Is the future of affirmative action in doubt?
It might be, according to Jason Riley:
When it comes to skepticism of affirmative-action policies, the issue isn’t whether today’s college students are “left-wing activists who aren’t in touch with the real world” but rather whether that description better applies to New York Times journalists and other liberal elites. If, as many who follow this issue expect, the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and the companion case, SFFA v. University of North Carolina, it will not only strike a blow for constitutional color blindness but also align with public opinion as expressed in polling and at the ballot box. As important, the High Court has an opportunity to correct judicial and administrative-state distortions of antidiscrimination law that date back more than a half-century and do much to fuel racial division…
Hence, not only does the Civil Rights Act prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; it also states clearly that nothing in the law requires an employer “to grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on account of any imbalance which may exist . . . in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in any community, State, section or other area.” Notably, the act also allowed employers to use an “ability” test in hiring decisions, “provided that such test, its administration or action upon the results is not designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”
No matter. In the aftermath of the law’s passage, this plain language would be turned on its head or ignored altogether to justify racial balancing not only in the workplace but also in higher education. “Federal administrative agencies and the courts led the change from the prospective concept of individual equal opportunity to the retrospective concept of parity of group ‘representation,’ ” wrote Thomas Sowell in Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, his 1984 book marking the 20th anniversary of the law’s passage. “Though lacking in either legislative authorization or public support for numerical group preferences, administrative agencies of government were able to enforce such [affirmative-action] policies with the support of the federal courts in general and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular.”
The article goes into the legal history of the doctrine; I suggest you read the whole thing.
A personal note: back when this was all starting out in the 70s, I considered myself a liberal. I had never voted for a Republican and never would until 2004, my political turning point. But I knew instinctively and immediately that affirmative action, as it was being applied, was pernicious. The cliche that two wrongs don’t make a right came into my head almost instantaneously, and I think it still holds true for affirmative action and in particular “disparate impact”:
In 1971, the Supreme Court held in Griggs v .Duke Power Company that employers could not test applicants for jobs or promotions—even if the tests were “neutral on their face, and even if neutral in terms of intent”—if it resulted in fewer opportunities for blacks. The case, brought by a group of black workers who were required to pass a high school equivalency exam to qualify for promotion, established the legal precedent for “disparate impact” lawsuits that present statistical disparities as prima facie evidence of racial discrimination. What began as a push for equal individual opportunities regardless of race became a push for equal group outcomes based on race…
The Supreme Court’s job in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases is to determine the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions. That shouldn’t be a hard call if the words of the Constitution and Civil Rights Act of 1964 mean what they say. Affirmative-action policies may have been well-intentioned, but intentions matter less than results. In practice, racial preferences have proved unpopular, polarizing—and ineffective, to boot. It’s time to end them.
Weren’t the problems obvious right from the start?
IQ tests don’t have a disparate impact on blacks. Blacks have a disparate impact on IQ tests. The court has it backwards. The tests are inanimate objects, they have no agency. When you went to college, did you get good grades because the tests had a good effect on you or did you have a good effect on the tests?
Traditionally, military service can have, and has had, a generally positive impact on soldiers…if they can make it through the system and learn the valuable—and essential—things that can be learned there.
WRT minority soldiers (but not only), military service has also been instrumental in providing a social structure and educational opportunities that have enabled them to live purposeful and successful lives during their service but especially after theirwards.
At this point I think I’m cynical enough to believe that these benefits, which the military can—and often does—provide minority soldiers, constitute a main reason why “Biden” believes the military MUST be gutted.
Oh, there are other reasons as well….
The Ivies are already scheming about how they are going to circumvent an adverse ruling by SCOTUS.
I personally consider myself to have been a victim of affirmative action.
Decades ago, I took the Foreign Service Officer Exam. I signed up to take it three years in a row. In the past they gave the test once a year and graded everyone on the same curve will all the other test takers for that year.
The first year I signed up it was cancelled because of a law suit claiming that the US State Department discriminated against women for promotions caused a judge to tell the US State Department to change the way they hired candidates for the Foreign Service. This judge felt that not enough women were being hired so there weren’t enough women to be promoted to higher positions.
The second year, which was the first year they gave the test according to the judge’s wish to hire more women and racial/ethnic minorities they gave out two scores. The first score they called the “raw” score (I believe this is what your score would have been before the affirmative action change to the test). The second score was the “adjusted” score. In order to be invited to the next phase of being hired you had to score over 90 in each of the various categories (questions were placed into a category: US Government, US Society, World history and Geography, Economics, etc.). All of my “raw” scores were 97 or 98, only Economics was low for me; it was a 94. Still high enough to be invited to the next phase.
Except they didn’t go by the “raw” score, they used the “adjusted” score. My score for economics dropped to an 89 – I missed by one point! Someone explained to me that how they arrived at the adjusted scores was by grading everyone on a curve, not against all test takers, but, grading them on a curve with others who were the same gender and race/ethnicity as themselves. So, if you were the only female Eskimo taking the test you would be graded on a curve by yourself?! Is that how it would work? It didn’t matter, my race and /or gender caused my “raw” score to be “adjusted” lower.
Just how was that fair? Just how did that better serve our country?
No matter, I bought an economics text book at my college and read to all front to back and again, and again for a year. I knew the stuff now!
So, I signed up for a third year. (I guess by now you could tell that this was a dream that I had since high school). Taking the test I knew that I knew the Economics answers as I now understood what the econ questions were about instead of just taking a guess.
But, that third year they only marked you as passed or failed.
And, yes, it might be bitter grapes on my part; but, every time I read about some screw up in the state department I chalk to down to “that’s what you get for lowering standards to hire folks based upon nothing to do with the job qualifications.”
And over the decades working in the corporate world I have seen the same cr@p; and I tell myself the same thing. That’s what they get for lowering standards to hire those who otherwise wouldn’t be fit.
Institutions which circumvent an adverse SCOTUS ruling should be prohibited from receiving any more federal aid, either directly or indirectly.
Weren’t the problems obvious right from the start?
They certainly were. But the media-enhanced bawling of ‘disparate impact’ was quite effective in convincing ‘liberals’ into such certitude of ‘this ain’t fair’ that far too many folks were happy to tear up the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act to support racial bean-counting in preference to competence at doing certain jobs. And that same assumption has been fed and fattened ever since, to the point that we MUST drop enough requirements for competence that we can pack the proper percentages of skin colors into every profession regardless of the collapsing of miles of bridges and the deaths of legions of relatives from the bumbling of ‘engineers’ and ‘physicians’ of the right colors.
I’m not sure if it was a conscious thing at first, but affirmative action quickly became a device used to ignore reality. Rather than fix, or at least try to fix, the things largely causing lower black achievement levels (like horrible inner-city schools or family breakdown in black communities), affirmative action was used to funnel enough black faces into certain scholarly and business positions to pretend everything was fine. And the same thing applied to other minority groups and women.
It would be interesting to see if a legal abolition of affirmative action has any broader cultural impact. After all, think about all of the things (like maternity leave, sexual harassment laws, and an entire childcare industry) that have been created to allow women to compete “equally” with men in the workplace.
Mike
The racial Stalinists…are being groomed, encouraged, nourished…and let loose…as they try to destroy anyone who might get in the way of their goal of total indoctrination, total power (and total destruction):
“Tensions Rise in Virginia Schools Over Racial Issues”—
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/03/07/tensions_rise_in_virginia_schools_over_racial_issues.html
H/T Powerline blog.
Youngkin and his crew have their work cut out for them.
There was a long article with many links – on Insty, or one of the other semi-conservative blogs a couple of days ago, listing all the recent instances of black students ganging up on and abusing white students (and teachers, too) … because all those students of color had apparently been taught that all their troubles in life were due to their white teachers and students. It was really appalling, the list of atrocities in schools, and on school busses, where white kids were being ganged up on and physically abused … sometimes harassed to the point of committing suicide, like that poor teenaged girl last month. (The harassers attacked her in the hallway, and posted the video … and then threatened her on social media.)
Yeah, DEI (sometimes spelled DIE) – way to go. Sparking a new race war. Ordinary people will put up with much – but not their kids being threatened and tormented. Not for much longer, I think. Welcome to race war. Thank you, all you charming goofs like Robin diAngelo and Ta-Hissy-Fit Coates. Your contribution to the new race relations war is noted.
Bunge, in cases not involving physical strength, women don’t need “affirmative action” to work effectively in most jobs.
One only has to look at the long, downward slide of systemic quality and merit to know that what was instinctively apparent at the beginning, has been borne out by the results.
But one can always claim a morally-superior, ends-justify-the-means victory, whatever the metaphysics, when virtue is on your side. So what if the Right Side of History turns out to be upside-down?
I was valedictorian of my high school class, a straight 4.0 average (before “advanced placement” classes allowed people to add .5 to their grade averages). A friend of Hispanic heritage had a C+ average (barely).
For my efforts, I received “Honors At Entrance” to UC Santa Barbara (a lovely certificate that I could frame and hang above my dorm desk) and a subscription to Reader’s Digest. My friend got a full ride scholarship to Harvard.
Later, when I was working my way through UCLA at the Village Theater in Westwood after a transfer, one of the candy girls there whose last name was Sanchez (but who was the blondest, blue-eyed Scandinavian beauty you’ve ever seen) got a full ride to UCLA.
My life turned out just fine; I had a wonderful, well-paying career, but it was always a little interesting to see how “affirmative action” played out in real life.
I took the Foreign Service test as well. I loved the “what if” questions about how one would handle ambassadors’ gaffes, such as “How would you deal with the Ambassador talking about the Premier’s wife’s figure?”
Hamilton Jordan, anyone?
There’s a not so fine line separating affirmative action and affirmative discrimination. DIEversity is extremist policy with religious/ethical roots in racism, sexism, and other class-disordered ideologies.
Stan – I remember the second year I took the test; and as we were leaving the building a young black women was complaining about the questions being too hard. I think the irony was over her head as one of her complaints was “Who the hell is Alvin Ailey and why should I know who he is?”
As for the Ambassador question – “Mr (or Ms?) Ambassador, such talk is considered culturally offensive in this country; how about you complement her on something else (and make a suggestion such as her charity work)?” As a Foreign Service Officer part of your job would be to guide the higher ups through the local culture. Then include the gaffe in reports to others if you feel the need to CYA. Yea, okay, maybe that isn’t the best way to handle it; but, I would have loved to be in the position to be dealing with such situations.
I, too, have had a good career – in corporate training. Many times I have been told that the company feels it is important to have a woman or minority in the training position as it is a “high profile” position and they would like to show that women and minorities can excel at the company. One place I worked at they were so insistent on having this one certain woman (she was black and Hispanic – yea! TWO check boxes!) do the training on Adobe Photoshop – and, yes, she was good at what she did – that they told me to step aside. So, I stepped aside. I didn’t lift a finger to help. The whole class complained that she didn’t teach them anything – just did a short demo on the overhead screen and then went around the room telling everyone individually as they tried to do it themselves “nope, that’s wrong; you don’t know what you are doing.”
At the same company, they had to start a policy of employees cannot be told who was giving the training since too many were asking before signing up for a class. If it was me they would sign up; if it was one of the “affirmative action” trainers they wouldn’t. Ha! even the employees saw how stupid their affirmative action was.
The answer to the question is “no,” because schools are already abandoning objective standards like test scores for their admissions decisions. This is of course so they can discriminate on in favor of target groups without being so blatantly obvious about it.
“Bunge, in cases not involving physical strength, women don’t need “affirmative action” to work effectively in most jobs.”
Unless you do nothing but sit at a desk and type on a computer, physical strength actually does matter in a lot of jobs. Who do you think lifts all the heavy packages at the post office?
And as a man, I don’t have to take time off work to have a kid (no matter what Pete Buttigieg pretends). Women do. Granted, we’re now getting paternity or parental leave for men, but maternity leave was something that for a long time existed to allow women to compete with men in the workplace.
Or even more basic, what’s a behavior that is quite common in male-only spaces that disappears whenever women enter them? Yelling. Yelling is a very normal thing men do with and to other men, especially for work. Men yelling at other men was a part of building the Pyramids, the Great Wall, and just about everything else in the world.
And it wasn’t just physical labor. Yelling was quite common in white-collar workplaces as well. From JFK to Lee Iacocca to Bobby Knight to John Ford, raising your voice in certain situations for certain purposes was entirely normal in all-male environments. But you can’t yell at women, can you?
Now, I don’t want to be too “red pill” here. I am exaggerating a little for effect. But almost all of the changes in the workplace over the last 50 years have been made to accommodate women and make it easier for them to compete with men. And maybe it’s been for the best overall. But there has been very little honest discussion about it.
Mike
When I was in college in the 90s/2000s, there was never any honest description of what affirmative action actually did. Every single human who spoke or wrote in favor of it lied about it.
It was always the same lie; it was “if you have two equally good candidates pick the one who’s a minority”.
If that was all affirmative action ever was hardly anyone would object–after all how often does it happen that two candidates are “equally good”? The concept of “disparate impact” was never mentioned or acknowledged, despite it having been in effect for at least 20 years.
Bunge appears to have never heard of non manual (technical) jobs and professions. Nor of the skilled trades. Now if all you can do is manual labor, knock yourself out, until you wear your body out.
I’ve worked with quite a few women engineers, chemists, geologists, editors, radiological control technicians, etc., some very competent, some much smarter and more effective than me. You say that’s a pretty low bar?
And then there are the loud mouthed aggressive a-holes. They make work a challenge for everyone else. Takes all kinds.
On the other hand, there was the AAP manager at my company who referred to the program as “Spics, Chicks, and N******”. So maybe there was a reason for it all.
We were all doing a lot better until 2008.
Weren’t the problems obvious right from the start?
Well, yes. The problems of Nazism, Communism, and Civil Rights (affirmative action) were obvious and apparent from the start. Your point?
Only in a world almost devoid of rational people with good values can slavery, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, Nazism, Apartheid flourish. Hmm. Guess that says something about humanity.
The Ivies are already scheming about how they are going to circumvent an adverse ruling by SCOTUS.
The purpose of lawyers (called legislators) is to write laws badly so that other lawyers can profit by verbal trickery to persuade other well-paid lawyers (called judges) to grant exemptions from the badly-written law.
No playwright’s farce has ever been so well-conceived as to match the role of lawyers in our society.
Some, albeit belated, affirmative action:
“DC police chief offers simple solution to get homicide rates down: ‘Keep violent people in jail’ “—
https://www.foxnews.com/media/dc-police-chief-offers-simple-solution-get-homicide-rates-keep-violent-people-jail
What an off-the-wall, counter-intuitive concept! What will those police chiefs think of next…
(To be fair, police chiefs are from Mars, everyone else in DC is from…)
“Weren’t the problems obvious right from the start?”
Not in 1964, when there was a reasonable expectation that positive discrimination in favor of “slightly” less qualified Blacks would allow the best to compete more equally with Whites.
From the ’71 decision note
“racial preferences have proved unpopular, polarizing—and ineffective, to boot.”
They were NOT so unpopular in ’71, despite all the lying that Frederick notes:
“between two equal candidates, choose the minority” (or woman).
Most Whites are ashamed of slavery – usually also being ignorant of it being historically ubiquitous throughout the world, especially Africa.
Few note that Barack Obama’s ancestors were African slaves in Africa, AND slave owners AND slavers (those capturing people and making them slaves).
In the 60s & 70s, most Americans thought women were about as good as men at just about everything mental, as well as Blacks raised as middle class being as good as Whites. The reality of women was pretty close, notwithstanding the scarcity of top female physicists, due to men have a flatter IQ curve with more at both top & bottom tails. (Larry Summers was punished for noting this truth.)
Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve” is mostly accurate, but …
Democrats hate, Hate, HATE the reality that Blacks on average have lower IQs than Whites, based to some extent on socially unchangeable genetics.
Reality is racist.
Democrats hate racism.
Democrats hate reality – and are smart enough to rationalize their failure, the “ineffectiveness” of their policies, by blaming Whites, and Males, and Christians.
Elite women reject the reality of a fair meritocracy resulting in top business leaders & mathematicians are men, just as elites reject the reality of so few top Blacks.
See Steve Sailor (on why surviving cold requires more smarts)
https://www.unz.com/isteve/cold-winter-theory-a-difference-of-degree/
or lower (law) bar standards:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/lowering-standards-parts-312-and-313/
or
https://www.unz.com/isteve/cnn-why-do-black-brains-differ-from-white-brains-racism/
very interesting ai study of which groups are most protected by ai Woke
https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-demographic-group-is-the-most-protected-by-ai/
There also exists a graph showing some 55k Whites, 45k Asian, and only 2k Blacks who scored over 1400 in SAT scores. All of them would do fine in any elite school – but there’s not enough high scoring Blacks, and there’s too many high scoring Asians.
Genetics, and reality, is racist.
Time we focus more effort on getting low IQ folk to have better life habits including more jobs with more pay – probably meaning more gov’t subsidies to such jobs (market intervention! oh my!) or other things. All low IQ folk need more help than the high IQ folk, tho many high IQ folk get some mental illness issues, too.
Or even more basic, what’s a behavior that is quite common in male-only spaces that disappears whenever women enter them? Yelling.
You know, whenever I read something by Bunge I do have the sensation of someone yelling at me.
It probably is not in danger because higher ed administrators respond to adverse rulings with lawfare and (when that runs out) try every door non-compliance. The only way to get rid of the race patronage schemes is to dramatically reduce their discretion over certain matters.
@Art Deco:The only way to get rid of the race patronage schemes is to dramatically reduce their discretion over certain matters.
Nah, personnel is policy. More rules will not do anything because the people who are supposed to enforce and implement them will not. These administrators need to be removed from their jobs entirely and their positions cut from university budgets.
Nah, personnel is policy. More rules will not do anything because the people who are supposed to enforce and implement them will not.
==
Thanks for the display of learned helplessness.
==
When I said ‘dramatically reduce their discretion’, I meant transfer decisions to other agencies operating under a precise set of instructions and audited by the state comptroller. Public institutions of higher education should not have any discretion over admissions and the state officials administering the admissions system should be operating mechanically with a ranking system prescribed in black letter law.
==
As for personnel, you can prescribe in law the functions of personnel offices in state institutions and provide for a series of administrative fines to be assessed consequent citations issued by the state comptroller on any employee who transgresses those boundaries and anyone north of him in the chain of command. Another thing you can do is have institutional boards elected by a postal ballot of those alumni registered to vote in the state. The elections could be held quadrennially, all institutions at the same time. The size of boards would be a function of the number of registered alumni, but always an odd number from 5 to 19. Candidates would be subject to rotation-in-office rules. Candidates would register by placing a contingently refundable deposit with the state board of elections and a personal statement of up to 600 words in length. The local board where the school is located would mail out packets including the ballots and personal statement to everyone on the state’s collated roll, and would be the return address where the ballots were counted. You could impose a similar system as a default on private institutions, with some dispensations for institutions which are subsidiary to membership organizations or have a claim to be properly under episcopal governance.
==
Another thing you can do in the realm of policy is in re public institutions to limit by law grants of tenure to faculty who have reached the age of 55 and to mandate faculty be declared emeritus when they are eligible for full Social Security and Medicare and when they’ve paid into TIAA-CREF (pro-rating periods of p/t employment) for at least 35 years. Emeritus faculty would be permitted to teach spot courses to fill in for faculty on leave or positions vacant, but would have no regular teaching schedule and no office space apart from a library carrel. Untenured faculty would be on renewable contracts of one to twelve semesters. Departing faculty would be do a terminal contract equal in duration to about 1/4 of the number of semesters said faculty had taught at the school to date, with some portion to be fulfilled by a severance settlement equal to the discounted present value of the hypothesized compensation to be paid over a certain number of years. You couldn’t properly impose this system on private institutions, but you could make grants of tenure unenforceable in court for any plaintiff under the age of 55 or over the age of 76.
==
Another thing you can do is require that public institutions limit their concentration, degree and certificate programs to those found in a glossary enacted by the legislature. You can also require that they apply to a commission of the state board of regents for permission to offer any given program, to which other institutions might file a reply. You might also provide for in law for the state comptroller to close any degree program which, over a period of 35 years, has failed to attract sufficient interest to justify it from among students whose performance metrics put them in the top 2/3 of an entering class. In so doing, you could provide for certain programs to be immune because they were the designated depository programs for the whole state system. So, you’d have one or two schools designated to provide instruction in a low census discipline (e.g. statistics, linguistics, demography, meteorology and climatology, astronomy, classics, art history, languages other than Spanish, and certain musical instruments) while programs apart from these would have to earn their keep.
==
You could also put elaborate entries in the glossary describing the content of certain programs. Teacher training programs would be candidates for this.
==
It was always about retribution or balancing even though humphrey denied it
Tom Grey, replying to Neo: ‘“Weren’t the problems obvious right from the start?”
Not in 1964…’
Actually I think they were. I was in high school in 1964 and supported the civil rights legislation. But although I can’t place it at any specific time after that, and I don’t know when I first heard the term “affirmative action,” I think I saw immediately that it was a mistake. To put the best possible face on it, it was an over-correction in response to serious injustice. I think I saw it primarily as an obvious logical contradiction, however well-intentioned. The practical consequences maybe were not so obvious as they would become.
Someone mentioned lower black IQ scores. John Derbyshire made a remark a while back to the effect that affirmative action, and its later and increasingly pathological development, is an attempt to square the circle of that very unwelcome fact and our national commitment to equality.
At the risk of being a party pooper; it makes no difference if the SCOTUS strikes down affirmative action (AA).
Any and all public or private institutions invested in that unconstitutional theology/ideology, will find workarounds.
our national commitment to equality.
==
There was no ‘national commitment to equality’. Social engineering schemes have never had much purchase outside of the ludicrously influential liberal cadres in the judiciary, the school apparat, and social welfare bureaucracies. See James Q. Wilson’s research in 1966 on the chasm that separated the mentality of the Boston City Hall and the concerns of ordinary residents.
I suspect you can adduce evidence that some time around 1955 the majority of whites concluded that it was wrong to treat blacks as a permanent guest worker population, or as an inherent subaltern class, or as a collection of untouchables. The only notion of ‘equality’ incorporated in that sentiment is that everyone faces more or less the same rules in a given venue.
(It was also around 1955 that Flannery O’Connor concluded that too much mundane ugliness was required to maintain segregation, making the effort not worth the candle).
“There was no ‘national commitment to equality’. Social engineering schemes have never had much purchase…”
I’m referring to the metaphysical commitment of the Declaration that “all men are created equal,” not to any scheme for forcing or even pushing equality of result.
Any and all public or private institutions invested in that unconstitutional theology/ideology, will find workarounds.
So, which workarounds are unacceptable and fought?
Having endured job interviews in the 1970s, when employer representatives would say amazing things like “Oh, I had to double-check your name, because from reading about your accomplishments, I assumed you must be a man,” I understand the suspicion about getting a fair shake, and the resulting temptation to advocate for affirmative action. Nevertheless, I always objected to it. For one thing, I didn’t relish having my own accomplishments degraded by the assumption that only AA got me into my position. For another, I wanted to work with truly intelligent and talented people, not people who checked a box.
My old law firm was correct, I think, in stressing that we should recruit on the basis of qualities that were genuinely valuable in the workplace, and that we should root out the strong temptation to overrate the abilities of people who were similar to us in irrelevant ways–not just gender or skin color, but hobbies and politics. I can live with extra effort at outreach in order to expand a talent pool that irrationally excluded people according to silly metrics or hollow badges of elitism. In the end, though, I insist on an honest and rational appraisal of genuine ability, however we get there.
I’m referring to the metaphysical commitment of the Declaration that “all men are created equal,” not to any scheme for forcing or even pushing equality of result.
I’m not sure ‘metaphysical’ is the right word.
That ‘all men are created equal’ is a statement that there are no orders of clergy, nobility, burgesses, and peasants here (an aspirational assertion, not a social reality in 1776). Well, there were none in 1955. There was a mess of legislation and administrative practice which treated blacks as a subaltern population. The measures necessary to stop doing that were much less intrusive than the accretion of policy responses adopted.
I nominate Mensa member LeBron James to replace Miguel Cardona as Secretary of Education.
When Justice O’Conner wrote that she hoped the Court would be able to rule that these policies were no longer necessary in a few decades, she demonstrated two things:
1) she had no idea how a constitution should work, and
2) no clue how political activist groups actually operate.