April 24, 2024

RICH LOWRY: The KKK at Columbia – why shouldn’t it camp out at the university, too?

Is there space for more haters at Columbia University?

Imagine if a contingent of alt-right students established their own encampment on a corner of the quad and began to shout antisemitic slogans — say, the infamous chant “Jews will not replace us” from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Would the president of Columbia, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, hesitate to have them arrested as many times as necessary to make them go away?

Would a huge contingent of faculty walk out to protest the arrests?

Would the president of Barnard, Laura Rosenbury, quickly lift the suspensions of the arrested students?

Answers: No, never, and of course not.

As Phil Klein has noted, there is a gross double standard in how progressive opinion regards antisemitism depending on who is peddling it. The antisemitism of the Right is considered morally abhorrent and inherently threatening. The antisemitism of the Left is very often ignored, explained away, or viewed as a regrettable excess.

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville — an execrable but relatively small-scale event — caused a near-national crisis. According to Joe Biden, it was such a galvanizing moment that it, and Trump’s response, prompted him to run for president.

The protests at Columbia have been widely criticized, but they have also garnered elite sympathy, most notably from supportive left-wing members of Congress and the school’s own faculty, who have clearly been staying Shafik’s hand. Meanwhile, more than 1,400 academics from a variety of schools are calling for a boycott of Columbia for allegedly being much too tough on the protesters.

There are obviously differences between Charlottesville and Columbia. The rally in Virginia featured violent clashes with counter-protesters and led to a murder. The groups involved were explicit hate groups, like the KKK, with violent pasts. Still, the bottom line is that the antisemitism of “Unite the Right” was roundly condemned as such.

Based on events on the past several days, I would assume “the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party” would feel quite at home at Columbia:

Posted at 8:42 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRY THAT IN A RED STATE: Watch: Texas DPS Shows Up at a Pro-Hamas ‘Encampment,’ and Beautiful Chaos Follows.

Posted at 7:47 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DAMON LINKER: Thoughts inspired by Taylor Swift’s 31-song notebook dump.

Bruce Springsteen gave Dylan a run for his money as a curatorial editor, especially in the years when he was most prolific. The Boss reportedly recorded as many as 70 songs for his fourth record, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978). The final album included 10 of them. Springsteen gave away several songs to other artists, held onto others for his next album, and left the overwhelming majority of them in the vault. When 20 or so of them were released in a few batches decades later, fans were shocked by how many of the abandoned songs were gems. But Springsteen considered them either too derivative of other artists or too overtly commercial to fit his stark, uncompromising vision for the Darkness album.

The same thing happened with his next album, The River (1981). Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded something on the order to 50 songs in several sessions. One version of the final album included ten songs. Then Springsteen changed his mind and expanded the project into his first and only double album of new material. The final version included 20 songs, which meant another 30 were left behind. Once again, the extraordinarily high quality of the abandoned songs thrilled his fans when many of them were released a number of years later.

Now imagine Springsteen’s early career took place in the streaming era, without the constraints imposed by vinyl pressings and the need to produce and ship a physical product. In this alternative timeline, the Boss puts out almost everything. In addition to the 30 songs he actually released in those years, he releases 40 more. That could have meant four more single albums of new songs from the Boss in these crucial years of his career. As I’ve noted, there’s an abundance of great material there. Many fans would have been ecstatic. But what would have been the artistic consequence of flooding the market in this way?

Most likely, Springsteen and his fantastic band would have come to be known as prolific craftsmen of highly enjoyable pop songs and expert musical ventriloquists capable of mimicking the sound of a 1950s ballad on one track and the amped-up punk aggression of The Clash on the next. They might have sold a lot more records, but they also might have sold fewer, as Springsteen lost much of his distinctiveness as an artist, and his universe of fans was kept fat and happy with a steady diet of new material and never left hungry for more.

Good-Enough Songs

The past five years have been a period of mind-boggling productivity for Taylor Swift. By my rough count, she has released 138 “new” songs since August 2019. (This includes the track listings of the new studio albums Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights, and The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, plus the vault tracks/outtakes/b-sides included on the re-recordings of her albums Fearless, Red, Speak Now, and 1989.)

In terms of quantity, that’s an extraordinary songwriting accomplishment. But I wonder if the volume of output—especially with her latest release—speaks to a failure or disregard of curatorial editing. It’s one thing to release 17 songs on Folklore and then another stylistically similar 17 on Evermore five months later. It’s a lot, but at least listeners had some time to digest the first batch before the second was dropped into their laps. But now imagine she combined the two albums into a single record with only the very best songs from each included, holding the rest for release years or decades from now. Wouldn’t that have been better, elevating this imagined single album above the extremely accomplished records she actually did release?

What happened on Friday of last week is as far away from such an approach as one could imagine. That’s when the previously announced 16-track new album was released but then became a 31-track magnum opus two hours later. This is a bigger version of what happened when Midnights was released in October 2022 with 13 tracks that became 20 later that night, when then the “3am Edition” dropped.

* * * * * * * *

It’s an old modern story: As external, received constraints on our choices are removed (through political reform, moral and theological liberalization, or technological advances), we are left with the burden of imposing constraints of our own choosing on ourselves—or else opting to give up on limitations altogether. I fear some of our greatest popular artists are showing signs of taking the latter path, and with less-than-entirely-positive results.

Of course, in just a few years, we’ll all look back at how quaint things were when songwriters actually had a process they carried around in their heads, instead of letting Brill Building GPT craft their material: What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHRIS QUEEN: Adventures in Bourbonland, Part 3.

But the real magic happened after the tasting was over. The employee told us about one of the bourbons (which I would’ve tried if I’d heard the story before) that the company believes is the only bourbon using the original Old Crow recipe. They call it ¡Cuervito Vivo! (The Little Crow Lives!).

Here’s where the story gets even better. Glenns Creek received a cease-and-desist letter not too long ago, but it wasn’t from Jim Beam, the current owner of the Old Crow brand. The letter came from Jose Cuervo, which wants Glenns Creek to avoid the Cuervito branding, even though Jose Cuervo makes tequila and not bourbon. Oddly enough, Jim Beam sent Jose Cuervo a trademark warning in 2011 over the crow in its branding.

After hearing that story, Matt and I both had to buy a bottle of ¡Cuervito Vivo! It was our way of sticking it to the man.

On our way out the door, another employee met us in the parking lot and struck up a conversation. When he asked us what we bought, we told him about our ¡Cuervito Vivo! rebellion. I told him that I was going to work the story into one of my columns, so he asked me who I write for. When I told him, he revealed to us that he’s a somewhat regular PJ Media reader as well as a volunteer in GOP politics and Tea Party activism in Kentucky.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

REMEMBER WHEN THEY TOLD US ANTIBIOTICS WERE USELESS AGAINST VIRUSES? Neosporin ointment in the nose may help fight off respiratory viruses. “Lab animals whose noses were treated using neomycin — the main ingredient in over-the-counter Neosporin ointment — mounted a robust immune defense against both the COVID-19 virus and a highly virulent strain of influenza, researchers found.”

I remember mockery of doctors who prescribed Azithromycin for Covid.

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S NOT 1965 ANYMORE: Charles Cooke: Columbia Is in the Grips of a Perverse Selma Envy.

Cooke said Tuesday that the escalating anti-Israel protests at Columbia University appear to reflect a desire on the part of the contemporary Left to “contrive” a kind of “great clarifying Manichaean moment,” even if they’re not living through one.

“I think that we are once again witnessing what is generally termed ‘Selma envy,’” Cooke said on The Editors podcast, “but I think that there is an attendant wrinkle to it.

“They have managed to deploy the logic and rhetoric of Selma in all circumstances in a manner that always, invariably, helps them,” Cooke said. He brought up something National Review Online editor Phil Klein pointed out, that “it’s not just that there is a double standard when it comes to Jews. It’s that there is a double standard when it comes to who is protesting Jews.”

Cooke recalled the Charlottesville riots, where “right-wingers were protesting Jews. They are therefore the bad guy who are making the world less safe. . . . but if the Left is protesting Jews, then they are the downtrodden.

“You can’t win. You cannot win in this framework. It’s extremely clever.”

Meanwhile, Bari Weiss’ Free Press is advising its readers, Go South, Young Man! Kids Are Giving Up on Elite Colleges—and Heading South.

The recent wave of violent protests and arrests at elite universities like Yale and Columbia have only confirmed for Scott Katz that he made the right decision to attend Elon University. The North Carolina college, where he is currently wrapping up his sophomore year, is a long way from his hometown of Lafayette Hill, the predominantly liberal Philadelphia suburb w