Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Weasel of the Year
Harvard President Gay is Weasel of the Year and the competition has never been steeper. She edged out past winners FBI Director Wray and USAG Garland at the last minute with a truly appalling performance before Congress. When asked to comment when contacted this afternoon in his retirement home in the UAE Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (AKA “Baghdad Bob”) simply replied “LOL. Amazing!”
FIRE ranks Harvard as the university most openly hostile to free speech. In response, its President explained that “free speech” is about learning to be sensitive to what listeners have been trained to accept and expect. The “tools” to be mastered on one’s “Harvard journey” are actually honing the skill to use only the language of the mandatory ideological framework and then calling that “free speech.” Indoctrination is called “exploration.” There is no persecution or cancellation at Harvard, merely natural outcomes of a community expectation of “sensitivity.” It does not matter if Jewish students are afraid to leave their dorm rooms because Harvard continues to strive to create a welcoming campus. Just look at the brochure.
On their best day, neither Josef Goebbels nor Leo Trotsky could have delivered that much crapola with a straight face and the calm demeanor of Claudine Gay. This lady could have delivered an upbeat Expedia ad for Auschwitz.
Published in Education“In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?”
Citing @BillAckman, @RepWalberg asks @Harvard President Claudine Gay about @hoovlet and Tyler Vanderweele, but she has nothing to say about them: pic.twitter.com/8c5mHzYbQI
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) December 5, 2023
She’s a real piece of work, isn’t she? I’d better stop there before I violate the CoC.
Get down to the copyright office and put in a claim. I’d love to see the annual Weasel of the Year pageant. Like the old days of Miss America, there’d be a song for the winner, and the five other contestants would gallantly support that winner, though they have tears in their eyes.
Holding an armful of red roses, choking back tears of her own, the lucky winner gets to speak: “I’d like to call for world peace. That is, according to intersectional principles of fair trade, gender-fluidity, racial equity and an understanding that violence is ultimately peaceful.”
If supporters of Israel began chanting
From the river to the sea
Israel for Israelis
we’d soon find out how committed these institutions are to free speech or whether this language is deemed to be a prohibited call to genocide.
“In the event that Claudine Gay cannot fulfill her duties as Weasel of the Year, those duties will be taken up by the Runner-up Weasel, Anthony Blinken.”
Or Anthony Fauci.
Not Fauci. Three-time winners retire from further consideration.
Beat me to it.
Finalist. Honorable mention.
At some point people in Ms. Gay’s position are going to figure out that their policy should simply be to default to the First Amendment. There shouldn’t be a Code of Conduct which conflicts with the Constitution. It’s not their job to police the speech of their students. Any more than it’s their job to enforce laws against sexual assault, which should be reported to the police, not some college dean. Did someone express that some group should be genocided? That’s hate speech but the courts say it’s protected. Don’t look to the college administrators to do something about it. Wouldn’t it just be easier for the administrators to say they’ve talked to their counsel who advised that the speech in question is protected by the first amendment and they won’t get involved with it?
“Live from Las Vegas. With your host AI Jack Barry”
Here’s a post of mine from 2019 that partly concerns Jack Barry.
The UN Women organization is a very close second. Here’s an Israeli satirical take on them:
And this from some brilliant wag on X/Twitter:
I disagree. The first amendment is a restriction on government. Harvard et al have it within their right to expel students calling for genocide of Jews (“intifada” was the term used). And I have little doubt they would expel white supremacist students calling for the enslavement of blacks, or Anglo-American students calling for the internment of Chinese (the Japanese don’t seem to be a threat anymore).
It’s not that these toxic institutions have double standards, although they obviously do. It’s that they hate Jews and want to destroy Western civilization as founded on Judeo-Christian values. And by the looks of things on campus and in all the major cities of the West, they’re very close to succeeding.
I sat in total amazement watching their testimony, all three were absurd. The total lack of moral outrage on the part of the left and these three women in particular is driving my up a wall with anger. Their incredible hypocrisy in instantly condemning such heinous crimes as “misgendering” while referring to rape, murder, and mutilations in relativistic terms as though there can ever be justification for them demonstrates a level of moral vacuity that should be unheard of in educators of our children at any level. That these three mediocrities have been allowed to ascend to the highest seats in the once greatest institutions in the field is a clear demonstration that the left is bent on destroying this country, and has made major gains in that goal. It seems that daily since October 7th my sense of moral indignation has been assaulted by the leadership of this country. That our president and his vice president are both unable to make a clear statement of horror and disgust at the actions of Hamas, that they equivocate in their statements and offer weak tea pronouncements and tell Israelis to use restraint when no country faced with a similar atrocity would be expected to do so leaves me seething with what feels like impotent anger.
We have watched campus snowflakes protest the most innocuous “mini aggressions” and get counseling and safe spaces to heal their wounded souls. Now those same demented children are calling or the extermination of a people who have suffered the worst assault on their homeland in recent history, and this on the campuses of the finest institutions of learning this country has produced where History should be taught and, apparently isn’t.
We know clearly why this is happening. A half billion dollars on Qatari money flowing into Penn to create programs specifically designed to do what we are seeing now. How much Chinese money is doing the same across the country. We are being sold out to the highest bidders, and the puppet masters controlling this flow of money are choosing people of the lowest moral character to head these institutions.
I am certain that if we do not elect a some one competent to the presidency in the next election we are looking at the Gotterdammerung for this country, and for the first time in my life, I do not think that that is an exaggeration.
I agree apart from the choice of president. I don’t think it much matters when the character of the people is so low.
I’m with you. I was thinking of a word different from “work” . . .
It’s an interesting argument, but not all speech is protected on college campuses. If it were, the presidents might have a point. But it’s not protected. See Alan Dershowitz.
Congressional questioners should have pointed out that what’s been going on on campuses is not only speech, but threats, disruption, and intimidation…clearly violations of actual Law in many cases: Why haven’t these been reported to law enforcement and prosecuted?
Clare Lehmann said she wasn’t surprised that these people turned out to be weasels…I wasn’t surprised that they were weasels, but at how bad they were at it. They’ve apparently been so enmeshed in the academic left-wing bubble that they can’t communicate with people outside it.
Academia is our Axis of Weasels.
Nit pick: I believe the “half billion to one billion dollars” figure is Qatar’s total covert funding of Islamists and Quislings in the West.
I stand corrected.
Someone should start an “I stand corrected” thread. For instance:
A Stryker Brigade is not “4,000 men who will never be over Mucho Grande”. I stand corrected.
The German air force does not serve luftwaffles for breakfast. I stand corrected.
There is no children’s opera named “The Babar of Seville.” I stand corrected.
And now there’s the walk-back, which is at least as disgusting as the original testimony, in which the yes/no questioning couldn’t have been more clear.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/12/the-presidents-walk-it-back.php
There is an article on NRO that I read earlier which details the various justifications that were used by the presidents for their earlier statements. Predominant among them was to equate Islamophobia on campus to the current surge of Anti-semitism. Strangely, I find absolutely no incidents of Islamophobia anywhere in the news, and given the leftist orientation of the media you can be sure that any event which even vaguely involved the mistreatment of a Muslim would be reported over and over. However, in each of the statements made by the presidents, and, in fact, Biden as well, Islamophobia is repeated multiple times, though none could cite a single incident on their campuses.
It has been a while, but I do recall reading that the entire “Islamophobia” meme was a product of, you guessed it, Iran. That their agents have been spreading that nonsense and having it megaphoned by sympathetic media for quite some time, despite the complete absence of any reportable incidents. Oh, yes, there was that deranged landlord who stabbed a young child and his mother, but the reason for that has never been establish. The question becomes, how do we equate the massive demonstrations across the country in cities and campuses which begin to resemble Kristalnacht to the complete lack of anything reportable involving mistreatment of a Muslim person or mosques or cemeteries. We all know that synogogues and Jewish graveyards are frequently festooned with Anti-Semitic symbols.
This all has the look of the manner in which the slaughter of women, children and the elderly, the burning of their homes, the raping of young women, the beheading of babies, the unparalleled savagery that took place on October 7th and its being compared by Hamas and Hamas’s advocates to the non-existent colonialization and occupation of Palestine and Gaza. In short, create a completely absurd lie, tell it over and over, and act the victim while committing the most heinous acts possible, including using your own children as human shields so that you can pile up more bodies to display to a gullible and complicit media.
What appalls me most is that a group of three highly educated woman in positions of power have so thoroughly sold out, prostituted themselves to the forces of evil, that they are willing to stand up and repeat those lies in front of the House of Representatives and the American people. It boggles my mind.
This.
It was in their job description. Utterly amoral opportunism was a minimum, while the full deck of leftist depravity was the ideal. Recall, again, that classic essay “Who Goes Nazi?”.
I was a bit disappointed when I did not hear of any members of Congress, when the university presidents blathered ostentatiously about “free speech,” citing any of the many acts by those universities that punished or cancelled people because their views were “conservative.”
My point was that if I was a university administrator who was increasingly getting put on the hot seat to account for their actions or lack thereof when dealing with these issues, it would just be easier to wash your hands of it by defaulting to the Constitutional standard. So yes it’s within their right to impose tighter restrictions, but why do that to yourself if it’s just going to get you fired at from all sides? Right now the administrators’ actions are dictated by their Code of Conduct, which they themselves are the interpreters of. Why not just adopt the legal standard instead which lets you blame your decisions on the Supreme Court?