OUT TODAY: FIRE’s 2025 COLLEGE FREE SPEECH RANKINGS. Where does your alma mater rank? (Mine, Duke, is #27. My wife’s Harvard? Take a wild guess…)

OH GOOD! THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IS HERE TO PROTECT US FROM ‘FOREIGN INFLUENCE’ IN ELECTIONS AGAIN! For crying out loud, just put up a website saying “The fix is in. Suck on it, plebs.” Cheaper and less insulting.

ACT TEST MAKES SCIENCE SECTION OPTIONAL. What’s going on? I thought we were obliged to Trust the Science!

VPNS TO HELP BRAZIL ACCESS TWITTER/X. Thanks to the commenters who submitted ideas. The most common ones seemed to be to use either Proton VPN, which can be had for free for one device, or the Brave browser’s built-in VPN–and then to use the X website, not app. Brave can also use the Tor network, for the even more paranoid (and tolerant of slow speeds). I was hoping for a free, open-source, distributed solution (other than Tor), but I don’t think that’s out there right now. As a note, you should generally avoid free commercial VPNs, which are reputed to often be spyware, but Proton is the well-known company behind ProtonMail, so it’s probably fine.

NO TO RUSHED RENAMINGS. I’ll go further – no to renamings, period. This is a well with no bottom that will drown us all.

BLEG: CAN WE HELP THE BRAZILIANS WITH VPNS? The New York Times may be weirdly relaxed about Brazil blocking X, many of us are not. We’re talking Brazil, not North Korea or Cuba – 200 million people in our own hemisphere. While Brazil’s cartoonishly villainous “Justice” Moraes has said that even using VPNs to post your cat photos will get you a fine 5 times larger than the average monthly salary of a Brazilian, I suspect Brazilians will give that ruling the respect it deserves.

My question to the Instapundit audience is this: are there any open-source VPN projects someone in the US can join to provide some free VPN bandwidth to beleaguered Brazilians? I have gigabit internet and would be more than happy to throw some bandwidth that way. If you want to make some suggestions in the comments, I will look at them and do a follow-up post with any suggestions that look promising.

‘MIGRANTS’ TRY TO BOARD SCHOOL BUSES FULL OF CHILDREN. 2 DAYS IN A ROW. “The alarming incidents occurred in the Jamul-Dulzura Union School District close to the Mexico border — where school bus drivers are now being ordered to skip stops where migrants might be waiting.” Yeah, suck it up and drive ’em yourself, taxpayers!

How amped up about “our democracy” are we supposed to get when the policy of “making it as easy as possible for random people from any country to just walk across the border” is the ironclad position of both major political party establishments despite having the same number of actual supporters as there are Kamala Harris primary voters?

THIS IS WHY YOU’RE ALREADY ON YOUR FIFTH REPUBLIC. “Political chaos in France after Macron refuses to name PM from leftwing coalition.” Man, imagine if voting for someone made no difference here! Heh heh heh… (tugs collar)

(H/T Ace of Spades.)

THE DEBT-FREE FOUR-YEAR DEGREE: IS IT POSSIBLE? Yes, with lots of work. But with the Democrats on a suicide mission to forgive college debt, it probably makes no sense to save or pay upfront for college when you could always just help your kid pay back the loans and still have a chance of getting some of that sweet, sweet free money. Perverse incentives much?

WILL COLLEGES HANDLE THE ISRAEL-HAMAS PROTESTS BETTER THIS YEAR? Define “better,” I guess. The obvious solution would be to have sensible rules and enforce them evenhandedly. Does anyone think that’s likely to happen?

WHAT A MONSTER. Pitt cardiologist Norman Wang was demoted, had an article retracted, and was told he was “unsafe” for students because of maniac statements like “Ultimately, all who aspire to a profession in medicine and cardiology must be assessed as individuals on the basis of their personal merits, not their race and ethnic identities.” He’s suing. (In the meantime, if you need a cardiologist, I suspect he’s a safe bet.)

‘ENDORSED BY SELINA MEYER’ IS NOT THE FLEX THEY THINK IS. Or is the message here the meta-message: that they can nominate anyone regardless of actual votes, rub it in your face, and you just have to deal with it? More from my unwilling membership on the DNC Endless Spam List. (Khaaaaan!)

HOW DEI IS CORRUPTING MILITARY EDUCATION. It’s only “corrupting” the military if you think the government is focused on foreign threats as opposed to domestic threats. A survey of its behavior in the past few years suggests that such an assumption might be erroneous.

THIS KAMALA CAMPAIGN TEXT JUST SEEMS DESPERATE. Does not scream “joy,” that’s for sure.

(Whatever evil prankster put me on the DNC spam list, well played, and I hate you.)

FORMER DAVIDSON DEAN: COLLEGES ARE TOO WED TO THE STATUS QUO. All good points, though tradition is valuable. But as enrollment drops, you’d think job #1 for colleges would be “stop alienating the people paying for this.” They won’t even do that.

ARE FACULTY SALARIES REALLY TOO LOW? I don’t know, but I do know this: they are not going up at anywhere near the rate of tuition. So where’s the money going? (Reminds me of doctors–medical costs skyrocket, but doctors’ salaries sure don’t. Who’s taking the dang money?)

‘GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR RESPONSIBLE MEDIA’ SHUTS DOWN DAYS AFTER LAWSUIT FILED BY X, RUMBLE. Wow, what a super “responsible” move. Super happy that these were the folks policing what I could read.

Beware, though: it likely just means that they have already started a successor effort to hammer people/organizations who countenance badthink.

IMMINENT STUDENT LOAN DISASTER: MORE THAN HALF OF BORROWERS NOT PAYING. The sooner we can put an end to the current student loan system, the better. The incentives for every party are just dead wrong.

CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT THAT CENSORED ANTI-COMMUNIST FLYERS SETTLES FIRE LAWSUIT FOR $330,000. And administrators have to go to First Amendment training–annually.

DUKE ENDS RACE-BASED SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM IN WAKE OF SUPREME COURT DECISION. Legalized racial preferences always made a mockery of equal justice under law. That the Court continues to allow it in employment, etc. continues to be to our great national shame.

VDARE.COM SHUTTING DOWN AS A RESULT OF LAWFARE. Its current homepage tells a harrowing tale of how government and corporations collaborated to wipe a website off the Internet, free speech be damned. I don’t know enough about the site to opine on its content, and I also know that doesn’t matter. We should be very angry that our institutions enable and engage in this cowardly silencing behavior–and wonder who else they’re silencing today.

LOUSY NEW TITLE IX REGS OFF TO A DESERVEDLY ROUGH START. Bad news: the regs strip students of critical free speech and due process rights, taking away the right to a live hearing and to cross-examine witnesses, and (while ED has been cagey on this) making schools punish students for “misgendering.” Good news: They’re so bad that, for now, courts have blocked them from taking effect in 26 entire states, and on many other campuses as well.

This huge mess is directly attributable to ED’s determination to use Title IX as an excuse to attack some of our most fundamental rights as Americans.

SURVEY REVEALS MAJORITY OF AMERICANS NOT BORN YESTERDAY; DID NOT RECENTLY FALL OFF TURNIP TRUCK. FIRE’s national survey also found that, by wide majorities, “Americans do not trust the government to fairly decide what speech is annoying, disturbing, harassing, indecent, intimidating, terrifying, or threatening.”

REALLY SEEMS LIKE IT WOULD BE HARD FOR THE SECRET SERVICE TO MISS THIS. He’s not sneaking, he’s just freely running around up there on the slopey roof.

Video from Donald Trump assassination attempt victim’s POV shows figure moving on roof moments before gunfire in Butler PA
https://t.co/y21Fof5GPt #FoxNews

— UnboundedLife (@unboundedlife1) July 31, 2024

‘HEALTH EQUITY’ VS. TEACHING ACTUAL MEDICINE.  Med schools in 2024: “Instead of asking, ‘How can individuals protect themselves against health problems?,’ doctors should wonder, ‘What kind of public collective action is necessary to confront health inequity across identifiable populations?’”