Who will save us from this bent Supreme Court?

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

Another week, and another set of fresh outrages from our Republican-bent Supreme Court.

In their ceaseless effort to re-elect whatever Republican is running for President to ensure that the Court will continue to be packed by bent extremist Republicans like Sulky Sam Alito and Brett “It just wants some fresh air” Kavanaugh, the Court produced two terrible decisions relating to the Tangerine-Faced Defendant's effort to seize power and avoid justice until he is able to fire his prosecutors.

Arguably the worst decision was contained in a one-page order setting down the TFG's appeal of his crapcan total immunity argument for April 25.  The Court knows full well that the immunity claim is ridiculous and must eventually fail, but its goal is to make sure that the insurrection trial doesn't take place before the election. 

Let's look at the record.

Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump's preposterous immunity claims in a careful opinion issued on December 1, 2023.  To expedite consideration of any appeal, Special Counsel Jack Smith urged the Supreme Court to decide the matter directly, bypassing the D.C. Circuit.  

On December 22, the Supreme Court denied the request without explanation.

This not just in: the Supreme Court is bent

The D.C. Circuit duly heard the appeal on an expedited basis on January 9, 2024 and issued its opinion knocking down Trump's frivolous arguments seriatim on February 6, 2024. 

Some pundits thought that the Supreme Court's December denial suggested that they might just let the D.C. Circuit decision stand.

Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?

After sitting on the petition for Supreme Court review (which your mansplaining law school ex-boyfriend called “cert.”) for over two weeks, the Court on February 28 in its wisdom granted cert., blocked further proceedings, and set a hearing date almost two months in the future.

Funny they didn't take nearly that long to award the 2000 election to Republican George Bush.  It took them four days.

This time, though, no one expects a decision until mid- to late-June at the least.  So four days to hand the 2000 election to the Republican, and four months before they will let a Republican stand trial for his insurrection.

Are you beginning to think this game isn't on the level?

And who knows how this Court will f*** up the obvious conclusion?  It could even say that there may be limited “official acts” immunity, pull some ad hoc standards out of Alito's blowhole, and demand that Judge Chutkin decide count-by-count whether the charged acts are “official ” before trial.

Even if they follow the law and uphold the D.C. Circuit, if the decision doesn't come down until the end of June, it may difficult if not impossible to hold a trial before the election.  Which is what the six bent Republican Justices want.

It might even lead to trying and convicting the President-elect on insurrection charges in November, before the Electoral College and the Congress meet.  Then what?  

Which brings us to the second pro-Trump opinion they issued in February: overturning Colorado's decision to bar the Former Insurrectionist-in-Chief from the ballot, contrary to the plain text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which had been passed after the Civil War to prevent insurrectionists from holding federal office.  Like the Presidency.

While all Justices, including the three unbent ones (and we'll get back to them), overturned Colorado's decision on the grounds that one state can't set standards that would affect a national election (unless they are intended to disenfranchise minority voters or put third-party spoiler candidates on the ballot like Ralph Nader or Jill Stein, which is OK, apparently), the Republican majority went well beyond what was needed to decide the case to pronounce that Section 3 a dead letter in the absence of legislation.

The unbent concurrence had some fun with this:

“If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.” Dobbs ... (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in judgment). That fundamental principle of judicial restraint is practically as old as our Republic. This Court is authorized “to say what the law is” only because “[t]hose who apply [a] rule to particular cases . . . must of necessity expound and interpret that rule.” Marbury v. Madison....

Today, the Court departs from that vital principle, deciding not just this case, but challenges that might arise in the future. 

This modest jape at the expense of John Roberts '76, which would have gone unnoticed by 99% of the public, provoked a hissy fit from Handmaid Amy Comey Barrett:

In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.

Speaking of Courts settling politically charged issues without stridency, here's just a few highlights from the opinion she joined in Dobbs, which took away the reproductive freedom that 170,000,000 American women had enjoyed for over half a century: 

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” [the opinion] said. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. ...Abortion destroys what those decisions call ‘potential life’ and what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an ‘unborn human being,...”

Imagine what Alito would have written if he wanted to be strident.

But our point isn't that Amy Coney Barrett is a prissy hypocrite.

Our point is the one that dissenters on the Court have been making throughout this century: this Republican-bent Supreme Court is not a judicial institution but an illegitimate House of Lords, legislating according to its own terrible political preferences.

The question is what to do about it. 

Despite their grandiose behavior, the Supreme Court can be brought into line easily in one of three ways: (1) enlarging the Court with some new seats, (2) enforcing term limits for Justices (although probably not the bent six Republicans already there), or (3) limiting its power to f*** things up by for example taking away their ability to enjoin federal action prior to judgment or to void certain types of legislation (like voting rights).

We don't have space here to deal with the usual whines about these fixes, which run along the lines of how dare Congress politicize the Court.  But it's the Court that politicized itself and it's the job of the branches who were in fact elected by somebody to bring it back into line.

Then there's the argument that if a Democratic Administration can add seats and limit jurisdiction, a later Republican Congress could do the same thing. Of course they could and they will if they have to whether or not we beat them to the punch. In the long term, the rehabilitation of the Supreme Court into an institution devoted to justice and not reactionary Cathlolic extremism depends upon the will of the American people to make it so and keep it. No one is coming to save us.

Some brave souls have already advocated for some or all of these things, like our very own Sen. Ed Markey.  And some legal academics have weighed in as well, like Penn's Kermit Roosevelt, a surname not normally associated with treason.

But imagine if the pressure to fix the impossibly broken Court came from inside the building.  Three eminent justices in their dissent to Dobbs said:

The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law

That's a plain statement of the illegitimacy of the current Supreme Court. Why shouldn't the three Justices who said it (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan,and Stephen Breyer) take the obvious next step and say publicly to the political branches that it is their job to fix it? 

The Supreme Court is out of control

There's no good reason why they shouldn't speak in some public forum (hell, we bet Breyer could wangle a slot at Harvard Commencement) and do what George Marshall did 75 years ago: demand urgent political action.

Their action will be seen by the usual suspects as some sort of bad faith undermining of the Court as a national treasure of dispassionate justice.  But the Court lost that reputation almost 25 years ago:

this highly politicized matter....runs the risk of undermining the public’s confidence in the Court itself. That confidence is a public treasure.  

Bush v. Gore, 591 U.S. 38, 157 (2000).

What's the point of pretending the Court is acting as a court when it indisputably is not, according to the unbent Justices who sit on it? 

We'd argue that the maintaining the false pretense is itself dangerous because it helps perpetuate the injustice and corruption of the six Republican wardheelers in robes.  

Imagine how powerful the effect would be of three past and present Justices admitting that the current Court is not only strutting down First Street NE naked, its pubes flying into Coke cans all over Capitol Hill, but that the time has come for the President and the Congress to fix the ongoing coup against democracy with appropriate legislation.

Indeed, the time came in 2000. 

Pretending since then that nothing is wrong has led us to observe helplessly the plight of 26,000 pregnant rape victims in Texas and the outrageous stacking of the criminal justice system deck in favor of a corrupt Russian-owned insurrectionist criminal defendant.

The supposed treasure of the Supreme Court's commitment to the rule of law was looted years ago and the Nazis have loaded it onto a plane to Berlin.  It would be great if Stephen Breyer could like his contemporary Indiana Jones rise to the occasion and crack the whip.

388 years of indoctrination in Harvard Yard, anti-Semitic and otherwise

 

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Archivist Aula Minerva

In case you haven't been paying attention, or, just possibly, you don't give a toss, things still aren't going Harvard's way, except they managed to screw the grieving survivors of corpses whose body parts were sold like merch by Harvard Medical School staff, thus proving the continuing viability of free-market economics.

Other than that, it's all bad.  The poor struggling hedge fund that runs a university on the side continues to be, like Joe Biden, beleaguered.

With the team of Garber and Manning, Harvard
has returned to its wise 400-year policy
of entrusting its governance to white men

The University's response continues to be tepid and tentative, much to the surprise of those who remember what a hell-raiser interim President Alan Garber '76 was back in Dunster House.  This week Garber, no doubt with the 1,000% backing of the Corporation (and you can ask Claudine Gay how much that's worth), appointed, after the proverbial worldwide search, a new interim Provost, who was found across Cambridge St. in the Dean's Office at Harvard Law School.

If you guessed that Garber chose a white man with multiple Harvard degrees, you win an all-expense-paid trip to Allston!

Garber's choice is one John Manning '82, J.D. '85.  Manning declared in the official Harvard newspaper, the Gazette:

“A great university must be a place of great humility, curiosity, and openness...”

Humility? 

Openness? 

Curiosity? 

At Harvard? 

This guy has his work cut out of him. 

Fortunately, his resumé is replete with instances of his service in humble, open, curious places:

Manning, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard College, also held various notable positions earlier in his career, including serving as a law clerk to the Hon. Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court of the United States and to the Hon. Robert H. Bork on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Additionally, he served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice and as an assistant to the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice.

Scalia. Bork. Why do those names sound familiar? And by the way, when did he “serve” in the Department of Justice?  You'll be shocked to learn that he did his stint in the Office of Legal Counsel, an agency devoted to arguing that the President can do whatever the f*** it wants, during the twilight days of the Reagan Administration, 1986-88.  No word on whether he worked on the memo confirming that the “arms for hostages” scam was well within the President's inherent power to sneak guns to the Contras.

We're going to go way out on the ivy here and speculate that Manning was put into the job to give Harvard desperately-needed credibility with its Republican tormentors.  After all, he's one of them.  I mean, if you're willing to kowtow to the guy who fired Archie Cox and the guy who boasted about his law-free rigging of the 2000 election, you've got to be comfortable dealing with Republican a**holes, right?

But Garber's move only shows how out of touch Harvard is with their persecutors.  In the old days, a well-connected Republican white man like Manning could place a few calls, jet down to DC for a quiet lunch at the Metropolitan Club, and all would be well.

Those days are over.  We doubt greatly whether his brilliantly-crafted arguments will cut much ice with the hooligans, crooks, Nazis, and thugs who make up today's Republican base. But maybe it's worth a try, if he's willing to take Lauren Boebert out for a, um, matinée.

Let's just say he's got a big stable to clean out. 

A recent example of the task that awaits him appeared in one of Harvard's two hometown papers, The Boston Globe:

A group of Harvard Jewish alumni is scouring the school’s course offerings, critiquing diversity and inclusion policies, and lobbying top administrators in an attempt to root out what they view as pervasive antisemitism plaguing the university....“There are entire Harvard courses and programs and events that are premised on antisemitic lies,” [said] Dara Horn, a writer and Harvard graduate....

Pervasive anti-Semitism in the University of Larry “Gals Can't Add” Summers and Counselor Underpants, former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz? Entire courses premised on antisemitic lies? Huge if true.

Of course, Ms. Horn, a gifted writer with a, shall we say, unusual perspective has her own hot takes on truth.  She once wrote a novel intended as a historical survey of generations of supposed anti-Semitism, including a long chapter on how the Viet Cong were bad for the Jews.

If we were going to make inflammatory statements terming whole swaths of the Harvard academic enterprise as “premised on antisemitic lies ”we'd want to bring some receipts.

We'd at the very least want our organization, supposedly representing Harvard's Jewish alums, to be a shining model of free discourse and respect for dissenting views.

Um, not so much:

Prof. Feldman knows anti-Semitism when he sees it

One early member, Marc Bodnick, an entrepreneur and 1990 Harvard graduate, was kicked out of the chat forum after clashing with other members there about Elon Musk, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israel-Hamas war. In messages, Bodnick was sharply critical of all three, prompting pushback from other members and, eventually, his expulsion. 

Free discussion and debate is all well and good, as long as you toe the group's Likudnik/neocon Republican line, as set forth in the Tanakh, of course.

But we were talking about pervasive anti-Semitic content in Harvard's academic offerings.  Like what?

In WhatsApp messages and in planning documents reviewed by the Globe, some HJAA members articulated the view that antisemitism is exacerbated by Harvard professors teaching students certain worldviews, such as those that divide the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Some argue these viewpoints lead to demonization of Jews and Israel — a claim that has led to fierce campus debates and pushback.

So could viewpoints expressed by Plato, for arguing that a state should be ruled by secular philosophers, for that matter. Sounds like advocacy of a one-state solution in which Jews could be a minority!

Or of course a theory that emphasizes the struggle between oppressors and oppressed might be philo-Semitic, depending on where you put the Chosen People. Or even worse, the historical record might allocate them to both sides to some extent, depending on the evidence (like the remorseless 60-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank.)  This would seem to be a paradigm of the kind of open debate for which a university is dedicated,  even the lesser ones – like Yale.

You might think that but if you do you're just another Jew hater.  Big thanks to Harvard Law Professor and happily married man Noah Feldman for enlightening us:

The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation but instead oppressors: imperialists, colonialists, and even white supremacists.

Well, are Israelis on the West Bank or Gaza oppressors or not? If you think that universities or even just ordinary folks in Dearborn, Michigan should have the option to explore this question in light of, you know, facts, you're a new-style anti-Semite, according to Prof. Feldman. 

But there's a deeper intellectual failing in scouring the Harvard course catalog for examples of ideologies you don't like.  The enterprise proceeds from the fallacy that Harvard has fallen from its former glory as a purveyor of objective non-ideological knowledge to which it must be compelled to return by deep thinkers like Virginia Foxx and Bill Ackman. 

But has it?  We happen to have on our shelves the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Courses of Instruction from 1973.  Let's take a look back at the days before Jew-hating ideology infected the purity of Harvard's intellectual pursuits.

Back then, the History Department offerings were refreshingly free of all that anti-Semitic oppression stuff.  Instead, eager young minds, including jocks looking to fulfill their pre-1600 distribution requirements, could take three, count 'em, three full-year courses on the “Great Age of Discovery” (History 136, 137 & 138).  

As oppression is nobody's idea of greatness, we're going to guess that in that halcyon era, any discussion of the possibly oppressive treatment of indigenous populations and imported Black slaves was avoided.  Since, unlike the football team, we didn't take “Boats,” we can't be sure.

Over in the Government Department, where oppression as a political phenomenon might be discussed, the totally non-ideological offerings included Gov. 148, taught by clash of civilization gasbag Sam Huntington, asking how long the American political system might last and considering its “viability and future.”  Fortunately, there's no oppression in this topic.

And of the six courses offered in International Relations, none explored issues like colonialism, oppression, or racism, because as was well known back then those issues play no role in international relations.

You can go all the way back to 1636 to learn that Harvard was founded as a sanctuary of wide-open and unfettered inquiry, free from any taint of anti-Semitism. Actually, it was founded to train Puritan ministers.  That sounds a wee bit anti-Semitic to us.

The point is that for 388 years, Harvard's offerings have reflected some ideology or another, whether it was training future witch hunters in Salem or future war criminals like Henry Kissinger.  There is no single objective model of a suitable curriculum, despite what you might have been told in Gov. 106a, Ancient Political Theory. Looking at the history of the world and deciding that the oppression of some groups by others is a worthy organizing principle seems as valid as the former principle that white men conquering a New World already full of people not in need of conquest was “great.”

See any oppression here?

And none of it is either a cause or effect of anti-Semitism.

Speaking of oppression, David Ignatius, a very mainstream Washington Post pundit, reported on the reason Gaza is starving:

But in late January, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told police to allow demonstrators to close the main border crossing at Kerem Shalom to protest Hamas’s refusal to release all hostages.

 

With the crossing blocked, panic began to spread, U.S. officials say. Food supplies in Gaza soon became scarce, triggering hoarding and looting. United Nations relief workers were attacked by armed gangs as they tried to bring trucks into Gaza. The trucks had been accompanied by Gazan police. But the police were affiliated with Hamas, and after Israel began targeting them with drones, the U.S. officials told me, the police backed away. 

Is that oppression of a hungry civilian population by an extremist hatemonger with a senior position in a heavily armed state that denies to West Bank Palestinians the rights of free movement and self-determination, among others?

Discuss.

If Noah Feldman and Dara Horn will let you, that is.

Cognitive Decline: In Washington, it's a contagious disease

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Medical Correspondent Vincent Boom-Batz, M.D.

The media has been spilling a lot of pixels these days ruminating without evidence about Joe Biden's cognitive decline.  Here's just a few egregious examples from the last two weeks alone:

🚨🚨Scoop: Biden’s cheat sheets - use of note cards, pre-screened questions worries donors. https://t.co/i2XptZAAOk

— Jim VandeHei (@JimVandeHei) February 23, 2024

Do you prepare for important meetings? Court hearings?  Speeches?   Congratulations, you may be a vegetable! 

If you don't believe us (or conventional-wisdom fount Axios), just ask The New York Times:

It appears that cognitive decline is contagious.  Consider the nonstop farrago of incomprehensible demented nonsense from the Tangerine-Faced Defendant.  In just one speech he was unable to pronounce “evangelical,” claimed he was leading Nikki Haley by 91 points, complained about “swastickers” plastered on buildings in Washington, said unnamed woke types were replacing baseball fields with “knocker” fields, said everyone agreed with overturning Roe, and repeated the mainstream Republican talking point that doctors were killing babies after they were born.

Those ravings followed hard on the heels of his confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, and then later claiming he intended to “interpose” the two names to make a (false) point:

"It’s very hard to be sarcastic when I interpose," Trump told the crowd. "I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki from tricky Nikki, tricky Dicky."

But somehow our mainstream media's cognitive abilities short-circuit when it comes to highlighting the overwhelming evidence of Trump's dementia. You might argue that this cognitive breakdown is severe enough to warrant replacing the broken-down old hacks now covering the election with younger journalists who haven't yet lost their ability to report what's really going on.

Just this week, the failing memories of the press were displayed again in the coverage of the Alabama Supreme Court's decision to outlaw IVF on the grounds that the embryos frozen in those test tubes are bouncing bundles of baby joy entitled to the same protections as real live human beings who can be seen without a microscope.

The decision was made possible by the bent Supreme Court's overruling of Roe, on the grounds that states can and should be entrusted to make decisions about matters like reproductive rights and the definition of human life.  Many states had already said that a fertilized egg was as human as the baby Jesus, but those laws had been nullified by Roe. 

As a result of Trump packing the Supreme Court with three new bent forced-birthers, 

there are fears around not only what this means for the future of IVF in Alabama, but reproductive rights across the country. Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, emphasized this didn’t just happen because of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling — and it didn’t start with overturning Roe v. Wade, either.

“There has been a concerted effort in Alabama and elsewhere for years to give legal rights to embryos and fetuses,” Kolbi-Molinas said. “Extremist politicians see decisions like this as part of the building blocks to force the U.S. Supreme Court to eventually say that not only are states permitted to ban abortion, but if embryos and fetuses have legal rights the same way as people, then states must ban abortion.”

This was apparent to anyone who followed the issue of reproductive freedom over the past 40 years.  Some, like Ross the boy no one would have lunch with Leverett House, intended this very outcome.

Others like NPR tried to sound the alarm:

“What is happening is that for 50 years, there has been a constitutional right to privacy and now that right is going away. States can pass laws banning or restricting reproductive medical procedures.” That covers abortion, but could also include IVF, as it is a process inherently focused on the creation of fertilized eggs — and what happens next with them.

And yet thanks to the cognitive decline of our media, the threat to Alabamans who want to have a child came as an utter shock:

To be fair, it's not just The New York Times that was perplexed by fetal-personhood laws and the demise of reproductive freedom.

Republicans too seem to be suffering from near-universal memory lapses and cognitive breakdown.  

Let's help them reclaim their past. Since 1996, Republican platforms have stated that fetuses are entitled to all the rights of children. Now-forgotten moderate mainstream Republican George Bush liked to emphasize the supposedly inherent humanity of embryos by trotting out in front the cameras what his flacks called “snowflake children,” which were children born from embryos (as indeed all are):

Kellyanne's ex doesn't remember much

The message was unmistakable: Within every frozen embryo were the beginnings of a[n adoptable, artificially produced] child... When Karl Zinsmeister, my domestic policy adviser, suggested inviting a group of snowflake babies to the White House, I thought the idea was perfect. Each had come from a frozen embryo that, rather than being destroyed for research, was implanted in an adoptive mother.

He was using those children as props to explain his opposition to stem cell research using frozen embryos – the same embryos that Republicans are now shocked, shocked to discover are routinely destroyed in IVF procedures.

Just this week, Republicans have piously stated their support for IVF, including the 166 House Republicans who signed onto legislation that would have granted full Constitutional rights to embryos.  These Republicans have such bad short-term memories that you have to wonder if they could pass a competency exam.

Which leads to yet another group of supposedly distinguished political savants: ex-Republicans now doing business as never-Trumper allies, who can't stop moaning about what has happened to their once beloved thoughtful moderate party.

They seem to have forgotten the last 30 years of Republican policy positions on reproductive freedom, Bush's insane spineless anti-science decision to cripple stem cell research, and, of course, the fact that three of the six bent Republican Justices who voted to overturn Roe were appointed by Presidents named Bush.  

George Conway, prominent never-Trumper has to be reminded that he cast his ballot in 2016 for his wife's employer, Trump (who appointed three bent forced-birthers to the Supreme Court, in case you like George have forgotten).  At least when called on it he had the grace to apologize, but otherwise he seems to have forgotten his years toiling in the Republican slime factories for the Federalist Society and Clinton's impeachment.

Or former Iraq warmonger Tom Nichols, who seems to have grave difficulty recalling why his shilling for George Bush's disgraceful war of lies and torture in Iraq was so terrible, including the bit about helping to form today's Republican view that the rule of law is, shall we say, optional.

We can't even characterize the case of longtime Republican neocon bag carrier Bill Kristol as cognitive decline because he started from such a low baseline.  He's forgotten that as late as 2021 he was described by The Washington Post as a “prominent anti-abortion commentator.” 

Back in the day he was the forced-birth movement's favorite yeshiva bocher:

Billy just can't remember

A story that I love is the one where Jody Bottum met with Bill Kristol about a job at The Weekly Standard. Jody told Kristol that the day the Standard wavered on the question of abortion would be the day Jody quit. Jody says Kristol “drew his finger along the desk, tapped it for emphasis and said, “We are square on life and getting squarer.”

Back in those long-ago days, the Standard used a pro-life article written by Kristol as a copy-editing test. This to warn any pro-choicer that this magazine was pro-life.

Those were the days, my friend.  

Here's five words for Billy: woman, uterus, freedom, embryo, hypocrisy. Now let's wait five minutes and see how many he can remember.

That's why when we hear plaintive mourning over the wonderful vanished Republican party of snowflake babies and fetal personhood, we wonder if these blowhards are likewise too cognitively impaired to be taken seriously as contributors to political discourse in our time.

What to do about the epidemic of cognitive decline and memory loss in Washington, afflicting as it does the Washington punditocracy, virtually every elected Republican, and even our dear precious Republican allies?

We think that they all need to take a break from their current pursuits, which clearly strain their increasingly fogged brains, and just take the time to enjoy looking at flowers and clouds from their Chevy Chase porches.

As for us, we'll go ridin' with Biden.

Red Sox Spring Training Preview: It's Time to Load the Schmucks!

It's time for that great Red Sox tradition: the loading of the schmucks!

By Spy Baseball Correspondent Sisyphus
with Jenny Herk in Ft. Myers, Florida

It's a Boston tradition as old as flipping off drivers trying to merge ahead of you on the Pike.

In the depths of winter, thousands of Red Sox fans line up in the cold on Jersey St. to participate in the Loading of the Schmucks.

Every year, the Spy's ace baseball columnist Shill Shamelessly hitchhikes down to Sox Spring Training to bring true Sox believers his peerless insights into the Olde Towne Team gained from his decades of baseball experience and close relationships with Sox insiders.– Ed.

Sox fans, take it from ol' Shill! This is the year! Better line up for Series tickets now, because this is a team of destiny

Sure you'll hear a lot of complaining from the usual Grumpy Gusses complaining about the Red Sox failing to sign any of the top-tier free agents. It would have been the easy, popular thing to do to open up John Henry's bank vault and shell out for an impact pitcher like Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Jordan Montgomery.

But the Red Sox supremo is too smart for that.  The fact that Montgomery hasn't gotten the contract he wanted proves how clever John Henry is.

Henry and his brain trust instead shrewdly invested in All-Star reliever Liam Hendriks.  No doubt he'll be ready to go by August, when the Sox are contending for a pennant, and he'll be fully recovered from both Tommy John surgery and a serious form of cancer.  Brains, not bucks – that's the Red Sox story.

And I don't want to hear a lot of whining about how the Sox let Justin Turner get away for short money. Just because Turner was the second most productive hitter in the lineup (.800 OPS, 23 home runs, and 96 RBIs) doesn't mean he was worth the $13 million those silly Blue Jays paid for him.

You've got to remember that the Red Sox are a small-market franchise.  You can't expect them to compete with New York and Los Angeles for expensive talent they way they did before 2019.

If they blow all of John Henry's hard-earned jack on overpriced players, how can you expect them to pay for that great cold cut buffet for all hungry baseball writers, including all the ice-cold 'Gansetts you can drink (or, in ol' Shill's case, stick into his backpack for later consumption at the Palmetto Bug RV Park)?

So here's a shout-out to the 2024 Red Sox and their genius front office.  If I was in the duck boat business, I'd be planning ahead for a busy November!

This winter, as past, the Red Sox are trying to stir up interest in their last-place team by celebrating the loading up of the loyal Red Sox schmucks who travel to Spring Training in Ft. Myers to celebrate the hopeful start of yet another futile Sox season.

Such cynicism, a requirement of membership in Red Sox Nation in the previous century, has returned in full force in recent years as the team that won four World Series championships in 14 years has descended back into the dull mediocrity that Sox fans enjoyed in the days of Frank Malzone and Dick Stuart.

The difference is that now the Red Sox are charging the highest prices in baseball to watch one of its worst teams.  At least when Dalton Jones played, you could watch the game from the bleachers for a buck.

Despite the crushing expense of watching the Sox either live or for a mere $30 a month on their captive TV network, Red Sox billionaire supremo John “I am the boss” Henry has decided to throw his nickels around like manhole covers while he expands his empire into crap like a bunch of tossers kicking a ball in Liverpool, wherever the f*** that is.

By the way, nobody gives two wanks about watching English soccer teams run around and do nothing for 90 minutes on Saturday morning.  Nobody, John, no f***in' body.  Am I going too fast for you?

Despite the caliber of play on the field, and the tightfisted owner's refusal to improve his outfit, the loyal schmucks are loaded up and ready for another unexciting season of Red Sox baseball.

“I look forward to going to Ft. Myers every winter and watch the team,” said schmuck Jeremiah T. Burke of Milton.  “Nothing like cashing those disability checks from the State Police and knocking back a few dozen tall cool ones,” said the former State Police Captain who was injured in the line of duty on a wet floor at Dunkin' Donuts.

His wife Kathleen Burke is another loyal schmuck: “It's so much fun to watch the players work out and run, their taut muscled bodies gleaming in the Florida sunshine.  They're so handsome all I want to do is wait outside the locker room – [I think that's enough from Mrs. Burke –Ed.]

But some schmucks believe that this is the year that the Sox can turn it around.  “This is a good young ballclub and I think that Justin Turner can really step up and be a team leader,” remarked James X. Burke of Wakefield.

Informed that the Sox had lost Turner to free agency because ownership was too cheap to pay up for him, Burke exclaimed, “F***in-A!”

The annual loading up of the schmucks has become a key part of the Red Sox marketing plan.  “Without the millions of schmucks who pay hundreds of dollars for tickets, plus another Benjamin's worth of hot dogs and beer-flavored water, we couldn't afford to give the people of Liverpool the sports team that they deserve, ” said Red Sox PR functionary Tiffany Burke.  “Not to mention $30 a month to watch a mediocre team on TV.”

“And this year we're going to have special days for all the loyal schmucks from around New England without whose support the Sox might actually have to pay for a competitive team,” she said.

“In addition to special games honoring our Maine Schmucks, Rhode Island Schmucks, and Connecticut Schmucks, we're going to target specific cities.”  She mentioned that on Pawtucket Schmuck Night, Pawtucket fans will receive a splinter from the wreckage of McCoy Stadium, abandoned by the Sox minor league affiliate when Rhode Island taxpayers refused to build them a new stadium. 

The excitement around the ceremonial loading of the schmucks was heightened this year when Sox brass announced that baseball genius Theo Epstein was coming back to recruit some deep-pocketed schmuck billionaires to buy Henry out [Surely, advise on strategic issues? – Ed.]

To long-time Red Sox Schmuck Anthony DiBurke of Attleboro, Epstein's return heralds a new age of winning baseball in Boston: “Theo's got a great eye for talent and I'm sure he'll bring in players as good as Mookie Betts.  Or better!”

It's not clear that the Red Sox will even manage to get to .500 this year with their weak staring pitching, lack of bullpen depth, and questionable offense. 

But at least we'll all be able to enjoy great Sox traditions like the season-long loading up and subsequent fleecing of the schmucks!

By the way, the equipment truck arrived in Ft. Myers.

Yard Time: Meet the hatemonger who is supposedly the best friend of 10,000 Jews of Harvard!

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Nellie Bly in Washington

Poor Harvard.  The colossus of wealth, power, championship squash teams, and privilege remains besieged.  On the other hand, nothing burnishes its reputation better than the caliber of its tormentors, like long-time Republican hatemonger Rep. Virginia “Shut Up, Girl” Foxx.

We'll get to her.  But first, it sounds as if things are still pretty rough in Harvard Yard.  No less a personage than Acting President Alan Garber '77 is feeling the heat:

Maybe some Jewish students aren't
really Porcellian material

Harvard University’s interim president Alan Garber...is concerned by reports of “social shunning” of Jewish students in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war, and said there “needs to be a discussion about what are the limits” of permissible speech....

Garber said that what he finds “most disturbing of all are situations or experiences students describe where they have felt they could not speak in class because there are attacks on Israel or maybe Israelis.”

“They feel unsupported in contradicting them,” he said.... 

Social shunning of Jewish students? This is news to Alan? Why does he think that after careful consideration his application to join the Porcellian Club in 1974 was, um, put on the shelf behind the S.S. Pierce Scotch?

So are we to understand that the crisis at Harvard is that students, especially Jewish students, are afraid to speak?  That would come as a refreshing change to contemporaries of Alan Garber, who remember that students, Jewish and otherwise, would never shut the f*** up, even when they had no f***in' idea of what they were talking about.  A little silence at dinner in Dunster House might even have been welcomed back in the day.

Are today's Harvard students more easily cowed than Alan and his buddies? Let's ask a real journalist who hangs around Harvard a lot these days.

They aren't, reports Jill Abramson '76, former Executive Editor of The New York Times:

Over nearly 10 years I taught 250 students. Some of my students came from privileged backgrounds, like one of my best students, Mary Julia Koch, the daughter of the late David Koch. My students also included lefties, whose doctrinaire comments sometimes annoyed me. But they were willing to respectfully engage with their classmates, like Sophia Downs, a leader of the Harvard affiliate of ...the national antiabortion group. (Aren’t those kinds of class discussions what a university education should be?)....

Alan's contemporary John Roberts '76
always shared his views and his weed freely

During the semester she was in my class, I asked Sophia to take me to one of the Students for Life campus meetings ....Sixty students attended the meeting to listen to the speaker, Kristen Hawkins, head of Students for Life. At a place supposedly infested by cancel culture, there were no disruptions.

You don't say?  

By the way, Alan has recently been informed that it's not just the Jewish students who worry about what happens if they run their mouths:

Harvard University faced new challenges Tuesday, from pro-Palestinian and Muslim students alleging the school has not protected them from harassment and racism,...A legal group representing 14 Harvard students asked the Department of Education this week to investigate the school for allegedly failing to protect them from discrimination and targeted harassment due to their Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian backgrounds, or their pro-Palestinian views. 

Gee maybe if your views on the current Gaza war involve valorizing the suffering of your compatriots (whoever they are) and ignoring or worse yet exulting in the suffering of your adversaries, maybe you should keep quiet and study your stats problem set.  If you are a Harvard student, you can be assured that despite what your parents have told you your whole life, no one wants to hear your opinions.  And if the dining room conversation makes you uncomfortable, maybe the whole point of a college education is to have your preconceived notions challenged in ways that discomfort you.

But the hurt feelings of Harvard students, real or imagined, aren't the real crisis facing the University.  

The real crisis is that that bad-faith Republican ideologues have decided to jump on the alleged assault on free speech, not to mention former President Claudine Gay's scholarship issues, to attack the entire structure of higher education and free inquiry itself.

Exhibit A: Mean racist old hag Virginia Foxx, previously best known for telling a Black women journalist who asked a perfectly appropriate question to “shut up.”   She, like fellow bad-faith blowhard Elsie Stefanik '06, has decided that attacking Harvard and other universities is a sure path to ill-gotten fame if not fortune.

So who is she anyway?  It turns out that despite the trailer-trash demeanor, she's a canny well-educated reactionary in the mold of a Phyllis Schlafly with a doctorate in, wait for it, education.   She was one of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election (although not the votes for her in her district).

Virginia Foxx has always been interested in education

Before she glommed onto universities, she had sought to advance bigotry and oppression in America's public schools:

Now Foxx is championing parental rights in schools, a hot-button issue in many states, and recently shepherded a bill through a divided House. She also wants to bar transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.

“Progressivism and the lies it espouses have devastated our public education system,” Foxx says. It’s hardly radical, she says, to declare “men are not women. Women are not men.” 

She knows full well that the path to wrecking American higher education is to attack it at what she thinks she can sell as its weak points: its refusal to take the quantification of white privilege – excuse us, “merit”–  at face value and the supposed climate of anti-Semitism on campus (a campaign immensely aided by brilliant comments like Alan Garber's above).

She knows how to generate headlines like:

As her role model Joe McCarthy proved, you can drag out an inquisition with subpoenas forever, generating additional scurrilous headlines of “coverup” should the unfortunate victim not wish to strip naked for her pleasure.  We'll bet that somewhere in the documents Harvard, no doubt advised by the crack defenders at WilmerHale, someone said something stupid.  That will generate more headlines, more sound bites, and more subpoenas.

If you think that this batsh** crazy supporter of a tangerine-faced bigot and his effort to overthrow democratic government is not really concerned about the well-being of the Jews, just ask her:

Foxx also insisted that her investigation is not being fueled by political or ideological motivations.

“What is driving us is concern for students and for faculty,” she said. “It has nothing to do with ideological beliefs. It’s all about protecting the students.”  

Would she lie to you?

Yes, she would:

Conservative Republicans have long decried higher education in the United States, describing the cultures on most college campuses as being captured by liberal elites who inculcate students with left-wing values and suppress conservative thought. And over time their disdain has deepened.

From 2015 to 2019, the share of Republicans and independents who lean Republican saying that colleges have a negative effect on the country rose from 37 percent to 59 percent, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. By 2022, another Pew poll reported that 76 percent of conservative Republicans said colleges affect the country negatively. Meanwhile, a number of Republican-dominated state legislatures have moved to end what they consider “woke” policies and teachings on campuses.

Democrats on the committee noticed what was happening. “I also want to note that the main point of this hearing should be to identify bipartisan solutions to combat antisemitism, not an excuse to attack higher education, liberal arts education, or important diversity, equity and inclusion work that’s happening at colleges and universities across the country,” said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore).

And the chaos agent behind this well-financed ideological attack on education under the guise of protecting the Jews, Chris Rufo, is a neo-Nazi eugenics freak.  By definition, that's not a friend of the Jews.

What's really appalling is how few are willing to speak out in defense of Harvard and other universities, either because they aren't exactly appealing victims or because their defenders don't want to fan the flames of the controversy.

That would be a serious mistake.  Letting bad-faith ideologues conduct inquisitions into Harvard and liberal education under the guise of combating anti-Semitism legitimizes these attacks.  That's how it worked in the 1950's until Joe Welch finally stood up to Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, after thousands of lives were ruined.  

It also worked in other places not that long ago:

 

 

That's something that Alan Garber should really be concerned about.

Op-Ed from Zontar: Why won't working class voters try to understand us?

Editors' Note: You can't open your newspaper (assuming you live somewhere that still has them) without running across the usual drivel about how the reason that white working class voters support the Tangerine-Faced Rapist is because those nasty mean coastal elites don't understand them, won't reach out to them, and are generally just so mean! 

Interestingly, the Spy Deep Space Desk recently intercepted another transmission from the distant planet Zontar, which has just the opposite problem.  Their complaint was incomprehensible to us but in the spirit of promoting galactic peace and harmony, we present it to you the reader so that – [They get the setup. Get on with it – Ed.]

By Z. Jean Carroll
Guest Writer
The New Zork Times

It's a commonplace to say that Zontarian politics are polarized.  But what accounts for the wide gap between the two sides?  We think it's because that orange working-class voters have a warped understanding of who the pink professional class are and what we stand for.  They should try harder to reach out to us, with whom they have little contact and even less sympathy.

The highly educated elite brought you television!

Our message to the orange working class is simple: You should get to know us.  We are the people who cure your illnesses, teach your dumb as paint children, design your smartphones and 90-inch TV's you are glued to, even synthesize the fentanyl that you love so much.  We have every skill the pickup-driving, drug-abusing, wife-beating, ignorant orange working classes lack.  So why do you hold us in such scathing contempt?

Professional-class Zontarians often supported Republicanz  until the party shifted its focus to orange supremacy and bigotry against those with different gender or other identities, thus abandoning the emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion that once marked the ZOP. Through this new and divisive bigoted approach, hard-right orange Republicanz not only ignored anyone who looked or sounded different from them, but also started to judge them as not real Zontarians and not worthy of the love and support of the orange working class voter.

Most of us care deeply about respecting the rights of anyone in the LGBTQ population and protecting the reproductive freedom of women. Why can't the orange working class understand our belief that women are entitled to control their own bodies regardless of what religious beliefs you hold?  We also think that women have the right to go out in public or shop without being raped by rich, powerful men who then smear them when they appeal for justice. 

And we can't understand why they describe such violent criminals as “authentic” and then when they lie about their depredations defend these fiends as “he is who he is.“ We're hurt when we hear orange-faced men and women say they like such behavior and invective.  Do they actually approve of sexually abusing women, including underaged ones? 

Well-educated liberals place great weight on family values!

The orange working-class should also know that many of us are deeply religious.  Our religions don't teach hate, intolerance, greed, and self-indulgence.  Instead, they emphasize the dignity of all humanity, the important of good deeds, and the duty to help the poor.  Why can't the orange working class accept our religion as genuine, too?

When the ZOVID epidemic struck, those of us in the healthcare professions bravely went to work to help victims of an unknown contagious disease that for all we knew might claim our own life.  We feared that our children would grow up without parents or worse yet we would bring the virus home to our family.  But we took care of everyone as best we could.

So you can imagine how disappointed we were when many orange working class voters rejected and mocked our science-based efforts, choosing instead to dose themselves with horse dewormers and bleach.  Worse yet, those same orange working class persons refused to cooperate with simple public health measures like masking in close spaces.  They even engaged in intimidation of and violence against those who sought to enforce masking rules.  And it was all because their candidate didn't want to smear his greasy makeup by wearing a mask.

You should know that we, the highly educated, place a great weight on learning, scholarship, and free inquiry.  That's why we react so badly when politicians supposedly representing the orange working class try so hard to cripple our public schools and threaten our teachers. Don't they realize that strong public schools are the only hope for the children of the orange working class?

Because we tolerate diversity and welcome inclusion, we also are firmly opposed to efforts to exclude and stigmatize students who, for example, have a different gender identity.  When will orange working class voters learn that hatred and bigotry have no place in our public schools or indeed anywhere in public life?

Professionals like air traffic controllers keep us safe!

We do understand the resentment of orange working class voters who have seen their standards of living decline after 50 years of largely Republicanz rule.  What we don't understand is why the voters who have suffered so much from Republicanz policies that gave tax cuts for the rich and took away union protections from them consistently vote for the party that exacerbates their very real economic plight.

Many of us spent our entire lives working to improve the lot of the orange working class whether through guaranteed health care, aid to education, protecting public health, or building a planetary infrastructure that promotes economic growth.  Yet in return all we get from the orange base is anger and paranoid conspiracy theories. 

We beg the orange working class Republicanz to speak the language of the educated class again. Put value on the value we contribute to this country. We want to be valued, heard, and shown some respect. 

If only the orange working class voter would reach out to us, they would see we are not their enemies.

They would see we are their friends.  Their only friends.

Danger, danger! Our sensors have detected - DEI!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling, Yard Editor Larry Lowell,
and Aviation Correspondent Douglas Corrigan

The recent defenestration of ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay and an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max have a surprising link: both are connected to the inchoate evil that is DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, unless you are part of the great right-wing grievance machine, where it stands for the triumph of evil coastal elites.

Don't believe me?  Just ask the most meritorious columnist in America, former National Review table-pounder David French, now peddling his wares in The New York Times:

Uh-oh. This sounds serious. And who better to remind us of the dangers of DEI than a former writer for a magazine that for decades opposed the Civil Rights Act and upheld white supremacy, including gems like this: 

“Why the South Must Prevail” is shocking to the 21st century reader. The piece put National Review on record in favor of both legal segregation where it existed (in accordance with the “states’ rights” principle) and the right of southern whites to discriminate against southern blacks, on the basis of their “Negro backwardness.” The editorial defended the right of whites to govern exclusively, even in jurisdictions where they did not constitute a majority of the population. 

In the same op-ed, Buckley concluded that as long as African Americans remained “backward” in education and in economic progress, Southern whites had a right to “impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to affect a genuine cultural equality between the races.” ...He offered no guidance as to how blacks might attain what he called “cultural equality,” save for by the sufferance of the white population. 

But don't worry: years later self-proclaimed intellectual William F. Buckley said he was sorry.  And since no lasting harm was done by 350 years of armed and entitled racist garbage like this, there's no reason to worry about it anymore.

According to French, that is. 

Before we get to French's half-assed effort to define DEI, let's see how it is used out in the real world. Here's an example of a hiring policy of a well-known law firm not known for hiring third-raters just to advance the woke agenda, to put it mildly:

Gee, if Cravath can commit to DEI without being compelled to hire idiots like Clarence Thomas, maybe DEI is not the clear and present danger that David French and his fellow apologists for white supremacy think it is.

Let David try to explain:

To put it simply, the problem with D.E.I. isn’t with diversity, equity, or inclusion — all vital values. The danger posed by D.E.I. resides primarily not in these virtuous ends, but in the unconstitutional means chosen to advance them.

That's certainly simple, although meaningless.

Although he won't come right out and say it, as a veteran right-wing litigator, he's trying to suggest (without having the intellectual courage to state plainly) that any effort to remedy the continuing effects of America's 425 year love affair with racism is unconstitutional because it would entail taking race into account in making various decisions, like who should be President of Harvard. While this is a popular theory among white reactionaries, it doesn't happen to be – true. As a very meritorious double-Harvard grad wrote last year:

This contention blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count. But the response is simple: Our country has never been colorblind. Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented “inter- generational transmission of inequality” that still plagues our citizenry.

Remember when police were chosen on merit alone?

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. ___ (2023)(Jackson, J. dissenting)

The two dissents dissect the ridiculous anti-text anti-original intent argument that the post-Civil War amendments mandated “color-blindness.”

Guess David isn't too interested in dissenting opinions.  Instead he harps, as did the right wing advocacy group that sued Harvard, on the supposed ill-treatment of Asian-American Harvard applicants:

it is difficult to ignore the overwhelming evidence that Harvard attempted to achieve greater diversity in part by systematically downranking Asian applicants on subjective grounds,  

The process was so devastating to Asian-American applicants that they constituted only 24% of the entering Harvard class at issue, although they represent a full 6% of U.S. population.

It's peculiar that white men seem very upset about this supposed injustice, while Asian students themselves do not.  In fact, major Asian-American student organizations at Harvard supported the University's position.

French goes on to cite vaguely university disciplinary processes that he claims fail to attain the Constitutional standard of due process, which is by definition not applicable to private colleges and universities.  Or, for that matter, to newspapers, who can s***can whichever columnist they want for any or no reason.  We think he must have learned this tidbit at Harvard Law School, but who knows?

What's really going on here, in addition to white supremacy, is white men's fears that they are losing their privilege, or what they like to call “merit.”

Remember when soldiers were chosen by merit alone?

Even French, to his credit, can't swallow the Sissy SpaceX white racist crap about how DEI supposedly led to the door of that Alaska Airlines 737 falling off (the entirely made up theory is that somehow unqualified hires were too stupid to attach the bolts). 

This has led to a spate of racist fairy tales about how DEI would lead to incompetent pilots, surgeons, and other worthies because white men would no longer be ushered to the top of the heap.  Even the less self-serving argument – that all these goodies should go to those with the best SAT scores and GPA's – disappears on a moment's introspection.

We know pilots and surgeons.  I want them to be good at what they do.  I also know that beyond some minimum, there's no correlation between test scores and competence at a job that requires diverse skills, like flying or surgery.

I know plenty of Harvard summas I wouldn't trust in the cockpit or with a blade in their hands.  A pilot needs to be calm, flexible, and patient and have the ability to multitask, scan, and stay cool in a crisis.  A surgeon needs good judgment and good fine motor skills.  I can think of plenty of people with good test scores who don't have the skills to slice a salami, much less an abdominal wall.

Aviation, before it was ruined by DEI wokeness

Further, research into the terrible health outcomes between Black and white Americans has told us that Black patients are more likely to trust and comply with the instructions of Black doctors.  So if the true measure of medicine is its ability to heal the sick and keep us healthy, then medicine needs plenty of Black doctors and other health professionals to serve the US patient population. 

Does anyone think that the rich powerful white billionaires have the best test scores and GPA's?  Have you ever talked to one?

On a related subject, if you think that Harvard must admit students only on the basis of the numbers, then you must think that The New York Times must have the same standards. Columns must be awarded only to those with the most glittering degrees from the finest schools.

What were David French's merits exactly?  He received his BA from Lipscomb University, widely regarded as the finest institution of higher education in Nashville, Tennessee [That would be Vanderbilt – Ed.].

Lips.  Comb.  University.  Is that the best undergraduate background the Times could have found for the demanding job of Op-Ed columnist?  It sounds more like the background of someone who screws bolts for Boeing.

So why was this mook hired?

Here's how Media Matters hailed his hiring:

the New York Times' announcement notably leaves out French’s history as an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ legal organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Moreover, French has a history of expressing troubling sentiments about gay and trans people in conservative outlets ....“I don’t agree that trans men are ‘men’ or that trans women are ‘women,” French said....

Wowzeh.

We all know why French was hired: the Times wanted another literate right-winger they could take out in public.  They wanted a staff of editorial columnists who were diverse and inclusive.  As their boss and owner put it, even in Fox News's bent retelling:

The New York Times Company Chairman A.G. Sulzberger defended the newspaper saying it does a good job of representing a diverse set of views after being asked why the company's goals don't include the diversity of views.

That's what Harvard wanted in its entering class, too.  But what's OK when it benefits a reactionary white graduate of Lipsync University isn't OK when it benefits minority groups who have been systematically assaulted for four centuries.

If you have to ask why such disparate treatment is defensible, either ethically or intellectually, then you probably didn't graduate from Lippitydo University. 

And by the way, French, so worked up about the treatment of Asian-Americans in Harvard admissions, doesn't seem to be too upset about the number of Asian-American colleagues on the Times's editorial page.  That number is zero.  Maybe they're just not good with words?

Speaking of those doors flying off Boeing airplanes and how white racist plug-uglies are lying that it's due to DEI, the real reason that Boeing's planes are shiite is...wait for it...white men:

That [safety-first] ethos is hard to instill using only financial incentives or the threat of firing. What’s really needed is a culture of perfectionism—and that’s what Boeing seems to have lost over the past 20 or so years. To take only the most obvious example: The two fatal crashes of the 737 Max were the result of a new flight-control system that depended on data from a single sensor that had no backup....Designing a system that had a single point of failure violated the canon of aviation engineering, which has always emphasized the need for redundancy in cases where failure would have disastrous consequences. But in the new Boeing, people thought the risk was worth taking—or perhaps the new corporate culture they’d absorbed had simply stopped making them value what the engineers said.

Yes, the same rapacious white plutocrats funding attacks on educational institutions, using DEI as the battering ram to destroy academic freedom and intellectual integrity, were the ones whose greed, arrogance, and incompetence led to the deaths of hundreds and the ruination of a once-great company.

Why?  What's gone wrong with white men in this country?  Is it the breakdown of the white family?  The white penchant for drug and alcohol abuse?  The cultural backwardness of many whites, even the richest ones?  The white loss of respect for law and order?  

We don't know.  But unlike French's DEI bogeyman, the rule of rapacious white men is blowing the doors off of our country as we try to navigate through dangerous skies.

I can't wait to read all about it in the diverse opinion pages of The New York Times.