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One of the best op eds and saddest commentaries on Harvard, and universities in general, to date.
Institutions of higher learning now cower at the prospect of teaching what once distinguished America from most all the world. What the author writes is that students are now seen as customers and customers are always right except in this case.
What is even more hysterical and sad is that identity politics has now boomeranged and bitten a black man in the a--.
I always knew there could come a time when Americans would have to fight to recapture
a semblance of what made our nation great but did not believe it would come from within. POGO was omniscient: "The Enemy Is Us" but I do not believe Walt Kelly foresaw it would be predominantly from the radical element that has taken over The Democrat Party. (See 1 below.)
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Those beautiful South Pacific Islands Michener wrote about are in play. (See 2 below.)
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OCA, a victim of her own lunacy. (See 3 below.)
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St John's College's agenda. The thinking student's college. (See 4 below.)
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History is replete with miscalculations. Does this apply to Trump?
Democrats, assorted Trump haters and radical lefties are correct when it comes to their belief Trump has many downsides that, under ordinary and normal circumstances, would disqualify him to be president. He has a playboy history, is often boorish and inelegant, is not a prodigious reader, has narcissistic tendencies, Tweets and insults and you know the rest. However,neither is he everything Bernie or the husband of a senior Trump official would have us believe.
The miscalculations Democrats, assorted Trump haters and radical lefties make is they believe their own propaganda and cannot see Trump, the successful and accomplished president. They deny his economic achievements, attributing them to Obama. They cannot believe he is capable of waking up NATO. They find him lacking understanding in the ways of effective diplomacy because of his impetuousness.
They find him all veneer and lacking depth. They are blinded by the fact, in less than three years, he has addressed harmful issues that others have denied and/or were afraid to tackle from trade, The Middle East, education, our penal system, secure borders, crippling red tape, U.N bias, Iranian sponsored terrorism, ISIS, and a host of other matters..
Consequently, they are fielding a variety of candidates that suggest you can beat a nobody with a nobody. I submit,Trump is certainly not a nobody, has grown in presidential stature and is on his way to bringing about some necessary changes in his desire to "Make America Great Again."
I do not believe, however, he is likely to accomplish many of his goals because Democrats, assorted Trump haters, radical lefties and the mass media are doing everything in their power to undercut him, China is a powerful emerging force, has a vast array of strengths that more than match our own and their leadership is focused and committed to use everything at their disposal to surpass us. Alas, we remain naively unconvinced.
Furthermore, after 8 years of Obama's divisive and destructive efforts to transform America we find ourselves at odds domestically. It is inconceivable we are considering replacing capitalism with socialism, considering FDR's effort to pack The Court and believing 16 year old's are competent to vote when they no longer are educationally exposed to anything that teaches them about America's great history because school curricula has been diluted and taught by an increasing number of Marxists.
As I have written before, it is too early to determine whether Trump can win a second term but,I do believe, as long as Democrats are intent on miscalculations that gives Trump leverage. As long as the economy remains positive and people are employed, wages are rising that gives Trump leverage. Finally, if Trump gets a few breaks with respect to trade negotiations and Europe begins to awaken to the threats from China and radical Islam, that also works to Trump's advantage.
Miscalculations are like cataracts. They tend to distort one's objectivity. Add to the mix hate, radical policies and the re-embrace of anti-Semitism, all outside the mainstream of American political and social thought, and you create momentum for your adversary.
In 2016, the Democrats fielded a loser, the mass media protected her and disregarded her warts, and focused on Trump's deficiencies and he became the Accidental President. Should they do so again, as they seem desirous of doing, he most likely will be re-elected.
Time will tell.
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Dick
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1) Triggered by Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer
A law professor agrees to represent an unpopular client, and undergrads say they’re traumatized
By Heather Mac Donald
Harvard has opened an investigation into law professor Ronald Sullivan, who earlier this year joined Harvey Weinstein’s criminal-defense team. Some undergraduates complained that Mr. Sullivan’s decision to represent Mr. Weinstein, who is charged with rape in New York, puts them at risk. By taking the complaint seriously, Harvard puts its commitment to identity politics above the core tenets of due process.
Student backlash was immediate when the New York Post reported in late January that Mr. Sullivan would be representing Mr. Weinstein. A visual and environmental studies major started an online petition to remove Mr. Sullivan from his position as faculty dean of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s 12 undergraduate residential houses. Mr. Sullivan’s choice of client was “deeply trauma-inducing,” and shows that Mr. Sullivan doesn’t “value the safety of students,” the petition announced. Would Winthrop residents “really want to one day accept [a] Diploma,” the petition asked, from someone who “believes it is okay to defend” Mr. Weinstein?
Six Harvard dorms held “listening sessions” attended by emissaries from the university’s Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, whose website urged traumatized students to seek mental-health services and other help from Harvard’s massive Title IX bureaucracy. Harvard’s dean of students and its lead Title IX coordinator attended a student protest outside the main administration building, where the ubiquitous Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response doled out hot chocolate.
Still-unidentified vandals spray-painted #MeToo slogans such as “your silence is violence” on Winthrop House. The record reveals no condemnation from Harvard officials and requests for comment were not returned at press time. The Association of Black Harvard Women complained that Mr. Sullivan (who is black) had “failed” female African-Americans at Harvard and had compromised his ability to support “survivors . . . as they deal with their trauma.”
This student agitation could have been an opportunity for a lesson in the values of Western democracy. Harvard’s administrators could have explained that a lawyer who defends someone accused of a crime doesn’t thereby condone crime. Rather, he is upholding the principles that all defendants, even guilty ones, have a right to legal representation and that the state may criminally punish someone only after proving his guilt in a rigorously contested adversarial process.
History shows that without such a requirement, state power slides toward tyranny, Harvard’s adults could have said. Mr. Sullivan’s representation of Mr. Weinstein embodies the highest ideals of the law—that every accused person, no matter how reviled, is entitled to a defense in court.
Instead, the administration kowtowed to hysterical students. Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College and a business school professor, launched a review of “concerns about the community’s overall climate” at Winthrop House. As part of the investigation, Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research would administer an anonymous survey, and a former freshman dean would speak privately with Winthrop House residents.
The fact of the climate review is bad enough. It validates the idea that there is something to investigate in Mr. Sullivan’s decision to represent an unpopular client. And the administration’s rhetoric smacks of a re-education camp. The Harvard Crimson reported that Mr. Khurana was “actively” communicating to Mr. Sullivan what he was hearing from “members of the community and what they’re describing their needs [sic] so that Professor Sullivan can adjust to those needs.” Mr. Khurana said he has also “communicated that the College believes that more work must be done to uphold our commitment to the well-being of our students.” In reality, Mr. Sullivan has done nothing to jeopardize the well-being of Harvard’s students.
The dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Claudine Gay, was ominously noncommittal regarding Mr. Sullivan’s ability to rehabilitate himself. Mr. Sullivan’s efforts to date to reassure the community about his commitment to its safety have been “insufficient,” said Ms. Gay, who is also a government and African-American studies professor. Echoing Mr. Khurana, Ms. Gay asserted that “there’s more work that needs to be done,” and hopes for a conversion: “I am hopeful that Professor Sullivan is prepared to be a partner in that work.”
The anonymous climate survey arrived in Winthrop House members’ email boxes this month. Predictably, it asked if the house was “racist” or “homophobic” and whether it has a “strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Harvard might as well close up shop if there is any doubt in 2019 that the answers to these questions are no and yes, respectively. And what do racism and homophobia have to do with the Weinstein case anyway?
In a twist of identity-politics delirium, Mr. Sullivan is now playing the race card against the administration. In a New Yorker interview, he said of the climate survey: “It’s absolutely never happened before, and I do not believe that it would happen again to any non-minority faculty dean.” That racism allegation is as preposterous as the claim that Winthrop House residents are unsafe because of Mr. Sullivan’s criminal-defense work.
The victimhood ideology Harvard is stoking is inimical to education. The zealotry of the Believe Survivors movement, the insistence that identity-based victims uniquely possess the truth, the claim that testing such truth in the marketplace of ideas or a court of law constitutes further victimization—all work against the so-called critical thinking that colleges such as Harvard pride themselves in fostering.
The Sullivan episode represents the toxic union of identity politics with the consumerist model of education, whereby the student is a customer and therefore is always right. Even if Mr. Sullivan ultimately keeps his job at Winthrop House—or at Harvard—Harvard’s graduates will carry with them into the world a profound ignorance of the principles that safeguard American liberties. As they assume positions of power and influence, that will put everyone’s freedom at risk.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.”
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2) Iran-Backed Militias Step Up the Battle in Iraq
A novelist’s assassination, the harassment of a U.S. Army patrol and other signs of a growing threat.
By Jonathan Spyer
Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq are growing more powerful and confident as they operate with increasing impunity.
Gunmen murdered Iraqi novelist Alaa Mashzoub, a chronicler of Iraq’s lost Jewish community, as he rode his bicycle through his hometown of Karbala Feb. 3. Mashzoub was a bold critic of Iran’s increasing power in Iraq. His relatives believe that was what led Shiite militiamen to target him.
A few days after the killing, Aws al-Khafaji, a powerful Shiite militia leader in his own right and Mashzoub’s kinsman, appeared on TV and denounced Iranian interference in Iraq. He was captured by the Shiite militias of the Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Units and has not been seen since.
The same week, in a less dramatic but equally ominous incident, Iraqi Shiite militiamen challenged a U.S. Army foot patrol near the al-Qathia base in eastern Mosul. Heavily armed men parked a vehicle in the way of the patrol and followed the U.S. troops, filming. The video clip released later triumphantly declared, against a background of tinny martial music, that the fighters of the Popular Mobilization Units’ Ninawah Command had successfully disrupted the American attempt to conduct a patrol in the city.
These events, among others, demonstrate that Iran’s Shiite militia allies are beginning to constitute a second power in Iraq, within and beside the official state. Confrontation with the 5,200 U.S. troops in the country is inevitable.
Iraqi security forces in the al-Doulab area of Anbar province found and defused three Grad missiles that had been set on a timer to be launched at the al-Asad base in the province on Feb. 2. U.S. troops are stationed at the base, which President Trump visited in December. According to Iraqi media reports, the missiles were defused 15 minutes before they were set to launch. This followed September strikes by Shiite militias on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the U.S. Consulate in Basra.
Two days later Ja’afar Husseini, spokesman of Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful of the Shiite militias, warned that clashes between the Iran-allied fighters and the U.S. “may start at any moment.” He added, “There is no stable Iraq with the presence of the Americans.” He echoed Qais al-Khazali, leader of the Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia, who made similar remarks Jan. 28.
The dislodging of ISIS has prompted this Shiite aggression and threats. The Popular Mobilization Units were assembled mainly out of existing Shiite militias in the summer of 2014, as the ISIS juggernaut rolled toward Baghdad. That threat necessitated a truce between the Shiite militias and U.S. forces. Yet even at the height of the war with ISIS, the Iran-backed militias did not forget their enmity for the U.S. I embedded with Kataib Hezbollah during the fighting in Ramadi province in the summer of 2015. Fighters would regale Western journalists with stories a secret pact between the Sunni jihadis and the U.S. against the Shiites and Iran.
The Iran-backed militias that now have U.S. soldiers in their sights are not merely military organizations. Their political wings compete in elections and are already making gains. The Fatah list of the Shiite militias, headed by Badr Organization commander Hadi al-Ameri, polled second in voting for Parliament last May. The rival Shiite list of Moqtada al-Sadr was the surprise winner. Iran’s Qods Force commander, Qassem Suleimani, said in a rare public speech last month said that “today the best and closest friends of Iran are the rulers of Iraq.”
Two days later Rear Adm. Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said “the Iraqi government, Parliament and nation strongly oppose the presence of U.S. forces in that country,” before predicting that “by the end of 2019, the United States will have to leave the rest of the region.” Senior Iranian officials increasingly speak of Iraq as crucial to their regional strategy.
It appears the militias and their Iranian patrons seek to turn the spotlight on the U.S. presence in Iraq as part of a larger strategy for building their own legitimacy. They will likely combine political and military action—deniable provocations on the ground to build an atmosphere of tension, along with a push for a parliamentary vote for the Iraqi government to request a U.S. departure. Killings of figures such as the novelist from Karbala will remind the population of who wields power on the streets.
Renewed, if sporadic, attacks by Sunni jihadists also further the Iranian narrative. On March 6, they attacked a Popular Mobilization Units convoy near Makhmur, killing five militiamen. Such incidents help the militias portray themselves as the shield protecting Iraq’s Shiite majority.
If the Iranian strategy succeeds, Iraq’s future might look like Lebanon, where the Shiite Hezbollah militia is an untouchable power inside the formal structures of the state and out.
A Badr Corps officer told me at the movement’s headquarters in Baghdad: “In Iran, you have the Artesh [army] and the IRGC”—the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a state-organized Islamist militia. “So it will be also in Iraq. There will be the army to defend the borders, and the Shia militias to defend the regime.” It would be a mistake to underestimate the militias. U.S. forces in Iraq should be ready for their next move.
Mr. Spyer is director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis and a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and at the Middle East Forum. He is author of “Days of the Fall: A Reporter’s Journey in the Syria and Iraq Wars.
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Ocasio-Cortez’s Popularity Plummets
Leftist Ocasio-Cortez is heralded as a hero from her revolutionary friends, but the American public at large and her constituents do not feel the same way. The Daily Wirereports:
“When ‘centrists’ care more about the GOP base than the Dem base, bigotry gets legitimized,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in response to a tweet on her ratings. “This is *the* playbook. GOP does it w/ virtually every Dem figure who isn’t a white male: otherize, demonize + splinter. It’s vital that we adapt & dismantle this approach, not cow to it.”Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) continued to be angered over her increasingly poor ratings on Monday, suggesting on Twitter that centrists who do not agree with her are legitimizing bigotry.A poll released by Gallup on Friday “found that the increase in Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘unfavorable’ rating in recent months has more than doubled her increase in ‘favorable ratings,'” The Daily Wire reported. “Gallup further noted that Ocasio-Cortez’s favorable rating was ‘underwater’ among the majority of groups and was only viewed as favorable among 56% of Democrats.”A seperate poll released this week found that only 12% of New Yorkers call Ocasio-Cortez a “hero” after she worked to sabotage the Amazon deal — which would have brought tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars worth of economic activity to New York — while “38 percent label her a villain.
The American center is recoiling from radical leftism, and this will only help the Republican party
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March 27, 7:30 p.m., Peterson Student Center, Great Hall
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