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: The Harvard Law Review retaliated against a student for allegedly leaking documents to yours truly—and demanded he request their destruction in the midst of three federal probes.
Now the journal is being accused of illegally interfering with a government investigation.🧵
The Justice Department told Harvard on May 13 it was investigating reports of race discrimination at the journal. A week later, the law review instructed a student who was cooperating with the DOJ investigation, Daniel Wasserman, to round up the documents he’d allegedly shared.
The journal told Wasserman to "[r]equest that any parties with whom you have shared Confidential Materials … delete or return them to The Review."
NEW: The Harvard Law Review put out a "factsheet" last week claiming the journal complies with Supreme Court precedent and does not select editors based on race.
We've obtained a trove of new evidence that casts doubt on both claims.🧵
The factsheet quotes from what it claims is the current policy for editor selection, which cites "Supreme Court guidance" and bars the consideration of race.
But when we showed this policy to three current and former editors at the journal, none of them were familiar with it.
The journal claimed the new policy had been adopted "this year." But as recently as May 4, HLR's online application packet said that the journal considers "all available information," including "racial or ethnic identity," to select editors from "a diverse set of backgrounds."
NEW: 44 of the nation’s largest law firms were hit with a discrimination complaint on Monday alleging that they use an outside staffing agency to hire interns based on race.
These are some of the same firms that pledged to end DEI hiring as part of their deals with Trump.🧵
The complaint, filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, targets Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), a nonprofit that places minority students at elite firms the summer before their first year of law school.
The paid internship often leads to a return offer the following summers, giving recipients an extraordinary leg up on their white peers.
EXCLUSIVE: The EEOC is investigating Harvard's faculty hiring practices after the school boasted online that it had increased the number of ‘women, non-binary, and/or people of color' on faculty—and decreased the number of white men.
The probe is based on Harvard's own data.🧵
The EEOC is sixth federal agency to launch a probe of Harvard. The investigation is based on materials from the school's website—many of them now deleted—in which Harvard bragged about increasing the number of "women, non-binary, and/or people of color" on faculty.
The largest increase was in the share of non-white tenure-track faculty, which rose by 37 percent between 2013 and 2023.
The majority of those new hires, Harvard noted in a 2023 report, had been made in the past year.
NEW: UCLA medical school was sued today for discriminating against whites and Asians in admissions.
The lawsuit is based on my reporting from last year. It was filed by Students for Fair Admissions—the same group that got affirmative action outlawed nationwide.🧵
SFFA scored a landmark victory against Harvard University in 2023 when the Supreme Court ruled that racial preferences were unconstitutional. Now the group’s president, Edward Blum, is framing the UCLA lawsuit as a sequel to the Harvard case.
"This lawsuit sends an important message to every institution of higher education: Any school and administrator that uses race and racial proxies in admissions in defiance of the Supreme Court's ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard will be sued," Blum said.
NEW: In March, the Trump administration said it would investigate whether UCLA medical school's admissions office discriminates based on race.
Two weeks later, the med school promised to do just that, telling students in writing that it would pick "BIPOC" admissions officers.🧵
On April 8, the school circulated a memo that outlined "guiding principles for student representation on the admissions committee," which includes 3rd and 4th year students. Those guidelines require the committee to consider race when picking student admissions officers.
"The Chairs of the [admissions committee] will review all submitted recommendations to ensure representation from those who identify as BIPOC and LGBTQ+," the memo reads, according to a screenshot obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.