April 27, 2024

IT’S A MESS ALL OVER THE WEST:  Why is Education Such a Mess?

And probably at the back of the profound decay in our “ruling class.”

Posted at 1:02 am by Sarah Hoyt

April 26, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Make it special.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OH, THAT LIBERAL FASCISM: Meet the new Left, who think Hamas are good and that Swastikas are woke.

It’s narcissistic identity politics on steroids, one where specific conditions and geography melt away completely. It’s no longer enough to have solidarity with the people of Palestinians in their time of plight; you must be them. Are you fat, trans, and live in, say, Evanston, Illinois? You are somehow in a shared position with starved and bombed-out citizens of Gaza. “Palestine is a flat circle,” you can almost hear True Detective’s Rust Cohle murmur if he were a contemporary campus radical.

I witnessed All One Thingism in the flesh in Atlanta while reporting on the “Stop Cop City” saga. What began as a very specific protest against the construction of an expensive new public safety facility in a Georgia forest by environmentalists, police, and prison abolitionists got subsumed into “Free Palestine.” After October 7, anarchists marching in the streets of Atlanta increasingly donned keffiyehs, waved Palestinian flags, and held signs that said: “From Atlanta to Palestine” (which I believe is a fairly big 6,400-mile line).

There’s no better embodiment of this trend than James “Fergie” Chambers, the wealthy tattooed Left-wing heir in Atlanta. Last summer, Chambers helped bankroll the Stop Cop City movement with millions from his Cox family fortune and attended protests in person. Then, in December, he announced he was converting to Islam. He’s currently living in Tunisia and directing his big bucks into anti-Zionism causes.

And lest you think it’s just blue-haired college baristas with these views, consider the author with the worst book title of all time who recently posted among the most despicable Tweets of all time. That would be courtesy of Malcolm Harris, the author of S— Is F—ed Up and Bulls— and veritable Napoleon Dynamite of communist writers.

Earlier this month on X, Harris responded to CNN’s Jake Tapper’s report that the Pennsylvania synagogue he had bar mitzphaed at had been vandalised with a swastika. Harris didn’t condemn the anti-Semitic graffiti but indirectly praised it. The meaning of the Nazi symbol had been reversed from bad to good, Harris said, “from a Nazi threat to a condemnation of genocide.”

America is evil, Hamas is good, and swastikas are now woke. This is your brain on All One Thingism.

Woody Allen tried to warn us in Sleeper that swastikas were the Radical Chic symbol of the future:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Take Columbia’s Khymani James — please.

Well, they may be ignorant or stupid, they may be evil, but they may also need help. Take, for example, Columbia undergrad Khymani James — please. James may be in need of help, but he appears to be busy negotiating with the authorities at Columbia to stand down.

* * * * * * * *

“Unexpectedly,” CNN broke out the airbrushes to protect James:

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and a Jeremy Corbyn-esque worldview, and it all makes sense.

Evergreen:

UPDATE: Report: Anti-Israel Protester Thrown Out of Columbia After White House Condemned ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve to Live’ Statement.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE STIG CRASHES AN EXPENSIVE LEMON: Most Dishonest Reporter in America Buys The Onion.

I used to love The Onion, but as with so many things that lean Left, it lost its sense of humor and basic connection to reality in the past decade or so. It used to poke fun at both the Left and the Right, and it could make you guffaw about politics and the absurdities of the world.

In the old days it published some real zingers, poking fun at everybody.

Alas, those days are long gone, and the Ben Collins era promises to drive a stake through the heart of The Onion.

One great irony is that Collins is one of the big promoters of the “disinformation” narrative. He never saw a story that the Left found inconvenient that he didn’t want to pretend to “debunk,” censor, or slander. He called his beat at NBC “News” the “Dystopia Beat,” implying that living in a world with Orange Man and his supporters was a living hell.

He certainly worked hard to slander us.

Collins was, of course, one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation on planet Earth, lying about everything. He did revel in being a punching bag for the right, largely because he could slander us with impunity from his well-paid perch at NBC.

Think of him as a better-looking but less charming Joe Scarborough. He has Karine Jean-Pierre’s wit, Nina Jankowicz’s temperament, and Sam Bankman-Fried’s integrity and ethics.

Expect The Onion to become even less funny and even more biased. I don’t mind bias in my humor as long as it is, well, funny. Everybody needs to have his ego prodded, and by God the Right deserves as much ridicule as the Left. If you can’t laugh at Donald Trump selling Bibles in the same way he sold only OK steaks and crappy wine, then you need to get out more.

But The Onion is now focused on calling Republicans Nazis and similar names, and that isn’t funny. It’s stupid. You can make fun of people for being stupid, but being stupid is not funny. It is sad.

The Onion’s humor is closer to a Robert DeNiro rant about Trump than a Babylon Bee headline. It has gotten so unfunny that Elon Musk probably would not have noticed if Twitter had deplatformed them. He famously bought the platform in order to return The Babylon Bee to it.

It’s a calm, genteel 2024 — if only the Onion had more material to satirize these days:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOU WOULD NEED A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH: University of Washington anti-Israel encampment postponed over lack of diversity. “A planned anti-Israel encampment at the University of Washington was scrapped at the last minute because of a lack of diversity — following fierce backlash for not involving any Muslim, Palestinian or Arab students.”

It’s clown shows all the way down.

Posted at 6:13 pm by Glenn Reynolds