Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed Cornell Law Professor Dr. William Jacobson to the newsmakers line.
During the second hour, Jacobson outlined his new website criticalrace.org that lists colleges and universities that do and do not perform special race training activities and programs on their campuses. He explained how the site was to provide a guide for parents and students that would allow them to make a more informed decision in regards to what they were looking for in their college campus life.
Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line for the first time by a very good friend Professor William Jacobson. Founder of the Legal Insurrection blog. We’re going to talk a little bit about criticalrace.org here in a minute. But I have to say Professor Jacobson you’ve done such a great job for the country. And you and I first got to know each other back in 2012 when we worked kind of jointly to document the fact that Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts has zip, zero, nada Native American ancestry whatsoever. Welcome to the Tennessee Star Report, Professor Jacobson.
Jacobson: Thank you for having me on Michael. This is like a reunion.
Leahy: It is a reunion because you and I and Howie Carr the Talk Radio King of Boston just kind of worked together. No one else was looking into the real facts of Elizabeth Warren’s false claims of Native American ancestry. But you lead the way and I followed and we really proved definitively zip, zero, nada Native American ancestry for Senator Elizabeth Warren, despite her multiple claims.
Jacobson: That’s right. And you recall we also worked with some Cherokee genealogists who provided great research.
Leahy: Twyla Tharp. Yeah. She was great.
Jacobson: We brought it forth and we put it out there. What we did back in 2012 probably prevented her from becoming president or having a real shot at it because it all came back to haunt her. And you may recall or not that I actually created a website called elizabethwarrenwiki.org.
And that had everything. All of our research over the years brought into one place and gave really the definitive explanation of her scam claiming to be Native American for employment purposes. And it all came back. And in 2020 who loved elizabethwarrenwiki.org more than anybody? Bernie supporters. (Leahy laughs) Bernie supporters were constantly linking to our chapter and verse about this Pow Wow Chow Cookbook.
Leahy: That was the funniest part of it.
Jacobson: You were the one who found that.
Leahy: I found the Pow Wow Chow Cookbook where she first claimed Native American ancestry in 1984. She wrote all these kinds of phony recipes in this Pow Wow Chow Cookbook. I got a copy of it and you know, she claimed that cold mayonnaise and crab was a Cherokee recipe in 1984 and she used that as an example. I sent that book to Howie Carr and it appeared on the front page of the Boston Herald. It was just you know, it was so ludicrous. It was hilarious.
Jacobson: Yeah, and you know, we documented it. Virtually every story she told about her family lore was either definitively proven true or cast into very very serious doubt. Like the story about her parents having to elope because her mother was Native American. I mean, there’s just nothing there to support that. It was just one thing after another. And I think it really took a toll over time. Of course, then Trump jumped on it. (Laughter)
Leahy: Yes he did.
Jacobson: But it was really like wrapped around her and it deserves to be because she lived her life as a fraud in a very pernicious way, which is she wasn’t openly claiming other than in Pow Wow Chow Cookbook to be Native American. She didn’t associate with Native Americans. She didn’t help Native American students join the faculty advisors to the Native American Law Students Association.
She did nothing. But when she got herself listed that way for employment because she knew that it would use her resume because schools were desperate for diversity. And they did in fact claim her to be the first Native American Harvard Law School, tenured professor.
Leahy: They did for a period of time until they didn’t. So your latest product. By the way a hat tip to you for all your great work at Legal Insurrection. Now the Legal Insurrection Foundation is how you’re supporting it. You’re also a professor for the clinical practice of Law at Cornell Law School. Here’s what’s interesting to me. Now you’ve got this great new project called criticalrace.org. Tell us about that project.
Jacobson: Sure. Well, this year, the last year, and over the summer Cornell instituted a program to push ‘anti-racism’ into every practice and into every aspect of the campus. They began to move forward with the program that could be mandatory coursework. Mandatory programming for faculty. These are all under discussion, but it was put on on the table.
And that was obviously very concerning. And then in early September several 100, I haven’t counted it there so many faculty students and staff including nine law professors, signed a list of demands as to how this anti-racism initiative should be implemented calling explicitly for racially discriminatory hiring practices and things like that. And so at that point, we had been looking into this critical race training.
There have been a lot of reports and leaks of documents by government agencies in various places. And I decided let’s put this all in one place so students and parents know what they’re getting themselves involved in. And so over the summer, we started researching it. And it was after this demand document from the faculty that I said, you know people need to know. I don’t think anybody has a clue what’s going on at these campuses and off.
And so we continued to build it out and we constructed a database and we turned it live about 10 days ago. And what criticalrace.org is an interactive database. Now, the database itself is neutral. It could be just as easily used by people who want this training to find out where it’s happening as people who oppose it. Obviously, we’re not in support of it. We consider it coercive and oppressive to campus free expression.
But the data is the data. And so we have now 232 schools in the database. Not all of them listed have mandatory or active critical race training. But it’s a way for you to check. You can find the school and see what’s going on. We link to only public information. Everything is sourced and it would basically tell people what the schools are telling themselves.
Because they love to brag about this stuff and pat themselves on the back and virtue signal about all this stuff. And you can go to it and it’s a map. And you can hover over it and click on your state. You can click on the schools we have listed. We are hoping to build it out to about 500 schools so that people can see it. And you may click on schooling and they say hey they’ve got a ton of critical race training. I want to go there. Or I want my child to go there.
Or you may look at it and say wait a second, maybe this is not really the sort of environment that I want someone to go to. This is not a blacklist. We’re not claiming that you should go to school there or that just because it teaches critical race training you shouldn’t go there or your child should go there. We are just giving you the information and you can evaluate whether it’s going to be a good situation for you or not.
Leahy: I went on the criticalrace.org website, and I looked here in Tennessee. And you have two colleges listed. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Vanderbilt. And Vanderbilt shows that there is some critical race theory training involved in the nursing school. That’s according to that database. I haven’t looked at UT Chattanooga. Are you going to be adding more colleges in Tennessee like UT Knoxville and a few others?
Jacobson: I’m sure we will. It really is a matter of time and ability and gets to a certain point that you want to get it live when you’ve got a critical mass of schools. But like I said, the hope is to build it out to 500 total or thereabouts. I think that would then cover the vast majority of schools that people will be applying to. Obviously, there are more schools than that in the country.
As of now, we are limiting it to higher ed. There’s been a huge demand and request for us to cover K-12. But that’s harder to get your arms around even though it’s actually where a lot of the action is happening now because there’s something like 10,000 public school districts in the United States. It’s a lot harder to cover K-12.
We are going to be putting up a page of K through 12, which will have resources for people and where they can reach groups that can find that information. I don’t know that we can ever really recreate this map for K through 12. It’s just too massive. We’d have to hire a team of people just to update it and research it and keep it current.
The other thing that’s on our website for each school is a search button that you can use which will custom-design which automatically will do a Google search for that school’s name plus the term anti-racism which is the lingo used on campuses for this. And you will see what’s happening recently because obviously, we’re going to try to keep these schools as up-to-date as we can.
But we can’t update them every single day. Therefore, you know, we provide that mechanism for people. So I think it’s a good resource. As I said, it’s gotten a tremendous response and a lot of media coverage. And we’ve had over a million page views in the 10 days since we turned it live. People want to find out about this stuff and we provide that information.
Leahy: Professor William Jacobson good friend and longtime colleague. Thanks for joining us. Go to his website criticalrace.org. Thank you, Professor Jacobson.
Jacobson: Great. Take care.
Listen to the second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Dr. William Jacobson” by Fox News.
