We have a frightening cornucopia of breaking news in our country today. Let's take a peek at what's in the bad news horn of plenty:
- “Say it loud, say it clear. We don't want no Zionists here.”
And here we thought elite universities like Columbia didn't want no students who use double negatives. Don't they have no double negative questions on the SAT?
Maybe the students who want Jews gone “From the river to the sea” should have run their anti-Zionist chant past the English Department. But what we're learning about the insanity going on at our elite universities is that some of the professors themselves don't want no Zionists here. Some are crazier than their chanting students.
I bet any parent spending as much as $90,000 per year to send a kid to Columbia would be surprised if their top-performing student came home for summer vacation saying he or she don't want no Zionists at Columbia. If you're paying that much for tuition and room and board (and presumably freshman English), you probably don't want to hear that your child (and they are children) is camping out on “the quad” in support of terrorists, that 1930s-era antisemitism is making an ugly comeback, and that Jews are being warned to avoid the campus for their own safety.
Wouldn't you expect more for your $90,000?
Per year?
The grammar, at least, improved when furious students chanted, “Mike, you suck!” (a thoughtful analysis of the issues, worthy of the Ivy League), and,“We can't hear you!” when the Speaker of the House visited the campus last week. Speaker Mike Johnson said the Columbia president should resign if she can't restore order on campus.
Sounds like a good first step.
A second would be to expel any student who takes a swing at a cop. And deport any foreign student who likes the sound of “Death to America.”
You'd think this would be obvious to such well-educated administrators.
- I keep hearing that students today “don't feel safe” in any number of situations, including when they hear someone say something with which they disagree. How do you square such sensitivity with freedom of speech? We laughed years back when some students needed therapy animals and PlayDoh to get them through the catastrophe of Donald Trump in the White House.
When I went to college, your local draft board had other plans for you if you flunked out, or chose to “take a year off” from college. It made the whole staying in school deal a lot more consequential.
Somehow, feeling safe was a luxury most draft-age males weren't afforded.
- I see that North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgham and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem are both taking active roles in the campaign to put Donald Trump back in the White House. I saw both in the news this week.
So far, I haven't seen Gov. Mark Gordon taking a similar prominent role touting the Trump election campaign.
There could be reasons. The folks at Harvard might look askance at Gordon joining his fellow western governors on the Trump bandwagon. (When was the last time you heard Trump say the words “carbon negative?”) Or maybe Gordon has his hands full contending with his own feisty state Republican Party, which censured him last week.
And Trump might disagree on gun-free zones.
Whatever the reason – and let's hope Gordon plans to get more active in coming months – you'd expect the governor of the state that gave Trump the highest percentage of votes (almost 70 percent) in 2020 to join the Burgham/Noem efforts to save our country from four more years of train wreck President Joe Biden.
- Next time you see young, spoiled, antisemitic demonstrators on campuses battling police officers, think about President Biden's campaign to forgive college loans (many held by people earning big salaries today) by whatever means necessary. You'll recall that the Supreme Court ruled that he doesn't have the power to forgive college loans. But, undeterred, President Big Spender persists.
Free-spending Joe insists on offering money we don't have to “forgive” debt most of us never incurred.
It's obviously a shameless effort to buy the votes of young people in an election year.
