From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Sometimes there are things so inexplicable or indiscernible that you have to fall back on what feels like wild speculation.

I posted on the example of China some weeks ago.  With China being the epicenter of Covid-19 and the seeming non-coincidence of the colocation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the outbreak, it was challenging not to consider this to be a possible deep strategy.  The thinking was along the lines - China exaggerates the dangers of Covid-19 and establishes a model for response (complete control of the population, mandates, economic shut-downs, population lock-ins, etc.)  The virus spreads to the rest of the world and all the public health institutions fall into step behind China without following their own policies or the evidence.  The rest of the world ends up being badly damaged by the consequent lock-downs and other authoritarian and restrictive policies.

It was notable that for 12-18 months, Covid seemed to disappear from China while the rest of the world succumbed.

Was Covid-19 just a deep Chinese strategy to harm the West?  At a cursory level, the answer seemed initially like it could conceivably be yes, that this was a deliberate strategy.

But that hypothesis took a hard hit when Covid began to spread in China in the past six months.  China used the same repressive and ineffective policies they had used at the beginning but now shutting down whole cities and regions.  They really believed what they were preaching.  Despite the emerging evidence in the West that the proper response all along should have been narrowly focused on the very elderly with co-morbidities.  

Despite all the evidence against their policies, the Chinese really believed in what they were doing.

I see another example of inexplicable behavior that is explainable by people or an organization truly believing something that is simply not true.

The Ohio Supreme Court has now confirmed that Oberlin College has to pay Gibson's Bakery some $36 million for the damage done by Oberlin to the Gibsons.  

From Will I Ever See the $36 Million Oberlin College Owes Me? by Lorna Gibson.  The subheading is My family was falsely accused of racism by a powerful school in a small town. Our business was destroyed. We won our case. But the school is refusing to pay.  It is a tragedy on many dimensions and entirely owing to bad acts and bad faith by the leadership of a formerly estimable liberal college.  

To add onto everything else, six months before the trial began, my husband David was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. He was still working from seven in the morning to eleven at night, but the cancer treatments were brutal. Once the trial started, David decided to pause the treatments so he could be as strong as possible in court. It was important to him that the jury not find out that he was sick. He wanted the case to be decided on the basis of the facts alone.

When the jury found in our favor—they ruled that we were owed $44 million in damages (which was later reduced to $31 million)—relief washed over me. I thought we’d finally be able to move past this and get back to work. 

But after the verdict was handed down, David and I left Oberlin to seek treatment for his cancer at bigger hospitals in the South and in New York. We found out that the cancer had spread during the trial, and that we had no recourse. Before he died in 2019, David asked me to keep the store going. “Just keep the doors open, no matter what,” he said. He gave his life for the store, and I promised him that I would do everything I could to honor his final wish.

I still haven’t seen a penny from the school. In 2019, Oberlin appealed to have the jury verdict overturned. Ohio’s Ninth District Court of Appeals rejected Oberlin’s claims and upheld the jury’s verdict. But in May of 2022, Oberlin appealed again to the Ohio Supreme Court to try to avoid the jury’s decision. Thankfully, earlier this week, the Ohio Supreme Court denied Oberlin’s appeal and ruled that the school must pay us $36 million. But even with this most recent ruling, the college, which has about a billion dollars’ worth of assets at its disposal, still refuses to pay. 

We hoped that, with time, the kids who started all this would graduate, and that new students would come in and that the whole drama would fade. But I’m told that freshmen are still told to boycott us. Parents who come in tell me that their kids have been brainwashed to hate us.

I was with my father-in-law, Allyn Sr., when he died several months ago, at the age of 93. We laughed a lot during his last days. He loved his stories, and he was telling them until the end. Most of them revolved around the bakery, like when Stevie Wonder came in. Allyn Sr.’s last words to my son, a few days before he died, were: Do good, honest work. 

We used to rail against Robber Barons and their ilk.  They are largely long gone, replaced now by Academia and advocacy groups seeking to impose their world view on everyone else and with the resources to do so.  This is a classic David and Goliath story between the innocent Gibsons and the evil Oberlin College leadership.

A characterization expanded upon in Jonathan Turley's Oberlin’s Revenge Mania: College Finally Runs Out of Appeals in Campaign Against Family-Owned Bakery.  

The long and vengeful campaign of Oberlin College against a small family-owned grocery has come to an end at the cost of a breathtaking $36 million for defamation. The Ohio Supreme Court had rejected what should be Oberlin College’s final appeal of a verdict in favor of Gibson’s Bakery. The bakery has been the target of an unrelenting attack by the school after it had the temerity to fight a false charge of racism in a shoplifting case involving Oberlin students who later pleaded guilty to criminal charges. Oberlin President Carmen Twillie Ambar and the Board burned through millions in litigation costs above the damages rather than admit that the college was wrong in the targeting of this grocery. That money could have been used for scholarships and other worthy purposes. Instead, Amber and the Board will simply ask alumni to foot the bill for a legal effort that seems to become little more than a revenge fetish.

[snip]

The handling of this matter by Oberlin is nothing short of reprehensible in not only the treatment of this grocery (which was founded in the 1800s) but in the wasting of the assets and reputation of the college. Yet, not a single official appears to have been disciplined for this costly campaign. With tuition at $30,000 a year, the ultimate cost of this litigation would cover free tuition for a year for half of the college. (The total enrollment is only 2,600 students).

Yet, over $40 million somehow became little more than the price of vanity of a college to refuse to admit its original error and to apologize for its conduct. It was a complete failure of leadership by the president, the board, and the college. No one seemed willing to take the responsibility to say “enough” and stop the burning of added costs year after year. So the college continued to gush money as it racked up losses in court.

They have frittered away the assets and reputation of a school with a wonderful history and stellar academic reputation . . . all to pursue a small grocery like Captain Ahab and his whale. Indeed, the final filing should just quote Melville to capture the blind rage needed to sustain this ill-conceived effort: “From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

From the very beginning of the case, there seemed little dispute about the facts.  The shoplifting occurred as did the resisting of arrest by the thieves.  Oberlin College took the position that the law should not be applied to the shoplifters and then the College leadership led a punishing financial and vilification campaign against the victims of the shoplifting.

Just as with China, it seemed like there was no reasonable way to understand Oberlin's response.  They were wrong in fact and in behavior.  Why were they fighting so doggedly?  What did they know that the public did not?

As it turns out, nothing.  They were wrong and always had been but believed that they should not be seen as wrong.  They formed an obsession with destroying the Gibsons in order not to be held accountable for their own lamentable absence of moral leadership, fiduciary leadership, and civil leadership.  

The leadership of Oberlin College, whenever given the choice between cutting their losses and doubling down on bad, always doubled down on bad.  And it now has apparently caught up with them.  The judgment has to be paid.  Whether the bad actors in leadership roles ever have to take accountability remains to be seen.  

Aside from the Gibsons, there is one other victim group whom Oberlin seems to have no regard for.  Jonathan Aladin, Cecilia Whettstone and Endia Lawrence were the Oberlin student shoplifters.  They should not have done what they did.  But socially we cut some slack for youthful errors.  Bite the bullet and recover.

Yet, owing to Oberlin's leadership's obsession with vengeance against the Gibsons, the names Jonathan Aladin, Cecilia Whettstone and Endia Lawrence remain ever in the news, a perpetual reminder of their young folly.