“The worst are full of passionate intensity”: meet Columbia student leader Khymani James

The New Neo Posted on by

Lately there’s been a great deal of talk around the blogosphere about Khymani James, the student leader – if the movement can be said to have a leader – of Columbia’s anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-Enlightenment demonstrations and encampments.

It makes me think of this sort of thing, updated for our own more messed-up era:

If you want to get up to speed on the sort of person who’s now considered a student leader, see this as well as this. From the former:

One of the most vocal student activists leading the anti-Israel Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, Khymani James, openly stated in an live-stream of an official university inquiry in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

James, who states in the hearing that he goes by “he/she/they” pronouns, live-streamed his meeting with Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, where he doubled down on an Instagram post that sparked the report. In the report, which he reads aloud at the start of the meeting, James warned Zionists who may want to “meet up and fight” and that he “fights to kill.”

“Do you see why that’s problematic in any way?” a Columbia employee asked James during the hearing, to which he responded: “No.”

And from the second link:

[James said] “We will always stand on business. Zionists, they don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone, Zionists don’t deserve to live. The same way we’re very comfortable accepting that nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world. ”

That particular video then cuts to James speaking in a cult-like fashion to a group of “protesters” who then formed a human chain to block Jewish students from passing.

James wasn’t done, though. In another excerpt from his livestream, he can be heard suggesting that he has a desire to murder Jews but hasn’t acted on it yet.

As the great poet Yeats wrote over 100 years ago, “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” He also wrote that “the best lack all conviction” – but I don’t think that’s the case here. “The best” have plenty of conviction – they’re just not in charge of our institutions.

But what especially interests me about Khymani James – aside from the fact that Columbia didn’t expel him under their no-hate-speech policy after they became aware of these remarks – is his personal history. Most recent articles I’ve read about him ignore that history, but I find it quite fascinating because this guy has been in a leadership role for a long time and has gotten many kudos for it. See this:

In 2021, the Boston Globe wrote a glowing article about James and his “confrontational approach.” It said that James was a high school student at the prestigious Boston Latin Academy, and a student member of the Boston Public Schools committee before resigning because the adult members were “racist and adultist.”

Just a few months later, he called into a school committee meeting and stated, “I, too, hate white people,” while defending two members accused of anti-white racism.

So that was in 2021, about three years ago, towards the end of his high school career. No wonder he’s so full of himself. The world has rewarded him over and over for his racism and hatred. He probably considered himself immune from any negative consequences, and why not?

And here’s an excerpt from that 2021 Globe article. What a lot of heady power for a 17-year-old [emphasis mine]:

As a global pandemic raged last fall, and battles over school reopening plans turned bitter, a 17-year-old high school senior named Khymani James was sworn in as the student representative on Boston’s School Committee.

From the confines of his bedroom, where he logged into marathon School Committee meetings on Zoom and peppered Twitter with his sharp critiques and pointed questions, James became an unlikely force in Boston politics last winter as he advocated for the city’s 50,000 students.

Outspoken and relentless in his quest for answers, the teenager’s direct approach at times contrasted starkly with the more cautious, guarded takes of his School Committee elders, all of them political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the mayor. …

The passion James brought to his public service began with his own turbulent personal history, the traumatic losses he rarely mentioned, even to close friends. It also reflects a generational shift, according to experts. Across the country, younger leaders are moving toward more confrontational approaches, forged in an era of historic social upheaval and destined to clash with an older, more conservative brand of leadership.

“This generation of young people is no longer satisfied with incremental change,” said Chris Buttimer, a researcher at the MIT Teaching Systems Lab who has studied student activism. “They want to fundamentally change structures.”

More background of a personal nature:

Known for his scathing critiques of Boston’s schools, James is also a sterling example of the system’s potential: A young Black man raised by a single, immigrant mother in a South Boston housing development, nurtured by teachers who recognized his potential, accepted by one of the city’s best public high schools, and then by a prestigious Ivy League college, Columbia University.

He attributes his lack of fear to his upbringing by a Jamaican mother of uncommon strength, who taught him to reject societal “rules” put in place to oppress the powerless. But tragedy and trauma made James fearless, too: When, at 12 years old, he lost his mother and his world collapsed, it felt like he had nothing left to lose.

Until then, it had been the two of them against the world, their feisty natures so closely entwined, James thought of them as two halves of the same person.

“Colors looked different after she was gone,” he said. “The sky looked darker.”

After his mother’s sudden death at age 31, James shuttled between relatives and family friends, enduring episodes of emotional abuse and struggles with his mental health, he said. Just beginning to identify as gay, he encountered intolerance in his own family.

After a relative abruptly kicked him out of their home on Easter morning in 2016 — in part for identifying as gay, James said — he recalls walking to a nearby T stop, carrying his few belongings in a garbage bag and wondering where to go next. He was still just 12.

He admits to having mental health “struggles” – and I believe him. The enmeshment with his mother and then her death at a young age would certainly be traumatic. However, plenty of people have terrible childhoods and don’t turn into raging balls of hatred because of it. He might have been thrown out of the relatives’ house because of being gay, but note that “in part” statement. My guess is that he was a rebellious and difficult young adolescent and they’d had enough. I wonder whether the Globe independently corroborated the story, as well.

More:

His close friend Charlene Adames-Pimentel recalls rampant homophobia in their middle school, where James was a target who constantly fought back. (“How’s your GPA?” was one of his favorite comebacks.)

“He was that person that everyone wanted to break, and you can’t break him,” Adames-Pimentel said. “He was intimidating in the sense that he was always right, and always himself.”

“Always right?” Hardly. But I don’t doubt he’s actually smart in the academic sense; James got into Boston Latin when it still was an exam school. Then he had a court internship, and then the prestigious Committee appointment:

Keenly observant and unafraid of conflict, James called out hypocrisy where he saw it: in budget cuts that threatened his teachers and mentors; in school reopening plans that failed to address aging ventilation systems; in leaders who claimed to value student voices, but failed to give the School Committee’s lone student representative, elected by their peers, equal standing as a voting member.

I had wondered how he got the position and that answers the question: other students elected him. More – and note that word “passion” again:

[Superintendent] Cassellius said she admired James’s passion and tireless preparation for meetings, and believed deeply in his potential, as she wrote in a glowing recommendation to Columbia. But she said she worried that the traumas of his past, and of the pandemic, were affecting him as his tone grew harsher.

It’s a trajectory that appears to have gotten steeper while at Columbia, and grown to include Jew-hatred.

More:

James said he was fully aware of committee conventions, and ultimately made a conscious choice to reject them. “I chose not to practice respectability politics because it wasn’t getting anyone anywhere,” he said.

“Respectability politics.”

James finally resigned from the School Committee. He then continued in the same strident and verbally combative vein. The following person gets bragging “I told you so” rights for warning Columbia prior to James’ becoming a student there [emphasis mine]:

After a June 16 School Committee meeting where James used inflammatory language to defend Oliver-Davila and Rivera, the two former board members accused of antiwhite racism, one Twitter user posted a video of his comments [apparently the ones bout hating whites] and tagged Columbia, suggesting that the school reconsider James’s admission. “Is this the type of student you want at your school?” the tweet asked.

Columbia administrators may be sorry they didn’t heed that particular tweet.

By the way, the comments to that Globe article, from 2021 when it was written, are quite something. Here’s one, for example: “Racism is the exploitation of people of color by white people and our white institutions. Prejudice against whites is not racism.”

Khymani James has probably been told that for most of his life.

And guess what? Now that all of this has gone public, Columbia has finally acted a little bitty bit:

Columbia University has banned the student protest leader, who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” from the campus, a university spokesperson confirmed to The Hill Friday.

Is that the same as being expelled? I don’t think so. And it’s not as though Columbia has just learned any of this. They were told of warning signs before James even entered the school, but they’ve certainly been aware of his rabid Jew-hatred for many many months.

Even James himself seems to have noticed that his usual exemption from consequences seems not to be operating quite the way it used to, because – very uncharacteristically, as far as I can see – he has apologized:

James apologized for the heated language Friday, saying in a post on social media platform X that his comments were “wrong.”

I was curious to read for myself what this apology consisted of, and sure enough, it’s accompanied by a “poor me” blaming of the nasty old right and the playing of the ever-present intersectional victim card. Here it is:

James has been playing this sort of game for a long, long time, minus the surface apology. It would be nice if he stops being rewarded for it. But I have no doubt that, if he fades into the background, he’ll be easily replaced by others playing a similar game.

Kristi Noem isn’t going to be winning over the dog lovers

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the story:

The Guardian’s article describes a section of Noem’s book, set for release next month, in which she recounted shooting her dog after deciding it was “less than worthless” and “untrainable.”

In her account, Noem grabbed her gun and led the dog, named Cricket, to a gravel pit.

“It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done,” Noem wrote.

She then went on to kill a family goat, which she called “nasty and mean.” Noem also led the goat to a gravel pit, where she said her first shot wounded but did not kill the animal. She got another shell for her gun and killed the goat, according to the book. …

Noem was lambasted Friday on social media; some said they were “horrified,” while others posted pictures of their dogs.

Although I’m fond of dogs, my first thought was about something I learned when I first moved to New England over a half century ago: the fact that back then, outside of cities, many people considered their dogs working animals and if they weren’t up to snuff they were shot. I’ve heard many stories from people in my generation about that sort of thing happening to them as a child: a parent taking the animal somewhere out of sight and killing it because it was worthless for work.

Now I see that Noem herself gave the same explanation:

“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” she said in a post to X …

Nevertheless, it’s not something that’s going to endear her to most voters today, to say the least.

The White House took the opportunity to post photos of the president “walking with the family dog Commander, who has had various biting incidents.” Apparently Commander is a serious serial biter who probably should be put down, so this is quite the contrast.

In addition, Noem is – or was – considered a contender to be named as Trump’s VP, and so this certainly seems a counterproductive revelation on her part. What’s more, Trump isn’t keen on dogs, although I doubt anyone is using that as the deciding factor in whether or not to vote for him. But Noem may now be out of contention.

The background to all of this is that plenty of untrainable (or untrained) dogs or just surplus dogs are euthanizeed all the time in the US, it’s just that people outsource the coup de grace now. Here are some animal shelter statistics.

SCOTUS has got its work cut out for it on the presidential immunity question

The New Neo Posted on by

Jonathan Turley has written a good article on the dilemma facing the Court:

There are cliffs on both sides of this case. If the court were to embrace special counsel Jack Smith’s arguments, a president would have no immunity from criminal charges, even for official acts taken in his presidency.

It would leave a president without protection from endless charges from politically motivated prosecutors.

If the court were to embrace Trump counsel’s arguments, a president would have complete immunity. It would leave a president largely unaccountable under the criminal code for any criminal acts. …

Alvin Bragg is the very personification of the danger immunity is meant to avoid.

With cliffs to the left and the right, the justices are looking at a free-fall dive into the scope of constitutional and criminal law as they apply to presidential conduct.

They may be looking not for a foothold as much as a shorter drop.

Some of the justices are likely to be seeking a third option where a president has some immunity under a more limited and less tautological standard than the one the DC Circuit offered.

The problem for the court is presidential privilege and immunity decisions are meant to give presidents breathing room by laying out bright lines within which they can operate.

Ambiguity defeats the purpose of such immunity. So does a test that turns on the motivation of an official act. …

The line-drawing proved maddening for the justices in the oral argument.

Maddening, but necessary.

And now it’s the president of Columbia who may be guilty of academic fraud

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we go again.

I get a bit tired of starting posts by saying something like “It comes as no surprise … “. But indeed, it comes as no surprise that Columbia’s president Nemak “Minouche” Shafik, who recently testified in front of Congress and who has been AWOL in dealing with the vicious anti-Semitic “demonstrations” at the school, is now suspected of having taken false sole credit for a highly-cited academic paper:

Shafik got a B.A. in economics and politics from UMASS-Amherst, an M.S. in economics from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in economics from Oxford.

In one of the comments at “X”:

Unbelievable. Has plagiarism now become a prerequisite for those applying for the position of President of elite US universities?

So far, the academics involved have also all been seeming DEI hires: women, and also some are minority women.

One of the commenters says this, however:

You might want to go slow here; in research jobs it is not uncommon to credit the research director despite what is often a very minor role in the product.

I assume we’ll hear more. She might get canned in the meantime for other reasons – and get replaced by another leftist apparatchik.

The unintended and yet totally foreseen consequences of raising the minimum wage

The New Neo Posted on by

Whoever could have guessed such as thing? Everyone:

In response to recent minimum wage increases in California, fast food restaurants across the state are shifting to automation to get rid of wage-earning humans.

The move to making customers place orders at digital kiosks alleviates what owners say is the financial strain of rising labor costs after the minimum wage for the state’s fast food workers increased on April 1 from $16 to $20 per hour.

Harsh Ghai, a Burger King franchise owner who manages 140 outlets along the West Coast, is leading the transition to automation. He plans to introduce digital kiosks across all his restaurants within months — a drastic acceleration from his original timeline of five to 10 years.

Note that it was going to be happening anyway, just on a slower schedule.

And – Harsh Ghai? Is he a harsh guy?

Here’s another article on the effects of the new minimum wage law.

How could anyone not realize that this was coming as a result of the law? Minimum wage law hikes tend to ignore economics but make those who support them feel good – at the workers’ expense.

This was inevitable: defamatory race hoaxer meets voice AI

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m surprised this took as long as it did – which was not very long, actually. The black perp, who had been athletic director at the school, combined race hoaxing with workplace revenge in order to frame his white principal:

A high school athletic director in Maryland has been accused of using artificial intelligence to impersonate a principal on an audio recording that included racist and antisemitic comments, authorities said Thursday.

Authorities said the case appears to be among the first of its kind in the country and called for new laws to guard against the technology. Experts also warned that artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly powerful, while the ability to detect it may lag behind without more resources.

Dazhon Darien faked the voice of Pikesville High School’s principal in response to conversations the men had about Darien’s poor work performance and whether his contract would be renewed, Baltimore County police said. …

The audio clip quickly spread on social media and had “profound repercussions,” the court documents stated, with the principal being placed on leave. The recording put the principal and his family at “significant risk,” while police officers provided security at his house, according to authorities.

The recording also triggered a wave of hate-filled messages on social media and an inundation of phone calls to the school, police said. Activities were disrupted for a time, and some staff felt unsafe.

Darien apparently used Large Language Models to create his fake, and fortunately the police got some experts to analyze it. Darien was about to be arrested, but was boarding a flight to Houston and was stopped because of “how he had packaged his firearm for the flight.”

The article I linked, which is from Fox but was originally from AP, never mentions that Darien is black and the principal white. I only know that fact because earlier I had read another article that mentioned it, but I can’t locate that one at the moment. Interesting omission by AP.

Just to check on the rest of the MSM, I read this CBS coverage of the story. No mention of the race of either man. I also watched a video there, which did have a photo of the principal. But nothing of the sort about the perp, and no mention of his race. These omissions are highly highly unlikely to be accidental.

The New York Court of Appeals says that Harvey Weinstein gets a new trial

The New Neo Posted on by

You can find the details here. The gist of it is this:

There’s a rule that you can’t put on evidence of prior “bad acts” to prove that a defendant committed the specific bad acts he’s being tried for in the present case.

It’s not that such evidence is completely irrelevant; it’s that it’s unduly prejudicial to the defendant. Such evidence tends to poison the jury against the defendant well out of proportion to the actual light it sheds on the current crime being judged at trial.

But that’s what the state of New York did to get their conviction. …

Another exception, which seems to be the one used in this case, is to claim you’re not putting on these witnesses to prove his prior bad acts, but to shed light on his state-of-mind he had when committing the acts he’s on trial for.

The prosecution put on three witnesses to accuse Weinstein of prior rape, and claimed they weren’t presenting this evidence just to show he’s generally a rapist, but to prove that his state in mind in the current case was one of intent to commit a sexual assault. That is, it wasn’t just a mistake where he misread the woman’s level of interest in him.

But I mean, come on: You can’t tell the jury “don’t consider this testimony as evidence that he committed the current crime, just consider it as far as his state-of-mind.” That’s telling people to put the information in a special vault in their brain that they cannot access except to answer one particular question. No one’s brain works like that, not even the brain of Noted “Compartmentalizer” Bill Clinton.

And speaking of Bill Clinton – a somewhat similar approach was used in the Paula Jones case to query him in a deposition about none other than the extent of his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and that’s what led to the entire Lewinsky story coming out in public and leading to his impeachment. I was against such questions then, and I’m against them now. To refresh your memory in the Jones case [emphasis mine]:

Jones’s lawyers decided to show to the court a pattern of behavior by Clinton that involved his allegedly repeatedly becoming sexually involved with state or government employees. Jones’s lawyers therefore subpoenaed women they suspected Clinton had had affairs with, including Arkansas Appeal Tribunal employee Gennifer Flowers, as well as White House employee Monica Lewinsky. In his deposition for the Jones lawsuit, Clinton denied having “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky. Based on testimony provided by Linda Tripp, which identified the existence of a blue dress with Clinton’s semen on it, Kenneth Starr concluded that Clinton’s sworn testimony was false and perjurious.

During the deposition in the Jones case, Clinton was asked, “Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1, as modified by the Court?” The judge ordered that Clinton be given an opportunity to review the definition. It said that “a person engages in sexual relations when the person knowingly engages in or causes contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person”. Clinton flatly denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. Later, at the Starr Grand Jury, Clinton stated that he believed the definition of sexual relations agreed upon for the Jones deposition excluded his receiving oral sex.

It was upon the basis of this statement that the House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton on December 19, 1998, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton was subsequently tried before the Senate, where votes on either charge both fell far short of the 2/3 supermajority required for conviction.

Also, please see this post of mine about the cases against Weinstein:

Of course, the fact that one woman may have lied—or been mistaken, because perhaps she was drunk—about the nature of their sexual contact does not mean they all have lied or been mistaken. As I’ve said before, each accusation must be taken on its own merits (although few people seem to do that): even assuming that the weight of accusation indicates that Weinstein is guilty of some violations “does not mean that all his accusers are telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” …

With Weinstein, there are so many stories that it is easy to think that most of them must be true. But that temptation must be resisted. The trouble is that truth and falsehood can be fiendishly difficult to ascertain in cases such as this. …

Are people usually that clearly in touch with their own behavior, thoughts, and feeling around complicated situations of a sexual nature, in which fear mixes with desire to advance one’s career, and in which all of it is mixed with the liberal consumption of alcohol or other substances? The vagaries of memory are part of the problem as well, and revisionism can occur either much later or very shortly after the act in question. Regret, confusion, trauma, forgetfulness, defensiveness, rationalization—all can play into it in various ways for the alleged victim.

Mass graves and the MSM: spreading the lies

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the latest in media reporting of Hamas’ tall tales. No need to listen to the whole thing, although it’s interesting. You can get the gist of it in ten or fifteen minutes, or perhaps even less:

More on the subject can be found at Legal Insurrection.

Plus:

The Palestinian “narrative” is lies all the way down. But the edifice of lies has become most people’s truth, because the lies have been picked up and amplified by their willing handmaidens in our very own MSM as well as the press in much of the world. I’ve been reporting on this for twenty years, and so have many many other people with far more readers. It’s obvious, and has been for a long long time. And yet the lies have sped round and round the world while the truth keeps laboriously putting its boots on.

One of the many many hallmarks of Palestinian lies is the way they actually reverse the truth. For example, relevant to this story: who is it who respects the dead and who is it who desecrates dead bodies? We know that the Israelis do the former and the Palestinians the latter. So this recent report is an example of the kind of Orwellian reversal we keep seeing in this conflict and so many others.

As I read in one of the YouTubers’ comments to that first video:

Palestinians redefine many words:
• War becomes a Genocide.
• Rape becomes Resistance.
• Borders become Concentration Camp walls.
• Suicide bombing becomes Heroism.
• Moving civilians out of harm’s way, becomes Ethnic Cleansing.
• Hostages become Prisoners of War.
• Keeping citizens separate from the terrorists they want to kill, becomes Apartheid.
• People returning to their ancient homeland become Colonizers.
• Terrorists become Freedom Fighters.
• Palestinian migrants become Natives to the land.
• Children dying in a war as collateral damage becomes Murder.
• Something rightfully obtained that was never theirs, becomes Theft.
• Being on land that you 100% control per LAW, becomes Occupation.

Indeed.

Trump’s chances in New York

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Karmi.”]

Trump is trapped in New York City for the duration of his show trial there. The Democrats may think they’ve checkmated him – it’s certainly their hope – and perhaps they have. But Trump is nothing if not creative:

“I think we have a good chance of winning here and we’re gonna give it a big plan,” Trump said about New York State. “We’re going to the South Bronx to do a rally.”

“We’re going to be doing a rally at Madison Square Garden, we believe,” Trump added.

The rallies will focus on honoring police, firemen, and teachers. “We’ll be honoring the people that make New York work,” Trump said. “It’ll be very exciting, but we think we have a really good chance of winning.”

I have to say that Trump deserves some sort of award for sustaining his spirit in the face of a degree of persecution that would have felled most people long ago. Whether that translates into having a chance in New York – well, let’s just say it’s a real longshot. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden both beat him in that state by about 20 points, getting about 60% of the vote. Trump’s way behind there in polls now – but not anywhere near as far behind as that. For example, in a very recent Siena poll (April 15-17):

“The good news for Biden is that he continues to hold a double-digit lead over Trump in solidly blue New York. The bad news for Biden is he only leads by 10 points, 47-37%, after leading 48-36% in February, in a state where enrolled Democrats outnumber Republicans better than two-to-one,” Greenberg said. “While Biden has support from 72% of Democrats, Trump has the support of 81% of Republicans and leads with independents, 46-32%.”

Also notice that Biden’s total is under 50%, and that only 84% of respondents picked either Biden or Trump. I was curious about the rest, and it turns out that 4% said they’d vote for someone else, 7% said they wouldn’t be voting, and 5% haven’t made up their minds yet. Interesting.

Actually, I don’t really think Trump has a chance of winning New York. But wouldn’t it be fabulous if the trial ended up backfiring and he won the state in 2024? Such poetic justice. He’s certainly highly unlikely to get actual justice in his trial there.