Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS ON TOP OF ITS GAME AS USUAL: Kirby: We Need Another Pause to Get 8 American Hostages Out of Gaza. “And why would that be, precisely? Could it be that Joe Biden somehow failed to negotiate their release during the first operational ‘pause’ that he took credit for brokering last month? . . . That certainly sounds suspicious. Hanlon’s Razor could apply here, in which we shouldn’t presume malevolence when incompetence can fully explain a failure. Biden and his team abandoned 14,000 Americans to the Taliban while bugging out of Afghanistan in August 2021, so we have ample precedent for this kind of disgraceful disregard for American lives by Biden et al. What this looks like, however, is Biden and his team using American hostages as leverage on Israel, manipulating American public opinion to force them into bad deals and eventually a solve-nothing cease-fire that allows Hamas to survive and rebuild … again.”

Nothing says that you can’t be both evil and incompetent.

WHERE WE ARE NOW:

Of course, the FBI is busy investigating Catholic churches.

RED GUARDS: Report indicates leftist Stanford students ‘blacklisted’ profs for not complying with woke academic accommodations in 2020. “A new report suggests that Stanford University students, acting in pursuit of racial and social justice, emailed hundreds of professors during the COVID-19 pandemic, demanding they lower academic standards and blacklisted them if they chose not to comply.”

“Acting in pursuit of racial and social justice.” Lol.

PUSHBACK CONTINUES:

Related: Higher Education: A Toxic Industry.

Also: John McGinnis: Addressing the Rot in Our Universities. “DEI offices will always put the worst interpretation on any remark that may conceivably offend a minority—unless the remark is about Jews, and especially Israelis. In that case, they will put an innocent interpretation on even the most offensive remark.”

I MEAN, HE’S NOT WRONG: Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America: Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism.

America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism.

Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.

Children’s test scores have plummeted because college education departments train teachers to prioritize “social justice” over education. Censorship started with one-party campuses shutting down conservative voices. The coddling of criminals originated with academia’s devotion to Michel Foucault’s idea that criminals are victims, not victimizers. The drive to separate children from their parents begins in longstanding campus contempt for the suburban home and nuclear family. Radicalized college journalism departments promote far-left advocacy. Open borders reflect pro-globalism and anti-nation state sentiment among radical professors. DEI started as a campus ruse to justify racial quotas. Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”

Never have college campuses exerted so great or so destructive an influence. Once an indispensable support of our advanced society, academia has become a cancer metastasizing through its vital organs. The radical left is the cause, most obviously through the one-party campuses having graduated an entire generation of young Americans indoctrinated with their ideas.

And there are other ways. Academia has a monopoly on training for the most influential professions. The destructive influence of campus schools of education and journalism already noted is matched in the law, medicine, social work, etc. Academia’s suppression of the Constitution causes still more damage. Hostility to the Constitution leads to banana-republic shenanigans: suppression of antigovernment speech, the press’s acting as mouthpiece for government, law enforcement used to harass opponents of the government.

Higher education by and for political radicals was foreseen and banned by the American Association of University Professors, which in a celebrated 1915 policy statement warned teachers “against taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions.”

Yeah, I doubt you’d get that statement through the AAUP today. Plus: “An advanced society can’t tolerate the capture of its educational system by a fringe political sect that despises its Constitution and way of life.”

Related: Higher Education: A Toxic Industry.

CHRIS WRAY LIES TO CONGRESS:

Ya think Merrick Garland will prosecute him?