MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Education Apocalypse Now? The Ivy League Hits An Iceberg.
April 26, 2024
FBI DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER WRAY: ‘We Don’t Monitor Protests’
And when we say “don’t,” certain exceptions do apply: The FBI Was Monitoring Student Protests Against Ben Shapiro.
The ongoing student protests over Israel and Palestine have become the center of a national controversy, with members of Congress calling for National Guard deployments and terrorism financing investigations against the protesters. But a few years ago, the federal government was interested in a very different sort of campus controversy: whether right-wing journalist Ben Shapiro should be allowed to speak.
In October 2017, the FBI prepared a “tactical intelligence report” on Shapiro’s upcoming speaker event at the University of California, Los Angeles. The bulletin was released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for FBI documents on the Black Lives Matter movement, and posted to the public records platform MuckRock by journalist Jordan Lassiter.
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“We have on-going demonstrations with ANTIFA/Black Bloc people, which have repeatedly shown a propensity of violence. We are expecting large scale, violent demonstrations” against speeches by Shapiro and the right-wing pundit Milo Yiannopoulos, said the memo, which Reason obtained from BlueLeaks, a trove of leaked fusion center documents.
Berkeley police weren’t wrong to expect violence. A previous speech by Yiannopoulos had been canceled in February 2017 due to a riot by left-wing protesters. Then, in April, both far-left and far-right activists showed up in Berkeley to fight.
The September event at Berkeley with Shapiro, however, went smoothly. Under heavy police presence and protected by over half a million dollars in security measures, Shapiro spoke to hundreds of audience members while hundreds of protesters gathered off campus. A few demonstrators were arrested for carrying a banned weapon or assaulting a police officer.
As Iowahawk quipped at the time:
OUT: POPULATION BOMB. IN: BABY BUST. U.S. births fall in 2023 to lowest number since 1979. “For American women generally, the decision to have a child seems to have shifted to later in the lifespan, as more women focus on education and careers prior to childrearing.”
JIM TREACHER: Has the Secret Service Gone Insane?
A U.S. Secret Service agent with Vice President Kamala Harris’ detail was removed from their assignment after engaging in a physical fight with other agents while on duty Monday…
Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the U.S. Secret Service, called the incident a “medical matter,” adding that the agency wouldn’t be commenting further.
A medical matter… that caused a physical fight between Secret Service agents? Wait, what?
All we were told at first was that the agent was acting “erratically.” But thanks to Susan Crabtree at Real Clear Politics, now we know some specifics:
[Secret Service agent Michelle] Herczeg showed up at the [Joint Base Andrews] terminal and began acting erratically, grabbing another senior agent’s personal phone and deleting applications on it, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The other agent, a shift leader, was able to recover his phone and then acted as if nothing had happened.
But Herczeg’s bizarre behavior didn’t stop. She then began mumbling to herself, hid behind curtains, and started throwing items, including menstrual pads, at an agent, telling him that he would need them later to save another agent and telling her peers that they were “going to burn in hell and needed to listen to God,” a source told RealClearPolitics.
As Treacher writes:
Look, man, if you want to let the president of the United States get assassinated because you were scared of being blackballed as a bigot, be my guest.
But you can’t make us turn a blind eye. We see you.
P.S. Okay, I was right: Herczeg used to be a cop in Dallas, and in 2016 she sued the department for $1 million over “gender bias.” And then she blackmailed her way into the Secret Service.
At the Corner, Luther Ray Abel adds: Unfit Female Agent Responsible for Secret Service Ruckus.
How Herczeg came to be in the vice president’s employ after such an experience is an open question, as security for the president and those in his orbit are expected to have spotless backgrounds and years of experience. It’s fair to wonder if the Secret Service’s signing on to the 30×30 initiative, a pledge to have 30 percent of all law enforcement women by 2030, could have forced the qualification of Herczeg when her record was below the level expected of male officers.
The Left, for all its fearmongering about white supremacists and January 6 rioters lurking in ponds and mulberry bushes, does not take seriously just how dangerous the world is. Anyone who understands the number of unwell and hostile entities in the world and has any status at all would think it best to surround himself with excellent protection, regardless of the color or genitalia of his security. But the president and vice president think signaling their virtue through manning, however unqualified and distracted the component parts of their security might be, is the best course for their purposes.
Better dead than rude, to coin a phrase.
PROSECUTORS AGAINST THE LAW: Indiana Prosecutor Laments That Self-Defense Laws Exist, Protect Defensive Gun Users.
DON SURBER: Trump, the Happy Warrior.
In New York, where Alvin the Chipmunk Bragg is trying him because a porn whore extorted money from him, the jolly times continued.
The New York Post reported, “Trump vows to ‘straighten New York out’ while visiting bodega where clerk Jose Alba was hit with murder charge for stabbing an ex-con in self-defense.”
Only public outcry forced Bragg to drop charges against the bodega clerk, who is now suing the bastard.
Trump had them singing the national anthem in Harlem. Colin Kaepernick was the hardest hit.
But read all about the lawfare against him:
Using the courts to kill Donald Trump was well planned and coordinated by the White House. Unfortunately, the planner appears to be the incompetent Kamala Harris fresh off her job as border czar, which saw the largest invasion American history.
The DC press is in denial of course.
On Tuesday Politico said, “Trump and his allies like to complain these days that he is a victim of ‘lawfare’ — some sort of elaborate, multi-jurisdictional conspiracy involving federal and state prosecutors, private civil litigators and judges in different courts across the country to take him down through the court system. The media aids and abets it, in their telling.”
And yet the trials are coordinated so that he is not in two courts at the same time. The press coverage, too, is coordinated, which was the whole point of the Politico story I cited, “Inside the Off-the-Record Calls Held by Anti-Trump Legal Pundits
“Some of the country’s most prominent legal commentators are holding off-the-record sessions to hash out the latest twists and turns in Donald Trump’s legal saga.”
By hash out, Politico meant agree to a narrative.
They continue to play Civilizational Jenga.
LOL:
‘Israel Must End Its Illegal Occupation!’ Cry People Staging Illegal Occupation https://t.co/jttjudIRZD pic.twitter.com/QcRQ2jZ2Fy
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 25, 2024
GET YOUR BALANCE BACK: 5-Minute Core Exercises for Seniors: Daily Routines to Build Balance and Boost Confidence. #CommissionEarned
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Hamas Disappointed Liberals Don’t Believe They Massacred Jews After They Went To All The Trouble To Livestream It.
RIGGED: Republican AGs accuse Ed Dept. of partisan vote harvesting for Democrats: Biden administration’s effort to pay college students for get out the vote campus campaigns backed by left-wing activists. “Nearly 20 Republican state attorneys general have called on the U.S. Department of Education to rescind guidance telling administrators they can use federal funds to pay students for get-out-the-vote efforts. The seven-page letter essentially describes how the new allowance to hire college students to register voters through the Federal Work-Study Program would amount to partisan vote harvesting for Democrats.”
OPERATION STUMBLEBUM: THE NEXT GENERATION. Scoop: Biden’s walkers.
President Biden has introduced a change to his White House departure and return routine: Instead of walking across the South Lawn to and from Marine One by himself, he’s now often surrounded by aides.
Why it matters: With aides usually walking between Biden and the press’ camera position outside the White House, the visual effect is to draw less attention to the 81-year-old’s halting and stiff gait, Axios’ Hans Nichols and Alex Thompson report.
Some Biden advisers have told Axios they’re concerned that videos of Biden walking and shuffling alone — especially across the grass — have highlighted his age.
Weeks ago, the president told aides that he’d prefer a less formal approach, a White House official told Axios. He suggested that they walk with him.
White House staffers and reporters alike noticed the sudden change in Biden’s walk routine beginning in mid-April, after more than three years in which he’d typically walked solo.
Senior aides — including deputy chiefs of staff Bruce Reed and Annie Tomasini, and close adviser Mike Donilon — are among those who’ve walked with the president across the lawn to and from the helicopter.
Since the change, some advisers think the images of Biden’s walks to and from the helicopter are better, and they expect him to continue to have aides join him.
By the numbers: In March, Biden’s five walks to and from Marine One at the White House were by himself, or with family members.
Starting April 16, Biden was joined by staff or lawmakers nine out of 10 times he walked to and from Marine One.
The big picture: Biden’s team has focused on changing voters’ perceptions about his age in recent months.
The earlier funnier Saturday Night Live would have gotten loads of material out of the above news – assuming the president had an (R) after his name, of course. Unfortunately, they’d much rather now play the palace guard than actually risk being funny.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: NORTIV 8 Men’s Military Tactical Work Boots. #CommissionEarned
THE PRIORITIES OF THE VOTERS ARE SHARPLY DIFFERENT FROM THE PRIORITIES OF THE RULING CLASS: “Axios commissioned a Harris poll and discovered something unsurprising, even if the establishment was shocked. Americans support mass deportations of illegal aliens.”
Pretty much all of our institutions are now set up to ensure that the ruling class gets to enact its priorities instead of the voters’; that has worked so well that much of the ruling class is unaware of what the voters’ priorities even are.
I’VE NEVER BEEN MORE GLAD THAT IT’S RIOT SEASON NOW — THAT MEANS WE’VE GOTTEN THE LOCKDOWNS OUT OF THE WAY ALREADY: Bird flu could jump to humans any day. A former surgeon general says it feels like 2020 again.
THESE THINGS SEEM TO ALMOST ALWAYS BE HOAXES: Baltimore principal was framed by school athletic director using AI to fabricate racist attack. It’s just the technology that improves.
Related: Who Can You Trust?
RICH LOWRY: It’s Columbia 1968 — the antisemitic version.
Israel is to today’s radicals what the Pentagon was to 1968’s.
Just as the protesters back then demanded the university cut ties with a Defense Department outfit doing research for the Vietnam War, today’s radicals want the university to divest from Israel.
The essential argument is the same — that Columbia bears moral responsibility for crimes against humanity committed in an imperialist war.
Yesteryear’s agitators might have been surprised to learn that student demonstrators acting in the tradition of 1968 have been discomfiting and harassing Jews and expressing support for a horrific terrorist assault.
Here too, though, there are connections to 1968, at least its more extreme elements.
The famed Columbia protest leader Mark Rudd went on to become part of the violent Weather Underground.
The Weather Underground you say? A generation from now, who will emerge from these protests as having shaped American politics at the highest level?
BOB GRABOYES: Columbia Delenda Est.
Related:
Nemat Shafik – @Columbia Prez only has 1 well-cited publication in her life, in Oxford Econ Papers 1994.
This paper is lifted almost entirely from a 1992 report coauthored with consultant not credited in the publication.
This is wholesale intellectual theft, not subtle plagiarism pic.twitter.com/ttqN3C7hFm— Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak (@mushfiq_econ) April 26, 2024
There sure seems to be a lot of this stuff out there.
GREAT MOMENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION:
Watch a brave, calm & reasonable Jewish student at @UCLA cope with an hysterical, incoherent & shrieking professor. https://t.co/6mKbLSnM3W
— Christina Hoff Sommers (@CHSommers) April 26, 2024
YOU WOULD NEED A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH:
"Call the Philosophy department!" is my new favorite battle cry. I cried laughing I admit. https://t.co/A5fAo3e0nq
— Lex Jurgen (@Lex_Jurgen) April 25, 2024
MAKING YOUR LIFE WORSE ISN’T COLLATERAL DAMAGE, IT’S THE GOAL: Biden EPA Threatens to Shut Down Coal Plants Amid Energy Crisis.
A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Boston police arrest 108 at Emerson College pro-Palestinian tent encampment [+video].
ELON MUSK vs. the Globalist Censors. “Australia’s top thoughtcop – let’s call a spade a spade – is one Julie Inman Grant. She has the power under the Online Safety Act 2021 to demand the removal of ‘Class 1 material’ from the internet. That’s anything that depicts ‘revolting or abhorrent phenomena [that] offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety’. The vast bulk of what gets wiped off the web is child porn. Sometimes clips of violence are culled, too. Right now, Ms Inman Grant is seeking to excise a video of a stabbing. But here’s the twist: she doesn’t only want to block Aussie eyes from seeing it, but everyone’s eyes. Everyone in the world. All of us. Tyrant much?”
Australia is basically reverting to its prison origins.
TRUTH ISN’T A DEFENSE: A judge on the Superior Court in San Diego has been disqualified from hearing cases under the Racial Justice Act on the ground of bias. In part he is accused of having said: “There is absolutely no evidence that … the proportion of persons in an ethnicity committing a crime must be the same as the proportion in the population.” The problem, of course, is that statement is plainly true.
