Dear Weekend Jolter,
Sooner or later, the anti-Israel agitators will start throwing soup and mashed potatoes at things.
Their antics lately have made as much sense as those of the Just Stop Oil and copycat climate activists, around that point when they decided it was better to piss people off with befuddling stunts (soup, potatoes) while posing obviously false choices to society (e.g., What’s more important to you, the planet or a Van Gogh?) than earnestly advocate their position.
The position of those cheering on Hamas has been heinous from the start. But when they marched on America’s campuses and downtowns with placards declaring “By any means necessary” and “Resistance is justified,” their cause and purpose were painfully clear. Not so today. They began to veer into absurdity last month, when demonstrators marched on a Philadelphia falafel shop co-owned by an Israeli-born chef and accused its kitchen of genocide (incidentally, I visited said falafel shop last week and could find no evidence of the Zionist conspiracy, only perfectly composed hummus). Then during the holiday stretch, demonstrators scrambled to block traffic outside major airports, including New York’s JFK and Chicago’s O’Hare. This, while protesters tried (and failed) to disrupt Christmas itself. Caroline Downey reported on statements made at one New York rally, which we can largely recognize as being composed of English words but read like the output of an exhausted AI bot trained on Daily Stormer content:
“Zionism is antisemitic,” one attendee at the march said. “Hamas, and long live the resistance.”
Whatever you say.
Then there was, as Jay Nordlinger flagged, the effort to target retailer Zara and accuse it of complicity in, again, genocide over an ad campaign that supposedly evoked scenes of Gaza destruction — but didn’t actually, considering the campaign was conceived and put together before the war began. The episode was ridiculous, both at the time and in hindsight. Any logical cohesion behind anti-Israel protesters’ actions could be seen fraying then and there, any core purpose spitting out strands of severed sense like rubber from a fresh-cut balata golf ball. Fast-forward to the end of December, and Jimmy Quinn finds protesters in New York City flat-out endorsing an Iran-backed terrorism campaign:
“Yemen, Yemen, make us proud. Turn another ship around!” is the newest protest chant heard during anti-Israel marches in New York City, clearly referring to the attacks that the country’s Houthi rebels have launched against shipping vessels in the Red Sea.
It’s safe to say these guys have lost their own plot. The anti-colonialist freedom marchers are now run-of-the-mill chaos merchants, rooting for whichever Tyler Durden–esque actor burns brightest while causing mayhem of their own. Where the “movement” goes from here is anyone’s guess — but we can assume its followers will keep lashing out at anything with a vague connection to Israel or Jews (remember the war on Sabra?).
The antics would be easy to dismiss, even laugh at, at this stage — if not for the result they seek, which is for Israel to lay down arms and welcome the next horrific phase of Hamas’s “flood,” and if not for the threat, as Noah Rothman explains, these antics pose to the public. Their increasing disconnection from reality and evidence, including the embrace of false-flag and other conspiracy theories, is another troubling aspect. Countering some of this misinformation, the New York Times recently published a deeply reported and wrenching account of Hamas’s use of sexual violence, contra the insistence of October 7 truthers that the stories of rape and mutilation are apocryphal. Even if the marchers have lost their focus, nobody should forget that this is the conduct they justify, the “any means” they endorse.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On the Harvard president’s resignation: Claudine Gay’s Resignation Won’t Solve Harvard’s Problems
The Ohio governor’s recent veto should be overturned: To Err Is DeWine
ARTICLES
Charles C. W. Cooke: Chris Christie’s Pointless Candidacy
Charles C. W. Cooke: The Important Thing Is Harvard Lost
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Why the Harvard Plagiarism Scandal Is So Irresistible
Alexander Hughes: Can Harvard Be Saved?
Dan McLaughlin: Our Plagiarist President
Dan McLaughlin: Four Problems for Democrats Trying to Sell the Message That the Economy Is Great
David Zimmermann: ‘Clinton Likes Them Young’: Newly Released Epstein Documents Name Late Sex Offender’s High-Profile Associates
Caroline Downey: Female Boxers Sound Alarm on Men in Women’s Division: ‘You Could Die’
Audrey Fahlberg: Trump’s Iowa Court-Room Caucus
Madeleine Kearns: On ‘Right-Wing’ Smut
Brittany Bernstein: And Then There Were Two: DeSantis, Haley Left Standing on Debate Stage as Trump Dodges Final Pre-Iowa Contest
Henry Olsen: The Blue-State Exodus Could Have Profound Effects on GOP Power
John Fund: Officials Now Admit the Disaster of Their Covid Policies
Wilfred Reilly: ‘Systemic Racism’ in the Justice System Does Not Exist
Andrew T. Walker: Can Evangelical Journalists Say Anything Good about Evangelicals?
CAPITAL MATTERS
“This is madness.” Read Matthew Lau’s assessment of Canada’s EV approach: Electric Vehicles: Canada’s Curious Math
Casey Mulligan examines the cumulative effect of oodles of regulations: How Great Is the Regulatory Burden?
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White explains why this reboot fails: Say ‘No!’ to This Color Purple
Brian Allen has the first of a two-parter here (and you can check out the second on the front page Saturday morning): Fashioned by Sargent Starts the New Year Dressed for Success
It seems Star Wars fatigue has set in among the NR staff. Read the laments here.
EXCERPTS, V.S.O.P.
We can’t say Claudine Gay’s resignation at Harvard is a total shock. Nor can we say it solves the deeper problems on campus. From NR’s editorial:
It must be understood that a mere change at the top will not alter the diseased university culture and intellectual dogma at places such as Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania. When it comes to an academic monoculture that has long been fueled, in part, by DEI administrative power and prerogatives, the fish rots from the body up, not the head down; the work of fixing the madness of campus culture will involve massive structural reforms like tearing out DEI administrative culture from the university system root and branch, not merely cosmetic leadership changes. Similarly, Gay’s resignation will not change the fact that you can flip up a rock anywhere in elite academia and find hundreds more Claudine Gays, whose careers benefit from an almost comical indifference to the scholarly standards compared to DEI imperatives. It is worth noting that the Harvard Corporation stood by Gay for weeks, initially clearing her after a superficial investigation that downplayed “a few instances of inadequate citation” while ignoring dozens of other examples of potential plagiarism that had been flagged by researchers.
In her resignation letter, Claudine Gay offers no mea culpa and fails to even address the specific accusations against her. She implies she is resigning not because of any academic sins she herself personally committed — for any such admission would, on a logical level, make her planned return to a teaching position equally as untenable as retaining the presidency. No, she maintains that it was “distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.” Perhaps this is understandable — people rarely show equanimity in the face of massive personal, public disgrace. Nonetheless, she will remain on the faculty at Harvard University, and Harvard University, like almost all of our elite academic institutions, is sick to its soul with an inability to confront the hatred running rampant on its campus. The battle for sanity in American education continues.
Henry Olsen digs into the data to game out the political implications of the much-covered migration of Americans from blue to red states:
The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal nonprofit, recently projected that states that Joe Biden easily carried in 2020 would lose a net twelve House seats to states carried by Donald Trump. Another two seats would move from two Rust Belt swing states, Michigan and Pennsylvania, to the Sunbelt swing states of Arizona and Georgia. As a result, if this projection proves correct, a Republican candidate in 2032 would be able to capture the White House simply by winning the Trump states plus Arizona and Georgia.
That alone would be potentially groundbreaking. As is often noted, Republicans have won a majority of the popular vote only once since 1988. Normally, that would make it impossible to win the presidency, but the GOP coalition has been historically imbalanced. The GOP’s reliance on whites without four-year degrees means it can win states that have large numbers of such voters while losing elsewhere. Therefore, since 2012, its losing margins in blue states have increased as well as its ability to contest other states. The GOP coalition does not need a popular-vote majority to win the Electoral College.
Current population trends will exacerbate that gap between support among voters and support in the Electoral College. In 2020, Trump lost the popular vote by 4.4 percentage points and the three closest states — Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — by less than one point each. Had he lost the popular vote by only 3.7 points, assuming a uniform national swing, he would have carried all three states. Had that election occurred after the recent population shifts and the related reapportionment, however, he would not even have had to win Wisconsin: He might have lost by four points nationally, carried Arizona and Georgia, and won the Electoral College.
One might worry that migrants from blue states are bringing their politics with them, endangering the GOP’s hold on their destinations. That’s possible, but the data thus far show the exact opposite: Republican strength has been rising in destination states since the pandemic migrations, not falling. . . .
The population shifts will also help the GOP significantly in Congress. Democrats hold the Senate only because they have all four Georgia and Arizona seats. If this migration is only slightly tilted toward the GOP, Democrats’ ability to keep those seats will be seriously threatened.
Moreover, Democrats are likely to lose House seats because people are leaving their base metropolitan areas.
Just a reminder that we’re roughly a week out from the start of the 2024 presidential contest, and the guy who will probably run away with the GOP nomination hasn’t done a single debate and has no plans to change that. From Brittany Bernstein:
Only three candidates have qualified for a CNN debate that will take place in Iowa just five days before the caucus: Trump, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.
But Trump has once again declined to participate, setting up a debate that will instead center on the battle for second place between DeSantis and Haley.
The former president has instead elected to participate in a Fox News town hall in Iowa that will run at the same time as the debate.
“We understand Donald Trump is scared to get on the stage because he’d have to finally explain why he didn’t build the wall, added nearly $8 trillion to the debt, and turned the country over to Fauci,” DeSantis communications director Andrew Romeo said in a statement. “But even Gavin Newsom had the courage to stand on the stage to debate his own failed record against Ron DeSantis.”
And on the topic of this presidential contest, Charlie bludgeons Chris Christie’s apparent rationale (this idea that he’s the only anti-Trump truth teller) for staying in the race:
It is certainly true that, in 2024, Chris Christie has rebranded himself as the most principled anti-Trump candidate within the firmament. But there is branding and there is reality, and, in this case, the two remain distant cousins. Chris Christie can, indeed, be described as an anti-Trump candidate. But he cannot fairly be described as a principled one. There are certain figures within the political universe who have paid a price for their opposition to Trump. Christie is not among them. In 2016, it suited him to be a Trump lackey; in 2024, it suits him to be a Trump critic. In between those eras, Christie experienced no discomfort whatsoever as a result of his positions. He did not, like figures such as Liz Cheney, lose his leadership position and then his career. He did not, like some writers and broadcasters, miss out on lucrative opportunities. He coasted, moving where the wind took him. That has a profound effect on his credibility.
It is telling that Christie’s explanation of his shift does not make any sense. This week, Christie announced that he had chosen to endorse Donald Trump in 2016 because Donald Trump was going to win. That, though, is not even remotely exculpatory. When Christie issued his endorsement, back in February 2016, the primary was still underway, and many of us — myself included — were still fighting hammer-and-tongs to try to prevent Trump from prevailing. Why wasn’t Chris Christie? I’ll tell you: Because Chris Christie wanted to be rewarded with a position in the Trump White House, and he believed that a well-timed recommendation of the front-runner might secure one. That decision was not a blunder; it was conscious, deliberate, transparently self-serving, and, relative to many other Republicans’ endorsements — including those issued by figures who went on to become Trump sycophants — early. Today, Christie talks about it as if it had been a fait accompli. This is false. I can still remember where I was when I heard about his endorsement, and I can recall how disillusioned it made me feel about the prospects of stopping Trump. Had he wished to, Christie could have stayed with the anti-Trump side until Trump won the nomination. He didn’t, and he must own that.
Shout-Outs
Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, & Adam Sella, at the New York Times: ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7
Jennifer Kabbany, at the College Fix: Harvard Corporation members should resign in wake of Gay fiasco, watchdogs say
Susan Crabtree, at RealClearPolitics: After Telework Surge, Federal Buildings Remain Largely Empty
CODA
I just returned from some quality family time in Philly for the holidays. It’s true what the Boyz say — I was in fact able to find all the Philly steaks I could eat (which in my case, with my cholesterol levels, is one). Enjoy the throwback. And Happy New Year.