A woman was interested to know how many inmates in Washington state identify as transgender, and how many of those transgender identified inmates have been given transfers to go from men's prison to women's prison, and the reverse. To get this information, she filed a Freedom on Information Act request. Instead of getting the information she requested, she got sued by the ACLU.
Here's a copy of the public records request filed by the citizen:
Why did this woman seek this information?
"I started requesting information about what is happening in US prisons after learning about cases abroad where violent male offenders were housed in women's prisons," the woman who made the request told The Post Millennial, "including a case where a woman became pregnant as a result. Due to the shameful lack of impartial media reporting on this issue, the public can't trust the institutions we've come to rely on to get accurate information.
The ACLU responded by sending the woman this letter:
We must seize every opportunity to protect and advance our civil rights and liberties — in legislatures, the courts, and our communities. Join us in holding our leaders and institutions accountable to fulfill the promise of democracy. With your support, we can lead freedom forward.
To what extent can the government prosecute lies? First Amendment Law Professor Eugene Volokh has written an excellent article considering many angles. Here's an excerpt:
Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has never resolved the question. It hasn’t resolved the big-picture question: When can the government punish lies? It hasn’t resolved the medium-size question: Can the government punish lies in election campaigns? And it hasn’t resolved the particular question: Can the government punish lies about the mechanisms of voting, and in particular about how to vote?
[T]he court considered the case of Xavier Alvarez, a local government official in an LA suburb; he had lied about getting the Congressional Medal of Honor, and was prosecuted under the Stolen Valor Act, a statute that bans such lies about military decorations. Unconstitutional, six justices said. There was broad agreement that “Laws restricting false statements about philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and other matters of public concern … would present a grave and unacceptable danger of suppressing truthful speech.” “The point is not that there is no such thing as truth or falsity in these areas or that the truth is always impossible to ascertain, but rather that it is perilous to permit the state to be the arbiter of truth.” (That’s from the dissent, but the concurrence endorsed it, and the plurality’s opinion was even more speech-protective than the others.)
Yet when it came to more specific lies, whether about one’s own medals or something else, there was no majority opinion.
Back in October 2020, I watched Jodi Shaw go public to explain a problem with the hostile work environment at Smith College, her then-employer and her alma mater. I'll never forget the earnestness in her voice, the determined look on her face and her intense emotions as she carefully described the situation. She knew she was about jump off the high dive and there would be no turning back. As I watched her video, I didn't sense any attempt at advocacy or showmanship. Shaw made her video to say some things that were factually straightforward, but socially dangerous for the many Smith adherents of the new religion of Critical Race Theory. She called out that the Emperor had no clothes.
Shaw was concerned that Smith College was attempting to fight racism with what has come to be known as neoracism, a pernicious new version of racism. At Smith College, Martin Luther King's great dream is dead. At the urging of the leadership of Smith College, complex human beings are proudly categorized and judged by the color of their skin, not by the content of their character.
I've followed Shaw's postings and videos carefully since October. Shaw has expanded on her concerns in subsequent videos and tweets: Reducing people to "colors" undermines moral agency, reduces people to "racial objects," and needlessly creates antagonistic in-groups and out-groups. She knew that breaking her silence would threaten her loss of income and perhaps her personal safety and it now has, as explained below.
Jodi Shaw was, until this afternoon, a staffer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She made $45,000 a year — less than the yearly tuition at the school. She is a divorced mother of two children. She is a lifelong liberal and an alumna of the college. And she has had a front-row seat to the illiberal, neo-racist ideology masquerading as progress.
As part of her article, Weiss has reprinted Shaw's resignation letter in full. Here is an excerpt from Shaw's letter:
I can no longer work in this environment, nor can I remain silent about a matter so central to basic human dignity and freedom. . . . Under the guise of racial progress, Smith College has created a racially hostile environment in which individual acts of discrimination and hostility flourish. In this environment, people’s worth as human beings, and the degree to which they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, is determined by the color of their skin. It is an environment in which dissenting from the new critical race orthodoxy — or even failing to swear fealty to it like some kind of McCarthy-era loyalty oath — is grounds for public humiliation and professional retaliation. . . . Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. . . .
What passes for “progressive” today at Smith and at so many other institutions is regressive. It taps into humanity’s worst instincts to break down into warring factions, and I fear this is rapidly leading us to a very twisted place. It terrifies me that others don’t seem to see that racial segregation and demonization are wrong and dangerous no matter what its victims look like. Being told that any disagreement or feelings of discomfort somehow upholds “white supremacy” is not just morally wrong. It is psychologically abusive.
Jodi Shaw is no longer working as an employee of Smith College, but she is continuing to actively help Smith College find its way out of the Critical Race Theory thicket. You can follow her tweets here. She has set up a GoFundMe to help with her living expense and her legal fees.
What is happening is wrong. Any ideology that asks people to judge others based on their skin color is wrong. Any ideology that asks us to reduce ourselves and others to racial stereotypes is wrong. Any ideology that treats dissent as evidence of bigotry is wrong. Any ideology that denies our common humanity is wrong. You should say so. Just like Jodi Shaw has.
Eric Weinstein lays it out succinctly for you, no matter what your political persuasion. These entities need to be regulated or we need to create public equivalents. If only we could trust our politicians to step in and protect free speech across the board . . .
One of the things I find most disturbing about "anti-racists" is their demand that you must either agree to everything they say or else you are a "racist." Popular authors Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo claim that if you are not an "anti-racist" you are a racist. There are only two options. Thus speak the anti-racists. This false dilemma, this unjustified dichotomy, is just "because."
"Anti-racism" is not the opposite of racism, despite the misleading nomenclature. It is virulent new form of racism. To pull off this minor miracle of creativity, the "anti-racists" have invoked a new expansive definition of "racism" that has nothing to do with specific unfair attitudes or behavior of specific people. The "anti-racists" invoke a Manichean claim that it is OK to judge people as good and bad (respectively Blacks and whites) based on immutable physical appearance, just because. In doing this, they are dusting off that old disreputable idea that melanin should serve as a guilt barometer. This is something they have in common with racists of the Civil War and Jim Crow eras, although the new barometer is upside-down.
This "anti-racist" formula has worked all too well for the past several years. Well-meaning people who fervently disagree with this "anti-racist" claim, however, including the specific claim that "all white people are racist," are being held emotional hostage. They are afraid to speak up, to disagree in public places. It is truly bizarre to see so many people who disagree with these "anti-racist" claims who are afraid to speak up. I know this from numerous private conversations. It's starting to look like many religions, where the preachers preach at the flock and members of the flock merely nod their heads, even thought they know in every bone of their bodies that the Earth is not 6,000 years old, that virgins don't have babies and that (an example from my Catholic upbringing) eating the host is not literally eating bloody muscles and capillaries. Members of the flock sat in total silence when the NYT promoted claims that the American Revolution was primarily for the purpose of promoting slavery, a central claim of "The 1619 Project."
So this is where we are: the preachers are preaching and members of the flock keep sitting silently because they are afraid of going to "anti-racist" hell. For them, hell is what would happen is they were publicly called "racist." Thus, members of the flock will sit in paralyzed silence, even when the anti-racists call all "white" people and their Black intellectual allies "racist" no matter how exemplary their lives have been. Isn't that weird? "White" people are already being called racists as a group merely by their skin color, yet they fear being called "racist" as individuals. And what drives this fear is, ironically, that they hate racism. This is stranger than any fiction any creative writer could concoct. These "anti-racist" threats of name-calling are successfully turning many people into Zombies (this reminds me of how many types of wasps sting and zombify other bugs to use as hatcheries). After getting stung by the threat of being called "racists," the fearful zombified flock is willing to sit in silence even when the "anti-racists" make patently false claims that no racial progress has occurred since 1619, since the Civil War or since the Civil Rights era. They sit in silence while the "anti-racists" ridicule Martin Luther King's idea that we should not be judged by the color of our skin, but only by the content of character.
Once this creepy dynamic settled into place, anti-racists, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, began getting free rides from individuals who knew better but who were afraid to speak out. More troublesome, the anti-racists' fact-free and oftentimes false diatribes also began getting luxury free rides from corporate HR departments, government agencies (and here) and many members of our sense-making institutions, including left-leaning legacy media. In addition to securing the silence of people who disagree under threat of being called names, the "anti-racists" employ another big weapon: the rage of Woke mobs who are willing to destroy the careers of anyone who dares to dissent (recent example).
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