Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Be here now.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

JOHN LUCAS: “As I type this, the President is reading a speech to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day. He is now urging us to ‘never forget’ the Holocaust and other outrages perpetrated against the Jewish people. This same man has attempted to micromanage Israel’s conduct of its defense against the Hamas murderers and has followed through by cutting off or limiting ammunition supplies to Israel. Never forget? Pay no attention to what this man says. Watch what he does — and does not do.”

CAMPUS PROTESTERS PRETEND TO SPEAK FOR STUDENTS, BUT THEY DON’T: Poll: 81% of College Students Want Protesters Held Accountable. “A majority also said they oppose the protest tactics: 67% say occupying campus buildings is unacceptable and 58% say it’s not acceptable to refuse a university’s order to disperse. Another 90% said blocking pro-Israel students from parts of campus is unacceptable.”

Plus: “And that’s after more than six months of radical campus actions. The pro-Hamas fringe isn’t even convincing their most sympathetic and proximal cohort, let alone anyone else.”

SURE, BUT THEN IT WOULDN’T PRODUCE GRAFT IN CALIFORNIA: Money California wastes on the homeless could buy a first-class life in Missouri.

In some places, one unit of supportive housing for people who are homeless costs a cool million dollars. And, every month after it is built taxpayers fork over $17,000 for security, maintenance, social workers to help them get government assistance, utilities, cleaning and such.

To put that in perspective for people in normal America, you could buy each Californian suffering from homelessness two first-class tickets to Kansas City International Airport, get them a limo ride to their new home, which would be a new three-bedroom ranch, fully furnished (natch) with a new Tesla in the garage, and still save hundreds of thousands of dollars. Every month, you could give them a salary for picking up cans and other debris along the highways that would be greater than half of what working Missourians make and still save $10,000 off that monthly bill.

If money and houses could solve homelessness, this is what California would do — and Missouri would be a winner, as all those formerly homeless people paid property and income taxes thanks to the taxpayers of the palm-festooned paradise on the Pacific.

Well, if California wanted to solve homelessness. But homelessness is too lucrative a problem to solve.

STANDING UP TO HATRED AND BIGOTRY: 13 Federal Judges Say They Will No Longer Hire Law Clerks From Columbia University, Citing ‘Virulent Spread of Antisemitism’ and ‘Explosion of Student Disruptions’.

The letter marks a new front in the hellish public relations war that has consumed Columbia and cost it major donor capital. As the encampment drew throngs of outsiders to the university’s doorstep—some of whom promised daily repeats of the Oct. 7 attacks—pressure mounted on Shafik, the university’s president, to lay down the law.

She did not do so until April 30, after nearly 5,000 alumni signed a petition demanding that the police clear Hamilton Hall. In the interim, Columbia lost one of its most prominent patrons, Robert Kraft, who said he could not in good conscience donate to a school awash in “virulent hate.” Billionaires Leon Cooperman and Henry Swieca have also cut ties with the university.

Related: Columbia Faculty Group Goes on Strike in Solidarity With Anti-Israel Student Protesters.

THE PROCESS IS THE PUNISHMENT:

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Dems use the legal system to target the right — yet give the left a pass.

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

This philosophy, announced by Brazilian President Getulio Vargas in the 1940s, is no longer just the favored approach of Latin American strongmen. It has become the openly practiced strategy of today’s Democratic machine.

Read the whole thing.