PRINCETON PRESIDENT MISUNDERSTANDS FIRE DATA—AND CAMPUS FREE SPEECH: “In his new book Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber reports on FIRE’s data on free speech and First Amendment norms on campus while making no effort to understand it and misusing the data of others.”
Archive for 2025
October 31, 2025
HAPPY HALLOWEEN: A candy engineer explains the science behind the Snickers bar.
Related (From Ed): Seen on Facebook; parents, check your kids’ candy carefully tonight, lest they contain highly addictive 64th note electric guitar solos and complex irregular time signatures!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN:
Christians observe All Hallows’ Eve as a chance to both acknowledge death and laugh at it, because we know that death is not an end; we learned that half-a-year ago during the Easter Triduum that preceded Christ’s victory over death. https://t.co/ajlQdq8aNH
— Elizabeth Scalia (@TheAnchoress) October 30, 2025
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is Boston Cooked?
The assessment case is ongoing, and it’s just one illustrative example among many of Mayor Wu’s broader approach to governance: prioritize the interests of your supporters (whether they be voters or private interest groups) above the economic health of the city and the rule of law within it.
In the narrow sense of winning elections, this approach is working. Wu beat her 2021 mayoral opponent by 28 percentage points and her 2025 opponent by 49. In the latter race, Wu spent almost no time discussing Boston’s stagnant housing production, dismal educational outcomes,2 or worsening crime situation. Instead, she chose to make her opposition to President Trump’s budget cuts and immigration enforcement the centerpiece of her campaign.
Playing to your base while neglecting the broader health of the city isn’t new in Boston; it was the defining element of James Michael Curley’s four non-consecutive mayoral terms.3 Curley, an Irish populist, used the power of the office to make life as unpleasant as possible for his predominantly English opponents in the hope that they would emigrate to the suburbs, thereby leaving him with a more favorable electorate. In the process, business activity dried up and the city was driven to the brink of bankruptcy; its recovery took decades of concerted work by city and state leadership.
Wu, who studied economics under Ed Glaeser, author of the famous paper that formalized the “Curley effect”, is no doubt aware of this history, yet4 her approach to governance is remarkably close to Curley’s: help your friends, punish your enemies, and don’t worry too much about where the city will be a decade or two from now.
Ultimately, this is on the voters who choose to enable Wu.
VDH: Are Americans Better or Worse Off Since January?
No wars broke out during Trump’s current year. Tentative Trump-inspired ceasefires helped stop violence between India and Pakistan, Cambodia and Thailand, Egypt and Ethiopia, Serbia and Kosovo, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Trump’s tariffs so far have not caused, as critics predicted, a recession or stock collapse. Instead, the stock market has reached all-time highs.
Trillions of dollars in promised foreign investments in the U.S. have set a record. And China, for the first time in 50 years, is facing an American-led global pushback against its exploitative, mercantilist trade policies.
The left is outraged about many of Trump’s executive orders.
But the public largely supports destroying the cartels’ seaborne drug shipments bound for the U.S. Polls show majorities favor banning transgender males from female sports, ending DEI racialist fixations, and enacting long-overdue higher education reforms.
Yet the daily news is about politicians’ f-bombs, government shutdowns, Trump’s social media trolling, and street violence. But the facts tell a different story of national recovery from the self-inflicted disasters of the recent past.
But think of the East Wing! Kamala Harris loses it, goes on expletive-laden rant about Trump’s donation-funded ballroom.
🚨NEW: Kamala Harris *MELTS DOWN* over Trump ballroom🚨
"Are you f*cking kidding me? This guy wants to create a ballroom for his rich friends while completely turning a blind eye to the fact that babies are going to starve when the SNAP benefits end in just hours from now! Come… pic.twitter.com/11iT7n3EH7
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) October 30, 2025
Why, it’s as if: Howls Over the White House Ball Room Remind Us That Progressives Tear Down Only for Destruction.
Destruction that Kamala wholeheartedly supported: Kamala Harris Lies, Claiming That She Never Promoted the Bail Fund That Bailed Out BLM Rioters As Well As Murderers and R4pists; But the Tweet In Which She Promoted that Bail Fund Is Still Up!
(Her tweet offering to bail out rioters is still up, incidentally.)
That Heritage now finds itself defending Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a man who has praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust, and mocked Jewish suffering, is a symptom of a moral rot spreading through the American right.
Kevin Roberts says, “Christ first, then America always.” He frames this as courage, as standing up to “the globalist class.” But listen closely to what he’s actually saying. It’s not faith or patriotism. It’s the language of power cloaked in religion and stripped of any guardrails.
It is also deeply dishonest.
Nobody is trying to “cancel Christians” for criticizing Israel. Nobody has ever said that disagreeing with Israeli policy makes someone an antisemite, any more than disagreeing with President Trump makes you less of a patriot.
The issue is when you charitably host and defend literal Jew-haters, people who call Jews “vermin” and say the Holocaust didn’t happen, and then pretend that doing so is a defense of free speech.
Roberts says Heritage “won’t cancel our own people.” But that phrase, “our own people,” is doing a lot of work here. Because who exactly does that include now? Are neo-Nazis now “our people”? Is Nick Fuentes, a man who preaches venomous hate against Jews, women, and Black Americans, now under the Heritage tent?
The conservative movement once knew how to draw lines. William F. Buckley exiled the John Birch Society from the mainstream right when it crossed into conspiracy and antisemitism. Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire because he understood that evil is not relative. It must be named and it must be confronted.
Now, men like Kevin Roberts call evil a “debate partner.”
He claims “we challenge those ideas in debate.” Debate what, exactly? Whether Jews are subhuman? Whether the Holocaust happened? Whether women belong in the kitchen? Whether slavery was good for the South?
No serious moral movement treats those questions as intellectual exercises. They are disqualifying.
Read the whole thing.
And here, as the Carlson-Fuentes bromance could be a mile marker on the road to 2028: Warning: The Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes Bigots Are Targeting JD Vance.
LEFTIES ARE SPOILED, VIOLENT CHILDREN: Death Threats to ICE Increase 8,000%.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX Updates for Faster and Simpler Plan to Return Astronauts to the Moon.
CHANGE: This Is What We Voted For: ATF Removes CLEO Notification Requirement From NFA Forms. “Part of the process of making an NFA item like a suppressor — either as a manufacturer or an individual — includes filling out an ATF Form 1 an d notifying your local chief law enforcement officer or CLEO. It’s a ludicrous holdover from the early part of the twentieth century that has zero practical value for anyone involved in the process. The good news is it’s about to go away.”
GLEICHSCHALTUNG:
BREAKING: California’s UC system now requires students through an online TEST to affirm transgender ideology to stay enrolled. Under the SHAPE program, refusing to use trans pronouns or objecting to males in women’s restrooms is labeled “harassment.” Fail the quiz, and you’re… pic.twitter.com/ZUtRB8QNiX
— Amy Reichert (@amyforsandiego) October 30, 2025
TED CRUZ CALLS FOR JUDGE BOASBERG’S IMPEACHMENT FOR ‘ABUSING HIS POWER.’
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, this week released more FBI files related to the surveillance of Republican organizations and persons by then-special counsel Jack Smith. The new information provided by Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also prompted a renewed call for Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to be impeached.
In particular, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, denounced the federal judge for signing a gag order preventing AT&T from letting the Texas lawmaker know that his cellphone records had been sought by Smith for at least a year.
“If a judge signs an order reaching a factual conclusion for which there is zero evidence whatsoever, that judge is abusing his power,” Cruz said at the press conference, adding:
“I am right now calling on the House of Representatives to impeach Judge Boasberg.”
More Republican failure theater, or would this actually accomplish something? At the very least, it would put Democrats on record that they support lawfare:
Impeachment by the House, even if a conviction in the Senate is unlikely, would have the salutary effect of having the entire episode aired publicly, and forcing the Dem. Senators to vote in such a way that has them affirm their approval of this kind of effort against sitting… https://t.co/6uoXOM8aGd
— Shipwreckedcrew (@shipwreckedcrew) October 31, 2025
HEH:
BREAKING: It appears that hackers have taken over the University of Pennsylvania computer systems, calling the college a “dogshit elitist institution full of woke retards” and threatening to release evidence of its discriminatory admissions practices. pic.twitter.com/3eNg05t7ZF
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 31, 2025
Maybe their official communications should be so forthright.
NO COMETS REQUIRED: Large quantities of water are created as a natural consequence of planet formation, experimental work demonstrates. “Previous mathematical modeling research has demonstrated that interactions between atmospheric hydrogen and iron-bearing magma oceans during planet formation can produce significant quantities of water. However, comprehensive experimental tests of this proposed source of planetary water had not been performed until now.”
I ALMOST WENT WITH “LOL, DAVID FRENCH,” BUT HIS SCHTICK STOPPED BEING FUNNY A LONG TIME AGO:
You attended a rally last week that flew Palestinian flags and hosted tents celebrating Charlie Kirk's assassination.
You purposely sugar coated and ignored that. I have defended you against these attacks going back 10 years.
The influencer/pundit right has an antisemitism… https://t.co/OfFUPGbl15
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) October 31, 2025
Plus: “David could have said no thanks, to both sides, like a lot of us did. He could’ve chose the wilderness but he didn’t. There’s not really money or financial security in doing that. He’s ultimately in the end no different than Tucker Carlson.”
THE “FOR YOU” TAB HAS ALWAYS SUCKED: Jennifer Welch Is Proof the New X Platform Algorithm Is Messing with Conservatives “It’s been more than a month, and more than a few conservatives have been complaining about a major algorithm shift on the X platform. Instead of seeing posts from people they follow or may like, the ‘For You’ feed is serving up to conservatives all of the most hard-core leftists who didn’t take their ball and go home when Elon Musk bought Twitter.”
TRIM YOUR NAILS: 360° Rotating Toenail Clippers. #CommissionEarned
WELL SAID:
You can take any entity Elon owns and each one of them would be a lifetime achievement for someone else.
As an example, this year 90%+ of all payload launched into space worldwide will have been launched by SpaceX. This is a historic achievement by itself, but he has a half…
— The Hegemony™ (@OneHegemony) October 31, 2025
WELL, GOOD: Moms for Liberty activist beats defamation suit by DEI employee over ‘woke,’ ‘white savior’ jabs.
Moms for Liberty activist in Wisconsin described a onetime “social justice coordinator” in the local high school as a “white savior” and “woke” woman with a “god complex.”
She said the employee is emblematic of diversity, equity and inclusion specialists who earn more than the district’s teachers, “woke lunatics … bullying you into silence and compliance,” and should “forfeit her job to a person of color” if she “really wants to promote equity.”
Scarlett Johnson spent nearly 1,100 days defending herself against a defamation suit by the coordinator, Mary MacCudden, before a divided state appeals court cleared her name this week, overturning a lower court that said a jury should consider whether Johnson’s hyperbolic language implied factual assertions about MacCudden.
The duration of the litigation shows the ongoing legal and financial peril for parental rights activists who criticize government employees using language typical of conservatives against those they consider progressive, authoritarian and hypocritical.
“The defamation lawsuit against her was meritless and should have been promptly dismissed,” Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty deputy counsel Luke Berg, whose group represented Johnson on appeal, said in announcing Tuesday’s verdict, three years to the day after MacCudden filed the complaint in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.
If anything, Johnson was overly generous.
CONSTITUENT SERVICE: Virginia County Released Illegal With 19 Criminal Charges.