Bob Dole endorses Jeb Bush: with help like this…

The New Neo Posted on by

…you don’t need saboteurs:

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole has endorsed Jeb Bush for president and will serve as the former Florida governor’s National Veterans’ Chairman, according to the campaign.

Dole said that while almost all of the candidates are his friends, he believes Bush is the most qualified…

“I will do all I can to be helpful to Jeb’s campaign,” Dole promised.

Helpful? Staying quiet might have been most helpful. But I believe Bush is beyond help.

Bush was already persona non grata among conservatives, and originally the candidate of choice for establishment types. But even the latter have been deserting him because (as I wrote a year and a half ago) he’s the candidate without a constituency.

Well, he’s still got one: Bob Dole. I’ve nothing special against Dole, but his stamp of approval on the nearly-moribund Bush campaign seems to me to be a sign that it’s circling the drain.

Debate open thread

The New Neo Posted on by

The undercard is debating right now. My first observation is that Fox Business News shines compared to CNBC, the moderators of the last debate.

Of course, it’s not hard to shine compared to CNBC, which covered itself with shame. But the Fox Business folks are asking real questions about the actual, you, know, economy.

9:31: So far, this is like an old-fashioned debate. Actual substantive questions, slightly longer answers allowed. Everyone is coherent and articulate so far, but Kasich tried to muscle in on Jeb Bush at one point, and Bush had his usual wimpy-toughguy response. Now, Kasich is doing it again, and calling Trump’s position on deportation “silly.” Who knew that Kasich would be the one to take on Trump? And now Bush is being sarcastic towards Trump too—“thank you for allowing me to speak”—joining with Kasich on the deportation issue.

9:42 Go, Cruz! Great answer on immigration. To me, this highlights the difference in quality between Cruz and Trump. Both are tough on illegal immigration, but Cruz is smarter about it, and in many ways tougher and more able to actually accomplish something, I think. Fiorina has been good, too (excellent answer right now on Obamacare), but I’m not sure she’s going to get people to make her #1 if they already have another favorite.

10:11 Kasich is coming across as a cranky, pushy, annoying guy. What is he even doing there? I’d much rather be seeing Christie.

10:30 Fiorina on fire here on the topic of Putin, and the military. It occurs to me that this debate is a demonstration of the fact that you can have a debate that is pretty heated, quite interesting, and yet where the moderators are asking substantive rather than gotcha questions.

Someone—I’m not sure whether it was Kasich or Paul, but I think one of them—just asked why “she” (meaning Fiorina) “keeps interrupting everyone.” Which I don’t think she’s been doing, but I can’t say I’ve been paying strict attention to who’s been interrupting who. But the crowd booed when he said that. And if it was Kashich who said it, it’s pretty funny, because he’s been honing in on other people’s time over and over.

10:50 Found in Ace of Spades’ comment section–

From Greg Gutfield: “When Kasich talks, it’s like you’re watching a guy trying to put his oversized luggage in a small compartment, but refuses to move.”

From commenter “Jane D’Oh”: “I’d kill for Carson to just pull out a pocket knife and flick it open.”

10:53 Kasich will not shut up.

10:54 Paraphrasing Fiorina, who gets a big hand for the following: “This is how socialism starts. Government creates a problem and then steps in and tries to solve the problem.”

11:01 Rubio turns his youth into an asset vis a vis Hillary. That’s part of his stump speech, but it’s still effective.

11:18 Neil Cavuto calls the debate “riveting,” and says it wasn’t about the moderators, it was about the candidates. Good point, and nice dig at CNBC, without mentioning it specifically.

The poop swastika: real or phantom?

The New Neo Posted on by

When I wrote my first post on the University of Missouri racism flap, I included these observations:

And if the origins of that [excrement] swastika are anything like many such incidents in the recent past at other universities, the perpetrator could actually have been one of the protesters or a sympathizer. For example:

…Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller News Foundation broke the story that a number of supposed racial incidents at Oberlin College in Ohio this spring [2013] were, in fact, a hoax. Oberlin certainly took the incidents seriously, even canceling classes on March 5 to convene a “day of solidarity.” However, Oberlin city police reports obtained by Ross made it clear that at least some of the material that had Oberlin up in arms, including a large swastika banner that was hung in the science center under cover of night, was in fact done by one or two Oberlin students as a “joke/troll to get an overreaction, in the context of the racist crap that has been going on on campus.”

As an example of joking or “trolling,” the latter of which is loosely defined as “deliberately provoking people in order to get an angry response,” putting up a swastika banner, hanging up anti-Muslim flyers, printing out “niggermania” cards, etc. is in spectacularly bad taste. It’s not funny, it helped put the entire Oberlin community in an uproar, it alarmed many students and faculty members, and it’s morally obtuse…

Oberlin is not the only campus that has suffered in recent times from hate incident hoaxes. New examples seem to pop up every year, sometimes more than once.

The article goes on to describe a number of fake “hate crimes,” not all of them racially tinged. That doesn’t mean the University of Missouri incidents are staged or faked; it means they need to be authenticated in some way, and it could be difficult to do so.

So I considered the idea that the poop swastika was actually an inside job, constructed as an attempt by the activists or their sympathizers to up the ante and spark more outrage. I didn’t, and still don’t, know for sure. But based on past experience and knowledge, as cited in those quotes, it would not have been surprising if was eventually determined to have been that sort of hoax.

However, what I did not consider, but what Sean Davis has devoted this piece in the Federalist to, is that the swastika never even existed in the first place.

I had assumed that the existence of the swastika had been confirmed by someone official and documented in some way: a dorm advisor, the campus police, a person with a cellphone. But apparently not, as Davis writes:

Although Donley did not respond to repeated requests for comment prior to publication, The Federalist spoke with two RHA staffers while trying to get in touch with Donley. Neither had personally witnessed the poop swastika. When asked if there was any photographic evidence of the alleged incident, one staffer replied, “Not to my knowledge.”

Frankie Minor, the director of residential life at Mizzou, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether he personally saw the poop swastika or any photographic evidence of it.

The Federalist also attempted to contact Christian Basi, the associate director of the University of Missouri News Bureau, who previously told the Columbia Missourian on Oct. 30 that the incident had been immediately reported to Mizzou police. Basi did not respond to requests for comment prior to the publication of this article.

Calls to the University of Missouri Police Department, which responded to and investigated the alleged poop swastika incident, also failed to yield any evidence of the poopstika.

There’s more in that vein. It’s always possible something will turn up to make it clear the thing did exist. But so far, Davis has tried to locate such evidence, and failed.

But that’s emblematic of every single part of the Missouri “narrative.” Much of it seems to rest on reports by people who are already invested in activist politics. The most credible of these reports is the one where a group said that a single drunken white male (who may or may not have been a student) called them the n-word. How incidents like these could ever be totally prevented or controlled by any college administration, however dedicated it might be to inclusion and diversity and every other liberal principle in the book, remains to be articulated.

But more importantly, as with allegations of sexual harassment, accusers no longer have to prove anything; the court of public opinion is the only court that matters, and it’s controlled by those with an agenda.

[ADDENDUM:Here’s a fairly good summary of the weaknesses of all the evidence, from a commenter at Ace’s. Another commenter there had this to say about the swastika: “I call bullshit.”]

And then there was Yale

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been too busy to follow what’s been happening at Yale. But since we’ve have talking about what’s going on at college campuses, I’ll take a moment to pay some attention.

Conor Friedersdorf has a piece on the subject at The Atlantic. After the usual throat-clearing about how the students’ mean well and all that jazz, he gets to a description of what actually occurred. Friedersdorf offers lengthy excerpts from the email written by lecturer Erika Christakis that was deemed so offensive by students that they’ve been “trying to get the couple removed from their residential positions, which is to say, censured and ousted from their home on campus…[by] attacking them, some with hateful insults, shouted epithets, and a campaign of public shaming.”

Fiedersdorf then goes on to add that “In doing so, they have shown an illiberal streak that flows from flaws in their well-intentioned ideology.” Yeah, right, just a little “illiberal streak.” No; their entire ideology is illiberal, in the sense of being profoundly opposed to liberty.

When you take a look at what Erika Christakis actually wrote, you’ll see that it was respectful, almost hesitant, and politically correct, with the mildest of suggestions for change. As Friedersdorf writes, “When I was in college, a position of this sort taken by a faculty member would likely have been regarded as a show of respect for all students and their ability to think for themselves.” I would caution him that the university of his experience has died and is no more. Get with the program (pogrom?), Conor.

Here’s what ensued:

…Yale students…demand[ed] that Nicholas and Erika Christakis resign their roles at Silliman College. That’s how Nicholas Christakis came to stand in an emotionally charged crowd of Silliman students, where he attempted to respond to the fallout from the email his wife sent.

Watching footage of that meeting, a fundamental disagreement is revealed between professor and undergrads. Christakis believes that he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue. But many of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings.

Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement.

Do you recognize the description? This is exactly what happened to the administrators at Missouri. Students demand, faculty and administrators must knuckle under and pronto, turning themselves into Allan Bloom’s Ursus universitatis on command.

Here’s the video. Watch it and weep at what leftist education and activism has wrought at what was once one of the greatest universities in the world.

And read the entire Friedersdorf piece.

More on Missouri—and more and more and more

The New Neo Posted on by

The University of Missouri story is not over. It has legs, and it has tentacles. I wrote two posts about it yesterday, and one at Legal Insurrection today that’s even longer, and I’m still not done. Nor are they.

If you read my Legal Insurrection post—and I hope you do—you’ll see that it introduces and discusses elements of the story of which I was as yet unaware when I posted on my blog about the events. The gist of it is that both President Wolfe and Chancellor Loftin, the men who were pressured to resign and have done so, had been doing and saying things that one would think would placate the demanding mob, but didn’t even cause the protesters to break stride in their efforts to remove them. I also spent many hours—many, many hours—searching in vain for more details about the actual charges of racism at the campus, those charges to which Wolfe and Loftin were accused of paying insufficient attention. They amount to (a) two reports of black students being called the n-word, once by an unspecified group of men in a pickup truck who may or may not have been students themselves, and once by another man who is sometimes described as having been a drunken student, and (b) one report of a swastika smeared in feces on a bathroom wall in a dorm, by an unknown person for an unknown reason. That seems to be it.

So, as Amy Miller points out, a lot of people are puzzled about what Wolfe and Loftin did or did not do that deserve canning as punishment. I can answer that question quite simply: they didn’t deserve it, the social justice warrior mob demanded it, and what the social justice warrior mob wants on college campuses the social justice warrior mob gets. Enlisting the football team in the fight was the icing on the cake, because football is very powerful on the college campus as well.

As I wrote yesterday, for the most part the American university died quite some time ago.

There are some other things I learned while researching that LI post. I already knew that the sequence of events began with an allegation by the student body president Payton Head (who is black) that he was harassed by some people in a truck shouting the n-word at him. But I hadn’t yet read the Facebook post in which he announced this. I’ve read it now, and it’s an interesting document, a veritable textbook of victimology, an immediate call to action, and an indictment of those who need to check their privilege, with a rather vague description of the offense and its alleged perpetrators.

Take a look. After you read it, you will not be surprised to learn that Head has been described in the school newspaper as “an activist for social change since he stepped foot on MU.”

Speaking of activists, there are other activists in this Mizzou protest movement, as one might expect. For example, the graduate student who started a hunger strike had this to say about his own history and inspiration:

But when you talk about most recently on campus, in terms of protesting and mobilizing communities, that really came from my experience organizing during Ferguson, after the murder of Mike Brown. Because the University of Missouri is only two hours away from Ferguson, and being able to have that experience”¦

”¦[I]t’s a part of the Black Lives Matter movement. But in another sense, this is really unique to campus just because of the example that we got from some of those who were organizing in Ferguson. There are three queer black women, who used their knowledge from Ferguson organizing in creating an organization called MU for Mike Brown. And from that, that’s really where a lot of what has been going on on campus has been morphed from.

Then we have the second complaint of n-word use. This time there were more witnesses, but the identity of the perpetrator (and whether it was even a student) seems likewise vague.

The deeper one goes into the facts at Missouri, the more it seems clear (or at least highly likely) that the actual complaints were minor at best, and that it is not at all certain that the alleged offenders were students there. What on earth was the administration supposed to do about it? There was nothing they could have done that they didn’t do. These incidents were pretexts for flexing the muscles of the movement. The activists have found themselves—particularly with the addition of the football team, which has muscle both literal and financial—to be strong indeed.

The left is very sophisticated. The left is very tireless. The left is very organized. The left is very savvy about politics and power. The left is a giant octopus whose reach is vast, and it is in nearly total control of the American university.

I’ll close with more Allan Bloom, from his Closing of the American Mind, written in 1989. It’s long, but it’s important:

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others the warlike, in others the industrious. Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle. Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime. We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family (his own family””what has in its decay been dubbed the nuclear family). Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man. This called for something very different from the kind of attachment required for traditional communities where myth and passion as well as severe discipline, authority, and the extended family produced an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism, unlike the reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty””not so much to country but to the form of government and its rational principles””required in the United States”¦

But openness”¦eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. 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.

Liberalism without natural rights, the kind that we knew from John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, taught us that the only danger confronting us is being closed to the emergent, the new, the manifestations of progress. No attention had to be paid to the fundamental principles or the moral virtues that inclined men to live according to them.

The photographer versus the mob

The New Neo Posted on by

Watch it:

Articles about what happened are here and here.

Heather Mac Donald writes the following in City Journal (before this particular incident occurred, by the way; she is speaking of another video, one of an incident that occurred at Yale):

This shocking video is a glimpse of the future””the boorish, hate-filled Cultural Revolution come to America. Colleges have capitulated completely to delusional victimology; unless employers are willing to stand up against the coddled products of the academic hothouse, we may all soon be living in a world of screaming, monomaniacal victims.

One more thing: Ben Carson and the media

The New Neo Posted on by

You might think that the media attack on Ben Carson had the intent of damaging his standing among Republican voters in the primary. And if you think that, you’d be correct. The MSM has been distressed by the prospect of a man such as Carson, who polls well against Hillary Clinton, getting the nomination.

But even if that doesn’t work, and Carson successfully defends himself against the charges, and GOP voters reject what the MSM is saying about him (which seems to be happening), those MSM hit pieces on Carson still would be considered a success if they damage Carson with their natural and more trusting readership, Democrats and moderates.

So, what are the polls saying? Republicans still like him, they really really like him:

Over seven in 10 Republicans have a positive view of Carson (71 percent), similar to his 68 percent favorable rating in a Post-ABC poll six weeks ago. Businessman Donald Trump is close behind, with 69 percent favorability among Republicans, followed by Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) at 58 percent, former Florida governor Jeb Bush at 56 percent and Sen. Ted Cruz at 53.

What distinguishes Carson from his opponents is how intensely Republicans like him — 39 percent report a “strongly” favorable view of Carson, 13 points higher than for Trump (26 percent) and more than twice as many with strongly positive views of Rubio (19), Cruz (18) or Bush (12).

Moreover, Americans in general like him:

Carson also boasts largely positive ratings beyond the Republican party. By 50 percent to 32 percent, considerably more Americans have a favorable than unfavorable view of Carson. And in fact, that 50 percent favorable rating is the best for any presidential candidate in Post-ABC polling going back several months.

But inroads have been made in Carson’s standing with Independents:

His unfavorable ratings among political independents have risen to 35 percent, up from 23 percent six weeks ago. But even here, his overall image among independents continues to be positive, with 47 percent giving him favorable reviews.

So, it’s a modified success for the media.

The media isn’t through trashing Carson, not by a longshot (unless his polls drop significantly, in which case they can dispense with bashing him and start liking him again). The media isn’t even through with the “Carson the fabulist” attack, as you can see by columns such as this one by Richard Cohen in the WaPo, which trots out the same tired accusations.

Funny thing, though: Carson’s spirited and intelligent defense of himself against these accusations may have the paradoxical effect of showcasing a different side of Ben Carson. Those who may have thought him too phlegmatic for the presidency may be heartened by seeing his energetic defense of himself.

More on Missouri

The New Neo Posted on by

In response to my post on the resignation of President Wolfe of the University of Missouri, commenter “cornhead” asks: “How is the [university] president responsible for all these actions of third parties?”

Cornhead’s question was almost certainly rhetorical. But I’m using it as a jumping off point to add something important: the protesters and their supporters aren’t even remotely interested in questions such as cornhead’s, or the concept he’s getting at. They are interested in establishing and underlining the collective responsibility of members of races and classes of people they perceive to be their oppressors, and they are interested in zero tolerance. Therefore, if there is a single racial slur hurled by a single white person who might be in the vicinity of the university, all white people at the university are presumed guilty and in need of punishment and/or correction. And, if it’s anything like many situations that have occurred in the recent, past, quite a few would-be protestors are capable of manufacturing such incidents if they don’t occur naturally, in order to set up the circumstances for the self-flagellation that’s presumably required on the part of members of the privileged group.

The goal is not to establish responsibility and identify actual perpetrators. The actual goal is power: the power to make demands that will be obeyed—the power to turn the tables and reverse the power differential, putting the protesters in charge of what Allan Bloom called the “dancing bears” in the university faculty and/or administration. A central demand of protesters such as those at Missouri is almost always a university-wide process of mind-control and intimidation, with the mandatory requirement that administrators offer and faculty and students attend classes and/or workshops that describe exactly what is now required in terms of speech, thought, and behavior that the protesters deem acceptable.

In other words, the protesters want to become the official campus propagandists. Perhaps they already have done so.

We see here yet another demonstration of why it is that universities such as the University of Virgina instituted an immediate crackdown on fraternities as a result of the allegations in the Rolling Stone rape article, and why they kept many elements of the crackdown in place even after the story was revealed as bogus. They are dancing bears who don’t want to lose their jobs—and the majority of them are True Believers, as well.

Why am I giving so much space and time to this issue? Because it’s vitally, vitally important to liberty and the rule of law.

University of Missouri president Wolfe confirms the death of the university…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that was noted by Allan Bloom decades ago in The Closing of the American Mind.

I’ve written about Bloom’s book and thesis many times, particularly here and here. If you read those posts, you’ll immediately see their relevance to what’s happening now at the University of Missouri.

Here’s a summary of the Missouri situation:

The president of the University of Missouri system resigned Monday with the football team and others on campus in open revolt over his handling of racial tensions at the school.

President Tim Wolfe, a former business executive with no previous experience in academic leadership, took “full responsibility for the frustration” students had expressed and said their complaints were “clear” and “real.”…

The complaints came to a head a day earlier, when at least 30 black football players announced that they would not play until the president was gone. One student went on a weeklong hunger strike.

So now Wolfe’s gone, having taken responsibility for what happened. What was it that happened? Initially the AP story was a bit vague:

For months, black student groups have complained of racial slurs and other slights on the overwhelmingly white flagship campus of the state’s four-college system. Frustrations flared during a homecoming parade Oct. 10 when black protesters blocked Wolfe’s car, and he did not get out and talk to them. They were removed by police.

Students at the university are quoted in the article as expressing solidarity. Here’s one girl:

Katelyn Brown, a white sophomore from Liberty, said she wasn’t necessarily aware of chronic racism at the school, but she applauded the efforts of black students groups.

“I personally don’t see it a lot, but I’m a middle-class white girl,” she said. “I stand with the people experiencing this.”

And after all, what do middle-class white girls know? All they can do now is “stand with the people” experiencing whatever it is that the people say they are experiencing.

And what might that actually be? Here are some more details:

The protests began after the student government president, who is black, said in September that people in a passing pickup truck shouted racial slurs at him. In early October, members of a black student organization said slurs were hurled at them by an apparently drunken white student.

Also, a swastika drawn in feces was found recently in a dormitory bathroom.

Many of the protests have been led by an organization called Concerned Student 1950, which gets its name from the year the university accepted its first black student. Its members besieged Wolfe’s car at the parade, and they have been conducting a sit-in on a campus plaza since last Monday.

Two trucks flying Confederate flags drove past the site Sunday, a move many saw as an attempt at intimidation.

Okay, let’s recap:

There was an allegation that a truck of people drove past a black student and shouted racial epithets. We don’t appear to know whether (a) this in fact happened (b) whether the shouters were students (c) the identity of those students; and (d) whether they represented a widespread group or just themselves. But I doubt anyone except a few old curmudgeons like me are interested in the answers to those questions, or the same questions for that “apparently drunken white student,” and those Confederate flags. I’d also dearly love to know who put the fecal swastika on the wall, and why, and who it was actually aimed at.

And if the origins of that swastika are anything like many such incidents in the recent past at other universities, the perpetrator could actually have been one of the protesters or a sympathizer. For example:

…Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller News Foundation broke the story that a number of supposed racial incidents at Oberlin College in Ohio this spring [2013] were, in fact, a hoax. Oberlin certainly took the incidents seriously, even canceling classes on March 5 to convene a “day of solidarity.” However, Oberlin city police reports obtained by Ross made it clear that at least some of the material that had Oberlin up in arms, including a large swastika banner that was hung in the science center under cover of night, was in fact done by one or two Oberlin students as a “joke/troll to get an overreaction, in the context of the racist crap that has been going on on campus.”

As an example of joking or “trolling,” the latter of which is loosely defined as “deliberately provoking people in order to get an angry response,” putting up a swastika banner, hanging up anti-Muslim flyers, printing out “niggermania” cards, etc. is in spectacularly bad taste. It’s not funny, it helped put the entire Oberlin community in an uproar, it alarmed many students and faculty members, and it’s morally obtuse…

Oberlin is not the only campus that has suffered in recent times from hate incident hoaxes. New examples seem to pop up every year, sometimes more than once.

The article goes on to describe a number of fake “hate crimes,” not all of them racially tinged. That doesn’t mean the University of Missouri incidents are staged or faked; it means they need to be authenticated in some way, and it could be difficult to do so.

But beyond that, there’s another question: so what if these things happened? So what, even if they were committed by students? If the students can be identified, there are proper remedies and disciplinary action to follow, I’m almost certain—and no doubt they would be followed. If the incidents can’t be authenticated or the students identified, though, does that mean that, unless a campus reacts as Oberlin did to its hoax incident—canceling classes to convene a “day of solidarity, and the like—it’s an insufficient response? President Wolfe had already stated that his administration was meeting “around the clock” to study changes that were needed, and that many of them were already included in a “systemwide diversity and inclusion strategy” that had been in the works even prior to the incidents, and was due to be announced in spring of 2016.

Not good enough; not even close. Here’s what the University of Missouri protesters felt would have been a sufficient response (or rather, responses). I offer them in their entirety:

I. We demand that the University of Missouri System President, Tim Wolfe, writes a handwritten apology to the Concerned Student 1-­9-­5-0 demonstrators and holds a press conference in the Mizzou Student Center reading the letter. In the letter and at the press conference, Tim Wolfe must acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and provide a verbal commitment to fulfilling Concerned Student 1-9-5-­0 demands. We want Tim Wolfe to admit to his gross negligence, allowing his driver to hit one of the demonstrators, consenting to the physical violence of bystanders, and lastly refusing to intervene when Columbia Police Department used excessive force with demonstrators.

II. We demand the immediate removal of Tim Wolfe as UM system president. After his removal a new amendment to UM system policies must be established to have all future UM system president and Chancellor positions be selected by a collective of students, staff, and faculty of diverse backgrounds.

III. We demand that the University of Missouri meets the Legion of Black Collegians’ demands that were presented in 1969 for the betterment of the black community.

IV. We demand that the University of Missouri creates and enforces comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units, mandatory for all students, faculty, staff, and administration. This curriculum must be vetted, maintained, and overseen by a board comprised of students, staff, and faculty of color.

V. We demand that by the academic year 2017-2018, the University of Missouri increases the percentage of black faculty and staff campus-wide to 10%.

VI. We demand that the University of Missouri composes a strategic 10 year plan by May 1, 2016 that will increase retention rates for marginalized students, sustain diversity curriculum and training, and promote a more safe and inclusive campus.

VII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding and resources for the University of Missouri Counseling Center for the purpose of hiring additional mental health professionals — particularly those of color, boosting mental health outreach and programming across campus, increasing campus-­wide awareness and visibility of the counseling center, and reducing lengthy wait times for prospective clients.

VIII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding, resources, and personnel for the social justices centers on campus for the purpose of hiring additional professionals, particularly those of color, boosting outreach and programming across campus, and increasing campus-­wide awareness and visibility.

Perhaps that would be enough. For now.

By the way, the student government president at this school (whose undergraduate population is 79% white and 8% black) is black. One would think that might be evidence of a lack of systemic racial prejudice at the school, but apparently not nearly enough to save President Wolfe. Only turning the University of Missouri into a re-education camp will do. And I doubt that would be the end of it, either; the left rarely stops there.

This is very ominous. But it’s only the current manifestation of a trend that has been going on at least since the late 60s; the incident Allan Bloom was describing occurred at Cornell in 1969, after all. I’ll close with his words from The Closing of the American Mind, which I had quoted in a post I wrote last June entitled “Student Power and its Origins”:

[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.

We no longer hear much about academic freedom; it’s dead. It died quite some time ago, after becoming fatally ill in the late 1960s. President Wolfe didn’t want to be made into a dancing bear (demand #1), so he’s gone. That’s another kind of dance, but to the same tune.

[ADDENDUM See this for more dancing bears of the Ursus universitatis variety.]

Trump, Politico, and the West Point story

The New Neo Posted on by

And what of Donald Trump? He Jumped right onto ye olde Politico bandwagon, unlike the other Republican candidates:

WOW, one of the many lies by Ben Carson! Big story,” Trump tweeted, the latest in a string of attacks on Carson by the business mogul.

And then there was this:

IS CARSON HALLUCINATING? NOW LIES ABOUT WESTPOINT?

Just another reason to love Donald Trump, right?

I haven’t seen any walkback on the accusations from Trump yet, either. I’d say the odds are very poor that any will ever come.

Now, let me just say that it’s possible that some real dirt will be unearthed on Carson, something that will be important and verified, a material lie or something else that matters. But so far that’s not happened, and Trump is being opportunistic and cynical in seizing on Politico’s story without any sort of critical eye—despite the fact that Trump himself denounced Politico roundly about six weeks ago, when he tweeted the following:

@Politico, which is not read or respected by many, may be the most dishonest of the media outlets— and that is saying something.

The failing @politico news outlet, which I hear is losing lots of money, is really dishonest!

Not so dishonest that they can’t be treated as extremely trustworthy when they’ve got a hit piece on your main opponent, right?

I’m wondering what Trump’s defenders say about all of this. They have a few choices. One is to ignore it and pretend it’s not happening. Another is to say he’s right and Politico is right, and the evidence is compelling that Carson is a lying liar who lies. That shows an ability to ignore evidence and logic that would seem worthy of a leftist, and that’s not a compliment. A third option is to say it doesn’t matter because Trump is the only candidate who (fill in the blank with the praise of your choice).

As for me, it only strengthens my dislike of Trump and my conviction that he would be a terrible terrible president, and that he is no conservative either, and cannot be trusted. It is also possible, as some have asserted, that he’s actively working for the election of Hillary Clinton if he himself doesn’t make it as president. His attacks on his rivals have certainly had more force and repetitiveness than any critiques he’s made of her.

The media plot re Carson thickens…

The New Neo Posted on by

…or thins, depending on how you look at it.

The way the story stands right now is this, as best I can glean:

Almost all of Politico’s assertions about Carson and West Point have been walked back. No, the Carson campaign did not admit fabricating anything. Carson claims that he talked to Westmoreland at a dinner in 1969, and he was verbally offered a scholarship, not in the formal sense of an offer on paper but as a verbal assurance that if he wanted to apply he would be admitted and would get (as did every other cadet at that time) a free ride.

All the rest of it seems to boil down to nitpicking over the date of the meeting—was it Memorial Day, as Carson has held, or was it a few months earlier at a different banquet that Westmoreland attended in Detroit, as is more likely the case?

Wow, he probably got the date wrong by a few months for something that happened when he was seventeen. Run him out of town on a rail; the man should never be president!

The other stories that cast disparagement on Carson’s veracity are all of the “he said it happened, and we can’t find anyone who witnessed it” variety. These incidents were not for the most part things that could be verified by random people in the community, or even by anyone but Carson and the other person or people (usually rather few) involved, and none of those people has said he is lying. Of course, it’s possible that at some future point an actual lie of Carson’s that’s material in some way will emerge. But if not, it won’t be for lack of trying on the part of the MSM.

So far there’s very little, if any, red meat here. But you wouldn’t know it from the coverage. We on the right side of the blogosphere have followed this with interest and in detail, and have seen the slowly emerging retractions and Carson’s defense (some of those retractions have been from bloggers and pundits on the right who initially bought the Politico story).

But if you look at the MSM, you’d hardly know all of that was happening. I just did a search, and a vast number of papers that managed to cover the original “Carson the liar!!” story haven’t quite gotten around yet to taking any of it back. For example, at least as far as I can see, the NY Post and the Daily News still have only their original accusatory “Carson the liar” stories up without any updates or corrections, and in some cases have started on new stories in the same vein. This is the same media which failed to pursue Obama’s history—a history that was far more politically relevant, and featured a host of lies, then and now. For that matter, when did you last hear them talking about Hillary on the tarmac in Bosnia? And you won’t, either.

Politico did what it did to Carson with its eyes open. Writers know how to write, and they know what a word such as “offer” means versus words such as “application” and “acceptance.” They know that “scholarship” is not ordinarily some arcane and technical term of art. When used by most people, it means what we commonly understand it to mean, which is an education that’s paid for by the school or some other grant rather than by the student. When they printed that story yesterday about Dr. Carson, it was part of a concerted effort on the part of the media to sling enough mud at him that some of it was bound to stick. In the past, that sort of thing has worked; why not now?

And it has stuck. Commenter “K-E” wrote yesterday that “Politico should be ashamed of itself.” My reply was that not only was it very unlikely that Politico would be ashamed of itself, it probably would be very proud. That’s true whether Politico has had to change it’s story (which it did) or not:

UPDATE IV: Politico has now gutted its original piece, scrubbed the original title, removed the claims cited in this article as false, and added the following editor’s note:

Editor’s note: POLITICO stands by its reporting on this story, which has been updated to reflect Ben Carson’s on the record response. The original story and headline said that Carson’s campaign had admitted he “fabricated” a “full scholarship” from West Point, but now Carson denies that his campaign’s statement constituted such an admission, and the story and headline were changed to reflect that. POLITICO’s reporting established that Carson said he received a “full scholarship” from West Point, in writing and in public appearances over the years ”” but in fact he did not and there is actually no such thing as a “full scholarship” to the taxpayer-funded academy. And today in response to POLITICO he acknowledged for the first time that was not the case. Carson never explicitly wrote that he had applied for admission to West Point, although that was the clear implication of his claim to have received an offer of a “full scholarship,” a point that POLITICO’s initial report should have made clear.

Sadly, this Editor’s Note is still untrue. Politico obviously didn’t stand by its reporting, given that they changed the central claims. Their ridiculous attempt to pass off their editorializing as a possible interpretation of Carson’s campaign’s response is nonsensical. Furthermore, Politico did not establish that he did not receive a “full scholarship” offer from West Point — informally, he did receive such an offer, and in colloquial terms as well as West Point marketing materials, free tuition constitutes a scholarship. As for the notion that Carson implied he had applied to West Point, this is blatantly false — he says in both his own book as well as on Facebook, and has for years, that he applied only to Yale.

But that first headline that readers saw is the one that would tend to stick in the brain, “Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point scholarship.” The point of all of this is not to print the truth, it’s to damage Ben Carson’s candidacy by the death of a thousand cuts. And if you look around the blogosphere and on YouTube, there are plenty of commenters jumping on the “Ben Carson is a liar/fabricator” bandwagon, just as Politico knew they would and planned that they would.

It will not end here. Carson must be destroyed, as John Nolte (and others) predicted shortly before yesterday’s news broke:

Let me be very, very clear about one thing: The DC Media cannot allow Dr. Ben Carson to become President of the United States. And if the DC Media has to put on white robes, burn crosses, grab firehoses, and sic German Shepherds on Carson, they will. In fact, they already have. Not literally, but the tactics and the goals are exactly the same: By any means necessary, destroy the free-thinking black man who threatens our power.

It is just a historical fact, settled science if you will, that since the days of slavery, and straight through to Jim Crow and Segregation, that Democrats have sought to personally destroy any black person who dares threaten their power base. Dr. Carson is a huge threat to the Democrat Party, almost all of the DC Media is populated by leftwing Democrats, and therefore he must be destroyed ”” he must be Clarence Thomas’d.

Carson is a big threat to the Democrats, and they know it. So they are going about the neutralizing of that threat in the easiest and most effective way they know. Because they can.

[NOTE: I’ve entertained the thought that next up with Carson will be an accusation of sexual harassment or other misbehavior against him. Could be. But I actually think they’ll stick to with this “he’s a liar” tactic, because it hits him where it hurts, and his autobiography provides tons of fodder for this sort of attack. As would anyone’s, including Barack Obama’s, if they cared to do so.

Of course, once they’ve established Carson as a liar, then they might go to the sexual accusations because the ground will have been prepared, as it were.]