Friday, September 21, 2018

Yale Law Dean: Reports that Professor Groomed Female Clerks for Kavanaugh 'Of Enormous Concern'


By Robert Wenzel

It's getting crazy out there.

As I have already noted, Brett Kavanaugh would be bad news on the Supreme Court so I don't care what happens to him. That said, anyone that would replace him would be just as bad if not worse.

For libertarians, the Kavanaugh-Christine Blasey Ford "he said-she said" controversy is just a vicious cage match between two front people for behind the scenes groups of power hungry creeps, so grab the popcorn. There is nothing for us to do other than
enjoy the entertainment and there is plenty of that.

The latest news comes via NBC, under the headline Yale Law Dean: Reports that Professor Groomed Female Clerks for Kavanaugh 'Of Enormous Concern,' "[T]the dean of Yale Law School on Thursday responded to reports that a prominent professor at the school had advised students seeking judicial clerkships with Brett Kavanaugh on their physical looks, saying the reported allegations of faculty misconduct are 'of enormous concern' and calling on anyone affected to come forward."

The "prominent professor" turns out to be Amy Chua, a professor at the law school, who is most widely known as the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

From NBC:
[Chua] would advise students on their physical appearance if they wanted to seek a clerkship for Kavanaugh. Specifically, Chua would help potential applicants to have a "model-like" appearance...

According to reports, Jed Rubenfeld, who is also a professor at Law School and Chua's husband, also once told a student seeking a clerkship that Kavanaugh "hires women with a certain look."

"He did not say what the look was and I did not ask," the student said, according to The Guardian.
Meanwhile, Ed Whelan, president of The Ethics and Policy Center and a Kavanaugh supporter, has launched a series of tweets, that include floor plans of a house, etc, suggesting that Christine Blasey Ford might have been too drunk to know who attacked her and that it was not Kavanaugh but rather a case of mistaken identity.

The head of the ethics center then did the seriously unethical and with nothing but a sketchy
theory named a new suspect,  Chris Garrett, a Georgetown Prep classmate, friend, and football teammate of Kavanaugh.

Whelan then posted these side by side yearbook pictures of Garrett and Kavanaugh from the year of the alleged attack.




Ford has responded to Whelan's theory. “I knew them both, and socialized with” them, Ford said, adding that she had once visited Garrett in the hospital. “There is zero chance that I would confuse them.”

 Meanwhile, the Yale student newspaper, Yale News, paints the general atmosphere of the student organizations that Kavanaugh belonged to when he was a student at Yale as Animal House in style, with an emphasis on Animal:
A photograph that appeared in the Yale Daily News on Jan. 18, 1985, shows Kavanaugh’s fraternity brothers waving a flag woven from women’s underwear as part of a procession of DKE  [the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity] initiates marching across Yale’s campus...

In the 1985 photo, the DKE pledges — “fondly known as ‘buttholes,’” according to the caption — brandish a flag made of underwear and brasiers as they march outside Woodbridge Hall, Yale’s central administrative building. At the time, Bartlett Giamatti, the University’s president, was a former DKE brother himself...

In a letter to the editor published in the News three days later, a Yale student, Rachel Eisler ’86, charged that DKE’s pledge antics “demean women.” She wrote that she approached one of the pledges carrying the flag to ask whether any briefs or jockstraps were affixed to the pole. “Well, I didn’t make it,” the pledge responded, according to the letter. He then said he doubted that any “guys’ stuff” would be woven into the flag.

“‘But hey,’” he told the female student, according to the letter. “‘Your panties might be here!”

Steve Gallo ’88, a member of DKE’s 1985 pledge class, said on Wednesday that the flag “was just somebody’s stupid idea” and that the underwear was “obtained consensually.”...

But in a comment on a post in the YaleWomen Facebook page, Jennifer Lew ’87, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s, recalled that DKE brothers would ransack women’s rooms while they were in class to collect undergarments. Another alumnus, Julie Klein ’87, described DKE as an “animal house.”

In addition to DKE, Kavanaugh also belonged to Truth and Courage, one of Yale’s secret societies for seniors. Among some students, the all-male club, which was popular with athletes, was known by the nickname “Tit and Clit.”

Truth and Courage fizzled out of existence in the early 2010s. But since Kavanaugh’s graduation in 1987, DKE’s reputation for mistreating women at Yale has only grown. Yale banned DKE from campus for five years in 2011 after videos circulated of fraternity recruits chanting “no means yes, yes means anal” in front of the University’s Women’s Center....

Kavanaugh does not appear to have spoken publicly about his time in DKE. But in a speech to the Yale Law School Federalist Society in 2014, he recounted “falling out of [a] bus onto the front steps of the Yale Law School at about 4:45 a.m.” after a night of bar-hopping in Boston, according to a partial transcript of the speech published in Mother Jones.
And so at this early stage in the cage match, I have the social justice warriors ahead. With elitist establishment frat boy, college hijinks possibly ruined forever (unless the frat boys prove me wrong 😉).

But sadly, some libertarians may cheer on one group or the other here. This is wrong, both groups are evil here. It is a battle for power over us, we may laugh through our tears but this is about evil people battling to be in control of taking away more of our liberty.

There is some psychic gain in seeing some of these bastards roasted in public but this is not how we win the battle for freedom. This is a sideshow.

The battle is won by advancing the intellectual observation that liberty is at the core of civility and the advancement of man.

When our bowl of popcorn is done, when we finish laughing at a show trial about an event that happened, or didn't happen, some 30 plus years ago, we must do more at the level of the intellectual liberty battle, much more.


Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of
EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty.  More about Wenzel here. 






UPDATE

Whelan has apologized:

4 comments:

  1. Elitist children running wild at their fraternities/sororities in the mid 80s? Shocking. I'm sure NOBODY thought that stuff was happening... Seriously Wenzel, do you think we would be eating this much delicious popcorn if Hillary had won? It would have been business as usual.

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    1. Bob, Great work at not getting lost in the entertaining diversions, instead emphasizing the target: freedom from the predacious State.

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  2. But what did Ms. Chua say?

    In an emailed statement to NBC News, Chua said: "For the more than 10 years I've known him, Judge Kavanaugh’s first and only litmus test in hiring has been excellence. He hires only the most qualified clerks, and they have been diverse as well as exceptionally talented and capable.

    "There is good reason so many of them have gone on to Supreme Court clerkships; he only hires those who are extraordinarily qualified. As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, he has also been an exceptional mentor to his female clerks and a champion of their careers. Among my proudest moments as a parent was the day I learned our daughter would join those ranks."


    This is all the fault of the voters. Obama's massive spying operation does not register with them in the slightest nor does Kavanaugh's support for it as constitutional which is an outrage.

    BTW, in a federal lawsuit, there is a liberal policy of allowing amendment of claims and defenses if done timely so that discovery can occur before trial. A party sitting on a defense or claim for months would not be allowed to spring it at trial. Or like this, during closing argument. Shouldn't these even more important proceedings be subject to some rules and ethics? Lying is permissible in politics. With contracts, lying is called fraud and is forbidden. Who wants to claim that political solutions work better than contractual ones?

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