Jane Kitchen, despite her humble background, got into elite Seven Sisters Bryn Mawr (Kathryn Hepburn’s alma mater) with a scholarship.
It was less fun than she thought it would be, being the poor girl at a rich girl’s school, and then came COVID and a closed down campus, leaving her trapped at home. She transferred to anti-establishment, right-wing Hillsdale and evidently found happiness.
I worked hard in school. I have a single mom and we don’t have a lot of money, so I knew that I would have to score a near-full scholarship.
When I graduated high school at 16, my mom didn’t want to send me so far away so young. I enrolled in my local school, Arizona State University, and we both agreed that I could transfer out after my freshman year.
I arrived on Bryn Mawr’s campus, a Seven Sisters school in Pennsylvania, in the Fall of 2019. I was overjoyed. The campus was gorgeous, and, to this day, it is probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in real life. There were gothic towers and acres of manicured lawns. I was eager to join the other nerdy girls and to find friends I’d have for life.
I’d gone to underfunded, overcrowded public schools my whole life and this was my first experience with small classes and teachers who seemed to love teaching. I took a poetry class where the professor would sing folk songs to us in the hallway as we made our way into class. I learned to write short stories from an Italian instructor who compared writing to preparing homemade pasta. I had been nervous about not being able to keep up academically, but the calculus class I took that first year was easier than the one at ASU.
Socially, it wasn’t entirely what I expected. The people at Bryn Mawr were the wealthiest and most liberal I had ever encountered. During my first week on campus, a girl I met suggested over dinner that 9/11 was justified because the United States had meddled in Middle East politics. She went on to say that the 9/11 memorial should be changed so as to show more respect to Muslims. One of the girls in my hall casually mentioned that Michelle Obama had been in a spin class she had taken in the Hamptons that summer. At first, I thought she was kidding.
I joined a sketch comedy group, which often started meetings by asking members to answer a question. One day, the question was “How is your semester going?” A few people answered directly, and then one girl said “I’m having a great semester, but I totally acknowledge that some students, especially BIPOC students, face a lot of challenges on campus.” Then, every person after her prefaced their answer by saying that students who aren’t white were probably having a worse semester than them.
I didn’t sit around with my friends all night arguing about big questions like I thought I would. It was assumed that we all agreed on the answers. But I made friends, and I loved my classes. I went to parties at nearby colleges, and I was making plans to study abroad in Ireland, which, as someone who had only left my home state twice, was a huge deal for me.
That was supposed to be in the Fall of 2020, but of course it never happened. I remember talking about the coronavirus on the way home from a party with my friend, a self-professed germaphobe, in January of 2020. She asked if I thought we should be worried. I told her that as a campus we should be more worried about binge drinking, and we both laughed. I thought that would be the end of it. Weeks later, Bryn Mawr announced that my spring semester would be held online.
William Doyle responds to the WSJ’s assertion that “no evidence of widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 Presidential Election can be found.
They stole it all right, but they stole it more cleverly.
[T]here is another side of the argument regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 election that The Wall Street Journal has relentlessly ignored.
The hypothesis is that a deeply corrupted corporate media, Big Tech censorship, legally questionable intervention by the courts, and infiltration of key election offices by lavishly funded Democratic activists resulted in “heavy-handed election interference of a kind we have never seen before” that decisively “rigged” the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
The WSJ editorial board would know this if they had read this, this, this, this, this, this, or our work on the role of Big Tech money in Wisconsin’s 2020 election. All of these studies present indisputable evidence of a “rigged election” in Wisconsin and in other key swing states, where the highly partisan distribution of big Center for Tech and Civic Life money, and obvious election interference by CTCL-funded election offices, was more than sufficient to flip those states toward Biden.
The WSJ then opines “the stolen-election theory doesn’t hold up [according to the WILL Report]. President Biden won Wisconsin by 20,682 votes, and mass fraud would likely have resulted in some discernible anomaly.” But this is a perfect example of the “red herring” fallacy. The problem is not “mass voter fraud,” but a very “discernible anomaly” involving a highly coordinated and privately funded “shadow campaign” for Biden that took place within the formal structure of the election system.
By injecting more than $419 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, laundered through the CTCL and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), the professional left presided over a targeted, historically unprecedented takeover of government election offices by demonstrably ideological activists and nonprofit organizations in key areas of these swing states. Nothing like this has happened in at least the last 150 years of American elections.
Treating CTCL spending as if it were just another example of one campaign outspending another, or the insidious role of “dark money” in the 2020 election, misses the point entirely. Big CTCL and CEIR money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, media buys, lobbying, or Citizens United v. FEC-related campaign finance issues.
It had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by Democrat activists and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, ballot harvesting efforts, and data sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and surgically targeted, door-to-door get-out-the-vote efforts in areas heavy with Democratic voters.
In Wisconsin and other swing states, big CTCL money introduced structural bias in favor of Biden into the entire 2020 election. This involved favoring certain voters and voting practices over others and disfavoring other classes of voters and voting practices, giving CTCL’s preferred voting methods—especially no-ID absentee ballots—and “New American Majority” voters and voting methods an outsized effect on the final election results. CTCL targeted heavily Democratic jurisdictions for heavy spending, and provided little or no funding to election offices in more Republican-leaning cities and counties.
Summer Brennan channels the Susan Sontag of “Notes on Camp” in an over-the-top essay occasioned by Meatloaf’s recent passing, celebrating his MTV video of “I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).”
I’m not any regular viewer of MTV videos. It’s an artistic? genre that emerged really after my time of personal engagement with popular music, but I watched this one, and feel obliged to agree: this one’s a hoot.
Meat Loaf looking as grotesque as Quasimodo, in a setting as Gothic as the Phantom’s Opera House, singing nonetheless passionately about love, bizarrely enough, works on a variety of levels.
When I saw Meat Loaf’s iconic I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) for the first time on MTV, I had just finished eighth grade. It was… I mean… oh my god. This music video had everything: revving engine sounds; a mausoleum; a Michael Bay-directed helicopter, car, and motorcycle chase; a foggy blue forest; angst; a sexy fat man in Halloween makeup smashing a literal hall of mirrors; flashlights; dorky lyrics; sexual longing; an opulent bi-curious bedroom set, lesbian succubi absolutely included; and so, so many candles. It was a power ballad missile of queasy erotic awakening aimed straight at my 14-year-old heart.
I was powerless to resist it.
The pure old-fashioned melodrama of it all. The absolute cheesiness. The passion. It was glorious. It was ridiculous. It was histrionic. It was camp as fuck. It was a music video that asked, what if Quasimodo was an over-the-top bombastic 70s rock star and also sang like the Phantom of the Opera? What if a floor-length white dress could also show your whole underwear? What if you followed a fugitive hunchback through the dark woods and then bathed in your clothes by the light of a thousand burning tapers? What if backup singers? What if lightning? What if chandeliers?
If you were unmoved by this kind of thing, even in middle school, then fine, but you are not my people.
People are still turning out appreciative, insightful essays about Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” (2021) 8-hour-long documentary of the Beatles’ 1970 composing sessions leading to a rooftop performance.
There’s a truism in sport that what makes a champion is not the level they play at when they’re in top form but how well they play when they’re not in form. When we meet The Beatles in Get Back, they’re clearly in a dip, and that’s what makes their response to it so impressive. Even the best songs they bring in are not necessarily very good to begin with. Don’t Let Me Down is not up to much at Twickenham. George calls it corny, and he isn’t wrong. But John has a vision of a song that eschews irony and sophistication and lunges straight for your heart, and he achieves it, with a little help from his friends. They keep running at the song, shaping it and honing it, and by the time they get to the roof it is majestic.
The already classic scene in which Paul wrenches the song Get Back out of himself shows us, not just a moment of inspiration, but how the group pick up on what is not an obviously promising fragment and begin the process of turning it into a song. In the days to follow, they keep going at it, day after day, run-through after run-through, chipping away, laboriously sculpting the song into something that seems, in its final form, perfectly effortless. As viewers, we get bored of seeing them rehearse it and we see only some of it: on January 23rd alone they ran it through 43 times. The Beatles don’t know, during this long process, what we know – that they’re creating a song that millions of people will sing and move to for decades to come. For all they know, it might be Shit Takes all the way down. But they keep going, changing the lyrics, making small decision after small decision – when the chorus comes in, where to put the guitar solos, when to syncopate the beat, how to play the intro – in the blind faith that somewhere, hundreds of decisions down the line, a Beatles song worthy of the name will emerge.
A good song or album – or novel or painting – seems authoritative and inevitable, as if it just had to be that way, but it rarely feels like that to the people making it. Art involves a kind of conjuring trick in which the artist conceals her false starts, her procrastination, her self-doubts, her confusion, behind the finished article. The Beatles did so well at effacing their efforts that we are suspicious they actually had to make any, which is why the words “magic” and “genius” get used so much around them. A work of genius inspires awe in a lesser artist, but it’s not necessarily inspiring. In Get Back, we are allowed into The Beatles’ process. We see the mess; we live the boredom. We watch them struggle, and somehow it doesn’t diminish the magic at all. In a sense, Paul has finally got his wish: Let It Be is not just an album anymore. Joined up with Get Back, it is an exploration of the artistic journey – that long and winding road. It is about how hard it is to create something from nothing, and why we do it, despite everything.
Ever once in a while, some representatives of the community of fashion establishment goes just one Woke step too far, and is obliged to retreat sullenly, doing damage control all the way.
Rod Dreher posts a rather colorful example from Bard College, quoting Bari Weiss.
[I]f you don’t subscribe to Bari Weiss’s newsletter Common Sense, you are really missing out. From today’s TGIF news roundup by Nellie Bowles, there was this:
It’s always fun to check up on what’s going on in academia. Here’s an announcement that showed up in the Bard College library newsletter (Bard tuition, $57,498 a year):
In keeping with campus-wide initiatives to ensure that Bard is a place of inclusion, equity, and diversity, the Stevenson Library is conducting a diversity audit of the entire print collection in an effort to begin the process of decanonizing the stacks. Three students, who are funded through the Office of Inclusive Excellence, have begun the process which we expect will take at least a year to complete. The students will be evaluating each book for representations of race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and ability.
So, to paraphrase this library announcement: three Bard students, chosen and paid for by the Office of Inclusive Excellence, are tasked with reviewing every book in the Bard library to evaluate how well it adheres to their moral standards. Facing outrage from library-fans, Bard quickly retracted and rewrote this announcement and clarified that the audit was more high-level analysis of each book and author.
Still I like to imagine these students marching through the stacks, pulling every spine, reading every page to examine for “representations of race, gender, religion, and ability.” Does Charles Dickens dehumanize someone with a limp somewhere? I bet he does. There’s some nasty ableism in Beowulf. Was Aristotle a feminist? This could take a while. Also, I think I kind of want to be on this committee.
The term decanonizemeansexclusion of a person’s name from a list or catalog. It’s a term most commonly associated with the church, who decanonizes to demote a saint who’s on the outs.
There’s of course a whole new intellectual underpinning for all of this. Here’s the librarian Sofia Leung, who offers trainings and workshops on critical race theory in libraries:
“Our library collections, because they are written mostly by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks,” she writes, asking her readers to pause and think about that in her essay, Whiteness as Collections. Or watch her talk with the University of Michigan on the “‘Ordinary’ Existence of White Supremacy in Libraries.”
The announcement about decanonization came in a cheery library update. It wasn’t the top item. It’s just there between an alumna to be honored and a local cleanup effort. Decanonization is a casual, business-as-usual sort of activity, hardly anything to pay attention to or ask about.
When I wrote to ask about the announcement, Bard officials explained that this was all a big misunderstanding. Nothing the library newsletter had about this effort should be taken literally, they told me.
“It will help us understand and answer questions about representation in our collections and build a more inclusive collection going forward,” wrote Betsy Cawley, the director of Bard libraries. “Nothing is being removed, recategorized, or replaced.”
Decanonization is not decanonization at all. Judging each book does not mean judging each book (“an earlier brochure entry suggesting that has been revised”). It is just a fact-finding mission to learn more, not to remove anything.
In some cold upstate New York panic, they retracted and rewrote the whole thing. “The erroneous entry has been removed,” the school tells me now.
Regardless, if any Common Sense-readers would like to read books that three Bard students deem offensive, please turn yourself in to the local police station.
This is insane. It’s good that Bard retracted it, but it is a scandal that this kind of anti-intellectual, illiberal lunacy ever saw the light of day in the first place.
Gerard van der Leun updated the Beatles hit song “Help!” (1965) for Joe Biden’s contemporary America.
When I was younger so much younger than today
I never needed anybiden’s help in any way
But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured
Now I find I’ve lost my mind and voted for the whores
Help me if you can, I’m feeling broke
And I do appreciate you being ‘woke
Help me get more money all for free
Won’t you please steal for me?
And now my strife has changed in oh so many ways
All my freedoms seem to vanish in this maze
And every now and then I feel just like a whore
See I need you to work so I can cop and score.
Help me if you can, I’m feeling brown
And I do appreciate you fucking ’round
Help me get more freebies by the pound
Won’t you please, please steal for me?
Nobuo Fujita, a Japanese pilot, was the only person to ever bomb the contiguous US. After the war, he was invited back to the same town he bombed (Brookings, Oregon).
Once there, Fujita offered his family’s katana to the mayor, as a token of remorse and humility.
_
Hours before sunrise off the coast of Oregon in September of 1942, there was movement on a submarine. It was nine months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and a team of Japanese sailors were quickly assembling a seaplane on the deck.
Next to them was a catapult for takeoff and a crane to pick the wheel-less plane from the sea after the mission – they were going to bomb the coast as retaliation for what was known as the ‘Doolittle raids’ which had struck Tokyo months prior.
30 year-old fighter pilot Nobuo Fujita had wanted to bomb LA or San Francisco – but had been told by his superiors to target Brookings, Oregon.
Fujita would ignite the forest, engulfing a chain of towns, drawing valuable resources away from battle and inciting fear throughout the West Coast.
But Oregon conditions wouldn’t allow it. It was wet and the bombs fizzled in the damp woods.
The crew packed away the plane and headed back West.
20 years later, a group of Brookings businessmen invited Fujita back for the towns’ Memorial Day celebrations.
When Fujita arrived, he gifted his families prized 400-year-old samurai sword to the town.
Brookings and Fujita forged a bond that lasted the next 3 decades. The town made him an honorary citizen in 1997. He passed away just days later at 85 years old.
A tree had been planted in the place where Fujita dropped the bombs, his daughter spread his ashes at the location. She said she felt his soul would be flying over the forest forever.
DRAKE he’s in his hammock an’ a thousand mile away,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the ships,
Wi’ sailor lads a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe,
An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’
He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.
Drake he was a Devon man, an’ ruled the Devon seas,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Rovin’ tho’ his death fell, he went wi’ heart at ease,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe,
“Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.”
Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?),
Slung atween the round shot, listenin’ for the drum,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
Where the old trade’s plyin’ an’ the old flag flyin’,
They shall find him, ware an’ wakin’, as they found him long ago.
Yale’s next residential college should be named for Pawel Morozov, the Soviet Young Pioneer, who reported his father to the Party for hiding food. The father was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp, and ultimately executed. 13-year-old Pavel was killed by his relatives for betraying his father, and then his whole family was executed by firing squad.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that Yale has successfully adopted the Neighborly Surveillance and Reporting System that proved previously so successful in East Germany and Castro’s Cuba.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Yale University has required all students to mask indoors in public spaces. But it was 9:30 p.m on a Saturday night, and the library was deserted. With no one within at least 150 feet of him, a Yale senior decided to relax with a movie—and without a mask.
It got him reported to the school’s COVID hotline.
According to the Yale senior, another student walked into the library and demanded he mask up. Since he didn’t have one on him, the senior said he would leave. As he was gathering his belongings, the other student pulled out her phone and began filming him. When the senior asked for her name, the student raised her middle finger and stormed off.
Two days later, he received a notice from the Yale administration that he had been reported for violating the school’s “Community Compact,” a set of rules put in place to “promote the health and safety of all community members.” The student was given 24 hours to provide the “Compact Review Committee” with “any relevant information” he would like it to consider during the official “evaluation” of his conduct. He was ultimately found guilty of a violation and threatened with a “public health withdrawal.”
“The [committee] has determined that your conduct posed a risk to the health and safety of yourself or other community members,” the university wrote the student two weeks later. “Should you continue to engage in behavior that violates the Yale Community Compact, you will be placed on Public Health Warning and may face more serious outcomes, including the removal of permission to be on campus.”
According to university documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, the incident in the library took place on December 4, 2021—the same night 1,000 maskless students gathered for Yale’s annual holiday dinner. A ritzy Yale tradition that had been canceled in 2020, the dinner featured lobster-laden ice sculptures and a parade of mostly masked dining hall workers, who marched the decadent culinary spread through a packed crowd of students, according to a video posted of the evening’s festivities.
The episode offers a window into the intrusive and often inconsistent enforcement of Yale’s COVID rules, which, as one student put it, “made campus feel like a surveillance state.” The rules were put in place before the existence of vaccines but have persisted long after, relaxing or tightening as case counts fluctuate and new variants erupt.
You successful hedge fund tycoons, be sure to give Peter Salovey another $100 million, since he’s doing such a fine job.
1956: For a bet whilst drunk, former Marine Thomas Fitzpatrick stole a small plane from New Jersey and then landed it perfectly on a narrow Manhattan street in front of the bar he had been drinking at. He had made a bet with a fellow drinker that he could leave the bar, go to New Jersey, and then get back in 15 minutes.
He did nearly the exact same thing two years later, after a bar patron refused to believe he had done the first one.
Above the Law Founding Editor David Lat handicaps Joe Biden’s “Black Female” potential SCOTUS picks.
Who will President Biden pick to replace Justice Breyer? I offered some off-the-cuff reactions in a lengthy Twitter thread, and now I’ll provide more detailed analysis.
Here’s one thing we do know: the Biden Administration’s SCOTUS nominee will be a Black woman. In February 2020, back when he was a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised to appoint the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. And yesterday, after news of Justice Breyer’s retirement broke, White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated that pledge.
Indeed, President Biden appears to have anticipated this very moment, by placing a record number of Black women on the federal appeals courts (where every current member of SCOTUS has come from, save Justice Elena Kagan). He has nominated eight Black women to the circuit courts, and five have been confirmed—doubling the number of Black women on the federal appellate bench.
Without further ado, here are five women I view as leading contenders to replace Justice Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court, along with my rough odds on how likely it is that each will be nominated. Odds are, of course, subject to change (and I have already changed them from the odds I put out yesterday, in fact).
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: 3-to-2 odds (40 percent)
Age: 51 (born September 14, 1970)
Current role: Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (since June 17, 2021)
Education: Harvard University (A.B.), Harvard Law School (J.D.)
Clerkship(s): Judge Patti Saris (D. Mass), Judge Bruce Selya (1st Cir.), Justice Stephen Breyer
Senate vote history: 53-44
ABA rating: Well Qualified
Judge Jackson is widely viewed as the frontrunner—and one can see why. First, she has the credentials and experience we look for in SCOTUS nominees (for better or worse): two Ivy League degrees; multiple clerkships, including a Supreme Court clerkship; and judicial experience, including service on the prestigious D.C. Circuit and eight years as a district judge before that. Second, she enjoys strong support in liberal and progressive circles, thanks to her background as a former public defender and rulings against Donald Trump and his administration in several high-profile cases—including the Don McGahn subpoena litigation, when she declared that “presidents are not kings.”
Third, she went through the Senate confirmation process just last year, winning support from all 50 Democrats, including Senators Joe Manchin (W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), and three Republicans—Senators Susan Collins (R-Me.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Yes, a senator who previously supported her could argue “SCOTUS is different”—but the prestigious and powerful D.C. Circuit ain’t chopped liver, and any senator who voted for her last year did so with the knowledge that she was a potential high-court contender. And because Judge Jackson hasn’t done anything crazy while on the D.C. Circuit—indeed, critics might complain that she hasn’t done anything, period—it’s hard to see why any of these senators would have a change of heart.
So my guess is that Judge Jackson will get the nomination—unless there are some lucky breaks in favor of Justice Kruger, to whom we now turn. Read the rest of this entry »
