How bad are hate speech laws in the UK? Saying "it's OK to be white" can result in a harsher sentence than child pornography.
@abigailandwords found numerous cases in which UK judges jailed thought criminals while letting actual criminals off the hook.
The list is shocking.🧵
Judge Benedict Kelleher sentenced a man to 18 months in prison for chanting "who the fuck is Allah?" He gave a lighter sentence to a man who physically assaulted a police officer.
Judge John Temperley gave a man 12 weeks in prison for a racist Facebook post. He did not impose any prison time on a man with 46 indecent images of children.
An incendiary Facebook comment earned a man 20 months in prison, in part because his lack of privacy setting was taken as evidence of incitement.
But 8,000 images of child porn? That will only get you a six month sentence from Judge Kearl.
Judge Rupert Lowe sentenced a man to nine months in jail for shouting racist comments at a football player. Lowe gave no jail time to a doctor who ejaculated into a cup of coffee and gave the cup to a woman.
NEW: As the Trump administration investigates the Harvard Law Review over the journal’s race-based policies, the law review itself will be conducting its own investigation—not into the documents showing patent discrimination, but into who leaked those documents to yours truly.🧵
The journal’s top editors asked members of the law review last week to come forward with any information that might help identify the leaker, writing, "The information contained in the article should not have been shared."
"We are looking into the matter," the editors said Friday in an email. "Our inboxes and offices are open to anyone with information about these recent events. We will update you with developments."
EXCLUSIVE: The Trump administration just launched multiple probes of Harvard University and the Harvard Law Review, citing allegations that the flagship law journal discriminates based on race.
The Education Department and HHS will each conduct separate investigations.🧵
The probes come after the Free Beacon published extensive evidence of race discrimination at the nation’s top law review, both in the selection of articles and editors.
The probes—to be conducted by each agency’s office for civil rights—come days after former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell vowed to sue Harvard over the journal’s policies, which include evaluating articles based on the racial diversity of their citations.
NEW: The Harvard Law Review has made DEI the "first priority" of its admissions process. It routinely kills or advances pieces based on the author's race. It even vets articles for racially diverse citations.
And guess what? Editors at the top journal put all this in writing.🧵
We obtained more than four years of documents from the law review, including article evaluations, training materials, and data on the race and gender of journal authors. They reveal a pattern of pervasive race discrimination that could plunge Harvard into even deeper crisis.
Just over half of journal editors are admitted solely based on academic performance. The rest are chosen by a "holistic review committee" that has made the inclusion of "underrepresented groups"—defined to include race—its "first priority," per a resolution passed in 2021.
NEW: NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab laid off 900 workers due to budget cuts. But it refuses to fire its top DEI officer, Neela Rajendra, who has said that "extreme deadlines" are an obstacle to "inclusion."
The lab changed her title but kept many of her duties the same.🧵
Rajendra said on a 2022 podcast that that "some people might be left behind" by the "super fast pace" of tight deadlines. That comment came two years before a pair of astronauts were stranded on the International Space Station for nine months due to a faulty propulsion system.
In 2024, the lab laid off 900 workers—or 13% of its staff—amid budget cuts due to delays on its Mars Sample Return program.
Rajendra survived the cull, however. And even after Trump's executive order banning DEI in the federal government, the lab kept her around.
NEW: Trump's Equal Employment Opportunity Commision (EEOC) sent letters to 20 white shoe law firms today requesting information about their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, arguing that many of the firms' practices appear to violate civil rights law.🧵
The letters ask the firms to provide detailed information about their diversity fellowship programs—some of which explicitly limit eligibility based on race—and to explain how the firms achieved rapid changes in their demographic makeup without recourse to race discrimination.
Recipients of the EEOC's letters include Latham & Watkins, WilmerHale, Skadden Arps, Goodwin Procter, Hogan Lovells, Kirkland & Ellis, and White & Case. Two of the firms, Perkins Coie and Morrison & Foerster, were sued over their minority-only fellowships in 2023.
NEW: A gender studies professor who says "white empiricism" undermines Einstein’s theory of relativity sits on a top advisory panel at the Energy Department.
Meet Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who claims string theory "failed to succeed" because the field has too many white men.🧵
Prescod-Weinstein, a professor of physics and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire, was appointed to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) under the Biden administration in 2024.
The panel advises the DOE on research and funding priorities for particle physics, giving it significant say over which projects receive federal support.
Prescod-Weinstein will remain on HEPAP until 2027 unless the Trump administration takes action to remove her.