Jun
9
2025

Karoline, No

This should be a no-brainer. But Karoline Leavitt is the Trump administration's leading example of non-braininess. Robby Soave spells it out: Terry Moran Insulted Stephen Miller? That's None of the Government's Business.

Karoline is an unhappy tweeter:

Robby belabors the obvious, but that's OK:

This is a textbook example of "jawboning"—when the government tries to accomplish some censorship by threatening improper government action. It is exactly the sort of thing that conservatives rightly hated about the previous administration: President Joe Biden, his senior advisors, and various federal employees browbeat social media companies into taking down content that the feds deemed wrong, hateful, or dangerous. They didn't just say that they disagreed with major platform moderation policies: They raised the possibility of punitive legislation against Facebook, Google, and Twitter unless they complied.

Leavitt is free to complain about Moran's comment, as Vance did. But her insinuation that she would be speaking with Moran's manager reads like a threat, and thus like an attempt at censorship. As Jenin Younes, a civil liberties attorney, noted in a reply to Leavitt, the Trump administration issued an executive order to prevent the kind of jawboning that took place under the previous White House. To turn around and do the same thing is obviously hypocritical.

"Journalists and everyone else can say what they want about members of the Administration (and anything else) without having to fear reprisal from the government," wrote Younes. "You should delete this tweet and apologize for your attempted act of tyranny and also failure to understand basic constitutional concepts."

This is not to excuse Moran, whose surname is only one letter away from… no, I won't go there.

Also of note:

  • For the nth time: I am not a lawyer, but… Jed Rubenfeld wonders Are White People a Protected Class Now? And he leads off with a stunning stat:

    For a year after the 2020 George Floyd riots, America’s largest corporations pretty much stopped hiring white people. According to Bloomberg News, of the over 300,000 new jobs filled at S&P 100 companies in 2021, only six percent—you read that right, six percent—went to whites, who make up some 61 percent of the U.S. population. This was done in the name of “inclusivity” and “diversity.”

    That's a four-year-old number, and Bloomberg published it in September 2023. So: grain of salt. But it seems to be based on Official Government Statistics.

    And here we get into the legal weeds. Jed looks at the recent unanimous SCOTUS ruling in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services:

    Writing for the full Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson held that Title VII protects “individuals,” not groups, and protects “minority and majority” alike. The Sixth Circuit’s rule, Jackson said, violated the “basic principle” that discrimination law “does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.”

    This is a major decision for the Court. The “basic principle” it reaffirms—that discrimination law protects individuals, not groups, and does not vary depending on minority or majority status—plainly applies not only to sexual orientation, but to race as well, calling all DEI hiring into question.

    Fundamentally, Ames blows a hole in a concept central to DEI thinking. For a long time, discrimination law in America has been organized around the idea of “protected classes.” Thousands of cases hold that the first requirement of any Title VII discrimination claim is that the employee must show that he “was a member of a protected class.” The Sixth Circuit’s opinion in Ames repeated this statement.

    It's not just the judicial branch blowing a big hole in the DEI juggernaut; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission now has a new sheriff in town, Andrea Lucas, and she issued a stern warning in a March press release: EEOC and Justice Department Warn Against Unlawful DEI-Related Discrimination. Which includes links to helpful documents: What To Do If You Experience Discrimination Related to DEI at Work; and What You Should Know About DEI-Related Discrimination at Work.

    This is all welcome news. The documents "clarify" for the DEIdolators: there are no "protected classes"; there are protected characteristics: race, sex, etc.

    And we are all protected (or should be) from discrimination based on those characteristics.

    (See Wikipedia for the full list of protected characteristics.)

  • Shut up, they explain. Jesse Singal has the unpromising headline: Contra Evan Urquhart On The Right To Journalistic Exclusion. But he's examining a specific example of a more general censoriousness:

    Last week The New York Times released The Protocol, a six-part podcast series about the American fight over youth gender medicine. The podcast is hosted by Austin Mitchell and centers on the work of Azeen Ghorayshi, the science section’s point person on this subject. […]

    For now, I’d like to talk a bit about the reaction. Or preaction, to be more precise. Well before the podcast was released, activists were outraged. They were outraged, at root, because they do not think there should be any meaningful debate over any substantive aspect of youth gender medicine. I understand that many activists would claim otherwise, that I am caricaturing their position, but their actions speak otherwise. And the more honest members of this group are open about their views.

    To her credit, Julia Carrie Wong, a senior reporter at The Guardian US, expressed this explicitly on Bluesky: “The idea that there should be a public debate about the appropriate medical care for a minuscule population of children remains one of the most absurd lies that these liberal transphobes, NYT edit board included, tell themselves. No there shouldn’t! It’s not an appropriate matter for public debate!”

    Because these critics are opposed to any genuine coverage of this issue but aren’t usually willing to say so out loud, they often have to reverse-engineer reasons to be mad. In the case of The Times, which has come under a lot of unfair fire from these activists in recent years, that has led to all sorts of ridiculously bad faith accusations, some of which can fairly be called lies.

    These folks don't just put fingers in their ears to avoid hearing contrary opinions and facts. They want to put their fingers in your ears too.