Further to Jane’s post a couple of days ago about the political conversion of her friend Jackie (“Interview With Jackie,” July 14), I thought that readers might be interested in a similar story involving a somewhat more public resident of Manhattan named Maud Maron. Maron was the subject of a post by Bari Weiss at her Substack site on July 12, with the title “A Witch Trial at the Legal Aid Society.” Maron’s story gives a good indication of just how difficult it is to think independently and break free of the Manhattan groupthink, particularly if you want to have any kind of public profile.

Weiss’s post contains substantial biographical information about Maron that paints her as being, until recently, a rather typical left-wing Manhattan Democrat. She attended Barnard College (where her activities included acting as an escort for Planned Parenthood) and Cardozo Law School. Her career goal was to be a public defender, and she joined the Legal Aid Society (New York’s main public defender organization) right out of law school in 1998. After a lengthy hiatus beginning in 2006 to raise four children, she rejoined Legal Aid in 2017. Her Democratic Party credentials include working for the John Kerry campaign in 2004 and contributing (“many times”) to the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. Her four kids all attend New York City public schools. She was elected to her local Community Education Council in 2017 and again in 2019. In the recent primary elections in New York, she ran in the Democratic primary for the City Council in her district, which is District 1 (Lower Manhattan).

But the combination of having four kids in the public schools and serving on the Community Education Council put Maron in the position to actually learn what passes for “education” in those quarters these days. By mid-2020, when she had begun her run for the City Council, Maron started to speak out about the racist garbage that is sweeping public education in the City. In July 2020, she published an op-ed in the New York Post with the headline “Racial obsessions make it impossible for NYC schools to treat parents, kids as people.” Excerpt:

I am a mom, a public defender, an elected public-school council member and a City Council candidate. But at a city Department of Education anti-bias training, I was instructed to refer to myself as a “white woman” — as if my whole life reduces to my race. Those who oppose this ideology are shunned and humiliated, even as it does nothing to actually improve our broken schools. Though facing severe budget cuts, the DOE has spent more than $6 million for the training, which defines qualities such as “worship of the written word,” “individualism” and “objectivity” as “white-supremacy culture.” The administration, and many local politicians, buy into a benign-sounding but chilling doctrine called anti-racism, which ­insists on defining everyone by race, invites discrimination and divides all thought and behavior along a racial axis.

In short, at least on this one issue where Maron is quite knowledgeable, she had broken from the official Manhattan orthodoxy and groupthink. What next? Undoubtedly, you can guess. From Weiss:

Three days after she published the piece, the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid Caucus put out a lengthy statement saying that “Maud Maron has no business having a career in public defense, and we’re ashamed that she works for the Legal Aid Society.” It declared: “Maud is racist, and openly so,” and offered no evidence to back up the charge. It said that this veteran public defender was a “prominent opponent of equality” and a “classic example of what 21st century racism looks like.”

That was the beginning of what Weiss describes as the “witch trial.” The statement of the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid group was retweeted without comment of the Legal Aid Society itself. Various of Maron’s Legal Aid colleagues issued tweets calling her things like a “pathetic racist” with a “segregation platform.” Four colleagues published a lengthy attack piece on August 14, 2020 in Gotham Gazette with the headline “When School Segregationist Dog Whistle Becomes a Bullhorn.”

Weiss interviewed (or attempted to interview) several of Maron’s Legal Aid colleagues for the piece. Exactly one, by the name of James Chubinsky, was willing to speak for attribution — and he has recently retired. Chubinsky, who had been Maron’s supervisor in her most recent stint at Legal Aid, called her work performance “beyond terrific.” Another colleague had similarly complimentary things to say, but would not allow his name to be used. Chubinsky has this to say about the current environment at Legal Aid:

“It was becoming intolerable,” Chubsinky said of the intolerance that had taken root at Legal Aid. “We talked about all of this behind closed doors. Because you can’t talk about this with the doors open. It’s a really oppressive environment for anyone who isn’t radical, including, by the way, those attorneys of color who don’t share these lunatic views like abolishing the police or saying that it's necessarily racist to arrest people for misdemeanor crimes.”

The latest is that on July 12 Maron filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court accusing the Legal Aid Society of racial discrimination against her and of constructive termination.

Here are my comments for Ms. Maron:

I am enormously glad that you have awakened to the harm that left-wing education doctrine is currently inflicting on schools, children and parents. I am also enormously glad that you have decided that this issue is sufficiently important that you are willing to speak out about it at substantial risk to your career and standing among your peers.

But on the other hand, where are you now, and where have you been for the last 25 years (since you graduated from college) on the rest of the destructive agenda of the left? You supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election. Did you somehow miss that this guy was a cheerleader for the Soviet Union until right up to the time of its collapse, and that he remains a supporter of the Castro regime in Cuba to this day? The essence of these regimes, and of the socialism that Sanders explicitly advocates for, is the very sort of suppression of dissent that you are now experiencing. Were you somehow unable to learn about or understand how this works, and why it is so evil, until it actually happened to you personally?

Having seen New York City public education from the inside, and having been subject to its “white supremacy” training, you now know how destructive the policies of the left are in this one area. But are you willing to take any time to investigate and apply any skepticism in other areas? For example, Weiss quotes you as saying “If you had asked me when I became a mom what I thought were the pressing concerns my kids would face I probably would have said climate change . . . .” Have you taken any time since then to educate yourself on that subject? Or are you just going along with the trendy orthodoxy and groupthink until it completely destroys our economy and impoverishes all the low income people?

Anyway, once again welcome, at least in part, to the side of rationality.

Finally, I note that Ms. Maron got approximately 9% of the vote in the recent City Council primary in her district, which was good enough for a fourth place finish. It appears that she will now run again in November as an Independent.