The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Alvin (Bragg) and the Chipmunks

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.)

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 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"?