The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | How This Group Is Stopping Woke Racism Through Legal Action

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

“The remedy for racism never is more racism.” That’s the guiding principle behind a new initiative called the Equal Protection Project.  Through education, investigation, and litigation, the Equal Protection Project is working to expose instances of racism in America, such as a school district in Rhode Island that announced it was holding an event for non-white educators only. "I mean, racism's been around in various forms for a long time, but now it's done in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion," says Bill Jacobson, founder and publisher of LegalInsurrection.com. That's a reference to the likes of Ibram X. Kendi, who in his book “How to Be an Antiracist” insists, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Jacobson announced the launch of the Equal Protection Project on the Fox News Channel "Tucker Carlson Tonight" program on Thursday night.  Jacobson joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to explain how the Equal Protection Project is working to promote the “fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity.” Find out more about the Equal Protection Project here: https://equalprotect.org/ Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, February 27th. I'm Virginia Allen. The remedy for racism is never more racism. That is the guiding principle behind a new initiative called the Equal Protection Project. Through education, investigation, and litigation, the new project is working to expose instances of racism in America, such as a school district in Rhode Island, who announced they would hold an Educators of Color meetup. Bill Jacobson, founder and publisher of legal insurrection, is behind this new initiative, and he joins the show today to explain how the Equal Protection Project is working to promote the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity. Stay tuned for our conversation after this.

For over 35 years, the Heritage Foundation Job Bank has been helping conservatives at all professional levels find employment in key positions in Washington, D.E. and across the country. We can help you connect with positions in the administration on Capitol Hill, in public policy organizations, and in the private sector. To learn more about the Heritage Foundation Job Bank, go to heritage.org slash job dash bank. We are joined today by Bill Jacobson, a Cornell law professor and the founder and publisher of legal insurrection. Professor Jacobson, welcome back to the show.

Thank you for having me back. It's been a while and I appreciate it. Well, this is pretty exciting because today we are talking about a new project that legal insurrection has just rolled out with the aim of fighting equity discrimination. And it's called the Equal Protection Project. Professor, would you just take a minute to explain what exactly the mission of this project is? Equal Protection Project is now Legal Insurrection Foundation's third project. Our first one is the Legal Insurrection website, which is how most people know us. The second project, which we rolled out two years ago, is Critical Race.org, which has interactive maps in a database of critical race training at all levels of education.

But the new one we just rolled out is the Equal Protection Project, which is equalprotect.org. And the mission there is really to fight what I think of as the newest form of racism. I mean, racism's been around in various forms for a long time. But now it's done in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And probably the best way to illustrate what we're dealing with here is our first project at the Equal Protection Project is contesting, legally contesting, a new teacher hiring incentive program at the Providence, Rhode Island School District, which is the largest in the state, where teachers, newly hired teachers can get student loans forgiven, but only if they are non-white. So white teachers cannot

apply for that program. And we're contesting that. And that's what I mean by the newest form of racism. There are unfortunately a fair number of people in the various DEI industry components who think that discriminating against white people is okay that it's not as bad as discriminating against non-white people. And we reject that. So our mission statement is that there is no good form of racism and that the answer to either past or present racism is not more racism. And that's what our mission is to fight against what I refer to as equity discrimination. Was there a specific moment when you realized we need the Equal Protection Project? What was that launch into, yes, this is something that we have to do?

Well, a lot of it has to do with our Critical Race.org website, which is mostly database-driven. We do have some resources, but it's mostly a resource for people. And we get a lot of tips there. And we've been for two years now getting tips about this sort of discrimination that's going on throughout education, corporations, and government. And we never were able to act on them. We could report on them, but we couldn't act on them. And then I think it was probably the Providence, Rhode Island's school district situation that said, we've got to do something. I mean, if public school districts are openly and unabashedly discriminating on the basis of race

and using diversity, equity, and inclusion as the justification for it, and if government officials are actually participating in it, the Providence School District has been taken over by the state of Rhode Island. So this is essentially the state of Rhode Island discriminating that we can no longer just report on it. We can no longer just document it. that we need to take that next step. So I think Providence, and there's a whole multitude of problems, race discrimination problems in the Providence School District,

but that I think was the triggering moment last fall when we said we just can't sit back anymore. We have to do something. And that gave rise to Equal Protection Project and EqualProtect.org. Yeah. Well, and like you say, I mean, you all for a long time have been shining a light on these issues. You've been reporting on it,

and that still is part of that mission that you want to be educating people just on what is happening, but you're taking it a step further with this litigation aspect, which you've touched on. But talk about that a little bit more. I mean, what is ahead for you all in relation to taking legal action and filing lawsuits? Well, legal action can be a lot of different things other than filing lawsuits. Certainly, that's sometime necessary. But I understand that I have been in private practice as a litigator before I joined Cornell for 22 years, how many. messy, that process is. But sometimes you have to do it. So it could be, we're still going to shine a light.

It's sometimes publicity alone is enough to stop a practice. Sometimes it's sending a warning letter. So getting back to the Providence School District, we got a tip from somebody because now teachers in the system who were afraid to speak out, know to reach out to us that there was going to be an educator of color meetup, and that was organized by the district. This is not just people getting together on their own. So an official government function, which was segregated, it was only open to non-whites, the sign-up form you had to list your race or ethnicity, and being white wasn't one of the ones you could list, and it was being held at an event space in Cranston, Rhode Island. And so we wrote to the event space. And we said, calling to your attention, because you probably don't know, you just rented

space to the district. This is a segregated event. Here's the proof of it. And you are subject to the Rhode Island Public Accommodations Law. And under the Rhode Island Public Accommodations Law, you would actually be potentially liable for hosting a discriminatory event, even if you didn't organize it. Well, lo and behold, that put an end to that event. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall, but all of the sudden that event was not being held at that event space. And all of the sudden, Providence is announcing because we managed to get some local media coverage. Oh, that was all a mistake, all these forms. We didn't mean what we said. So that's an example of things we will do that don't necessarily involve a lawsuit. And there are a lot of laws that are out there

that people can utilize. And public accommodations is a very underutilized law because virtually any public space is going to fall under that. So that's one thing we might do. We might do complaints to the U.S. Department of Education, if it's an educational institution, or the EEOC, or the state attorney general, who in most states has enforcement authority for the discrimination, anti-discrimination laws. So that's another thing we're going to be doing a lot of that wouldn't necessarily involve a lawsuit. But sometimes you are going to get recalcitrant people who don't want to just stop doing what they're doing. And we will file lawsuits to the extent we can file them in the name of the Legal Insurrection Foundation.

We will do that. But sometimes you need another plaintiff. You need a plaintiff withstanding, so to speak. And that's very hard to get because, again, getting back to Providence, there's a number of teachers who've reached out to us, and they're just scared to bring a claim against the district. Because they know there will be retaliation. They know it could be career ending. and then they've got to hire a lawyer. So there's a lot of fear.

But we will, to the extent there is a plaintiff, we would arrange for them to get counsel. We would not necessarily represent them ourselves. So one of the things we're doing at the Equal Protection Project is creating a lawyer network. People will be able to go to the website, lawyers. You're not committing yourself to anything, and we're not committing anything to you,

but we now have a list. So if somebody in Iowa, for argument's sake, contacts us through the website, we would at least potentially have somebody to refer them to there. Or if we want to help somebody more directly, we would be able to get local counsel. So we're going to confront people wawfully. We're going to expose them. But if all of that doesn't stop the problem and if a state attorney general is not willing to act and fulfill the attorney general's responsibility, we will sue people. But that would be our last resort. it has to be there. And so that's one of the things we're planning to do.

Professor Jacobson, how do you think we got to this moment in history? Because, you know, we're seeing obviously this, you know, this moment in history where there is this great focus on being anti-racist and on equality and all of these things. And yet we have, like you've mentioned, you know, school districts that are trying to hold events that are only for people of color. How have we wound up at a moment where we need an organization like the Equal Protection Project? It was both a long time coming and of short time coming. The long time coming is you've seen this building over the years. A lot of people talk about critical race theory and it's variations.

And one of those variations is what's called anti-racism, which is a completely misconduct. term the way they use it. Okay, it's Ibram-Kendis, how to be an anti-racist. And it advocates for this current discrimination to remedy past discrimination. So it is an ideology that explicitly calls for current discrimination. And that has become the philosophy, it started on the campuses, as a lot of things do, and now has spread to the broader culture, where you have this concept that you measure group results. And if there is any difference in groups, results, that means it must be racism if it's a non-white group that is not performing as well. Of course, we know that's not true, and we could have a whole discussion on why that's not true.

But the point is, that ideology took over that we are a systemically racist country. That emanates from critical race theory. That led to the so-called anti-racism discrimination that has become really embedded in the diversity, equity and inclusion industry, which is a multi-billion dollar industry. And so people believe that you need to essentially have racial retribution, that you have to punish and discriminate against white people in order to remedy other problems. And because we don't agree with that because that violates not only the Constitution. It violates laws at the federal government way down to local ordinances like the public accommodations law.

The big lie of the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry is that we're a systemically racist country. In fact, we are a systemically not racist country. From the Constitution down to local ordinances, we prohibit and make unlawful discrimination on the basis of race. And we need to enforce those laws. So what we plan to do is do our best as a nonprofit. entity to help enforce laws that already embed non-racism into our system and to push back against

the people who are very powerful and very well-funded who want to take us back to the 1950s and back to the 1940s, but they want a different victim. The only difference between what's going on now in the 1950s is which racial group is the victim. And that to us is a societal dead end. That is not where we should be heading. We have to adopt the principle that's in the Constitution that everybody is entitled to the equal protection of the law. Well, and you've been raising concerns for a long time over critical race theory trainings in schools, of teachers, classes on college campuses. And so two years ago, as you mentioned earlier, you all launched the critical race database. It includes over 500 educational entities in higher ed, K-12, school.

schools, medical schools, military services. So, and really the goal of that was to expose how these learning institutions are requiring critical race theory classes and trainings. What was the response that you received from launching that project two years ago? Mostly positive. I mean, I certainly have negative responses over the years to many things I've done. But shockingly, there was a fairly moderate response. to that because we're simply documenting things.

It's a database. Every single piece of information in the database has a source. And the sources are universities themselves and schools themselves. They love to brag about this stuff. And so we simply document it. We have researchers who spend their days going through university websites and documenting what they say they are doing. So the data is actually completely neutral.

And putting yourself out there on the internet is not always the most pleasant experience. In our inbox at the critical race.org website, on any given day, we get people accusing us, in not pleasant terms, of promoting critical race theory or of being racist because we oppose it. And the reason they can't tell is because the data is just the data. People can do with it what they want. And so the response to that has been positive. We have over 100, I think it's up to about 125 now media links to it. and we've done all that without a publicist.

So these are people who use the database. We've had approaching 3 million page views to the website in two years and over 7 million user actions. So user actions are not just page views, but when they click on the resources that we have, the links that we have. So it's a utilized website has received almost uniformly positive media coverage and the reaction at Cornell,

the school newspaper wrote it up was fairly muted because it is what it is. And nobody can dispute what we're showing. And so that has actually been a fairly positive experience and has led to a lot of media coverage, but also a lot of invitations to community groups where I simply discuss what is happening. You can like it or you can dislike it. And now obviously we do have a position. We're against it. But that doesn't affect the data that we have. Yeah. Now, you mentioned, you're at Cornell and you know throughout your time there you've obviously been doing so much work at legal insurrection and with launching the critical race database and now with the equal protection project what is the response from students from faculty and staff at Cornell to the

work that you're doing it's hard to say because there is on every university campus and Cornell's no exception a culture of fear and surveys confirm this. So my anecdotal interactions with students and staff, less so with faculty, is that they're afraid to speak their minds. So I get a lot of private praise, but I don't get a lot of public praise, and that's okay. Sometimes there's negativity. As you know, because I was on your show two years ago in June, there was an attempt to get me fired and a whole lot of nastiness, and I wrote out that wave with the help of going on your show and other shows talking about what's happening. It's always good not to be isolated.

And so I don't know what they really think about me. You know, I'm an anomaly there. You know, the entire law school faculty, I'm the only openly political conservative. I mean, there might be others who maybe think of themselves economically conservative, whatever. but they're not out there. And in the entire Cornell University, which I think has approximately 1,700 people, they call faculty at different levels,

I am really the only one who is politically out there. And, you know, that's good and bad. A lot of people don't talk to me, don't want to be associated with me, but a lot of people do. I am the faculty advisor to almost every right-of-center student group on campus. And I'd love to think it's because I'm so wonderful, but the reality is there's nobody else. I mean, I am the faculty advisor to the Cornell chapter

of the network of enlightened women because apparently they couldn't find an enlightened woman on the faculty to be their faculty advisor. And that's great. So I, in many ways, relish the role that I play on campus, but I wish I wasn't the only one. I wish I wasn't alone out there. And that's a problem throughout higher ed. It's a monoculture. It's a liberal culture. And frankly, the students are probably more diversified in their viewpoints than the faculty are. The faculty is approaching 100% who are left-leaning. Some are really far left-leaning. Some are just, you know, your standard liberals. But it's a monoculture, and it's not getting any better. It's getting worse. Well, the website for those who want to learn more about this project, it's equalprotect.org.

We'll leave a link in the show notes. But Professor Jacobson, if there's a teacher listening or someone listening from anywhere across the country and they're thinking, oh, my goodness, you know, there was an instance at my school or in my community that kind of looked like discrimination. And I would love to get some insight on this, get some thoughts from a legal person. perspective, what would be the steps that they should take? I'd say it would depend upon what the nature of the problem with is. If it's a very specific employment practice problem, you probably should consult a local employment lawyer about that. We at Equal Protection Project are more looking at systemic problems, policy problems, things that affect large numbers of people. That doesn't mean we're not willing

to look at things that are person-specific, but you're probably best off with a local employment lawyer if you've been fired and you need to file a claim. But if you know a practice in your school district, like the Providence discriminatory teacher loan forgiveness practice, we want to hear about that because that will affect a lot of people. And at least in terms of what we are equipped to do, that's what we're really looking to do. To fight the systemic racism of the equity agenda is what we're looking to do. So we have a contact form at our website, and you can contact us, and we can take it from there. Excellent.

The Equal Protection Project, you can learn more at equalprotect.org. Professor Jacobson, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate you coming on and sharing about this new project with us. Yeah, it's great to be on. This is one of the best podcast there is out there. So I always want to come on your podcast. And thank you for having me on again. Thank you all so much for joining us on today's episode.

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