The Seattle City Council is facing something of a dilemma in its popular pledge to cut the police budget by 50 percent. To do so would require firing a significant number of police officers, which is also popular. The problem is that the firing would be done by seniority and many of the less senior officers are black. The solution according to City Council member Lisa Herbold is simple: fire officers based on their race. While that would be the definition of racial discrimination, Herbold clearly believes that it is discrimination for a good cause. The federal courts are likely to disagree. Most notably, Herbold’s call for racial discrimination against white officers would seek to undue the work of Justice Thurgood Marshall who insisted that racial discrimination unlawful and evil regardless of the race you want to disenfranchise or discriminate against.
I recently received a letter contesting my statements concerning Attorney General Bill Barr in columns (
Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley has called upon Attorney General Bill Barr to launch a federal civil rights investigation of the St. Louis couple who wielded guns outside of their house during a protest in their gated community. I have 
We have been discussing the campaigns to remove faculty who voice dissenting views on the current protests or underlying issues. The art world has now been swept into this disturbing trend where critics label any opposing views as racist and demand the removal of anyone who questions their demands. That was the case with Gary Garrels the long-standing senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). He resigned after museum employees circulated a petition that accused him of racism because he simply stated that, while seeking to diversify the artists featured in the collection, he would not bar acquisitions of artists simply because they are white. That would not only decouple ignore the inherent value of the art but apply a racial discriminatory rule.
We have been discussing 
China has a long and authoritarian history of suppressing free speech even though 
Recently, 
Fifty years ago, Ford Motor Company started production on the Pinto, a car that was billed as the be-all, end-all for the automotive industry. The only problem was that the car seemed to burst into flames if it hit a mid- to large-sized squirrel. The Pinto’s combustibility did not stop its advocates from pushing its use until it finally was pulled from the roads.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declined to condemn the destruction of a statue of Christopher Columbus in the city of Baltimore (where she was born and raised) yesterday in the latest example of politicians enabling such mob action with their silence. When asked about a mob pulling down the statue and dumping it in the harbor (with no interference from police), Pelosi simply declared “People will do what they do.” Indeed, they will when leaders refuse to condemn their conduct. Her comment explains why a recently arrested supporter of 
There has been exhaustive coverage over the latest tell-all book targeting President Donald Trump. Mary Trump’s book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” slams her uncle for a series of horrible acts and a lifetime of deceit. However, one allegation has drawn much attention and raises a related issue repeatedly discussed on this blog: Trump allegedly used a friend as a surrogate to take his college entrance test in order to secure a place at the elite Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. The problem is that this allegation appears to be untrue if the widow of the named individual is telling the truth. That raises the issue of 
Rep. Iihan Omar has been much in the news for her extreme positions on 
Many years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking at Tsinghua University, considered one of the best educational institutions in China. I was impressed as faculty at the university struggled to remain intellectually active under the repressive controls of the Communist regime. It is a perilous existence as academics fear that they will write anything that annoys the government. Now, one of the best known law professors in China,