Americans watched in horrified disbelief as the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT testified before Congress last week. The leaders of three of the most prestigious universities in the country revealed themselves as inept, morally bankrupt frauds, as they danced around whether campus calls for genocide constitute harassment.

This is a moment of maximum peril for elite universities, which rely on reputations earned decades ago. Essentially, they run on prestige.

If Americans sense they’re choosing their students by the same flawed methods they’re using to choose their leaders, the prestige that sustains them is very much in jeopardy.

And that’s exactly what’s going on. Elite universities pretend to be meritocracies when that’s no longer the case. They’ve decided to privilege Marxism and “intersectionality”—cloaked as DEI—above merit. That’s their prerogative, but the results were evident at the recent hearing. And they weren’t impressive.

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Disney just filed its annual form 10-k with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and it contains some stunning admissions. 

The company acknowledges that it is having problems with declining profitability because their content is increasingly out of step with consumer preferences. They also admit their politicking may be hurting the company's brand. 

But didn't we know that already? What's new here? 

What's new is that the company is admitting it in an official document registered with a powerful regulatory authority. 

To this point, Disney has tried to spin us with stories which avoid the core problem. The problem wasn’t too many Marvel sequels. The problem is that most of them pandered to progressive causes.

It's one thing to try to spin the press. It's another thing to mislead the SEC, which has severe legal consequences. In other words, Disney pretty much had to tell the truth this time. 

Now it's time to hold them accountable. Now shareholders have the right, indeed the duty, to talk to the company. 

Seize that opportunity!

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“We think there’s about eight hostages that are Americans,” John Kirby told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos this week. Two weeks earlier, Biden claimed that his brokering of the hostages for prisoners deal with Israel showed focus on the safety of Americans. Biden also claimed that the four-day ‘pause’ showed his determination to “bring Americans home.”

In eight days of exchanges, however, only one American got released.

Despite brokering the deal, it never included any guarantees that the nine Americans would be released unharmed, nor did it require Hamas to allow Red Cross access to Americans they kidnapped. At the same time, Biden and his team neglected to arrange for the exit of over a thousand Americans from Gaza.

Kirby now wants Israel to enter another pause to get the rest of the Americans out. We should be asking why Biden didn’t arrange for that in the first set of exchanges? … and why Biden and his team have made a habit of abandoning Americans to terrorist groups—first in Afghanistan and now in Gaza.

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Elon Musk said some incautious things on Twitter recently. That's not much of a surprise. Musk is an irascible genius, with no filter and a bit of a Twitter addiction. 

But the reaction was terribly disproportionate, with widespread but spurious charges of anti-Semitism and then a wave of boycotts by Apple, Disney, Comcast, IBM and others. 

But according to the Claremont Institute's BLM funding database: three of those companies have pledged roughly half a billion dollars to BLM and related causes. And BLM has been associated with Hamas cheerleading and a cals to end the nation of Israel. Musk deleted the tweet, visited Israel and made perfectly clear: He’s no antisemite. And yet the boycotts continue. Companies are right to consider reputational risk. 

But boycotting the world's richest man who owns a gigantic megaphone for spurious reasons is risky. So is entangling your brand with Hamas' genocidal allies. 

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So-called “women’s groups” have always claimed to speak for women and defend their interests. Now we know these claims were a hypocritical sham.
Feminist women’s groups have lost all legitimacy by failing to denounce Hamas’ use of rape and sexual violence against women as a weapon of war.
What Hamas has done to Israeli women is beyond horrific. Take just one example: One Israeli woman, described as having the “face of an angel,” was gang-raped by eight to ten men. She begged to be killed, before being shot in the back of the head. 

Her rapists laughed.

A State Department spokesman admitted Hamas likely refuses to release female hostages because they’ll tell of the grotesque sexual atrocities committed against them.

Still the “women’s groups”—including the UN’s arm for women’s empowerment—remain far too silent. They’re appalling.

It’s time to reassert the moral standard against violence against women in war.

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Last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Israel doesn’t have enough “credit” to completely dismantle Hamas.  This weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris said too many civilians are being killed and Israel must respect international law.

Of course, civilians must be protected and international law respected, as they were by Israel on October 6th of this year and last year and the year before that.  Of course, too, Hamas, which has been hiding armaments in civilian outposts like schools and hospitals, and civilians in front of military targets, is violating international law. This was true on October 6th of this year and last year and the year before that.  Hamas attacks on Israel were the most radical violations of humanitarian and international law we’ve seen. This is how terrorists always operate.

What is new is that U.S. officials now are complicitly aiding and abetting terrorist war manuals and rules of engagement.  This is the precise path to more civilian death, not less.  Blinken and Harris should be ashamed of themselves.

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The reservoir of sympathy for Israel in the wake of the October 7th attack has turned out to be shockingly shallow.

We're seeing gleeful bloodlust in the streets of capital cities, among the students at elite universities. Murderers celebrated instead of condemned.

What has happened to our world?

Israelis have no illusions about what is intended by the now-commonplace chant "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." The message is simple in that phrase: Erase the Jews. I am hardly alone in believing it is a call for genocide, for another holocaust.

Do you wonder at how ferociously Israel defends itself? Consider how the United States and Britain responded when the Axis powers sought to destroy them in World War II.

America and her allies' aim was the enemy's unconditional surrender, or its leaders' deaths and the destruction of their war machine. Total war.

And America succeeded.

As will Israel, where "never again" still means "never again."

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After the tragic death of George Floyd,  virtually every blue chip company in America leapt into the fray pledging fealty and shareholder dollars to BLM. Now, after the horrific massacres by Hamas, that decision has not aged well. The BLM movement, including one of its co-founders and various affiliates, have come out publicly against Israel and in favor of the “liberation of Palestine.” 

One of the co-founders has been on the record as of eight years ago explicitly identifying herself with the ending of the “colonial experiment” Israel. That’s flat out genocidal. 

American business utterly failed in its due diligence when it associated its brand, brands owned by us, the investors, with a movement whose anti-Semitism was obvious to anyone who bothered to look. 

It's time for the customers, employees and especially the shareholders of these companies to speak up and urge these companies to disavow their association with the pro-Hamas BLM movement. Basic decency requires nothing less.

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When Joe Biden announced that he’d brokered an operational pause in Gaza, he proclaimed his effort showed his determination to “bring Americans home.” But, Biden’s deal didn’t actually include any guarantees that Hamas would release any of the ten American hostages. At the end of the negotiated period, only one had been freed.

So what did Biden really want from the ‘pause’? As many suspected, the White House began using the inertia from five days of a truce to push an end to the war—and on the terms of Hamas.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the ‘brokers’ of the hostage-for-prisoners deal have begun pressuring Israel to accept yet another cease-fire from Hamas, in exchange for possibly ‘thousands’ of Palestinian prisoners. The IDF would be forced to exit Gaza with an agreement of ‘demilitarization’ from the terrorist group that just pledged to repeat the atrocities of October 7 until Israel is annihilated.

This is not just weakness. It is an utter moral collapse.

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In just the last week, there have been two disquieting accounts of the persecution of Jews in New York City. In one, a pro-Hamas mob smashed the window of a kosher restaurant. In the other, a high school teacher had to take shelter as hundreds of students rampaged through the halls and threatened violence. All because she had attended a pro-Israel rally.

This isn’t the America I grew up in. It’s shocking and sad. 

But it’s predictable when young people and immigrants have been taught to treat traditional American values—like open mindedness and color blindness—with disdain. The diversity, equity and inclusion curricula adopted by schools nationwide has put group identity above all else and substitutes emotion for reasoned disagreement.  

It's time that we insist on tolerance and respect for all who embrace America and our time-honored way of life.

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