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Aug 9 22 tweets 5 min read Read on X
NEW: Tim Walz signed into law a bill that established racial quotas throughout the state's health department, from a requirement that two members of a pregnancy task force be "Black or African American" to rules governing the ethnic composition of a "health equity" council.🧵 Image
The legislation, which Walz signed last May, created race-based membership requirements for five separate committees while setting up additional race-conscious programs. Legal experts said the quotas were patently unconstitutional and would be easy pickings for a plaintiff.
"Any time the government uses a racial classification without a compelling state interest, that is unconstitutional," said Adam Mortara, the lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Some of the requirements Walz signed into law are highly granular. The pregnancy council, for example, must include "two members who identify as Native American" and two OTHER members who are "Tribal representatives appointed by the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council." Image
Other councils have quotas for Hispanics, Asian Americans, "LGBTQIA+" people, and the disabled.

It is not clear whether white people who "identify as" minorities are eligible for the positions. Walz and the Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Image
The quotas form a stark contrast with the image of an avuncular Midwestern moderate that Walz and his allies have sought to project since his rollout in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described Walz as a "heartland-of-America Democrat" with politics "right down the middle." Others have noted that Walz, a former football coach who served in Congress from 2007 to 2019, had a voting record to the right of many House Democrats.
But his record as governor of Minnesota has been far more progressive. Walz signed laws allowing abortion through the end of pregnancy, expanding health insurance to illegal immigrants, and preventing the extradition of children who travel to the state seeking gender surgery.
After George Floyd's death at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, the state also became ground zero for the racial unrest of 2020 and the wave of race-conscious initiatives that followed it—including a triage system that rationed COVID drugs based on race.
Walz presided over that system, which prioritized "BIPOC" individuals for scarce therapies and gave race more weight than certain risk factors, as health systems across the country were under strain due to a new and highly contagious variant of the virus.
The scheme was scrapped in January 2022 amid moral outrage and legal threats.

Since then, Walz has dutifully rubber-stamped racial policies emanating from his state's activist class, ranging from the legally dubious to the downright bizarre.
In 2023, for example, Walz signed a law updating the Minnesota Human Rights Act to ban discrimination based on "hair texture" and other "traits associated with race," including "hair styles such as braids, locs, and twists." Image
Then came a law mandating quotas on the Community Solutions Advisory Council, the Health Equity Advisory and Leadership Council, the Equitable Health Care Task Force, a task force on pregnancy and substance abuse, and the African American Health State Advisory Council
The quotas appear to have created some hiring difficulties: An August job posting said the health equity council was seeking "an additional three members to meet statutory requirements," which include the "representation" of nearly every protected class in the United States. Image
"To ensure the council's diversity," the post read, the health department "seeks applicants who identify as LGBTQ, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and/or as having a disability."
A separate "Equitable Health Care Task Force" has identical criteria, while a "health equity" grant program must target counties with "a higher proportion of Black or African American, nonwhite Latino(a), LGBTQIA+, and disability communities," according to the 2023 statute. Image
"That's clearly illegal," said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, a conservative public interest law firm. "The law prohibits states from intentionally discriminating."
The Community Solutions Advisory Council, which doles out "healthy child development" grants, must include three "Black Minnesotans of African heritage," three Latinos, three Asians, and three Native Americans. Image
Within each group of three, one member must be a parent with a child under age eight. Other seats on the committee are earmarked for people with "expertise in racial equity" and "advocacy on behalf of communities of color and Indigenous communities."
The African American Health State Advisory Council must include both "African American individuals who provide and receive health care services" and "African American secondary or college students." Image
And a "Long COVID" grant program must prioritize groups "disproportionately impacted" by the disease, including "African Americans, African immigrants, American Indians, Asian American-Pacific Islanders, Latino(a) communities, [and] LGBTQ+ communities." Image
Grant recipients, the law adds, "may also address intersectionality within the groups."

Read the full story here: freebeacon.com/democrats/as-m…

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More from @aaronsibarium

Aug 6
NEW: Scores of doctors are now registering their patients to vote—including suicidal and psychotic patients at a PA mental hospital.

Helping them is Vot-ER, a nonprofit founded by a Kamala Harris staffer that is targeting traditional Dem voting blocs.🧵
freebeacon.com/elections/meet…
Many patients at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute's inpatient clinic cannot complete "the activities of daily living" or are "suicidal, aggressive, or dangerous to themselves or others."

Since 2020, the hospital has been helping those patients vote.
Located in a swing state that could decide the 2024 election, the hospital asks psychiatric inpatients, regardless of diagnosis, if they would be interested in "voter registration tools" that let them check their nearest polling station and register to vote online.
Read 58 tweets
Jul 25
NEW: Princeton is on the verge of promoting a professor who participated in the occupation of a campus building that disrupted university operations and led to more than a dozen arrests.🧵

freebeacon.com/campus/princet…
Princeton has recommended that the classics scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who along with 13 anti-Israel student protesters stormed Princeton’s historic Clio Hall in April, be promoted from associate to full professor, pending the approval of the university’s board of trustees.
The board is all but certain to approve the promotion, which would make Peralta eligible for deanships and other leadership roles, given that the group nearly always rubber stamps the university's appointments, professors familiar with the matter said.
Read 16 tweets
Jul 23
NEW: The World Professional Association for Transgender Health asserted that gender surgeries and hormones were "medically necessary" so that insurance companies would pay for them, letting concerns about the treatments' affordability dictate claims about their effectiveness.🧵 Image
WPATH's standards of care were updated in 2022 to include language about the medical necessity of hormones and surgeries because, as one WPATH official wrote in an email, the group was frustrated with America's "obtuse and unhealthy system of healthcare 'coverage.'"
Most private insurance plans and state Medicaid policies exclude procedures deemed elective or cosmetic. That is why, in 2016, WPATH issued a statement describing gender treatments as "medically necessary" and urging U.S. insurers to cover them.
Read 46 tweets
Jul 3
NEW: Top Columbia officials conceded in private that their rules for managing student protests "don't work," according to new text messages released this week by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

They also mocked one of their colleagues as a “clown.”🧵
The messages, sent during a May 31 panel on Jewish life, reference the cards that Columbia administrators, or "delegates," have been handing out to protesters since last year in an effort to break up unauthorized gatherings.
The cards instruct recipients to show their student IDs and notify them of possible sanctions, including a semester's suspension, if they don't pack up and leave.
Read 16 tweets
Jul 2
NEW: The deans at the center of the Columbia texting scandal said Jewish students were "coming from a place of privilege" and suggested they have more institutional support than their peers because of their supposed wealth, according to new messages reviewed by the Beacon.🧵
Image
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The messages, obtained by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and released on Tuesday, show that three of the deans—Susan Chang-Kim, Matthew Patashnick, and Cristen Kromm—engaged in a more extensive pattern of disparagement than has been previously reported.
"I’m going to throw up," Chang-Kim, Columbia’s vice dean and chief administrative officer, wrote to her colleagues roughly an hour into the panel. freebeacon.com/campus/amazing…
Read 11 tweets
Jun 21
NEW: The dean of Columbia College, Josef Sorett, mocked Columbia’s top Hillel official in a new text message obtained by the Beacon, further implicating him in the scandal that’s caused three of his colleagues to be placed on leave.

“LMAO,” Sorett said of the rabbi’s remarks.🧵 Image
Sorett’s text came in response to a sarcastic message from his colleague, Columbia’s vice dean and chief administrative officer Susan Chang-Kim, who said of Columbia’s Hillel director, Brian Cohen, "He is our hero."
The exchange, according to the person who photographed Chang-Kim’s cell phone during the May 31 panel on anti-Semitism, came as Cohen told a concerned parent that his "soul has been broken" by the protests on Columbia’s campus, which included calls to murder Jewish students.
Read 8 tweets

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