The Morning Report — 4/30/24

Good morning, kids. Back in the spring of 1978, during my freshman year at Brooklyn College, a couple dozen black and Puerto Rican students led by one "professor" Richie Perez stormed Whitehead Hall, kicked out teachers and students from their classrooms, and barricaded themselves inside. IIRC, It was ostensibly to protest cuts in the budget of black and Puerto Rican studies departments and demand not only restoration but an increase in funding. Then-chancellor John Kneller gave them exactly one hour to exit the building. Or else.

Perez and his gang of braindead stooges, responded with a rather catchy little ditty blasted out from a bullhorn, no doubt bequeathed to Al Sharpton – "Kneller, you liar! We'll set your ass on fire! The hour came and went, and wouldn't you know it? Bang on the tick, the tactical cops from the 63rd Precinct charged in and handed out hickory shampoos con gusto to everyone inside. And everyone who had been forced out, inconvenienced and pissed off cheered on the boys in blue and mocked the bruised and bleeding bastards.

Those were the days, my friend. People like me who were kids during the hippie era of the 60s were mostly done with it by the middle of the next decade as we grew into our teenage years. The crap that Perez et al tried to pull was simply not tolerated. Unfortunately, the fact that there was even a Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department at all was a foreshadowing of what we are seeing today at Columbia and universities across the country.

The Richie Perez's spread from their relatively contained petri dishes of the humanities and soon infected every single department. And from there, the graduates found themselves in every field of endeavor, especially the law and government to the point where we have this charming gal, among many many others, wielding power:

[Kristen] Clarke, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, will speak at the law school's graduation ceremony on May 13, at a time when Columbia is accused of violating the civil rights of Jewish students.

Her address comes as Columbia moved classes online for the rest of the semester after a string of anti-Semitic incidents at the university. Anti-Israel protesters on campus have called for killing supporters of the Jewish state, assaulted Jewish students, burned Israeli flags, and chanted at Jews to "go back to Poland."

. . . Clarke was at the center of another anti-Semitism controversy during her confirmation process in 2021, when news emerged that she had invited the author of The Jewish Onslaught, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory book, to speak at Harvard University in 1994. The book accused Jews of orchestrating the slave trade and of colluding to suppress black progress.

Clarke, who served as head of Harvard's Black Students Association in the 1990s, defended the invitation at the time of the event, calling the book's author, Tony Martin, an "intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact."

Years later, during her confirmation hearings, she apologized for the invitation and said it was a "mistake to accept [Martin's] offer to come and to defend him."

. . . [So-called quote-unquote "president"] Joe Biden has walked a careful line between condemning the anti-Semitism at Columbia and appeasing anti-Israel progressives in his voting base.

I saw Tony Martin and my mind went to Cyd Charisse. But I digress. In any case Kristen Clarke is among the most horrid bigots imaginable; and that makes her absolutely perfect to head up the DOJ's Civil Rights Division. The bullet points from her complete Discover the Networks dossier:

*Wrote that melanin makes blacks racially superior to whites


• Worked for the Department of Justice, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Civil Rights Bureau of New York State

  
• Demanded that the Boy Scouts permit the hiring of openly gay adults

  
• Became president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in 2016

  
• Alleged that “trans women of color” are being victimized by increased violence

  
• Supports affirmative action in order to increase “diversity”

  
• Pressured social media companies to censor “hate speech” by “white supremacists”

  
• Embraces Critical Race Theory and the “Defund the Police” movement

  
• Supports teaching children that whites are oppressors
* Compared Trump supporters to Klansmen

  
• Became Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in May 2021

She has direct links to the twin towers of divide and conquer, Barack Obama and Eric Holder. Like the latter two, Clarke is not a one off. Our entire government is infested with hordes of Clarkes in every bureau of every department of every agency. Bad as the situation is, it didn't just happen when Obama took office. This infestation is the result of decades of corruption in and now outside of government. In the old days, it was mere corruption and venality, but over the past several decades that has been coupled with Marxist ideology and the results are in your face.

It's why this piece from the usually estimable Christopher Roach makes me scratch my head:

The left’s latest cause célèbre is opposing the Israeli counterterrorism operation in Gaza. A lot of Israel’s supporters have been aghast at the size and scale of these protests, openly wondering why the students are spending so much time protesting at all and, after years of championing free speech, are calling for censorship to stop anti-Semitism. . .

. . . I will state as a preliminary matter that there is a difference between protest and targeted harassment and that the latter should not be protected as free speech. That said, our foreign policy towards Israel should be subject to debate and accepted as a target of protest as much as anything else. Suggestions that such views are beyond the pale and warrant expulsion simply because they are unpopular are impossible to square with the First Amendment and more general American principles of free speech.

There have been many overwrought and dishonest criticisms of recent campus protests, but they do not appear more violent or more sinister than other protests of recent years. They mostly seem to be peaceful sit-ins. While violence and threats of violence have no place on campus, part of academic freedom and the college experience involves encountering ideas one disagrees with. Like most protests, these assemblies consist of a majority that is law-abiding and engaging in free speech and a much smaller minority of angry, anti-social agitators. And this division is evident everywhere you look. . .

. . . The heavy-handed efforts to crush these protests will almost certainly boomerang. Arrests and police actions will enhance protesters’ sense of being part of a significant and potentially dangerous cause and also increase their credit among the anti-establishment left.

While there have certainly been excesses and obnoxious behavior in the recent wave of protests, this seems to be par for the course, mild even. Unfortunately, most of the Gaza protests critics conflate peaceful protests with anti-social harassment, have been short on facts and long on emotion in their allegations, and deliberately ignore the presence of a substantial Jewish contingent among the anti-Israel protesters. Dropping the hammer on protesters for mere misdemeanors—like the Draconian sanctions imposed on the January 6 protesters—will encourage sympathy and discredit the authorities. . .

. . . If Israel and its policies are so great, they should be able to win the battle of public opinion with facts, logic, and protests of their own. In many respects, they have. Americans are mostly pro-Israel. But life is not always black and white. Some of Israel’s supporters, as well as many Israelis, also object to the scale of destruction in Gaza and the military operation’s apparent inability to provide long-term security.

A moral panic over ordinary expressions of political disagreement, controversial views, and uncouth language is not the way. Such a policy would be inimical to free speech, based on a distorted record, and will only give the activists of the progressive left the validation they are seeking. University and government policy should be built on the solid, content-neutral ground of distinguishing permissible free speech from prohibited criminal violence and harassment.

The fact that someone so erudite and usually right on the money can be so clueless as to what is happening on campus and on the ground in Israel itself is just fucking ponderous.

"Win the battle of public opinion with facts, logic and protests their own?" RUFKM, Chris? You seem to think that we live in an imaginary world where all those things are still operative. To say the least, we live in a world of lies, deception and naked oppression of anyone who dares expose it.

How can you call for the defense and preservation of the First Amendment when it not only doesn't function, but when much of the other Amendments are on the ropes if not de facto dead? Did the stolen election of 2020, the imprisonment of political prisoners for using that First Amendment they foolishly thought protected them, and the in your face persecution of Donald Trump not tell you anything? Evidently not.

Free speech does not exist anymore because the civil society it was part and parcel of, to greater or lesser extents since 1789 is either dead or about to flatline. Wanting to preserve the 1-A is sort of like trying to set a broken arm of someone who is experiencing total organ failure.

It's not that we have to destroy the Constitution to save it. It's already destroyed. We now have to create a society that respects and reveres individual liberty and the rights of those with which they disagree while at the same time protecting us from those who do not. Meh. We have imported alien, violent, dark age cultures that work hand in hand with our own native born tyrants to drag us back to an even darker age. Forever. They must be vanquished and excised from our midst.

If that means ditching the original Constitution to do so, then God help me, so be it. The left is fond of spouting that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Well, it's high time we take that attitude.

NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.

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