HARVARD: THE PRESSURE’S NOT OFF. Billionaire Megadonor Ken Griffin Says He Will Stop Donations to Harvard.

Griffin announced his decision to stop donating to Harvard during a keynote talk at a conference hosted by the Managed Funds Association in Miami. . . .

“I’d like that to change and I have made that clear to members of the corporate board,” he said. “But until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role as educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution.”

He added that Harvard students were “whiny snowflakes” caught in a misguided ideology of oppressor and oppressed during his remarks.

“Will America’s elite university get back to their roots of educating American children – young adults – to be the future leaders of our country or are they going to maintain being lost in the wilderness of microaggressions, a DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame, and just being loss in the wilderness?” Griffin asked.

A Harvard spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During his remarks, Griffin also said that his firms Citadel LLC and Citadel Securities, which recruit heavily from Harvard, would not hire any students who allegedly signed a controversial student group letter in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel — mirroring a pledge by billionaire hedge fund CEO Bill A. Ackman ’88 and other business leaders who have heavily criticized the University in recent months.

Griffin, whose donations to Harvard total more than $500 million, is the largest donor to date to publicly pledge not to give to Harvard over its handling of antisemitism and its historic leadership crisis last fall. His announcement is also a serious signal that donor backlash did not end with former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation Jan. 2.

Good.

OPEN THREAD: Go for it.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s Chang’e-7 moon mission to target Shackleton crater. “The area, stated to be the illuminated rim of Shackleton crater, possibly corresponds to a candidate landing site for NASA’s Artemis 3 crewed mission named Peak Near Shackleton. Such a site could offer favorable illumination while also being close to permanently shadowed regions which could host volatiles such as water-ice.”

FORTUNATELY ENTIRELY THEORETICAL AT PRESENT: Tapping Into The Power of a Hypothetical Black Hole Could Create an Insane Bomb.

WELL, GOOD: DNA Decoys Outsmart Viruses in Groundbreaking Vaccine Approach.

MORE THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT: A rise in appendix cancer among young people.

WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE, BOEING? Toyota urges owners of old Corolla, Matrix and RAV4 models to park them until airbags are replaced: Don’t even drive these particular cars to the dealer — the dealer will come to you. “If the airbag deploys, a part inside is more likely to explode and shoot sharp metal fragments, which could cause serious injury or death to the driver or passengers.”

STATES SHOULD OFFER THEIR OWN TRAINING FOR THEIR OWN UNORGANIZED MILITIAS:* The True Intent of the Democrats’ Anti-Militia Bill Is to Infringe on Firearms Training.

*Which is basically everyone.

WE CAN START WITH ABOLISHING THE CDC AND THE NIH: Systemic US reforms needed to prevent mass death in the next pandemic.

HMM: When facing potential annihilation, the DEI industry doubles down. Let’s discuss.

Social Justice Warriors always lie, and they always double down.

AN IDEA SO CRAZY THAT IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Harvard Admissions Should Be More Meritocratic. “What’s the opposite of meritocracy? Historically, positions were distributed by hereditary privilege, family ties, patronage to cronies, or sale to the highest bidder. These are not far from the system we have here.”

Related: Not Just Claudine Gay. Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Plagiarized and Claimed Credit for Husband’s Work, Complaint Alleges.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: 2023 Tax Filing Season Opens Today As IRS Computer Snarl Could Impact Millions Of Taxpayers.

YOU KNEW THEY WERE GOING TO END UP HERE EVENTUALLY: How much does human breathing contribute to climate change? All those billions of bodies exhaling carbon dioxide with every breath really starts to add up…

LIKE THOSE INSTITUTIONS THEMSELVES: The poisonous antisemitism that has infected elite institutions of higher learning is both silly and extremely dangerous.

TAX THE RICH, FEED THE POOR, TILL THERE AIN’T NO RICH NO MORE: GOP lawmakers try to tax ‘woke’ private universities’ massive endowments. If it were up to me, I’d limit nonprofit tax exemptions to organizations that actually provide services to the needy.

WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SUCH A HOTBED OF HATRED AND BIGOTRY? Dept. of Education investigating University of Wisconsin over anti-Semitism complaint.

HMM: Ms. Carroll’s Answer on How She’ll Spend Her Trump Money Is a Sound Bite That Could Win Him the Election.

DOUBTFUL, BIDEN’S DOING A FINE JOB OF THAT ON HIS OWN: Jill Biden Goes on the Attack in Houston: Trump Wants to Make Joe Biden Look Bad.

DON SURBER: Democrats and RINOs desperately try to wipe the open borders off their shoes.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: How I got kicked out of a Mothers Against Antisemitism group. “It’s not rocket science. Years of melding Reform and Conservative Judaism to leftism, only to find that that leftists wouldn’t spit on Jews if we were on fire, has been a disaster. It has moved Jews away from Judaism and it has functionally destroyed these Jewish movements. If you’re a Jew still sitting in the pews and funding the services that push political nonsense in place of torah, it’s time to go. Stop paying for a rabbi’s 7th grade musings on climate change and stop funding displays of “banned” books that aren’t actually banned. There were lessons in the horrific attacks of October 7th of how Jews should move forward. Let’s learn them now. And I wish the new MACA Foundation, and their totally emotionally healthy leader, all the very best.”

SUICIDE PACT: Cornell Board of Trustees “Unanimous Vote in Support of President Martha E. Pollack.” DEI is a religion at Cornell. People don’t give up their religion easily.

DIVERSITY IS OUR (ONLY?) STRENGTH: Another Story on the Hiring Scandal at the FAA. “This is a pretty clear case where a DEI pressure group— the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees—convinced the FAA to drop standards and then further gamed the new system from the inside for the benefit of the group’s members. All of this including the FAA ‘investigation’ which cleared those involved stinks to high heaven but we’re not supposed to talk about that because we can’t let the right have a win on DEI at this moment in time or, you know, ever.”

Background: “A scandal at the FAA has been moving on a slow-burn through the courts for a decade, culminating in the class-action lawsuit currently known as Brigida v. Buttigieg, brought by a class who spent years and thousands of dollars in coursework to become air traffic controllers, only to be dismissed by a pass-fail biographical questionnaire with a >90% fail rate, implemented without warning after many of them had already taken, and passed, a skill assessment. The questionnaire awarded points for factors like ‘lowest grade in high school is science,’ something explicitly admitted by the FAA in a motion to deny class certification.”

DEEP STATE WARMUP: Matt Taibbi: The Democratic Machine’s Dirty-Tricks Warmup Was With Nader in 2004.. “The recent ballot access challenges, political investigations, and canceled primaries are just an extension of a phenomenon we should have seen coming twenty years ago.”

YOU’LL ONLY THINK THAT IF YOU LISTEN TO THE PRESS: No, Texas Has Not “Defied” The Supreme Court: Perhaps Governor Abbott will flout a directive from the Supreme Court in a future case, but reports of Texas “defying” the Supreme Court are bunk, and many making such claims should know better. I suspect they do.

CDR SALAMANDER: Tower 22’s White Swan: It was only a matter of time.

Related:

Biden Cleverly Distracts From Civil War By Starting World War https://t.co/6CUTKQkQjN pic.twitter.com/f3tEnuPARQ

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 29, 2024