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I’ve been quipping for a while that it must be awfully depressing these days for the climate cultists heading out to block a road or yell at some politician, only to find the pro-Hamas anti-Semites got up earlier than they did and beat them to it. But some climatistas are not taking this lying down—that is until someone makes them lie down, as in this clip from Harvard:
BREAKING: we just called Joe Manchin a sick fuck. We humiliated him in front of a herd of Harvard elites. He squared up. We held firm. Barbaric murderer, hideous fiend, he torches humanity and laughs. pic.twitter.com/1ajrQsKnbJ
— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) March 1, 2024
The Harvard Crimson headline is heart-warming:
Climate Protester Thrown to the Ground After Interrupting Joe Manchin’s Harvard IOP Talk
An aide to U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) threw a climate action protester to the ground following a confrontation at a Harvard Institute of Politics event Friday morning.
The incident came just minutes after at least six protesters from Climate Defiance — a climate advocacy group — interrupted a talk Manchin was delivering at the Harvard Kennedy School. The protesters criticized Manchin’s support of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a controversial 300-mile natural gas pipeline in West Virginia that has been condemned by environmentalists.
“You sold our futures and got rich doing it, you sick fuck,” one person shouted, prompting Manchin to stand up from his chair to face the protester.
Meanwhile, across campus at Harvard Law School, this happened:
Skadden is one of the firms that signed a letter to Harvard last fall expressing concern about antisemitism on its campus.
When lawyers from the firm visited Harvard Law today, students accused them of supporting apartheid and being complicit in genocide. pic.twitter.com/4riq3gT9sY
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) March 1, 2024
Down at Penn, a similar story:
Pro-Palestinian protestors interrupt Jameson at Board of Trustees meeting, forcing adjournment
Interim President Larry Jameson’s first University Board of Trustees meeting as president adjourned within minutes on Friday after protestors disrupted the meeting.
The Board of Trustees meeting was scheduled to take place from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Inn at Penn. At 11:33 a.m., a group of 12 pro-Palestinian protestors affiliated with the Freedom School for Palestine started calling for “endowment transparency.” Their chants went on for four minutes, until the Board of Trustees meeting was adjourned at 11:37 a.m, having quickly passed its agenda items.
Meanwhile, down the road at Yale, a Communist group (seriously?) disrupted a lecture by historian Timothy Snyder, who is a left-leaning and rabid anti-Trumper, but apparently that’s not enough for self-styled Communists:
Timothy Snyder evacuated his “Hitler, Stalin, and Us” lecture on Thursday afternoon after a Communist activist group entered the classroom and would not leave.
Around 10 demonstrators affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist Party showed up at the classroom in William Harkness Hall five minutes after the start of class and began shouting at Snyder while holding up signs and recording students. . .
The demonstrators walked into the back of class and held up signs while Raymond Lotta, the group’s leader, declared, “No class as usual today!” Lotta called on Snyder to condemn the United States for its support of Israel’s military offensive against Hamas in Gaza and accused him of “brainwashing” students with “anti-communism.”
Chaser:
“To call DEI useless would be an understatement,” Kestenbaum said. pic.twitter.com/09oLSQx4Du
— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) March 3, 2024
Bryan Caplan, professor of economics in George Mason University’s excellent economics department, has a long article out today with the James Martin Center about the attempt to impose a mandatory “Just Societies” course for all students at George Mason starting next fall, and the course is a total ideological DEI wokefest. He also has a separate Substack article that goes into lengthy detail.
Partly because Caplan blew the whistle on this Orwellian outrage, the course requirement is on hold for the moment, pending “review” by the administration. And naturally the DEI campus Stasi is threatening to “review” Prof. Caplan for this offense.
One passage from his Martin Center article deserves special highlight:
This is quixotic, I know, but let me try to break through the woke academic echo chamber with some harsh truths. If you promote DEI for a living, the reality is that normal, apolitical people see you as a racist, sexist, censorious fanatic. They don’t say so publicly … because they are afraid of you. They don’t tell you privately … because they are afraid of you. But when they’re speaking to people they trust, they vehemently disagree with you—and yearn to see you all fired.
Well, it appears that the University of Florida has figured this out. Today the University (where Ben Sasse is now president) summarily closed down the entire DEI apparatus, and is summarily dismissing, rather than “reassigning” DEI staff to other offices. It has also canceled all outside contracts for DEI consultants. It will save $5 million right away, which Sasse says will be diverted to new faculty recruitment.
Here’s the note that went out:
More of this please. Burn them all down.
Related: Harvard announced today that it is appointing . . . a white male as interim provost. I didn’t think that was allowed any more at Harvard. But not just a white male, but a somewhat conservative white male—John Manning of Harvard Law School. Manning clerked for both Robert Bork on the DC Circuit and Nino Scalia at the Supreme Court. How he snuck onto Harvard Law’s faculty is something to ponder.
Harvard must really be badly rattled if it is willing to violate current progressive dogma and appoint a white male to such a senior position.
Liberals really are extremely fragile people. This helps explain why they need “safe spaces” with cuddly stuffed animals, grief counselors, and warning labels against “microaggressions.”
The latest evidence is a completely unironic and totally un-self-aware piece in the New York Times about the anguish of liberal law professors having to teach constitutional law at a time when the Supreme Court leans right. It’s so upsetting that some professors are moved to tears and can’t conceive of continuing. The New York Times thinks this is actually “a crisis.”
Seriously, you can’t make this up:
Rebecca Brown, at the University of Southern California, has been teaching constitutional law for 35 years. “While I was working on my syllabus for this course, I literally burst into tears,” she told me. “I couldn’t figure out how any of this makes sense. Why do we respect it? Why do we do any of it? I’m feeling very depleted by having to teach it.”
I’m skeptical that she “literally” burst into tears, though I expect she literally misused the word “literally” here. In any case, shouldn’t the phrase, “I couldn’t figure out how any of this makes sense?” have been applied to Wickard v. Filburn ever since it was put to paper in 1942? And yet somehow the few conservative law professors that existed behind enemy lines in law schools managed for 80 years now to explain Wickard (and dozens of other ridiculous liberal Court rulings) with a straight face and without bursting into tears, or having anxiety attacks.
The Times inadvertently gives away what’s really going on here (beyond general liberal fragility):
“The people who taught us were all Warren court people,” said Pam Karlan, a constitutional and voting-rights expert at Stanford law school, referring to Chief Justice Earl Warren, who through the 1950s and 1960s led a court of both Democratic and Republican appointees to expand civil rights, equalize political representation and liberalize the criminal justice system. “They’d clerked on that court. They valorized it. There was this notion that judges were these heroes who would save us all. Our students do not have that view.”
Ah yes, the glory days of the Warren Court, which invented new “rights” left and right (actually just “left”). There’s never been an era with more result-oriented jurisprudence that the Warren Court, but it delivered results liberals liked. But now that the Court is delivering rulings liberals don’t like, it’s the end of the world. Or at least their world.
It gets worse:
“We’re witnessing a transformation in the New Deal consensus,” said Mark Graber, a leading constitutional scholar and Regents professor at the University of Maryland.
Oh please, don’t get my hopes up like this!
There’s a serious irony here. Back in the late 1990s, after the Supreme Court had once again botched a significant case in Romer v. Evans, overruling a precedent on sodomy laws from just 1986, the conservative journal First Things published as symposium on “The End of Democracy” that called into question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in the wake of its serially bad decisions in Casey v. Planned Parenthood and Romer v. Evans, among others. It caused a huge ruckus on the right, and several leading conservatives attacked First Things and resigned from its editorial board, including Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, and Walter Berns. This “smash the Court” enthusiasm didn’t gain much acceptance, and quickly passed from the scene.
I see no such intramural argument on the left about the Supreme Court. Now it is the left that is bent on delegitimizing the Supreme Court. It is all toddler temper tantrums and hair-on-fire freakouts that some jurists, many with Ivy League law degrees, have a different opinion from theirs.
Prediction: I know that a lot of liberal law professors can’t stand it that Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and J.D. Vance all went to Harvard or Yale for law school. There is likely before long to be an effort to screen out conservative applicants to elite laws schools so that they don’t have an Ivy League credential.
This fall will mark the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the famous “free speech” movement at UC Berkeley. You can find my account of it, written in the aftermath of the Milo Yiannopoulos riot of February, 2017, which I was present for, at this link.
The Yiannopoulos riot was bad enough, but last night there was a sequel at Berkeley. As loyal readers may know, I am not around campus much this semester, as I’m temporarily filling in for a recently deceased professor at Pepperdine’s graduate school. So I missed a mob that prevented Ran Bar-Yoshafat, a reserve combat officer in the Israel Defense Forces who has been deployed in Gaza, from giving a presentation on campus at the invitation of several student groups.
The mob was not peacefully protesting. As has happened to Jewish students at many campuses, the mob was banging on doors and threatening violence. The Jewish News of Northern California offers an account—some excerpts:
Jewish students at UC Berkeley evacuated from a campus theater Monday night after a mass of protesters, chanting “Intifada! Intifada!” and other slogans, shattered a glass door at the venue and shut down a scheduled lecture by an Israeli attorney and IDF reservist.
Several students who were attending or working the event at Zellerbach Playhouse were injured, including two young women, one of whom sprained a thumb wrestling to keep a door shut as protesters tried to muscle it open. Another female student reportedly was handled around her neck, leaving marks. A third student was spit on, he told J.
The lecture was scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. Ran Bar-Yoshafat, who is a reserve combat officer in the Israel Defense Forces and was deployed in Gaza, planned to discuss international law as it pertains to Israel. “He’ll explore whether Israel violates international law, the rules of wartime conduct, and how the IDF can better protect civilians,” a social media post publicizing the event said.
The talk was conceived of as a small lecture in a classroom at Wheeler Hall, but organizers moved it at the direction of campus police for safety reasons after the anti-Zionist group Bears for Palestine, the Cal affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine, called for a protest to “shut it down,” according to Joseph Karlan, a student leader of campus pro-Israel group Tikvah and one of the event organizers.
There’s more at the link.
Separately in the Jewish News, Daniel Solomon, a graduate student acquaintance of mine who was present, reports:
The people who were forced to flee apparently forfeited their right to security after committing the unpardonable sin of coming to hear an Israeli speak on campus. The university, which has touted its commitment to free speech while actually condoning a climate of antisemitic intimidation, did little to protect the safety of the speaker and audience — and even less to protect their free speech rights.
Parading through the campus in a fashion worthy of the finest paramilitary, the pro-Palestinian rioters exulted in their victory.
This latest episode at UC Berkeley caps months of harassment — and on occasion, violent outbursts— from wannabe Hamasniks. On Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas pogrom, Bears for Palestine released a statement praising its “comrades in blood and arms” for their operations “in the so-called ‘Gaza envelope.’” The same organization then mounted demonstrations at which participants clamored to “globalize the intifada” and “free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
Again, more at the link above, and do read the whole thing if you have time.
If there are no consequences for this latest act, which is worse in many ways than the Yiannopoulos affair if you think about it for a few minutes, then it can truly be said that free speech is dead at UC Berkeley.
Here are some related videos and collateral material:
I didn’t know this but apparently students were spat on, called antisemitic insults, and even assaulted at last’s night event @UCBerkeley . Shame on this institution, which still has nothing to say.
https://t.co/AQO7Yu35yw— Daniel Solomon (@DanielJSolomon) February 27, 2024
Last night at @UCBerkeley, Jewish students were threatened, assaulted, and prevented from attending a speech by a Jewish speaker on campus. Campus police shut down this private event when it became clear that they could not protect the students. Multiple students reported being… pic.twitter.com/FKidts1FvZ
— JCRC Bay Area (@SFJCRC) February 27, 2024
I’ve reached the point where I hope a second Trump Administration will propose Nuremberg Trials for campus anti-Semites, on whom who foolish college administrations bestowed tenured faculty positions.
Vaunce News 