Dear Weekend Jolter,
College students returned to campus across the country the last couple weeks. Alongside them, the anxious parents of freshmen lovingly helped their kids move into newly purchased tents on the quad.
Okay, that last part is a fiction — for the time being.
University administrations battered last school year by the combined scourge of tent-pitching anti-Israel student protesters and enabling faculty members are making a show of updated rules and regs as the new year begins.
The University of Denver is banning the tents. Columbia University, site of perhaps the most dramatic clash with protesters earlier this year, likewise has prohibited “camping” on the lawns (with guards on site). So has the University of California system, which, as Zach Kessel reports, is enforcing a ban on using a mask to hide one’s identity. The Wall Street Journal reports on further measures being taken to head off another round of disruptive demonstrations over Israel and Gaza, including rules against late-night rallies at Indiana University and restrictions on the use of bullhorns at Harvard.
University officials have every incentive to prevent a repeat of last school year. The failure to crack down early on anti-Israel protests in the wake of the 10/7 Hamas massacre led to daily chaos, intimidation of Jewish students that in some cases resulted in legal action, law-enforcement intervention, high-level resignations, and pressure from donors — not to mention an environment that in too many cases was not conducive to education, the product millions of students and their families pay for.
Yet whether colleges’ heavily publicized rules and newly expressed commitment to them will be enough to get control of the most activist-oriented campuses remains to be seen.
Israel’s collegiate foes signal a continued interest in demonstrating, this time perhaps via tactics other than encampments. Protests marked the first day of classes at Columbia University, though they largely were outside the gates. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka and Stephen Ailinger note that Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine “continues to actively organize demonstrations” and that “the D.C.-area SJP chapter was involved in recruiting protesters against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington.” At the University of Michigan, police arrested pro-Palestinian demonstrators last week, though they reportedly were not students; activists on the university’s student government, meanwhile, are threatening to withhold funding to student groups until the school divests from Israel.
Amid these challenges, some schools are sending mixed messages.
Zach reports that Columbia University “failed to discipline students who broke into and occupied a building on campus, even after pledging to do so.” Not only that, he reports that the doctoral student who infamously demanded “humanitarian aid” for the building occupiers in April (people, mind you, who were free to leave at any time to access essentials like water and granola bars) is now teaching a class in the same Columbia building. Down the East Coast, the University of Maryland recently reversed course to prohibit anti-Israel events on October 7, following outrage over a planned demonstration whose permit was initially granted.
Leslie Lenkowsky, an emeritus professor at Indiana University, voiced concern in a column for NR that his college hasn’t prepared enough, despite a new policy on “expressive activity” that allows peaceful protests but restricts camping and loud music. Rebecca Korbin, who served on Columbia’s antisemitism task force, told the AP that her school hasn’t made any “monumental changes,” worrying that the experience could soon resemble that from last spring: “We are hoping for the best, but we are all wagering how long before we go into total lockdown again.”
Just before the new school year, that task force released a damning report based on input from hundreds of students who described the harassment and threats they faced. A sampling:
One student who had moved into her dorm room in September, told us she placed a mezuzah on her doorway as required by ritual law, as traditional Jews have done for centuries. In October, people began banging on her door at all hours of the night, demanding she explain Israel’s actions. She was forced to move out of the dorm. . . . Students have reported having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls, while walking back to their dorms on Friday afternoon and when they were on their way to synagogue. . . . Students also recounted finding jokes about Hitler written on communal dormitory whiteboards.
Students reported that they struggled to get the university to take action in response. Colleges should, of course, ensure that open debate and discourse thrive on their grounds, no matter the subject. But the behavior documented by the Columbia report is bigotry masquerading as activism. The task force called for promoting a “richer ethic of pluralism,” something America’s universities should strive for in earnest this time.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
No more concessions: Hamas Must Pay for Murdering an American Hostage
What’s going on in Albany? Kathy Hochul’s Chinese Connection
Brazil’s got it wrong: Musk v. Brazil
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy: Hunter’s Inevitable Guilty Plea Spares His Father and the Harris Campaign
Andrew McCarthy: The Biden-Harris DOJ’s Embarrassingly Unserious Criminal Complaint against Hamas
Mark Antonio Wright: No, Winston Churchill Was Not the ‘Chief Villain’ of the Second World War
Michael M. Rosen: In Gratitude and Grief: The Inspiration of Hersh Goldberg-Polin
Noah Rothman: Hamas Is Not Afraid of the Biden-Harris Administration
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Pro-Life Realism Post-Dobbs
Becket Adams: Media Pretend That Systematic Government Censorship Is a Nothingburger
Ryan Mills: Radical Activists Nearly Ruined a Denver Mom with Racism Charge. Then the Evidence Came Out
Haley Strack: Israel Kills Terrorist Who Murdered a Father in Front of His Children
Jimmy Quinn: Former Hochul Aide Arrested on Chinese Foreign-Agent Charges
Jay Nordlinger: 4.4 million years, &c.
Jim Geraghty: America’s Useful Idiots of Hostile Regimes
Abigail Anthony: Women’s College Adopts Women-Only Admission Policy, Angering Students and Faculty
James Lynch: Judge Delays Trump Hush-Money Sentencing Until after Election
James Lynch: Foreign Automaker Lays Off Thousands of Michigan Workers after Pocketing Hundreds of Millions in Biden EV Subsidies
CAPITAL MATTERS
The price controls are coming from inside the house. Tomas J. Philipson, on a problem that’s already here: Our Price-Controlled Economy
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
John Fund examines a critic-audience disconnect: Reagan Triggers Progressives, but Movie Audiences Love It
Brian Allen spotlights a bold, fresh artist in New York’s Hudson Valley. His medium, in Brian’s telling, is “a broad cross section of animal, mineral, and vegetable”: Sculptor Daniel Giordano: Part Wizard, Part Storyteller, All Artist
Jack Butler is not impressed: The Rings of Power Returns to Lay Bare Its Flaws
DON’T GO, THE PARTY’S JUST STARTING
Mark Antonio Wright thoroughly debunks the account of a “historian” who tried this week to rewrite World War II history:
The podcaster Darryl Cooper, Tucker Carlson’s most recent guest on his Twitter interview show — and whom Carlson describes as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United states” — has set tongues wagging over his assertion that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.”
“Now,” Cooper clarifies, “Churchill didn’t kill the most people; he didn’t commit the most atrocities” — two massive concessions, Mr. Cooper! — “but when you really get into it and tell the story right, and don’t leave anything out, you see that [Churchill] was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.”
As the kids these days say: “Big, if true.”
Cooper tends to ramble when answering Carlson’s questions, but best I can tell, he assigns Churchill “chief villain” status on the basis of several interrelated factors:
(1) Before the war, when he was not yet in government, Churchill agitated for a British guarantee of Poland’s security, should that country be invaded by Germany.
(2) As prime minister in the spring and summer of 1940, Churchill refused to entertain German peace feelers and carried on the war even after the Fall of France.
(3) Because Churchill kept the British in the war in 1940, the war ground on, and this set the conditions for German and Soviet atrocities in the east, which wouldn’t have happened if the war had ended sooner.
(4) Britain, under Churchill’s leadership, waged a bombing campaign of German cities, which caused the deaths of many German civilians.
(5) Churchill and Britain, by refusing to quit, stayed in the war in the hope that other powers such as the Soviet Union and, most critically, the United States would eventually join her in defeating Germany.
(6) The results of the war, including the destruction wrought on Europe and the rise of Soviet power, have led to the diminishment of the Western world. . . .
Cooper’s revisionist history is simply folly.
Books could be written on this subject — indeed, thousands have been! — so I will limit myself to two points:
First, pace Cooper, Britain simply would never have been safe if she had quit the war and made peace with Germany in 1940, and Churchill was right to oppose a negotiated peace. Second, an early German victory in Europe would not have been “better” for the West than the real outcome of the war. . . .
Has there ever been a regime as untrustworthy as Hitler’s Germany? Has there ever been a regime that so routinely breached its international commitments? In the mid 1930s, Germany began openly violating its treaty obligations that limited the size of its military. In 1936, Germany violated the Locarno and Versailles Treaties by remilitarizing the Rhineland. In 1938, Hitler provoked the Sudetenland crisis, which led to the Munich Agreement, after which he promised he was through with territorial demands. But then, of course, in 1939, Hitler broke his word and Germany absorbed the rump of Czechoslovakia and began immediately making demands on Poland. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland (a violation, by the by, of the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934). In May 1940, Germany invaded neutral Belgium and neutral Holland, violating the commitment to uphold their sovereignty and neutrality. In 1941, Nazi Germany launched a surprise attack on its then-ally the Soviet Union after having signed the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact.
In what universe does Cooper believe that Hitler’s Nazi Germany could have been a trustworthy interlocutor with whom Britain could negotiate a peace?
Jimmy Quinn has been all over the China beat, especially as it pertains to peculiar ties to New York officials. Read his account of this week’s bombshell indictment:
Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governor Kathy Hochul, acted at the direction of Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party officials while serving in state government, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment Tuesday.
In a statement, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York said that Sun was arrested Tuesday morning with her husband, Christopher Hu. . . . Sun is a former deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul and has served in numerous roles throughout New York State government since her first post under the administration of former governor Andrew Cuomo in 2012. Before that, she served as Representative Grace Meng’s chief of staff, when the Queens Democrat served in the New York State assembly.
“As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as deputy chief of staff within the New York State Executive Chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the CCP,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said.
The federal government is alleging that Sun was an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and that her husband engaged in money-laundering while they benefited from millions of dollars in bribes from Chinese officials.
The indictment details a shocking pattern of collaboration with China’s consulate general in New York, with Sun at one point in 2020 letting a Chinese diplomat listen in on a private conference call for New York officials regarding the state government’s response to the Covid pandemic.
Chinese-government and CCP officials directed her to block Taiwanese officials from engaging with officials from New York. Beijing views the current government of Taiwan as a traitorous separatist movement and wants to annex the country. . . .
Among the financial and economic benefits they received were “Nanjing-style salted ducks” prepared by a Chinese government official’s chef, which were delivered to Sun’s parents. The consulate delivered at least 16 salted ducks, the indictment indicates.
They purchased a $3.6 million house on Long Island, a $1.9 million condominium in Honolulu, and luxury cars, including a 2024 model Ferrari, the indictment said.
John Fund highlights the yawning gap between the reviews of and audience reaction to the new Reagan movie:
If you need any more evidence that there is a gap the width of the Grand Canyon between the views of progressive elites and many average Americans, look no further than the reaction to Reagan, the new biographical film starring Dennis Quaid that launched in theaters last Thursday. Movie critics have done everything but pour boiling tar on the film and its makers. On the Rotten Tomatoes review site, Reagan earns a 20 percent “rotten” rating based on 46 reviews by critics.
The Daily Beast didn’t waste any time, slamming Reagan as “the worst movie of the year.” Boston critic Sean Burns calls it “a children’s story for the adult diaper set.” The AV Club claims that the film’s references to Reagan’s faith spring from its origins in the “christofascist content creation world.” Milder takes are that the film is shallow, idolatrous “historical hooey,” and a giant bore.
On the other side, the Rotten Tomatoes measure of audience appreciation (“Popcornmeter”) gives the film a 98 percent “fresh” score based on more than 1,000 verified film attendees. Reagan also scored big on two theatrical exit-polling sites, earning an “A” grade from CinemaScore and 4.5 stars from PostTrak. Ticket sales for the four-day Labor Day weekend are likely to come in at a very respectable $9.2 million.
We often see a divide between movie critics and the people in the theater seats. And when it comes to films with a political angle or a statement on controversial values, those gaps can be big. But of the approximately 15,000 films released in the quarter century of Rotten Tomatoes’ existence, there has never been a gulf between critics and audiences as vast as that for Reagan.
It’s unprecedented. Only four films since 1998 have seen a divide of 50 percent or more: Boondock Saints (65 percent), Super Troopers (54 percent), Venom (50 percent), and Uncharted (50 percent). The gap with Reagan is a stunning 78 percent.
Perhaps the dichotomy is explained in part by the fact that a big chunk of Americans have been waiting for just such a movie on Reagan. Previous efforts have sought to take down or tarnish the former president. . . .
Mark Joseph, the producer of the new Reagan film, says he felt compelled to make the movie before Hollywood attempted once again to rewrite history. “Nobody knew him like his enemies did — and it’s through that lens that we tell the story. It’s impossible to understand the last century without understanding who Ronald Reagan was,” Joseph told me.
CODA