Free Republic

Just as 9/11 and the space shuttle disasters showed failures at the relevant agencies, the 10/7 pogrom has exposed a failure of leadership at all levels of government and society.Derek Hunter often writes to the effect that when one thinks that Democrats could not go any lower, they whip out their shovels and keep digging deeper and deeper. I was reminded of his insight when I saw a headline this morning. It’s not enough that the US chose not to send ammunition to Israel during a hot war. It was still not enough to threaten not to send certain critical...

These infantile campuses have a rendezvous with adult accountability, both public and governmental. And they won’t like what is coming. Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations. Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality. The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide...

In a Wednesday statement, California State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia wrote: “On Tuesday evening, Sonoma State University President Mike Lee sent a campuswide message concerning an agreement with campus protesters. That message was sent without the appropriate approvals ... because of this insubordination and consequences it has brought upon the system, President Lee has been placed on administrative leave.” ... Among the four “points of agreement” he described was for the school to disclose university vendor contracts and seek “divestment strategies.” In another section, under the heading “Academic Boycott,” Lee detailed how the school will not pursue formal collaborations that...

Contrary to popular conservative opinion, I don’t want this college chaos to end anytime soon. I want it to increase and metastasize and continue right up until these entitled, ugly, mutated communist jerks totally alienate every normal American. It’s already happening. The frat boys have turned. The normals are turning. At one of these colleges, you had the theater major graduation ceremony invaded by Palesimpians and the parents began chanting, “USA! USA!” Will this and the administrations’ feeble response help flush these institutions’ bloated reputations down the crapper? Yes, please! So, keep it up, communist dipwads. I’m loving this. This...

Prof. Shai Davidai, a lecturer at Columbia University, which recently suffered from violent anti-Israel protests, published an open letter to Israeli academics expressing his concern for their imminent harm. "To all my friends who research and lecture in Israel, it's hard for me to say this, but it's important that you know. You will be the first to be harmed," Davidai He mentioned that "The processes are already in motion and although you don't feel it yet, it's coming. And when it arrives, it will be too late to act". "It will start almost without you noticing. Articles that won't...

The one-eyed Jack American Left has been flipped over, and what turned up proved frightening. The current radical and often violent protests on mostly blue-state, supposedly elite campuses have exposed in toxic fashion what the left has become. And yet, in a paradoxical fashion, the campus insanity has offered the nation some moral clarity. What’s surprising is not that the demonstrators are violent and nihilist, but that they are, on the one hand, so openly and crudely anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-American, and yet on the other hand, so passive-aggressive, narcissistic, and weepy. Nevertheless, the antics of the campus cry-bullies have...

In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer HAL 9000 jumped the boundaries its creators set and took control of the vessel, killing most of the crew. Are we seeing a similar situation as the little campus Marxists, the ones whom the Democrats’ elites and intelligentsia created, burst out of their academic confines? Have their little minions escaped the lab, much as COVID-19 escaped Wuhan? As it turns out, the revolutionaries have broken free, but it turns out that they and their creators are as one.Or is it a smokescreen to mislead the public and to stall for time?...

Mohamed Abdou is a pro-Hamas “anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization” at Columbia University. Now, I don’t mean to pick on Abdou; it’s just that he happens to teach virtually every trendy pseudo-intellectual identitarian twaddle concocted by modern man. Ultimately, we make Abdou’s job possible. Nearly every student loan taken in the United States is either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers. This sounds wonderful in the abstract, since it allows every student a chance at higher education. The reality, however, is that we...

More university professors are joining the demonstrations roiling college campuses, both to voice support for Gazans and to defend their students’ right to protest. Faculty, many of whom are in their 60s and 70s and came of age during the era of Vietnam War protests, are pushing back against university presidents, accusing the leaders of heavy-handed and inconsistent crackdowns on free speech, and warning against a wave of authoritarianism some say has been creeping onto campuses for years. Professors in leadership positions are guiding calls for votes of no-confidence, spearheading classroom walkouts and visiting encampments alongside students. Many are facing...

On Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Harvard Professor and President Emeritus and former Harvard President Larry Summers said that America’s enemies must “be taking great encouragement from the spectacle that is being made by our young future elites on so many of our leading college campuses, and even more by the craven responses that are typifying university leaderships.” Summers stated, “This is very depressing and worrisome to me. As I’ve said on your show before, David, I think the United States is in the most dangerous geopolitical moment we’ve been in probably two generations, given what’s happening in...

When even far-left MSNBC is willing to call out the campus insanity spreading like a plague across the land, we may have reached a point of no return in the leftists’ depraved obsession with one of the most barbarous movements of modern times. These radicals are becoming ever more violent in defending and uplifting a proudly terrorist organization, Hamas, and its stated goal of wiping Jews off the face of the earth. Indeed, when students (and likely a host of masked outside provocateurs) stormed and took over Columbia University’s administration building on April 30, Mika Brzezinski, co-host of an MSNBC...

Back on April 15, I received an extremely courteous message from Matthew Weinberg, the chairman of the UCLA chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), inviting me to speak on campus in mid-May. While I was grateful for the invitation and immediately accepted, being invited to UCLA was the equivalent of getting a message from the dentist saying it’s time for a root canal: it’s painful and unpleasant, but necessary. The pro-Hamas mob in the campus encampment, however, might not allow someone as dangerous as me to speak there. Yes, they’re the ones in charge. YAF explained what is happening...

You’ve had this coming for a loooooong timeOne of my favorite all-time films is 1982’s “The Verdict” starring Paul Newman as down-and-out attorney Frank Galvin who takes on a case against the Archdiocese of Boston.After astonishingly turning down a settlement offer from the defendant and opting to go to trial, Galvin soon loses his star witness.Desperate and not knowing what to do, Galvin goes to the home of the trial judge late at night to beg for a continuance.The judge slowly closes the door in his face and says “I have no sympathy for you.” Consider me the judge these...

America’s academic leaders seem powerless only because they’ve spent decades promoting the ideologies now on such brutal and ugly display.The scenes unfolding at America’s most prestigious colleges are horrific. Antisemitic mobs preaching genocide — at times crossing the line into actual violence — have rendered campuses unsafe for Jews. Faculty members cheer them on, advocating for full-on pogroms.Top administrators flounder. Columbia had protesters arrested and suspended, then stood dumbfounded as a larger, more belligerent wave took their place. Unable to guarantee the physical safety of its students, the school moved all classes online. Copycat mobs on campuses across America formed...

When Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky set up Retraction Watch in 2010, the idea of highlighting academic malfeasance was seen as unusual. Researchers didn’t peddle disinformation; they were the arbiters of truth and the custodians of society’s collective knowledge. In the fourteen years since, the scales have fallen from our eyes as the breadth of academic falsity has been uncovered – through the work of Marcus, Oransky, and a host of others. When they set up Retraction Watch, they believed there were around three retractions published by journals a month. It was actually 45. Now it’s closer to 300. The...

The pro-Hamas demonstrations that have become the latest social contagion to afflict the nation, with “encampments” springing up on college campuses across the country to demand “freedom” for “Palestine,” show clear signs of being orchestrated. One telling indication of this is that a massive number of these allegedly grass-roots protesters have identical tents, as if some well-heeled leftist bought them in bulk with the intention of helping this allegedly spontaneous movement get going. The groundwork for what is happening these days, however, has been laid for years. These demonstrations are in large part the handiwork of the Middle East Studies...

The Left’s winter of discontent appears to be transitioning into a summer of rage as college campus unrest heats up with the warmer weather. Well-funded and well-organized anti-Israel protests are spreading from one college campus to another. And they are becoming a feature in America’s Democrat-run cities as mobs of radicals have been able to shut down roads, bridges, busy intersections, and businesses with impunity. Unlike in 1968 when similar student unrest was eventually met with force when protests got out of line, most of America’s institutions have become willingly or unwillingly helpless in the face of this chaos. There...

The University of Saint Katherine, a small nonprofit in North San Diego County, recently announced it will close May 18, citing “financial pressure due to unprecedented inflation and rising state-mandated labor costs.” It’s not alone. Nationwide, universities face financial hardships that appear to be getting worse. More than 100 colleges and universities have closed or merged, or announced plans to, over the last eight years, according to a tracker updated this month by Higher Ed Dive. The list, which does not include for-profit colleges and also omits mergers among public institutions, totals 108 since 2016. The closures span the spectrum...

Maryam Alwan figured the worst was over after New York City police in riot gear arrested her and other protesters on the Columbia University campus, loaded them onto buses and held them in custody for hours. But the next evening, the college junior received an email from the university. Alwan and other students were being suspended after their arrests at the “ Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” a tactic colleges across the country have deployed to calm growing campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war. The students’ plight has become a central part of protests, with students and a growing number of faculty...

Here’s that Professor of Economics who was arrested at Emory university and everyone seems to think is some poor victim of police repression. Caroline Fohlin ADMITS she hit a police officer on the head. Even professors are not allowed to assault cops. Yes, even professors.