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We’re a day late getting to the whisky bar this week on account of complicated travel schedules. Lucretia sits in the host chair as Steve was still feeling light-headed from too much high-altitude skiing while John is his usual jaunty self, baiting Lucretia with his thoughts in the Boston Globe about how Alvin Bragg and the other chipmunks of the left are blowing it with their attempt to bring down Trump through the dubious vehicle of Stormy Daniels.
That’s just a warmup for a review of this week’s developments in the Harvard affirmative action case and the Stanford Law School DEI meltdown, which are related at their core. The New Yorker, of all unexpected places, launched a high-explosive torpedo at Harvard, while Stanford’s DEI evil empire doubled down on wokery. Steve wonders whether the DEI dean, Tirien Steinbach, and the National Lawyers Guild chapter that ginned up the student protest against Judge Kyle Duncan, are double-agents secretly in the employ of Karl Rove or the Koch brothers or something, given the damage they did to campus wokery through this single incident. (Actually it just shows how thick and impervious is the campus woke bubble.)
And we end with a celebration of what has to be one of Kamala Harris’s top five cringiest word-salads, and a puzzle over the explosion of a . . . chocolate factory, just before Easter. Coincidence?
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The link to The New Yorker article didn’t work, but I found it via DuckDuckGo.
Here’s one stunning paragraph:
[Appeals Court] Judge Burroughs’s opinion also addressed the striking fact that, when sending recruitment letters to potential applicants in “Sparse Country” (underrepresented states in the Harvard applicant pool), Harvard used an SAT score cutoff of 1310 for white students, 1350 for Asian American females, and 1380 for Asian American males. There were gasps in the courtroom when this evidence was revealed at trial. (When asked on the stand why a white boy who scored 1310 would receive a recruitment letter while his Asian American male classmate who scored 1370 would not, Fitzsimmons said, among other things, that “there are people who, let’s say, for example, have only lived in the Sparse Country state for a year or two,” and, by contrast, “there are people who have lived there for their entire lives under very different settings.”) Judge Burroughs downplayed the relevance of this disparate treatment, finding that it didn’t happen every year, it didn’t “seem to be linked to efforts to advantage or disadvantage any particular racial group,” and it was “unclear” whether it was accidental or intentional. And, despite acknowledging that receiving the recruitment letter “is correlated with a higher likelihood of admission,” she deemed it “fundamentally a marketing tool that does not affect individual admissions decisions”—thereby neutralizing one of the most troubling facts to emerge at trial. (Emphasis mine.)
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-secret-joke-at-the-heart-of-the-harvard-affirmative-action-case
The most chilling part of the story is that the Democrats have put many, many judges like this into the Federal judiciary, where they rule without reference to the Constitution, or the law, or even the facts, as in this case.
I found an interview of @stevenhayward on Instagram.
Very shocking… I think it’s time to get out of there…
Also you guys should all wear this for the next podcast:
https://sambarsky.myshopify.com/products/power-lines
I may have mentioned this before but: My late younger brother, in the mid-60s had a near perfect 4 year straight ‘A’s at arguably the best HS in Manhattan. (Think Jesuits.) He had almost perfect SATs. He played 4 (four) years of varsity basketball. He applied late (but NOT too late) to a very well known Ivy League school in the North East and had sterling recommendations from Alums (WASPs, however)…and was told, in writing, Thanks but NO THANKS…that they had met their quota of Italian Catholics from the NY City metropolitan area.
Thanks so much for not missing an episode! I was hoping it would show up in my podcast feed today cuz you guys really do come through! (Is it apparent that I’m ravenous for content?) Much grass.
In the discussion of DEI (or DIE as Lucretia prefers, or Division, Exclusion, and Intolerance as I prefer), Lucretia raised the concern that eventually the public will discount “minority” people in professional roles because the public will assume they were “diversity” hires. That is already occurring. Didn’t Justice Thomas complain about this decades ago, that he was discounted early in his career by people who assumed he had been hired only because of his race under the then-prevalent scheme of “affirmative action”?
When I was a kid, I preferred the black dentist that was available to me to the white dentist.
Of course, back then, nobody was lowering standards to admit more blacks to dental school.
Punchline: When people, including blacks, start preferring white doctors and dentists to black ones, this will be presented as — proof of racism!
This is the only Ricochet podcast that I listen to.
Only frustrating thing is the occasional John comment; but it’s all good because @lucretia is there to rebut.
Sorry for my digital blackface Lucretia meme
Kudos to Steve for telling a great Polack joke, one that stands the test of time – I first heard it (and immediately retold it) around the time when Steve was in high school.
John mentioned that it’s “almost cynical” to consider the motivations of the racist university admissions directors. Almost? It seems cynical to ignore their obvious evil intentions.
According to The Unimpeachable Source,
At one point, Steinbach was affiliated with Kresge. I remember Kresge from my youth in the United States northeast, but I have no recollection of Steinbach.