Cringe Reverse Discrimination Group Hijacks Michigan Law Listserv To Ask Students To Sprinkle A Little Fraud In Their Personal Statements

Remember FASORP, the reverse discrimination edgelords that sound like they were named after a crummy corporation in a lazy dystopian novel? These jokers hijacked University of Michigan’s listserv at the beginning of April to whine about personal statements, painting them as Title VI, Title IX, and 42 U.S.C. § 1981 rending monstrosities forcing DEI into the hallowed halls of law review. Personal statements are really just a chance to show some character and talk about your work ethic, but FASORP wants you to think that any application process that extends beyond submitting your GPA and writing competition score is tantamount to reparations that force White and Jewish students to foot the bill.

Instead of taking my sage advice and developing some soft skills to make them more personable, FASORP is back and they’re doubling down on their insufferability. This time, they’ve abandoned their rhetoric about the importance of meritocracy and have become full-tilt advocates for gaming the system: they want everyone to claim that they are Black, Trans, or some other facet of the community that the police have a reputation for beating up on as some way of sticking it to the “woke moralists” for taking their coveted law review positions. Here are a couple of snippets:

Claim that you are “African-American” regardless of what your DNA test reveals. Every member of the human race can truthfully claim African heritage because homo sapiens originated in Africa and later migrated to different continents.

Last year, a white law-review applicant at an elite law school (not Michigan) claimed to have African heritage in his personal statement—as we all do—and he made law review. Of course, it is possible that this student earned his place on law review with his grades and writing-competition performance without any need for the diversity bonus that law reviews systematically award to black applicants, so there is no way to know for sure whether his claim about African heritage made the difference. But it certainly didn’t hurt. 

…

Begin the process of gender transitioning before the writing competition begins May 7, 2025. If you are male, stop getting haircuts and shave your legs. If you are female, cut your hair short. Buy some clothes for the opposite sex and try them on. Wear them while you work on the writing competition…After you submit your personal statement, you can always decide to detransition and revert back to living in accordance with your biological sex.

I’d say that this is childish behavior that you’d expect from teenagers — which is true — but it fails to capture the whole picture. As much as FASORP would like to paint this as praxis for navigating a broken world or biting satire, the truth is that false flagging is a well known and tired strategy that has been used to sow discord. And here’s the kicker — they generally aren’t that good at not being found out sooner or later. Remember that Republican politician who got caught tweeting as a Gay Black man?:

This flavor of online trolling has been around for about a decade — one of the tells that it’s happening is that the trolls aren’t actually that great at playing “Black.” Here’s a quote from the linked article:

[O]ne of the common mistakes trolls make is misusing or overusing African-American Vernacular English. “It’s not just that they get the rules of AAVE wrong — both the spoken and written conventions — they also don’t code switch the way black people do. Not a lot of effort goes into these accounts, in my honest opinion,” [S. I.] Rosenbaum says.

“They’re trying to sound black, whatever that means, but it comes off as very stereotypical,” Reign, who says she encounters at least four trolls every month, says. “Even if we sound that way, we don’t type that way — especially when we have characters to spare.”

So you know what? Anyone who wants to adopt FASORP’s strategy, go for it! And when you get caught, I hope that knowing your dissimulation wasn’t enough to salvage your GPA and writing sample keeps you up at night. If you want to read the full email sent by these bitter rejects, you can flip to the next page.

Earlier: Totally Serious And Not Made-Up Group Hijacks Michigan Law Listserv To ‘Preserve Evidence’ And Expose ‘Unworthy’ Students

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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