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JOEL KOTKIN: Jews finding less comfort on the Left.

Jews are a contradictory people. Overall, achievement-oriented and very capitalistic, Jewish educational and self-employment statistics are among the highest for any religious group. They are also politically powerful; amounting to roughly 2 percent of the U.S. population – half their percentage a half century ago – Jews account for nine of 100 U.S. senators and 19 of 435 members of the House.

Yet if Jews have achieved significant economic and political power, they have done so primarily as Democrats. Only one of the 28 Jews in Congress is a Republican – Lee Zeldin from New York’s Long Island – and the one independent, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, is enough of a Democrat to be running, with surprising success, for that party’s presidential nomination. . . .

But, in recent years, anti-Semitism and, particularly, anti-Zionism have shifted ever more to the Left. Over a decade ago, my wife and I visited Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, the famed French Nazi hunters, at their Paris office. Although they expressed concern about the traditional anti-Semitism of Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front party, they were more alarmed about a rising new virulent strain from a combination of Islamic and left-leaning sources.

The massive movement of Muslims into Europe – now accelerating into a tsunamic wave – is accelerating these trends. The European Left, long enamored of radicals from the developing world, increasingly adopts the notion that Israel represents the ultimate political atrocity.

The most obvious manifestation now is the powerful drive to force European universities to divest themselves of investments in Israeli companies and even ban Israeli academics. This is occurring even though Israel, with all its many imperfections, is by far the most democratic, feminist and gay-tolerant country in that exceedingly bad neighborhood.

It’s hard not to see anti-Semitic ideas in this assault.

Well, that’s because they’re, you know, right there. I’m surprised that it’s taken so long for Jews to catch on. But, then, to see what is in front of one’s nose takes constant struggle.

YOU SPELLED “LYING LIAR WHO LIES” WRONG: Washington Post: Hillary Clinton’s incomplete timeline on her personal e-mail account.

WELL, THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY:

Shot:

The Cocked Fist Culture has turned into an ouroboros, except the snake is well past swallowing its own tail. It’s eaten its way clean up to mid-sternum. Recent books across the political spectrum have extensively documented this turn, notably Mary Katharine Ham and Guy Benson’s End of Discussion on the right and Kirsten Powers’s The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech on the center-left. Though the outrage industrial complex shows no sign of shrinking, some thought a high-water mark had been reached earlier this year when Jonathan Chait, a New York writer and reliable liberal, broke ranks, accusing his own team of ideological repression through all the thought-and-speech policing. He charged that the hijacked left had adopted the modus operandi of old-line smash-mouth Marxists, who’ve always been contemptuous of mainstream liberalism’s tendency to enshrine dissent. The present left merely swaps Marxist preoccupation with economics for race-and-gender-identity fetishization.

While some on the right gave Chait a swat for sniffily arriving a quarter-century late to the anti-p.c. party, his comrades lined up to steamroll him. Amanda Taub, Vox’s self-described “senior sadness correspondent,” responded that there’s no such thing as political correctness. Even using the term is just a way “to dismiss a concern or demand as a frivolous grievance rather than a real issue,” a device “often used by those in a position of privilege to silence debates raised by marginalized people.” A sentence that sounded suspiciously like it had been written by a political-correctness meme generator. The kind that Orwell described as prose consisting “less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a pre-fabricated hen-house.”

But the senior sadness correspondent must’ve grown even sadder when several months later, Vox itself ran a piece by a professor bylined Edward Schlosser. He complained of students’ claiming grievous harm over every imagined affront. Of his and his colleagues’ having to adjust their teaching materials so as not to trample the fragile buttercups, for fear of losing their jobs. Of being afraid to teach the likes of Upton Sinclair and Mark Twain at the risk of triggering sensibility-offending IEDs. Of cultural studies and social-justice writers enabling these attitudes in popular media by attempting to make complex fields of study as easily digestible as a TGIF sitcom, which has “led to an adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice.”

The piece’s headline, incidentally, was “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me.” One is tempted to reply to Professor Schlosser (not his real name, he was too afraid to use it): How do you think the rest of us feel? Especially as the students being taught—if “teaching” is actually what happens in the trigger-warned, hermetically sealed safe spaces that higher-education classrooms have become—move into the workforce. There, they can further the debate, which no longer remotely resembles a debate, since a debate is something too unsafe-spacey to have.

— “The Cocked Fist Culture: Crossing the Microaggressions Minefield,” by Matt Labash, which appeared online this past Thursday at the Weekly Standard.

Chaser: “Awful: Somebody made a video of Dana Loesch shooting herself in the head.”

— Twitchy.com, yesterday.

No word yet when Paul Krugman, Chris Matthews, Brian Ross, CNN and President Obama will be condemning this disgusting bit of eliminationist artwork and its excoriating effect on the culture as a whole.

REQUIRED READING FOR BERNIE SANDERS FANS: Marxists’ Apartment A Microcosm Of Why Marxism Doesn’t Work.

ROGER SIMON: THE CASE FOR BEN CARSON GROWS: “Not surprisingly, this – dare we call it – uppityness on the part of the neurosurgeon has elicited a fair amount of cognitive dissonance or, in Andy McCarthy’s term, willful blindness from the liberal punditocracy.  Jake Tapper on his Sunday show acted as if he could scarcely understand what Carson was saying, even though it is quite simple.”

Not to intrude on Dr. Carson’s day job of studying how the brain works, but the inability to understand the worldview of half the country is a curious mental affliction that seems endemic to CNN newsreaders.

MILO YIANNOPOULOS:

We recently shared news with our readers about one of the most extraordinary reports to come out of the UN in years: a document that compared “cyber violence” to physical violence, and advised national governments to censor the internet on the basis of the whining of privileged western feminists.

Closer examination of the report found the quality of its citations to be extraordinarily poor. No I mean like seriously, it was laugh out loud hilarious. Links to broken web pages, blank documents, and even a footnote linking to an author’s local hard drive. (I am not making this up.) Other sources included articles that accused major video game publishers of promoting “satanism.”

Is this the sort of ruthlessly factual approach to important global controversies that led the UN to put Saudi Arabia in charge of a human rights panel? Enquiring minds want to know, especially since the two feminists presenting this report, ferocious critics of gaming culture Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, both have – how should I put it? – a complicated relationship with fact and context.

Read the whole thing.

BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY: “A good bit of leftism seems to be driven by the resentful innumeracy of otherwise intelligent people.”

Found via someone on Glenn’s Twitter feed, who dubs it “Comment of the decade.”

CHUCK TODD PLAYS BRUTAL VIDEO OF HILLARY CLINTON’S BIGGEST FLIP-FLOPS FOR HER.

In 2008, NBC waited until Obama was securely in place as the Democrat nominee before beginning their search and destroy mission on Hillary. That culminated in Keith Olbermann’s violent eliminationist rhetoric in late April of that year, demanding “Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.”

If not Hillary, which Democrat has NBC’s corporate backing this time around?

Related: “Every GOP candidate better have their contingency plan ready for when Hillary isn’t the nominee. We weren’t in 08 and it screwed us.”

JOHN O. MCGINNIS: The Association of American Law Schools Needs More Political Diversity.

In the week that a new organization, Heterodox Academy, was established to press for more ideological diversity in academic life, the learned association in my own profession showed how much it is needed. The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) sent around a notice of its prospective annual meeting, highlighting its most prominent speakers. Of the thirteen announced, none is associated predominantly with Republican party, but eleven are associated with the Democratic Party. Many are prominent liberals. None is a conservative or libertarian.

Five are judges, including Stephen Breyer, all appointed by Democrats. Another is the incoming Senate leader of the Democrats. Three others contributed predominantly to Democrats. One for whom no contributions could be found held a fund raiser for President Obama. Another worked for the Democratic side of the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment of President Clinton.

It is true that Michael Bloomberg is also speaking. He has been at various points a Democratic and a Republican and is now an independent. Perhaps the AALS thought that a single person could create diversity through his many political avatars! But seriously, Bloomberg, who has crusaded for gun control and limitations on permissible ounces in a sugary soda, does not resemble a conservative or libertarian. He ran as a Republican in 2000 for Mayor of New York City because it was the nomination he could acquire.

Now my point is not to disparage the highlighted speakers. They are all eminent men and women. Some have even take positions friendly to ordered liberty. Deborah Rhode has made excellent arguments for the deregulation of the legal profession. But when everyone shares largely convergent premises, intellectual discourse is stunted. And the lack of diversity is particularly embarrassing in the legal academy.

Yes, it is.

Plus: “The obliviousness of the AALS to need for political diversity stands in stark contrast to its relentless push for gender, racial, and ethnic diversity.” Yes, it does.

DC CLIMATE CHANGE RALLY GOES FROM HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS EXPECTED TO… JUST HUNDREDS:

But what if you actually want to stop ‘climate change?’ Well, go back to those people on the street, and ask them whether they want a buck-per-gallon gas tax hike.  Or working to shut down more heavy industry in the United States.  Or doubling or tripling the subsidies offered to ‘green energy’ companies. Or, indeed, anything else that would be drastic, significant, and above all relevant to people’s daily lives. You will get… hundreds showing up to a climate change rally on the Mall*.  Because talk is cheap.

…Which is possibly why it’s so profitable for the aforementioned people who are only in all of this for the money, huh? Generate visible but ultimately meaningless enthusiasm for a cause for pennies, sell that enthusiasm to gullible sorts with more money than sense for dollars, make a tidy profit on the difference.  God bless the American Way.

I don’t understand why, when grilled by old media about global cooling, global warming, climate change, climate chaos, or whatever it’s called this week, Republicans don’t respond by asking the interviewer, well are you prepared to see cut? Should we eliminate NASCAR? The NFL? Hollywood? Your TV network? I mean, if you’re telling me it’s a crisis — then when will you and your employer act that way yourselves?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON AHMED AND THE ART OF THE PSYCHODRAMA: Ahmed the clockmaker and Columbia’s Mattress Girl are reminders that there are careerist advantages to becoming a victim of religious, racial, or sexual prejudice.

SIMPLE JUSTICE: The Department Of Education’s Office Of Civil Rights Gone Rogue.

Even McIntosh, despite her dodging and weaving, concedes that Catherine E. Lhamon, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and head of the DoE Office of Civil Rights has gone off the reservation. She has no lawful authority to mandate colleges and universities adhere to her political whims, as reflected in her “guidance,” upon pain of losing federal funds.*

When asked (see 1:37 in the video) who gave Lhamon the authority to impose her personal will upon the nation’s colleges and universities, she responded, “with gratitude, you did when I was confirmed.”

The United States of America did not confer upon a person named Lhamon the authority to recreate Title IX in her image, to impose threat of the loss of public monies upon failure to adhere to her vision, to force a fundamental and systemic change that created a wholly new authority to rid the nation’s higher educational system of anything that might adversely affect the feelings of “marginalized” students, ascertain and punish students who are alleged to have engaged in conduct that caused such unpleasantness.

While much of the discussion, and dispute, addresses the fringes of this system of adjudication, ranging from what conduct is subject to collegiate condemnation to how it’s determined, to what’s to be done about it, precious little thought has gone into the government’s authority to do any of this in the first place.

There is none. Lhamon took it upon herself to send out a letter to her “dear colleagues,” and the nation’s higher education system chose to read her letter and say, “well, okay then.” The “dear colleague” letters are not, and never were, of binding authority upon anyone. They are not the law, and anyone asserting that this creature devouring innocent students on campus is mandated by law is wrong. Title IX does not create authority for colleges to adjudicate rape and sexual assault on campus.

You know, Administrative Law is a nice field. But in this fundamentally-transformed America, there’s a lot more administration than there is law.

THE DOUBLE DOWN: What Do You do When Technologies Change And Your Business Model Becomes Obsolete.  This post was put up in one of my facebook groups and as I was on a break from The Novel tm, I read it.  I got to a paragraph and my mouth dropped open.  The post is about the publishing earning reports that shows that, in traditional publishing, since Amazon stopped forcing traditional publishers to put up ebooks for under 9.99, ebooks have been selling less than paper books.  This is no more than any business person knows: raise prices, sell fewer units. Particularly in a recessionary environment.  My friend Cedar blogged about the report here. None of which prepared me for these reported news:

Publishers, seeking to capitalize on the shift, are pouring money into their print infrastructures and distribution. Hachette added 218,000 square feet to its Indiana warehouse late last year, and Simon & Schuster is expanding its New Jersey distribution facility by 200,000 square feet.

Penguin Random House has invested nearly $100 million in expanding and updating its warehouses and speeding up distribution of its books. It added 365,000 square feet last year to its warehouse in Crawfordsville, Ind., more than doubling the size of the warehouse.

“People talked about the demise of physical books as if it was only a matter of time, but even 50 to 100 years from now, print will be a big chunk of our business,” said Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, which has nearly 250 imprints globally. Print books account for more than 70 percent of the company’s sales in the United States.

The company began offering independent booksellers in 2011 two-day guaranteed delivery from November to January, the peak book buying months.

DO read the whole thing. Even if publishing isn’t of interest to you, watching an entrenched industry deal with catastrophic change is fascinating.  (And because it is my business, more than a bit scary.)

THE WAR ABOUT STAR WARS: A matter of canon.

IT’S A FLACCID AND UNCONVINCING WEAPON: Macho talk is Obama’s only weapon against Putin.

HE WHO PAYS THE PIPER CALLS THE TUNE: Billionaire Steyer calls for more Democratic debates.

ONLY SO MUCH LIPSTICK YOU CAN PUT ON AN ARKANSAS RAZORBACK: Spielberg tried – and failed – to make Hillary seem likeable.

IT ALLOWS FOR GREAT SELF DRAMATIZATION: From women who never faced adversity.  The Myth of the College Rape Culture.

RUMORS OF HER DEATH WERE GREATLY EXAGGERATED: A curious case.

WELL, THAT FILLS ME WITH CONFIDENCE: Almost All US Temperature Data Used In Global Warming Models Is Estimated or Altered.

FROM BEN BOVA AND LES JOHNSON: Rescue Mode.

NEVER THOUGHT HIGHLY OF HIS INTELLIGENCE: Corbyn’s conspiracy theory: 9/11 attacks were ‘manipulated’ to make it look like Osama Bin Laden was responsible, says Labour leader.

WELL, WAS THERE: The Mystery of Pope Francis: Was There a Vatican Coup?

MARK STEYN IN COPENHAGEN: Steyn marks the tenth anniversary of an important milestone in the struggle between a fainthearted west and a resurgent Islam.