Elite American Universities Completely Beyond Hope

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  • In a post last week I marveled at the sudden discovery by the Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT of the importance of freedom of speech when it involves demonstrators favoring elimination of Israel and slaughter of Jews. Yet somehow, at the same institutions, comparable principles just don’t seem to apply in the case of basic dissent from leftist political orthodoxy.

  • When the official party line gets questioned, all the elite universities have multiple tactics to diminish and banish the deviators, whether that be by demanding loyalty oaths (e.g., “diversity statements”) in hiring or admissions, holding mandatory “diversity” or “sensitivity” training sessions, disinviting speakers, conducting pretextual investigations of dissenters, funding the favored and denying tenure to the disfavored, and many other such methods.

  • So how bad is it out there on elite campuses, really?

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Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Versus Intentional Fraud -- Lazard Edition

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Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Versus Intentional Fraud -- Lazard Edition

  • My last post, on December 14, asked readers, when considering climate advocacy journalism and reports promoting wind- or solar-generated energy, to ask themselves whether the author is merely incompetent versus perhaps committing intentional fraud. The post focused on a particular piece that had been published in November in euronews.green, byline Lauren Crosby Medlicott.

  • In that piece, Ms. Medlicott had egregiously cherrypicked some operating data from the Spanish El Hierro Island wind/storage electricity system to make it appear that that system is a success, when in fact it is a disastrous failure. Could this really have been mere incompetence on her part, or was Ms. Medlicott intentionally seeking to deceive her readers?

  • Ms. Medlicott’s piece was so appalling that I was unable just to let it pass. On the other hand, to be honest, Ms. Medlicott is a relatively small fish in the climate advocacy game. Are the larger fish any more honest?

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Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Or Intentional Fraud?

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Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Or Intentional Fraud?

  • It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud? (The third possibility — reasonable, good faith advocacy — can generally be ruled out in the first few nanoseconds.).

  • As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, I suppose it would be better to be merely incompetent. However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author could be so stupid as to actually believe what he or she is saying.

  • So let’s apply this inquiry to a piece that has come to my attention in the past few days.

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"Free Speech" At Harvard, Penn, MIT And Other Elite Universities

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  • Six days ago, on December 5, the Presidents of three elite universities — Harvard, Penn and MIT — appeared at a Congressional hearing to testify about their responses to pro-Hamas and anti-semitic demonstrations and advocacy on their campuses.

  • In the most widely-viewed exchange at the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik asked each of the Presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their codes of conduct. The three answered by emphasizing the importance of freedom of speech on their campuses, and by saying that they could not give a definitive answer as to whether calling for genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct, because the answer was “context-dependent.”

  • Over the intervening days, the responses of the three Presidents have generated widespread backlash, including harsh criticism from even some mainstream press sources, and even pushback from some major donors. The Presidents’ responses appeared to be, and were, tone deaf and highly legalistic. But were they wrong?

  • This may surprise you, but I’m going to stand up for the three Presidents on this particular point.

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The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (11) -- Still Waiting For The Bribery Charges

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  • Yesterday, Hunter Biden was finally indicted — on tax charges. Here is a copy of the indictment, filed by Special Counsel David Weiss in the Central District of California, and signed by his principal deputy Leo Wise. The nine counts include three felonies.

  • The indictment makes for moderately entertaining reading. The gist is that Hunter Biden, rather than paying taxes of about $1.4 million that he acknowledged he owed for years 2016-19, instead “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle.” Well, we all knew that.

  • A more important question is why it has taken until now to produce an indictment for crimes that were this obvious and on which the statute of limitations was running.

  • So where are the bribery charges?

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Another Conflict In Which The Left Has No Interest: Venezuela/Guyana

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Another Conflict In Which The Left Has No Interest: Venezuela/Guyana

  • The response by Israel to the October atrocities of Hamas seems to have roused the international Left into a furious frenzy. Widespread demonstrations supporting the Gazans’ slaughter continue on a daily basis in major cities around the world and, especially, on university campuses. The demonstrations feature thinly- or not-so-thinly-veiled calls for elimination of Israel as a state, and for violence against Jewish people. The demonstrators call the Jews every horrible thing they can think of, the very worst in their vocabulary being “settler colonialists.”

  • Meanwhile, other comparable conflicts go on around the world without even a hint of interest from the same international Left. In this post on October 11 I discussed the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where at that very moment the Azeris were in the process of completely expelling a large community of Armenians from their historical homeland in a section of the Caucasus region called Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenians have apparently continuously occupied the area since well before the time of Christ, and converted to Christianity as a nation in 301 A.D. Encyclopedia Britannica dates the arrival of the Azeris (Muslims) from Central Asia around the 9th to 11th centuries A.D. Doesn’t that make the Armenians “indigenous” and the Azeris “settler colonialists”? You will be hard pressed to find a handful of news articles covering this situation, let alone even one tiny demonstration on a college campus.

  • And now consider the conflict between Venezuela and Guyana.

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