TAKE 2: A couple of key paragraphs disappeared from this one on Friday, the first time I tried it…
SCENE: A press conference at the Minnesota State University system. Spokesperson Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK stands nervously in front of a podium, facing a gaggle of barely-engaged press, and Mitch BERG of Shot in the Dark/AM1280/HotAir.
BIRKENSTOCK: So, with the changes in federal funding, it appears the Minnesota State University system is going to have to make unprecedented hikes to tuition:
Minnesota State school officials mull what could be the largest tuition hike in more than a decade https://t.co/Rx4ci1jeUB
Joe Doakes, looking at Como Park through his rear-view mirror, emails:
Harvard is pushing back against President Trump’s demands for reform. President Obama praised them for resisting. He is joined by several Thoughtful Republicans Of Moderate Bona fides On Neither Extreme Side (TROMBONES, the new and more acceptable word for people formerly known as RINOs) who agree that yes, racial discrimination is bad, and viewpoint discrimination is bad, and antisemitism is bad, but is that any of the federal government’s business, particularly at their elite private Ivy League alma mater?
Harvard’s defenders have a point. But so does Trump.
The purpose of federal student loans is to help poor kids go to college. The purpose of federal research grants is to subsidize schools who can’t afford to hire good people. Why should grandma pay income tax on her Social Security to subsidize leftist hatred at a billion dollar private school?
Trump should announce that henceforth, student loans and research grants will be based on need – individual and institutional. Harvard can subsidize its own students and researchers to hate whomever they like on their own nickel.
Joe Doakes
I’d love to see schools fill out a FAFSA form and spend a few weeks waiting to see if they get qualified.
Entire Twin Cities media and left (ptr) last week: “A graduate student, one of America’s best and brightest, was snatched away in the middle of the night by ICE for exercising free speech! They could come come for any of us, citizen or not!”
Officials say a University of Minnesota graduate student detained by ICE was not arrested due to student protests but because their visa had been revoked for a previous DUI offense. https://t.co/b12cwAnMv1
I’ll admit it – two months of DOGE has made me a little inured to stories about outlandish things that the Federal Government spends our money on.
Promoting DEI in Serbia? Transgender comic books in Peru? Yaaawn. Get back to me when you’ve got something interesting.
So when I heard that there was a fracas about funding universities in Australia, a part of me thought of course there is. Why would we not be funding universities in Oz?”
What I didn’t figure on was that there would be so much of it the risk of losing it would cause a national emergency down under. The Trump administration is asking seven Australian universities, not to do without all that American aid money, but to justify the aid money they are getting, in terms of American nationional interest. According to the Guardian:
The Trump administration told Australian university researchers a push to promote administration priorities and avoid “DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal” was behind a “temporary pause” of funding, according to a memo seen by Guardian Australia.
University sector sources say the US has severed research funding at six universities – Monash University, Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and University of Western Australia – since Donald Trump came to power, including some as early as January. ANU is the first university to publicly acknowledged it.
Which is, according to Sky News, an urgent enough matter that Australian PM Tony Albanese is being urged to drop everything and get on the case:
A memo sent by the US office of managament and budget to an Australian university project on January 27 and retrieved by The Guardian, declared financial assistance for the researchers was a waste of taxpayer money and explained federal spending priority would go towards “the will of the American people”.
“Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again,” the memo said.
“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”
The cuts would leave a $600M hole in Australian research budgets.
And if you guessed some Ozzie academics would refer to Americans wantintg American money to serve American interests as “foreign interference” – well, you’ve been paying attention this past four years (and you know that public unions are pretty much the same around the world):
“The Federal Government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms.” – Alison Barnes, NTEU National President
The National Tertiary Education Union’s (NTEU) national president Alison Barnes slammed the missive, and said the Albanese government had to “guarantee Australian researchers would be protected.” “The federal government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms,” she said.
Not to mix my metaphors, but “the first three weeks of a new diet are the. hard part” seems appropriate under the circumstances.
VanDassor, a Highland Park Middle School teacher, was first elected president of SPFE in 2021. Her union is a champion of left-wing causes, including “restorative practices,” which are a “model for a healthy, racially equitable school culture.”
In her statement, she said that SPFE members “will continue to do what we have always done: care for and educate ALL of our students. Feed them. Keep OUR schools safe for them. Teach them the full history of our country.”
VanDassor asserted that “fascist regimes” always begin by “targeting the most vulnerable populations and by making it a crime to tell the truth.”
I first codified Berg’s Seventh Law – progressives are always projecting their motives and actions onto conservatives – nearly twenty years ago. It may be the thing for which I and this blog are best known outside Minnesota.
And there’s a reason for that. It’s universal.
We’ve seen it in different ways in different eras in the evolution of Big Left. But the most grating started sixteen years ago, when the Obama administration could be said to have started on its path of racial division and plate throwing by starting the claim that our society was awaiting a wave of right wing/”white supremacist” terror that “would dwarf 9/11”.
Why are liberals so violent? People just want a safe clean car. Leave them alone. @CoffeyTimeNews should be watched closely by the police pic.twitter.com/CEu62peiOB
Button it up with “You really don’t hate them enough”.
It’s a progression with no end; every day brings new loathsomeness. It’s entirely possible it’s a barrel with no bottom to scrape.
But Nicole Wallace has to be getting close to that metaphorical nadir:
JUST IN: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace politicizes young DJ’s moment at Trump’s speech, says she hopes he doesn’t k*ll himself because of something like Jan 6.
Holy sh*t
“I hope he has a long life as a law enforcement officer, but I hope he never has to defend the United States… pic.twitter.com/2wHSzECggL
Condescendingly snarks about a kid with brain cancer, in order to
spread the fiction that “right wing terror is the real danger facing the US”- a horse they’ve been trying to flog into a slow trot for sixteen years, now.
So maybe you can hate Big Leftymedia more than you do. But beyond this, doesn’t it all kind of blur together?
I am intermittently concerned that Big Left might eventually learn the lessons of this past election.
And then I see things like this:
NEW – Lego can be "anti-LGBT" because the bricks have "male or female parts" that are made to "mate" with each other, says Science Museum in London — Telegraph pic.twitter.com/IDGOePyZrR
I can’t speak for Krugman’s career as an economist – I wish King Banaian was still blogging, and hopefully he’ll talk about this in his show one of these days.
So while his retirement leaves me with one less source of material, [1], it is enough for today to rejoice in the fact that for a moment, America will be incrementally less dumb by omission.
[1] Although the Cano Corollary to Berg’s 21st Law warns us to not celebrate too hard: ” “blue” never gets “lighter” or less “progressive”. There is only one electoral direction – more “progressive”. While written about elections, the New York Times would seem to be germane.
The University issued one of those “Oaaaaakaaaay, we’ll look into it, because hypothetically that’s not the kind of thing we approve of here, if it happened…” statements that says between the lines “our PR department is working overtime on this one…”
In a very significant development — I am almost prepared to say the most significant development in the current presidential contest — it has recently been revealed that Brian D. Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College and a leader in the development of Minnesota’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum, explicitly called for the “overthrow of the United States.” This goal has demonstrably shaped Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards, according to which students are taught as early as kindergarten that America is evil. The video recording of Lozenski was made two years ago but was taken down the day after it was spotted by Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center…
And for someone who’s made a bit of an art form out of concealing his radical nature under a couple of layers of Elmer Fudd-wear, it’s actually been kind of brazen of Walz.
But there’s not much point in trying to make Lozenski look like anything but a CRT Kommissar:
To make as explicit an assertion as did Lozenski is extremely rare; indeed, I have never seen or heard such an admission. The destructive intent of ethnic studies or CRT has been very apparent and much commented upon for many years by the conservative commentariat. But Lozenski’s open, cavalier articulation makes the destructive nature of ethnic studies virtually impossible to deny.
So the debate should be interesting, for a change.
Look – it’s not like there’s any reason at all, ever, that I’d vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I am not better off than I was four years ago, and likely either are you.
But in addition to the whole “communist” thing, she appears to have been exactly the kind of soulless bureacratic bean-counter and image-polisher that I excoriated here.
This is true, I have posted about it many times. Not sure why no one cares.
For me personally, it indicates that she is power-hungry and doesn’t actually care about the outcomes of her policies just their intentions and policies are determined by outcomes, not intentions. pic.twitter.com/t5fsdkpPkW
A PBS senior corresponent apologized Wednesday after falsely telling her audience thart former President Donald Trump tried to talk Israel out of a cease-fire amid its ongoing war in Gaza.
Judy Woodruff passed off blame for the blunder by “clarifying” that she based the flimsy scoop on outside reporting that she had read byefroe broadcasting from the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago.
“The reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the prime minister of Israel, urging him not to cut a deal right now, because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign”, Woodruff told a PBS roundtable”.
Woodruff posted a tweet “Clarifying” her regret that she’d been caught:
I want to clarify my remarks on the PBS News special on Monday night about the ongoing cease fire talks in the Middle East. As I said, this was not based on my original reporting; I was referring to reports I had read, in Axios and Reuters, about former President Trump having…
But it’s out there. Democrat tweeps are chanting it like it’s fact. The intellectual gerbils that make up the Democrat base are parroting merrily away.
Because, well perception is reality. And who controls what people perceive, anyway?
Could happen to anyone.
Hey – wasn’t “misinformation” public enemy number one?
Saturday’s murder of a Trump supporter and father of several, the serious wounding of at least two more, and the miraculously slight injury to candidate Trump, was shocking.
But it was far from unexpected.
First things first: Thomas Crooks was the one who pulled the trigger, killed Corey Comperatore, and tried his damnedest to kill former President Trump. On him alone lies the immediate responsibility.
But creating the atmosphere in which a 20 year old would consider blazing away at a crowd that included a Presidential candidate?
That’s been a team effort.
The left has spent 8 years telling the entire world this man is Orange Hitler, merely because they want government power. What's surprising is that this hasn't happened sooner. pic.twitter.com/EUHRpkf4cb
Of DNA And Psychiatry: This is what America does to dictators.
This is what we did to Nazis.
We’ve brought a lot of them down in our time:
Our cultural memory involves a lot of fighting against actual tyranny – indeed, it’s an inextricable part of our country’s DNA:
And so last Monday, a week ago, whenthe once-presigious New Republic ran this as their cover…:
…and supported it with this…:
We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.” We unreservedly choose the latter course.
I’m not saying the New Republic intended to inflame some nutbar to take a literal shot a Trump (and, let’s not forget, a crowd of his supporters, murdering one and leaving two more in the hospital). But if they were, it’d be hard to know what they’d do differently.
It’s nothing new:
Untermensch: Of course, it’s not just Trump – although he’s been the focus of most of Big Left’s efforts over the past 8-9 years.
The left’s noise machine has moved someone to put literal crosshairs on Republicans – but the rhetorical iron sights were in play long ago.
POTATUS? As recently as the day before the assassination attempt, this was the President (or at least his loathsome social media tweep):
It’s been a running theme of his entire presidency; here’s his entire “Independence Hall” speech in which, surrounded by fascist re-framings of totems of American democracy, he said that half the population – “MAGA Republicans” – wanted to “end democracy”.
I’m loathe to use phrases like “declaration of (fill in adjective) war” lightly. But it’s too corrosive a narrative to just call “collctive slander”. The President actively tried to stoke irrational fear in half ot the population, of the other half of the population, for purposes of inflaming passions to turn people out for a mid-term election the Democrats expected to lose.
But it’s about way, way more than just elections.
Bad History: Big Left – the collective institutions that support the larger leftist drive for power, the media, academia, big leftybusiness, the non-profit/industrial complex, the public employee unions – have been actively working to demonize, marginalize and dehumanize their opposition as a matter of “etermal campaign” policy for a solid decade and a half.
Locally? Let’s not forget the fact that Major Jacob “Humiliiating Mompants” Frey told the Minneapolis Police not to worry to hard about protecting people coming to see Donald Trump at Target Center in 2016 – and didn’t bother intervening in a wave of assaults on the street.
Also, the March 4 2017 attack by “Anti”-Fa on a group of Republicans in the rotunda the the State Capitol, injuring several in the immediate aftermath of the Trump inauguration.
In the latter two episodes, official actions can be seen as positive incentives to commit violence against Trump, his supporters and conservative dissenter is general.
The surprise is that it took this long to bubble up to Trump.
The counter-gaslighting has already begun:
“It was fake! They sounded like blanks!” (Tell it to the dead man)
“It was just a piece of glass from the teleprompter!” (That’s very unconfirmed – and irrelevant, since any “piece of glass” would have been propelled by f*cking bullet aimed at Trump’s head)
“The shooter was a registered Republican! (in an open primary state, who also donated to ActBlue. This one is in the process of falling apart).
But to me, for purposes of this piece, the worst is this:
Biden has never incited violence against Mr. Trump or any political opponent. Please stop with these unfounded accusations which have the potential to inflame more violence. That’s the last thing our country needs right now.
This is the culmination (so far) of a fifteen year long arc of stoking hatred for political gain. Caling it otherwise is delusion at best, evil at worst.
For Want Of An Inch: But Trump survived.
And the imaging is much more redolent of Churchill…
…whom, let’s be honest, Big Left hates just as badly.
Perhaps you heard – conservatives won big in EU elections last weekend.
You might have missed it, because the news only referred to “the far right” – as if Francisco Franco were back from the dead.
Indeed, it’s yet another term that today’s left have rendered meaningless:
The term “far right” has become so loosely applied that it’s effectively useless in sniffing out genuine cases of extremism and more often used to slander reasonable people. pic.twitter.com/sfcIkp2Zdr
Let not pretend this is accidental. Big Left has been working for decades to gain control of the language and its perception. The systematic turning of all “right wing’ thought into some neo-fascist aberration shifted into high gear in 2009, when Obama’s Homeland Security czaritsa Janet Napolitano told the nation’s law enforcement “don’t mind all those leftist terrorists, watch out for all that right wing terror which is going to come out of nowhere someday, pinky swear!”.
Just watch – in a month, NPR and the NYTimes will furrow their brows and wonder why society has had a “Big Sort”…
The good news: these sorts of results usually bode well for elections in America, at least for the upcoming cycle.
[1] In the “fascist dictatorship founded on racial obsession, focused on murdering Jews” sense of the term, rather than the “I’m a leftist and I don’t whatever it is” sense.
Hamline University in Saint Paul is an exquisitely expensive instution that seems to be not quite as prestigious as Saint Thomas, and always a couple of degrees behind Macalester in terms of the impeccability of their leftist orientation.
But they aren’t to be left behind.
Here’s their “pro-Palestine” neo-Brownshirt “encampment”, as a rainy night ended this morning.
So maybe we’ll have Hamline kids puking on their own lawns for a change this weekend.
Everything that needs to be said about you – those who deny the use of the institution for which the majority of the students, and the taxpayers, pay (and pay, and pay and pay and pay) was said almost six decades ago…
“All of it began the first time some of you—who know better, and are old enough to know better; let young people think that they have the right to choose the laws that they would obey…as long as they were doing it in the same of Social Protests.”
It’s high time we stopped calling Ivy Leaguers like this Columbia spokesbeing:
Reporter grills Columbia student after she demands the university help feed protestors occupying Hamilton Hall:
"It seems like you're saying, 'we want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food'." pic.twitter.com/vNczSAM4T1
By the way – at “Mitch Berg University”, students who infringe other students rights – Jewish, conservative, liberal, communist, I don’t care – by depriving them of the use of the campus they pay to attend will be blockaded into their “autonomous zones”; no water or food go in, no sewage comes out.
Only way out is through a checkpoint where they either make a videotaped apology and commit to pay restitution to the students they’ve adversely affected, or sign the acknowledgement on their expulsion paperwork.
Yep – progs standing in the door of the schoolhouse, trying to keep the race they hate out.
This looks like a sitcom, but it's not. A human blockade of hundreds at Columbia approaches a small group of Jewish students while saying "one step forward… push them out of the camp" in perfect unison. This is a Columbia tent encampment pic.twitter.com/QvBuzP5QJH
“Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students safety”.
Oh, I suspect the NYPD could do it, if there were any political will to do so.
The fact that there isn’t should make every American sick to their stomach.
Bonus question: as someone else put it (I wish I could claim credit) – if Trump was responsible for what happened in Charlottesville, why aren’t Biden and his boss responsible for this?
