Some people figure things out slower than others. Such is the case with formerly lefty billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackerman, who is simply shocked to find out that Harvard has unquestionably embraced antisemitism and diversity in the name of DEI.
Here’s Dave Rubin excerpting Ackerman’s interview with Lex Friedman:
“The governance structure [of Harvard] is a disaster.”
“October 7th is the event that woke me up. Thirty student organizations came out with a public letter on October 8th, literally the morning after, this letter was created, and said Israel is solely responsible for Hamas’s violent acts.”
“Again, Israel had not even mounted a defense at this point, and there were still terrorists running around in the southern part of Israel.”
“And I’m, like, what is going on, you know? WTF, right? And that’s when I went up on campus and I started talking to the faculty, and that’s where I started hearing about ‘Actually, Bill, it’s it’s this DEI ideology.'”
“They started talking to me about this oppressor/oppressed framework, which is effectively taught at on campus, and represents the backdrop for many of the courses that are offered.”
“You know, I’m a pretty aware person, but I was completely unaware.” If you were “completely unaware,” then no, you’re not a “pretty aware person.” The malignancy of social justice has been know for at least a decade, and the hard left’s love for Muslim terrorists manifested itself at least as far back as the 1980s, when campus lefties loved the PLO almost as much as the commie Sandinistas. My guess is that by “a pretty aware person” you mean “you read the New York Times and watched a nightly MSM news broadcast, and stayed safely inside your real estate/hedge fund bubble, and never realized just how much your news sources were lying to you.” And all those PLO- and Sandinista-loving lefties now have their hands on control levers of the Democratic Party.
“They’re like ‘Look, Israel is deemed an oppressor and the Palestinians are deemed the oppressed, and you take the side of the the oppressed. And any acts of the oppressed to dislodge the oppressor, regardless of how vile or barbaric, are OK.”
“This is a super dangerous ideology.”
“DEI comes out of a kind of a Marxist, socialist backdrop way to look at the world.”
“Unfortunately it’s advancing racism as opposed to fighting it.”
As Dave Rubin notes:
Yes, his conversion is welcome, but again, conservatives (and even just anyone paying attention) has know what poison DEI/Critical Race Theory/Social Justice is for a decade. The #BlackLivesMatter/#Antifa riots didn’t make him think something just might be wrong with victimhood identity politics?
Bill Ackerman needs to go back and look at what else the left-leaning MSM has lied to him, about (including inflation, China, crime statistics, the Russian collusion hoax and and Donald Trump).
Israel has begun the process of flooding the network of tunnels beneath Gaza in an effort to flush out the impacted Hamas assets lodged there, according to U.S. officials who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. The Israeli military operation has so far involved the installation of seven massive pumps and testing the process of flooding the Hamas holes with water from the Mediterranean Sea, and now the great enema has begun in earnest.
“Israeli officials say that Hamas’s underground system has been key to its operations on the battlefield,” explains WSJ. “The tunnel system, they say, is used by Hamas to maneuver fighters across the battlefield and store the group’s rockets and munitions, and enables the group’s leaders to command and control their forces. Israel also believes some hostages are being held inside tunnels.”
The tunnel system has been dug throughout much of Gaza and is also active at the Egyptian border, the crossing at which Hamas militants smuggle many of their weapons into Gaza. It is a critical infrastructure for the terrorists’ ability to continue to wage their bloody war against the only democracy in the region. Remove the network of tunnels from the table, and you severely cripple that ability.
Thanks to Home Alone and Irish we know that a particular cart of groceries went from $19.83 in 1990 to $77.28 today.
389.7% inflation over 33 years.
Annualized, that’s just 4.208% inflation, since the goal is 3%, that doesn’t seem so bad.
The problem is that cart of goods was $44.40 last year. That’s an annual inflation of 2.4755% from 1990 to 2022. Below the Fed’s desired rate, good for us, bad for the national debt.
That means we had 174% inflation in one fucking year.
A common problem, one that well pre-dates the invasion of Ukraine, is that we have shockingly well credentialed people of influence from both parties who have an inability to understand that Russians are not Westerners. They don’t think like Westerners, though they may look like them.
The Russians have a distinct culture, history, and view of themselves and their place in history. The underperforming political, military, and diplomatic elite in the West – with few exceptions outside the former Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO – expect Russians to react in the same way and to the same degree to the incentives and disincentives that move needles and preferences in DC and Brussels.
Time is always on the side of Russia, which is one of the reasons the slow rolling of weapons to Ukraine has been an exercise of malpractice of the highest degree. You are either in or out.
Two years on, “we” still are not sending a clear signal. It is amazing, really; in military might, GDP, demographics and a whole host of other reasons, Russia should not be as resilient as they are … which is why DC & Brussels are being played so hard. They still do not understand Russia.
Even after 1,000 years of experience, we have Western leaders who refuse to believe that the Russians are fundamentally different than the West is in the 21st Century. You can’t put the cultural ability to absorb damage and brutal patience you cannot see in some metric that can go on a PPT slide.
What the Russians lack in so many other places, they make up for here. As such, this critical part of understanding Russian motivation keeps being missed. Yes to their economy and apocalyptic demographics. Yes to all that.
For all the reasons Russia continues to fight, so too do their Ukrainian brothers – demonstrating greater resilience and endurance that Western expectations.
The time for leaving Ukraine to its fate is long past. Yes, the West has a short attention span and is suffering under the dead hand of entrenched leaders with a defeatist mindset – but none of this is written.
Ukraine can still win – or at least something that can be called a win. It would help if the Russians had some internal issues that required more attention that Ukraine, but even then – all is not worth shrugging over.
Yes, I’ve seen the math – the metrics – but war is informed by math, but not defined within it.
At a relatively modest cost in our treasure and almost none of our blood, we are wearing down Russia’s ability to project power for a generation, perhaps two. Perhaps many more generations should demographic instability mate with political instability. The Ukrainians – facing the same economic and demographic challenges as the Russians – are up for the fight. There is no reason for more comfortable nations who have supported them so far to go wobbly at half-time.
“FBI Official Who Helped Launch Trump-Russia Probe Sentenced to Four Years in Prison for Work with Russian Oligarch…In August, Charles McGonigal, a 22-year veteran of the bureau’s field office in New York, was found guilty of a count of conspiracy for working with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with close ties to President Vladimir Putin.”
Jagged Little Pill is now 28 years old. I don’t think I’ve listened to it for the last 27.
Texas Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) has won a resounding victory over U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX-18) in a runoff election for mayor of Houston, carrying the race by 64 percentage points according to election results.
“Voters have spoken and I am humbly grateful to the people of Houston for electing me as their next mayor,” said Whitmire in a statement.
The election results largely mirrored the latest polling in the race where Whitmire maintained a lead over Jackson Lee, especially in runoff scenarios where negative perceptions of the congresswoman indicated many voters who had supported one of the other 18 candidates in the first round would likely move strongly towards Whitmire. Polls also indicated crime and public safety were among the top concerns for Houstonians — an issue on which Whitmire, as the longtime chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, held a distinct advantage over Jackson Lee.
I didn’t follow that race closely because it’s been obvious for a long time that Lee simply isn’t very bright, something even the lefty sorts at the Daily Beast noticed.
In the Democratic-leaning Houston, Republican-backed candidates have slightly increased their presence on the 16-member city council with the help of the local party, outreach efforts into minority communities, and campaign efforts from conservative organizations.
According to unofficial election results, candidates Julian Ramirez, Willie Davis, and Twila Carter all won runoff elections for At-Large Positions 1, 2, and 3, and incumbent Mary Nan Huffman handily fended off a challenge from attorney Tony Buzbee for District G. The victors will join incumbent Amy Peck, who ran unopposed for District A, and Fred Flickinger, who won the District E seat on Election Day last month.
Each of the five contested candidates have enjoyed the support of the Harris County Republican Party (HCRP), the Republican Party of Texas, and groups like the Kingwood Tea Party.
Pundits frequently forget that not so long ago, Houston was a Republican stronghold. Ted Cruz won Harris County (albeit it narrowly) in 2012, and Greg Abbott carried it in 2014.
“Elon Musk took another shot at Disney CEO Bob Iger Thursday, after the state of New Mexico sued Meta for allegedly enabling child sexual abuse and trafficking – yet Disney and other woke advertisers, who paused advertising on X in a kneejerk reaction to claims of antisemitism – apparently have no problem when it comes to the sexual exploitation of minors.”
A black scholar Harvard President Claudine Gay plagerized is plenty pissed off.
One of the academics who was plagiarized, former professor Carol Swain, is pissed after Harvard gave Gay a pass on what would have resulted in severe punishment and/or expulsion for anyone else, as Townhall’s Christopher Rufo reports.
“I rarely get angry, but I am angry,” Swain wrote on X. “[R]ight now about the racial double standards that are TEMPORARILY giving #ClaudineGay an opportunity to resign. White progressives created her and white progressives are protecting her. The rest of us have had to work our rear ends off to achieve success. Some get it handed to them.”
Rufo interviewed Swain, who said that the plagiarism went far beyond a few paragraphs – and that Gay’s “whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work.”
“She became president of Harvard and got recognition as being its first black president. I don’t believe her record warranted tenure, and I believe that I had to meet a much higher standard than she did,” she told Rufo, adding “Something changed in the mid-1990s, [when] we were having a big affirmative action debate.”
Rufo asked Swain what she thought would happen to a white person under these circumstances, to which she replied “A white male would probably already be gone.”
Harvard announced that Gay would keep her job after a week of calls for her ouster, first, regarding her refusal to condemn calls for violence against Jews on campus, and then, after the plagiarism accusations broke. Despite a donor revolt spearheaded by billionaire Bill Ackman, a petition signed by 700 faculty members on Gay’s behalf won in the end.
I’m hoping that this week is Peak Busy for me. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Rasmussen: “Today’s [President Donald Trump] approval ratings among black voters: 29% This time last year: 15%.” Overall Trump approval rating at 50%.
Related: “President Donald Trump was lauded by inner-city pastors, including one who said he may go down as the ‘most pro-black president’ in recent history, during a White House roundtable on Wednesday that was focused on efforts to reform the prison system.” (Hat tip: Da Tech Guy via The Other McCain.)
At long last, the Trump administration has created a “freedom option” for people suffering under Obamacare. A final rulemaking issued Wednesday reverses an Obama-era regulation that exposed the sick to medical underwriting. The new rule will expand consumer protections for the sick, cover up to two million uninsured people, reduce premiums for millions more, protect conscience rights, and make Obamacare’s costs more transparent. And unlike President Barack Obama’s implementation of his signature healthcare legislation, it works within the confines of the law.
Federal law exempts “short-term, limited duration” health insurance from having to carry the unwanted coverage and hidden taxes Obamacare requires. Many consumers have understandably taken refuge from soaring Obamacare premiums in short-term plans.
Hoping to force those consumers into Obamacare plans, the Obama administration sabotaged short-term plans by stripping them of crucial consumer protections. It cut the maximum plan term from 12 months to three months, and forbade issuers from offering “renewal guarantees” that allow the sick to continue purchasing short-term policies at healthy-person rates. State insurance regulators protested that these restrictions literally stripped sick patients of their coverage.
Wednesday’s rule reinstates and even expands the consumer protections Obama curtailed. It allows short-term plans to last 12 months, and allows insurers to offer them with renewal guarantees.
You read that right. Democrats curtailed consumer protections; Republicans are expanding them.
Is the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, Sarah Jeong, a racist?
From one perspective — that commonly held by people outside the confines of the political left — she obviously is. A series of tweets from 2013 to 2015 reveal a vicious hatred of an entire group of people based only on their skin color. If that sounds harsh, let’s review a few, shall we? “White men are bullshit,” is one. A succinct vent, at least. But notice she’s not in any way attacking specific white men for some particular failing, just all white men for, well, existing. Or this series of ruminations: “have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation. there’s literally nothing. like skiing, maybe, and also golf. white people aren’t even allowed to have polo. did you know that. like don’t you just feel bad? why can’t we give white people a break. lacrosse isn’t for white people either. it must be so boring to be white.” Or this: “basically i’m just imagining waking up white every morning with a terrible existential dread that i have no culture.” I can’t say I’m offended by this — it’s even mildly amusing, if a little bonkers. (Has she read, say, any Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson?) But it does reveal a worldview in which white people — all of them — are cultural parasites and contemptibly dull.
A little more disturbing is what you might call “eliminationist” rhetoric — language that wishes an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth: “#cancelwhitepeople.” Or: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.” One simple rule I have about describing groups of human beings is that I try not to use a term that equates them with animals. Jeong apparently has no problem doing so. Speaking of animals, here’s another gem: “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.” Or you could describe an entire race as subhuman: “Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.” And then there’s this simple expression of the pleasure that comes with hatred: “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” I love that completely meretricious “old” to demean them still further. And that actual feeling: joy at cruelty!
Another indicator that these statements might be racist comes from replacing the word “white” with any other racial group. #cancelblackpeople probably wouldn’t fly at the New York Times, would it? Or imagine someone tweeting that Jews were only “fit to live underground like groveling goblins” or that she enjoyed “being cruel to old Latina women,” and then being welcomed and celebrated by a liberal newsroom. Not exactly in the cards.
Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro admits that socialism doesn’t work. Just think how much pain could be avoided if he had admitted this before people had to eat their dogs…
Mistaken police call for an active shooter at a McAllen mall turns out to be an illegal alien robbery gang. Result? Seven illegal alien criminal suspects arrested.
Sheldon Silver Sentenced: Seven in Sing Sing. (Actually, it’s not clear the former New York Assembly speaker will be serving his sentence in Sing Sing, but we can only hope, for the sake of the alliteration…)
China cracks down on illegal coffins. Which is to say, any coffins, since cremation is now mandated. Including seizing and destroying coffins old people have spent their entire lives saving for.
When Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York in 2014, things changed drastically. I started to hear rumblings early on. My former colleagues who were dedicated public servants were concerned by a large-scale rollback of Bloomberg’s strategic initiatives. These seemed to be based on partisan politics and black-and-white thinking as opposed to critical analysis. It was very disappointing for me since I had also voted for de Blasio.
Although I was still working in the same social-services agency where I had remained at the end of Bloomberg’s term, my job changed radically. I had no contact with the new commissioner who appeared to be disengaged from substantive discussions about social-services programs for an extremely vulnerable population. In fact, she was much more preoccupied with renovating her office — I heard her new desk alone cost thousands of dollars. She even requested that a private bathroom be built for her. She had the attitude of an oligarch and was disturbed that she had to vet invitations to galas through legal and City Hall. She wanted carte blanche to attend expensive events.
She also refused to meet with the lawyers in her department and she kept the door to her office closed and didn’t know the names of the people who worked in her agency.
Under my commissioner, there were no benchmarks, no goals and she did not hold regular meetings with her general counsel. Under her tenure, the legal unit was gutted. And there were no consequences for failing to meet performance goals because there were no performance goals.
Comics video blogger Jeremy Hambly attacked at GenCon. “The Quartering also provided another update claiming five eyewitness have identified the attacker as Matt Loter, the owner of Elm City Games.” GenCon promptly expelled Loter. Ha! Just kidding!
GenCon is blocking and muting and banning people who talk about @TheQuartering’s assault on their official channels and social media accounts.
It’s almost as if they want to make people angry by censoring all conversation about the topic.
“Millennial Drops Support For Socialism After Learning How Hard It Is To Get Avocado Toast In Venezuela.” The Babylon Bee has just been tearing it up recently. I probably need to add them to the blog roll.
A funny thing happened on the way to total Social Justice Warrior cultural domination: They finally started paying a price for their “violent eliminationist rhetoric.”
More and more, it seems that being a left-wing racist asshat is an excellent way to earn yourself a pink slip:
In a followup to an item in last week’s LinkSwarm, Phil Montag, the Nebraska Democrat openly celebrating the shooting of Steve Scalise wasn’t just fired from his Nebraska Democratic Party gig, he was also fired from his day job.
The University of Delaware cut ties with part-time, adjunct faculty member Katherine Dettwyler, who said that North Korea detainee Otto Warmbier deserved to die at the hands of communist North Korean abuse since he was “young, white, rich, clueless.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
Essex County College fired adjunct professor Lisa Durden for statements attacking white people and supporting pro-black segregation. “You white people are angry because you couldn’t use your white-privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter all-black Memorial Day celebration.” Said Essex County College president Dr. Anthony Munroe (who himself is black): “Racism cannot be fought with more racism.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Yale dean June Y. Chu loses her job after calling people ‘white trash‘ in her Yelp reviews. (Aside: When did the New York Times start putting in Chinese ideogram subheadlines at the top of every story?)
in all these cases, merely refraining from being complete asshats would have been sufficuent for the offenders to keep their jobs.
Do we want to live in a world where people can be fired from their day jobs for unrelated Yelp reviews? Probably not. But as IowaHawk once observed:
I'm sure the Drexel prof's "white genocide" crack was just an ill-delivered joke, but I didn't set the ancient Twitter Outrage Mob rules
Until very recently, left wing Social Justice Warrior mobs were allowed to go after people’s livelihoods with impunity for the most trivial of politically incorrect infractions, confident that no matter how radical or racist their own words and deeds, that they would pay no price for it. Only recently have the same rules Social Justice Warriors apply to others been applied to themselves. Only when the pain of their own reckless attack mob mentality is inflicted on them will they stop.
Finally, the rest of the world is punching back twice as hard, and radical leftists have no one to blame but themselves.
If pink slips are the only language they understand, then pink slips it is.
Even Thomas “What’s The Matter With Kansas” Frank calls Obama “ineffective and gutless.” (Warning: Salon Liberal Whining Ahead.)
Liberal law professor Lawrence Tribe thinks that ObamaCare is probably doomed due to the Halbig decision. “I cannot see how this Court could do anything other than decide the same way as the DC Circuit did. The statue is clear on its face.”
Even “ObamaCare Architect” MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber said the same thing back in 2012: “What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.”
As to Mr Earnest’s point on “what Congress intended”, who can say? No Congressman who voted for the bill read it. Presumably, some legislator’s staffer wrote that actual line about “established by the State”. If we could locate him among the vast entourages of the Emirs of Incumbistan, we could ask him what his “intention” was. Until then, calibrating the competing degrees of deference to a corrupt bureaucracy, a contemptuous executive, a politicized judiciary and a feckless hack legislature brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s line about arguing the precedence of a louse and a flea, with a tick and a cockroach thrown in.
Sarah Palin endorses Joe Carr against Lamar Alexander in Tennessee senate primary. I don’t think anyone who watched Alexander’s “Lamar!” flannel flameout in the 1996 Presidential race has ever really trusted him since…
A New York City cupcake truck seems a little unclear on who their clientele might be. (They’ve since deleted both this tweet and the one where they implored people not to “snitch” to cops when they see crimes committed…)
So Democratic state representative Trey Martinez-Fischer used his speech at the Texas Democratic convention to say that GOP stands for “gringos y ostros pendejos” (or, roughly, “gringos and other assholes”). In other words, he just insulted every black, Hispanic and Asian Republican in Texas.
The late Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., a former leader of the KKK, twice was elected the majority leader in the U.S. Senate and served a 6-year stint as, ironically, minority leader in between. Add Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and countless others to the list of elected Democrats who’ve said things just as racist as Sterling, yet faced no consequences.
To liberals, people are their skin color first, and that should dictate their thoughts and behavior. To stray from that is somehow a betrayal. It’s the basest form of racism, even if the victim and the perpetrator share the same melanin.
To progressives, you aren’t an individual, you’re your skin. Clarence Thomas isn’t a man, he’s a black man. He isn’t an American, he’s an African American. It’s the prefix, not the person, that matters. That, at its core, is racism.
The Left’s focus on the status of wealthy and high-income Americans is precisely backward — backward if improving the lives and opportunities of those born into poverty is your goal. If your goal is to increase the income and power of the public sector for your own economic and political ends, then of course it makes more sense to focus on the rich: That’s where the money is, and the perverse reality of the Left is that it cannot fortify its own interests by improving the lives of the poor but can do so by pillaging the rich.”
2013 Walter Duranty awards for media liars were given out. Seymour Hirsch received a lifetime achievement award…
Egyptian Muslim group declares that democracy must be eliminated because ”it does not allow to save Muslims and theorizes the equality of Jews, Copts and Muslims and must therefore be condemned”.
Three girls fined $3,500 for wearing bikinis. In Italy.[Edited to add: Jihad Watch has updated the story as a hoax.]
Unless you follow the NBA, you may be unaware that owner Donald Sterling’s Los Angeles Clippers were, until very recently, regarded as one of the worst-run franchise’s in the league. Between moving to Los Angeles in 1983 and 2010, they only had two winning seasons.
The Clippers have recently been on the upswing, having drafted one All Star (Blake Griffin) and traded for another one (Chris Paul), that Sterling wisely let have more input in composing and running the team. The input Sterling has on running the team, the better they tended to do. So the Clippers are in the playoffs in the powerhouse NBA West. Things were looking up.
It takes an extra-special brand of stupid for a man who owns a team in a league with predominately black players, with one and half black superstars on his team (Griffin is half-black, half-leprechaun) and a black coach (Doc Rivers) to be caught saying he doesn’t like black people. It’s tantamount to declaring “I never want to have another big name NBA free agent come to my team ever again!”
Using the logic liberals so often deploy, this “proves” that Democrats are more racist than Republicans.
On the same topic, here’s acerbic, articulate and frequently perceptive British atheist Pat Condell on the subject of progressive racism:
A few money quotes:
“In progressive hands, the word racist has become the verbal equivalent of a chemical weapon, or a dum-dum bullet, used spitefully, disproportionately, as a first resort, and without the slightest justification.”
“It seems to me that the people who constantly invoke skin color for no reason, as progressives do to the point of obsession, are the ones who actually have a problem with it. They see racism everywhere because they’re riddled with it themselves.”
“You see, progressives don’t really believe that non-white people are equal, or are capable of being equal on their own merits.”
Instead of going out and doing the heavy lifting myself on a Texas vs. California update, Victor Davis Hanson [[Corrected. – LP]] has done another of his California is totally screwed pieces, and it’s a cornucopia of facts on California’s decline.
A few tidbits:
Salinas just named an elementary school after a serial cop killer
“Hundreds of thousands of the working and upper-middle class, mostly from the interior of the state, have fled — maybe four million in all over the last thirty years, taking with them $1 trillion in capital and income-producing education and expertise. Apparently, they tired of high taxes, poor schools, crime, and the culture of serial blame-gaming and victimhood.”
“One of every three welfare recipients lives in California.”
