The above cartoons run the gamut of commentary but, I believe, they have a common thread. They highlight hypocrisy and the mass media's attempt to paint Trump in the most negative light because they have chosen to shut their eyes to Obama's disastrous 8 years, the Left's off the chart bias among other matters.
The market has been roiled,of late, due to a variety of factors.
a) Any new Fed Chairman creates uncertainty until Wall Street gets a feel and what he/she will do about policy..
b) Trade war will not be anything that reaches the level the market's fear. Why? Because Trump is willing to touch third rails but he eventually acts in a rational way and uses bluster and threats, based on legitimate concerns, as his negotiating ploy.
c) Markets are correcting because of various news cross-currents. Earnings are good, cash flows are increasing, multiples have been reduced to saner levels, inflation remains in check, partly due to the power of technology's impact, consumers have yet to receive their tax benefits and spending on infrastructure will occur. What goes straight up can come down quickly as it has.
I still favor selected financials, health care related, energy, selected utilities and some technology. I particularly favor ABBV, CVS and SO .
d) Trump is correct to bring up matters of unfair trade which have not been addressed and thus, when he does everyone gets overly exercised. What the fear mongers fail to take into account is that Trump is on firm ground since those engaged in unfair trade know they have enjoyed an advantage .
With respect to the Amazon fracas, he is using his personal enmity towards Bazos to bring up the fact that the high cost of delivering mail is because Congress decided it is a service all citizens are entitled to and Trump is a business man who is committed to the bottom line. Trump is a plumber type who abhors government's leaky waste and approaches government as a businessman not as a politician.
I am not justifying everything Trump does and the manner in which he approaches issues. I am simply trying to objectively understand him as opposed to being knee jerk opposed to him simply because he is unlike any president we have experienced and he beat Hillary. Trump haters have plenty of material they can use to perpetuate their hatred of the man and thus, blind themselves to the positives he is accomplishing.
I am not a genius investor but I am capable of cold analysis partly because I have a law degree and partly because I spent almost 50 years in the stock market trying to sort out everyone's emotional impact on my client's money.
Trump has shaken the world out of its torpor and the America I grew up knowing is back in town and I find that refreshing. Jury still out but China is listening, Putin is vulnerable if Trump carries out his plan of flooding Europe with American energy and N Korea is being told by China how they must act. Eventually Iran could be isolated and Russia will spend a great deal of money, they do not have, seeking to support Iran which can prove a losing cause if the West comes to the realization Iran is a real/viable threat to world order.
Trump has stated many times he does not broadcast in advance as Obama yet, he declared he wanted out of Syria. Again, I see this as a negotiating ploy to get The Saudis to take on more of the cost and become increasingly engaged. (See 1 below.)
The nation and leader I remain most concerned about is Turkey and Erdogan. He remains the fly in the ointment and is thoroughly unreliable. Also remember, he is the one Obama called his best friend. When it comes to being consistently wrong Obama even tops Biden.
Meanwhile, until Israel is viewed realistically the Palestinians will continue protesting thinking this will win money, empathy and apolitical advantage beyond being killed.
What the Palestinians will soon learn is the threat of Iran is working against them and the strength of Israel and its commitment to stand up against Iran is winning favor among Egypt and The Saudis. (See 2, 2a and 2b below.)
Finally Israel's F35's recently penetrated Iranian air space testing their and Russia's air detection abilities. These planes can go to Iran and return and repeat the trip without refueling. Very little has been reported on about this!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I have been in touch with Amy Wax seeking to ascertain whether she will come to Savannah and speak.
I just finished the article about her travails for telling what liberals do not like hearing yet offer no rebuttal other than 'keep your mouth closed or we will make life miserable.' The article appears in the April 2 issue of The weekly Standard and was written by Marl Bauerlein. (See 3 below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Still catching up and probably one or two more memos until return again, April 16.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
+++++++++++++++++++++
1) In Syria, we 'took the oil.' Now Trump wants to give it to Iran.
By Josh Rogin
There are a lot of good arguments for maintaining an American presence in Syria after the fall of the Islamic State, but President Trump doesn’t seem persuaded by any of them. Perhaps he would back off his urge to cut and run if he knew that the United States and its partners control almost all of the oil. And if the United States leaves, that oil will likely fall into the hands of Iran.
It’s one feature of a larger U.S. mission in Syria that is really about containing Iranian expansionism, preventing a new refugee crisis, fighting extremism and stopping Russia from exerting influence over the region. The United States has serious national security interests in making sure that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran don’t push America out of Syria and declare total victory.
But Trump has repeatedly said those tasks are not the United States’ responsibility. He promised to pull the approximately 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria at a campaign rally on Thursday in Ohio.
“We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon,” he said. “Let the other people take care of it now.”
It’s not an offhand remark. Last month, Trump said that although he thinks the slaughter in eastern Ghouta by Russia, Iran and the Assad regime is “a humanitarian disgrace,” he has no intention of doing anything about it, because our mission is to “get rid of ISIS and go home.”
Of course, that contradicts his top national security officials. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said late last year that the troops would stay to prevent “ISIS 2.0” and stabilize the situation. In January, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson laid out in a carefully workshopped policy speech five long-term goals for U.S. policy in Syria, including ridding the regime of weapons of mass destruction and solving the political conflict. He promised that the United States “will maintain a military presence in Syria focused on ensuring ISIS cannot re-emerge.”
But if Trump disagrees and is looking for a Syria policy that fits his campaign, he might remember that he has constantly complained that in Iraq, “we should have kept the oil.” Of course, we can’t and shouldn’t take or keep Syria’s oil. But there’s a grain of truth in Trump’s idea. Control over oil is the only influence we have in Syria today.
“We have this 30 percent slice of Syria, which is probably where 90 percent of the pre-war oil production took place,” said David Adesnik, director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “This is leverage.”
The actual people holding the land with the oil are not U.S. troops, but the mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces that were trained and armed by Washington, along with local Sunni Arab leaders who are resisting the ongoing onslaught by government- and Iranian-backed forces.
The Assad regime and Iran have a stated and ongoing strategy to take back all the land that Assad once controlled, including the land containing Syria’s most valuable energy resources.
What’s more, in May, Trump is expected to pull the United States out of the Iran deal, meaning that he will reimpose U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil. It would be profoundly counterproductive to hand Iran control over a swath of Syria that contains huge amounts of oil at the exact same time.
As Chagai Tzuriel, director general of Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence, told me, if the U.S. and its allies intend to stop Iran’s regional expansion, that mission must begin in Syria. Also, if there is to be any real peace negotiation, the U.S. military presence is crucial for America having influence there as well.
“If there is a true commitment to counter Iran, it needs to be done in Syria first. If it’s not done in Syria, we will lose that campaign,” Tzuriel said. “The presence of the American forces is very important … That buys you a seat at the table that decides the future of Syria.”
If the U.S. troops leave, the Kurds are likely to cut a deal with the regime and leave the Sunnis to Assad’s cruelty. Then, the Iranians will move into the area, completing their land bridge of control from Tehran to Beirut. If Trump doesn’t have a real Syria strategy, he doesn’t have a real Iran strategy.
“Iran is turning its proxy network, its axis of resistance, into a region-wide resistance army,” said Melissa Dalton, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She said Iran now has more than 250,000 proxy forces directly or indirectly under its influence around the region.
Syrian opposition leaders are asking for the United States to work with both the Kurds and the Sunni Arab local leaders to consolidate control in liberated areas and help organize local governance. Those who have fought the Islamic State don’t want to live under the rule of Assad and Iran, said Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nongovernmental organization that works with the Syrian opposition.
“It’s incredibly important that with all these oil-rich areas … we don’t end up in a situation where we do have to pull out and there is some sort of deal that allows Iran to essentially take the land, the oil, and these areas, and empower their land bridge that they’ve been building inside the country,” he said. “We took the oil. We’ve got to keep the oil.”
Josh Rogin is a columnist for the Global Opinions section of The Washington Post. He writes about foreign policy and national security.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2) Hamas-fails-to-breach-israeli-borderGaza terror group uses civilian shields to protect gunmen and sappers
ByByLiel Leibovitz
--What should we call the violent clashes along Israel’s border with Gaza this weekend, which cost 17 Palestinians—at least five of whom were members of the armed wing of Hamas, according to Hamas—their lives? Much of the press, foreign diplomats, and Senator Bernie Sanders called them “protests.” But is that really the right word for attempts by masses of people organized and incited by a terrorist organization to breach the border of a sovereign country using plastic explosives? No.
While the usual suspects are busy denouncing Israel for war crimes, two facts mustn’t be ignored and cannot be explained away, no matter how critical one is of the Jewish state and its policies.
The first is that Hamas again used innocent civilians, many of them children, in its cynical quest to score propaganda points against Israel. Just as it had murdered at least 160 Palestinian children by forcing them to dig the tunnels used to allow gunmen to infiltrate Israel, and just as it continues to use civilians as human shields to protect its arsenals and rocket factories, the terror organization again put the most vulnerable on the line to further its murderous cause. Israel Defense Forces soldiers facing the violent mob this weekend spotted a seven-year-old girl, prompted by Hamas to run into harm’s way. “When the IDF troops realized it was a girl,” the army spokesperson’s office reported, “they picked her up and made sure that she could get back to her parents safely.” No matter how sympathetic you may be to the Palestinians’ national aspirations, the use of children—or their parents—as human shields to generate favorable imagery is beyond the pale.
Even more telling, however, is the question of what, in the first place, Hamas was hoping to achieve by marching civilians en masse on Israel’s border. Israel no longer occupies even one inch of Gaza. Every Israeli settlement in Gaza was uprooted. Every Israeli settler who ever lived in Gaza—including thousands who were born there—was relocated to Israel, many of them by force. For those who see Israeli settlements as inherent obstacles to peace, Gaza today is proof that they are not. The responsibility for Gaza’s continued suffering lies entirely elsewhere.
Having withdrawn from the strip in 2005, Israel no longer has any territorial claims on Gaza; but Gaza, as this weekend makes painfully clear, still has territorial claims on Israel. In its continuous attacks on their neighbors to the north, and in its most recent efforts to cross into Israel, Hamas has again proven what the organization’s charter so clearly states, namely that its singular goal is the utter and absolute destruction of the Jewish state. It wants all of the land, not peace or coexistence or any other sensible and reasonable goal, which is why any territorial compromise on Israel’s behalf is nothing more than an invitation to the next, even bloodier conflict.
Think that’s Zionist propaganda? Here is the leader of Hamas himself, explaining the point of last week’s protests: The “March of Return,” said Yahya Sinwar, “affirms that our people can’t give up one inch of the land of Palestine. The protests will continue until the Palestinians return to the lands they were expelled from 70 years ago.”
It’s a deeply depressing reality, and it’s likely to exasperate the beautiful souls among us who’d like to see this conflict resolved and who continue to cheer for some sort of magical process that would somehow stop the hostilities. As this weekend so abundantly and painfully proves, that kind of talk is futile.
The only path forward is for the Palestinians to abandon the futility of their ongoing and senseless violence, and come to terms with Israel’s right to exist. Until they do that, we’re likely to see more mindless bloodshed and more pain, all of it the fault of a craven leadership sacrificing its people on the altar of crazed, radical, irredentist hatred.
2a) Arab Leaders Abandon the Palestinians
Facing threats from Iran and Turkey, they want peace—and to strangle Hamas.
Walter Russell Mead
On the surface it was business as usual in the Gaza Strip. Hamas bussed thousands of residents to the border with Israel to begin a six-week protest campaign ahead of the 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence—or, as the Palestinians call it, the nakba, or “catastrophe.” This protest would mark “the beginning of the Palestinians’ return to all of Palestine,” according to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
It didn’t. Stones were thrown, tires were set aflame, and shots were fired. When the smoke cleared, the borders were still in place and 15 Palestinians lay dead, with three more succumbing later from injuries. While families endured their private tragedies, familiar controversies swirled. The usual people denounced Israel in the usual ways, countered by the usual defenders making the usual arguments.
But what is happening in Gaza today is not business as usual. Tectonic plates are shifting in the Middle East as the Sunni Arab world counts the cost of the failed Arab Spring and the defeat of Sunni Arabs by Iranian-backed forces in Syria.
In headier times, pan-Arab nationalists like Gamal Abdel Nasser and lesser figures like Saddam Hussein dreamed of creating a united pan-Arab state that could hold its own among the world’s great powers. When nationalism sputtered out, many Arabs turned to Sunni Islamist movements instead. Those, too, have for the time being failed, and today Arab states seek protection from Israel and the U.S. against an ascendant Iran and a restless, neo-Ottoman Turkey.
But the American protection on which Arabs rely cannot be taken for granted, as President Trump’s apparent determination to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria in the near term demonstrates. Under these circumstances, Israel’s unmatched access to Washington makes Jerusalem even more important to Arab calculations. Perhaps only Israel can keep the U.S. engaged in the region.
It is against this backdrop that the old Palestinian alliance with the Arab nations has frayed. Most Arab rulers now see Palestinian demands as an inconvenient obstacle to a necessary strategic alliance with Israel. The major Gulf states and Egypt apparently have agreed on two goals. The first is to strangle Hamas in Gaza to restore the authority of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. The second is to press the authority to accept the kind of peace that Israel has offered repeatedly and that Yasser Arafat and his successor have so far rejected.
Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are playing for time. They support the first goal by refusing to pay the salaries of government employees in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip even as they resist pressure to make peace with the Jewish State. It is not yet clear what the authority’s final response to the peace pressure will be. Even if it ultimately decides to accept an Arab-sponsored compromise, making a show of resistance can improve its credibility with the Palestinian public and, perhaps, extract better terms.
Hamas is in an even more desperate plight. The Arab blockade and donor strike cripples Gaza in ways the Israelis never could. Food is growing scarce, electricity is erratic, unemployment exceeds 40%, and raw sewage runs into the sea. Many Gaza residents presumably want the only thing Hamas can’t offer: relief.
Historically Hamas has reacted to this kind of pressure by launching wars against Israel, trusting its friends abroad to force the Jewish state to cease fire before it can inflict serious damage on Hamas’ leadership. But in the 2014 war, Arab foot-dragging gave Israel time to deal a serious defeat to Hamas. Another war would be equally ruinous and for the same reason: The Arab governments want Hamas crushed, and they won’t stop Israel from doing the job.
The current demonstrations, Hamas hopes, can whip up a global wave of rage and indignation against Israel without provoking a full-on war. That might weaken the Arab coalition against it. But the prime audience for Hamas’s performance this time isn’t the Arab world; it is Turkey and Iran, whose support Hamas will need to survive if it is driven from Gaza (as Arafat was once driven from Jordan and Lebanon).
Rifts between Palestinians and other Arabs are nothing new. But the collapse of Arab nationalism and the failure of Sunni radicalism have weakened the political forces that rallied Arab support to the Palestinian cause. With millions of new Arab refugees in Syria, and growing threats to Arab independence from powerful neighbors, prioritizing Palestine is a luxury many Arabs feel they can no longer afford.
2b)
Saudi Crown Prince Acknowledges Israel’s Right to Exist, Says Iranian Ayatollah ‘Makes Hitler Look Good’
By Algemeiner Staff
In an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that was published on Monday, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — currently in the midst of a two-week visit to the US — acknowledged Israel’s right to exist.
“I believe that each people, anywhere, has a right to live in their peaceful nation,” the 32-year-old Saudi royal said. “I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land. But we have to have a peace agreement to assure the stability for everyone and to have normal relations.”
Asked about antisemitism in his country, Prince Mohammed stated, “Our country doesn’t have a problem with Jews. Our Prophet Muhammad married a Jewish woman. Not just a friend — he married her. Our prophet, his neighbors were Jewish. You will find a lot of Jews in Saudi Arabia coming from America, coming from Europe. There are no problems between Christians and Muslims and Jews. We have problems like you would find anywhere in the world, among some people. But the normal sort of problems.”
Israel, the crown prince noted, “is a big economy compared to their size and it’s a growing economy, and of course there are a lot of interests we share with Israel and if there is peace, there would be a lot of interest between Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and countries like Egypt and Jordan.”
Prince Mohammed — commonly known as MBS in the West — had strong words for Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying the head of the Tehran regime “makes Hitler look good.”
“Hitler didn’t do what the supreme leader is trying to do,” Prince Mohammed explained. “Hitler tried to conquer Europe. This is bad…But the supreme leader is trying to conquer the world. He believes he owns the world. They are both evil guys. He is the Hitler of the Middle East. In the 1920s and 1930s, no one saw Hitler as a danger. Only a few people. Until it happened. We don’t want to see what happened in Europe happen in the Middle East. We want to stop this through political moves, economic moves, intelligence moves. We want to avoid war.”
Last week, Prince Mohammed met in New York City with around a half-dozen representatives of major American Jewish groups.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3)
Fahrenheit 451 updated
On the Amy Wax controversy surrounding the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Notes & Comments April 2018
The University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Visions of Travel
What took them so long? That was our first question when we heard the latest news about the distinguished University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. Last summer, Professor Wax created a minor disturbance in the force of politically correct groupthink when she co-authored an op-ed for The Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.”
What, a college professor arguing in favor of “bourgeois” values? Mirabile dictu, yes. Professor Wax and her co-author, Professor Larry Alexander from the University of San Diego, argued not only that the “bourgeois” values regnant in American society in the 1950s were beneficial to society as a whole, but also that they were potent aides to disadvantaged individuals seeking to better themselves economically and socially. “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake,” Professors Wax and Alexander advised.
Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
Such homely advice rankled, of course. Imagine telling the professoriate to be patriotic, to work hard, to be civic-minded or charitable. Quelle horreur!
Wax and Alexander were roundly condemned by their university colleagues. Thirty-three of Wax’s fellow law professors at Penn signed an “Open Letter” condemning her op-ed. “We categorically reject Wax’s claims,” they thundered.
What they found especially egregious was Wax and Alexander’s observation that “All cultures are not equal.” That hissing noise you hear is the sharp intake of breath at the utterance of such a sentiment. The tort was compounded by Wax’s later statements in an interview that “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans” because “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.”
Can you believe it? Professor Wax actually had the temerity to utter this plain, irrefragable, impolitic truth. Everyone knows this to be the case. As William Henry argued back in the 1990s in his undeservedly neglected book In Defense of Elitism, “the simple fact [is] that some people are better than others—smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace.” Moreover, Henry continued, “Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal.” And it follows, he concluded, that “Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.”
True, too true. But in a pusillanimous society terrified by its own shadow, it is one thing to know the truth, quite another to utter it in public.
For his part, Theodore Ruger, the Dean of Penn Law School, tried to have it both ways. He didn’t, on that occasion, discipline Professor Wax or seek to revoke her tenure. But he hastened to disparage her observation as “divisive, even noxious,” and to “state my own personal view that as a scholar and educator I reject emphatically any claim that a single cultural tradition is better than all others.”
What a brave man is Ted Ruger. Uriah Heep would have been proud.
There were other efflorescences of outrage directed at Professors Wax and Alexander last autumn. But since the metabolism of outrage and victimhood is voracious as well as predatory, fresh objects of obloquy were soon discovered. Attention drifted away from Amy Wax.
Until a few weeks ago, that is. At some point in March, a social justice vigilante came across an internet video of a conversation between Glenn Loury, a black, anti–affirmative action economics professor at Brown University, and Professor Wax. Titled “The Downside to Social Uplift,” the conversation, which was posted in September, revolved around some of the issues that Professor Wax had raised in her op-ed for the Inquirer. Towards the end of the interview, the painful subject of unintended consequences came up. The very practice of affirmative action, Professor Loury pointed out, entails that those benefitting from its dispensation will be, in aggregate, less qualified than those who do not qualify for special treatment. That’s what the practice of affirmative action means: that people who are less qualified will be given preference over people who are more qualified because of some extrinsic consideration—race, say, or sex or ethnic origin.
Professor Wax agreed and noted that one consequence of this was that those admitted to academic programs through affirmative action often struggle to compete. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class,” Professor Wax said, “and rarely, rarely in the top half.” Professor Wax also observed that the Penn Law Review had an unpublicized racial diversity mandate.
Uh-oh. It took several months for the censors to get around to absorbing this comment. But last month they finally did and the result was mass hysteria. From Ghana to Tokyo to Israel, students associated with Penn Law School were furiously trading emails, tweets, and other social media bulletins about Amy Wax. The university’s Black Law Students Association, whose president, Nick Hall, was instrumental in publicizing the video, went into a swivet. What, they demanded of Dean Ruger, was he going to do about Professor Wax’s outrageous comments?
In a word, capitulate. Then preen. Dean Ruger announced that Professor Wax would henceforth be barred from teaching any mandatory first-year courses. “It is imperative for me as dean to state,” he thundered, “that . . . black students have graduated in the top of the class at Penn Law, and the Law Reviewdoes not have a diversity mandate.” Did he offer any data to back that up? No. Perhaps Penn doesn’t keep track. But Dean Ruger may wish to consult a study published in the Stanford Law Review in 2004 which showed that in the most elite law schools, 52 percent of first-year black students pooled in the bottom tenth of their class, compared to 6 percent of whites. Only 8 percent of first-year black students were in the top half of their class.
Lack of data, however, is no impediment to declaring one’s higher virtue while simultaneously caving in to the atavistic forces of political correctness. Amy Wax, intoned Dean Ruger, is “protected by Penn’s policies of free and open expression as well as academic freedom.” Nevertheless, she will be treated as a toxic personality, too dangerous for Penn’s tender shoots embarking on a career in law. “In light of Professor Wax’s statements,” Dean Ruger wrote in a community-wide email,
black students assigned to her class . . . may reasonably wonder whether their professor has already come to a conclusion about their presence, performance, and potential for success in law school and thereafter. They may legitimately question whether the inaccurate and belittling statements she has made may adversely affect their learning environment and career prospects. . . . More broadly, this dynamic may negatively affect the classroom experience for all students regardless of race or background.
As Jason Richwine noted in a column for National Review, Dean Ruger’s protest is “almost Orwellian in its blame-shifting.” All of the issues he lists “are the direct result of Penn’s affirmative-action policies. Those policies generate a racial skills gap in Penn’s first-year law class, and Professor Wax has merely voiced what every rational observer already knows.” Moreover, grading of first-year students at Penn is blind: professors do not know which grade is assigned to which student.
Doubtless Dean Ruger hoped that by scapegoating Amy Wax he would effectively mollify the beast of political correctness. Not likely. As could have been predicted, his capitulation and nauseating Two-Minutes-Hate display of politically correct grandiosity merely sharpened the appetite of the racial grievance mongers. Dean Ruger publicly castigated and in effect demoted Amy Wax. But that was not enough for Asa Khalif, a leader of Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania, who is demanding that she be fired outright. Indeed, he told The Philadelphia Tribune that Penn has one week to comply. “None of what this racist is doing is new to anyone familiar with her,” Khalif said. “Many people have known about her for years. Not just black and brown people, but people who don’t believe she can fairly grade or teach people who don’t look like her. . . . We are unwavering in our one demand that she be fired.”
As we write, L’affaire Wax is still unfolding. Who knows to what lengths Mr. Khalif and his Black Lives Matter thugs are willing to go? Who knows what ecstasies of groveling condemnation Dean Ruger or other Penn administrators may indulge? One thing, however, is clear. The truth is a dispensable commodity at our elite colleges and universities. When it clashes with the imperatives of political correctness, the truth loses. Like the firemen in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, most of those populating the higher education establishment are busy destroying the very things they had, once upon a time, been trained to cherish and protect.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 36 Number 8, on page 1
Copyright © 2017 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
newcriterion.com/issues/2018/4/fahrenheit-451-updated
Copyright © 2017 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
newcriterion.com/issues/2018/4/fahrenheit-451-updated
No comments:
Post a Comment