Cornyn has spent over a year courting Trump’s support, while Paxton has run to Cornyn’s right and pitched himself as a stronger ally of the president. Cornyn and Senate GOP leaders argued that he is a stronger general-election candidate as Democrats look to win statewide office in Texas for the first time since 1994.

The runoff is a week away, and early voting began Monday.

True that Cornyn would be stronger in the general? False? I am no expert on Texas politics, but it seems to me a tossup: Paxton appeals more to the base and Cornyn to the middle and is disliked by the base as a RINO. But Paxton is described as “scandal-plagued.” Then again, Lisa Murkowski supports Cornyn and says “she was ‘supremely disappointed’ and echoed leadership concerns that Paxton could have a harder time keeping the seat in GOP hands.” I suppose “leadership” means Thune? And of course, it’s Murkowski saying this, and I do not trust her to act in the GOP’s best interests..

The whole things seems like a mess:

Despite promising to intervene quickly after March 3, when Cornyn finished narrowly ahead of Paxton, Trump kept both campaigns on edge for months. He initially said he would ask his non-endorsed candidate to drop out, but his neutral stance meant the opportunity to do so came and went.

Instead, the two camps and their allies have spent nearly $25 million on advertising in the runoff, much of it used for the two candidates to bash each other in intensely personal terms. It brings the total ad cost of the Republican primary to nearly $125 million, most of which has come from the pro-Cornyn side.

Apparently Trump thinks that Talarico, the Democrat opponent, will be a weak candidate. I hope he’s correct. For what it’s worth (probably not all that much), polls indicate that both Republicans are more or less tied with Talarico at present.

The post Trump endorses Ken Paxton for Texas senator appeared first on The New Neo.

Howard University has given Ibran X. Kendi a plum job – or, as the headline of the article puts it, “Howard University appoints racist crackpot as history professor, giving him an endowed chair.” An excerpt:

… [Kendi] “will serve as the inaugural holder of the Carter G. Woodson Endowed Chair in History, a position supported by $3 million in donor funding that honors its namesake historian, known as the ‘father of Black history’…In addition to his chair position, Kendi will direct the school’s new Institute for Advanced Study, which ‘is dedicated to interdisciplinary study advancing research of importance to the global African Diaspora, including inquiry into race, technology, racism, climate change, and disparities,’” reports Campus Reform.

Interim President Wayne A.I. Frederick said the appointment “affirms Howard University’s enduring responsibility to steward Black history with rigor, integrity, and purpose.”

Kendi supports racial discrimination against whites, and hates capitalism. “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says Ibram X. Kendi’s best-selling book promoting race-based government policies, How to Be An Antiracist. The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist was that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality for black people: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book. Students in many school systems have been assigned a book by Kendi that is historically inaccurate. Kendi once wrote an op-ed suggesting that white people are aliens from outer space.

Boston University had tried giving Kendi a similarly influential job and lots of money during heyday of Black Lives Matter and the antiracism craze (June 2020), and got almost nothing for their pains and their money. The center he headed was finally demonetized last year:

… [Kendi] wrote zero academic papers at least during the first three years he was there…..On a [2024] page titled ‘What We’re Working On,’ nothing is listed from this year. No policy reports or convenings have been published since 2022…[In 2024] The Antiracist Legal Education Project advertises an event from September 2023 as ‘upcoming,’ while the annual Antiracist Book Festival was not held in 2023 or 2024. A Vertex Symposium, which is also described as an annual event, has not occurred since 2022.”

As Campus Reform notes, “Before joining Howard, Kendi founded and led Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research (CAR), which launched in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. The center aimed to promote policies and scholarship designed to build what Kendi described as an ‘antiracist society,’ but was shuttered by the university last June following reports of internal management issues and financial concerns…..Campus Reform reported on the closure and questions raised by staffers about the center’s operations, including former employee Yanique Redwood, who stated that employees felt ‘overwhelmed’ and that leadership made ‘too many promises’ to funders while delivering few tangible results.”

Boston University’s gain is Howard University’s loss, although Howard doesn’t seem to see it that way.

At least Kendi’s not a terrorist from the 60s. Many of them landed cushy university jobs, too – after they got out of prison, or remained “free as a bird” on technicalities.

The post Howard University snags quite the prize: Kendi appeared first on The New Neo.

The 250th anniversary of America’s founding provides an opportunity to reflect on—and fight over—the country’s extraordinary story. Unfortunately, many of the serious scholars who study America—its history, literature and culture—fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale. …

… [W]e found only one part of this narrative presented in most of almost 100 articles we examined from over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, it’s widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies.

The journal’s scholarship paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S. We found that 80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive. Of the 96 articles we examined, our research identified 77 as critical, focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. Some articles went to absurd lengths to identify sins. One essay posited that thermodynamics—the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature—is “an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.”

Is it any wonder that so many young people are so down on this country? Although I must say that most of the old people I know are also reflexively critical of America.

This would be a good time to revisit a passage written by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, back in the 1980s. In it, he describes an incident he experienced when he was in school in the 1940s. Here you can see the naive origins of the kind of thinking that’s now rampant in academia:

Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

And I’ll close with a verse from Robert Frost, first published in 1947:

A CASE FOR JEFFERSON

Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.

The post Anti-American studies appeared first on The New Neo.

Professor Bruno Gonçalves remembers teaching Claudio Neves Valente at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal, where the suspect studied physics in the late 1990s along with Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor who was killed.

Gonçalves, who is now the president of the department, told CBS News that Neves Valente was the best student in his course.

Gonçalves also said he knew Louriero, but only from meeting him in later years after he left university, and he has no memory of him as a student. Louriero went on to a successful career in physics research and was director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Neves Valente enrolled in a PhD program in physics at Brown in 2000 but only stayed one year, the university said. Gonçalves said he has searched for other academic or professional traces of his former student after his time at Brown but couldn’t find any.

So that leads to an obvious possible motive: envy of others who have succeeded or who are about to succeed, and rage because of his own failed career despite his brilliance. Perhaps he even thought the class he shot up at Brown was a physics class; I’ve read that it’s where the physics classes used to be held.

In a statement, the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal confirmed that Neves Valente had been a student at its Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion, studying for a degree in Engineering Physics between 1995 and 2000. Loureiro took the course during the same period, the institute said.

“My understanding is that they did know each other,” said Leah Foley, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts.

He probably was aware of Loureiro’s career trajectory over the years – upward – compared to his own downward path. The classroom at Brown, in which he had apparently taken classes, was the scene of the crime – and the “crime” in his own mind was probably the fact that he never amounted to anything professionally after dropping out of Brown.

Envy. Spite.

Neves Valente was also a visa lottery winner – that’s how he came here again, in 2017. So it’s after 2017 that he has the opportunity to revisit those places and that person, which could explain some of the delay in taking his revenge. There also could be something else in the timing – drug or alcohol abuse, relationship failures, mid-life angst, worsening of schizophrenia or other mental illness, or just a final realization that at 48 he’s never going to make it, never going to fulfill even a fraction of that early promise.

According to the parents of Neves Valente, a break with family occurred over 20 years ago. His age at the time is very consistent with a schizophrenic onset:

When Claudio Neves Valente, a promising physics student in Portugal, headed off to graduate school at Brown University more than 25 years ago, he seemed to have a promising career in science ahead. Soon after, though, he stopped taking classes. Then he cut off all contact with his family back home, a relative said.

In fact, he seemed to vanish.

His mother and father had not seen or heard from him until Friday, when they saw his image in news reports and learned that he was accused in the shooting of students in one of Brown’s science buildings and of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor he had once one to school with in Portugal. …

“They are devastated,” Mirita Domingues, a relative of Mr. Neves Valente’s, told The New York Times. “His mother said this morning that she had always worried that the next time she would hear about him, he would be dead.”

The only child of a well-to-do family … He excelled in school, scoring top grades in every subject …

The article goes on to say that he had been a happy child, and that at eighteen he represented Portugal at the International Physics Olympiad, and was the brightest of the four Portuguese representatives. His high school physics teacher said he was the brightest student he’d ever taught, and that he’d never forgotten him.

And I think it’s very telling that the article goes on to quote a teacher from the school attended by both Neves Valente and Loureiro as saying that although they both were at the top of the class, it was Neves Valente who had the higher grades.

And yet in ensuing years at Brown, where he spent three semesters at the turn of the century, he already was withdrawing socially, according Scott Watson, his only friend at the time who is now a physics professor at Syracuse and says:

“[Neves Valente] wanted to isolate himself” …

Dr. Watson reclled that Mr. Neves Valente was often unhappy and even angry, complaining that classes were too easy and that the food on Brown’s campus was subpar. …

Mr. Neves Valente could be “kind and gentle” his former friend recalled – as well as brilliant. But the suspect could also be a bully, Dr. Watson said, going so far as to call a Brazilian classmate his “slave.”

He left Brown without even getting his Master’s degree, much less a doctorate. He apparently went back to Portugal initially, although no one seems to know how or where he spent the ensuing years until his return to the US in 2017. Even after that, little is known until the murders; an address in Miami turns out to have probably been a false one.

NOTE: He sounds a bit like the path of the Unibomber – from academic prodigy (math in the case of Kaczynski) to dropout in his 20s, to isolation, to murder – although the motives for the Unibomber’s murders seems different.

The post My guess at the Brown/Brookline killer’s motive appeared first on The New Neo.

Oh, and it was a homeless ex-student in physics, who lives in the classroom building in which the Brown murders took place, who broke the case – posting on Reddit, among other things – and gets the money reward, which at $50K doesn’t seem like nearly enough. Perhaps he should receive a portion of the hefty salary of the president of Brown, whom just about everyone agrees is a nincompoop at best.

Truth really is stranger than fiction. If you wrote a script, would you choose that description of the case and the killer? You can find details of the story here as well as here. From the latter:

[The Brown homeless man] John, it’s been revealed, was the second person of interest whose image was put out earlier this week, and he was onto the suspect way before anyone else. According to a Fox News report, John became suspicious of Neves-Valente after the two “locked eyes” in a campus bathroom hours before the shooting. John then followed the gunman around the campus and eventually confronted him about his weird behavior.

Dead men tell no tales, and unless Claudio Manuel Neves Valente left one of those manifestos so popular with mass murderers, the motive may remain very obscure. It’s somewhat comforting to know it was one killer rather than two, but it’s terrible to think that the second murder might have been avoided if he could he have been caught earlier.

Most people are faulting the lack of good security camera video at Brown and the failure to establish a perimeter in a timely fashion, and the school also has a university chief of security Rodney Chatman, who may be a DEI hire and had left his previous position under a cloud:

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Chatman said he faced pushback for policing reforms he tried to implement at the school. He departed for Brown in 2021.

In October, two local police unions, the Brown University Security Patrolperson’s Association and the University Police Sergeants Union, issued votes of “no confidence” in Chatman, the former expressing “deep concern among the membership regarding the direction and leadership of the Department of Public Safety,” according to the Brown Daily Herald. …

The school has faced criticism regarding the killer’s access to the building and a lack of security cameras that could have helped in identifying the shooter.

Chatman has only briefly addressed the shooting in the days since it occurred, saying that three outdoor sirens on the campus did not activate during the shooting because of how quickly the event took place, according to the Rhode Island Current.

Fox News Digital has found that diversity, equity and inclusion has been a major focus for Brown’s campus safety department and Chatman himself. …

In a prior post on LinkedIn, Chatman asked other campus police departments to refrain from posting pictures of themselves with weapons or performing tactical maneuvers, suggesting that it could make their communities anxious.

Perhaps worst of all, we have this allegation:

Stefanik shared a report that Brown University was pressured by “human rights groups” demanding that they disable their CCTVs so violent pro-Palestinian activists wouldn’t be held accountable for their actions.

I really, really hope that’s not what happened. But I fear it is.

The post The Brown killer and the Brookline killer were the same Portuguese ex-student in physics, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente appeared first on The New Neo.

And it did.

Little did I know at the time that something similar had started to happen to our own children – a bit muted, yes, but similar, although I only came to know about it later on. In America, it wasn’t just about hating Israel, although that formed a significant part of it. It was also about hating the US and western civilization.

This article (hat tip: commenter “miguel cervantes”) is an in-depth look at where this was done, how it was done, and by whom it was done:

Since 1981, American universities have accepted $13.1 billion from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait (Bard, 2024). Qatar alone contributed nearly $6 billion. Roughly 73% of these contributions are worth approximately $10.7 billion. None of these billions have any publicly stated purpose despite federal disclosure requirements (Bard, 2024). …

Here’s what we do know. Saudi Arabia gave Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center $20 million. The funding was structured to “follow” the center’s director. This gave the Saudi government effective control over who held the position (Middle East Forum, 2020). Qatar Foundation International sponsored K-12 teacher training sessions. They covered travel and expenses for American educators attending workshops on Middle East history (Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, March 2025). At least one donation explicitly funded a Palestinian Studies professorship at Brown. The position went to someone who supports boycotting Israel (Bard, 2024).

That was Doumani. His position didn’t exist until foreign money created it. His influence shaped the curriculum materials that were used in roughly 8,000 schools. Those materials reached approximately one million students annually. Brown ended the Choices Program in 2025. The university cited financial pressures and mounting criticism over the program’s Israel-Palestine materials as reasons for shutting it down.

The pattern repeats everywhere. Foreign governments fund academic positions. Universities fill those positions with scholars who share the donors’ worldviews. Those scholars create curriculum materials. The materials reach thousands of schools nationwide. Teachers trust them because they bear prestigious university names. Parents never question them because they don’t know the funding sources. Students absorb frameworks that were designed by foreign governments to advance foreign interests.

And it works. Research examining the years 2015 to 2020 found something striking. Institutions that accepted Middle Eastern funding experienced 300% more antisemitic incidents than institutions that didn’t accept such funding (Network Contagion Research Institute, 2024). Separate studies reached the same conclusion.

Seeds are dropped, and it spreads and spreads.

More:

The scholars it trained, the frameworks it promoted, the orthodoxy it enforced are now embedded throughout American academia. They’re training the next generation. It’s a self-perpetuating system that grows more extreme with each cycle.

These scholars don’t stay confined to Middle East Studies departments. They spread to Education departments where they train future K-12 teachers. They move into Schools of Social Work. They populate Ethnic Studies programs where they apply Middle East frameworks to American history. The infection metastasizes. Then it flows downstream to every institution these graduates enter.

Much much more at the link, including the influence of China.

We’ve seen the results. The generational aspect of the problem has been especially apparent after 10/7.

The author continues:

The few states that tried to implement reforms discovered they were attempting to drain an ocean with a bucket. The system is too large. Too interconnected. Too self-reinforcing for any incremental reform to work. It requires comprehensive action at the federal level. It requires sustained political will across multiple administrations. Anything less than that will fail.

The author goes on to recommend a comprehensive 10-point plan to reverse the course of this multi-faceted titanic perversion of US education. It’s hard to imagine we’ll muster the political will to do this, but something extremely drastic is necessary – long past necessary.

The post The mis-education of generations of US students: it was actually Qatar who sold us the rope with which we’ll hang ourselves appeared first on The New Neo.

These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia. Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June. …

You have stated that no “red lines” have been crossed by these decisions. However, Columbia has appointed a vice-provost initially tasked with surveilling Middle Eastern studies, and it has ordained that faculty and staff must submit to “trainings” on antisemitism from the likes of the Anti-Defamation League, for whom virtually any critique of Zionism or Israel is antisemitic, and Project Shema, whose trainings link many anti-Zionist critiques to antisemitism. It has accepted an “independent” monitor of “compliance” of faculty and student behavior from a firm that in June 2025 hosted an event in honor of Israel.

Utter BS – these groups do not say any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism. Many Jews who are not the least bit anti-Semitic criticize Israel constantly, for example. But using a double standard to judge Israel is indeed anti-Semitic. Spreading lies about the history of the region in order to demonize Israel is indeed anti-Semitic.

It’s no accident that Columbia – which has, through professors such as Khalidi, been spreading such lies about Israel for decades – is now a hotbed of anti-Semitism. And of course Khalidi uses this “any criticism of Israel is falsely called anti-Semitism” accusation to defend himself. That doesn’t make it true.

I have little doubt he’ll either get a cushy position elsewhere if he wishes to un-retire, or will go on the lucrative lecture circuit to further spread his message.

The post Goodbye Khalidi – don’t let the door hit you on the way out appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s the latest:

Transgender swimming champion Lia Thomas will be stripped of University of Pennsylvania swimming titles after the Ivy League school bowed to pressure from the Trump administration.

The university will also issue formal apologies to every biological female competitor who lost out to a transgender competitor following an investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

The probe found UPenn violated Title IX by “allowing a male to compete in female athletic programs and occupy female-only intimate facilities.”

“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action. Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the University for future generations of female athletes,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement.

Swimmer Lia Thomas was and is, to all intents and purposes, a fully-equipped post-pubescent biological male. He had no business being in a woman’s locker room, and the fact that U Penn forced such a thing on its female swimmers was a terrible offense.

So, at the very least, the university won’t be doing that anymore – until, of course, Democrats take control of the federal government and redefine what Title IX means.

Or perhaps the left has learned its lesson on this, although I wouldn’t count on it. And by “its lesson,” I mean the practical lesson that forcing men into women’s locker rooms isn’t a popular stance, and may have contributed heavily to Democrats’ losses in 2024. I don’t expect that the left would learn the moral lesson or the lesson about biology.

The post U Penn agrees to apologize for allowing men into women’s sports appeared first on The New Neo.

Harvard University has stripped a world-renowned scholar of her tenure status. The university’s top governing board, the Harvard Corporation, decided this month to revoke Francesca Gino’s tenure and end her employment at Harvard Business School.

Gino, who was celebrated for her research on honesty and ethical behavior, had faced scathing allegations of academic misconduct and fraud. …

In 2023, Harvard launched an internal investigation into Gino’s work after concerns were raised on a blog called Data Colada, run by a group of behavioral scientists who scrutinize academic research. The Harvard investigation concluded that Gino had manipulated certain data to support her hypotheses in at least four of her studies.

At that point, the university placed her on unpaid administrative leave.

Gino denied the allegations and filed a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard …

Irony noted.

The post The ethics of the ethics researcher appeared first on The New Neo.

Trump issued an order “revoking Harvard’s participation in F-1 and J-1 visa programs, under which foreign students attend Harvard.” The administration had asked Harvard to provide information on its foreign students’ participation in “illegal and violent activities,” and Harvard’s reply was not considered adequate. Harvard sued, and an injunction was issued against the administration.

John Hinderaker, who wrote the post I just linked, believes that the administration will lose this particular case, and even that they probably expect to lose it because they have arbitrarily dispensed with certain statutory requirements. He considers this particular action against Harvard to be more political than legal.

On the other hand – as pointed out at Legal Insurrection:

The judge made the ruling without a Trump lawyer present. As I stated in my blog yesterday and today, DHS gave Harvard 72 hours to respond to requests.

As Margot Cleveland pointed out, there is “no reason the court couldn’t have set [an] afternoon hearing.”

I suppose this one may end up going to SCOTUS as well.

One particularly interesting aspect of this case is how it highlights the extreme dependence a university such as Harvard has on foreign students. They pay full tuition for the most part, unlike many of Harvard’s regular students. The percentage of foreign students is twenty-seven percent of Harvard’s enrollment.

The post Trump against Harvard; judges against Trump appeared first on The New Neo.