December 9, 2023

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Receipts: WaPo Lost It When Trump Used the Word ‘Vermin,’ But Check Out These Headlines.

Remember the DNC-MSM pretended to have the vapors when they believed that Republicans deliberately inserted the word “rats” for “Democrats” in a 2000 tv ad? It was a much simpler time, in retrospect.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Jonathan Turley: ‘Bunch of Lies’: Biden’s Clintonesque Denial Before a House Impeachment Inquiry Vote. “As with Clinton, the denial was absurd, even insulting. Roughly 70% of voters (including 40% of Democrats) believe Biden has acted either unlawfully or unethically in the overseas business dealings of his family. More importantly, the House has interviews, documents, photos and even audiotapes contradicting Biden’s continuing denial of having any knowledge of his son’s financial dealings.”

Posted at 8:50 am by Glenn Reynolds

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Shots fired outside Jewish temple in Albany as Hanukkah begins; no injuries reported. Or, Two APs in One! (Emphasis mine):

A menorah stands outside the entrance to Temple Israel, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023, in Albany, N.Y. A 28-year-old suspect was in police custody for allegedly firing two rounds from a shotgun outside the Jewish temple on Friday, just hours before the start of Hanukkah. Officials said no one was injured and police [said] they did not know the man’s motive.

A man fired a shotgun twice outside a Jewish temple in upstate New York, hours before the start of Hanukkah on Thursday, then said “Free Palestine” as he was taken into custody, police said. No one was injured.

Somebody’s about to get memory holed, very quickly:

Posted at 8:15 am by Ed Driscoll

VDH: How Were the Universities Lost?

After October 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America’s campuses.

Americans knew previously they were intolerant, leftwing, and increasingly non-meritocratic.

But immediately after October 7 — and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces — the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.

Indeed, not a day goes by when a university professor or student group has not spouted antisemitic hatred. Often, they threaten and attack Jewish students, or engage in mass demonstrations calling for the extinction of Israel.

Why and how did purportedly enlightened universities become incubators of such primordial hatred?

* * * * * * * *

The Ivy league and their kindred so-called elite campuses may soon go the way of Disney and Bud Light.

They think such a crash in their reputations is impossible given centuries of accustomed stature.

But the erosion is already occurring — and accelerating.

At the present rate, a Stanford law degree, a Harvard political science major, or a Yale social science BA will soon scare off employers and the general public at large.

These certificates will signify not proof of humility, knowledge, and decency, but rather undeserved self-importance, vacuousness, and fanaticism — and all to be avoided rather than courted.

I don’t know about that — you may not be interested in the Gleichschaltung, but many corporatist CEOs and their human resources departments will be for some time to come.

Related: ‘I Am Sorry:’ Harvard President Claudine Gay Addresses Backlash Over Congressional Testimony on Antisemitism.

As the backlash grew into an uproar, Gay issued a statement through Harvard’s official social media channels on Wednesday in an attempt to clarify her response to Stefanik’s line of questioning.

“There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students,” Gay said. “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”

But the damage had been done, an error Gay acknowledged on Thursday as the fallout continued. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce announced an official congressional investigation into antisemitism at Harvard. Hours later, Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from an advisory group to combat antisemitism on campus that Gay established only weeks earlier, citing her congressional testimony.

“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay said in the interview. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”

“Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth,” Gay added.

“My truth,” huh? As Mark Steyn wrote in 2005 after then-NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey first brought that phrase into national prominence:

When Governor Jim McGreevey announced last year he was stepping down, he told the people of New Jersey something very modern. He said, “My truth is that I am a gay American.” That’s a very contemporary formulation: “my” truth. To John Paul II, there was only “the” truth. To the moral relativists, everyone’s entitled to his own – or, as the Governor continued, warming to his theme, “one has to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world.” That sappy narcissism is what the New York Times boilerplate boils down to: “abortion, homosexuality and contraception” is an alternative Holy Trinity for the church of the self.

In any case, it’s a nice tell by Gay that Harvard’s postmodernism, and its related syndromes, postcolonialism and postnationalism, aren’t going to change anytime too soon:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

ON SALE FROM SARAH A. HOYT:  Draw One In The Dark.


Something or someone is killing shape shifters in the small mountain town of Goldport, Colorado. Kyrie Smith, a server at a local diner, is the last person to solve the mystery. Except of course for the fact that she changes into a panther and that her co-worker, Tom Ormson, who changes into a dragon, thinks he might have killed someone. Add in a policeman who shape-shifts into a lion, a father who is suffering from remorse about how he raised his son, and a triad of dragon shape shifters on the trail of a magical object known as The Pearl of Heaven and the adventure is bound to get very exciting indeed. Solving the crime is difficult enough, but so is — for our characters — trusting someone with secrets long-held. Originally published by Baen Books.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

ANDREW SULLIVAN: The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off: Did the Congressional hearings finally expose the scandal of the Ivy League?

It may be too much to expect that the Congressional hearings this week, starring the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, will wake people up to the toxic collapse of America’s once-great Ivy League. But I can hope, can’t I? In the immortal words of Hitch (peace be upon him), as you listen to these people, “You see how far the termites have spread, and how long and well they have dined.”

The mediocrities smirked, finessed, condescended, and stonewalled. Take a good look at them. These are the people who now select our elites. And they select them, as they select every single member of the faculty, and every student, by actively discriminating against members of certain “privileged” groups and aggressively favoring other “marginalized” ones. They were themselves appointed in exactly the same way, from DEI-approved pools of candidates. As a Harvard dean, Claudine Gay’s top priority was “making more progress on diversity,” i.e. intensifying the already systemic race, sex and gender discrimination that defines the place.

In our society, we consistently get bad people at the top. That’s not an accident, that’s what the system selects for. Plus:

In the hearings, President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.

This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary.

Plus:

Freedom of speech in the Ivy League extends exclusively to the voices of the oppressed; they are also permitted to disrupt classes, deplatform or shout down controversial speakers, hurl obscenities, force members of oppressor groups — i.e. Jewish students and teachers in the latest case — into locked libraries and offices during protests, and blocked from classrooms. Jewish students have even been assaulted — at Harvard, at Columbia, at UMass Amherst, at Tulane. Assaults by woke students used to be rare, such as the 2017 mob at Middlebury that put Allison Stanger in a neck brace — but since 10/7, they’re intensifying.

If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country. Because they have been taught it’s the only moral position to take.

Abolish the Ivy League.

Related: Has woke higher education met it’s destiny? Doom scrolling the response to congressional testimony by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn on antisemitism in higher education. If I’m being truthful, it’s fun.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds