media storm troopers at bay. But I prefer the story I heard recently of a British army officer who, finding zemself seconded to a suitably modern government department and faced with a similar instruction to identify zis pronouns, promptly circulated a memo to colleagues with the declaration that his preferred pronouns were “colonel” and “sir.”

In its small way the Goldman memo colorfully captures the deepening mess the precepts of contemporary ideological orthodoxy are making of our society, our economy and our democracy. It highlights how the real progress made over decades toward a fairer and more equal society is being thrown away under the authority of a new set of rules and rulers as elitist and privileged as the old ones.

For those ancien régime aristocrats, it was having the right shoes or the proper accent. For today’s, it is adherence to the constantly changing rules of ideologically approved thought and language.


It was thanks to the radical meritocracy and audacious dynamism of institutions like Goldman that we were able to dismantle so much of the authority of elite power structures that restrained us from fulfilling our potential. The past 50 years have been marked by the genuine eradication of barriers to opportunity for the underprivileged regardless of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation or anything else. This is how we were genuinely starting to fulfill the promise of equality.

But the cultural revolution that began in the past decade is re-erecting those barriers and creating new elite power structures, elevated not by talent or hard work, but, curiously, by membership of the self-approved class, signaled by the right luxury beliefs and articulated by the right “inclusive” language.

Adrian Wooldridge, who has written a book on the rise of meritocracy, frames this in a recent article in the Spectator. The left, he says, is “creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.”

Bear with me because I am going to extrapolate from these baneful developments to a much larger worry about the geopolitical conditions we confront.

As we survey the competition between global civilizations in the multipolar world we now inhabit, we see that the West is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries. It’s axiomatic that a rising China and perhaps other powers look like formidable contenders for global leadership—with implications for our own security and prosperity.

But if we are losing that struggle, it isn’t because of the superiority of authoritarian, communist or autocratic systems. We know that liberal capitalism has done more for human prosperity, health and freedom than any other economic or political system.

If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.

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They seem nice!
« Reply #148 on: May 01, 2023, 01:44:03 PM »