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Aug. 31, 2023 - Where There's Woke - Thomas Smith
01:01:27
WTW9: Powell's Title IX Story, Part 2: IT GETS SO MUCH WORSE
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Time Text
What's so scary about the woke mob?
How often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green M&M will now wear sneakers.
Hello, and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas Smith.
That's Lydia Smith.
I am.
And we are on Title IX, Part 2.
So Title 18, I think is how, no, Title 11, 10? 81.
No, it's still title night.
So make sure you listen to part one, everyone.
If you happen to tune into this and you missed the, you know, my stupid fucking iPhone does this all the time.
It'll mark stuff played that I didn't play.
Like just, I saw it do it today with gam.
It just marked one played.
I was like, I didn't touch that asshole.
So anyway, if you're hearing this.
And you're like, what are you talking about?
We did Tyler and I in part one.
Let's see, we can summarize it really quickly.
Betsy DeVos under Trump wanted to make sexual harassment and sexual assault easier to do.
And Michael Powell was like, I know what's a good use of fucking New York Times Inc.
Let me write about the idiots or the fake feminists who say that's a good idea.
And that'll be my article.
Huh?
Brilliant.
Fucking print it.
Published.
Yeah.
No, that's a good summary.
Darn, yeah.
We could have done the episode in like 30 seconds.
Yeah.
So we talked about our first fake feminist, Janet Halle, last time.
This time we're going to dive into our next one named Nancy Gertner.
And so Nancy Gertner comes into this story with this quote, I'm a feminist, but I'm also a defense attorney who recognizes the importance of due process.
OK.
Yeah.
Are those different things?
Yeah.
Huh?
I'm a feminist, but I'm also not a murderer.
Yeah, man, those aren't things you need to set up as a post.
I already see the bias leaking through and you're framing.
Yeah, and so Nancy Gertner, she's 76.
I just have to throw that out there.
Listen, I...
I don't have a problem with age.
Absolutely do not have a problem with age.
But it is an interesting through line that I'm noticing with some of this stuff.
Well, yeah, of course.
Gerontocracy.
I do have a problem with that.
And I just thought of it following up on a point from the last episode of Michael Powell's whole like, oh, I love finding the people who are, you know, that you wouldn't think they believe this.
Well, I don't know, man.
I would think that a 76-year-old woman would think this.
It kind of cuts against that a little bit, doesn't it?
I think there's a reason this maybe works in print better, because I don't think he lists their fucking age.
No.
It's just like, oh, this is a woman.
Oh, this is a feminist woman.
It must be somebody 42 years old or something.
No, it's somebody who's 76 and fucking stopped learning new things about feminism in 1990.
Yeah.
And you're like, I'm done.
And I think this is, I mean, you know, everybody knows this, but, um, first wave feminism, second wave feminism, third wave feminism, right?
Like every single wave... Starts sucking eventually?
Well, they distance themselves from the previous wave and the previous wave is like, they don't know what they're talking about.
Like this is a tale as old as time, right?
But it'll be for really good reasons.
Like it'll be like the last wave is like, oh, but you also want to give black people the vote?
No, just women.
You know, it'd be like, that's like the first, I remember with the intersectionality.
Yeah.
Like that, like with a lot of the suffragettes, that was genuine.
It's it sucks because it's these people who are like, oh, that's a hero of history.
Yeah.
And they're like, yeah.
They're like, we shouldn't be teaming up with black people.
Women should get the vote, but I don't really care if black people, you know what I mean?
It's a lot of stuff like that where it's like, oh, you were progressive until you weren't anymore.
And you know, that is what it is.
But Michael Powell, that doesn't mean you can talk to Susan B. Anthony late in her career and be like, this feminist hero has a certain view on race.
And you're like, no, man.
Yeah.
Are we going to end up like this, though?
No.
Okay.
This happens every time.
This happens every time.
Again, I've had this conversation with Eli 50 times.
We're not doing it.
Here's the thing.
Oh, you heard the episode.
Sorry.
Listen to Dear Old Dads, everybody.
Because we had this same conversation.
Eli said, first off, Callie Wright has the ability to just assassinate us on camera.
They are going to check every single matrion.
Oh, that's a pajama party.
I know.
I was going to say so.
Callie's coming by.
Yeah.
Hopefully we'll see Callie.
I doubt it might not be real.
But if it is real, it's a good policy.
You have you've designated a super intelligent and progressive person with ethics to come check each year if we've been like, you know, I think I think the kids actually, they kind of went too far.
Nope, dead.
We're just, it's over.
Well, that's, that's why it won't happen.
No, I think it won't happen because, and this is not at all anything we planned on talking about, but I do think this, I do think there is an outlier thing happening there because I know, I bet you there are a lot of listeners who are genuinely, I mean, maybe, maybe not, but like, I genuinely worry about that where I'm like, God, am I going to just, will there be something where I'm like, no, see, even though I spent, I'll be fucking 70.
I'm like, look, I know I spent 50 fucking years saying they've never gone too far, but they went too far, you know?
But I don't think so.
I think that you hear from the outliers.
Maybe outliers isn't the right word, but you hear from the squeaky wheels.
You hear from the high profile, second wave feminists, whatever it is.
And I don't want to just target feminists.
This is every, you know, every group of people.
I mean, even elder statesmen, civil rights icons, you know, were the same thing.
Like some of them, some of them stayed amazing forever until they died.
And some of them hit a level where like, yeah, but this is kind of dumb, right?
And then you're like, oh.
And I think that it's not inevitable.
It's just you hear from the complainers, you know, and some of them are high profile, you know, and specifically, tell you what, you also may hear from them disproportionately because of people like fucking Michael Powell, who are like, I'm going to go find that person.
Yeah.
So that gets us back on topic.
Sorry.
Yeah, so Nancy Gertner was a federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton.
When she retired, she moved to Harvard Law School and started teaching there.
She wrote a piece regarding the DeVos standards and the things that were happening there that she felt were good and why.
And what I want to highlight here is not her piece because I feel like We get it, right?
Right.
It's kind of the same.
Official WTW analysis of that.
Yeah, we fucking get it.
Yeah.
But what I do want to highlight is the response to what she wrote.
And it's by a woman named Alexandra Brodsky.
And she is amazing.
This is the best part of the job, hon.
I don't know what this instance is, but often there is some fucking saint who nobody knows about who wrote like a book or like a peer-reviewed paper that five people know about that perfectly breaks down every problem with a thing.
And you're like, what?
This person is a fucking genius.
And you get to read them and be like, this is amazing.
Or it's somebody everybody knows.
Oftentimes it's someone who's just like really smart somewhere, maybe they're an academic, maybe they're whatever, they have some specialty, and they're just like so bothered by it that they're like, I'm taking my own fucking personal time and I'm going to write an extremely good rebuttal to everything.
I think she was a 2L at the time.
Oh, that's the best.
Yeah.
I love it.
Oh, her and the intern from NASA.
Oh, we should get them together.
Oh, this is an elite club.
This is like, this is the, okay.
We're starting our, neither of us is in a fucking comic book sound, but we'll just pretend.
We're starting our super, fuck, what are they called?
Damn it.
I got to reference the right one.
It can't be the Justice League.
That's the one everyone hates, because DC.
What's the one?
The Avengers.
Oh, duh.
It's the fucking Avengers.
Yeah.
That became so commonplace that I was like, it can't be that because that's too obvious.
Yeah, that's our fucking Avengers team.
Assemble.
This is great.
OK.
Yeah.
So she's amazing.
She went to Yale Law School.
I want to highlight while she was at Yale Law, she wrote a term paper about stealthing.
Do you know what stealthing is?
Yes.
Yeah.
And so for our listeners... That was a weird reaction.
Sorry, I need to explain.
We were considering talking about that on Dear Old Dads because of a weird, like, Reddit story we saw that was like, we were arguing about in certain ways, so that's, sorry.
Thank you for clarifying.
- I don't know why that's a really good-- - Worry not dear listeners. - Two seconds of someone being like, fucking what was that reaction?
Oh my, is that like his thing somehow?
Oh my god.
So yeah, so she wrote a term paper about it back in 2017 at Yale Law, and she said a lot of people read it, and a person who wrote it was actually a California Assembly member.
And when they read it, they were like, oh wow, this is a problem.
And so Stealthing, for those who don't know, And I think, technically speaking, it could be more things.
Like, I think it branched out to like, well, if you're doing any sort of, you know, deception about that, yeah, you're essentially consent is given under those conditions.
Right, and those conditions are changed.
Yeah, if you're deceiving them intentionally.
Yeah, but it wasn't illegal.
And so when she wrote a term paper about it and a California assembly member read it, they were like, oh, it's a problem that this isn't illegal.
And they actually sponsored legislation in California and her term paper helped lead to, you know, hopefully a safer environment or at least a path of, you know, safety for individuals.
Yeah, I know.
She's incredible.
So she wrote a response to Nancy Gertner.
And what's been interesting, you know, I do want to give Nancy Gertner some credit here.
She's engaged Alexander Brodsky, and they've had a back and forth.
So they've written pieces back and forth.
They've had conversations just, you know, on the side, the two of them, not in like a public environment where they've, you know, I think ultimately Nancy Gertner has problems with her approach to this from my perspective, from Alexander Brodsky's perspective, but she's not unwilling to engage in conversation about it.
And I do appreciate that.
I don't know that she'll ever have her mind changed, but she's not hiding in a corner and only interacting with Michael Powell.
What I do want to show is kind of some of that back and forth that's happening where they dig into some of these arguments, Alexander Brodsky and Nancy Gertner.
So if you want to open up.
Oh, oh, this is that.
OK.
The video I sent you.
Yeah.
All right.
So this is a panel that was invited through the American Constitution Society in March 2015.
She is like by far the youngest person on the panel.
And again, she's engaging a retired federal judge, Harvard law professor who's 76.
She's like, yeah.
And also let me help you open that fucking PDF.
God damn it.
Yeah.
I think that's a really important question because it's absolutely true that we have been addressing Disciplinary responses to sexual misconduct as a whole different beast from school's general disciplinary actions.
I think that that's really dangerous for a couple of reasons.
I think that we often forget that people get suspended and expelled for schools for reasons other than rape.
That hasn't really been part of the conversation recently.
I think that's important in part just because it's not like schools are new to this game.
It's absolutely true that schools are paying increased attention to these particular kinds of harms, but they have disciplinary procedures.
And I think that one of the dangers is that when we talk only about sexual misconduct, which unfortunately ends up being a conversation only about rape, which leaves out harassment, intimate partner violence, stalking, other kinds of gender-based discrimination, we end up thinking that we're talking about the criminal law.
And I think we see that the criminal law really has a monopoly over our imaginations when it comes to thinking about responses to gender-based violence.
We see this in the responses in some state legislatures across the country, where their first idea to solve the problem is to say, why don't we just turn everything over to the police?
That's a really intuitive idea if you have faith in the criminal justice system.
Yes.
There's both a question of whether, even if all of these cases made it to the police, what good that would do.
But also, I co-direct an organization called Know Your 9, which is a student campaign to end gender-based violence.
And we've done some informal surveys and also just spoken with members of our team and survivors who get in touch with us.
And what they say is that if my school was required to hand this over to the police, I just wouldn't have told anybody.
And what that means is that the police certainly aren't holding anyone accountable.
Schools can't hold anyone accountable.
And what worries me the most is there's no opportunity for survivors to get the services that they need.
Okay, well, that's fucking great.
I know.
She's fantastic.
And so, as she mentioned in there, she co-founded an organization called Know Your 9.
Essentially, kind of the creation of this organization was women were getting assaulted and they did not feel like they had the support.
or know where to go to or the schools weren't taking it seriously.
And rather than waiting for administrations to come in and change and, you know, the long process there, some students started connecting across campuses and helping each other.
And so that kind of was like the start of this idea for this organization that she co-founded called Know Your Nine.
And she's since moved on, but she, you know, consults with them still and is involved to some degree.
But they have an amazing set of resources, really try to help advocate for students, help connect them to the appropriate place, define what the policy is at whatever school they go to.
And I think some of the things that she highlights there are really important.
You heard me respond to, that's assuming that we have faith in the criminal justice system.
And like you said, yeah, this was in 2015.
She was seeing these things, certainly not the only person who saw these things.
Oh, I want to clarify, because that made it sound like, I'm not saying that was before someone would have known the justice system sucked.
No, no, no, and I'm not saying that.
I'm saying, yeah, I just want to make sure no one took it as that.
I'm saying this is, to your point, I think she's really seeing where this is going and perfectly predicts the right-wing view on this, or just knows it.
Actually, talking about the year, just right now is bringing this other lens for me, for Nancy Gertner.
I just praised her for going back and forth with Alexander Brodsky.
But here we are in 2020, and it seems like her views literally— Fuck, it's 2020 right now, Jesus Christ.
We're back?
Well, I mean, the article— No!
We already did COVID, don't take me back.
Have I been trapped in a podcast this whole time?
You have to let me out.
Yeah.
Yeah, the Michael Powell article, 2020.
Yeah, but Michael Powell article 2020.
I'm just now realizing, like, now I'm kind of mad again.
I just gave her credit for engaging in these conversations, but five years and she's saying the same story.
This won't translate amazingly, but I want to see your reaction to another clip.
There's two more clips that I want to do.
Live reacts!
This next one is very short.
So to set this up, Brodsky speaks about misogyny and how it underlies a lot of the reaction to Title IX and issues that people have with pursuing campus sexual assault through that mechanism, the idea that victims lie.
And so Nancy Gertner responds to this at 4240.
But so if you find for the man, you're bound to be criticized.
If you find for the woman, you are not in this climate.
Did you see her face?
Yeah.
So Brodsky, our kind of hero in this, did like 47 double takes silently.
Yeah.
So essentially Gertner is saying like, you can only find one way to get society on your side.
Jesus fucking Christ.
These people are so... Which is a very concerning thing for a retired judge to come out and say.
You're just in a fantasy land.
Because like, that's one thing that if your only exposure to the outside world is Twitter at this time, because it's still called that.
Then maybe you might think that and that might make sense to you.
But when you do more research about it, and it just is really shocking to see a woman say that, it just sucks, but you know, that's how it goes.
What you find is, oh no, it's exactly the fucking opposite until five seconds ago.
And five seconds ago, it's not as though it switched from, oh, every single thing is painful and horrible and you get harassed and all that when you accuse a man.
And then it switched to like, it's all great.
It's not that it's oh, no, it's still fucking sucks.
But now like there's like 10 people who are like, no, good job.
And then there's still a mob of people fucking pitchforks who are like, how dare you fucking a bunch of slurs against women?
Yeah, it's truly sad that this person would think that or would say that it's just a joke.
Yeah, and you know, she said elsewhere, too, that a lot of her concerns were aligned with the perception of the process and worrying that people will always think that women just lie.
But it feels like with that statement, she's perpetuating some of that.
I reacted in the same way that Alexander reacted.
I was like, are you sure you want to say that?
Well, let's think of any recent women who accused anyone.
Oh, I remember Amber Heard and she was the whole world put her on a chair, like in a bar mitzvah for some reason is my image that I'm going with.
And they lift her up and they're like, you're the best.
You're the best.
Oh, no.
Or was it that she was fucking harassed nonstop, no matter what, and hyper scrutinized and every single thing.
All the TikToks for the makeup.
Yeah.
It's just you're not in the world, Nancy Gertner.
This is not the world.
Yeah.
The next thing that came up that I really want to highlight from this panel discussion was regarding, you know, what happens to men when they're expelled and what is the harm that they experience.
And I think Alexandra Brodsky had some nice points on this.
This is at minute 53.
The Huffington Post did a study on this and looking through some university materials and found that Most students who are expelled, which first of all is a very small proportion, not only of students who face these charges, but who are found responsible for these charges.
Even of that small population, very few of those are facing obstacles to re-enrolling in or transferring to other universities, which brings up like a whole other host of questions about basically moving a dangerous person from one campus to another.
With that being said, if it is seriously affecting some people, That's something that I think we should care about, sort of not just the harm of the last semester, but the stigmatic harm of having been expelled for this kind of thing.
I just think what you hear from some of the men's rights activist groups is that there is nothing, as they tell me on Twitter, there is no harm like being expelled for rape.
And I guess my question would be, you know, my, when I was a freshman, there was someone who painted in red Yeah, I think that kind of ties into this concern about, like, well, what about the accused and the impact that this has on their lives?
There's nothing that gets added to a transcript.
job resume either.
So I just think that this is not, this is a problem.
It is not a unique problem.
Yeah, I think that kind of ties into this concern about like, well, what about the accused and the impact that this has on their lives?
There's nothing that gets added to a transcript.
There's nothing that like you have to disclose you were expelled for whatever reason.
And on the flip side, kind of what you alluded to in your reaction there, there are cases of where a serial predator has been able to matriculate at a variety of campuses and continue that same pattern.
Yeah.
If this were an illegal immigrant, the right would be like, well, obviously kill that person.
Yeah.
But because it's probably a fucking white dude with a swimming scholarship, they're like, well, this is a saint.
This is our boy.
This is our perfect boy.
You cannot even be mad at them.
You can't do anything.
You can't keep them away from their victim.
Yeah, it's just a fucking joke.
Sorry.
Yeah, no, no, it's OK.
It is very infuriating.
And I think it's one of those things where it is a complicated issue because you're going to have nuance, right?
You're going to have folks that did make a mistake.
Well, yeah.
Title IX investigation is found against them.
Maybe they're expelled for that because it was egregious enough.
But it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to do it again.
You don't want to prevent them from getting an education, getting I don't really think it's that, honestly.
they've learned and grown.
But then there are people where it is a problem, and it is something that they have a tendency to repeat as a pattern.
And how do you differentiate those situations, and how do you protect people in other schools without demonizing an entire group?
Like, it is complicated.
I can appreciate that. - I don't really think it's that, honestly.
- You don't think so?
- Well, I think that it's like anything else.
As she says, it's not a unique challenge.
I think this is, what happens is some people with an agenda come in and focus and put blinders on and focus on one thing, and they do what I said, and I think it was the first episode.
They look at the most extreme possible punishment, combine that, sometimes they combine that with the least possible offense, and then they just assert, I'm not saying that Gertner did that necessarily, but that tends to be the mode of argument.
Oh, people are saying hi to a girl on campus, then they're shot.
And you're like, no, that's not fucking what's happening.
And I think it is really important what you just said there, because it even infects, I say infects, like this mode of thinking, I think even, even when you're not trying to do it, but you're engaged with someone else doing it, it does kind of leak into your own psyche.
Where it's like, you gotta remember, for one thing, we're talking about kids, you know, we're talking about young people who make mistakes, and they may be very bad mistakes, and they may be mistakes that should mean they're expelled, of course, but as she says, that's a small group of people.
Like, even within the subset of people who are found guilty by a, you know, investigation or whatever, it's still a small subset.
You might have people who do something that's not cool, and what you would want, this whole Fight, this whole bullshit, basically.
I don't know what else to call it, but a bullshit.
This whole fucking bullshit really does, I think, real harm because it's forcing everyone into this extreme thinking, even when you don't necessarily want to.
Like, you gotta think about how many things there might be that are genuine, either mistakes or they're not good, but they're things that someone, as you said, could learn from.
It's someone who might be 18.
They could be fucking 17.
I don't know.
It's somebody who I would hope This is always going to be my feeling and people seem to not hold this consistently.
You know, in different contexts, people take different attitudes toward perpetrators.
You could be watching a show, a documentary about reformed felons and how they're getting, and you're just like, you're rooting for them all the way.
And then you see like someone who did a bad, probably like some sort of sex crime when they were 17.
And you're like, kill that person.
You know, like we just seem to have unequal feelings about different things.
And I get it.
Like there's a lot of emotions and things are going to also resonate differently depending on your experience and all that.
And it's all valid.
But I think my consistent way I try to think of it is especially the younger someone is, the more room for growth they might have.
You know, that's going to scale a little bit to where it's like, yeah, I hope that, by the way, the less serious the offense is, you know, it's going to scale as to like what should be done here.
And I'm not fucking in charge of any of this.
So that's, you know, it doesn't matter what I think.
You're not a Title IX coordinator.
But like, I assume that there's someone trying to do their fucking job, and no matter what system you set up, there's going to be someone trying to do their fucking job, and there's going to be someone doing it badly somewhere.
There's going to be some college somewhere in the country where they do a bad job, and then no matter what the system is, that will happen.
And then what these people do is they again they hyper focus on edge case bad outcomes and they use that to slam the entire paradigm that we're in that just completely ignores all the good it's doing, it ignores the fact that any system is going to have tough edge cases, any system is going to have some bad effects, and the more we can Tone down the conversation.
And I mean that in like, in a way that's appropriate.
Obviously, if somebody's just a violent sex criminal in a call, it's like, no, I'm not, you know, of course, like, but for the most part, you know, these are kids.
There's going to be people like, if we could tone it down and take it away from this culture war lens, I bet you that leaves a lot more room for people to take a very human approach that would be beneficial to not only the victim, but the perpetrator going forward with the rest of their lives in the best way they can.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, an interesting stat I came across when I was researching for this was a lot of people are really concerned about false accusations.
And I think it's reasonable to—I would hate if my kid was—if I felt like they were falsely accused.
But statistics show that your son, for example, is more likely to be a victim in college sexual assault than they are to be falsely accused of committing sexual assault.
Or, you know, rape or, you know, the Title IX grouping of stuff.
And so I think, like, keeping that in perspective, too, we wish it were zero, of course, but that's just not how the world works.
And that's also approaching it as though every single time there's a false accusation, someone is just shot by a sniper rifle.
It's like, no, they're doing investigations.
You would have to further constrain it down to, okay, how many false accusations were Somehow the whole administration, whoever does this thing, doesn't believe them and then they expel them and it's the worst possible outcome.
That's just a fractional, you know, yeah, there's going to be a couple.
It's a big fucking country with 240 million people or whatever.
Like, yeah, okay, that's always going to be true.
There's always going to be some bad cases.
And that's really fascinating, Hun, to bring that up that even again, of course, there are male victims, of course, but like it's a lot fewer just statistically.
And to have that context of, oh, no, even if you were just talking about like one of our sons, they are individually much more likely to be the victim of something.
And therefore would I think would want to and we would want them to have all the best tools at their disposal and for the university to have all the best tools at their disposal.
There's way more likelihood that you're in that situation than that you're... I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on just saying that you're falsely accused, because that's whatever.
If you're falsely accused and it goes to the college and the Title IX administrator and they're like, oh, this is bullshit.
That's nothing.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, it sucks.
But that's just someone did a bad thing to you and you had a bad day or month or whatever, which is not great, but that's life.
Like that will happen.
That's not going to follow you on your transcript.
That's not going to follow all this other complaints that you're not going to get expelled.
You're not.
I would say maybe there are some people who get the worst punishment as a result of false accusations.
I would think it's pretty fucking rare.
And you're further subdividing that group down and down and down to where they've been falsely accused and it's gone as bad as it can possibly go.
And by the time you get the number down to that, it's just vanishing.
It's got to be vanished.
Vanishingly small, and you're much more likely to be the victim of something, and you would hope that in that case, you have all the resources you need.
And if you've truly been falsely accused and you've been expelled, you have a heck of a lot of right-wing lawyers that are ready to support you.
People just shoving fistfuls of cash in your face.
You have legal remedies, right?
You can sue your university and go after them.
There was a case of a gay student who ended up being expelled.
And we're not going to get into the case, but essentially what happened was they dropped the lawsuit after the judge found it in favor for them that their university had missed the step of, you know, X, Y, and Z. And the student had said, you know, I just wanted recognition that, you know, they messed up the procedure and I don't need anything else.
So there are, you know, remedies for folks.
Yeah, I'm sure that sucked for that person.
Yeah.
And I can tell people from experience, any time you have to use the legal system at all, that sucks.
Like, that's a bad day.
So that's not great.
It's not.
I think it's just, again, it's the whole theme of all of this is taking a fully contextualized, nuanced view of things.
And nobody is out there, especially not our new hero, Alexandra Brodsky, Who we hopefully will someday meet and interview or something.
I don't know.
I'm going to try.
Yeah, gosh, she seems amazing.
Nobody, including her, thinks that the system we come up with will be perfect.
Nobody fucking thinks that.
There's no point in arguing that.
It's just not true.
This is no no system is going to be perfect.
It's about tradeoffs.
And I could tell you with absolute certainty that the Betsy DeVos system is going to be a fucking disaster and was a disaster for as long as it was in place.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so I think we have one last female law professor that he talks about, and then I want to circle back and kind of dive into some of the claims that he's making in the article, and we can debunk those.
But closing out our fake feminists is Jeannie Suk Gerson.
She's also a Harvard professor, like I mentioned.
These are all Harvard professors.
All three of them?
Yep.
She is not in her 70s, though.
Oh, oh.
She's younger.
Nineties?
Bye.
Janet Halley is a mentor of hers.
So you found a club of people.
Yeah.
Oh, but this diverse group of checks, notes, people who probably meet in the break room at like fucking Jesus, dude.
Yeah.
It's such bad journalism.
I'm sorry.
They're all three at the same instant.
Yes.
All three at the same institution signed all the same letters.
Look, even if I wanted to do your bullshit journalism for you, like, even if I was your editor, Michael Powell, and I was like, yeah, look, man, I'm with you.
I want to do shit journalism.
Like, that's what I'm here to do.
So I put on my pants one leg at a time just like everybody else, I came in here, I packed my lunchbox, I came here to do shit journalism.
That's what I want to do.
But like, don't you think we should find like one person from three schools rather than a clique?
Or clique or however you pronounce it.
I say clique.
Yeah, I think.
Yeah, me too.
But I hear people say clique and it seems more like the word.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Then a little club of people who all go to the same fucking place.
That's just not good journalism.
That's not representative in any fucking way.
Yeah, and I think what I, you know, I'm not going to do a deep dive of her necessarily, but I do want to highlight something in particular.
In 2014, she had major complaints about the approach that schools were taking in discussing law related to rape.
Schools were really wanting to issue God forbid.
warnings or God forbid disclose, you know, that they were going to be touching on stuff that might be of a sensitive nature.
And she was like, this is ridiculous.
Everyone's having to change how they do their curriculum.
And this stuff isn't a lot of law.
Oh, man.
And you know why that's just not OK is because then you'd have to change how you do your curriculum.
Yeah, I know.
OK.
OK, just change how you.
It's like when we found out Pluto is not a planet.
Just fucking change it.
It's that's fine.
She was like, I'm going to have to like retype something.
God damn it.
Yeah.
So this is very closely, just coincidentally, this is us independently doing research that's actually pretty closely related to a current story I'm working on.
Oh.
Yeah, so more on that later.
But this idea that because you are going to be a lawyer, you have to be exposed to any possible traumatic thing and have no warning, like tough breaks.
That's the world.
Well, no, actually, that's not like you.
You don't do like, hey, man, I want to do tax law.
And someone's like, you have to do this right case right now.
And you don't get any warning.
And I'm going to give you all the gory details.
Like, no, that's not how life works like you.
You don't have to be exposed to that stuff if you don't want to be.
And so for students who are prospective, you know, lawyers, giving them like just a heads up is like the minimal possible fucking thing you could do.
Yeah.
And so so she has concerns about, you know, content warnings for for potentially traumatic material.
And then recently there or I guess recently, Two years ago, there was this push about why they don't want to teach about Dred Scott anymore.
They do want to teach— Yeah, so she's behind that, too.
Oh my God.
That was also, I think— Okay, yeah.
Okay, more on this later.
Yeah, we'll do some more Jeannie Suk Gerson in the future, I'm sure.
But just wanted to briefly touch on her.
She's the third feminist that is spoken of in this article.
And so now I want to get into just a couple of the things that Michael... The third paragraph of the article.
Oh, God.
Yeah, I know.
There's been so much, but I think there's some stuff that we can just kind of knock out.
He starts talking about what the Obama administration did with their Dear Colleague letter and some of those things I talked about.
But when you get down a little bit later, it says, perhaps most controversially, Obama officials encouraged universities to appoint a single official who acted as detective, prosecutor, judge and jury.
That's not true.
Yeah, it doesn't really sound right at all.
Yeah, if you read the Dear Colleague letter from 2011, it says at least one.
And so it's going to depend on the resources.
Same year as the Dear Muslimah letter.
What are the odds?
Why is it Dear Colleague?
It's weird.
I know.
It is weird.
I don't know why they call it that.
Thanks, Obama.
That's the one time I've ever made that joke.
I had to wait until it was like long enough after that it wasn't what everybody was saying.
Oh my God.
And I would like to announce, this is, I would like recognition.
That's the first time I think I've ever made that joke.
Like that's, it's only acceptable 20 fucking years after the fact.
So that's just not true at all.
And then he talks about lowering the bar to determine guilt.
Sorry, are you going to tell us what is actually true?
Because this is important.
This is, once again, I will not beat it to absolute death, but I'm going to kick it around a little bit.
This is the New York Times.
This is not an opinion article.
This is fucking reporting.
And it's a dude just saying like, yeah, they made a guy the high inquisitor.
Yeah, and every school is probably set up differently.
I mean, so that's what makes it a little challenging is you have thousands of institutions that all are trying to abide by the same guidance, but it might look different for them, dependent on their resources and, you know, things that are important to their administration.
But it is not a directive that was coming from the Obama administration.
They said there needs to be at least one Title IX coordinator.
And from what I was gathering from the letter, you can divide the responsibilities how you see fit.
So it's not necessarily that the one individual serves in all of these capacities to close out the entire case.
But there is a single point of contact overseeing the Title IX initiative.
Of course there are.
Right.
Because that's how hierarchy and organizational charts work.
I just love that these New York Times fucking reporters need, and this is not a put down to you, because it's me too, somebody who in her off time, of which she has none.
In my closet.
Yeah.
With a blanket on the wall.
Is gonna just quickly fact check this asshole.
God, what?
Oh my God.
He's gone from the New York Times, but he's at the Atlantic.
I know.
That's not that much different.
So then he goes on to say, So that's our preponderance of the evidence.
So that's our preponderance of the evidence.
This is something that a lot of schools were already doing.
And it's probably good.
Yeah.
And so when I was looking through the Dear Colleague letter, the Office of Civil Rights says they specifically spell this out in the Dear Colleague letter.
They say why they want to do preponderance of the evidence standard, why they think that that is appropriate.
They say SCOTUS uses this in civil litigation involving discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Like Title IX, Title VII prohibits discrimination on basis of sex.
So those logically then tie together.
They also use that same standard in how they determine if they're going to terminate the funding of a school through their administrative hearings.
So it's sort of, you know, setting the standard to be equivalent along the entire process of this journey.
If grievance procedures use clear and convincing standards, that means that they are inconsistent with the standard of proof for violations of civil rights laws.
So it wouldn't be equitable.
And that's really what OCR is looking to do is, OK, we have anti-discrimination across a variety of protected classes.
That's interesting.
they being handled in these classes, we need to make sure that we're being equitable on this class as well.
And so that's why they moved to the preponderance of the evidence standard, not because they felt like it.
That's interesting.
So it's more thinking about it from the rights of kind of the victim, I guess, is a It's like comparing it to other civil rights things where it's like, okay, if your civil rights are violated, forget everything else about the conversation.
They're saying in other contexts, your civil rights are violated.
You shouldn't have to prove beyond a reasonable out or that's, I know that's the highest standard, but the second highest standard or whatever.
Clear and conventional.
Yeah.
Which is probably what, fucking two thirds or 75% if you were to think about it as a percentage That it's sort of a violation of your rights to have to meet that burden.
And it's comparing it and saying, why is this different?
Yeah.
Because I mean, at the end of the day, this is not something that, as we've said, it's not going to put somebody in jail.
It's not going to be reflected on their transcript.
But what we do need to consider is the purpose of Title IX was that women were not necessarily afforded the same educational opportunities as men.
This was trying to right that wrong and if there are situations in which women feel like they cannot pursue the same opportunities and education as men.
Then that is a problem.
They are being discriminated against.
And as the Supreme Court ruled through the 80s and 90s, sexual assault, sexual harassment are forms of sex discrimination.
So if that is happening, your civil rights are being infringed upon because you're not able to pursue education as you normally would in a safe environment.
Yeah.
He says, yet some of the strongest female voices in legal circles occupy this hill of dissent.
So he brings in RBG and he says that, you know, she said in speeches and interviews that the Obama-era regulations deny due process in a fair hearing to the accused.
Now, she's not here to have a conversation with.
She was back then, right?
She was back then, but she was old.
So are we running into that same problem?
Yeah, well, I mean, she was like a whole generation older, I feel like.
Yeah, 90-something?
But yeah, did you check on that?
I mean, is that- She did say.
So she was concerned about due process.
Sure.
But I think when we listened to that conversation, or I guess panel discussion with Alexander Brodsky, equating it to the criminal law is problematic.
And I think that's probably what a lot of lawyers, a lot of people who are trained in the legal profession tend to do.
when something that is literally against the law, you know, it's in the penal code for states.
And, you know, it is something that is a crime to not wear that hat and to put on that disciplinary hearing hat.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm not sure about that.
Who knows?
You don't think so?
Because I think that a lot of, similarly, I think if you have an understanding of the law, you might just as likely say, yeah, man, our fucking legal system has stuff like this all the time.
There's a reason we have a name for these different burdens is because they exist and stuff.
The less serious a thing or the less consequences, the less whatever, The lower the standard kind of is usually, broadly speaking.
And I think a good lawyer or even a mediocre lawyer would see, oh, okay, well this, I mean, they're not in a court of law and they're not at all, as a part of this process, they're not going to be charged criminally.
So why would I think that like they should be held to criminal standards if they're not in a criminal law thingy?
I just think we're looking at a selection, a purposefully selected group of Harvard old ladies who used to be feminists.
I don't know that that means that lawyers disproportionately have this conception.
I think they might just as easily be the ones who are like, no, this actually makes sense because this is how this works.
Yeah, but I guess I'm cluing in on RBG in particular.
Yeah, I don't know what to make of that because I don't, like you said, I mean, who wouldn't say they have concerns about due process?
Like, yeah.
No, I have Everyone has concerns about due process.
I don't know the context of that RBG quote, but like, yeah, who knows?
And by the way, again, they could have been focused on or privy to one of the edge cases and that was fresh on their mind.
Who knows?
Yeah.
OK, he also says that per the Dear Colleague letter, the accused cannot cross-examine the accuser.
And what it actually says, it strongly discourages from letting either party directly question or cross-examine each other.
That's traumatic for everybody.
What fucking good would come from that?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So that is pretty misleading there.
The next big thing I want to talk about is further down in the article, and he gets into statistics.
And so he talks about the number of women that are assaulted on college campuses and that itself being a subject of debate.
He says that advocates say one in five female students have experienced assault while in college.
And if you account for a high rate of underreporting, which we all know happens, the Federal Clary Act says that there's only 8,500 rapes that happened within a year.
Rapes?
He says that?
Yes, it says rapes.
So he's conflating rape and assault statistics, and he does it for a third time.
Are you kidding me?
No.
A separate Justice Department study from 2013 found nearly 28,000 students had reported rapes, attempted rapes, and assaults.
So these are three different categories of things that he's putting in one paragraph together.
Come on, dude.
It's very lazy.
Further, the Federal Clery Act is not meant to be the Title IX reporting arm.
It is something distinct.
And even so that the Department of Justice issued a side-by-side PDF in 2014 called Intersection of Title IX and the Clery Act.
And in the purpose of presenting this document, they said, to date, the Department of Education has not identified any specific conflicts between Title IX and the Clery Act.
It says that, you know, there were some concerns of inconsistencies, but it identifies The differences between the two.
What is reported under each one?
Who is reporting under each one?
Under what circumstances are they reporting under each one?
It's just this paragraph in particular drove me nuts because it's just it's wrong on every account.
All right, look, I know I get yelly, but I think it's appropriate here.
This is outrageous.
I'm looking at this paragraph.
You can't help but undersell it because it's that outrageous.
I want to read this paragraph.
I know you basically did, but just to make sure.
Here we go.
Here's Michael fucking idiot pal.
The precise number of women assaulted, as you pointed out, assaulted on college campuses is itself a subject of debate.
Advocates point to federal surveys suggesting that one in five female students have experienced assault while in college which amounts to about 400,000 students.
It's like I'm pulling my fucking phone calculator.
Siri, how many total students and then does them like just a fucking multiplication and gets to 400,000 and then says well and even if You account for a high rate of under-reporting.
The Federal Clary Act, which requires colleges and universities to report crimes on campuses, reported far fewer rapes!
He says it!
Rapes!
with 8,529.
This is so fucking bad.
Yeah, Federal Clary Act is like to campus police.
It's not Title IX.
This is like, okay, we did a survey and we asked like, how many of you have ever been slapped or punched or stabbed or killed?
I don't know why we asked them that, but like we asked them all those things.
And one in five were like, yeah, I've been one of those things.
I've been slapped, I've been poked, I've been stabbed, I've been shot, I've been killed.
And then we look at this other report that said, how many fucking murders were there?
Yeah.
And it's less.
And this fucking great mouse detective.
Michael Powell is like, this is ridiculous.
This is ridiculous.
I didn't know this.
I didn't catch this.
This is, I can't, this is so fucking, this is the New York, why do we do anything?
Let's quit, I'm quitting my job.
I can't, I can't do it.
I can't do it, Hunt.
This is so dumb.
I know.
This is so, if this was a blog or a tweet from an asshole, I'd be like, okay, yeah, he's an idiot.
It's embarrassing.
They're all fact checkers!
Yeah.
Jesus!
Unbelievable.
I probably woke up the kids.
Like, I can't believe this is... If they come in here, I'm going to explain this entire thing to them, by the way.
I can't help it.
Well, good.
They need to know.
Yeah, I don't know if they'll understand.
Fuck!
Okay.
All right.
I'll see how much of that I kept in.
Hopefully all of it.
I guess the last major thing I wanted to call out here with how he's presenting this information.
We've talked about the disingenuous depiction of what the Obama Dear Colleague letter was about.
We talked just about now the statistics.
We talked about who these three liberal feminist law professors are, all from Harvard.
He also talks about what's happening with students that are filing lawsuits against universities if they feel like their due process rights have been violated.
And I just wanted to call this out really quickly before I get into my last, you know, kind of big piece.
He says that, you know, it's according to Professor Casey Johnson at Brooklyn College, a critic of Title IX regulations who monitors such legal challenges.
What I want to call out here is Professor Casey Johnson at Brooklyn College.
is a history professor.
Okay.
And he got really into the 2006 Duke Lacrosse rape case.
And ever since then, he has been very obsessed with this.
Which I think, wasn't that a genuine false accusation case?
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean like the way that it turned out like- This is, I want to be clear, I have not researched this.
My common understanding is that it did in some way turn out to be some sort of injustice that took place.
Yeah, and I don't know that I would necessarily say that it didn't happen because the woman has been pretty insistent that she was sexually assaulted.
Okay, yeah, no, that fits.
That was just, I absorbed that from the ether and obviously it was fucking wrong.
But I will say that procedurally and stuff, like, I think their rights were violated because it was like a criminal case and the DA ended up being disbarred.
Okay, that's serious.
Yeah, no, that's, that's, yeah.
And if it is a criminal case, obviously criminal standards of evidence and proof and all that.
Yeah, different story.
And guess what?
That translates to there was a miscarriage of justice in the United States of America.
Yeah, which happens every day.
And when it's fucking rich white kids, people are like, this, we're gonna die.
The whole country is going to explode.
But when it's, you know, a poor black person every single day, 50 fucking times a day in every single county in the country, Eh.
Might as well be the name of this podcast, actually.
kids, just an aside very quickly. - Might as well be the name of this podcast actually. - Did you see Brock Turner's going by his middle name trying to like keep people from Googling him? - I know this wasn't the case because this is not your personality, but that was like the setup for like a really hacky joke.
- Yeah, totally.
It would be like, yeah, it's actually like fucking, you know, rape Turner.
I don't know.
It'd be some stupid thing like that.
Like the combination of words would make it.
So he's going by it's something that says he's like a sexual assaulter of people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just thought we were talking about sexual assault.
So, um, rich white kids.
You just wanted to tell me that someone was going by their middle name.
Okay.
I would go by double.
I would double it.
I would be like, I'm now Brock, Brock, Turner, Turner.
No, like his double.
He's like, let's say his middle name is Anderson.
I'd be like, my name is now Anderson, Anderson.
Like I'm not even, don't even keep one of them.
Yeah.
It's just fucking Anderson Squared.
Start over.
Some people have that weird name.
Yeah, why are you asking?
Haven't you heard of somebody else?
The drummer for Jimi Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell.
Mitch Mitchell.
Brock Turner, if his middle name was Mitch, he'd be like, yeah, I'm now Mitch Mitchell now.
Just to extra throw him off the scent.
Yeah.
So here's my, you thought the sexual assault, conflating rape and assault and all that stuff.
It's going to be hard to beat that, hun.
It is going to be hard.
That's a high watermark for this episode.
Here we go.
Okay.
Oh boy.
Michael Powell does not talk at all about how Betsy DeVos came to deciding what her changes were going to be.
Her staff collaborated with men's rights activist groups.
Oh my God, really?
There are hundreds of emails.
Ooh, FOIA?
Are we getting FOIA?
Yeah, I wasn't able to track down all the emails.
I've tracked down coverage regarding the emails.
But did somebody do that, I assume?
Yeah.
Hundreds of emails with three major men's rights activist groups.
Oh my God.
So much so that a major funder of one of them got Betsy DeVos' speech in advance of her sharing that she was going to be making these changes to say, would love your thoughts.
And then he responded with some ideas, and the response was, you always have great insight.
Oh my God!
Yeah.
That's like a punchline I would come up with.
What, are you taking notes from the Men's Rights Act?
What?
You are?
Yeah.
Oh, you literally are.
Yeah.
No, this is like real.
This is like your civil rights division being like, hey, David Duke, do you have any notes on this?
That's insane.
That is really insane.
Yeah, when I stumbled across this, I stared at my computer screen for a while because I was like, what?
No!
And this was something that, you know, had a little bit of press coverage.
Certainly not enough, in my opinion.
No.
Yeah.
And certainly Michael Powell should have included this in his article if he did.
You mean Michael Powell, the New York Times journalist, didn't include some, not just like important context, but like fucking game-changing context that goes against his whole fucking asshole shtick?
He didn't include that in his article?
Unreal!
Like I want to warn these quote-unquote feminist legal scholars and be like, hey, just so you know, Did you see this?
And do you really feel like you're still on the same side?
That's how bad this is.
You're going to Christina Hoff Summers and be like, hey, I know you fucking suck so bad.
God, you suck.
But like, do you suck this bad?
Yeah.
If I show you this fact, like, do you still suck?
And she's like, yeah, probably.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just shocking to me.
No, it is.
I'm actually mad right now.
Not just at, well, all of it.
I mean, it's all of it, but to your point, hon, I've never heard of this.
I'm a pretty tuned in, especially around this time, quite tuned into politics person.
I have no fucking memory of this.
To the point where, like, I want to do more, like, I want to do a follow up on it.
Like, I want to go find the emails.
I'm sure someone FOIA'd them.
I want to find who the fuck she was talking to.
And then here's the thing that I've learned.
Again, more patterns I'm identifying.
We're going to get better and better at this as we go.
One pattern that I'm finding is a good thing to do is, as you already are doing, go find every person that she talked to and look up not just what they say, you know, when they're putting their Sunday best on.
Yeah.
When Michael Powell's interviewing him or some shit.
Go find what they say any other time, because you'll have people, and this is kind of other research I'm doing, take the turf examples is recently what I've been looking into.
You have people who are like, no, no, I respect trans people.
I just think that sports are a question that we should have.
And then a bunch of people are like, well, yeah, OK.
Yeah.
And then they're like, hold on one sec.
I'm going to tweet something.
Trans people don't exist!
Any other thing, and I was sparing people, the vitriolic hatred is way worse than that.
Any other place, they'll tweet the worst anti-trans stuff, like truly disgusting anti-trans stuff.
Not just like, ideologically I disagree with trans people, like genuinely disgusting trans insults.
But because they don't do it literally in the interview, where some asshole like Michael Powell wants to give them the shiniest image they can, That's what we need to also check with all these people because you know that will be the case.
There will be somebody who did some major interview or they publicly put forth the idea that like, oh, yeah, I just don't.
I'm worried about male suicide rate.
And you're like, well, yeah, OK, me too.
That's why wouldn't you be worried about that?
And then go two feet to your left and they're like there's a sign that says like all women should be killed.
You know, it's just the worst shit.
Super red pill.
Yeah.
And anyone who's anywhere near this, in a reporting sense, who doesn't report the full thing, like, not just the things they say when they want to put on a good face, a good image, but also all the other stuff that they say.
That's not hard to find.
It's not hard to find.
If you don't report all of that, you're a fucking hack, and you're doing a bad job, to say the least.
At best, you're a fucking hack doing a bad job.
At worst, or not even worst, at realistic, you're an ideological hack trying to astroturf some anti-progressive bullshit in the country.
I don't know what.
You have an agenda, and it's not good.
Yep.
So this was his kickoff article with the beat that he had at the New York Times.
What a start!
What a start.
Jesus.
You know what's interesting?
I'll close it out by saying this.
I think everyone was expecting to get updated Title IX.
guidance from the Biden administration before the school year started, but they didn't.
It was delayed to October 2023.
Wait, are you saying we're still in the fucking Trump rule?
No, we're still into the Trump rules.
Yeah.
No, they did.
I thought I saw they did some of it.
They repealed pieces of it, but not all of it.
So they're doing a big revision.
So that'll come out October 2023.
But very recently, California just ruled that fair proceedings do not require the opportunity to cross-examine.
So now there's some precedent happening in the legal circles regarding like what a fair proceeding is.
So I think there's probably going to be more to come.
I'm going to be watching these feminist legal scholars over the next few months to see their takes as this stuff comes out.
And maybe we'll have cause for another one.
But this is our Michael Powell deep dive anyway.
Well, I'm just, I'm fucking blown away.
I know it's the format of the show and people who know me as a person know I don't, I don't, I can't script anything.
I like genuine interaction.
I don't like rehearsed stuff.
I don't like scripted stuff.
But like, fuck, you could have warned me.
No, not really.
I'm totally joking.
It was so hard to keep this to myself.
When I stumbled on it, all I wanted to do was tell you.
This is unreal.
Like, this is so... Like, I would expect Phoebe, when she's in sixth grade, to do better journalism than this.
Yeah.
Like, fifth grade, like, okay, you turned into Michael Powell.
Don't worry, kiddo, you're young.
Everybody, when they're in fifth grade, turns into a steaming pile of fucking shit that's the same as a Michael Powell article.
Sixth grade, though, we better, you better grow out of that.
I'm sorry.
You know, you better be able to actually, I don't know, fucking think critically about fucking anything.
This is unbelievable.
Sorry, I'm going to get mad again.
I won't be able to relax.
So we're going to call it here.
Truly, that was excellent, hon.
Seriously, great work.
I'm so mad.
I'm sorry I made you mad.
Michael Powell made you mad.
Absolutely.
And the New York Times.
It's not just him.
I know.
I know that asshole is going to exist in the world.
That's what bothers me most is the New York Times.
They have fact checkers.
They have millions of dollars.
They may be billions.
I don't remember, but they're a giant company.
They have resources to dwarf our resources.
So many times it's a mathematical, negligible fucking thing.
And it takes two seconds.
Just reading that paragraph, like honestly, just reading it once.
I know.
With the stats would be like, well, this is stupid.
Like, this doesn't make sense.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm going to try to relax.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Please support the show patreon.com slash where there's woke.
Apparently Lydia ought to be making, I don't know, a billion dollars because that's the level of journalism she's doing apparently here.
So please support the show.
We really appreciate you.
And Lydia, great job.
This was the best.
Thank you.
Yeah, I just want to say, you know, we're having a great time.
I'm really enjoying digging into this stuff and seeing what I can find out and trying to spot bad actors when we can see them, but also being reasonable in it, too.
You know, we don't want to be sensationalist in our coverage either.
Yeah, wherever you guys can support us is great and looking forward to the next one.
Well, absolutely.
I get certainly latched on to and I have a high emotional response to how outrageously stupid stuff is.
But it's important to note, I think it's really important to say, this is also a very important human issue for a lot of students, a lot of kids at universities who God knows what the bad stories are that we may or may not hear about because of the time that this policy was in effect.
It's a very serious, real human issue.
You know, it's a crazy thing, but it's actually way fucking better when we have Democrats in office than when we have Republicans.
It's crazy.
I know it's crazy.
I know your fucking socialist podcast that makes a billion dollars a month told you otherwise, but no, it's actually better when Democrats are in power for millions of reasons that you're not able to keep, that I'm not able to keep in my head at all times.
And this is one of them.
This is massive.
This is mad.
What difference might this make in someone's life?
Who is the victim of something.
And unfortunately, they happen to be of the graduating class of fucking, I don't know, 2020 or whatever.
And they were victimized in the wrong year.
And so therefore, they got no justice.
Who knows what happened to them?
Who knows what their mental health outcomes were?
These are very real things.
Or if they like dropped out of their program specifically because it was a, you know, another student in the program.
We know that happens.
We know that happens and it sucks.
And that's why we're doing this.
I mean, this is an older story, but like, it's still relevant.
Like you said, the new guidelines are not in effect yet.
I mean, I do think Biden reversed some of it, but it's just item number 7 billion of things that when an evil Nazi raccoon goes and ruins your government, it takes a while to fucking clean it up a little bit.
In the same way that it takes a long time to debunk inaccurate information.
I know.
We've done, I don't know, fucking two, three hours on this and Michael Powell probably wrote this steaming turd in like 15 minutes.
Yeah.
It's such an easy formula.
I'll find some assholes who are not really feminists and call them some feminists.
Check.
Done.
Bam.
Cash my check.
My New York Times journalism check.
All right.
Thanks so much for listening.
Thanks, Lydia.
Great job.
Fuck Michael Powell.
Fuck the New York Times for this bad oversight.
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