Uncategorized

At UNC, Anti-Semitism Is Too Close to Call

Featured image Last Friday, the University of North Carolina’s Faculty Council held its first meeting of 2024. The meeting’s agenda included a resolution condemning anti-Semitism on campus. The background of the resolution was an on-campus event in November at which a speaker said, without rebuttal from others present, that “October 7 was for many of us from the region a beautiful day.” This was the text of the resolution: We strongly condemn »

Barry and Biden Barely Cared About King

Featured image On January 15, 2016, when he proclaimed the national holiday for Martin Luther King, President Obama said: With profound faith in our Nation’s promise, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led a non-violent movement that urged our country’s leaders to expand the reach of freedom and provide equal opportunity for all. Together, with countless unsung heroes equally committed to the idea that America is a constant work in progress, »

Republicans Open Big Lead On Generic Ballot

Featured image Pollsters love to ask the generic ballot question: without naming names, “If the elections for Congress were held today, would you vote for the Democratic candidate or for the Republican candidate?” It is a basic measure of party strength as the next election approaches. The generic ballot question is also weirdly volatile. Preferences shift more often than one would expect. In any event, Rasmussen has good news for Republicans: Ten »

Gavin Escuela

Featured image California Gov. Gavin Newsom attended Santa Clara University on a “partial baseball scholarship,” and as he told Liz Mullen of Sports Business Journal in 2019, “the only reason I am governor of California, the only reason you are talking to me right now, is because of baseball.” That same year, veteran California commentator Dan Walters advanced other reasons Gavin Newsom might be governor of California: Newsom is succeeding someone who »

Breaking: Gone Gay

Featured image Well, 2024 seems to be off to a great start: Claudine Gay is resigning as president of Harvard. It had to kill the Harvard establishment to take this step, since they had framed the possibility as “giving in to the right.” Of course the problem is that Gay’s resignation will change little at Harvard, or any other elite university. It is a certainty that Harvard will find someone equally committed »

Happy Left Coast New Year

Featured image So people sensibly ask: how can you possibly stay in Krazifornia? Certainly we are governed by worse than the usual malevolent morons, but California’s natural assets allow for our moron overlords to exact a high cover charge to live here. As I often ask audiences, how many people would live in Arkansas if they had California’s level of taxation and regulation? Economists call California’s attractions “exploitable asymmetries,” though when I »

2023 Notes in Passing

Featured image Back on July 23, the Obamas’ personal chef Tafari Campbell “disappeared while paddleboarding in the waters of Edgartown Great Pond on Martha’s Vineyard.” The death of the 45-year-old was “ruled an accident,” but troubling questions failed to float away. Campbell had posted videos of himself swimming laps, so it was strange that an able swimmer perished in eight feet of water, in a pond for the most part half that »

Merry Christmas!

Featured image Merry Christmas to our Christian readers, and to all who are enjoying the holiday. I hope everyone’s holiday will be as blessed as ours. All six of our grandchildren will be with us today, and I need to sign off to start wrapping Christmas presents. Never let it be said that I leave anything to the last minute! »

The Presidents Walk It Back

Featured image Yesterday the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn provoked outrage when, in the course of testimony before a House committee, they wouldn’t say whether a call for genocide against Jews would violate their universities’ policies. The blowback from donors and alumni must have been nuclear, as today both President Claudine Gay of Harvard and President Liz Magill of Penn released statements recanting yesterday’s testimony: Actually it was Gay who “confused »

Live From Washington DC, John Yoo In-Depth!

Featured image Last year, as many readers will recall, I was fortunate to have the privilege of appearing on C-SPAN’s “In-Depth” series, a two hour program where the host takes you through your entire corpus of work. Well, our podcast partner, and my frequent classroom partner, John Yoo was jealous, and is appearing  tomorrow at noon eastern (9 am Pacific) on In-Depth. He encourages all Power Line readers to tune in, and »

When & How Did Universities Become So Crazy Left?

Featured image I was fortunate yesterday to take in part of a two-day conference at AEI in Washington DC in honor of Princeton’s Prof. Robert P. George (Robbie to his friends, but still “Professor George” to me and most other mortals), and in particular a retrospective of his early book published thirty years ago, before he had achieved tenure in Princeton’s political science department, entitled Making Men Moral. It set out a »

New Low in Liberal Ignorance

Featured image Behold our current secretary of education, who couldn’t get anything more backward if he took LSD and tried really hard: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona: "I think it was President Reagan who said, 'We're from the government. We're here to help!'" Here's the actual quote: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." pic.twitter.com/Hgxpt2Xdoh — Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 27, 2023 »

Thinking About Rome—The Rap Version

Featured image A couple months back we reported here about how the woke media was concerned to discover that lots of young males spend a lot of time and mental energy thinking about the Roman empire, and this is obviously a gateway to racism, sexism, homophobia, and every other deplorable trait of toxic masculinity. The Washington Post dredged up Lewis Webb, a Cambridge historian of ancient Rome, to provide the necessary coda: »

Happy Thanksgiving!

Featured image The Evangelical Lutheran Church In America, of which I was a member until recently, has become a left-wing political organization rather than a religious one. So what was the ELCA’s proclamation for Thanksgiving, a holiday that is intended to express gratitude to the Almighty? Yup, it’s a National Day of Mourning. No gratitude to God for bringing Europeans to begin new lives in the New World. On the contrary. (And, »

Totalitarian Tutorial

Featured image “Who you are and who you know yourself to be is valid. We want you to be your authentic self every day.” That was Andrea Palm, Deputy Secretary for Health and Human Services, in an official video announcing new HHS gender identity, non-discrimination and inclusion policy. Who is this Deputy Secretary, viewers have a right to wonder,  who is so wise in the ways of authenticity? According to her HHS »

Millennial Meltdown

Featured image When a bunch of bedraggled and unkempt hippie protestors in the 1960s paraded signs near Governor Reagan reading “Make love, not war,” Reagan responded with his usual biting wit: “Doesn’t look like they’re capable of either.” Behold the current equivalent of dissolute youth—you could hardly come up with a deliberate parody this good if you tried: The circle of life can be summed up like this: you’re born, you work, »

The Bel-Airabs Revisited

Featured image “Hymietown Revisited,” starring Eddie Murphy as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, recalled other sketches from a time when Saturday Night Live was fearless, funny and non-partisan. Favorites included, “White Like Me” and “Dukakis After Dark,” and another classic. “The Beverly Hillbillies,” with Buddy Ebsen, Max Baer Jr., Donna Douglas and Irene Ryan, ran from 1962 to 1971. The show was hard to satirize but on December 8, 1979, SNL answered the »