• It’s not every day you get to bring complete joy into someone’s life:
• But here are some people I won’t be following on Academia.edu—the hits just keep coming:
Provosts—ostensibly the quality control executives in higher education—at universities have the power to stop this nonsense. But they never do.
• The Wall Street Journal has one of the best Letters to the Editor sections of any American newspaper, and the Journal devotes so much space that could otherwise be filled with another column because, I am reliably informed, the letters draw a larger readership than columns sometimes. Anyway, today the Journal ran a letter that ranks as one of my top ten favorites ever. Here it is:
Why I Sat Out the 2012 Election
Regarding Matthew Continetti’s fine review of “The Unhappy Statesman” by McKay Coppins (Bookshelf, Oct. 24): Much to the chagrin of my Republican friends, I sat out the election of 2012. My reasoning was as follows: Option No. 1 was a man elected to executive office by the most liberal people in this country, who had a socialized-medicine program whimsically named for him, who was on the record in favor of abortion on demand, gun control and taxing the citizenry to fight climate change. Option No. 2 was President Obama.
Chris Sobolewski, Collegeville, PA
• Anyone else notice the asymmetry between the reaction to the comparatively small and wholly pathetic group of tiki-torch bearing losers in Charlottesville in 2017 who chanted “Jews will not replace us” and the reaction to thousands of college students and protestors chanting for a second Holocaust with that chant “from the river to the sea”? The Charlottesville protest in 2017, which supposedly prompted Joe Biden to run for president because of the lies told about Trump’s comments about the clashing protestors the following day, was triggered by the controversy about whether to take down statues of Robert E. Lee.
The other shoe has dropped: the Lee statue that was taken down in Charlottesville in 2017 has now been melted down, rather than placed in a museum somewhere as was originally contemplated:
Charlottesville’s Lee statue meets its end, in a 2,250-degree furnace
SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S. SOUTH — It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too.
So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly Unite the Right rallyin 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze. . .
The statue’s defenders more recently sought to block the city from handing Lee over to Charlottesville’s Black history museum, which proposed a plan to repurpose the metal. In a lawsuit, those plaintiffs suggested the century-old monument should remain intact or be turned into Civil War-style cannons.
But on Saturday the museum went ahead with its plan in secret at this small Southern foundry outside Virginia, in a town and state The Washington Post agreed not to name because of participants’ fears of violence.
Just consider it practice for the left to revive ovens for some other group.
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