The university told Fox News on Friday that "parents of all backgrounds" could attend the seminar,  "From Integration to Antiracism," even though it was "principally intended for white parents of public school children."

However, the university went on, "the program's materials and content were not clear enough about it being open to all."

The statement came the same day that NYU was hit with a federal civil rights complaint over the seminar, which a few days before its first meeting had sent participants an email explaining "why we are meeting as white folks." During the program, which took place from February to June, facilitators argued that the racially exclusive workshop would spare minorities the "harm" of "hear[ing] our racist thoughts."

"People of color are dealing with racism all the time," Barbara Gross, the associate director of NYU’s Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative, said in response to a question from one parent, who argued that a whites-only anti-racism training seemed "a little counterintuitive." "The purpose is to create space where we can talk about our racism with each other … without burdening the people of color in our lives."

Every seminar attendee appears to have been white. One parent even said she was "grateful that there weren’t people of color in this space," according to audio and video obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, since their presence would have made it uncomfortable for her to speak openly about racism.

"NYU is working with program leadership to ensure that the program conforms with University’s standards and applicable law," the university’s Friday statement said.

NYU general counsel Aisha Oliver-Staley did not respond to a request for comment.

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The complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Education by the Equal Protection Project, alleges that the five-month-long seminar violated four civil rights laws: Titles II and VI of the Civil Rights Act, New York State’s Human Rights Law, and 42 U.S.C. § 1981, which bans racial discrimination in contracting.

It comes as the university is already under a consent agreement with the Education Department over several anti-Semitic incidents on campus, including a violent anti-Israel protest that resulted in two arrests.

The workshop, which cost $360 to attend, argued that white people need to "unlearn racism" without "burdening the people of color in our lives." Facilitators and attendees repeatedly made clear that no minorities were allowed, with one parent stating that she was "grateful" for the seminar’s racial homogeneity. Other parents fretted about the "white supremacy culture" inherent in their jobs as lawyers and editors, according to audio of the seminar obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

While many schools have been hit with discrimination complaints over minority-only fellowships, the NYU workshop, "From Integration to Antiracism," marks the first time in recent memory that a university has faced blowback for excluding people of color. The seminar concluded a few weeks before the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions, a ruling expected to upend race-conscious programs on campus and beyond.

"Eliminating racial discrimination," the Court’s decision read, "means eliminating all of it."

Though the workshop began four years ago, it did not explicitly bar minorities until 2020, according to archived webpages included in the complaint.

The Education Department "should investigate this blatantly discriminatory program and the circumstances under which the creation and promotion of it was approved," the complaint states. "NYU’s deliberate racial segregation in its FIAR workshop series constitutes invidious discrimination for which there is no legal justification."

New York University did not respond to a request for comment.

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The all-white seminar, "From Integration to Anti-Racism," cost $360 to attend and met six times between February and June, according to a description of the program that has since been scrubbed from the university’s website without explanation. Organized by NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, the workshop was "designed specifically for white public school parents" committed to "becoming anti-racist" and building "multiracial parent communities."

But to promote solidarity with all races, participants were told, it was necessary that the seminar include only one.

A few days before the first session, facilitators circulated a short handout, "Why a White Space," to explain "why we are meeting as white folks for these six months." The handout, produced by the nonprofit Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere, argued that white people need spaces where they can "unlearn racism" without subjecting minorities to "undue trauma or pain."

Facilitators reiterated this argument on day one of the seminar, audio and video of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. When a parent questioned the premise of the workshop—saying it seemed "a little counterintuitive" to exclude minorities from an anti-racism seminar—Barbara Gross, the associate director of Steinhardt’s Education Justice Research group, assured her that it was for their own good.

"People of color are dealing with racism all the time," Gross said. "Like every minute of every day. It’s a harm on top of a harm for them to hear our racist thoughts."

Even before the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions, it was illegal for universities to practice other forms of race discrimination. The whites-only workshop, five lawyers said, almost certainly violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which applies to the recipients of federal funds, and—since NYU charged parents for the seminars—also ran afoul of laws banning discrimination in contracting, according to Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project.

"It’s quintessentially illegal," said Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. "This episode illustrates the horseshoe theory whereby left- and right-wing radicals end up agreeing on race-based societal balkanization. It’s like that social media meme: ‘woke or KKK?’"

The program took place while NYU was under an ongoing consent agreement with the U.S. Department of Education over a string of anti-Semitic incidents on campus. As race-based programs of all stripes face added scrutiny in the wake of the High Court’s affirmative action ban, the seminar is a stark signal that "anti-racism" doesn’t just mean minority-only fellowships or workforce diversity targets; at one of the top universities in the country, it now includes programs that bear an eerie similarity to Jim Crow.

"They are literally running a ‘whites only’ program in the interest of so-called social justice," said Samantha Harris, an attorney who litigates campus speech and civil rights issues. "I find it inconceivable that the people putting these programs together don’t see the irony."

NYU told the Free Beacon that it would be "reviewing these matters to determine whether they conform to our standards." Gross did not respond to a request for comment.

The seminar is a fascinating study of how one group of white liberals guilt-tripped and self-flagellated their way into segregation.

Participants seemed petrified by the possibility that they could "harm" a person of color with a misplaced comment or anecdote, a fear that made the whites-only training a kind of therapeutic refuge.

Asked when they first "learned about race," one parent recalled how, while she was in kindergarten, a black classmate had been expelled for bringing a knife to school. Later in the session, she expressed relief that there had been no minorities around to hear such a traumatizing tale.

"I was so grateful that there weren’t, you know, people of color in this space to hear me say [that] my first experience learning about what my race was was a black boy with a knife," she said. "That can be harming."

The first session of the workshop, which included approximately a dozen parents and ran for two hours, encouraged that sort of hypersensitivity. As participants filed into the meeting, they were greeted by a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s "All You Fascists Bound to Lose" performed by the "Resistance Revival Chorus," a group of women and "non-binary singers" that "centers women in music."

After participants shared their pronouns—most of which were "she/her"—facilitators performed a brief land acknowledgment and laid out the ground rules for the session.

"Resist the urge to intellectualize," Gross said. "We’re not going to get through this without welcoming the feelings."

In what seemed like an effort at self-awareness, another facilitator, Courtney Epton, told participants to avoid virtue-signaling. "Trying to compete with each other to be the ‘good white person,’" she said, is itself a "part of white supremacy."

Epton—a "senior equity associate" at NYU Steinhardt and a board member of the nonprofit Integrated Schools—did not respond to a request for comment.

At least one parent in attendance, Jordan Feigenbaum, had direct say over the governance of local schools. Feigenbaum serves on the Community Education Council for New York City’s District 13, an elected policy body that reviews school curricula and approves district zoning lines. He touted his participation in the program when he ran for office, saying the whites-only workshop would "enhance" his ability to serve the district.

Feigenbaum—who described himself as an "ally" in his candidate statement—did not respond to a request for comment.

Gross indicated that the workshop began four years ago when she heard from white parents with kids in majority-black schools that they felt like "everyone hates me." Since then, she said, the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd had made those parents more concerned about systemic racism—and more guilty about their assumed role in it.

She spoke of anti-black bigotry as though it were a genetic condition, passed down biologically as well as socially. "What we know intellectually is very different from what’s in our bones and in our nervous systems," Gross said. "What we have internalized. What we have inherited."

As a result, she added, "young African-American girls face 23 microaggressions every single day."

Instead of just wallowing in shame, however, Gross promised participants they would learn to "love [other] white people" in spite of their collective guilt.

The seminar also included a discussion of Tema Okun’s "Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture," which include "perfectionism," "a sense of urgency," and "worship of the written word." Many parents struggled to reconcile these teachings with the day-to-day demands of their careers, taking the already thin line between parody and reality and smashing it altogether.

"I’ve been correcting grammar a lot and typos," one self-identified editor said, "and reading this I was thinking, ‘Wow, I had no idea.’"

Another parent fretted that the characteristics of white supremacy culture were nearly identical with the values of her law firm. That wasn’t surprising, Gross said, given that American law "was built on racism and white supremacy."

Even Gross admitted that she was not immune to bigotry. One time, she said, several "women of color" in her office were laughing and playing games while they were supposed to be planning an event.

"I was thinking, ‘How can they get anything done,’" Gross said. "I had to catch myself."

At the end of the session, participants were assigned readings for their next meeting, including "Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People about Racism" by Robin DiAngelo and "Qallunology 101: A Lesson Plan for the Non-Indigenous" by Derek Rasmussen. Readings for later sessions included "Internalized White Superiority," "Toward a Radical White Identity," and "4 Ways White People Can Process Their Emotions Without Bringing White Tears," according to slides from the workshop obtained by the Free Beacon.

Participants were also asked to share what they learned with someone outside the seminar. But there was a catch.

"Share what you learn today with another white person," the slides for each session said, "not a BIPOC."

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The law school's office of student services, which coordinates applications to all journals including the flagship Columbia Law Review, said Sunday that journal acceptances had been postponed until the school could verify that they comport with the new, race-blind standard articulated in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

"In light of the Supreme Court decision on Thursday, we are working with university leadership to better understand any implications for the journal ranking process," the office told students in an email. "Because of this, journal acceptances will be delayed until we receive further clarity."

"We have an obligation," the office added, "to … ensure that our decision processes are consistent with the law."

Law journals have long used affirmative action to select student editors as well as articles for publication. The delay suggests that this widespread practice could be on the chopping block as a result of the High Court's sweeping ruling, which experts say has laid the groundwork for invalidating a host of race-based policies across academia and corporate America.

"It's almost impossible to avoid the implication that all recipients of federal funds are now subject to the same rule announced in Students for Fair Admissions," said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, which filed an amicus brief in support of the group that sued Harvard. As long as a law review is part of a federally funded university, it faces "the same constraints that the 14th Amendment applies to state entities."

That could spell trouble for Columbia's journals in the event of a legal challenge. Though the Columbia Law Review is technically an independent nonprofit, students apply to it through the university's online portal, and those with questions about the review are referred to the law school's associate director of academic advising, Jordan Carr. Other journals at the law school are published "in partnership" with the university, according to their websites.

Neither Columbia Law School nor the Columbia Law Review responded to requests for comment.

Legal academia is already feeling the heat from the Supreme Court's decision. Within 24 hours of the ruling, the conservative public interest firm America First Legal sent letters to 200 law schools demanding that they scrap racial preferences not just in student admissions but also in faculty hiring and law reviews.

"We will represent victims of these policies and sue any law school that allows these illegal and discriminatory practices to continue," the letters read.

The pause at Columbia indicates that the school's journals have similar programs, as do the demographic data solicited by the Columbia Law Review. Applicants are asked about their race, gender, and sexual orientation, according to segments of application form reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, and can also submit "other relevant information" about their "personal identity."

Even before the Supreme Court's ruling, law reviews were dealing with legal headaches over their use of racial preferences. In 2018, a Texas-based group sued the Harvard Law Review and the New York University Law Review for allegedly discriminating in the admissions process. While both lawsuits were eventually dismissed—largely on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing—law reviews may struggle to fend off similar complaints going forward, Morenoff said.

The Supreme Court's new standard could pose a particular problem for the Yale Law Journal, which in 2021 released admissions data following accusations of racism from minority students. It turned out the top-ranked law review accepted white and Asian applicants at much lower rates than their black counterparts, numbers that parallel the disparities cited by the Supreme Court in its judgment against Harvard.

"It certainly sounds like the whole set of elite law journals will need to change their MO or face consequences," Morenoff said.

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Many hailed the move as a sign that Stanford was turning over a new leaf and lavished praise on Jenny Martinez, the law school's dean, for her perceived defiance of the campus mob.

But the promised training wasn't much of a crash course in free speech. Instead, it was an online program that required barely a minute's effort, according to five people who completed the training as well as screenshots and recordings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Students were given six weeks to watch five prerecorded videos, most about an hour long, then asked to sign a form attesting that they had done so.

The videos could be played on mute, and the form—which could be accessed without opening the training—did not ask any questions about their content, letting students tune out the modules or skip them entirely.

"I watched none of the videos," one student said. "I never even opened the links. On the day the training was due, I went to the attestation link provided by the university, checked a box confirming I watched the videos, and that was the end of the matter. Whole process took 10 seconds."

The free speech program was much less demanding than the law school's modules on Title IX and alcohol issues, which require students to answer questions demonstrating an understanding of school policy, according to people who'd completed both trainings. The contrast has shaken students' faith in Stanford's vaunted recommitment to freedom of speech, which, one said, appears to have been "nothing more than hollow virtue signaling."

Stanford Law School did not respond to a request for comment.

The training followed a widely reported incident in which students shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals with help from Stanford diversity dean Tirien Steinbach. The episode, which was captured on video, touched off weeks of crisis management at the elite law school: Duncan received a formal apology, Steinbach was placed on leave, and the law school announced a series of steps it was taking to avoid a similar debacle in the future.

"As one first step," Martinez wrote, "the law school will be holding a mandatory half-day session in spring quarter for all students on the topic of freedom of speech."

The gap between what was promised and what was delivered could hamstring the law school's efforts to repair its relationship with the federal bench. Following the Duncan shout-down, two circuit court judges, James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, said they would not hire clerks from Stanford Law until they saw evidence of "lasting institutional change."

The training did little to promote such a shift, students said, because the activists who disrupted Duncan were the least inclined to sit through it.

"I overheard people joking about the program in the courtyard," said Josh Rooney, a second-year law student. "The students complying with the training were the ones who already agreed with it."

Even students sympathetic to the program reported muting it once they realized how perfunctory it was.

"Anyone could start the training and just fuck off and not listen," one student said. "It was just a waste of everyone's time," another added.

The videos seemed tailor-made to avoid controversy. They included a conversation between a public defender and a prosecutor, a bipartisan panel of judges, and a talk by the dean of Berkeley Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky, who discussed the basics of First Amendment law and how it applies to college campuses. None of the panels addressed events at Stanford directly, students said, though Chemerinsky did criticize the broader trend of campus shout-downs, according to a video of his talk reviewed by the Free Beacon.

The Duncan imbroglio was one of the most extreme examples of that trend in recent memory. Students bombarded the judge with insults and sexual invective, making it impossible for him to deliver his planned remarks. One protester yelled, "We hope your daughters get raped," according to Duncan and Tim Rosenberger, the former president of the Stanford Federalist Society, who had invited Duncan to speak about cryptocurrency regulation.

The most shocking moment came when Steinbach, the law school's associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, took the podium from Duncan and berated him for causing "harm."

"Do you have something so incredibly important to say," she asked, that it is worth the "division of these people?"

Though the law school later placed Steinbach on leave—calling her intervention "inappropriate"—the diversity dean appeared unchastened. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in March, she claimed that she had deployed "de-escalation techniques" when she confronted Duncan. And in an op-ed published in The Hill on Tuesday, Steinbach attacked "right-wing media" for misrepresenting "a verbal skirmish" between student protesters and the judge.

It is unclear whether Steinbach, who draws a six-figure salary, is still employed by Stanford, though the biography accompanying her piece this week referred to her role in the past tense, describing her as "an attorney who has served as associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Stanford Law School."

Steinbach did not respond to a request for comment.

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The bureau bars lenders from making statements that "discourage" minorities from applying for loans. Townstone may have violated that regulation, the agency said, when its employees discussed crime in Chicago on a company-hosted radio show about the mortgage market, which also advertised Townstone's services.

The offending statements, plucked from five episodes recorded over a three-year period, included a reference to the South Side of Chicago as a "war zone," as well as a recommendation that home sellers "take down the Confederate flag." Merely mentioning the flag, the agency argued, could scare off black applicants.

Facing a possible lawsuit and potentially stiff penalties, Townstone in 2019 retained a consumer testing firm, Kleimann Communication Group, to see if the remarks did in fact alienate African Americans.

The results were reassuring: Not a single black Chicagoan interviewed by the firm found the radio segments offensive, according to a copy of the firm's report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Some even said they were more inclined to use Townstone for mortgages after hearing its employees' banter, which they found funny and relatable.

But in July 2020—two months after the death of George Floyd—the bureau sued Townstone anyway.

What followed was an unprecedented legal battle between a small business with under 10 employees and a powerful federal agency that claimed to know better than the consumers it was allegedly protecting. Where working-class black people heard harmless chit-chat, agency officials heard disparaging dog whistles, which their lawsuit said amounted to "redlining."

Such claims are usually levied at big banks with deep pockets. Townstone marked the first time the bureau, set up in 2010 by Elizabeth Warren, had brought a redlining complaint against a non-bank mortgage lender, which would struggle to afford the multimillion-dollar payouts typical of a settlement with the agency.

It felt like "David and Goliath," said Barry Sturner, Townstone's president. And it was happening in a country that ostensibly bars the government from targeting citizens for their speech.

"They twisted innocuous statements about crime into something nefarious and then tried to use it to ruin my reputation and destroy my business," Sturner said. "When a federal agency with an unlimited budget and army of lawyers comes after your business and smears you as a racist, you're forced to give in and take it or choose an uphill fight."

Three years later, Sturner is still fighting. Though a district court dismissed the lawsuit in February, the bureau is now appealing that decision to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which could catapult the case to the Supreme Court.

While the odds are stacked against the agency in both venues—the Seventh Circuit, like the High Court, is majority-conservative—the persistence illustrates how government bureaucrats, armed with the mandate of civil rights, can bully and bankrupt businesses for constitutionally protected speech.

Legal fees alone often reach hundreds of thousands of dollars in a case like Townstone's, said Jessica Thompson, an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, who represented Sturner pro bono. Throw in the possibility of damages, and it's often safer to settle—a dynamic that allows the government to chill speech merely by opening an investigation and dangling the possibility of a lawsuit.

The result, Thompson said, is a system ripe for constitutional abuses.

"Content- or viewpoint-based restrictions on speech are antithetical to the First Amendment," she told the Free Beacon. "That means it's unconstitutional for agency bureaucrats to appoint themselves as speech police to censor discussions on public issues just because they might be offensive to some."

At least some of that censorship seems to have been due to the cultural distance between inner-city Chicago and Northwest Washington, D.C.

On a 2017 episode of Townstone's radio show, Sturner referred to a grocery store in the South Side of Chicago, Jewel-Osco, as "Jungle Jewel," adding that it was "a scary place" with patrons "from all over the world."

The agency cited the nickname as an example of language that "would discourage" minorities "from applying for credit." In fact, the jungle moniker has been widely used by black Chicagoans themselves, one of whom told Kleimann Communication Group that Sturner's comments were "reliable and helpful," according to the firm's report.

Other statements the agency cited were blunt but boilerplate. "You drive very fast through Markham," former Townstone president David Hochberg said on a 2014 broadcast, referring to a majority-black Chicago suburb that experiences more crime than 95 percent of American cities. "You don't look at anybody or lock on anybody's eyes." On a November 2017 broadcast, a Townstone employee likened the "rush" of skydiving to "walking through the South Side at 3 a.m."

The agency also chided the hosts for stating, in January 2014, that listeners should "take down the Confederate flag" before putting their homes on the market—guidance that reflects the official policy of the National Association of Realtors, which says displaying a Confederate flag may violate housing discrimination law.

"The Townstone Financial Show has regularly included statements that would discourage African-American prospective applicants from applying for mortgage loans," the lawsuit said. And its "home-selling advice has included recommendations regarding displays of the Confederate flag."

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau declined to comment.

It is doubtful that anyone complained to the agency about these statements, said Ted Frank, a well-known conservative attorney who tackles regulatory overreach. Instead, agency officials likely noticed that Townstone made fewer loans in black neighborhoods than others and began poking around.

African Americans only accounted for just 1.4 percent of Townstone's loan applications between 2014 and 2017, according to the agency's complaint, and less than 1 percent of its loans were for properties in predominantly black neighborhoods, which comprise around 14 percent of Chicago's population.

Though such disparities are not illegal in and of themselves—lenders can consider race-blind factors, such as credit scores, that vary on average between racial groups—they can be evidence of discrimination and the catalyst for a lawsuit. The result, Frank said, is a "racial spoils system" in which quotas, while not officially required, are effectively mandatory.

"If you don't have proportional representation among loan recipients, agencies will look for disparate impact and go after you," Frank said. "It's problematic to see Kendism"—a reference to "antiracist" activist Ibram X. Kendi, who argues that all racial disparities reflect racism—"be the official policy of the U.S. government."

Something like that policy has now been written into the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's operations manual. The bureau said last year that it would sue lenders for disparate impact "regardless of whether it is intentional," something Congress never authorized it to do.

It was the latest move by an agency that has long taken an expansive view of its mandate, at times interpreting laws to cover far more conduct than their plain text implies.

The Townstone litigation centers on the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which makes it illegal to "discriminate against any applicant" for credit on the basis of race. The agency has interpreted that law to include "prospective applicants" in addition to actual ones—a potentially massive category. It relied on this inflated interpretation to go after Townstone, arguing that the lender could be guilty of discrimination even if it had not discriminated against anyone who had applied for credit.

The argument was so bold that Franklin U. Valderrama, the district court judge presiding over the case, didn't address the First Amendment issues in his opinion. He dismissed the lawsuit purely on separation of powers grounds, saying the bureau, an Executive Branch agency, had ignored the clear meaning of a congressionally enacted law. For now, it remains an open legal question whether lenders can speak candidly about crime.

The appeal to the Seventh Circuit comes as the bureau's entire funding structure is under review at the Supreme Court. The existential stakes of that case have stirred debate about how the agency should be reformed and what it is for.

At a congressional hearing in March, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.) answered the second question by pointing to Townstone.

"I for one am glad the agency took action against discriminatory lending practices," Pressley told the House of Representatives' Financial Services Committee, citing the company's "racist messages." "We need more, not less, of the CFBP."

Ryan Nevin contributed to this report.

Update, 1:39 p.m.: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that it was Sturner who made the comment about Markham. It was Townstone's former president David Hochberg.

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The electric car company, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has become a culture-war lightning rod, earned just 37 points on the 100-point scale compared with the cigarette giant's 84.

ESG ratings are supposed to guide investors, and their money, toward ethical enterprises. But Big Tobacco has lapped Tesla in the ESG ratings race more than once: Sustainalytics, a widely used ESG ratings tool, gives Tesla a worse score than Altria, one of the largest tobacco producers in the world. And the London Stock Exchange gives British American Tobacco an ESG score of 94—the third highest of any company on the exchange's top share index—while Tesla earns a middling 65.

How could cigarettes, which kill over eight million people each year, be deemed a more ethical investment than electric cars? It may have something to do with the tobacco industry's embrace of corporate progressivism.

Companies like Altria have gone out of their way to emphasize the diversity of their corporate boards and the breadth of their social justice initiatives, from funding minority businesses to promoting transgender women in sports. But Tesla, whose executives are overwhelmingly white men, has resisted that bandwagon, going so far as to fire its top LGBT diversity officer last year.

The "S" in ESG typically includes diversity programs. Philip Morris International, which in 2021 advertised a partnership with "African data scientists," got a social score of 84 from S&P Global. Tesla got a measly 20.

The contrast highlights the hazards of a movement that lumps pressing health and environmental issues in with ideological fads. Early ESG efforts were laser-focused on "sin stocks"—companies whose core business was deemed immoral—including tobacco. But as ESG investing has ballooned, so has the number of variables used in ESG ratings, which now encompass everything from labor practices and carbon pledges to diversity trainings and human rights. That has created countless opportunities to game the system, experts say, and lets even the most sordid companies score points—and investors—by toeing the progressive line.

"ESG company ratings often measure abstract woke goals that have no rational connection to companies' actual businesses," said Boyden Gray & Associates managing partner Jonathan Berry, who sued NASDAQ last year over its diversity requirements for corporate boards. "Companies score 'points' mainly by demonstrating their compliance with the latest dogmas issued by the DEI complex."

Cigarettes are the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, killing more people than alcohol, illegal drugs, and car accidents combined. And their supply chain involves a litany of environmental sins: The industry's carbon footprint is substantial, and even e-cigarettes, marketed as a less harmful alternative to tobacco, can result in serious pollution because they don't biodegrade. Tobacco farming, which mostly takes place in developing countries, causes deforestation and soil erosion. Tobacco workers are exposed to toxic chemicals, including high doses of nicotine, which can lead to hospitalization.

But ESG ratings often mask those effects. Some scores, including S&P Global's, say in fine print that they are sector-specific, which means companies are held to different standards depending on their industry. An unusually green tobacco giant could score better than an electric carmaker with an all-male board, and corporations can earn points merely by setting water reduction targets or using "diverse" suppliers.

That may be why Philip Morris International, in its 2022 ESG report, bragged about "empowering" female tobacco farmers. "Women involved in tobacco farming often face structural and cultural barriers," the report explained. "Globally, less than 15 percent of agricultural land is owned by women."

This sort of rhetoric permeates Big Tobacco's ESG reports, documents aimed at investors seeking an ethical portfolio. Imperial Brands touts its trainings on "microaggressions" and a board that is 40 percent women. Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco promote their scores on Bloomberg’s Gender Equality Index—Tesla doesn't doesn't participate—which uses self-reported data to track companies' progress toward "equitable inclusion." Altria advertises a granular list of diversity targets, including for "AAPI women." And in 2020, the company's "Corporate Responsibility" report addressed the "pandemic within the pandemic" caused by "systemic racism." It did not mention that smoking, like COVID-19, disproportionately kills black Americans.

The paeans to diversity underscore how tobacco, long considered the quintessential sin stock, could exploit ESG to become a more palatable asset, profiting off the progressivism that has swept through C-suites and corporate boards. Most ESG funds exclude tobacco from their portfolios due to its harmful health effects. But cigarette makers are hoping to change that.

Philip Morris International CEO Jacek Olczak told the Financial Times in May that some ESG asset managers had asked his company, which sold over 600 billion cigarettes last year, for one-on-one meetings, signaling a possible rapprochement with tobacco.

"Asset managers will not spend the time on talking with you," Olczak said, if they don't plan to "reconsider the exclusion" policy.

That détente is largely due to the rise of smoke-free products, which now account for a third of Philip Morris International's revenue. But critics say the ESG movement, and the progressive marketing it encourages, have also played a role in legitimizing the cigarette industry. "Tobacco company ESG reports tend to deceive their primary audience, investors, into thinking that tobacco companies can be 'sustainable,'" the tobacco watchdog STOP wrote in an issue brief last year. "ESG reporting lets tobacco companies promote their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives"—like DEI—"while obscuring the significant health, economic, and environmental damage they cause."

Some rating systems even encourage cigarette makers to market their products to marginalized groups. Altria has a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index—a metric rumored to be behind the disastrous LGBT marketing campaigns at Target and Bud Light—which lets companies earn points by "advertising to LGBTQ consumers."

In California, tobacco kills almost as many gay and bisexual men as AIDS. LGBT youth nationwide are over twice as likely to smoke as their straight counterparts, and transgender adults smoke at three times the rate of the general public.

Altria said in a statement that it does not do "targeted advertising to the LGBTQ+ community" and that it earned its perfect score through other initiatives. Philip Morris International did not respond to a request for comment.

While the ESG juggernaut is relatively new, tobacco's corporate progressivism is not. When Philip Morris began advertising in gay periodicals in the 1990s, it dismissed critics of the move as bigots opposed to "inclusion." By the early 2000s, the company was using "Corporate Social Responsibility," the precursor to ESG, as a prophylaxis against lawsuits, according to a memo from Philip Morris's then-general counsel Steve Parrish.

"That will reduce the risks of lawsuits and improve our standing, when we are sued, as a 'responsible corporation,'" Parrish wrote to company executives in the 2000 memo, which was made public around that time in the course of litigation. "Otherwise, we will stand out as a target."

ESG ratings likely serve a similar purpose today, said Todd Henderson, a professor of law and economics at the University of Chicago. By performing well on them, tobacco companies can placate regulators and investors who think the "smoke-free future," as Philip Morris International calls it, is taking too long to materialize.

"A bad ESG score announces to the world you're a troglodyte," Henderson said. "That could be an invitation for socially conscious shareholders to seek board seats or oust a CEO."

BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard joined forces in 2021 to oust three ExxonMobil board directors who were out of step with the investors' climate priorities. All three firms own sizable stakes in cigarette companies, albeit not through ESG funds, giving them a considerable number of proxy votes. Tobacco's talk about social justice, Henderson said, may be a ploy to avoid Exxon's fate.

All this feeds into a larger critique that the ESG movement turns investors and rating agencies into de facto philosopher kings, weighing different and sometimes incommensurable values against each other. "You have to measure the goodness of women on corporate boards and compare it to the badness of killing people," Henderson said. "That's really a question for Plato."

The clash of values, he added, is one reason ESG scores vary significantly across different rating agencies, which means companies like Altria can usually find at least one good number to show investors. And it explains how even an electric car company can wind up with the short end of the stick.

To wit: Chevron, long a target for climate activists, edged out Tesla in the S&P's latest ESG ratings. It earned a lower environmental score than the automaker but scored over twice as high as Musk's company on social issues, where the oil titan has flexed its marketing muscle. Chevron's 2022 "sustainability" report boasts that the "first woman offshore platform engineer in Israel was employed by our operations."

Thomas McKenna contributed to this report.

Update, 12:32 p.m.: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Philip Morris sold six billion cigarettes last year. The correct number is 600 billion.

The post How Tobacco Companies Are Crushing ESG Ratings appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

To see if they’re up to snuff, most departments administer a written test, typically multiple-choice, to prospective lieutenants. Candidates must score above a cut-off to be considered for the job, with higher scores increasing the odds of promotion. The exam, which covers a litany of topics from building construction to medical techniques, is designed to ensure that the people making life-and-death decisions know the bare minimum to make them well.

So firefighters in Seattle, Washington, were surprised when their department’s lieutenant exam focused almost as much on social justice as on firefighting.

The test, which has both written and oral components, is based on a list of texts assigned by the Seattle Department of Human Resources—including, as of this year, How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and Both Sides of the Fire Lane: Memoirs of a Transgender Firefighter by Bobbie Scopa, according to a copy of the exam bibliography obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Along with A Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias and Fighting Fire, a memoir by a female firefighter, the books about race and gender span over 800 pages—a large fraction of the total study material.

"This stuff has nothing to do with firefighting," said Wayne Johnson, a retired Seattle firefighter who helped write some of the city’s promotional tests. "It has everything to do with social engineering."

The exam is part of a much larger effort to diversify a department that, as Seattle fire chief Harold Scoggins lamented last year, is "overwhelmingly" white men. Those efforts, critics say, have made the promotion process more about ideology and less about merit, politicizing a public service where competence can mean the difference between life and death.

In fact, in 2021, local officials including Scoggins commissioned a report on diversity in the fire service. One of its recommendations: avoid tests that "rely heavily on knowledge of firefighting."

"[T]ests that focus on how well applicants know the system and the job tend to favor those who make up the overwhelming majority of the fire service workforce, white men," the report says. "Questions that ask more about the candidate’s character and values, rather than knowing the ins and outs of the job, can be beneficial in advancing more women and people of color."

Seattle appears to have taken that advice.

An upcoming test for fireboat engineers, who operate the pumps and nozzles used to douse coastal fires, will quiz candidates on Robin DiAngelo’s Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, according to the exam bibliography. The fire captains exam likewise assigns DiAngelo’s book—along with handouts on the "structural interplay between all oppressions"—while the exam for battalion chiefs assigns the 2021 report on fire service diversity.

Scoggins did not respond to a request for comment.

Seattle’s tests are an outlier. In most cities, even Democratic strongholds like Boston and New Haven, written fire exams test only tactical knowledge. But in Seattle, where Scoggins himself helped protesters seal off the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in the wake of George Floyd’s death, promotions hinge on mastering these ideological tomes.

Firefighters who sat for the 2021 lieutenant's exam said How To Be an Antiracist was an integral part of it, while basics like fire behavior took a back seat. "If I had only read that one book, I would have done really well," said Andy Pittman, a former member of the Seattle Fire Department. "What we should be studying—high rise fires, water supply—wasn’t emphasized as heavily."

Pittman, who is Japanese as well as an Alaskan Native, said he scored well on the tactics portion of the exam conducted via video. But he hadn’t expected the written portion, which received the most weight, to be so slanted toward race and identity. While technically above the pass/fail cut-off, his overall score was low—tanked in part, he said, by the political questions. That put him near the bottom of the department’s promotion register, meaning he was all but certain to be passed over.

Beyond raising questions about competence, former department members say, the ideological screening has worsened a staffing crisis caused by the city’s vaccine mandate, which put nearly 80 firefighters—almost a tenth of the department—out of work. At a time when the city desperately needs first responders, the fire service has grown more hostile to the sort of people who typically join it: big, burly men whose politics tend to be to the right of the average Seattle bureaucrat.

"These woke tests are making it harder for the macho guys to get hired," said Steve Collins, who, along with Pittman and other firefighters interviewed for this story, lost his job in October 2021 when he refused the COVID-19 vaccine. "They weed out people who are not politically aligned."

The written tests are overseen by Seattle’s Public Safety Exams Administrator, Yoshiko Grace Matsui, who ensures that "civil service processes are equitable," according to her LinkedIn page. She did not respond to a request for comment.

The emphasis on equity has even bled into physical evaluations. When women fail the Candidate Physical Assessment Test—a standardized fitness exam all recruits must pass—the department has been known to offer them an immediate do-over, said Josh Gibbs, a former member of the department’s special operations team. Men, on the other hand, must wait until the next testing cycle.

Instructors have also been barred from gauging recruits’ readiness with tests more difficult than the standard assessment, said Ann-Maree Tedaldi, the department’s former fitness coordinator, again due to equity concerns.

"I was personally told I could not do any physical fitness testing to see where people were at or help them improve," Tedaldi said, "because the tests might be biased against certain populations."

The result, she added, was a high rate of attrition among new recruits, who found that the city’s training program—one of the best in the state—was much more physically demanding than the basic fitness exam. That in turn perpetuated the department’s staffing shortfall, which has at times forced units to stop operating.

The blunder reflects what Collins says is the fundamental design flaw in the city’s social engineering schemes:  "Mother Nature," he quipped, "is not an equal opportunity employer."

EDITOR'S NOTE, May 31, 2023: A previous version of this article featured an image of firefighter with the Bellevue Fire Department, which has no association with the Seattle Fire Department. We have updated the image.

The post Seattle Firefighters Now Drilled on Ibram Kendi Before Promotion to Top Jobs    appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The Free Beacon sent the D.C. Court of Appeals, which administers the test, a request for comment Thursday afternoon. Upon receiving the inquiry, Marie Robertson, the court’s acting chief deputy clerk, forwarded it to Douglas Buchanan, the court’s public relations director, with clear instructions: control the narrative.

"Looks like someone who probably doesn’t want to wear a mask sent it to the media to force our hand," Robertson wrote in an email. "We are likely to lift the mask requirement, but I’d like to announce that closer to the exam and I prefer that we announce it, and not that it comes from the media."

The next day—after the story was published—Buchanan responded to the inquiry. He thanked the Free Beacon for bringing a study on the harms of mask usage to the court’s attention, adding that "protocols may change between now and the time of the exam," which is 12 hours long. He also forwarded Robertson’s email to the Free Beacon, apparently by accident.

Buchanan declined to comment on the forwarded email, stating only that "we hope to make the best decision that is best for all involved."

Robertson did not respond to a request for comment.

The exchange offers a rare peek behind the curtain of COVID decision-making, showing how unwanted attention can shock officials out of bureaucratic autopilot. In January 2022, for example, Minnesota and Utah stopped rationing COVID drugs based on race in the wake of a Free Beacon exposé of the states’ allocation schemes, which many experts said were illegal. A large hospital system, SSM Health, reversed a similar policy amid well-publicized legal threats.

Mask mandates can have serious implications, especially for test-takers. A German study found that prolonged mask use can cause "difficulty concentrating" and "reduced cognitive performance" due to carbon dioxide buildup. And masking toddlers—as many daycares and preschools did—has been shown to retard speech and emotional development.

The D.C. court system did drop its mask requirement in April, two years after vaccines were widely available. Masks are still required in the D.C. Court of Appeals.

The post DC To Lift Bar Exam’s Mask Mandate After Free Beacon Report appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

"At this time applicants will be required to wear a mask fully covering their mouth and nose during the exam," the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which administers the test, told registered test-takers in a Thursday memo. "Any additional COVID-19 safety and health procedures will be announced closer to the exam."

The requirement comes on the heels of a German study that found masks expose users to toxic levels of carbon dioxide, which can cause "difficulty concentrating," "reduced cognitive performance, impaired decision-making and reduced speed of cognitive solutions." It also follows a study by the Cochrane Review—long considered the Bible for evidence-based medicine—that found masking "probably makes little or no difference" in the spread of COVID-19.

Though the D.C. court system dropped its mask mandate in April, face coverings are still required at the D.C. Court of Appeals, according to an announcement for the 2023 bar exam. The mandate makes D.C. a regional outlier: Neither Maryland nor Virginia are requiring masks at their respective bar exams, and the city of Washington, D.C., no longer requires masks in most government buildings.

The Court of Appeals did not respond to a request for comment.

Coming just days after the COVID national emergency expired, the mask requirements are a symptom of the bureaucratic inertia that has characterized the district’s pandemic response.

D.C. public schools required students and staff to test negative before returning from spring break this April, and, until March 2022, even required masks outdoors, long after scientists concluded the risk of outdoor spread was negligible. Last winter, the city also required proof of vaccination to enter bars and restaurants—just as a new strain of the virus decimated the shot’s ability to block infection.

Such restrictions proved sticky throughout blue states: When COVID cases spiked in January, public schools in Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania reimposed mask mandates.

There is now mounting evidence that those mandates were harmful, especially in educational settings. The German study, which reviewed the literature on face coverings and carbon dioxide, found that masks were associated with a litany of bad health outcomes, from anxiety and "testicular toxicity" to "irreversible neuron damage."

The longer masks are worn, the more likely they are to affect cognitive performance, the study said. Taking place over the course of two days, the D.C. bar exam is 12 hours long.

The post DC Bar Exam Will Require All Test-Takers To Wear Masks For 12-Hour Exam appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Doctors were wearing pins sporting the transgender flag. Nurses were asking children, most with no history of gender dysphoria, for their preferred pronouns, which were entered into an electronic record system and documented on white boards outside their rooms. More patients were on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, especially young girls. And the top-ranked hospital was telling staff that people could change gender based on their "mood," according to slides from a mandatory training reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The training, which was offered as recently as January, included a primer on "zi/hir" pronouns and used a "gender unicorn" to illustrate the "spectrum" of "other gender(s)."

By 2022, Rempe said, Children’s National was requiring staffers to use a patient’s preferred pronouns, no questions asked, even as European medical authorities were backing away from that practice, warning that on-demand gender affirmation could entrench dysphoria rather than reduce it, particularly in children. Worried the policy did more harm than good, Rempe asked for an exemption, which the hospital denied. She quit in early 2022.

"I was concerned that I would eventually have to administer puberty blockers and hormones, not just use the pronouns," Rempe told the Free Beacon. "I kept finding myself in situations I wasn’t comfortable with ethically."

Since her departure, Rempe has struggled to make sense of what happened to the hospital where she spent 16 years of her professional life. Was there a common thread behind the transgender flag pins, the pronouns, the puberty blockers, and the trainings and policies that enforced the new culture?

As it turns out, there is an outside force pushing hospitals in this direction.

The Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index became a flashpoint last month when commentators posited that the scorecard was behind Bud Light’s decision to air an advertisement featuring the transgender TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney. Well, it has a sibling.

Meet the Healthcare Equality Index, the Human Rights Campaign’s scorecard for hospitals that purports to measure the "equity and inclusion of their LGBTQ+ patients." The index, which uses a 100 point scale, is funded by Pfizer and PhRMA, the trade association that lobbies on behalf of large pharmaceutical companies. And, Rempe noticed, it awards points for all of the policies Children’s National implemented.

To earn a perfect score, hospitals must display LGBT symbols, solicit and use patients’ preferred pronouns, and conduct trainings on LGBT issues approved by the Human Rights Campaign, according to the scoring criteria. They must also provide the same treatments for gender dysphoria that they provide for other medical conditions—meaning a hospital that uses puberty blockers to treat precocious puberty cannot withhold the drugs from children who say they’re transgender. And though the index does not mention medical conscience exemptions explicitly, it does penalize hospitals for allowing "discriminatory treatment that is in conflict with their non-discrimination policy."

Over 2,200 health systems, including dozens of children’s hospitals, have been rated by the index. In 2022, Children’s National earned a perfect score.

The Human Rights Campaign is a private entity, and its ratings carry no official weight. But as countries around the world pump the brakes on pediatric transition, critics say that the index—bankrolled by the very companies that produce and profit off puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones—is encouraging the sort of no-guardrails approach that has made U.S. gender medicine an international outlier. The scorecard has helped powerful lobbyists seed their ideology across American hospitals, becoming de facto regulators of health care.

A spokesperson for PhRMA, Brian Newell, downplayed its role in the index, saying the trade association was "not involved in the development" of the scoring criteria. "Our work with the [Human Rights Campaign] has primarily focused on issues impacting patient access and affordability, including for those with HIV," Newell said.

Pfizer did not respond to a request for comment.

The most coercive part of the index is its "Responsible Citizenship" deduction. Hospitals can lose as many as 25 points for any behavior the Human Rights Campaign deems "discriminatory," an expansive category that includes statements made by hospital doctors and policies that restrict access to gender medicine, including puberty blockers.

Last year, for example, the Human Rights Campaign deducted points from two Texas hospitals, UT Southwestern Medical Center and Children’s Health in Dallas, because they stopped using puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria but continued to use them to treat precocious puberty—the blockers’ original purpose.

That "amounts to discrimination against transgender youth," the Human Rights Campaign argued in a press release.

Another hospital, Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Sacramento, Calif., was docked in 2022 because it refused to perform a hysterectomy on a transgender man, Evan Milton, who was seeking the procedure to eliminate feelings of gender dysphoria. The deduction came on the heels of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which alleged that the Catholic hospital had violated civil rights law by denying the surgery.

Mercy San Juan "withheld medically necessary care for a transgender man while providing the same type of care to cisgender women," the Human Rights Campaign said in a press release. "Every credible medical organization recognizes the medical necessity of affirming care for transgender and non-binary people."

This argument—that it is discrimination to provide surgery for one condition and not another—can sound like rhetorical gymnastics. But it has already been accepted by courts and government agencies, which have in some cases forced insurers to pay for sex-change operations.

Citing rules from the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, for example, a Wisconsin district court ruled that the state’s Medicaid agency had to cover "gender-conforming surgery." The court’s reasoning was the same as Human Rights Campaign’s: To cover mastectomies for breast cancer but not gender dysphoria, it said, "discriminates on the basis of diagnosis."

The overlap between legal precedent and the index’s criteria suggest that the latter do have the force of law behind them, in a sense. When the Human Rights Campaign applies the 25 point penalty, it is effectively claiming that a hospital has violated civil rights law. That in turn sends a message to activist groups and the Biden administration, said Rachel Morrison, a former attorney at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: "Maybe you should investigate."

"A bad score puts a target on hospitals’ backs," Morrison said. "Even if the index itself is not legally enforceable, hospitals still have an incentive to defer to it."

While the Human Rights Campaign has not sued individual hospitals over their transgender policies, closely-aligned activist groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal, have.

"It would be entirely on brand to use the rankings to invite or accelerate lawsuits against hospitals that score poorly," said Oramel Skinner, Arizona’s former solicitor general who is now the director of the Alliance for Consumers, a nonprofit that combats the overreach of trial lawyers.

Beyond the veiled legal threat, critics say the scorecard creates reputational incentives to defer to activists instead of medical science, which on transgender issues is increasingly in flux. Hospitals that do well on the index typically incorporate it into their marketing materials, issuing press releases about the quality of their LGBT care.

"My hospital displays a badge on signboards and in emails touting their status as an ‘LGBTQ+ Healthcare Equality Leader’"—the Human Rights Campaign’s designation for hospitals that earn a perfect index score—said a doctor at a large health system in New Jersey, adding that the hospital now requires the front office to ask patients for their preferred pronouns in front of the entire waiting room.

Many health systems seem unwilling to accept anything less than a solid 100. In 2020, after Children’s National only scored a 75, the hospital created a committee focused on boosting its rating, according to a press release. By 2022, it had achieved a perfect score.

Even Johns Hopkins, one of the most prestigious medical centers in the world, appears to have been influenced by the index. In 2018, the Human Rights Campaign docked the hospital 25 points for statements that psychiatrist Paul McHugh, a vocal critic of sex-reassingment surgeries, and another Hopkins doctor, Lawrence Mayer, had made about transgender issues.

Hopkins appears to have opted out of the Healthcare Equality Index annual survey, which gathers information used to complete the scorecard, after incurring that deduction, according to the hospital’s index entry. But by 2022, it had also implemented many of the policies demanded by the Human Rights Campaign, including insurance plans that cover facial reconstructive surgery and data systems that record gender identity and pronouns.

Johns Hopkins did not respond to a request for comment.

The index, which began scoring hospitals in 2017, is far from the only force behind the push for pediatric transition. Plenty of doctors are true believers, Rempe said, and Children’s National was "already motivated" to promote gender medicine before the index came along. Groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics have solidified the consensus, saying that "gender-affirming care" is not only necessary but "lifesaving."

Though U.S health authorities largely support this treatment model, their European counterparts do not. With rates of transgender identification skyrocketing among young people, especially girls—and amid mounting concerns about the long-term effects of puberty blockers and other treatments—medical bodies across Europe have moved away from the gender-affirming protocols they once championed, imposing new restrictions on pharmaceutical interventions and even urging caution on social affirmation.

Most studies find that gender dysphoria resolves itself by puberty. Social transition, however, has been linked to more persistent feelings of cross-sex identity, suggesting that it could "lock in" the dysphoria it is meant to alleviate, though the reasons for the link remain unproven.

Changing a child’s name and pronouns is "not a neutral act," a report from the British National Health Service concluded last year. "It is an active intervention" whose long-term effects are unclear.

The Healthcare Equality Index has ignored all these developments. Its scoring criteria, which were updated this year, award points for facilitating both social and physical transition and, aside from a caveat about "intersex children," includes no guidance on age limits or informed consent.

Points are also awarded for providing "Training in LGBTQ+ Patient-Centered Care" approved by the Human Rights Campaign. Hospitals can either submit their own internal trainings for review or pick from a list of pre-approved modules, which give some idea of what the group is looking for.

One training, offered by Howard Brown Health, teaches participants to "dismantle the gender binary" and "define misgendering as trauma," according to a description of the training on the Human Rights Campaign’s website, while another discusses "frameworks of care such as intersectionality and anti-oppression."

A running theme in the trainings is that transgender people’s high rates of mental illness are due solely to a lack of acceptance. This view, known as the minority stress theory, underpins many of the arguments in favor of on-demand gender affirmation. The training at Children’s National went so far as to suggest that using patients’ preferred pronouns reduces their risk of suicide, echoing the idea that social transition can be "lifesaving."

There is little evidence to support that claim, said Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who studies transgender issues. And by blaming all mental health problems on oppression, the minority stress theory discourages doctors from investigating the root cause of anxiety or depression—or, for that matter, of gender dysphoria.

"It is plausible that many youth with mental health problems are nowadays using ‘born in the wrong body’ as a way to make sense of their [underlying] mental health issues," Sapir wrote in an email. "Children’s National is very likely making a correlation/causation fallacy."

The hospital declined to answer specific questions about its training, stating only that it approached gender care "with the utmost seriousness and consideration." That care, it added, is "consistent" with the standards of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends puberty blockers for children as young as nine.

The Human Rights Campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The index’s power has been turbocharged by the legal uncertainty around transgender issues, which derives in large part from the policy ping pong between Democrat and Republican administrations. Though former president Donald Trump undid most of the Obama-era rules on LGBT care, the Biden administration has resurrected them and then some—attempting, among other things, to force Catholic hospitals to provide gender-reassignment surgery. With no clear answer about what the law requires, the safest place to be is on the side of the civil rights crusade.

"Lawyers will always advise hospitals to take the most legally defensive course of action," Sapir said. "In practice, that means deferring to the network of civil rights groups that will sue them."

It may also mean that nurses like Rempe—who said her objections to gender affirmation were religious as well as clinical—will see their medical conscience rights whither away in the face of activist pressure. In a press release announcing the 2018 edition of the Healthcare Equality Index, the Human Rights Campaign slammed a Trump administration rule that let health workers opt out of facilitating sex changes.

"The measure will directly harm LGBTQ people," the group said, "by prioritizing physicians’ beliefs over life-saving patient care."

Hospitals like Children’s National were on notice: provide religious conscience exemptions at your own risk.

"If the index is encouraging things people of faith object to," said Justin Butterfield, the deputy general counsel of the religious freedom group First Liberty Institute, "then sooner or later it will encourage hospitals to diminish protections for religious employees."

Now some Republican legislatures are seeking to strike back against the gender juggernaut. Missouri, Florida, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia are just some of the red states that have banned puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries for minors—measures that could force hospitals in those states to choose between violating the law or accepting a lower Healthcare Equality score.

Hospitals hoping to avoid that choice have a strong incentive to get involved in the legislative fight over gender-affirming care, Morrison said.

Especially since political activism is one of the practices the index rewards.

Hospitals receive points for "community engagement," the scoring criteria state, if they have "publicly supported LGBTQ+ equality under the law through taking action on local, state, or federal legislation or regulations."

The post How A Left-Wing Activist Group Teamed Up With Big Pharma To Push Radical Gender Ideology on American Hospitals appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

When he got word of his impending nomination in April 2017, the Post claimed, Kacsmaryk, then the deputy general counsel of the religious freedom group First Liberty Institute, removed his name from an article he had allegedly drafted for the Texas Review of Law and Politics, substituting the names of two of his colleagues for his own byline.

The switcheroo meant that Kacsmaryk did not have to list the article, which concerned religious conscience exemptions for abortion and transgender surgeries, on his Senate Judiciary Questionnaire. The revelations "raise questions" about whether Kacsmaryk "was seeking to duck scrutiny" of his views on hot-button issues, the story said—and prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers for an investigation.

The firestorm was fueled by prominent attorneys quoted in the Post, including Adam Charnes, a high-ranking official in George W. Bush's administration, who said it was abnormal and unethical for nominees to publish things they'd written under other people's names.

Almost every part of the story appears to have been misleading or false.

This report is based on dozens of interviews with experts on legal ethics from across the political spectrum, attorneys at First Liberty, and people involved in Kacsmaryk's nomination process. It suggests that Kacsmaryk did not write the article in question but instead supervised the attorneys drafting it, stepping back from that project—and many others—once his nomination was imminent.

This is a common practice, ethicists and people who have worked with judicial nominees said. And it hardly constitutes a duplicitous dodge.

"I'm not aware of a canon of judicial ethics that this would violate," said Carissa Hessick, a legal ethicist at the University of North Carolina, who has criticized restrictions on abortion and warned the right to gay marriage could be "blown up" by the Supreme Court. "It's not unusual or strange."

The Senate Judiciary Committee requires nominees to disclose all "published material" they have written or edited, any excerpt of which can be used against them. That is why, when someone is about to be nominated, the Justice Department tells that person to shut up.

"Our advice to nominees was to wind down their practices and not publish or give speeches while they were being considered for a federal appointment, even if they had made plans to do so up to that point," said Bethany Pickett, who worked on hundreds of judicial nominations in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy under former president Donald Trump. "It would be common for any nominee not to author or further engage with a publication once being considered for the federal bench."

Though Pickett did not work directly on Kacsmaryk's nomination, three people who did confirmed that Kacsmaryk was given the same advice. The decision to take his name off the article—in which he played only a minimal role—was in keeping with Justice Department norms throughout the years.

What emerges is a picture of a national newspaper framing a common and recommended practice as an act of deception. With Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch now facing ethics allegations of their own, the story is a cautionary tale of how overzealous reporting can insinuate scandal where none exists—especially when the target is a conservative judge.

Kacsmaryk has been under the microscope since he issued an order halting the Food and Drug Administration's decades-old approval of mifepristone, effectively outlawing the drug. The ruling, which the Supreme Court stayed in mid-April, sparked outrage from liberals and even some conservatives, who said it was an act of judicial overreach. Adam Unikowsky, a former law clerk to Antonin Scalia, went so far as to imply that the decision threatened the rule of law itself, calling Kacsmaryk's reasoning "egregiously wrong."

The Post story leaned into this bipartisan backlash. It included quotes from Adam Charnes, the principal deputy in former president Bush's Office of Legal Policy, and Alex Aronson, a former chief counsel to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), arguing it would be unethical for a hypothetical nominee to remove his name from an article.

They were the only attorneys in the story who expressed that view, which does not appear to be the consensus position among legal ethicists. Even liberals and moderates were skeptical that the byline switch raised any red flags, telling the Free Beacon it was neither unusual nor untoward.

"I know of other nominees—not for President Trump—who have taken their names off articles upon being nominated," Hessick, the University of North Carolina professor, said. "Potential nominees are explicitly told to stop publishing."

William Dailey, an ethics expert at the University of Notre Dame who writes occasionally for the liberal Catholic magazine America, said he didn't "see what the ethical objection would be." And Brian Frye, a legal ethicist at the University of Kentucky, said the name change would be problematic only if Kacsmaryk was the original author.

It "doesn't seem duplicitous to take your name off something you didn't actually write," Frye said, adding that he was a registered Democrat who doesn't agree with Kacsmaryk "about anything."

Charnes did not respond to a request for comment.

The Post made much of the fact that Kacsmaryk submitted an early draft of the article, titled "The Jurisprudence of the Body," in early 2017 under his own name. The byline switch came that April, when he informed the Texas Review of Law and Politics that, "for reasons I may discuss at a later date," First Liberty attorneys Stephanie Taub and Justin Butterfield would coauthor the piece instead. Their names weren't anywhere on the first draft, the Post stressed, and it was Kacsmaryk who'd been corresponding with the journal. He also provided some edits on later drafts, according to emails reviewed by the Post.

But Taub and Butterfield told the Washington Free Beacon that they wrote the first draft themselves. Kacsmaryk, they said, had been brainstorming ideas with Taub, who was his research assistant at the time. "When his schedule became too busy to write an article, or even to review my outline," Taub said, "I took the initiative of drafting an article. I listed [Kacsmaryk's] name as the author of this and subsequent drafts because I assumed I was ghostwriting it for him."

The Post did send First Liberty an inquiry addressed to Taub and Butterfield, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon. First Liberty responded on their behalf, telling the paper that Taub and Butterfield wrote the article and providing documentation of their involvement, some of which the Post mentioned, albeit with skepticism. Butterfield also said that the paper never contacted him directly—even though it had been given his cell phone number, according to Butterfield and another person with knowledge of the situation.

The Post’s director of communications, Azhar AlFadl Miranda, declined to answer specific questions about the paper’s reporting, saying only that the "responses from the First Liberty Institute are captured in our story."

Taub's drafts of the article were mainly edited by Butterfield, he said. Kacsmaryk's primary contribution was serving as a liaison to the Texas Review of Law and Politics, with which he had institutional ties.

"It made sense for Kacsmaryk to be the point man for the article," the journal's former editor in chief Aaron Reitz said, "because Kacsmaryk himself had worked on the Review while a student at [University of Texas] Law and had an established relationship with our journal." Hiram Sasser, First Liberty's executive general counsel, and Mike Berry, its vice president of external affairs, corroborated that account.

The article did not advance a novel legal argument, much less take positions Kacsmaryk hadn't already taken publicly. It was largely based on research Taub had conducted for an amicus brief in Stormans, Inc. v. Wiesman, a Supreme Court case involving religious conscience rights, Butterfield said. The article cited many of the same sources as that brief—which Kacsmaryk did include on his Senate Judiciary Questionnaire—as well as an essay Kacsmaryk had published in First Things, which he also included, according to a review of the documents' footnotes.

"All the content in that article was disclosed through some other citation," Sasser said.

Even if it wasn't—and even if Kacsmaryk had written the article himself—most experts agreed he wouldn't have done anything wrong. The Senate's rules apply only to articles that have been published or edited under a nominee's own name, Pickett, Dailey, and Hessick said, in part because a more exacting standard would be unworkable.

Ghostwriting is par for the course in the legal profession, and the attorneys listed on a brief often had unattributed help drafting it. If nominees had to disclose ghostwritten or ghostedited material, the Senate questionnaire would be nearly impossible to fill out.

"This broad interpretation being advanced—to disclose everything a nominee has ever touched—is inconsistent with the Senate's policies and practices," Pickett told the Free Beacon. "If that were the rule, every nominee who has ever served on a law journal would need to list all of the articles they ever edited."

Such a standard would pose problems for liberals and conservatives alike. After all, Fifth Circuit appellate judge James Ho noted in an April speech, "former Senate lawyer Stephen Breyer was not required to disclose everything he ghostwrote for Senator Ted Kennedy."

The only ethics expert who said Kacsmaryk should have disclosed the article was Frye. Judges should avoid "even the appearance of impropriety," Frye argued, and though the name change itself wasn't objectionable, Kacsmaryk's failure to list the article could still raise eyebrows.

But Frye also said that Kacsmaryk hadn't violated any rules. At the end of the day, Frye wrote in an email, a nominee's "obligation is to provide what the Senate requested. Nothing more & nothing less."

The post The Anatomy of a Washington Post Smear Campaign appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The students cited what they described as the "scapegoating" of the school's diversity dean, Tirien Steinbach, for an incident last month in which students disrupted Duncan's remarks and Steinbach egged them on.

"The apology was intimately aligned with White supremacist practices," the group's board wrote in a letter to the administration, which was posted on Instagram earlier this month. "We cannot, in good faith, participate in recruiting Black students into a community more concerned with palliating wealthy, White conservative donors than the 'student-focused and community-inspired' legal education [Stanford Law School] promotes."

As such, the group said it would "boycott official admit events" for the class of 2026 and encourage prospective students to go elsewhere. It's the second boycott to which the law school has been subjected: James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, the circuit court judges who said last year that they would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School, earlier this month announced a similar clerkship moratorium on Stanford, citing the school's refusal to punish the students who shouted down Duncan.

The law school administration laid the blame for those antics squarely on Steinbach, who at one point took the podium from the judge and told him his work had "caused harm." In their apology to Duncan, Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Martinez, the law school dean, said that Steinbach's intervention was "inappropriate." Steinbach has been on leave since March, and the law school has not indicated when or if she will return.

"Stanford's administration has actively marginalized its Black community, most recently by scapegoating Dean Tirien Steinbach," the Black Students Association wrote. "Dean Martinez and President Tessier-Lavigne's statements continuously minimize Duncan's behavior and the impact of his work."

The letter is the latest snag in Stanford's efforts to appease free speech advocates without sparking a full-scale revolt from activists. After Martinez apologized to Duncan, as many as 100 students protested her first-year constitutional law course, plastering fliers around her classroom and surrounding her as she exited it. Two weeks later, when the embattled dean outlined the steps Stanford was taking to protect free speech, she acknowledged her course of action would "not please everyone"—"not least of which those who have demanded that I retract my apology to Judge Duncan and those who have demanded that students be immediately expelled."

The riptide from both groups has put Stanford in a tough spot. Dissatisfied with the soft-gloved treatment of the hecklers, law professors, politicians, and state bar associations have all joined Ho and Branch's pile-on, using the powers at their disposal to make life difficult for the elite law school.

But bowing to that pressure could come at a cost. Like undergraduate admissions offices, law schools go to great lengths to boost minority representation. If Stanford's own students begin undermining its admissions efforts—especially those aimed at African Americans—the school may decide that a clerkship boycott is a price worth paying to maintain its diversity.

Black students have "historically contributed an extensive amount of free labor to assist the University" in recruitment, the letter said. "But we are continually overlooked by the administration when it makes significant decisions—as evidenced by the institution's condoning of Judge Duncan's behavior."

The Black Law Students Association, which is led by Ashton Woods and Cheyenne Joshua, and the law school's admissions office did not respond to requests for comment.

The letter also aired a number of grievances that it said predated the Duncan incident. Stanford, the Black Law Students Association argued, had hobbled the group's ability "to create a safe space for its members," and—despite black students' "free labor"—the school's admissions policies "reproduce and reify White supremacy, classism, and colorism."

The group also slammed Stanford for allowing "internet harassment" and the "doxxing of fellow students"—apparently a reference to the Washington Free Beacon's reporting, which included the names of several students, such as Denni Arnold, who organized the protest.

"Based on the administration's handling of DEI, we unequivocally share a vote of no confidence in the current state of the administration's ability to the administration's willingness to adequately consider and respect the needs of Black students and administrators," the group said. "We hope this letter will urge the administration to restructure its processes, lend credence to marginalized communities, and truly acknowledge and combat its practices of exploitation and domination moving forward."

The post Stanford Law School's Black Students' Group Will No Longer Help Law School Recruit Minority Students in the Wake of Duncan Apology appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Yale’s Jewish Law Students Association agreed in February to host Cotler-Wunsh for a lecture on anti-Semitism and human rights, one of several planned stops on a speaking tour organized by the Academic Engagement Network, a pro-Israel advocacy group. But on April 14–one week before Cotler-Wunsh’s talk, which is scheduled for Friday—Yale’s Jewish Law Students Association told the Academic Engagement Network that it would no longer be able to sponsor the event, according to Miriam Elman, the network’s executive director.

The drama follows a string of anti-Semitism controversies at the Ivy League university, which just this month hosted Houria Bouteldja, an anti-Israel activist and outspoken defender of Hamas, on the second night of Passover.  The event’s timing sparked blowback from Jewish students—though not from the Jewish Law Students Association—who said their religious obligations prevented them from organizing a counter-event or from attending the talk to pose questions.

Though the Jewish Law Students Association gave no reason for its about-face, Cotler-Wunsh and two Yale law school professors said they understood that the group succumbed to pressure to call off her lecture.

It is not clear who was applying that pressure, and Morgan Feldenkris, the president of the Jewish Law Students Association, did not respond to a request for comment. The talk would have been canceled but for deputy dean Yair Listokin’s willingness to step in and host the event himself, Elman said. Listokin declined to comment.

The behind-the-scenes drama surrounding the event demonstrates the extent to which pro-Israel speakers—even those who criticize the Jewish State’s government—are increasingly unwelcome at America’s top law school.

A former member of the Israeli Knesset, Cotler-Wunsh is part of the Blue and White alliance that briefly unseated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2020. The centrist party has promoted same-sex unions, opposed bans on public transit during Shabbat, and signaled an openness to peace talks—albeit not to land concessions—with the Palestinians, stances that have endeared it to secular Israelis while angering the country’s ultra-Orthodox bloc.

"If I’m controversial, I don’t know who isn’t," Cotler-Wunsh said.

This is not Yale Law’s first debacle over anti-Semitism or the Jewish state. In 2021, the Yale Law Journal hosted a diversity trainer, Erika Hart, who accused the FBI of artificially inflating the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes. And last year, activists at the law school urged students to boycott a spring break trip to Israel, plastering signs around the school that called Israel an apartheid state, according to sources familiar with the matter. Some of those activists, two sources said, were themselves members of the Jewish Law Students Association.

Such incidents reflect the wider trajectory of anti-Semitism on college campuses, where the line between criticizing Israel and attacking the Jewish people has been steadily effaced. A panel at Cornell University—held on Yom Kippur in 2022—featured a speaker who had likened the Gaza Strip to an "extermination camp, run by Jews." An event at the University of Michigan in January called for an "intifada revolution"; also that month, George Washington University was hit with a discrimination complaint after a psychology professor, Lara Sheehi, allegedly retaliated against Jewish students who raised concerns about her virulently anti-Israel remarks. Though the university cleared Sheehi of any wrongdoing, it declined to release its full report.

Law schools haven’t been spared the world’s oldest hatred: In April 2022, students at New York University School of Law circulated a letter decrying the "Zionist grip on the media" and defending terrorism against Israeli civilians.

Cotler-Wunsh has seen the vitriol up close. When she spoke at Columbia Law School earlier this week, she said, student protesters covered an Israeli flag with fliers decrying the Jewish state—the implication being that the state of Israel should not exist.

"By allowing speakers like Cotler-Wunsh on our campus," one flier from the protest read, "Columbia Law School is actively complicit in the dehumanization and repression of Palestinians."

While the students did not disrupt her talk, they also refused to engage with her. The protest provoked strong words from Cotler-Wunsh, who says that the outcry at Columbia—and the apparent fecklessness at Yale—don’t make solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict any easier.

"When a lecture about anti-Semitism provokes this sort of response," she asked, "how does that help Palestinians advance their right to self-determination?"

The post Jewish Students at Yale Law School Invited an Israeli Politician To Speak About Anti-Semitism. Then They Caved to Pressure. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

"We want people to feel welcomed, comfortable, and safe living here" in Northwest Arkansas, Candice Jones, Walmart’s head of diversity, emailed district leaders, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. To that end, the company was offering to arrange teacher training sessions with a North Carolina-based consultancy known as the Racial Equity Institute, a group "devoted to creating racially equitable organizations and systems."

"This would be great for teacher development and a great way to connect with the community," Jones said.

By August, teachers were learning that "perfectionism" is "white supremacy" and that "all our systems, institutions, and outcomes emanate from the racial hierarchy on which the United States was built."

Bentonville—the site of Walmart’s corporate headquarters—wasn’t alone.

In nearby Fayetteville, the district’s public schools embarked on a five-year "equity plan" funded and designed by Walmart-funded groups, including a DEI "research institute" at the University of Arkansas. School leaders attended trainings on the "six tenets of critical race theory," learned that "systemic inequality = trauma," were drilled on the harmful effects of "microaggressions," and sat through PowerPoints on "intersectionality."

The district also implemented a "restorative justice" program—designed to combat the allegedly "disproportionate" discipline of black students—that discouraged teachers from breaking up fights and instructed them to sit on the floor with students to "dispel any sense of hierarchy."

This report is based on thousands of pages of documents obtained through public records requests submitted by families in Bentonville and Fayetteville. It reveals how the world’s largest retailer is transforming schools in its hometown through grants, nonprofits, and corporate outreach, laundering its ideology as a kind of noblesse oblige.

The transformation highlights the tension between democracy and DEI, which—as one Walmart and Walton-funded diversity program, "TRUE," put it in a presentation to Fayetteville Public Schools—"sometimes must be imposed from the top down."

These initiatives might seem out of place in Northwest Arkansas, which voted overwhelmingly for former president Donald Trump. But Walmart, long a bogeyman for liberals concerned about the power of big business, has become just as progressive as the rest of corporate America, earning a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index in 2022.

The company is owned and controlled by the descendants of Sam Walton, who opened the first Walmart store in 1962. Once staunch Republicans with close ties to the national GOP, the Waltons have shifted left with each passing generation—and with the 2016 election, they began giving nearly as much to Democratic campaigns as to Republican ones.

That rapprochement has accompanied a shift in philanthropic priorities. Since 2018, the Waltons, who make grants directly through the Walton Family Foundation and indirectly through the Walmart Foundation, have spent millions on progressive initiatives across Arkansas—including drag shows for children and pro-bono DEI consulting.

Theaters, arts centers, health and housing nonprofits, business associations, and the Benton County government are just some of the organizations that have conducted diversity training on the Waltons’ dime. While those trainings are par for the course at big corporations—and a grant magnet for big foundations—few companies have funded DEI programs outside their walls. And even fewer have funded them in public schools.

Now, as the Waltons target classrooms in their hometown, longtime Arkansans are sounding the alarm, warning that revolution has come for a state Trump won by 28 points in 2020.

"Parents are often lulled into the belief that woke ideology won’t happen in their schools because they live in a ‘red’ state," said Carolyn Horine, a Bentonville parent. "Trust me as someone living in a conservative area: it can happen anywhere."

This transformation has taken place largely out of public view, aided and abetted not just by Walmart and the Waltons’ largesse but by the school districts’ lack of transparency. Fayetteville, for example, repeatedly assured parents that critical race theory was not being taught in schools even as it refused to comply with public records requests for DEI-related documents.

Families who finally got ahold of those records were left feeling betrayed. "We love Walmart around here," said Ila Campbell, a retired history teacher who sued the Fayetteville school district after it stonewalled her records request. "They’ve used their money to better the lives of people in Arkansas. That’s why it was so disconcerting to see them funding this stuff."

Long the dominant philanthropic force in Northwest Arkansas, the Walton empire is a case study in how cultural and corporate power interact. Local groups curry favor with the Waltons, said Jay Greene, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who used to teach at the University of Arkansas, because they rely on the family for grants. School districts "tend to be very aware of the Waltons’ priorities," Greene said, "and are inclined to implement them even if not directly required to do so."

That meant Walmart was pushing on an open door when it offered to connect Bentonville school administrators with the Racial Equity Institute, the same consulting group that conducts the company’s own diversity training sessions. The district’s superintendent, Debbie Jones, and its director of secondary education, Jennifer Morrow, accepted the offer in July 2020, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon, scheduling a mandatory training for all teachers that August.

It is not clear whether Walmart paid for that training or merely facilitated it. What is clear is that Walmart approved its contents. One workbook from the training was emblazoned with Walmart’s logo and included a "welcome message" from the company’s diversity office, which billed the workshop as a "powerful and thought-provoking" program "facilitated by experts from the Racial Equity Institute."

The session was a grab bag of DEI shibboleths. It listed "perfectionism," "a sense of urgency," and "worship of the written word" as examples of "white supremacy culture"; described "assimilation" and "tolerance" as markers of "internalized racial inferiority"; and defended racial preferences by saying that white people had "400 years of affirmative action." Participants were asked to reflect on each teaching using the Walmart-approved workbook, which included diagrams on the distinction between "equality" and "equity."

The district would later seek to distance itself from these lessons. In a September 2022 Facebook exchange with Horine, the Bentonville parent, Bentonville school board member Jennifer Faddis claimed that only "some staff" attended the training, adding that Bentonville "pulled out" after realizing "what was included." The Free Beacon was not able to verify Faddis’s claim that Bentonville had extricated itself from the program, and she did not respond to a request for comment.

But at least one high school in the district, Bentonville West High, was still using the Racial Equity Institute for all-staff trainings as late as April 2021, according to planning documents from the school. And in a January 2022 email, Debbie Jones, the district's superintendent, referred to the Racial Equity Institute as a "quality" program, saying it "wasn’t biased or trying to convince me of anything."

Debbie Jones, Morrow, the director of secondary education, and Candice Jones, Walmart’s head of diversity, did not respond to requests for comment.

Walmart’s influence was even stronger in Fayetteville, where the district outsourced much of its DEI work to a byzantine network of Walmart and Walton family-backed groups. In 2019, the Fayetteville Public School district was chosen to participate in a $2.5 million DEI training initiative, TRUE Northwest Arkansas, funded by the Walmart Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. The program has since expanded to include hundreds of groups in the region.

TRUE connected district leaders with Converge, a "social-justice consulting firm," for one-on-one coaching, according to a May 2019 email. The company—which specializes in "intersectional equity analysis"—also conducted an "organizational assessment" of the district, the results of which were presented at the Walton Arts Center that July.

There has been "backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion among staff and patrons," one slide from the presentation read. "DEI can and sometimes must be imposed from the top down."

TRUE, which has since rebranded as TRU, did not respond to a request for comment. Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.

Fayetteville also partnered with the University of Arkansas’s IDEALS Institute—another DEI program funded by Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation—to create a "Five-Year Equity Competency Plan," which began in 2019. Years two and three of the plan were funded by a $200,000 grant from the Walmart Foundation, which paid for training sessions on "microaggressions," "DEI leadership," and "culturally relevant pedagogy," according to copies of the grant application and equity plan.

Some of those trainings explicitly referenced critical race theory. In October 2019, the district brought in Sheldon Lanier, a public school administrator from Durham, North Carolina, to train district leaders on the "six tenets of critical race theory," including "intersectionality," "whiteness as property," and the "permanence of racism," according to a summary of the training. He returned in March 2021 for another training—this time on "culturally responsive instruction"—that called for the "implementation of CRT strategies" in the classroom.

Lanier and the IDEALS Institute did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Fayetteville Public Schools, Alan Wilbourn, said it was the district that decided to invite Lanier, not IDEALS, though his sessions appear to have been part of a professional development series outlined in the equity plan.

The $200,000 grant wouldn’t just fund diversity training, district leaders told Walmart in its grant application: some of the money would also go toward curbing "disproportionate discipline." In 2019, the Arkansas Department of Education had ordered Fayetteville to review its disciplinary policies on the grounds that black and disabled students were suspended at higher rates than others in the district, according to presentations and meeting minutes reviewed by the Free Beacon. Support from Walmart would help eliminate those disparities, the grant application said.

One way the district sought to do that was by embracing "restorative justice," an approach to school discipline that discourages punishing or even reprimanding bad behavior. By 2020, a year after the Walmart-backed equity plan began, Fayetteville High School was telling teachers to avoid the phrase "don’t touch her," according to the school’s "Restorative Practices Handbook."  Staff were instead instructed to address physical molestation with statements like "I feel really uncomfortable," and, if necessary, to form a "restorative circle" with students.

"To dispel any sense of hierarchy" in the circle, the handbook counsels, teachers and students should both sit on the floor.

Such policies are now widespread in the district, Fayetteville parents and teachers say, and have made it nearly impossible to remove dangerous students from the classroom. One parent said her child’s elementary school had refused to discipline students who were assaulting their peers. And an elementary school teacher said she was not allowed to tell students "no," much less take away recess time.

"We have eliminated every possible consequence," the teacher said, adding that administrators will sometimes reward bad behavior. "I had a child who was throwing scissors," the teacher recalled. "When I sent him to the principal’s office, he came back five minutes later with a stick of gum."

The IDEALS Institute was not directly involved in designing these policies, Wilbourn, the Fayetteville spokesperson, told the Free Beacon. But they reflect a key premise of the Walmart-backed equity plan: If some students are disciplined more than others, it must be because the district is biased against them—not because they act out more frequently.

Between 2019 and 2021, the district hosted several presentations on the causes of disproportionate discipline. None of them suggested that family structure—or, in the case of special needs students, emotional and intellectual handicaps—might play a role in the disparities. The main culprits were implicit bias, "cultural dissonance," and "zero tolerance" policies, the presentations said.

Fayetteville took great pains to shield these materials from public scrutiny. It initially refused to comply with a public record request from Campbell, the retired history teacher, who in June 2021 asked for detailed information about the equity plan. The district only relented after she filed a lawsuit under Arkansas’s Freedom of Information Act, materials from the lawsuit show. A judge later ruled that the delay had violated state law and ordered Fayetteville to pay Campbell’s attorney fees.

The district also sought to allay concerns that it was teaching critical race theory. By May 2021, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon, parents were reaching out to teachers about the equity plan and the Waltons’ role in it—queries that prompted the district to create a fact sheet dispelling "misconceptions" about "equity and inclusion."

"CRT is not an identified part of district curriculum," the fact sheet said. It did not mention that the district’s diversity training had called for the "implementation of CRT strategies" earlier that year.

Some Arkansans see little hope of reining in the retail juggernaut. Walmart is not just a philanthropic powerhouse but an economic provider, bringing jobs and investment—as well as frequent campaign contributions—to its home state.

"People are afraid to go after Walmart," Campbell said, noting that politicians on both sides of the aisle benefit from the company’s largesse.

Now, though, there are signs that the Waltons’ political influence may have peaked. Even as the family has consolidated its hold over Northwest Arkansas, it has suffered several high-profile defeats at the hands of state legislators, who are increasingly thumbing their nose at the family’s politics.

In 2021, the Waltons prevailed upon Arkansas’s then-governor, Asa Hutchinson (R.), to veto a ban on transgender surgeries for minors, only for the legislature to override the veto and sign the bill into law. And in January of this year, Hutchinson’s successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R.), signed an executive order banning critical race theory in Arkansas schools. Though the Waltons haven’t taken a stance on that measure, it will potentially outlaw the sort of programming they have pumped into public education.

The pushback bodes ill for Arkansas's corporate goliath, which may soon face the slingshot of the state’s voters.

The Waltons’ woke turn is "costing them influence," Greene, the Heritage Foundation fellow, said. "And their public defeats are further diminishing their power in the state."

The post How Walmart Pushed Arkansas Public Schools to Go Woke appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) wrote to the bar in March suggesting the change, arguing that Stanford Law School graduates should "be made to answer, in writing, whether they participated in the shameful harassment" of Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan, who was subjected to vulgar heckling when he attempted to deliver prepared remarks. The bar responded in early April, indicating that it planned to ask all applicants "directly" about their involvement in disruptive protests.

Texas's board of bar examiners made the change after concluding that schools like Stanford—which did not discipline a single heckler—cannot be trusted to attest to an applicant's character. The state "has historically relied on law schools to report disciplinary matters that should be considered in determining an applicant's character and fitness for admission to the Texas bar," Nathan Hecht, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, wrote on behalf of the bar examiners, who evaluate applications to the bar. "School reactions to recent violations of free-speech policies suggest that reliance is not justified."

All lawyers must pass a "character and fitness" check that screens for values like honesty and civility. If those checks become more focused on disruptive conduct, they could make law students think twice before engaging in that conduct.

"Texas lawyers are expected to adhere to the Texas Lawyer's Creed," Hecht wrote, "promising to 'treat counsel, opposing parties, the Court, and members of the Court staff with courtesy and civility.' The admission process should examine whether applicants can be expected to fulfill this promise."

Stanford students told Duncan, among other things, "We hope your daughters get raped!" The new bar questions are the latest effort to impose consequences in Stanford's stead.

"I salute Chief Justice Hecht for his efforts to uphold the integrity of the Texas Bar, which is second to none," Cruz told the Free Beacon. "And by applying rigorous standards for new lawyers, it will remain that way. Other state bar associations ought to follow suit."

Cruz and Hecht aren't the only ones looking to leverage the bar against disruptors. John Banzhaf, a distinguished public interest lawyer with a long history of liberal activism, said last month that he plans to file bar complaints against the students who disrupted Duncan, some of whom, such as Denni Arnold, have been identified.

It's just one wave in the tsunami of backlash against Stanford, from both elected officials and Duncan's fellow judges. House Republicans are now pressing the American Bar Association to investigate the law school, saying it is not in compliance with accreditation standards that require it to promote free speech. And two circuit court judges, James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, announced this month that they will no longer hire clerks from Stanford Law School, broadening the boycott they began of Yale last year.

"Rules aren't rules without consequences," Ho said in a speech. "And students who practice intolerance don't belong in the legal profession."

The post Texas Bar Application Adds Questions About 'Incivility' and Free Speech in Wake of Stanford Law School Fracas appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Todd Blanche, a longtime partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft, resigned last week from the elite firm to represent Trump, who was indicted on April 4 by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg (D.). Though Cadwalader has been tight-lipped about the circumstances of Blanche's departure, Blanche himself said something interesting. "Obviously," his parting email indicated, "doing this as a partner at Cadwalader was not an option, so I have had to make the difficult choice to leave the firm." Within hours, Cadwalader had scrubbed Blanche's bio from the firm's website. Neither Blanche nor Cadwalader responded to requests for comment.

The resignation, and the ultimatum from Cadwalader that it implied, was not a one-off. Like their corporate clients, top law firms have taken a sharp left turn over the past decade, joining groups like the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance and even hosting drag queens for Pride Month. That flight from the political center, lawyers and legal commentators say, has made "Big Law" much less willing to take conservative clients—especially when their last name is Trump.

"Trump is toxic for most big firms," said Adam Mortara, a former partner at Bartlit Beck who served as the lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court case that could outlaw affirmative action. "Lawyers can't get him or other right-wing clients past their partners."

Top attorneys now face a choice between cushy partnerships and conservative clients, whom white-shoe law firms won't represent. That has in turn fueled an imbalance of power within the legal system, as America's biggest and best-heeled firms increasingly do the bidding of one political party.

Big Law has no qualms about representing Democrats in distress: Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and Anita Hill are just a few of the liberals who have navigated sordid controversies with the help of top firms, including Williams & Connolly, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, & Flom, and Covington & Burling. And its pro-bono work is hardly nonpartisan: On issues like affirmative action and abortion, Big Law's amicus briefs almost always support the left.

"Conservative cases and clients tend to create more problems than progressive cases and clients," said legal analyst David Lat. "As a result, lawyers who do want to take on conservative clients often end up leaving their firms, with varying degrees of voluntariness."

Blanche is not the only lawyer who has left a large firm for Trump. Christopher Kise last year resigned from Foley & Lardner to represent the embattled former president in the wake of the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago, prompting the firm to scrub Kise's name from its website.

Other firms have pushed out partners for representing garden-variety conservatives. The superstar Supreme Court litigator Paul Clement resigned from his law firm, King and Spalding, in 2011 after it refused to let him represent the GOP-controlled House of Representatives in its bid to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act. A decade later, he left another white-shoe firm, Kirkland & Ellis, after it announced that it would no longer do gun-rights litigation—the same day the Supreme Court ruled in Clement's favor on a major Second Amendment case.

It is hardly unheard of for lawyers to turn down business they deem dangerous or harmful. Large firms have long been gun-shy about representing tobacco companies, for example, and in 2021, Big Law steered clear of challenges to COVID vaccine mandates.

But no client has proven quite as polarizing as Trump. A former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, knew of at least three major firms that barred their star litigators from representing the former president. And a lawyer who worked in the Trump White House said that Big Law's reaction to Trump was unprecedented.

"Under our system of justice, everyone is entitled to zealous representation of counsel," the lawyer said. "That norm now has a carveout: everyone except Donald Trump."

In 2017, Trump approached Hogan Lovells, one of the largest and wealthiest firms in the world, about representing him in a personal capacity, according to a former partner at the firm. Though Hogan couldn't have represented Trump even if it wanted—it was already representing a challenge to the then-president's travel ban, making any association with him a conflict of interest—there was "strident opposition" within the firm to having Trump as a client, the former partner said.

The Trumphobia can't be explained by an aversion to controversy. Big firms routinely wade into polarizing issues like abortion and trans rights—the "Transgender Name Change Clinic" is one of Cadwalader's pro-bono clients—while some, such as Paul Weiss, have done extensive litigation opposing the death penalty, a policy most Americans support.

"A few firms are equal opportunity avoiders of controversy," said the managing partner of a large law office, who requested anonymity to speak freely. "But in general, it's easier to take controversial clients on the left."

That double standard is sometimes defended on business grounds. If a law firm defends Trump, the thinking goes, other clients, especially large corporations, may cut ties with the firm in protest, thereby hurting the firm's bottom line.

"We aren't going to do things that adversely affect profits," the managing partner said. "There's very little upside to taking clients that might offend our Fortune 1000 clients."

But others say the economic argument has been weaponized by partisans at big law firms, which use the specter of losing business—even when no client has threatened to withdraw—to enforce orthodoxy in partner meetings.

"The idea that clients get mad about stuff is more a trope than a reality," Mortara said. "Progressive lawyers bring up client pressure to get their way, but it's really a political objection."

Granted, Trump is an extra charged lightning rod. Lawyers have been repelled not just by the ideological ick factor but also by the former president's well-known failure to pay his legal bills, even to trusted consiglieri like Rudy Giuliani. And attorneys across the political spectrum chafed at Trump's rhetoric about the 2020 election: Benjamin Ginsberg, a top GOP elections lawyer, left Jones Day over its work with Trump.

The firm's critics argued that it was aiding and abetting an unprecedented attack on democracy by taking up Trump's election lawsuits. With the stakes so high—and with most experts dismissing the lawsuits as baseless—some lawyers said there was an ethical duty not to represent Trump as he sought to overturn the election.

But events since then suggest that Big Law's Trumphobia is less principled than partisan. Bragg's indictment has flipped the familiar script: Even liberals are saying that it is now Trump's opponents who are flouting democratic norms on the basis of baroque legal theories.

Almost every expert who has discussed the indictment, from the anti-Trump conservative David French to the far-left Nation writer Elie Mystal, has said that the case underlying it is dubious. The shakiness has compounded worries about political prosecution and the rule of law: Fordham Law School's Jed Shugerman—a trenchant Trump critic who argued that Trump could be indicted while he was a sitting president—said that Bragg's legal theory posed "a dangerous precedent."

Elite firms are nonetheless passing on the chance to prevent that precedent from being set. For some lawyers, the reticence suggests that Big Law's politicization is hollowing out another legal norm: the idea that everyone, no matter how hated, deserves an attorney.

"That ideal is gone," a former Justice Department official said. "You can't do that anymore in D.C."

The post The Big Law Bias: To Represent Conservative Clients, Top Lawyers Often Forced To Leave Their Firms appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

"We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future," Ho, who sits on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, said Saturday evening in a speech to the Texas Review of Law and Politics, a transcript of which was reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The clerkship moratorium, like the one on Yale, will exempt current law students.

Ho's announcement is the latest and most dramatic effort to hold Stanford accountable for its treatment of Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan, who was shouted down by hundreds of students—and berated by Stanford diversity dean Tirien Steinbach—when he spoke at the law school last month. The students called Duncan "scum," asked why he couldn't "find the clit," and screamed, "We hope your daughters get raped."

Though Steinbach is on leave, Stanford has ruled out disciplining the hecklers, who by Stanford's own admission violated the school's free speech policy.

"Rules aren't rules without consequences," Ho said. "And students who practice intolerance don't belong in the legal profession."

Calling the disruption an act of "intellectual terrorism," Ho argued that Duncan's treatment reflects "rampant" viewpoint discrimination at elite law schools, some of which do not employ a single center-right professor. It is no coincidence, Ho said, that the worst free speech incidents have occurred at the law schools with the least intellectual diversity. Though Ho did not say what it would take for him to lift the boycott, he implied that a more politically diverse faculty—and a less ideologically uniform administration—would go a long way.

"How do we know everyone's views will be protected," he asked, "if everyone's views aren't represented?"

Ho and Branch, who introduced Ho at the Texas Review event, are 2 of 14 federal judges boycotting Yale Law School over a rash of high-profile free speech scandals, including an incident last March in which hundreds of students disrupted Kristen Waggoner, a religious liberty lawyer who has won several cases at the Supreme Court.

The boycott appears to be having an effect: Ho said in his speech that students and faculty at Yale have urged him not to let up, citing an improved campus climate. He's hoping that success will persuade his colleagues to stop hiring from Stanford, whose prestige, like Yale's, rests in part on its clerkship placements.

"Imagine that every judge who says they're opposed to discrimination at Yale and Stanford takes the same path," Ho said. "Imagine they decide that, until the discrimination stops, they will no longer hire from those schools in the future. How quickly do we think those schools would stop discriminating then?"

Read Ho's full remarks here.

The post Federal Judges Say They Won't Hire Clerks From Stanford Law School appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Stanford violated that requirement, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce said in a Friday letter to the bar association, by allowing and even encouraging students to shout down Duncan last month. The committee emphasized the remarks of Tirien Steinbach, the law school diversity dean who took the podium from the judge and harangued him for causing "harm."

Law schools must remain accredited by the American Bar Association to receive federal funds. A review of Stanford's accreditation would directly threaten its finances, upping pressure on the school to sanction the disruptors.

"With our letter comes accountability," Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), the committee's chairwoman, told the Washington Free Beacon. "We will not rest until we help restore the true intent and purpose of higher education."

The American Bar Association requires each accredited law school to have a policy promoting academic freedom. Stanford’s policy, outlined in its faculty handbook, states that "the widest range of viewpoints" should be free from "coercion"—a condition the letter says no longer obtains at the law school.

"In no sense can it be said that Stanford Law School adhered to its announced encouragement of the 'widest range of viewpoints,'" the letter reads. "And in no sense were Judge Duncan's viewpoints 'free from … internal or external coercion.'"

Having a policy, the letter adds, "implies that the law school follows its policy."

Stanford did not respond to a request for comment.

The letter, signed by Foxx and Rep. Burgess Owens (R., Utah), the chairman of the higher education subcommittee, comes amid weeks of damage control at the elite law school. Though Steinbach is on leave, Stanford has declined to discipline the students who disrupted Duncan, saying it would be unfair to do so given the "conflicting signals" they received. That decision has compounded the law school's public relations problem, with at least one prominent law professor, John Banzhaf of George Washington University, preparing to file a bar complaint against the hecklers.

"Stanford Law School's brazen mistreatment of Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan is un-American," Owens told the Free Beacon. "At a time when America feels more divided than ever, it is deeply disturbing to see how little this school and its students value free speech and open discourse—the very foundation of our democracy."

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Now an emeritus professor at George Washington University Law School, Banzhaf, 82, is among the most accomplished and aggressive public interest lawyers in the United States. His first legal jihad, waged in the 1960s against Big Tobacco, resulted in strict advertising restrictions on cigarettes as well as a ban on smoking in airplanes. Since then, Banzhaf has led litigious crusades against fast food chains, religious universities, and private clubs, using legal action—or the mere threat of it—to effect social change.

He’s hardly a right-wing zealot. It was Banzhaf who proposed and popularized the idea of appointing a special prosecutor to investigate former president Richard Nixon, setting in motion the legal drama that would ultimately end his presidency. A half century later, he filed a complaint with Georgia election officials over former president Donald Trump’s 2021 call to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger—in which the former president pressured Raffensperger to overturn the state’s election results—leading to a multi-year investigation and several subpoenas.

Now, though, this self-proclaimed "legal terrorist" has set his sights on an unlikely target: the Stanford Law School students who shouted down Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan.

Banzhaf told Stanford earlier this month that he will file a character and fitness complaint against the students with the California state bar.

"It appears that you have not taken any steps to discipline or otherwise sanction the student violators," Banzhaf said in a letter to Jenny Martinez, the law school’s dean, who has since ruled out punishing the hecklers. As such, the complaint "will have links to video recordings of the disruption so that bar officials can judge the students’ conduct for themselves."

The California bar requires applicants to demonstrate "respect for the rights of others and for the judicial process." That means the students who disrupted Duncan—in part by telling him "we hope your daughters get raped"—could be in for a rude awakening if Banzhaf makes good on his threat.

This incident "seriously calls into question whether these students have proper temperament to practice law," Banzhaf told the Washington Free Beacon. "It is completely unacceptable to shout down any speaker—much less a federal judge—and then face no consequences."

Such statements have made Banzhaf the strange bedfellow of Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), who this month urged the Texas bar to "take particular care" with graduates of Stanford Law School. The horseshoe suggests that outrage about Duncan’s treatment crosses partisan divides—and offers a blueprint to fill the disciplinary void left by other elite law schools, which have refused to punish blatant violations of their free speech policies.

Anyone can file a bar complaint, including across state lines. And, Banzhaf says, the complaints needn’t derail anyone’s career in order to be effective: Even the threat of an investigation—or a delayed and stressful bar application—could deter would-be disruptors, sending the message that actions have consequences.

Martinez said last week that it would be unfair to punish the students because they received "conflicting signals" from Tirien Steinbach, the law school diversity official who confronted Duncan and praised the protesters. Banzhaf isn’t convinced: Stanford’s rules against disruption are "very clear," he wrote in a press release, and "should not require student memorization or interpretation."

Martinez’s argument for amnesty, he added, "would have earned a low grade if submitted by a law student."

Stanford did not respond to a request for comment.

The stakes are personal for Banzhaf, who says that the attitude evinced by the Stanford students—"you can’t reason with people who disagree with you"—is antithetical to the legal system that’s enabled his victories. To fight the tobacco lobby in the court, he told the Free Beacon, "I had to understand its point of view."

He also had to engage with lawyers who, from his perspective, "were paid lots of money to lie and literally kill people." It’s a skill Banzhaf says is in short supply among today’s law students, in part, he argues, because they lack a sense of proportionality.

"Today, you have kids all upset about pronouns or the suggestion that there shouldn’t be treatment for an 8 year old who thinks she’s transgender," he said. Smoking, on the other hand, kills nearly 500,000 people each year, but Banzhaf would still split a cab with tobacco lobbyists on his way home from court.

"We didn’t beat each other up," he recalls.

The drama roiling Palo Alto, Calif., reflects a wider trend at the nation’s top law schools—including Yale, where hundreds of students disrupted a bipartisan panel on free speech last year.  Those protesters, like the Stanford hecklers, were not punished for their role in the disruption.

The permissiveness prompted a heated debate about how best to discipline law schools that won’t discipline their own students, and led 14 federal judges, including James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, to announce that they would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law.

While some conservatives praised the boycott, others decried it as a form of collective punishment, denying opportunity for all students over the misdeeds of a few. Bar complaints avoid that objection, Banzhaf noted, by targeting only those students who broke the rules. They also create an incentive for administrators to lay down the law on their own, since bar passage rates are a key indicator in law school rankings—and character and fitness checks are a prerequisite for passing the bar.

In addition, Banzhaf said, filing legal complaints of any kind is a sure way to generate publicity, something most universities like to avoid. And complaints can create cover to act in the face of political headwinds—an excuse for bureaucrats, be they Georgia election officials or California bar examiners, to launch a potentially unpopular probe.

"Once you file a document, law and custom requires some kind of response," Banzhaf said. "Bar officials don’t always investigate complaints, but they at least have to look and go through the motions."

Though the California state bar is among the most progressive in the nation, its committee of bar examiners, who handle character and fitness issues, is older and relatively more conservative, Banzhaf said. It also includes at least one judge, with most members appointed by the California Supreme Court—factors that could make it less well-disposed to Duncan’s hecklers.

"Judges in particular should be outraged that a fellow judge received this kind of treatment," Banzhaf said. "My guess is that the California bar will take this seriously."

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