Howard University snags quite the prize: Kendi

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’ve written several previous posts about Kendi, for example this.]

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.

Only a perfect war will do – and maybe not even that, if it’s waged by Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Those who hate Trump on the left and on the erstwhile right also hate the Iran War, or the Iran operation, or whatever you want to call it. They’ve declared it a failure after a month, “without evidence.” Or rather, the evidence they cite is that the regime spokespeople – the ones who are still alive – mouth defiant words and are able to get some missiles off now and then.

And today we have this difficult news:

An American pilot was rescued in a daring operation by US special forces Friday after Iran shot down an F-15E fighter jet — and placed a bounty on the crew.

A second fighter pilot was still missing.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed “newly developed and advanced air defenses” had downed the jet, which was “completely destroyed and crashed,” Tehran’s Press TV reported.

Since nothing the Iranian press says can be trusted at face value, there’s no reason to imagine this was the result of newly developed or advanced air defenses. If indeed the plane was shot down rather than had some mechanical problem – and I tend to think it was shot down, since the US isn’t denying it (or officially confirming it yet, as far as I can tell). The mechanism probably was either some local air defense system that had remained intact, or had been repaired, or something newly supplied from Russia that actually worked and constituted a surprise.

Trump’s enemies are very happy about this because they can use it to bolster their “the war has failed!” narrative, although there’s no logic to it. Anyone who thought thousands upon thousands of air strikes could occur without one or more planes being shot down (or coming down through mechanical failure) is either tremendously naive or disingenuous or both.

The demand is for no war ever – or if that fails, a perfect war. Even if the current regime were to surrender, I can practically guarantee that the Trump-haters (mostly on the left but not solely on the left) would give him no credit and would say the war was still a failure. They’d find a way and they’d find a reason.

One of the stupidest things they demand is the need to know exactly how long the war will last, even at its outset. Or the need to get a guarantee that everything will work out. Or they pretend that they haven’t been given reasons for the war. They also ignore the differences between the people of Iraq during that war and the Iranian people during this one. In addition, they act as though regime change was the main goal in Iran, and that if it doesn’t happen then the whole endeavor is a failure – when the idea was always that regime change would be an excellent side effect but that destroying the regime’s weapons and leadership would be a vast improvement on the non-war alternatives that have long been the status quo.

But they ignore all that and compare this war to some Platonic perfect war that does not exist in the real world. Or they say, “Of course, it’s a terrible regime that needed to end, but ….” offering no way to have made it end.

Trump is portrayed as stupid and blundering and ill-meaning, because that’s the only Trump that exists in their minds.

What would they have accepted as the proper provocation for a war? For the left, I suppose the answer might be “anything if a Democrat decided on it,” but “nothing” for Trump. And what of the isolationist right? What would they accept? Maybe an actual nuclear attack on the US or a full-scale military invasion by some foreign power? Maybe. Maybe even those things wouldn’t be enough. They might be labeled a false flag, as 9/11 was labeled by 9/11 Truthers who sprang up shortly after that horrific event. Or perhaps this sort of thing:

How long ago did I first start hearing that about FDR and Pearl Harbor? I can’t recall, but it was many decades ago. Even World War II was hardly a perfect war, so that must be discredited as well – a war against one of the most evil enemies in history. And yes, the casualties were very high.

Thing is, once you start feeling that the government has lied to you – which it certainly has at times – some people will slip into the convention that practically everything the government says is a lie – and in particular is a lie if doubting it feeds into their already-existent belief system. Plenty of people have lost faith in anything government says and does, and have found people to blame for that.

Another factor in all of this is the protected nature of most Americans over the years. The draft ended over fifty years ago, and so with an all-volunteer military, most people don’t have to serve in the military and lack any military knowledge of the type that might be learned by serving. I’m not asking to bring the draft back. But an abysmal level of ignorance, and pundits preying on that ignorance, is one of the consequences of the end of the draft.

Hegseth allows the military to carry arms on base

The New Neo Posted on by

Gun-free zones have the unfortunate consequence of making the people in them vulnerable to someone with a gun. This has been especially ironic on military bases, where there have been mass murders such as the ones at Fort Hood.

Here’s an article from 2014:

For decades, soldiers and their families have been able to purchase guns for personal use in retail stores on some bases. Even today, some “base exchanges” sell guns. Soldiers and their families can fire personal firearms at target ranges, participate in competitions and in gun clubs – all located on the nation’s military bases. But a federal directive won’t allow them to carry concealed weapons on bases, even though it’s legal in the rest of Texas.

Now, with two separate rampage shootings within five years of one another at Killeen’s Fort Hood Army base that left a total of 17 people dead, there is renewed discussion over whether soldiers and their family members should be able to carry concealed handguns on military posts in states like Texas. …

Until the 1990s, military personnel often kept personal firearms in their base homes without question. But starting in the 1990s, first under then-President George H.W. Bush, the Department of Defense issued an order prohibiting privately owned weapons on bases unless a commander makes an exception.

There were actually two fatal mass shootings at Fort Hood, the first in 2009 and the second in 2014. The 2014 one happened on April 2, which happens to be the same date as today. Perhaps that wasn’t lost on Hegseth when he issued this declaration:

The War Department’s uniformed service members are trained at the highest and unwavering standards. These warfighters, entrusted with the safety of our nation, are no less entitled to exercise their God-given right to keep and bear arms than any other American. Our warfighters defend the right of others to carry — they should be able to carry themselves. Recent events like what happened at Fort Stewart, Holloman Air Force Base, or Pensacola Naval Air Station have made clear that some threats are closer to home than we would like.

If you look at the responses to the tweet of Hegseth’s that I linked, many are negative. For example:

The sheer amount of negligent discharges that will inevitably follow is gonna be wild. There is no legitimate reasons non-mp’s to carry service rifle/pistol when not within a combat zone or conducting training. Accountability, safety, and oversight will be a nightmare.

Of course there can be problems. But there are already obvious problems with the present situation. The comment ignores the fact that it’s only been since the presidency of Bush I that the carrying of such weapons on base was banned. Why? Were there a lot of problems?

From that 2014 article:

“If they live in the base housing … guns have to be registered,” said Geoffrey Corn, professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston, who served more than 20 years as an Army officer.

Corn said he opposes proposals to allow concealed weapons on bases.

“The idea of carrying a concealed weapon is really inconsistent with the military culture,” he said.

He said military supervisors have enough to worry about without the concern that a soldier made unhappy by a particular order could be packing a hidden firearm.

But in 2014 at Fort Hood that’s exactly the situation, and it didn’t stop the shooter at all:

On April 2, 2014, a spree shooting occurred at several locations on the Fort Hood military base near Killeen, Texas. Four people, including the gunman, were killed while 14 additional people were injured; 12 by gunshot wounds. The shooter, 34-year-old Army Specialist Ivan Lopez-Lopez, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Immediately prior to the shooting, Lopez went to the 49th Transportation Battalion administrative office where he tried to obtain a ten-day leave form so he could attend to “family matters”. However, he was informed that he would have to come back later to retrieve it, sparking a verbal altercation between him and several other soldiers. The request was ultimately denied because Lopez had already secured housing in an apartment in Killeen.

Lopez then went outside to smoke a cigarette. At approximately 4:00 p.m., he returned and opened fire with a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson M&P pistol inside the same building, injuring three soldiers—?PFC Wilfred Sanchez, Sgt. Jonathan Westbrook, and SFC Warren Hardnett—?all of whom had been involved in the altercation with Lopez. [6][12] Lopez also killed Sgt. First Class Daniel Ferguson, who was attempting to barricade a lockless conference room door to prevent Lopez from gaining entry and harming anyone inside.

This went on for many minutes, as Lopez went to different areas of the base shooting people, all of whom I will assume were unarmed. What finally stopped him? This:

Approximately eight minutes after the shooting first started, Lopez drove to the parking lot of another building, Building 39002, where he was confronted by an unidentified military police officer, with whom he had a verbal exchange. When he brandished his weapon, the officer fired a shot at him that missed. Lopez responded by committing suicide, shooting himself in the right side of the head.

He finally encountered someone armed.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Pam Bondi is out as AG. I think she’s been on the way out ever since she “misspoke” on the Epstein files. She’s never been popular with the online right crowd.

This is from Trump, who – not surprisingly – isn’t telling why this happened:

Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future, and our Deputy Attorney General, and a very talented and respected Legal Mind, Todd Blanche, will step in to serve as Acting Attorney General. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

(2) Trump had already spoken out against Tucker Carlson (something J. D. Vance has yet to do, but it could happen). Now Trump has reposted a Douglas Murray column that absolutely excoriates Carlson as only Murray can do, entitled, “Deranged Tucker Carlson backstabs Trump.” Here’s Murray’s piece, if you’re interested. It is certainly clear where Trump stands on Carlson.

(3) California fraud involving government programs is incredibly widespread and has been going on for ages. Is anyone here surprised? The latest arrests involve hospice care that never was, to the tune of about fifty million dollars. Chump change in California:

The FBI, with the Health and Human Services (HHS), raided the home of Amelou Gill and Gladwin Gill, a doctor and a nurse, in Southern California over accusations that they committed $7 million in hospice fraud.

According to J.D. Vance, the FBI conducted additional raids in the area. In total, they nabbed people who allegedly stole over $50 million. …

St. Francis Palliative Care in Anaheim, which the Gills operate, has a 2.3% mortality rate over the last five years.

It’s odd when a hospice center has a 97% survival rate because people usually enter hospice at the end of a terminal illness.

It’s not unheard of that people who enroll in hospice don’t die within the six months allotted, and often they renew for another six months, and this can go on for quite some time. Or, now and then, they get better. But a 97% survival rate is beyond ludicrous.

There were many many signs in California (and elsewhere) that massive fraud was ongoing, and not just in hospice care. Much of it was ignored, although there were some prosecutions by the state. However:

(4) Moon launch by NASA:

The spur, of course, for today’s great leap was Elon Musk. While NASA’s big rival in the Sixties was the Soviets’ space programme, which threatened to prove that their ethos of collectivism could make faster progress than the American way of free men, free enterprise (and of course, free Nazis), Musk emerged in the 21st century as part Bond villain, and part John Galt. That Sixties narrative is now in danger of being reversed, with SpaceX taking the role of Ayn Randian, square-jawed enterprise and individual heroism, and NASA looking like the clumsy, over-burdened, over-regulated state-sector attempt, with more being spent on HR than R&D.

(5) Happy Passover! Each year, the meaning of the holiday seems to deepen. This year is no exception.

I need a new computer

The New Neo Posted on by

Mine is so outdated it’s ludicrous. How old is it? Well, let’s just say I’ve got Windows 7.

It’s not that I couldn’t have gone out and bought a new one years and years ago. After all, there’s a wide range of types and prices, and I mostly read and write on mine so I don’t need anything all that fancy. But what I hate, and what keeps me clinging – bitterly or otherwise – to the one I have is that I hate transitions to new devices and new systems.

And so I’ve been putting it off – for years. I nurse my old one along. It’s a Lenovo laptop, and people laugh when they see it, especially the keyboard. It has been worn down, like mountains that have been around for half a billion years. I’m going to post a photo, even though this is highly embarrassing:

And yes, I know I not only could get a new computer, but I could instead just get a new keyboard and attach it to the old laptop. But the keyboard is only a small part of the problem.

The seductive thing is – sometimes my computer works just fine. In fact, most of the time it works just fine. And so it lulls me into procrastinating on the task of replacing it – until I hit a day like today, when it’s been balky and strange and then suddenly, for no discernible reason at all, it’s fine again.

And, in the nature of computers, it’s not telling me: why today? Why now? Maybe it’s something else besides the ancient computer. Maybe it’s the wifi connection. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s – who knows?

And please please don’t tell me to get a Mac. Had one for many years and hated it. I never never never got used to it.

Tucker Carlson, changer

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyone who’s followed Tucker Carlson over the years knows he’s been on a long and winding journey: from a childhood that was highly unusual, to say the least – raised in mega-wealth but with an eccentric mother who deserted the family when he was six years old and thereafter had nothing to do with her two sons – to a long career as journalist and TV personality with shifting positions. He reached the heights of popularity on the right with his Fox News show from 2016 t0 2023, as he became more and more aligned with what one might call the Buchanan-type isolationist wing of the party and finally was let go by Fox and started his own podcast. Riding on his previous popularity (and probably an assortment of bots and foreign fans in Muslim states) he’s been popular ever since and grown increasingly pro-Russia and pro-Arab as well as increasingly anti-Israel in a mendacious manner.

Along the way, his religious views have changed as well. He describes some of that in this short clip from a year ago:

So although he was a nominal Christian growing up, it really was a shallow thing. And he says that about three years ago he was mauled by a demon. In addition, it was about two or three years ago that he read the Bible for the first time:

Tucker on spiritual warfare: “Leaving aside elections, it’s clearly a pivot point in history. There are unseen forces acting on people. People, while they have freewill, are not really in charge of the arc of history at all. A lot of these issues are symbols of a larger battle.”

So according to Tucker, the larger overarching battle is spiritual. In the last couple of years he keeps mentioning his Christianity and yet also has taken more and more extreme positions on a host of issues including – of all things – sharia law. This latter position is a rather recent development. For example, see this short video excerpt from about eight years ago, back in his Fox News days:

Contrast to this short clip of Carlson recently, demonstrating what you might call his “evolution” in thinking:

In that clip Tucker still self-identifies as a Christian, but his praise for “tolerant” and “diverse” Arab Muslim societies is bizarre. Not only does it contrast with what he “knew” eight years ago, but it seems based on dinner party conversation with polite elites trying to curry favor with him.

And yes, he’s probably been getting money from Qatar. But he’s been mega-rich for his whole life, and I think the prospect of more money would be insufficient in and of itself to turn the tide for him like this. I think he’s become an Arab and Muslim admirer because of their enforcement of strict cultural norms that he says are lacking in Western countries. The issues of liberty – or harsh apostasy punishment, or his old concern for women’s rights, or his definition of “diversity” in Arab states (which is a laugh), all really have fallen off in service to his desire for what he sees as clean streets and moral strictness where a man’s a man and a woman’s a woman and all that.

Which brings us to the present. It appears that Tucker is edging closer to taking the next step – conversion to Islam. Here’s Tucker now:

Today SCOTUS heard arguments on birthright citizenship

The New Neo Posted on by

See this:

Here is the Question Presented on which the court agreed to take the case:

“The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that those “born * * * in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” are U.S. citizens. U.S. Const. Amend. XIV, § 1. The Clause was adopted to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and their children, not on the children of aliens temporarily visiting the United States or of illegal aliens. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order No. 14,160, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, which restores the original meaning of the Citizenship Clause and provides, on a prospective basis only, that children of temporary visitors and illegal aliens are not U.S. citizens by birth. The Citizenship Order directs federal agencies not to issue or accept citizenship documents for such children born more than 30 days after the Order’s effective date.

“The question presented is whether the Executive Order complies on its face with the Citizenship Clause and with 8 U.S.C. 1401(a), which codifies that Clause.”

President Trump is attending, although the left has been outraged about that and claims it threatens separation of powers (and apparently no president has ever done so before). However, there has been a chair there for presidents if one happens to want to attend, so it seems perfectly okay.

The Legal Insurrection article I linked in the first sentence says that from the drift of the proceedings there’s no way to tell how the justices will ultimately rule, but it seems the vote will probably be very close with Barrett casting the deciding vote. Jonathan Turley seems to think it most likely that the government will lose. I find that I agree, mostly because I think they’re reluctant to make that large a change when the intent of the statute’s framers is unclear because they never envisioned the present-day situation (for example, that of pregnant tourists coming here for the sole purpose of giving birth here and of conferring citizenship on their baby and then immediately leaving with the baby).

I think it’s obvious that such a situation would not have been the intent of the statute’s framers, although they never explicitly addressed it. But I think it might take a constitutional amendment to change the law. I doubt such an amendment would pass – too many blue states? – and in any event it would take a long time.

[NOTE: I’ve written on the birthright citizenship question many times. I refer you in particular to this post, which adds links to several other posts of mine on the subject, plus a quote with some predictions.]

Planning for the Iran War’s aftermath

The New Neo Posted on by

We don’t know the extent of the planning for the aftermath of the current Iran operation, either by the US, Israel, or the Iranians. We don’t know what’s going on at present in terms of the destruction of the regime’s lower-down personnel rather than just the weaponry, its infrastructure, and upper echelon of leaders. We don’t know how many defections there have been, or from which regime segment. We don’t know what will happen in terms of negotiations or in terms of surrender, unconditional or otherwise (although I can’t imagine anyone in the regime surrendering unconditionally).

We don’t know how chaotic a transition of some kind will be, or how long-lasting, or how solid. We don’t know how many disruptions – particularly in the oil market – will take place, nor how serious and long-lasting they will be.

I have long assumed that it’s the Israelis who know the most about the ins and outs of Iran’s structure, including the factions who would like to take over in any Day After – their strengths and weaknesses, and their viewpoints. I think it’s a valid assumption of mine. But I don’t know.

Nor do I think there are good analogies from the past. There are huge differences between Iran and Iraq, and Iran and either Germany or Japan in World War II.

I came across this recent article purporting to provide a roadmap of sorts for the aftermath of the war. It’s long and involved, and I don’t know how well it matches plans already in the works or what will happen in the future. But I think it’s worth reading.

An excerpt:

Here we arrive at what is perhaps the most consequential analytical error in the entire strategic discourse: the persistent treatment of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a military organization.

It is not. It is a corporate conglomerate that happens to possess an army, a navy, a missile force, and a nuclear program. …

If the binding agent is economic rather than ideological, then the mechanism of accelerated regime collapse is economic rather than kinetic. A general who controls a $500 million construction portfolio operates on a fundamentally different calculus than a Basij ideologue with nothing to lose. One can be turned; the other can only be neutralized. The United States should be mapping these incentives at the individual commander level and designing calibrated offers: asset protection in exchange for institutional surrender, with amnesty for cooperation, and targeted financial strangulation for resistance. This costs a fraction of what sustained bombing costs, and it strikes directly at the structural ligament that holds the regime together.

And when that ligament snaps, when the Supreme Leader’s authority vanishes entirely, the legal and religious shielding of the bonyad empires evaporates with it.

What follows will not be an orderly audit.

It will be a scramble.

But it seems to me that’s the sort of thing that’s already known and understood, even though we’re not being told any details. Whether it will be carried out as planned is another question. But I don’t see why anyone should assume this sort of thing hasn’t been gamed out by the US and in particular by Israel.

Israel has so far taken the lead in killing the rulers of Iran, based on some sort of deep intelligence. I assume that Israel will take the lead in the aftermath if things go well, and that they have plans based on actual knowledge. But it is certainly possible that I’m being too sanguine. It’s a time of uncertainty.