MARK JUDGE: Maestro and Hollywood’s retroactive repression.

Bernstein was a towering figure in American cultural life, but the film focuses on his bisexuality and how it presented a serious struggle in the 1950s. This is an important part of the story, to be sure, but not the entire story. It’s one small part of a symphony. Yet this aspect of the great man’s life is the main theme of Maestro. This is sad because Bernstein’s life was absolutely remarkable, overflowing with drama, politics, family, and triumph. He lived enough for two men.

Film critic Norman Lebrecht nailed it: “Bernstein revolutionized New York’s repertoire with injections of Mahler, Nielsen, Shostakovich and two-dozen American composers. He launched Saturday morning televised talks for young people at Carnegie Hall, educating a whole American generation in the elements and excitements of orchestral music. He and [wife] Felicia were shining lights of New York society, equivalent in fame and glamour to the Kennedys in the White House. The film of West Side Story carried his fame worldwide. He combined the roles of composer, conductor, teacher, social commentator, and reformer, too much for one man, one life. This context was entirely missed in Cooper’s film.”

Bernstein was also falsely accused of being a communist. Hollywood lives for those false accusations*. But they’re not too big on people who were actually destroyed by communism. Where’s the movie about Whittaker Chambers?

Homosexuality might be taking over racism as the main thrust of Tinseltown’s retroactive repression. But only because the films picking the scab of racism have been endless: The Butler. The Help. Or Mississippi Burning. Or The Long Walk Home, Men of Honor, Malcolm, Mona Lisa Smile, Pleasantville, Hairspray, and Remember the Titans. Hollywood just never seems to tire of making movies that rub our faces in our own erstwhile iniquity. It’s a form of what Sir George Frazer in The Golden Bough called “sympathetic magic” — by devouring something belonging to someone else, you take on those attributes yourself. Thus, liberals get to feel virtuous for just making a movie.

To be fair though, Bernstein was certainly tipping the leftwing scale pretty hard, at least in 1970: Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: NIU hosts seminar on ending ‘White Linguistic Hegemony.’

THE PROLES AREN’T BUYING WHAT THE LEADERS ARE SELLING: Photos show mostly empty seats for Dylan Mulvaney event at Penn State.

ROGER KIMBALL: Biden Follies: The Son-Of-A-Gun-Number-One-Son Might Just Toss Pops Under the Bus.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS…WELL, PRETTY CONSISTENT, ACTUALLY: NY Post’s critic panned Napoleon movie, founder Alexander Hamilton panned the man.

The Post recently panned Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” starring Joaquin Phoenix as “looney tunes” — an opinion largely unchanged from Post founder Alexander Hamilton’s assessment of the French leader 200 years ago.

The nation’s oldest continuously operating daily newspaper was established in the autumn of 1801.

The terror and anarchy of the French Revolution were mostly over and Napoleon was ruling France as first consul.

Alexander Hamilton and his Post successors were unequivocal in their distaste for the diminutive de-facto dictator:

“A Corsican has usurped the throne of [France]. Twenty-four millions are made to submit to the will of an obscure foreigner,” the paper wrote in December 1803, a year before Hamilton’s death.

“Suicides have become common. Murder is esteemed an amusement. Divorces daily take place,” the paper added in lurid descriptions of his misrule. “Fathers have poisoned their children, wives have murdered their husbands. Children have become parricides. Prostitutes are registered on the public records … Such is the present condition of the once flourishing France.”

How do the two men stack up? Let’s go to the tape!

Related: From PJM alum Tyler O’Neil at the Daily Signal: Ridley Scott Managed to Make Even Napoleon Boring.

HARVARD CRIMSON: UPenn’s President Resigned. What Does it Mean for Harvard President Claudine Gay? “When Harvard President Claudine Gay was inaugurated as the University’s 30th president, many expected her to lead Harvard for the next decade. But after Gay’s testimony on Tuesday before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, many are demanding she resign in her first semester.”

Related: Campus Antisemitism, Free Speech, And Double Standards.

[T]he deep problem with their testimonies was not fundamentally about calls for genocide or free speech. It was about double standards — itself a form of antisemitism, but one that can be harder to detect.

The double standard is this: Colleges and universities that for years have been notably censorious when it comes to free speech seem to have suddenly discovered its virtues only now, when the speech in question tends to be especially hurtful to Jews.

The point came across at different moments in the hearing. Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican, observed that Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist, had been hounded out of Harvard (though not fired outright) for her views on sex categories. “In what world,” Walberg asked, “is a call for violence against Jews protected speech but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?”

Yes, a march saying that “Trans women are men” wouldn’t have gotten the close parsing that the pro-Hamas speech did, and everyone knows it.

Related thoughts here.

Flashback: Welcome to the Party, Pal!

UNSURPRISING: New Survey Showing Public Ignorance About the Holocaust Among Young Americans.

I remember the Insta-Daughter characterizing her college American History this way: “World War II was forever ago, but slavery was yesterday.”

AT AMAZON, Shop Holiday Deals. #CommissionEarned

ROGER KIMBALL: The disgraceful, ducking, diving, dodging college presidents.

Attentive readers will have noticed that I have emphasized that these three university presidents are ladies. I did so because the “feminization” of higher education we having been hearing so much about recently is very much in the background of this event. (Not, I hasten to add, that feminized males — I believe the preferred argot is “cucks” — like Peter Salovey at Yale or Christopher Eisgruber at Princeton wouldn’t have given similar non-answers: they surely would have.)

The feminization of higher ed — and of American society as a whole — is a large topic. Here I want simply to note that the repellent jelly of moral confusion that united all three responses was saturated by that feminization. None of those women could give a direct answer to a direct question about a matter of grave moral moment. Instead, they temporized, equivocated, dodged and parried.

Bill Ackman, the billionaire founder of Pershing Square Capital and (former) mega-donor to Harvard gave a splendid example of the opposite, non-hothouse response. “They must all resign in disgrace,” Ackman wrote. “Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world?” he asked. “Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context.”

It was a refreshing, straightforward, may I say “masculine” response. I second Ackman’s demand and hope that he has started a trend.

Andrew Sullivan dubs Tuesday’s hearing: The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off.

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.

Thanks to the recent Supreme Court case, the energetic discrimination against Asian-American candidates for admission at Harvard is no longer in doubt. But countless other candidates for admission have little to no chance, regardless of their grades, or extracurriculars, because they belong to the wrong race, sex, sexual orientation, and “gender identity.” As soon as students are admitted under this identity framework, they are taught its core precepts: that the “truth” — or, in Harvard’s now-ironic motto, “Veritas” — is a function not of logic or reason or of open, free, robust debate and dialogue, let alone of Western civilization, but of inimical and evil “power structures” rooted in identity that need to be dismantled first. Identity first; truth second — because truth is rooted in identity and cannot exist outside of it.

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. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.

As the Bard of Iowa Austin noted almost a decade ago:

And as a result:

FOX BUTTERFIELD, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Tennessee’s prison population grows as violent crime drops steeply.

HOW IT STARTED:

While Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had studied his World War II enemy, he was unprepared for the Nazi brutality he witnessed at Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945. Bodies were piled like wood and living skeletons struggled to survive. Even as the Allied Forces continued their fight, Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied. He invited the media to document the scene. He compelled Germans living in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves.

—“Eisenhower’s Foresight: Protecting the Truth of the Holocaust,” The United States Holocaust Museum, January 27^th, 2021.

How it’s going: One in five young Americans think the Holocaust is a myth.

—The Economist, Thursday.

In accordance with the prophecy: ‘Not All Calls For Genocide Are Bad,’ Say Ivy League Presidents Sporting Cool New Mustaches.

—The Babylon Bee, Wednesday.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST: “Not since Bill Clinton was asked about having sex with Monica Lewinsky and replied, ‘It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is,’ has there been such parsing.”

Writes Maureen Dowd, in “The Ivy League Flunks Out” (NYT), talking about the line “It is a context-dependent decision” spoken by U Penn president Penn’s Elizabeth Magill.

We were just talking about Bill Clinton rhetoric — 2 posts down, here — but that was about “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and the topic was Biden’s denials of involvement in his son’s influence peddling.

Dowd is writing about the “pathetic display” put on by the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania “when they were asked if calling for genocide against Jews counted as harassment.” Dowd only uses the word “harassment” once and doesn’t seem to see any need to define it or discuss it in any depth. When is an ugly/cruel/immoral/hateful statement harassment? Dowd — like many others, and unlike the “pathetic” presidents — glides immediately over to the much easier matter: It’s ugly, cruel, immoral, and hateful to call for genocide, against the Jews or against any people.

Clinton was a precursor.

LOL: Sheila Jackson Lee soundly defeated in Houstan mayoral race.

Flashback: Houston mayoral candidate Sheila Jackson Lee tells supporters to vote on wrong date.

YEP.

The Ivy league presidents had reached the point where they couldn't hear how they sounded to those on the outside of the echo chamber. That's what the "glamor of evil" does. https://t.co/Fl1Evhw33G

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) December 9, 2023

OPEN THREAD: Sorry it’s so late! I thought I scheduled one this morning, but apparently not.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Why is there so much military interest in the moon?

SOME OF THEM ARE PRESIDENT: Almost 40% of People With Dementia Don’t Seem to Know They Have It.

HORMONAL BIRTH CONTROL HAS UNDERAPPRECIATED DANGERS: Warning: Using Common Painkillers Alongside Birth Control Pills Increases Your Risk of Blood Clots.

FIRE STATEMENT: Penn resignations can be exactly what the university needs to restore free expression It could also be a disaster, of course, but we’ll work our butts off to prevent that from happening. I have some reason to believe the reformers want serious and fundamental change (in a good way).

AND NOW WE SEE THE LIMITS OF “CONTEXT:” UPenn President Liz Magill Resigns after Contentious Testimony on Campus Antisemitism.

The trustees of UPenn had organized an emergency meeting for tomorrow, so clearly the handwriting was on the wall, especially after Thursday’s news: Penn loses $100 million donation over antisemitism hearing.

WELL, GOOD: Scientists develop potential new drug treatment for multiple sclerosis.

READER FAVORITE: ThermoPro Lightning 1-Second Instant Read Meat Thermometer. #CommissionEarned

ONE DOWN, TWO TO GO: Penn president Elizabeth Magill resigns after a week of intense backlash.

I’ve received a copy of a letter that the MIT committee that selected MIT President Sally Kornbluth earlier this year received from alumni and, well, it’s scorching.

Related:

Extraordinary video in which a Jewish student highlights the extent of antisemitism on campus at @MIT. Elite universities and their DEI bureaucracies have failed us. pic.twitter.com/X2lX9sMw8l

— Ed Leon Klinger (@edleonklinger) December 6, 2023

Also: Bill Maher labels Harvard and UPenn presidents with nickname ‘Team Hamas’.

GOING THE DISTANCE: Here’s What It Takes to Drive a Tesla Over 1 Million Miles. “As InsideEVs notes, early Model S cars, including the 2014 year, commonly had reliability issues with the rear motor units and even their replacement units, which impacted this example as well, and the owner claims the rear motor unit on this one has been replaced a whopping 13 times (an average of 84,285 miles per motor including the current one, though we hope reliability has improved in recent years). The battery pack has faired much better, only being replaced three times so far, for an average of around 300,000 miles per pack, which seems pretty solid.”

His longevity secrets: “But he also somewhat babies his Model S, careful not to over-juice it on charges beyond 80 percent full, and by not letting it dip below 20 percent state-of-charge when driving. He typically only journeys about 60 miles at a time before taking a break, and doesn’t top off on breaks unless the car is low charge.”

JIM TREACHER: Week Sauce (12/9).

Joy Behar was embarrassed on The View this week* when a guest said he saw her take off her shoes on a plane.

Hey, it was a long flight and she needed to rest her hooves.

OnlyFans model Sami Sheen, daughter of Charlie, recently showed off her new boob job on Instagram.

She’s six months late, but it’s still a nice gift for Father’s Day.

When Time magazine asked Taylor Swift about her old albums, she replied: “I’m collecting horcruxes. I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one.”

This is what we get for allowing women to read.

No really, she actually said that: Taylor Swift baffles fans with quote about horcruxes and infinity stones during Time interview after being named Person Of The Year: ‘Her metaphors are just… inexplicable.’

Thanos, call your office!

* Behar had quite a banner week on ABC News’ flagship daytime show: Joy Behar Would Like to Talk to You About Her G-Spot.