• Don’t look now, but many institutions are collapsing under the unsustainable weight of smug leftism. First item: late night television. Fifty million Americans tuned in to Johnny Carson’s last appearance on The Tonight Show. Today, his Tonight Show successor, along with the egregious Stephen Colbert on The Late Show on CBS, barely have 2 million viewers on a good night, and are now being beaten in the late night ratings by conservative Fox humorist Greg Gutfeld. I’ll bet Gutfeld’s staff is not even one-tenth as large as the production staffs of the late night network shows.
• Speaking of self-immolating liberal institutions, have you heard the news: Harvard University’s new chaplain is an atheist. I suppose the only question here is: what took them so long? I recall a story of a writer friend—someone whose name you’d recognize—who spent a year in a liberal seminary several decades ago now, and recounted how a faculty member said to him one day: “I think I know why you are so unhappy here. You actually believe in God.”
• Oh goody: North Korea has restarted its plutonium-producing nuclear reactor. As the Wall Street Journal reports: “Kim Jong Un’s regime is fully aware that activity at its nuclear sites is closely watched by satellite surveillance.” In other words, the Norks have taken the measure of Biden, and proceeded accordingly.
• This one hardly needs comment beyond pointing out that the tech world’s “artificial intelligence” appears even more stupid than the human intelligence it is meant to replace:
Facebook apologizes after labeling part of Declaration of Independence ‘hate speech’
Facebook’s policies for censoring hate speech have again come under fire after the social media giant labeled a passage from the Declaration of Independence as hate speech.
Facebook apologized to a Texas newspaper on Tuesday for deleting its post that included the passage. The Liberty County Vindicator had been posting excerpts of the Declaration of Independence daily leading up to July 4th. The first nine posts were published without a problem. The 10th post, which included paragraphs 27 through 31 of the Declaration of Independence, was deleted by Facebook.
• Another college fraud exposed, only this time it is a college president:
The president of Lyon College in Batesville, Ark., resigned last week following outrage over an interview he gave to The Chronicle of Higher Education in which he discussed white supremacist activity in the area surrounding the college town.
W. Joseph King characterized Lyon, a private liberal arts institution, and another college in Virginia where he formerly worked as “bubbles of inclusion and of diversity surrounded by a sea of angry, disenfranchised populations and a large white-supremacist population,” according to the July 26 Chronicle article. “Both colleges have had to deal with active Klan chapters in the area.”
King is also is quoted saying that his home was vandalized with a spray-painted expletive following a meeting with students in which he told them to expect to find their political beliefs challenged. He also said that the Lyon campus had to go into effective lockdown after pro-Trump rallies in Arkansas during the fall of 2020 brought crowds bearing Confederate flags and neo-Nazi symbols. . .
Turns out former president King isn’t just a liberal bigot, but a fabricator as well “the “Lyon King”?):
The article originally said King suggested that the Trump rally happened in Batesville, a fact disputed by the Batesville police chief, who told a local broadcaster the rally and the alleged vandalism at King’s house never happened.
King said in an Aug. 21 statement that the Chronicle article, which had been published nearly a month earlier, had misquoted him as saying the rally was in Batesville, and that he was working with the article’s author on a correction. The Chronicle issued a correction Aug. 24 updating the record but denying any misquote: “A description by Lyon College’s President Joey King of fall-2020 campaign gatherings in support of Donald Trump refers to events elsewhere in Arkansas, not in Batesville, as King erroneously said earlier,” the correction reads.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.