What’s a White Knight to do when he’s in search of a damsel in distress? Find one. Save her. Even if she says she’s no victim, she’s not in distress and she doesn’t need to be saved. Zoe Katz, a 22-year-old USC student, was just fine and didn’t need saving, Matt Boermeester’s neighbor, however, had to be a good ally and save her anyway.

In the statement, Katz said she and Boermeester have dated for more than a year. The Title IX investigation began, Steigerwalt said, after a neighbor witnessed Boermeester and Katz roughhousing. The neighbor told his roommate, who told a coach in USC’s athletic department that Boermeester was abusing Katz. The coach then reported the incident to the Title IX office.

One tells another, who tells someone who’s subject to mandatory reporting, and so it goes. At each stage, there’s a rationale that justifies why it must be done, to protect the delicate and vulnerable who are incapable of helping themselves. Poor women, so helpless. Except Katz wasn’t helpless.

Zoe Katz, 22, a senior, said in a two-page statement her attorney emailed to The Times that Boermeester “has been falsely accused of conduct involving me.” Katz confirmed that the statement was hers. Her attorney, Kerry L. Steigerwalt, said that USC alleged that Boermeester shoved Katz outside her home.

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Academics see themselves as the artists, the thinkers, the inventors, the cutting edge of intellectualism. It’s an affectation, as if getting a job at a college as a teacher suddenly makes whatever crap pops into your head sufficiently sacrosanct as to be beyond reproach. Some profs aren’t quite as brilliant as they believe they are. Some are kinda dumb. But hey, they have the title, the attributed cred that comes with it, and the security of knowing that mommy always told them they were special.

But what if the people who fund your college or university disagree? Freddie deBoer, whose arms grasp tightly around the breast of progressive ideology, sees the problem.

Only 36% of Republicans, according to the Pew Research Center, believe colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country, versus 58% who say they have a negative effect. Among Democrats, those figures are 72% and 19%, respectively. That finding represents a crisis.

For it to be a crisis does not depend on you having any conservative sympathies. For this to be a crisis requires only that you recognize that the GOP is one of two major political parties in American life, and that Republicans’ lack of faith in higher education will have practical consequences.

The significance of this poll depends on the color of lenses in your specs. To progressives, it confirms their certainty that Republicans are stupid, anti-intellectual, haters of knowledge. To non-progressives, it suggests that academia has been seized by radical ideology and lost its way, putting far more effort into indoctrinating young minds to its dogma than teaching academic subjects. Indeed, should anyone spend four years in college majoring in gender and deviant sexuality? Should “white privilege” be a compulsory course? Continue reading →

That Trump’s lawyers were tasked with answering the question of whether a president can pardon himself for crimes isn’t particularly surprising. When asked to consider strategies in the face of attack, like an investigation by Robert Mueller’s investigation in collusion between the campaign and Russia, good lawyers will consider all possibilities, including some way outside the box. Hey, you never know.

What’s surprising, and either a bad thing or good thing according to where you stand on the political spectrum, is that this was leaked. But out it came, and, in turn, out came the scholars to get their names in the paper. After all, the question was posed, can a president pardon himself, and this went deep into law nerd territory. Perfect for an academic to show her stuff.

At Vox, the question was posed to 15 “experts.” The word “experts” is put in quotes not because the academics to whom the question was posed do not possess the requisite expertise, but because calling them experts begs the question. This was evident in the responses.

Susan Low Bloch, law professor, Georgetown University

I believe the president can pardon anyone, including him or herself. But the pardon cannot stop an investigation and, in a well-functioning democracy, should provoke an impeachment. The Constitution specifically provides that the pardon power does not prevent — or undo — an impeachment. I’m not sure if these Republicans would impeach, but I think that is the only check on the president.

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Dr. SJ sent me a link with a note that I should sign up for this. If she said so, then I must obey (for the unwary, her pet name is SWMBO. Mine is “you moron,” not that you needed to know that). Moments later, this arrived in my mailbox.

Look what you did, you little jerk…

If I had a nickel for every time I received this or a variation on the theme, But I digress.

I assure you, we don’t take what just happened lightly.

You just gave us your email and joined our newsletter.

That’s a VERY big deal to us.

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It might seem as if she’s back out of nowhere. Her attempt at porn did more to promote abstinence than any effort by Tipper Gore. Her resort to BDSM as a catharsis for her outrage could be the new 50 shades of pale. And it’s coincidental that it comes moments after Columbia University paid off Paul Nungesser, the victim of her mattress-toting shenanigans. But Emma Sulkowicz is back.

Tovia Smith at NPR held up Mattress Girl as a “survivor,” rationalizing that it’s her self-identification. After all, it’s not as if Nungesser was cleared of any wrongdoing and Sulkowicz’s only survival is from having been caught in her lies.

Reporter Tovia Smith quotes as a “survivor” the Columbia University graduate Emma Sulkowicz, who lost her rape case against fellow student Paul Nungesser in a campus adjudication based on the extremely low “more likely than not” evidence standard.

Sulkowicz and her activist friends harassed Nungesser, a foreign student, for years through her “Carry that Weight” art project, in which she pledged to lug a mattress around campus until Columbia punished Nungesser, whom it had explicitly exonerated of any wrongdoing.

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There’s a silly war going on in northern New Jersey, places with funny names like Mahwah and less-funny names like Upper Saddle River, over whether a piece of PVC pipe attached to a telephone pole is a sign, and as a sign, subject to local building codes. But the war sounds far less silly when you realize the claims are silly only because they’re an obvious subterfuge for the “real” problem.

• “Get those scum out of here.”
• “They are clearly trying to annex land like they’ve been doing in Occupied Palestine. Look up the satanic verses of the Talmud and tell me what you see.”
• “Our town is such a great place and if these things move in they will ruin it. They think they can do whatever the hell they want and we’ll be known as a dirty town if they move in. Please keep them out…”
• “I don’t want these rude, nasty, dirty people who think they can do what they want in our nice town.”
• “I don’t want my town to be gross and infested with these nasty people.”
• “I do not want these things coming into my town and ruining it.”

These are the comment from a petition to rid Mahwah of the “eruv.” The what?  Continue reading →

One of my basic quips here is that if you don’t like a post, you get your money back. The point, obviously, is that you read SJ for free if you so choose. Nobody makes you. You don’t have to like it, whether because you think the writing sucks or you just can’t stand the word “twit,” and you certainly don’t have to agree with anything I write. This is America and you can be as wrong as you wanna be.

But of late, I’ve noticed that donations to the cause have dwindled considerably. While I can see how many people read SJ, and the numbers remain remarkably robust, the lack of support is a little disconcerting. Continue reading →

There’s a requirement to be Humboldt County, California, Public Defender. It’s not a particularly hard requirement to meet, but apparently David Marcus, the current office holder, may have a problem.

Local attorney Patrik Griego refiled his lawsuit last week, alleging that Humboldt County Public Defender David Marcus fails to meet minimum state qualifications for his post. And this time, Griego is using Marcus’ own words against him in arguing that he is unqualified to represent the county’s indigent defendants as the chief public defender.

What is this onerous burden? Wait for it…

The heart of the suit rests on a section of the California Government Code that requires a public defender to have been “a practicing attorney in all the courts of the state for at least the year preceding the date of his election or appointment.”

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Did David Mueller lift up Taylor Swift’s skirt and grope her? It’s a fairly straightforward fact question. It either happened or not, and that’s the question of fact for the jury to decide. But Swift’s lawyer, Brian Schwalb of Venable, wasn’t willing to take the chance of an adverse finding, so he tried to gild the lily.

He proposed to introduce the “expert testimony” of University of Colorado Boulder gender studies prof Lorraine Bayard de Volo to “explain” Mueller’s masculine fragility.

De Volo is a Ph.D. women and gender studies prof, whose scholarship appears to focus on the intersection of gender and the Cuban Revolution. As such, she is a fully qualified expert to convey feminist mythology:

Sexual harassment and assault are fundamentally motivated by the perpetrator’s perceived need to assert power and to protect the perpetrator’s status. Throughout David Mueller’s pleadings in this lawsuit and his deposition testimony, he indicated that even before he met Ms.Swift, he felt his job security was threatened, his identity as a radio personality was threatened, and his masculinity was threatened. This perfect storm of threats to Mr. Mueller’s perceived status is consistent with the well-settled, academically-accepted, perceived threats to status that motivate a man to commit sexual harassment or assault.

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For those who yearn for the self-proclaimed Halcyon days of civil rights enforcement under Obama’s Department of Justice, it’s unfortunate that nobody told them that indigent defense in New Orleans was in ruins. No doubt newfound progressive icon Sally Yates would have been on it like Vanita Gupta was on transgender bathrooms. If only they knew.*

But the problems of spectacularly underfunded public defense in Louisiana was bad enough before. So prosecutors figured out a way to make it worse.

Jay Dixon was heading home from Baton Rouge to Lafayette one day when he got pulled over for speeding. As the deputy handed him the ticket, Dixon said, he was told to flip it over. On the back, Dixon found instructions saying he could pay the ticket by mailing a $175 money order made out to “DA P.T.D.”

If he paid the ticket that way, the deputy told him, it wouldn’t go on his record. Plus, it wouldn’t go through court, so he wouldn’t have to pay court costs.

“Who wouldn’t want to do it?” Dixon asked as he recounted what happened.

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