Admissions policies at universities are changing — for the better. Race-driven admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” thereby violating the U.S. Constitution.
Forty-five years and a day after one Supreme Court justice opened the door to race-based college admissions (the 1978 Bakke case), six justices closed it. The court has finally recognized that the Constitution prohibits such racial discrimination. In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion, “ending racial discrimination means ending all of it.” It’s unbelievable that it took until 2023 to do so, but sometimes the wheels of justice are slow.
Recent allegations by the creators of GIPPR, a conservative chatbot based on ChatGPT technology, that OpenAI shut down their project heighten concerns that artificial intelligence technology will be used to limit certain viewpoints. GIPPR’s developers allege that OpenAI said their bot violated policies regarding “deceptive activity and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Testing, however, showed that the bot repetitively identified its partisan viewpoint with statements such as “as a right conservative AI, I” and “as a conservative AI, I believe.”
This week, Fairfax County School Board members voted to restrict students’ and teachers’ free speech with a new bias incident reporting system in changes to the district’s code of conduct. Despite multiple legal challenges across the nation to this Orwellian tattle system, including one in the neighboring Loudoun County Public Schools, school board members overwhelmingly voted in favor of it. Here again, they demonstrate little regard for the Constitution or the district’s mounting legal fees, which totaled about $17 million from 2020 to 2022.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on June 6 informed us that former Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, his department’s first-ever chief diversity and inclusion officer, was leaving the post. Blinken credited her with “a series of other concrete, systemic accomplishments in [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility].”
Well, that’s pretty offensive. A liberal Texas real estate agent named Bob McCranie recently launched a service he initially dubbed the “Rainbow Underground Railroad,” which offers (paid) real estate services to help LGBT people relocate from red states where they now are supposedly in danger.
Reuters on Wednesday reported that Tesla has been returned to the S&P 500 ESG index, the socially conscious index operated by Standard and Poor's.
America's 13-year-olds are showing no signs of academic recovery from school lockdowns, as new federal data report math and reading scores at the lowest levels in decades.
The sounds of summer are a thing of joy for most people. The birds, the splashing, dogs barking, and the neighborhood kids playing outside. Warmth and life return to the streets. But then there are places such as Montgomery County, Maryland.
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Just two years ago, President Joe Biden said that he didn’t believe he had the authority to unilaterally forgive student loans through executive action. Following the Supreme Court’s predictable decision in Biden v. Nebraska, in which a 6-3 majority deemed his student loan forgiveness plan unconstitutional, Biden declared the ruling "unthinkable."
One of my favorite albums to listen to around the Fourth of July is Nightmoves by the jazz singer Kurt Elling. This great record has always expressed to me what America represents: faith, freedom, beauty, and American originals like Walt Whitman and Duke Ellington, whose work Elling covers.
When it comes to the nation’s supply of energy, the United States has an unfortunate tendency of stumbling from one crisis to another. Just as we turn the corner on energy-driven inflation and the shock of a global energy crisis, there is a new crisis now on the horizon: the rapidly eroding reliability of the nation’s supply of electricity.
Somewhere along the way, our vision for racial justice got hijacked by bureaucrats, academics, and activists.
- Robert Woodson, a veteran of the civil-rights movement is founder and president of the Woodson Center
