OH, THAT LIBERAL FASCISM: Meet the new Left, who think Hamas are good and that Swastikas are woke.

It’s narcissistic identity politics on steroids, one where specific conditions and geography melt away completely. It’s no longer enough to have solidarity with the people of Palestinians in their time of plight; you must be them. Are you fat, trans, and live in, say, Evanston, Illinois? You are somehow in a shared position with starved and bombed-out citizens of Gaza. “Palestine is a flat circle,” you can almost hear True Detective’s Rust Cohle murmur if he were a contemporary campus radical.

I witnessed All One Thingism in the flesh in Atlanta while reporting on the “Stop Cop City” saga. What began as a very specific protest against the construction of an expensive new public safety facility in a Georgia forest by environmentalists, police, and prison abolitionists got subsumed into “Free Palestine.” After October 7, anarchists marching in the streets of Atlanta increasingly donned keffiyehs, waved Palestinian flags, and held signs that said: “From Atlanta to Palestine” (which I believe is a fairly big 6,400-mile line).

There’s no better embodiment of this trend than James “Fergie” Chambers, the wealthy tattooed Left-wing heir in Atlanta. Last summer, Chambers helped bankroll the Stop Cop City movement with millions from his Cox family fortune and attended protests in person. Then, in December, he announced he was converting to Islam. He’s currently living in Tunisia and directing his big bucks into anti-Zionism causes.

And lest you think it’s just blue-haired college baristas with these views, consider the author with the worst book title of all time who recently posted among the most despicable Tweets of all time. That would be courtesy of Malcolm Harris, the author of S— Is F—ed Up and Bulls— and veritable Napoleon Dynamite of communist writers.

Earlier this month on X, Harris responded to CNN’s Jake Tapper’s report that the Pennsylvania synagogue he had bar mitzphaed at had been vandalised with a swastika. Harris didn’t condemn the anti-Semitic graffiti but indirectly praised it. The meaning of the Nazi symbol had been reversed from bad to good, Harris said, “from a Nazi threat to a condemnation of genocide.”

America is evil, Hamas is good, and swastikas are now woke. This is your brain on All One Thingism.

Woody Allen tried to warn us in Sleeper that swastikas were the Radical Chic symbol of the future:

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Take Columbia’s Khymani James — please.

Well, they may be ignorant or stupid, they may be evil, but they may also need help. Take, for example, Columbia undergrad Khymani James — please. James may be in need of help, but he appears to be busy negotiating with the authorities at Columbia to stand down.

* * * * * * * *

“Be glad — be grateful — that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists. I’ve never murdered anyone in my life, and I *hope* to keep it that way.” This is a top leader of @Columbia’s encampment, with whom the school is “negotiating,” expanding on his thoughts about how Israel… pic.twitter.com/ugodO4O7M5

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) April 25, 2024

“Unexpectedly,” CNN broke out the airbrushes to protect James:

HOLY CRAP. So @CNN had done an interview with Khymani James Thursday night where he "repeatedly declined to apologize for the video" where he said "Zionists don’t deserve to live"… and CNN didn't report it!https://t.co/EyouyhAjdn pic.twitter.com/zn20shchsQ

— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) April 26, 2024

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and a Jeremy Corbyn-esque worldview, and it all makes sense.

Evergreen:

UPDATE: Report: Anti-Israel Protester Thrown Out of Columbia After White House Condemned ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve to Live’ Statement.

THE STIG CRASHES AN EXPENSIVE LEMON: Most Dishonest Reporter in America Buys The Onion.

I used to love The Onion, but as with so many things that lean Left, it lost its sense of humor and basic connection to reality in the past decade or so. It used to poke fun at both the Left and the Right, and it could make you guffaw about politics and the absurdities of the world.

In the old days it published some real zingers, poking fun at everybody.

In Focus: Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years http://t.co/AZxoYxHW0t

— The Onion (@TheOnion) June 30, 2013

Alas, those days are long gone, and the Ben Collins era promises to drive a stake through the heart of The Onion.

One great irony is that Collins is one of the big promoters of the “disinformation” narrative. He never saw a story that the Left found inconvenient that he didn’t want to pretend to “debunk,” censor, or slander. He called his beat at NBC “News” the “Dystopia Beat,” implying that living in a world with Orange Man and his supporters was a living hell.

He certainly worked hard to slander us.

Collins was, of course, one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation on planet Earth, lying about everything. He did revel in being a punching bag for the right, largely because he could slander us with impunity from his well-paid perch at NBC.

Think of him as a better-looking but less charming Joe Scarborough. He has Karine Jean-Pierre’s wit, Nina Jankowicz’s temperament, and Sam Bankman-Fried’s integrity and ethics.

Expect The Onion to become even less funny and even more biased. I don’t mind bias in my humor as long as it is, well, funny. Everybody needs to have his ego prodded, and by God the Right deserves as much ridicule as the Left. If you can’t laugh at Donald Trump selling Bibles in the same way he sold only OK steaks and crappy wine, then you need to get out more.

But The Onion is now focused on calling Republicans Nazis and similar names, and that isn’t funny. It’s stupid. You can make fun of people for being stupid, but being stupid is not funny. It is sad.

The Onion’s humor is closer to a Robert DeNiro rant about Trump than a Babylon Bee headline. It has gotten so unfunny that Elon Musk probably would not have noticed if Twitter had deplatformed them. He famously bought the platform in order to return The Babylon Bee to it.

It’s a calm, genteel 2024 — if only the Onion had more material to satirize these days:

This is why The Onion will fail. They won’t touch something like this.

A bit where aides were strategically tripping or wandering off in the wrong direction to make Biden appear normal would be great. https://t.co/LNNOo9a7g5

— Fuzzy Chimp 🇺🇸🍌 (@fuzzychimpcom) April 26, 2024

(Classical reference in headline.)

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY, PART DEUX: Top advisor to D.A. Gascón charged with illegal use of deputies’ confidential records.

California’s attorney general filed criminal charges Wednesday against one of L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón’s top advisors, who supervises high-profile and sensitive cases including police misconduct, fraud and public corruption.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced the 11 felony counts against Assistant Dist. Atty. Diana Teran in a press statement. He accused her of improperly downloading confidential records of law enforcement officers in 2018 while she was working for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Teran then “impermissibly used that data” after joining Gascón’s office three years later, Bonta said.

The confidential records concern 11 sheriff’s deputies, according to a criminal complaint filed in L.A. County Superior Court. The deputies’ names were not included in the court filing.

The announcement of criminal charges against one of Gascón’s top advisors — particularly one so closely tied to his agenda of law enforcement accountability and criminal justice reform — sent shock waves across the state’s legal community and was expected to have a far-reaching impact on active and future criminal cases handled by Gascón’s office, while also fueling fresh controversy as he pursues reelection this year.

As New York Times owner Tom Cotton wrote in December of 2021: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.

IS THERE ENOUGH ADRENOCHROME* AVAILABLE IN THE WORLD FOR THIS TO HAPPEN? Biden Says ‘I’m Happy To Debate’ Trump.

On Friday, President Biden stated that he is willing to debate former President Donald Trump.

Speaking to radio host Howard Stern, Biden reportedly said, “I am somewhere. I don’t know when. I’m happy to debate him.”

In late February, after special counsel Robert Hur’s report stated that Biden exhibited memory problems, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), a co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign, responded to the consistent verbal gaffes committed by Biden, saying, “If Joe Biden commits a gaffe, a guy who stuttered all of his childhood, into his adulthood and everybody knows his stuttering is what caused a lot of his speech impediments, and we know that. It has nothing to do with his brain, he stumbles one time and everybody says, ‘He’s too old to be the president.’”

Of course, Biden’s “stuttering” is a recent invention by the DNC-MSM designed to explain away his brain dissolving into tapioca:

* No. No there is not, which is why Ed Morrissey writes, “Expect a walkback on that toute suite. The last thing Team Biden wants is their cognitively impaired candidate on stage in a live debate with a verbal pugilist like Trump. They won’t even allow Biden to do a live interview with the NY Times, and that would be a tongue-bath.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Inside the failed White House coup to oust Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

Top aides to President Biden secretly hatched a plan this past fall to replace White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre by recruiting outside allies to nudge her out the door, The Post has learned.

Jean-Pierre, who made history in May 2022 by becoming the first black and first openly gay person to hold the position, had developed the exasperating habit of reading canned answers directly from a binder to reporters at her regular briefings — offering what her superiors viewed as a less-than-compelling pitch for the 81-year-old Biden as he readied his re-election campaign.

De facto White House communications chief Anita Dunn, 66, the wife of Biden personal attorney Bob Bauer, told colleagues she had decided to call in prominent Democrats to explain to Jean-Pierre, 49, that the time was ripe to move on, sources told The Post.

“There were a number of people she asked to engage Karine,” said one source who heard of the strategy directly from Dunn, whose role as senior adviser has been filled during the past three presidencies by Jared Kushner (Donald Trump), Valerie Jarrett (Barack Obama) and Karl Rove (George W. Bush).

The source also told The Post that Dunn had claimed White House chief of staff Jeff Zients knew about and supported the cloak-and-dagger scheme to push Jean-Pierre out of the West Wing.

“There was an effort to have some outside folks who Karine knows and trusts talk to her about why leaving last fall would have made a lot of sense for her and her career,” the source said, calling it an “effort to encourage her to move along.”

It’s easy to ask the joking question, why is the left such a cesspit of racism and homophobia? But why is the Biden administration trapped in an identity politics box canyon of its own making? “Jean-Pierre is protected not by her stellar performance on the job, but by the identity boxes she checks. They can’t fire her without being eviscerated by the far left and its adherents in the mainstream press…Biden went woke instead of hiring a press secretary based on merit, and now he’s stuck with her during the most contentious presidential election campaign in history. That’s another self-inflicted wound committed in his dogged pursuit to please his left flank.”

And one more question, via our sister site, Twitchy: Will Peter Doucy ask Jean-Pierre about this story?

FBI DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER WRAY: ‘We Don’t Monitor Protests’

And when we say “don’t,” certain exceptions do apply: The FBI Was Monitoring Student Protests Against Ben Shapiro.

The ongoing student protests over Israel and Palestine have become the center of a national controversy, with members of Congress calling for National Guard deployments and terrorism financing investigations against the protesters. But a few years ago, the federal government was interested in a very different sort of campus controversy: whether right-wing journalist Ben Shapiro should be allowed to speak.

In October 2017, the FBI prepared a “tactical intelligence report” on Shapiro’s upcoming speaker event at the University of California, Los Angeles. The bulletin was released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for FBI documents on the Black Lives Matter movement, and posted to the public records platform MuckRock by journalist Jordan Lassiter.

* * * * * * * * *

“We have on-going demonstrations with ANTIFA/Black Bloc people, which have repeatedly shown a propensity of violence. We are expecting large scale, violent demonstrations” against speeches by Shapiro and the right-wing pundit Milo Yiannopoulos, said the memo, which Reason obtained from BlueLeaks, a trove of leaked fusion center documents.

Berkeley police weren’t wrong to expect violence. A previous speech by Yiannopoulos had been canceled in February 2017 due to a riot by left-wing protesters. Then, in April, both far-left and far-right activists showed up in Berkeley to fight.

The September event at Berkeley with Shapiro, however, went smoothly. Under heavy police presence and protected by over half a million dollars in security measures, Shapiro spoke to hundreds of audience members while hundreds of protesters gathered off campus. A few demonstrators were arrested for carrying a banned weapon or assaulting a police officer.

As Iowahawk quipped at the time:

JIM TREACHER: Has the Secret Service Gone Insane?

Brie Stimson, Fox News:

A U.S. Secret Service agent with Vice President Kamala Harris’ detail was removed from their assignment after engaging in a physical fight with other agents while on duty Monday…

Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the U.S. Secret Service, called the incident a “medical matter,” adding that the agency wouldn’t be commenting further.

A medical matter… that caused a physical fight between Secret Service agents? Wait, what?

All we were told at first was that the agent was acting “erratically.” But thanks to Susan Crabtree at Real Clear Politics, now we know some specifics:

[Secret Service agent Michelle] Herczeg showed up at the [Joint Base Andrews] terminal and began acting erratically, grabbing another senior agent’s personal phone and deleting applications on it, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The other agent, a shift leader, was able to recover his phone and then acted as if nothing had happened.

But Herczeg’s bizarre behavior didn’t stop. She then began mumbling to herself, hid behind curtains, and started throwing items, including menstrual pads, at an agent, telling him that he would need them later to save another agent and telling her peers that they were “going to burn in hell and needed to listen to God,” a source told RealClearPolitics.

As Treacher writes:

Look, man, if you want to let the president of the United States get assassinated because you were scared of being blackballed as a bigot, be my guest.

But you can’t make us turn a blind eye. We see you.

P.S. Okay, I was right: Herczeg used to be a cop in Dallas, and in 2016 she sued the department for $1 million over “gender bias.” And then she blackmailed her way into the Secret Service.

At the Corner, Luther Ray Abel adds: Unfit Female Agent Responsible for Secret Service Ruckus.

How Herczeg came to be in the vice president’s employ after such an experience is an open question, as security for the president and those in his orbit are expected to have spotless backgrounds and years of experience. It’s fair to wonder if the Secret Service’s signing on to the 30×30 initiative, a pledge to have 30 percent of all law enforcement women by 2030, could have forced the qualification of Herczeg when her record was below the level expected of male officers.

The Left, for all its fearmongering about white supremacists and January 6 rioters lurking in ponds and mulberry bushes, does not take seriously just how dangerous the world is. Anyone who understands the number of unwell and hostile entities in the world and has any status at all would think it best to surround himself with excellent protection, regardless of the color or genitalia of his security. But the president and vice president think signaling their virtue through manning, however unqualified and distracted the component parts of their security might be, is the best course for their purposes.

Better dead than rude, to coin a phrase.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Maybe by denying RFK Jr. Secret Service protection, they’re actually trying to protect him. . .

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Hamas Disappointed Liberals Don’t Believe They Massacred Jews After They Went To All The Trouble To Livestream It.

OPERATION STUMBLEBUM: THE NEXT GENERATION. Scoop: Biden’s walkers.

President Biden has introduced a change to his White House departure and return routine: Instead of walking across the South Lawn to and from Marine One by himself, he’s now often surrounded by aides.

Why it matters: With aides usually walking between Biden and the press’ camera position outside the White House, the visual effect is to draw less attention to the 81-year-old’s halting and stiff gait, Axios’ Hans Nichols and Alex Thompson report.

Some Biden advisers have told Axios they’re concerned that videos of Biden walking and shuffling alone — especially across the grass — have highlighted his age.

Weeks ago, the president told aides that he’d prefer a less formal approach, a White House official told Axios. He suggested that they walk with him.

White House staffers and reporters alike noticed the sudden change in Biden’s walk routine beginning in mid-April, after more than three years in which he’d typically walked solo.

Senior aides — including deputy chiefs of staff Bruce Reed and Annie Tomasini, and close adviser Mike Donilon — are among those who’ve walked with the president across the lawn to and from the helicopter.

Since the change, some advisers think the images of Biden’s walks to and from the helicopter are better, and they expect him to continue to have aides join him.

By the numbers: In March, Biden’s five walks to and from Marine One at the White House were by himself, or with family members.

Starting April 16, Biden was joined by staff or lawmakers nine out of 10 times he walked to and from Marine One.

The big picture: Biden’s team has focused on changing voters’ perceptions about his age in recent months.

The earlier funnier Saturday Night Live would have gotten loads of material out of the above news – assuming the president had an (R) after his name, of course. Unfortunately, they’d much rather now play the palace guard than actually risk being funny.

I’VE NEVER BEEN MORE GLAD THAT IT’S RIOT SEASON NOW — THAT MEANS WE’VE GOTTEN THE LOCKDOWNS OUT OF THE WAY ALREADY: Bird flu could jump to humans any day. A former surgeon general says it feels like 2020 again.

RICH LOWRY: It’s Columbia 1968 — the antisemitic version.

Israel is to today’s radicals what the Pentagon was to 1968’s.

Just as the protesters back then demanded the university cut ties with a Defense Department outfit doing research for the Vietnam War, today’s radicals want the university to divest from Israel.

The essential argument is the same — that Columbia bears moral responsibility for crimes against humanity committed in an imperialist war.

Yesteryear’s agitators might have been surprised to learn that student demonstrators acting in the tradition of 1968 have been discomfiting and harassing Jews and expressing support for a horrific terrorist assault.

Here too, though, there are connections to 1968, at least its more extreme elements.

The famed Columbia protest leader Mark Rudd went on to become part of the violent Weather Underground.

The Weather Underground you say? A generation from now, who will emerge from these protests as having shaped American politics at the highest level?

GREAT MOMENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION:

Watch a brave, calm & reasonable Jewish student at @UCLA cope with an hysterical, incoherent & shrieking professor. https://t.co/6mKbLSnM3W

— Christina Hoff Sommers (@CHSommers) April 26, 2024

21^st CENTURY HEADLINES: Is This the First AI Hate Hoax?* White Principal Accused of Racism Based on Fake Audio.

A pretty dramatic story out of Baltimore today which reveals what may be the first hate hoax perpetrated with the help of artificial intelligence. The principal of Pikesville High School, Eric Eiswert, was accused in January of making blatantly racist comments behind closed doors after an inflammatory audio file was posted on a popular Instagram account.

In the recording, the person speaking refers to “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag.”

The speaker goes on to question how hard it is to get those students to meet grade-level expectations. He uses names of people who appear to be staff members and says they should not have been hired. The speaker sayshe should get rid of another person “one way or another.”

“And if I have to get one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I’m going to join the other side,” the voice in the recording stated.

* * * * * * * *

Siwei Lyu, director of a media forensics lab at the University at Buffalo, said the audio is not particularly sophisticated. Lyu has developed technologies at the State University of New York for spotting audio and images created using artificial intelligence.

This audio is “not a challenging case for the algorithms. I believe someone just made this using an AI voice generator,” Lyu said, adding that he doesn’t believe the person who made it put a lot of effort into the task. Online voice generator tools, like one from Eleven Labs, are available to anyone and advertise their ability to instantly create audio that’s indistinguishable from human speech.

There is, however, clear evidence the audio was manipulated, Lyu said.

Today we got further confirmation of that as police arrested the man they say created that audio in an effort to get back at Eiswert for an earlier investigation.

* * * * * * * *
[Dazhon “DJ”] Darien (allegedly) stirred up a lot of fear and mistrust in his community. Like Jussie Smollett, he’ll probably get a minor slap on the wrist. I don’t know what he’s facing exactly but I hope if he’s convicted he gets the maximum possible sentence.

This headline earlier today won’t exactly help Darien clear his name: Ex-athletic director accused of framing principal with AI arrested at airport with gun. “Darien, 31, was apprehended as he attempted to board a flight to Houston at BWI Airport, Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. Darien was stopped for having a gun on him and airport officials saw there was a warrant for his arrest. Police said they did not know whether Darien was trying to flee.”

* It certainly won’t be the last, given the rapid spread AI and the increasing ease in faking audio, which, at least for now, is far more easy to manipulate than video. (Though expect plenty of the latter to be faked as well, going forward.)

UNEXPECTEDLY! US economy grew slower than expected at the start of 2024.

The U.S. economy grew at a slower pace than expected at the beginning of 2024 as consumers pulled back on spending in the face of higher inflation.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew by 1.6% on an annualized basis in the three-month period from January through March, the Commerce Department said in its first reading of the data on Thursday.

That is much lower than the 2.4% increase forecast by LSEG economists and marks a sharp slowdown from the 3.4% pace seen during the fourth quarter. It is the slowest pace of growth in two years.

“This was a worst of both worlds report — slower than expected growth, higher than expected inflation,” said David Donabedian, chief investment officer of CIBC Private Wealth US. “The biggest setback is the acceleration in core inflation, and in particular, the services sector rising above a 5% annual rate.”

And Team Biden is prepared to drive those growth figures down even more! Biden administration sets national goal to cut freight emissions to zero.

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE FRANK RIZZO AGAIN:

In the middle of an interview with San Jose's mayor, a random guy starts fighting the mayor's security.

California is literally a GTA server.pic.twitter.com/jN2CAtMINe

— Adam B. Coleman, Proud Father (@wrong_speak) April 25, 2024

Somebody like Big Frank, an ex-police commissioner, would have loved to have join in the rumble with the nutter passerby himself, instead of anemically texting through the incident. And why doesn’t the mayor of San Jose have a better armed — or trained — security guard?

FINALLY: Kim Kardashian coming to White House for VP Harris roundtable discussion.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Palestine Protester Tries To Argue With Skinhead But They Just Agree On Everything https://t.co/rqdc755ihr pic.twitter.com/X7cVcJdMlk

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 24, 2024

It’s a bromance as old as time:

TOM COTTON IS RIGHT. AGAIN:

The Russian word “pogrom” refers to an organized effort to displace Jewish populations from the spaces in which they reside by force. That is precisely what we’ve seen on far too many college campuses since the October 7 attack.

That’s what we saw at Cooper Union, where a braying mob of what we’ve been assured are only anti-Israel protesters threw themselves at the doors of a library in which a handful of Jewish students took refuge. Chanting “globalize the intifada,” in reference to the outbreaks of violence that targeted Israeli civilians with murder, the demonstrators terrorized their Jewish colleagues and compelled them to evacuate their refuge under guard. The Jewish students are suing their school for “being locked in a campus library to shield them from an unruly mob of students that was calling for the destruction of Israel and worldwide violence against Jews.”

Similar language could be used to describe the successful effort to scare Jews away from campus facilities at Cornell University. Following an outbreak of threats to “shoot up,” rape, and slash the throats of Jewish students on campus by pseudonymous harassers calling themselves “hamas,” “jew evil,” “jew jenocide,” “hamas warrior,” and “kill jews,” the school threw up its hands. Cornell advised its Jewish matriculants to avoid the campus’s Kosher dining hall lest they risk bodily harm. Of course, those students heeded their school’s warning.

“What shocked me the most,” said one witness to Rutgers University’s conciliatory attitude toward its agitated pro-Hamas contingent, “was the fact that the Jews attending the town hall were escorted out by police, not the individuals protesting and breaking the rules.” The event that so enraged the anti-Jewish protesters was only a banal effort by university president Jonathan Holloway to hold an event in which students could ask questions about the war in Gaza and the school’s approach to it. “Before he was able to answer a single one, anti-Israel protesters unleashed chaos,” Zach Kessel reported for NR.

And at Columbia, host to the recent spasm of anti-Jewish sentiment that led Cotton to call for reinforcements, the threat of violent antisemitism has forced many Jewish students off campus. The activists who called Jews “inbred,” demanded they “go back to Poland,” and chanted “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too” somehow managed to convince their Jewish colleagues that they meant business. Columbia administrators appeared to agree. It facilitated their flight to the shadows by moving classes to a “hybrid” setting so Jews could continue to study out of the sight of their tormentors.

Thus leaving Mediaite’s Michael Luciano (or his headline writer) to breathlessly scream, “Tom Cotton Brings Hysteria About Campus Anti-Semitism to Its Absurd Conclusion: ‘Nascent Pogroms.’”

Or to put it another way:

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS:  Texas State troopers arrive at UT Austin occupation, start making arrests.

The organization initially planned to march and occupy UT Austin’s South Mall, but administrators notified the group that the event wasn’t authorized.

[AYFKM: Columbia president told Congress this prof was ‘terminated.’ Now it appears he’s ‘holding class’ INSIDE Columbia’s gates among pro-Hamas camp]

”Simply put, The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere,” a letter from university administrators stated. “Please be advised that you are not permitted to hold your event on the University campus. Any attempt to do so will subject your organization and its attending members to discipline including suspension under the Institutional Rules.”

A large state police presence has been reported at the protest, according to the report. A state trooper reported that at least three had been arrested, with the university later confirming to local news that 10 had been arrested.

The University of Austin at Texas Hillel said on Instagram that administrators have assured them that “there will be no tolerance for disruption.”

But how will that play out for UT Austin? In her 2007 book, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, Diana West looked back at the college riots of the 1960s and noted wryly the outcome of the one campus were the faculty fought back:

The fact is, general support for the Vietnam War under President Johnson, and, later, President Nixon, remained fairly solid during periods of student upheaval—although such support was going to be lower amid the increasingly liberal subset of society that sent its children to, or taught them in, college. But what did these supporters say to their children? It’s not difficult to imagine long distance arguments over what was going on at school between Junior and the ’rents—liberal or conservative—but what harsh words ever led to harsh actions? That is, what collegiate revolutionary ever saw his dining hall contract canceled, or his bursar account closed? (As one historian remarked, he knew of no other uprising in history in which the revolutionaries had fellowships.) The conduct of the war in Vietnam, the pace of civil rights reform, or university slumlordship wasn’t ever the parenting issue. What concerned Mom and Dad—or should have—had to do with Junior’s behavior. Dirty words. Shoving. Pushing. Cutting class. Cutting fire hoses. Waving guns. Taking things. Breaking things. Throwing things (paving stones, Molotov cocktails). Burning things (buildings, records, research). But it didn’t—at least not in any consequential way. Indeed, at the University of Chicago, which may be the one campus where administrators acted swiftly to expel students who had occupied a building, “parents took out newspaper advertisements protesting the draconian punishment visited upon their darlings, thus providing a clue to what had gone wrong with their children.”

As James Lileks wrote about advertising in the 1950s and ‘60s, “Turns out that living in near-Utopia has the worst possible effect: you decide to strive for a different Utopia altogether. Come to think of it, though, the roots of it all are in the ads. They’re testaments to happiness, a goal, a mode of living. But it’s not happiness you get because you’ve earned it. It’s happiness that you deserve as an American. That’s where things started to go sideways. It’s a short hop to thinking you deserve it all because you exist.”

IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING? ‘Pedagogical Malpractice:’ Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class.

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described “fat liberationist,” in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”

UCLA “has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”

I don’t, after watching the healthcare industry flip on a dime in the spring of 2020 from “mandatory lockdowns” for all” to “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”

And as Mary Katharine Ham notes:

Katie Couric noted there is a lot of anti-intellectual/elite resentment in this country (driving MAGA). I agree w her in part. There is resentment of the intellectual elite bc they are neither intellectual nor elite but are very sure they should tell the rest of us what to do. https://t.co/n3Be0CDdY4

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) April 25, 2024

OUT ON A LIMB: Jerry Seinfeld Believes Hollywood Is Done, Movies Won’t Be As Important.

They say that the best type of joke is one that has some truth to it.

However, there’s nothing funny about Jerry Seinfeld’s latest take in which he declares that ‘Hollywood is Dead,’ and that the filmmakers and the upper echelon, holier-than-thou elites in charge pathetically refuse to acknowledge it.

“They’re so dead serious! They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over. They have no idea,” the 69-year-old Seinfeld told GQ Magazine “Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social and cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives.”

“When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it,” Seinfeld continued, before adding, “We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.”

The fabled comedian does have a point. I can’t think of any significant pop culture trends that have come from movies in recent years – hell not even lame movie lines like Scary Movie’s “Wassssupppp?!” that teenagers were doing all over America when I was growing up!

That’s not to say that there haven’t been good movies – of course there have been, but Seinfeld says the significant impact of the modern film isn’t nearly what it once was.

“Depression? Malaise? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business. Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, ‘What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?’”

Not having a unified “What are we supposed to do now plan” coming out of the pandemic, coupled with some pretty awful pre-pandemic product such as the last two of the Daisy Ridley Star Wars sequels, did nothing to restore the American public’s habit of seeing a new movie each weekend, particularly in the summertime.

As Steve noted on Tuesday, the formula for success, while expensive, isn’t especially difficult to write: “Give audiences flawed but admirable heroes they can identify with, and then put them through hell on the way to victory. It seems impossible that Hollywood can’t — or won’t — remember that simple lesson, but here we are.”

Hollywood went woke prior to 2020, and now risks going broke, instead of dialing all of that back with the simple goal of maximizing butts in seats to rebuild the industry by regaining the trust of viewers. Or as Samuel Goldwyn may or may not have actually told his directors, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S 2020 RAPE CONVICTION OVERTURNED BY NEW YORK APPEALS COURT:

On Thursday, the court found in a 4-3 ruling that the judge in Weinstein’s trial — a landmark moment in the #MeToo movement that the 2017 allegations against him started — had shown prejudice by allowing women to testify about allegations that were not part of the case. The court has now ordered a new trial.

Weinstein, the Oscar-winning producer of “Shakespeare in Love” and “Good Will Hunting,” is serving a 23-year sentence at the Mohawk Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Rome, N.Y. He will remain imprisoned as he was also convicted of rape in Los Angeles in 2022 and sentenced to an additional 16 years in prison. However, Weinstein was acquitted in the Los Angeles trial on charges involving a woman who testified in his New York case.

Note though that, “In spite of Thursday’s decision, Weinstein will remain in prison because he was separately sentenced in February 2023 to 16 years in prison in a Los Angeles criminal case for raping an Italian model. She testified that he threw himself onto her after appearing uninvited outside her “hotel room during an Italian film festival there in 2013.”

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Katherine Maher’s Color Revolution.

The Color Revolution is restless. Beginning in the former Soviet republics in the early 2000s, it moved along the coast of North Africa with the so-called Arab Spring in the 2010s, and, into the current decade, has spread further.

The ostensible purpose of Color Revolutions—named after the Rose Revolution, Orange Revolution, and Tulip Revolution in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, respectively—is to replace authoritarian regimes with Western liberal democracies. American and European intelligence services are often heavily involved in these revolutions, with ambitions not only to spread modern ideologies but also to undermine geopolitical opponents.

The West’s favored methods of supporting Color Revolutions include fomenting dissent, organizing activists through social media, promoting student movements, and unleashing domestic unrest on the streets. Americans hold varying opinions on such efforts, but what many don’t realize is that they occur not only overseas but also here in the United States. The summer of rioting following the death of George Floyd, which ushered in the new DEI regime, was in many ways a domestic Color Revolution, advanced by progressive NGOs, media entities, and political actors.

A minor figure in these movements, a woman named Katherine Maher, has recently come to greater prominence. Maher was involved in the wave of Color Revolutions that took place in North Africa in the 2010s, and she supported the post-George Floyd upheavals in the United States in the 2020s. She was also the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and was just recently named the new CEO of National Public Radio.

At NPR, Maher has already been embroiled in controversy. Longtime editor Uri Berliner, who has now resigned, accused her of left-wing bias and suppressing dissent. Following these accusations, I did extensive reporting demonstrating that Maher has a troubling history of arguing against the notion of objective truth and supporting censorship in the name of democracy.

Now I have gathered additional facts that raise new questions about Maher’s role as a regime-change agent, both foreign and domestic. She has brought the Color Revolution home to America.

Meanwhile, here’s a look at her predecessor’s last days at NPR:

NYT reports that the previous CEO of NPR was formally accused of racism and investigated by an outside firm, because he asked employees on a call to be "civil." pic.twitter.com/QdzpL0LrdK

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) April 24, 2024

Translation: like the New York Times’ Dean Baquet, NPR’s John Lansing couldn’t leave fast enough once his troops turned on him during the early days of America’s Color Revolution.

RICH LOWRY: The KKK at Columbia – why shouldn’t it camp out at the university, too?

Is there space for more haters at Columbia University?

Imagine if a contingent of alt-right students established their own encampment on a corner of the quad and began to shout antisemitic slogans — say, the infamous chant “Jews will not replace us” from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Would the president of Columbia, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, hesitate to have them arrested as many times as necessary to make them go away?

Would a huge contingent of faculty walk out to protest the arrests?

Would the president of Barnard, Laura Rosenbury, quickly lift the suspensions of the arrested students?

Answers: No, never, and of course not.

As Phil Klein has noted, there is a gross double standard in how progressive opinion regards antisemitism depending on who is peddling it. The antisemitism of the Right is considered morally abhorrent and inherently threatening. The antisemitism of the Left is very often ignored, explained away, or viewed as a regrettable excess.

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville — an execrable but relatively small-scale event — caused a near-national crisis. According to Joe Biden, it was such a galvanizing moment that it, and Trump’s response, prompted him to run for president.

The protests at Columbia have been widely criticized, but they have also garnered elite sympathy, most notably from supportive left-wing members of Congress and the school’s own faculty, who have clearly been staying Shafik’s hand. Meanwhile, more than 1,400 academics from a variety of schools are calling for a boycott of Columbia for allegedly being much too tough on the protesters.

There are obviously differences between Charlottesville and Columbia. The rally in Virginia featured violent clashes with counter-protesters and led to a murder. The groups involved were explicit hate groups, like the KKK, with violent pasts. Still, the bottom line is that the antisemitism of “Unite the Right” was roundly condemned as such.

Based on events on the past several days, I would assume “the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party” would feel quite at home at Columbia: