1/ I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) July 2, 2020

3/ So I respond by saying that I will credit their claims if they can show evidence of the following: that in leading their lives today they have stood up for the rights of unpopular victims of injustice whose very humanity is denied, and where they have done so knowing:

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) July 2, 2020

5/ (5) that they would risk being denied valuable professional opportunities as a result of their moral witness. In short, my challenge is to show where they have at risk to themselves and their futures stood up for a cause that is unpopular in elite sectors of our culture today.

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) July 2, 2020

For your Christmas edification, the fat, bloated, and incompetent corporation that owns your PC has delivered a sanctimonious PC sermonette which ought to make a lot of viewers want to go out and throw up in the street.

Kevin Salwen’s daughter Hannah didn’t think her parents were doing enough for the poor. So she persuaded them to sell their $1.6 million house and give half the proceeds to a village in Ghana.

I expect she also persuaded them to write a book about what they did, and tell the New Yorker all about it, too.

One day in 2006, Kevin and Hannah pulled up at a stoplight. To their left was a homeless man, to their right a guy in a Mercedes coupé. Hannah said, “Dad, if that man didn’t have such a nice car, then that homeless man could have a meal.” Kevin said, “Yes, but if we didn’t have such a nice car that man could have a meal.” This sank in rather more deeply than he’d intended. By dinnertime, Hannah was all worked up. She didn’t want to be a family that just talked about doing good, she said. She wanted to be a family that actually did something. Kevin and Joan explained that they did a lot: they volunteered at the food bank; they wrote big checks to charities; after Hurricane Katrina, they let a family of refugees stay in their basement. Hannah rolled her eyes. That was annoying, so Joan said, “What do you want to do, sell the house?” And Hannah said, “Yeah! That is exactly what I want to do.”

“We don’t expect anyone else to sell their house,” Hannah assured the Marymount girls, whose parents might not have appreciated a demand by their offspring to donate eight hundred thousand dollars (half the value of the Salwens’ house) to charity. “We know that’s a ridiculous thing to do. But everyone has something they can afford to give away. If you watch six hours of TV a week, maybe you cut that down to three hours and spend three with your family volunteering at a homeless shelter.”

A girl with a ponytail raised her hand. “Have you ever regretted selling your house?” she asked.

“There are some things that I miss,” Hannah said. “We had an elevator that led up to my room, and it was really cool, because nobody else had an elevator in their room. My friends would say, ‘Let’s ride in the elevator!’ But it really doesn’t matter.”

Now, there is a Oneupsmanship line that Stephen Potter might envy.

Publisher’s Weekly:

In this well-meaning but self-congratulatory memoir, the Salwen family decides to sell their gorgeous Atlanta mansion, move to a home half the size, and commit half the proceeds to the needy. … The authors tend to gush over their efforts while discounting the privileged position that allows them to make them (“we think everyone can give one of the three T’s: time, talent or treasure”); their unflagging optimism, buttressed by clear self-regard, can also be tiring.