Monday, August 19, 2024

Part I

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Columbia University Becomes a Postmodern Parable: Minouche Shafik Resigns in Wake of the Mishandling of Protests on Campus and Other Issues

Of course, the big story this week, at least we expect, is going to be the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And to that, we will turn in just a moment. But just as the nation was headed into the weekend, there was very big news with the resignation of the president of Columbia University. In its context, this is a huge story. Nemat Shafik, better known as Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, announced, as a surprise to the community, that she would be resigning from office, going back to Great Britain and actually joining the New Labor government in terms of a role within the foreign ministry. So, even as in Great Britain, she is known as a Baroness, we are looking at the reality that the big story is where she’s not. She is not now at Columbia University.

Now, just remember that Columbia University was Ground Zero, so to speak, in the campus uprisings against Israel and American support for Israel and on behalf of the Palestinians. Now, there are all kinds of complications related to these campus uprisings, and eventually they were something like coast-to-coast, particularly in America’s most elite universities. But nonetheless, Columbia does stand out, even in the crowd here, even as it did, by the way, back in 1968, in the 1960s when it was also Ground Zero for leftist student activism and ideological radicalism. And it’s all back. Only, by the time you look at what was taking place in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, what we’re looking at here is really undisguised anti-Israel position in activism.

And we’re also looking at the fact that much of it is now really anti-Semitic. And it was anti-Semitism that was in some ways related to Minouche Shafik there at Columbia. It was the flash point. So, why? Well, it goes back to a hearing that was held in the US House of Representatives when the Columbia President, in the wake of disastrous testimony from several other Ivy League institutional heads, two of which lost their jobs, Minouche Shafik was asked if she had witnessed any anti-Semitic actions or messaging on her campus. And she said no, she had not seen any. Well, that meant that either she was willfully blind; that’s a moral category in which you just refuse to acknowledge what you see with your eyes, or she was just misrepresenting her institution. Either way, all of this led to a twofold problem, and this becomes the parable of Minouche Shafik and Columbia University.

Here’s the twofold problem. She was not saying anything that by any reckoning could be morally considered within the bounds of opposing anti-Semitism. If you can’t see it, you don’t acknowledge it, then in some sense you’re facilitating it. On the other hand, she didn’t please the left either, because the left doesn’t want mere messaging, they are demanding activism. And this gets to one of the central issues here: did Minouche Shafik need to resign? Absolutely. Absolutely. And frankly, an awful lot of university presidents across the United States need to resign. Many of them are complicit in the anti-Semitism, in the abdication of responsibility to these ideological leftists and to student activists, and many of them are the ones responsible over the years for putting activist ideologically leftist faculty in positions where, quite honestly, they have been teaching toxic ideas and ideologies. And guess what? Here’s the result.

In a statement about her resignation, President Shafik said, “This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community.” She went on to say, “Over the summer, I’ve been able to reflect and have decided that my moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse challenges ahead.” Now, Shafik was not president of Columbia very long, and before that she spent about six years as the president of what is known as the London School of Economics, or LSE. Now, one of the things we note is that she is going back to work for the British government. By the way, that might turn out to be quite controversial in Britain, but that’s going to be their concern, not America’s concern or Columbia’s concern. But as she was leaving, she basically said that she had come to the conclusion that Columbia needs a new era under new leadership. Basically, no one was going to argue with that at this point.

But what’s also clear is that there were many who were saying “she failed us.” And those statements came from people who were more conservative and from people who were more liberal, more on the ideological left. So, I’m raising that in order to say what we have now in the distortion field and the ideological warfare on America’s elite campuses, we have campuses that are almost by definition, any honest person I think would have to say, ungovernable, unleadable. And that is because in the moral vacuum of the modern secular academy, there just is no moral center. There is no ability to say, “That’s wrong. Don’t say that.” But it’s not equilateral. In other words, many of the speech codes and the censorship efforts have been taken against the right, but you can’t really make those arguments against the left. And furthermore, you’ve got the left in a divide in which you have very historically liberal and progressivist Jewish groups. And then you have the Palestinian cause, which is, at least in terms of activism, further on the left and also deeply steeped in much contemporary Marxism and critical theory.

It is interesting that Eric Gertler, writing at The Wall Street Journal, points to Columbia in the example of General Dwight David Eisenhower, who became the president of Columbia in 1948, after he had been Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe. He writes, “Trustees should also consider leaders in the military, political and non-profit worlds. When General Dwight Eisenhower became president of Columbia in 1948, he lacked the academic credentials of a typical university president, but he had the foresight and skills to handle a university environment and its concomitant challenges.” But of course, the problem is we now know that the faculty at Columbia was overwhelmingly opposed to Dwight David Eisenhower, who was, after all, one of the most important figures who was alive in the world at the time. They were opposed to him and they were opposed to his leadership at Columbia University, because even back then in the 1940s, they complained that only someone from the academic tribe could really understand the modern university.

It’s hard to imagine someone like Eisenhower being chosen by one of these Ivy League institutions now, because it’s arguable now that the liberal and leftist faculty have even more control of the university, they have even more influence in terms of its processes. As a matter of fact, it’s also interesting to see what’s going on in the war between the faculty and the trustees in many of these schools. And the trustees in some of these schools are also overwhelmingly, say, overlapped with the donor class. And so you have these elite universities with the qualification of many people on the trustee boards being their philanthropic giving and capacity to give. And it turns out that at least some of them, particularly major philanthropists who are Jewish, are not exactly excited or as excited as they used to be about funding these neo-Marxist institutions.

But before taking more time, and we’ll be coming back to the university and its problems, we’ll be coming back to Christian worldview issues as related not only to the kind of ideological leftism that is now corrupting so much of higher education, but also the anti-Semitism that shows up in a story like this. It’s a failure of leadership. Minouche Shafik really had to leave Columbia. And even now there is speculation that it wasn’t as voluntary as was claimed in the statement. Some insiders on the board, well, actually you have people arguing both ways. It was forced. No, it was not forced. The fact is we may never actually know, but I think it’s fair to say it was almost implausible that Minouche Shafik would continue as the president of Columbia University say a year from now. The real question was the timing. But then the other big question is, where in the world would an institution like Columbia University go?

Part II

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Exit, Stage Left: President Biden, the DNC, and the Coup That Removed Him from the 2024 General Election

But there’s another issue that ties it to the Democratic National Convention where we turn now, looking at Chicago and the meeting of the Democrats this week. And that is because one of the greatest fears of the Democrats meeting in Chicago is that they will have in 2024, a repeat of 1968. What was that? In 1968, the Democratic National Convention notoriously, infamously, devolved into absolute riots, with student activists and leftist students joining in protest, riots they became, on the streets of Chicago outside of the Convention Hall, over the Vietnam War. And that basically contributed in a huge way to the loss of the Democratic nominee in the 1968 presidential election. That nominee was Hubert Humphrey. He was defeated by Richard Nixon. And if no other issue was on the table, then law and order was on the table simply because of the disorder that was riotously demonstrated at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

And you say, well, there is no Vietnam War going on right now, so what are you talking about? I’m talking about the very same activism that showed up on campuses like Columbia in the pro-Palestinian cause, the anti-Israel sentiment and the activism, much of it is now threatened there in Chicago. Now, the Chicago Police and Democratic authorities are going to do everything they can to keep this out of the public eye and to keep it from becoming a spectacle that would detract from the messaging they want out of the 2024 Democratic National Convention gathering. But the activists are, after all, committed to their activism. And one of the big questions is, okay, on the Left, would they be more committed to, say, letting a few things go in order for Kamala Harris and the Harris-Walz ticket to get elected? Or do they see this as a unique historical opportunity to make a point they think needs to be made, even as the warfare between Israel and Hamas is playing out in Gaza and beyond?

So we will see, and we’re going to find out fairly fast what is going on here. But the cause of the attention being directed to Chicago is going to be the Democrats as they are gathering for their national convention. And here’s where things get really interesting, massive worldview implications. The Democrats expect about 50,000 people at the Democratic National Convention. And the general rule is that when you have an incumbent President who’s running for re-election, you have the party of the incumbent after the party of the insurgent, or the party of, say in this case, the Republicans. So you have the Republicans go first, and then about a month later, now you have the Democrats going. But here’s what we need to know. When the Republicans met, they thought they understood what the race was. We all did. But that was before the coup. And increasingly, it becomes clear that’s what happened among the Democrats.

The disastrous performance of Joe Biden in the first and, for him, the only presidential debate in the 2024 cycle, it was such a game-changer, the Democrats were forced into the awakening that they were headed for electoral doom on election day. And to put the logic in their words, they had to do something. And so they did it. Now, I mentioned a coup, because the definition of a coup is a military or political action undertaken to topple a leader. And you don’t have a coup in an election. You have a coup outside the electoral process, which means that’s exactly what we’re talking about with Joe Biden. He received the overwhelming plurality and majority of all of the delegates who voted in the primary process. And that’s, if anything, an understatement. There was no close second. Joe Biden was like most incumbents, he was just overwhelmingly supported by voters. Remember, he stayed in the race all the way through the primaries. He left less than a month ago, and that means that he was really toppled by pressure from within the Democratic Party.

Now, more on that in a moment, because that means things are going to get very interesting in Chicago tonight. But the big story about the meeting is that the Democrats are hoping that this will continue their multi-week infomercial and their love affair with the media that has basically said, “We don’t worry about positions as might be assumed by a normal ticket.” When it comes to the Harris-Walz ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, her chosen running mate, it’s all about joy, it’s all about attitude. It’s all about one constant media-driven journalistically-abdicated infomercial. And that’s basically what’s going on. And the Democratic National Convention will afford the opportunity for an extended infomercial.

There are some issues, as I said, including the proposed protest that may take place, and be at least a game-changer when it comes to the big party. But the reality is that at least through Thursday, and Thursday night is when the nominee is going to speak herself. When Thursday night comes to a conclusion and the whole thing comes to a climactic, say, balloon drop or something similar, well, what you’re then going to see is whether or not the press intends to do any job whatsoever when it comes to pressing the Democrats for clear answers when it comes to proposals. And even as the Harris and Walz campaign says, “We’ve only been at this a matter of days.” Well, you know what? You asked for it. You are now, as they come out of the convention, the official nominee for President and Vice President of the United States. If you don’t have specific proposals, then how in the world can you credibly ask for votes?

But there’s an even bigger lie behind all of this, or a series of lies. One of them is Kamala Harris ran for president in 2019. She had a set of rather detailed proposals. She doesn’t want you to know about them now. I’m going to speak about one of them in detail in just a moment. So she’s really running from her 2019 campaign and from the policies she championed in that campaign, such as an absolute end to fracking. She now says, “Well, who would believe in that?” Well, you did, Madam Vice President, when you were then a United States Senator running for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 cycle. But there’s a lot of that going on. The bigger issue is that as you look at the campaign and then you look at the convention, this really is the icing on the cake. This really is the last orchestration of, you might say, the unveiling of the Kamala Harris candidacy.

So just remember that this convention was planned for somebody else. This convention was planned in order to nominate Joe Biden for the Office of President and for re-election. So that’s a particular kind of strategy. That’s different than a first-time election. An incumbent running for re-election has to run with momentum, yes, behind him, that’s positive, but also with exposure when it comes to the experience of the nation under the leadership of the President. That’s where Joe Biden was going to come up way short, particularly on economic issues and the question of immigration. Now, there was more critical attention that should have been eventually directed at a Biden candidacy, incidents such as his handling of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. But all that is now going to be pretty much swept under the rug. So let me tell you what’s going to happen.

In the coup, and I’m just going to insist it was something like a coup. In the removal of Joe Biden, the convincing of Joe Biden that for the sake of the party he had to drop out of the race, something he said that he would only hear from God. Just a matter of days before, he evidently heard from someone else, like Nancy Pelosi. Well, at least a central part of the implicit deal, if not explicit, between the Democrats, who basically forced him out of the race, and Joe Biden is, “If you want a big party going out, it’s going to have to be with your cooperation. If you stay in the race and lose, you’re going to go down in Democratic history as that guy. But if you withdraw from the race and you endorse Kamala Harris, then we’ll make sure that you are widely honored at the 2024 Democratic Convention.” So that’s what’s going to happen tonight. So President Biden is going to speak from the platform tonight, we are told.

Now, here’s the thing to watch, and something else to keep in mind. As you think about one of these national political conventions, the big event is the last event. The minor event is the early event. So in this case, let’s be clear about the messaging sent about the incumbent President of the United States, Joe Biden. It is, thank you very much. Thank you for exiting the race. Thank you for endorsing Kamala Harris. Thank you for doing so, acting like it was voluntary, and now you can say a few words and then exit the stage on Monday night. Over the course of the next few days, former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama will be speaking. But here’s where the party has a danger; they’re likely to want to give more prominence to former President Obama than to former President Clinton.

But you’re going to have a lot of people who are Democratic who’s who, and some who’s that? They’re going to be on the platform at various times. And some of this will be pretty well-organized time-wise, some of it won’t be, because these party conventions tend to get a little out of sync when it comes to the timing. But in any event, as you leave the event tonight, saying goodbye to President Biden, you can leave the stage now, things are going to move to former presidents and others who will speak; cabinet members, prominent Democratic members of Congress, major political figures. And then on Wednesday night in the evening, because the evening’s the big time, it’s the prime time, it’s the main time of national focus, the big audience, you’ll have the Minnesota Governor Tim Walz who will receive, officially, the Democratic Vice Presidential nomination and he will give an address. In all likelihood, it’s going to be pretty much like the address he’s been giving ever since he got the nod.

And then the biggest event of all comes with all the falderal on Thursday night in which the nominee, in this case, the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris will appear before the delegates who are going to cheer like crazy. And it’s all orchestrated for her acceptance speech to be the big climactic final event of the convention. After that, it’s all balloons, confetti, and someone who’s going to have to clean up the mess. Now, remember, that’s what they have planned. There are protesters who have a different plan. The Chicago Police, we are told, are completely on the situation. Well, we’ll find out. But it is a reminder that the activist energy in the Democratic Party, particularly among younger voters, very crucial to the Democratic Party, it is in the more anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian direction and with a high-fever pitch. There’s just no question about that.

And there are some rather embarrassing dimensions that just point out how fast the transitions on the Democratic side came. For one thing, even as of last night, if you went to the website and you pulled up the 2024 Democratic platform as summarized by the Democrats, it still referred to the Biden-Harris ticket. And it was no doubt that the main issue here was the President of the United States, Joe Biden. It was Biden’s position as supported by Vice President Kamala Harris. Well, that’s not going to work. They’re going to have to change that before they leave. But the bigger issue for me is going to be, well, okay, what will the actual policy positions in the platform be?

There are Democratic insiders who are now saying openly in the media that Kamala Harris really doesn’t want much specificity. Well, I guess not. That specificity is going to illuminate voters when they’re wondering where she really stands on so many of these issues, and those positions are going to scare voters away. There is no doubt that her political ambition, in a sense, very commonsensically, is to avoid any specific proposals. It’s one of the reasons why she hasn’t given a press conference of any magnitude and really hasn’t answered press questions.

Part III

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The DNC Has Become a Parody Unto Itself: The Immoral and Strange (And Just Plain Weird) Plan for the 2024 DNC – Including Free Vasectomies, an Inflatable IUD, and Abortion Politics

But with time running out now, I just want to remind us that in worldview terms, we need to be watching for some really big issues and how the candidates there in Chicago, how the Democrats in Chicago, how the convention together articulates these issues, or amplifies them, or illustrates them.

The Democratic Party is becoming one giant parable of abortion and sterility, and that’s becoming increasingly clear. It’s the party of death that is serving the purpose of the culture of death. When it comes to babies, the message being sent by the Democrats is very clearly, who wants them? We don’t want any. And let me tell you how parabolic that is becoming. The New York Times ran a big story date-lined just a couple of days ago, August the 16th, in which you had a report saying that Planned Parenthood of the Great Rivers, which serves a constituency primarily in Missouri and Illinois, it’s going to be at the Democratic National Convention, officially at the Democratic National Convention, and it is going to be offering free vasectomies as a part of the Democratic National Convention.

The New York Times says, by the way, those free vasectomies will be available to anyone who gets an appointment, whether or not he is a delegate to the convention. The only issue there is I had to edit a little bit to put in he, because anyone who understands anatomy and physiology knows that only a he can need or obtain a vasectomy. But given the logic and the absolute doctrinal commitment of the Democratic Party to the LGBTQ agenda and its attendant language, I can assume only that it would mean people, according to their kind of parlance, like people who need feminine hygiene products. So this would be people who need a vasectomy, which would be otherwise, people who have testicles. I mean, it’s just that clear. It’s embarrassing not to put it just that way. But that’s where the Democratic Party now is.

Can you imagine being told that at a major party convention which is going absolutely full-bore when it comes to abortion rights? The New York Times way of putting it, by the way, just the 16th, just two days ago, was “unbridled abortion politics.” So even the New York Times, let’s just say that’s not a conservative media source, is pointing to the fact that the Democratic National Convention is going to be all abortion, all the time, all they can. But now they’re adding not only abortion, and quite honestly, we just have to hope, we have to demand, we have to work for clarification, because there’s absolutely no sign that the vice president of the United States, as president, would be at all reluctant to force national legislation that would force adoption legalization in all places, at all times, by all means with no restrictions whatsoever. And you say, well, that sounds extreme. Well, that is the very position that was signed into law by her choice for Vice President, Tim Walz, the Governor of Minnesota.

So we can see exactly where this is headed. And frankly, all you have to do to understand that is listen to the Vice President over a process of years. We’re also told there’s going to be a giant inflatable IUD somewhere connected to the convention. And it’s as if they have become a parable of themselves. They’ve just become a parody of themselves. They have just demonstrated the fact that when it comes to abortion, when it comes to avoiding babies, when it comes to say even sterilization, hey, we are all for it. We’re going to do them at the Democratic National Convention. I’ll just have to put it this way. It’s as if some kind of comedy writer wrote this up. Only, this isn’t a comedy script. This is the 2024 Democratic National Convention. And at the end of the day, let’s face it, the worldview consequences are massive. And this isn’t a comedy, it’s a tragedy.

We’ll be watching it with you as it all unfolds.