Wednesday Potpourri

First, there is the case of one Jared Bernstein, President Biden’s Chief Economic Advisor, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.

John Konrad V managed to look up Bernstein’s academic credentials and qualifications.

Bernstein has an art degree from the Manhattan School of Music. He plays jazz in clubs. He holds a Masters of Social Work from Hunter college and a doctorate in Social Welfare from Columbia.

Naturally, when asked a question that is worthy of first year economics, he could not do it.

The country is in the best and most qualified of hands.

Second, federal judges have taken note of what is happening on the Columbia University campus. A dozen or so have explained that they will no longer hire clerks from the university or its law school. 

The Washington Free Beacon has the story:

Led by appellate judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, who spearheaded a clerkship boycott of Yale Law School in 2022 and Stanford Law School in 2023, as well as by Matthew Solomson on the U.S Court of Federal Claims, the judges wrote in a letter to Columbia president Minouche Shafik that they would no longer hire "anyone who joins the Columbia University community— whether as undergraduates or as law students—beginning with the entering class of 2024."

"Freedom of speech protects protest, not trespass, and certainly not acts or threats of violence or terrorism," the judges wrote. "It has become clear that Columbia applies double standards when it comes to free speech and student misconduct."

The letter’s signatories include Alan Albright, a district judge who hears a fourth of the nation’s patent cases; Stephen Vaden, a former general counsel at the Department of Agriculture who now sits on the United States Court of International Trade; and Matthew Kacsmaryk, the district judge who suspended approval of the abortion drug mifepristone in a controversial ruling last year. Others are well-known district judges appointed by former president Donald Trump.

While 12 judges joined the Yale boycott anonymously, Monday’s letter marks the first time that more than two judges have said on the record that they will not hire graduates from an elite university.

Third, cancel culture is alive and well in Germany. The EndWokeness Twitter account has the story:

German politician of the AFD party, Marie-Thérèse Kaiser was just convicted & fined $6,000+ Her crime? Posting statistics showing that Afghan immigrants are disproportionately committing sexuaI assauIt in Germany.

Fourth, here’s some news you can use, from the psycho world. Researchers have discovered something that I have long suspected. If you want to improve your mental health and emotional well-being, start by routinizing your everyday life. Forget about true love. Forget about empathy. Forget about blaming it all on smartphones. Routines are more important.

Eric Dolan reports for PsyPost:

Recent research published in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B has found that that maintaining a routine in social interactions is associated with enhanced emotional well-being of older adults. The study suggests that not just the frequency or setting of these interactions, but their regular timing can independently contribute to an increase in well-being among the elderly.

“Although it is commonly agreed that social interactions are good for older adults’ health and well-being, it is unclear how older adults should engage in social interactions to maintain or improve their health and well-being,” said study author Minxia Luo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Healthy Longevity Center and Department of Psychology of University of Zurich.

“My research aims to offer information about ‘how to do it.’ For examine, based on the same dataset, we have shown diminishing returns of social interaction frequency on well-being and loneliness, suggesting social interactions frequency is not ‘the more the merrier.’ We have also shown that alternating between solitude and social interactions is beneficial for well-being. The article of interest here is a third output from this project.”

The researchers found that older adults who engaged in routine social interactions tended to experience more positive emotions such as happiness and inspiration. This pattern was observed regardless of the context of the interactions, whether they were with friends, family, or others, and independent of the frequency of these interactions.

Interestingly, the findings also highlighted that maintaining a routine in social engagements was linked to a decrease in negative feelings, such as sadness or anxiety. This suggests that a predictable social schedule might provide a sense of stability and security, which can help alleviate stress and emotional lows commonly experienced by some older adults.

Fifth, on the free speech front, France has not been had. If you declare your public support for Hamas or its October 7 massacre, you could be in a lot of legal trouble.

For France, some speech is beyond the pale.

Matthew Dalton reports:

In France, government authorities are stepping in to draw the line. Courts have ruled that public speech condoning the Oct. 7 attack or legitimizing Hamas as a resistance movement amounts to condoning terrorism—a crime under French law, punishable by up to seven years in prison. French prosecutors are investigating politicians on the far-left, union officials and hundreds of other people for allegedly condoning terrorism and inciting antisemitism since October.

Sixth, the next time someone from the Biden administration touts improving crime statistics, refer him to this report. It comes to us from a Twitter account entitled Catturd-- no kidding.

In 2022, the Biden regime made it no longer "mandatory" to report crime stats to the FBI. The results was over 1/3 (over 6000 precincts) didn't report any crimes to the FBI. Cities that hardly reported any crime stats to the FBI include NYC, Baltimore, Washington DC, Miami and a ton of entire huge cities. Of course, this was done by the Democrats to hide their soaring crime numbers and easily fool low IQ sheep into believing easily provable hogwash.

Seventh, who is Maria Ressa. Apparently, she is a Philippine editor who won a Nobel Peace Prize. She has been designated the commencement speaker at Harvard University.

So far, nothing to write home about.

But then, as Matthew Continetti explains, Ressa is also a virulent anti-Semite. She has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and so on:

In a November editorial, Rappler called for a ceasefire and compared Israel's actions to those by Adolf Hitler, according to a translation.

"What Israel is doing is clearly a disproportionate response and its intention is not simply to retaliate, but to launch an all-out war," the editorial said.

 "In the intensity of Israel's godlike technology, its paleolithic instincts can be seen in the lack of effort to differentiate between civilians and its enemy Hamas."

The editorial said Israel's actions were "about to reach genocide."

"It is a great irony that the [Jewish] race that suffered centuries of oppression, even genocide at the hands of Adolf Hitler, is now [denying] the same aspirations [for] the Palestinians," said the column.

"We like to think that our world is more modern, more aware, and more compassionate, compared for example to the time of Adolf Hitler, or the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima," the editorial went on.

In its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict, Rappler has also referred to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as "militant" groups rather than terrorist organizations.

One would like to know who invited this anti-Semite to speak at the Harvard commencement? Or better, who failed to withdraw the invitation.

Eighth, speaking of detente, once upon a time, the Nixon administration tried to normalize relationships with Mao’s China, the better to undermine the Chinese alliance with the Soviet Union.

Now, it’s China’s turn. Its supreme leader, Xi Jinping is traveling to Europe to strengthen alliances with European countries, especially with France. Is it an attack on the Atlantic alliance? 

Writing in the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman expresses his suspicions.

Who is Xi Jin­ping’s travel agent? If you are mak­ing your first trip to Europe in nearly five years, an itin­er­ary that reads France, Ser­bia, Hun­gary seems a little eccent­ric.

But the three stops chosen by China’s leader make per­fect sense viewed from Beijing. For stra­tegic and eco­nomic reas­ons, China badly wants to dis­rupt the unity of both Nato and the EU. Each of the three coun­tries that Xi is vis­it­ing is seen as a poten­tial lever to prise open the cracks in the west.

Of course, one might conclude that America’s Sinophobia is producing an unintended consequence. 

Ninth, yesterday our mentally challenged vice president was in Detroit. As she was walking out of a restaurant with an order of take-out, a reporter asked her a question about the ceasefire negotiations involving Israel and Hamas.

To that Kamala replied:

Shrimp and grits. You wanted to know. Shrimp and grits.

One understands that she is a heartbeat away from the presidency. And one suspects that if there is a second Biden administration, our cerebrally defective president will retire and hand the oval office over to Kamala.

A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris.

Put that in your hookah and puff on it.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

China on Their Minds

China is on their minds. 

Princeton professor Rory Truex writes in the New York Times that the American right, in particular, has gone a bit overboard in its effort to oppose China. 

And then, Anne Applebaum has written an endless article in The Atlantic wherein she argues that in the great civilizational clash between democracy and autocracy, the American right, especially MAGA Republicans, are on the side of foreign autocracies, at the expense of all the democratic ideals that Applebaum holds dear.

Truth be told, Truex does have a point. Some of our congresspeople have gone a bit overboard in their effort to sanction all things Chinese.

America’s collective national body is suffering from a chronic case of China anxiety. Nearly anything with the word “Chinese” in front of it now triggers a fear response in our political system, muddling our ability to properly gauge and contextualize threats. This has led the U.S. government and American politicians to pursue policies grounded in repression and exclusion, mirroring the authoritarian system that they seek to combat.

It’s not just about TikTok and the Confucius Institutes:

When you are constantly anxious, no threat is too small. In January, Rick Scott, a senator from Florida, introduced legislation that would ban imports of Chinese garlic, which he suggested could be a threat to U.S. national security, citing reports that it is fertilized with human sewage. In 2017, scientists at McGill University wrote there is no evidence that this is the case. Even if it was, it’s common practice to use human waste, known as “biosolids,” as fertilizer in many countries, including the United States.

Or else:

Last summer, several Republican lawmakers cried foul over the “Barbie” movie because a world map briefly shown in the background of one scene included a dashed line. They took this as a reference to China’s “nine-dashed line,” which Beijing uses to buttress its disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea. According to Representative Jim Banks, this is “endangering our national security.” The map in the movie is clearly fantastical, had only eight dashes and bore no resemblance to China’s line. Even the Philippine government, which has for years been embroiled in territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea, dismissed the controversy and approved the movie’s domestic release.

One suspects that the anxiety derives from the fact that we are afraid we will not be able to compete effectively against China in the world markets. Otherwise, our methods are less than inspiring. If you will permit me an indulgence, we are fighting like girls. 

As David Goldman often remarks, the only way to compete against China is to outproduce them, not to sanction them.

In the meantime, it is sad to see Anne Applebaum waste so many words to denounce MAGA Republicans as aspiring pro-Chinese and pro-Russian autocrats. Given that much of her article involves exposing the Russo-Chinese propaganda machine, one is slightly taken aback to discover that she is promoting Democratic Party propaganda. 

It does not make her a very serious thinker. 

Anyway, Applebaum sees the world divided into democracies and autocracies. The latter, she thinks, are waging a propaganda war against democracies. These autocratic governments reject democratic elections, reject human rights, reject feminism, reject free speech and freedom of the press. Worse yet, they reject trans rights.

Strangely, Applebaum does not distinguish between autocracies. And she fails to acknowledge that China’s record economic growth occurred, true enough, in the absence of free elections, but was produced by free enterprise reforms. 

There is more to life than propaganda. Countries around the world are looking to China as a model of development because it has produced economic development. True enough, China has acted as though democratic reforms would compromise its economic successes. You can argue the point, but you should not say that it is all propaganda.

Applebaum suggests that we are losing the propaganda war. And that we should vote for Democrats. It is as dumb as it sounds. The West has been falling behind the East, but the reason seems to lie in our embrace of too much liberal democracy, to our detriment.

Feminism has certainly contributed to a slew of broken homes. The slew of broken homes has produced a mental health crisis among America’s children. 

And then there is transmania. We are engaged in an appalling failure to distinguish men from women, boys from girls, and expect everyone to embrace delusional beliefs as realities. 

Oh, and our great liberal democracy is currently awash in anti-Semitism, not from the right, but from the political left.

About that Applebaum has nothing to say. 

If we want to export liberal democracy we need to show that it works over here.

About that Applebaum has nothing to say.

How many countries would be happy to replace their autocrats with a senile demented, albeit, elected old fool. How many would want to have, as his backup, a certifiable imbecile.

And when it comes to free expression, even in our great liberal democracy, some expression is freer than others. America is no longer a paragon of free speech.

Abigail Shrier made the obvious points on The Free Press yesterday:

Punishment is meted out swiftly and mercilessly, and with no consideration for free speech principles, any time Confederate flag flyers are posted, any time students hold culturally insensitive themed frat parties, any time colleges uncover student use of the N-word while in high school (or even a word in Mandarin that sounds like the N-word), or even when students or faculty make the familiar conservative argument that affirmative action sets black students up to fail. Rinse and repeat and repeat.

Rather than whine about Chinese or Russian propaganda and about autocratic, and masculinist cultures, we would do better to produce a liberal democracy that actually works. 

Whereas Applebaum seems to think that relations between nations involve a power dynamic, where one side plies the other to its will, a more constructive approach sees that it’s about emulating success. If we are failing as a civilization, other cultures are not going to want to become like us. 

If our democracy elevates mediocre non-entities to positions of great authority, people around the world will notice. And will be more inclined to embrace autocracy. 

If our democracy does not respect differences of opinion, and especially if it seems to have adopted cancel culture from a failed Chinese experiment-- the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution-- the world’s people will not take our plaints about free expression seriously.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

Joe Biden's Storm Troopers

The Queen of Jordan understands it all. The student demonstrators who have set up encampments on college campuses across America are not defending the Palestinian cause or even Hamas. According to the Queen, they are idealists fighting for justice.

At some point, such platitudes become completely empty. One might say that the Israeli Defense Force are visiting justice on Hamas. Would it not be a grave injustice if Hamas survives the Israeli invasion?

Besides, when you pull back the veil you will also understand that Jordan, the world’s largest Palestinian state, refuses to take in any more Palestinian refugees. Idem for Egypt. 

Naturally, those who have been trying to understand the protest movement have been drawn to looking for an analogy. The protests of 1968 seem to fit the bill, even though the anti-war demonstrators of that time were threatened with conscription whereas none of today’s pro-Hamas group is about to be sent over to fight against the IDF.

The more important point is that the American administration, joined by certain Jewish members of Congress, has wildly excoriated the prime minister of Israel. For all of its chatter about being even handed, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer and now Jerald Nadler have spent more time and effort attacking Israel and blaming it all on Benjamin Netanyahu.

Surely, the effort to remove a leader in the middle of a war does not count as support. It gives aid and comfort to anti-Semitism.

Strangely enough, the revolutionaries that are camped out American quads are simply following the orders laid down by Joe Biden. Surely, he and his satraps have fomented anti-Semitism. 

Even as it has been sending munitions to Israel, administration spokespeople have balanced it with anti-Israel propaganda. This is called giving aid and comfort to Hamas, persuading them that they need not surrender, because Joe Biden will defend their cause.

As for the cause of the outburst of anti-Semitism, the only hatred that aligns with the protesters’ hatred of Israel is the hatred of one Donald Trump. I have previously noted that Trump might well be considered America’s first Jewish president. Could it be that years worth of vitriol thrown at Donald Trump produced a generation of young people that believe it acceptable to hate Jews?

So, a few words about irrational hatred. If Donald Trump is the Devil Incarnate, as Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe argued, then everything he did had to be bad or evil. Even if it appeared to be constructive or positive, it was still designed to trick you into thinking that Trump had some redeeming features.

Normally, you can find both good and bad in any politician. You will choose which one outweighs the other, but you will not judge one as irredeemably evil while the other is the sum of all evils.

When you condemn a politician by declaring him to be the Antichrist, you are obliged to destroy him. If a normal person would consider the Abraham Accords to be a significant achievement, those who see Trump as the Devil Incarnate must reject that judgment. They cannot accept Trump’s pro-Israeli foreign policy. 

Those who rejected the Abraham Accords declared that they were flawed because they did not address the Palestinian question. Such was the view of dopey John Kerry and he spoke for many on the American left.

Trump made great progress because he sidelined Palestinian terrorists, did not give them a seat at the table. On the contrary the Biden administration seems hellbent on recognizing their legitimacy. Biden himself grants Palestinians equal status with Israelis. He cannot denounce anti-Semitism without adding a denunciation of Islamophobia-- which barely exists in America.

If Trump worked well with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that could only mean that Netanyahu was a very bad man. 

It was not merely progressive politicians, most of whom have been notably anti-Semitic, but the groups that are funding the riotous protests tend to be major Democratic Party donors. This includes George Soros, of course, but also the Tides Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and even the Pritzkers.

So, Joe Biden’s Storm Troopers are fighting the good fight against Donald Trump. If that means taking the war to Jews, so be it. 

They have been induced to live in a fictional world where they need have but one political goal, destroying Trump. That means, denouncing everything he has done or will do.

Like Hamas these new Storm Troopers have but a single goal, to destroy. They do not have a platform; they do not have programs they want to enact; they merely want Hamas to win and Israel to lose.

Now that the Biden administration, for all of its tough talk about supporting Israel, has held up weapons shipments to the Jewish state, you can see that Biden is trying to save Hamas. 

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a few.

Is It a New Cold War?

Surely, you remember the halcyon days of the Cold War. It was capitalism versus communism, or else, democracy versus totalitarianism. The war had a few heated moments, but in the end we won. And in warfare, that most assuredly matters.

Now, if we are to believe Niall Ferguson, we are engaged in Cold War II. Unfortunately, the sides are not as clearly defined. We like to think that it’s still Us vs. Them, the democratic west versus the totalitarian east. Or else, we can imagine that it’s our free enterprise system versus their government-run industrial policy.

Whereas Cold War I played itself out in a certain number of small wars, from Korea to Vietnam, Cold War II seems to be playing itself out in Eastern Europe and even in the Gaza strip.

Dare I mention that the conflict in the Middle East has now arrived at America’s campuses. Those who favor democracy are in some considerable chagrin over the fact that in a war between Israel and Islam, Israel is largely outnumbered. You certainly do not want to deal with the dispute by taking a vote.

As for the current competition between the Judeo-Christian West and Islam, that conflict ought effectively to have been resolved, with the West having won and Islamic nations working to catch up and to compete in the clash of civilizations.

Yet, certain segments of the Muslim world would rather terrorize and extort than compete.

Then again, as China ramps up its naval activity in the South China Sea, our foreign policy elites are agonizing over the prospect of another conflagration, perhaps in Taiwan, the leading producer of a certain kind of semiconductors.

And let us not overlook the fact that the Biden administration has been allowing a full scale invasion of our Southern border, led by the peoples of Central and South America, peoples who do not have the same commitment to democracy or capitalism. 

Worse yet, in the civilizational clash between North and South America, the North has emerged victorious. So, when people see a mass illegal migration from South to North they are right to ask themselves whether these new migrants are here to work to compete or have come for the generous welfare. Do they want to earn their way or do they want to be coddled and swaddled, cared for from cradle to grave?

One understands that Western Europe is better known today for its welfare states than for its military prowess. These countries have spent far more on welfare than they have spent on building their armies and navies. As you know, President Trump excoriated them for making the American taxpayer underwrite their defense. It hurt their feelings….

Of late, led by Joe Biden himself, these same weak sisters in the Western alliance have been throwing fits at the spectacle of Israel fighting to defend itself. Israeli behavior is too manly for their delicate and effeminate tastes. 

The same applies to more than a few college students, who were taught to live in a matriarchal culture, and who are now horrified at the spectacle of a war.

So, if the West is going to compete against the authoritarian East it will need to do better at defining itself as something other than a charity provider.

Surely, this contrast is at play in the war between Russia and the Ukraine. One sympathizes with those who insist that Ukraine must win this war, but Ukraine is not winning the war. Worse yet, it is inconceivable that Vladimir Putin, autocrat extraordinaire, would ever allow Russia to lose a war against a country whose leader got his start on Dancing with the Stars.

It is nice to think that the Ukrainians are fighting for democracy, but still, theirs is basically a lost cause. One suspects that Putin will level the country before he concedes victory to an undistinguished leader.

The political argument about funding Ukraine is more about whether we should fund a lost cause at the expense of America’s open borders. 

Evidently, Hamas is not quite a charity, but it insists on taking what others have built. It blames others for the misfortunes that befall the Palestinian people and they never recommend working to earn what they want to enjoy.

Terrorism is an admission of failure, of an inability to build.

Students throwing tantrums are not ready to compete in the marketplace. They want to be given something they did not earn. It’s more about having a right to a living and less about earning a living. The Western world will need to discover whether it wants to function as a welfare state charity or whether it wants to do what is necessary to compete in the marketplace and on the battlefield.

Dan Hannan in the Washington Examiner looked at the demands that the pro-Hamas child protesters are making and found that they want to be taken care of:

But something has changed. Student radicals were always angry, usually illogical, and often violent. What is new is their whiny hypersensitivity. Can you imagine anti-Vietnam activists complaining because the authorities were insufficiently respectful of someone’s banana allergy? Or demanding that the college authorities send them food?

There is something quite comical about the juxtaposition, demanding the right to disrupt and destroy while simultaneously insisting that everyone else defer to their minutest delicacies. The protesters at UCLA even stipulated vegan and gluten-free food (but, naturally, no bagels already).

As for China, the enigma that is tormenting more than a few serious minds, one understands that many people would prefer returning to Cold War I, when we knew that Communist China was our enemy. Unfortunately, history does not always repeat itself and analogies are often less than perfect.

Here is the problem. Over the past four or so decades China has produced a record economic growth, wealth production and poverty reduction. Unless you want to grant credit to Communism for having produced Chinese prosperity, you would do well to stop sounding like a shrieky school girl ranting about the CCP.

And yet, China produced its economic development without the benefit of liberal democracy. It did not have elections and did not respect human rights. It was authoritarian without being totalitarian. In 1989, when student demonstrators decided that they needed to add democratic reforms to the economic reforms, the nation’s leaders demurred-- forcefully. 

In some ways, China is a living reproach to the commonly-held belief that the advent of liberal democracy will involve both free enterprise and democracy. For that many of our intelligentsia will not forgive it.

As for competing with China, we are now engaged in something like a Cold War. We are imposing sanctions and tariffs on China, the better to undermine its economy. And we have launched a propaganda war to undermine China’s reputation.

To some extent it has worked. China’s economy is doing less well than it might. To another extent China has adapted by sending products through third parties like Mexico.

It is fair to mention that China has not taken it all lying down. From the fentanyl epidemic to the shortages in certain medications, China has been trying to give as good as it is getting. And, dare we say, onshoring and tariffs produce inflation in America. How much do you like that?

In the end, however, sanctions and tariffs are not likely to prevail. If we want to compete against China we will need to build our own industries. We will have to learn to produce, more efficiently and more effectively. 

Surely, the current sanctions regime has empowered the Huawei Corp. to produce its own semiconductors and to seriously damage Apple’s market for iPhones. How much do we like that? We need to keep in mind that our countries are interdependent and that our sanctions provoke retaliatory sanctions.

If we are distraught to see Russia and China form an alliance, rightfully so, we might consider the old Nixonian policy of detente, and break the alliance by improving relations with China. It is bigger and more advanced than Russia. To imagine that we are going to compete by undermining it is childish thinking.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

Saturday Miscellany

First, David Goldman correctly calls this a scary thought.

Here's a scary thought: US manufacturers can't find skilled workers (you need "proficient" high school math to operate a digital machine tool). 24% of US high schoolers are "proficient" in math, or fewer than 1 million graduates/year. China's number of math-proficient HS grades is more like 10m/year.

Second, remember sustainable investing. It was of a piece with the Green New Deal. It allowed money managers to invest in environmentally sensitive and woke companies. It also rewarded companies that cared more about diversity quotas than about profits. 

Well, the fad has outlived its usefulness. Stephen Green has the story:

ESG was supposed to be the future of smart investing, but the future looks increasingly politically incorrect, according to a new Axios report on the "exodus" of money from "sustainable investment funds."

To put it bluntly, ESG was meant to be a money bludgeon for beating corporations into toeing the Progressive line. Maybe best exemplified by the BlackRock investment firm, the smart money would flow to firms with the best "green energy" records, the most left-wing public relations (and donations, natch), and the most buttinsky DEI (DIE?) departments.

The free market has pronounced its verdict on ESG investing. Investors are voting with their money and are pulling it out of these funds:

And the money did rush in. Until now. Because there's an inevitable response when the returns fail to materialize: investors bail. Last quarter, sustainable investment funds (including EFTs) "saw $8.8 billion in net outflows, per new data from Morningstar." The outflow was the biggest ever and is just the latest in a negative trendline that began a year ago. 

The Green New Deal Lite's efforts to spark our "transition to a clean energy economy" haven't accomplished much except for higher energy prices. Even the market for heavily subsidized electric vehicles appears to be plateauing much sooner and lower than expected.

Third, you might have noticed that President Biden finally roused himself sufficiently to utter a few words about the anti-Semitism engulfing American campuses.

Caroline Glick offered this commentary on Twitter;

It took Biden over 2 minutes into a 3 minute speech on anti-Semitism to use the term anti-Semitism. He then  immediately condemned "Islamophobia" and discrimination against Arab and Palestinian Americans.

Who is discriminating against them? Who is denying them the right to walk across campus?

No one. They're the ones attacking Jewish Americans and trampling Jewish American civil rights.

But as with Israel and Palestinians, Biden is accusing American Jews of doing to American Arabs what the Arabs are doing to them.

If this is what support looks like now, in the midst of the greatest onslaught against American Jews since the 1930s, just think what a second Biden term will look like.

Unbelievable.”

Fourth, do you want to follow the money? It’s an old but useful notion. Follow the money and see where it leads you.

So, when you ask who American universities have become infested with Jew hatred and Islamism, the answer come to you when you follow the money.

Ace of Spades writes:

How have America's universities become hotbeds of rabid Islamist rhetoric, foaming-at-the-mouth Jew-hate, and flat-out anti-American insanity?

It's simple. It was purchased with Arab money. Oh, Academia was primed for that sort of crap, since those beliefs are its default, but for a long time was some rough balance. Academia actually had a vibrant, if small conservative/libertarian presence. They also had brains, so their influence was out of proportion to their numbers.

But oceans of oil money began to flood the hallowed halls of our elite (and not so elite) institutions. It paid for endowed chairs for anti-American and anti-Israel professors. It paid for embedded Islamic Studies departments. It paid for university-affiliated NGOs carefully putting forth the pro-Islam/anti-West cant. And it paid for full-fare students from those oil-rich countries, plumping the coffers of these schools with cash that had a catch.

That catch was simple. Make Islam and the savage authoritarians in the Arab world objects of admiration rather than disgust. The Emir of Qatar isn't funding classes examining the vile treatment of women in the Muslim world, or the regular, state-sponsored murder of homosexuals, or the destruction of Jewish minorities within many of those countries. And of course some of that funding went to call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel by framing the "Palestinian Question" as the pinnacle of post-modern victim-hood.

So a generation of mush-brained undergraduates were taught to see the savage terrorists of Gaza and the West Bank as Jeffersonian freedom-lovers whose highest aspirations were to live in peace and harmony on the land that was stolen from them by those pesky Jews.

Fifth, Lionel Shriver keeps us up to date on the latest from PEN America, a writers’ guild of sorts. PEN just canceled its literary festival because too many writers refused to participate because PEN had not denounced Israel. No word on whether they wanted PEN to denounce Hamas also.

Shriver wrote, on Unherd:

Another day, another opportunity for huffy, hypocritical “progressive” posturing. PEN America has now been forced to cancel its World Voices literary festival in New York and LA, on the heels of also cancelling its 2024 awards ceremony. Too many authors had withdrawn from both events to make going ahead with staging either practicable. The reason for so many writers flouncing from these programmes? PEN’s failure to publicly denounce Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza. But you had probably guessed the point of indignation already, because as of October 2023, the Anglosphere’s far-Left has neatly pivoted from the infantilisation of black people to the Palestinian cause with the coordinated grace of a synchronised swimmer.

Nicely put, dare we say. 

Sixth, I know you have been wondering about this, but the Daily Mail has its nominee for the most dysfunctional state in America. The answer is: Illinois. So much for the political future of Governor J. B. Pritzker:

The state is grappling with a string of crises which have seen residents leave en masse - and earned it the unwanted title of one of the 'most dysfunctional' in America. The state has struggled to add jobs and its public pension debt has ballooned to nearly $150 billion. Meanwhile, its population has declined by hundreds of thousands, hurting tax income.

Seventh, if students are unhappy about having their education hijacked by fanatics, imagine how their parents feel. The Wall Street Journal reports on the parental backlash to the current degradation of the educational experience:

Parents paying as much as $90,000 for their sons and daughters to attend elite universities are angry and frustrated with colleges’ responses to the Gaza protests—on both sides of the political divide. Whether their kids are protesting, counterprotesting or trying to stay out of it, parents are demanding that schools do more to keep them safe and learning.

And also:

Parents are preparing to push back financially. They are requesting tuition refunds where classes have been canceled and contacting college counselors to ask how to get their money back. Parents are also threatening not to donate in the future. 

Eighth, on the transmania front, recent research has shown that people who undergo gender reassignment surgery are far more prone to commit suicide. 

Considering that unscrupulous counselors have been telling parents that if they refuse to allow their children to transition, said children will kill themselves, the new information will hopefully contribute to a new wave of honesty.

Yes, I know, but we can always hope.

The following tweet is from Ian Miles Cheong:

STUDY: Gender-affirming surgery found to be highly associated with significantly elevated depression rates, leading to an increase in su*cidal ideation and attempts, showing a 12.12-fold higher rate than those who did not proceed with the surgery.

Ninth, the latest in political prognostication comes to us from Andrew Sullivan. The British conservative now believes that the election is Trump’s to lose. Biden, he suggests, is toast.

The Daily Mail reports:

Andrew Sullivan says Biden's lackluster approach to campus chaos is enough to see him booted from the White House.

This combined with 'chaotic' border policies and Biden's stance on transgender rights will be enough to snuff out any chances of re-election, according to Sullivan, a gay conservative journalist.

'Biden is losing this election, deservedly,' he wrote on his Substack. 'And if he cannot pull off an almighty pivot — and I suspect at this point, he really can't — this election really is Trump's to lose.' 

Outlining his reasoning, he pointed to the student protests over the Vietnam war in 1968 which are largely blamed for costing the Democrats in the election of Richard Nixon.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.