Only a fool would be fooled by Jared Taylor

Jared Taylor is a notorious racist and extremist, recognized as a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Only an extremely naive person could read any of his articles, which are generally pleasantly written and express less obvious hate than an extremely patronizing condescension. For example, did you know that he actually likes black people? Sure does. He says so.

Like some other writers for this website, I have a reputation for writing rude things about blacks. I have written rude things about whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims, but being rude about blacks is one of our era’s unforgivable sins. Of course, what I write about blacks is true, but as Mark Twain pointed out, nothing astonishes people more than to tell them the truth. Deep down, everyone knows the truth about blacks, but a vital requirement for respectability is to pretend you don’t.

The fact is, there are things to like about blacks—and I like them. They mostly have to do with lack of inhibition, a kind of cheerful spontaneity you don’t often find in whites. I have a half-Asian friend—a connoisseur of stereotypes—who thinks blacks and whites differ in that respect even more than they do in average IQ. As he puts it, whites act like Asians who have had a few drinks and blacks act like whites who have had a few drinks.

That’s enough. You can read the rest of his article, where he mentions how they complimented his hat and speak an interesting dialect and are so trusting and child-like if you want, but you’ll recognize the game — he thinks that diminishing people into shallow stereotypes is flattering them.

I trust that readers here are not idiots and wouldn’t for an instant regard Jared Taylor’s condescension as anything but demeaning. Which means, obviously, that Amy Wax is not a reader here. Amy Wax is a professor at UPenn who has been regularly making racist comments to her students, insulting the Asian and Black students at her university, who have been lobbying for years to see her fired. She is such a dumb bigot that she invited Jared Taylor to speak to her classes…for some unfathomable purpose. Was she looking for training in treating her minority students more repulsively?

She has already applied that talent for condescension to Asian students, in addition to black students.

I confess I find Asian support for these [liberal] policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.

Just like Jared Taylor, she’s a master at deploying stereotypes like backhanded compliments.

She hasn’t been fired yet, but she has been slapped down a bit.

Wax — who has called into question the academic ability of Black students, invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to her classroom, and said the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration — will be suspended for one year at half pay with benefits intact. She also will face a public reprimand issued by university leadership, the loss of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement to note in her public appearances that she is not speaking for or as a member of the Penn Carey Law school or Penn.

But she will not be fired or lose her tenure.

It’s good to have tenure, isn’t it? You can even survive a blistering attack like this one, from the administration.

Wax’s conduct, according to [former U President] Magill’s letter, “included a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” She also, according to the letter, breached “the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of University policy.”

Wax also, both in and out of the classroom, repeatedly and in public made “discriminatory and disparaging statements targeted at specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify,” the letter said.

For that, her punishment is half-pay for a year and a loss of summer salary — I bet her half-pay is more than my full pay, and I don’t get summer salary, either, and unlike Awful Amy, I can’t make it up through my connections to the Hoover Institute, or by hitting the lucrative right-wing lecture circuit.

Just wait, she’s going to be declared a martyr by the “free speech” poltroons. Not bad for someone unable to recognize how vile Jared Taylor is.

The grill is blue, therefore the racism is true

Creationist logic is soaking into the general discourse, I’m sorry to say. As we’ve all heard, Donald Trump declared that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and some people have been desperately trying to validate that. Among their ranks we have Chris Rufo, the professional racist, destroyer of universities, and flailing idiot trained in the heart of the Discovery Institute, who attempts to mimic skeptical reasoning in a post titled…

The Cat Eaters of Ohio
The establishment media called it a racist myth, but is it?

Yes. Yes it is.

He’s going to get to the bottom of this story.

So, is there any truth to the charge? We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals that, yes, in fact, some migrants in Ohio appear to have been “eating the cats,” though not exactly in the manner that Trump described.

“Not exactly” is doing a lot of work here. To translate, he’s saying “not even close to what Trump described,” which he interprets as reasonable doubt that any rebuttals are valid.

Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!”

I watched the video. It’s true, there are live cats on camera, and there is a barbecue grill, and there is something unidentifiable cooking on the grill, and there is a man vocally accusing them of grilling cats. That’s it. One ambiguous video yanked off of TikTok. That’s Rufo’s evidence.

He does go a significant step further, and he or someone he’s associated with contacted the creator of the video, and even visited the neighborhood to ask questions. It’s a significant effort, but all he’s going to get out of it is a lot of irrelevant details. As any creationist knows, piling on random detail is an adequate substitute for actually confirming a hypothesis.

We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”

Point of order: there has been no evidence presented that it was a cat on the grill. Having the initial accuser repeat the accusation adds nothing.

We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.

So, not a Haitian. Telling us the country of origin of the accused does not in any way confirm that they were eating cats — we keep drifting further and further away from the initial claim — but it does contradict the story we were told.

But hey, people from Africa, people from a Caribbean island, they’re all the same. They’re black. Is Rufo trying to establish that yes, it sure is a racist myth?

One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.

At this point, we’ve lost the plot. Now we’ve got the testimony of someone in the neighborhood saying that she had a neighbor, not necessarily the same person as the one accused in the video, was from Africa. In Rufo’s mind, this is a connection sufficient to establish guilt, and he had a knife, and he was reputed to have hunted for meat in the neighborhood.

Somebody had a blue grill, the same color as the grill in the video, therefore they must have been cooking cats.

There are many cats wandering about, further evidence. I’m going to have to confess: there are many feral and pet cats living in my neighborhood. I’m going to be in big trouble if ever I’m accused of cat-eating, because they’ll be able to point to a random cat strolling by and announce “A-ha! Opportunity! Therefore, guilty!”

Rufo imagines himself a reasonable man, so he offers a reasonable interpretation.

To be clear: this single incident does not confirm every particularity of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs. But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its “fact checkers,” who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism.

It does not confirm any particularity of Trump’s statement. It’s a different city and a different nationality. Notice how he now segues from a video of something indefinite on a grill to a definitive statement that “cats alone were on the grill,” something that has not been established by this investigation. The question he should be asking is — what was Trump’s source for this garbled, ugly claim? I know, he’s just going to say it was people on television, but what ought to be engaging Rufo is not whether there is some thin, tenuous thread of circumstance that can be attached post-hoc to Trump’s claim, but what was the actual basis for the claim?

Also, the fact checkers never insisted that this has never happened. Every account I’ve read points out that there was an isolated instance of a mentally ill person eating a cat, so right away there’s an awareness that it’s entirely possible that there have been individual cases of such incidents. The expression of racism arises from the fact that Rufo and Trump and a whole wing of conservatives are flatly accusing an entire group of people of reprehensible behavior on the basis of the flimsiest evidence. It arises from the fact that Rufo can blithely equate Congolese with Haitian.

It takes only a single exception, however, to falsify a hypothesis, and the logical next step, for any honest broker, is to ask if it is happening more often, and elsewhere. It is not implausible. Many developing nations, including the Congo and Haiti, have traditions of animal sacrifice or consumption of what Americans would consider household pets. And if this occurred in Dayton, where the migrant population is relatively small, it could be going on down the road in Springfield, where it is relatively much larger.

Keep in mind that the hypothesis that Rufo is falsifying is the idea that no one has ever eaten a cat, which is both trivially false and a hypothesis that no one has proposed. An honest broker would not suggest that this is the premise in contention; the concern is that it has become a Republican talking point that an entire large community of immigrants is habitually preying on household pets in Ohio.

This is simply not true.

You also cannot extrapolate from one poorly documented possible case in Dayton to conclude that it must be happening on a larger scale in Springfield. You also don’t get to plop down the claim that pet-eating is endemic in Congo and Haiti without a source and without evidence, trusting only in the assumed racist bias that of course, black people everywhere engage in behaviors that good, civilized white people deplore.

Rufo has managed to confirm only that a) he’s racist as fuck, and b) has no grasp of elementary logic. It’s about what I’d expect from a creationist fool and professional hatemonger. How can we doubt that Haitians are eating your cats if he has photographic evidence that blue barbecue grills exist?

No racists down here in Texas, no sir

It’s all a lie by the Democrat party. The “True Texas Project” is a wholesome organization that just loves white Christians.

An influential grassroots group with close ties to Texas Republican lawmakers is hosting a conference next month that encourages its attendees to embrace Christian nationalism and resist a Democratic campaign “to rid the earth of the white race.”
Billed as the 15th anniversary celebration for True Texas Project, a far-right activist group that got its start as a North Texas tea party organization, the agenda claims there is a “war on white America,” and elevates theories that white Americans are being intentionally replaced through immigration — a common belief among far-right extremists, including many mass shooters.

I, for one, had no idea that one of the planks of the Democratic agenda was “to rid the earth of the white race.” The “True Texas” agenda is crystal clear, at least: they hate and fear the great replacement theory, cultural Marxism, multiculturalism, and love Zionism, the American Church, etc., etc., etc.

They have high-quality speakers, like Kyle Rittenhouse.

I know, I could stop right there. You already know how worthwhile this event will be.

They’re also bringing in Louie Gohmert…this isn’t helping, is it?

OK, they also include Paul Gottfried, who has the virtue of being someone most people have never heard of.

Few people have been more instrumental in that push than Gottfried, a former humanities professor who has written dozens of books on political history. Gottfried is credited with coining the term “Alt-Right,” which describes a movement of far-right reactionaries, white nationalists and race scientists that sought to intellectualize their fringe views. Led by Spencer, the neo-Nazi who was mentored by Gottfried, the Alt-Right was crucial in mainstreaming extreme views in right-wing circles, but flamed out after its members played key roles in 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where tiki-torch wielding neo-Nazis and fascists marched before killing one counterprotester and maiming countless others.

Gottfried is also the founder of the H.L. Mencken Club, which holds an annual conference that has included some of the world’s most prominent extremists, including Jared Taylor, a eugenicist who claims it is unnatural for white people to live alongside non-whites; and Peter Brimelow, whose group VDARE has been crucial to spreading white nationalist writings and propaganda.

Their claim that they aren’t racist is not very persuasive when they’ve got ties to Taylor and Brimelow and Spencer.

These people aren’t fooling anyone.

Blood quantum is back, baby

First of all…Mike Lindell has a TV station? He’s got something called “Lindell-TV,” anyway, which seems to be nothing but a streaming channel on an off-brand service. The costs for a kook to get online and make noise just gets lower and lower.

Anyway, one of the babblers on that network wants Kamala Harris to take a DNA test.

A host on Mike Lindell’s television network called on Vice President Kamala Harris to take a DNA test to prove a demonic spirit wasn’t prompting her to say she was Black.

During his daily “Let’s Talk About It” program on Lindell TV, host Will Johnson defended former President Donald Trump’s claim that Harris had only recently “happened to turn Black.”

What does demon DNA look like? How would we tell?

But Johnson suggested Thursday that Harris was lying about her race and should take a DNA test.

“How about we get Kamala Harris to do a DNA test like him and like Elizabeth Warren?” Johnson said. “Then we’ll put it to rest. She comes back, and she’s a little bit more Black than Elizabeth Warren is Indian, then we’ll, OK, go, she can be Black half the time.”

“Why not do that?” he asked. “And then they say we are the weird ones — we’re the weird ones because we don’t want to go along with the insanity.”

Elizabeth Warren was negligibly Indian, and most importantly, did not have any cultural connection to any tribe. Harris has a father who is black, so she’s roughly half black genetically, but what matters more is that she grew up with black and Indian heritage. You don’t get to tell her what her background is. She’s black and Indian. That the Republicans are diving into this weird obsession with inventing criteria for people’s cultural and genetic heritage is creepy.

Mr Johnson is the insane weird guy who wants to quantify how “black” a person is allowed to be. It doesn’t make any sense — if 23andme comes back and says she is 43.5% black, how does one “be” black 43.5% of the time?

I’ve had 23andme analyze my DNA, and this is what it tells me.

I guess I’m 2/3 Scandinavian. What does that mean for my allowed behavior? So two of my 3 meals per day should be matpakke, herring, or kjøttkaker, and the other meal should be pasties, bangers and mash, or mushy peas? Since I’m an atheist, I’m probably fractionally demonic, so my snacks should probably be demonic.

This is what we mean by calling these bozos “weird” — they have this twisted idea that people must conform to the stereotypes rattling around in their heads.

He seemed surprised that the attendees at the National Association of Black Journalists were black

I have never witnessed so much deflection, evasion, and dishonesty…and I’ve debated creationists. I had to run to the bathroom twice during this video!*

I was surprised to see his line of criticism of Kamala Harris was to accuse her of not actually being black. That degree of racism was…novel? It’ll be interesting to see how that works for him in a debate.

*Admittedly, there were other circumstances.

Nosedive right into the sewer

We should have expected this. Donald Trump’s good buddy, Sebastian Gorka, responds to the news that Biden has resigned and will almost certainly be replaced by Kamala Harris:

Gorka joined Mark Dolan on GB News to discuss how Harris would stack up against Donald Trump in a race for the White House.

This disaster whose only qualification is having a vagina and the right skin colour… he said before being interrupted by GB News host Mark Dolan.

She’s a DEI hire, she’s a woman, she’s colored, so therefore she’s gotta be good, and at least her brain doesn’t literally freeze in mid-sentence.

We can’t expect that most right-wingers will be that blatant. Another pundit, Chloe Dobbs, on GB News tried to rephrase the hate to be a little more palatable.

Political commentator Chloe Dobbs said she sympathised with Gorka’s view, but felt he worded it too strongly.

I wouldn’t have used exactly the same words, but he does have a point, she said.

Being a woman of colour in this world definitely gives you a leg up. She is very unpopular and she is often accused of using word soup, no one understands what she stands for, she is a very weak candidate.

How do you get to that position when you’re that unpopular? I think the colour of your skin and the fact you’re a woman plays some part.

She wouldn’t use the same words, she says, before saying exactly the same thing.

The reality is that she is an accomplished politician, and that Harris is as popular as Biden, even slightly more so, and she hasn’t even begun a prominent campaign for the office. I’m far more comfortable putting her into the oval office than I was for Joe Biden.

Is this still the 19th century?

One hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, pious Christian churches would gather donations to fund missionary work — they’d send people to Africa or to Indian reservations to ‘enlighten’ the heathen, which often meant chastising native peoples for living life without proper obedience to Christian authorities. These frequently had horrible consequences. Here in the US, we had boarding schools, forced separation from family, and vicious denigration of native culture. Kids died. Communities were trapped in poverty. And it was all to ‘save’ people from an imaginary hell.

It’s still going on.

The Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona spans 2,625 square miles – just a little larger than the state of Delaware, but with a population just over 14,600.

Based on our reporting and speaking with members of the tribe, there are over 80 churches on the reservation, representing 27 different Christian denominations. The tribe indicated that there was an official list the churches operating on the reservation but no list has been delivered.

East Fork Lutheran school was founded in 1951 by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (Wels), a religious group which has been active in Arizona since 1893 as part of its Apache Mission – an effort to convert “unreached tribes” to Christianity. This was one of many schools built on the reservation by Wels. The mission has shifted to now being focused on training Native American Christians to lead in the ministry and serve as missionaries to other Indigenous nations throughout the US and Canada.

Oh god. WELS. I grew up in a very liberal Lutheran church, where we learned that the Wisconsin synod was the wellspring of the devil — extremely conservative, tied tightly to hateful conservative politics, and consorting with them was even worse than hanging out with the Baptists* (isn’t sectarianism wonderful?). We’d get that message in between the Sunday calls to support our mission in Africa.

WELS is running a school in Arizona, and they recently expelled a couple of young Apache girls for…DANCING. It was satanic, don’t you know.

The way the school saw it, it was devil worship.

In October 2019, three teenage girls were punished for participating in a spiritual ceremony. Their Arizona school expelled two of them, and let the third off with a warning, citing their attendance as a violation of school policy and grounds for expulsion.

Caitlyn, now 18, says she and her friends were disciplined for participating in a Sunrise Dance, a traditional Native ceremony at the core of White Mountain Apache culture.

The Monday after the dance, Caitlyn’s parents told her to stay home that day. They had received a call from East Fork Lutheran school telling them not to send their daughter in. She didn’t know why. Then around noon, her mom got another phone call. The principal wanted to meet with Caitlyn, her parents and the local preacher. The principal and preacher also invited the two other girls and their families to their own private meetings with school leadership.

The Sunrise Dance was a very big deal for young women in their culture, but the church hated it. You’re not allowed to think differently in their church, and some of the stuff taught in the Apache community was competition with white Christian mythology, so it must be crushed.

For the first 12 years of her life, Caitlyn looked forward to having her own dance – a sacred coming-of-age experience celebrating the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It’s a great financial sacrifice for the family. Over four days, a girl’s community prays for her. They offer her gifts and witness her as she participates in rituals symbolizing her maturity and growth. A medicine man presides over the event, praying and singing with holy members of the community called Crown Dancers, who recite the creation story to the audience.

The idea meant the world to Caitlyn. But she didn’t have her own Sunrise Dance: if she were found out, she would be expelled from school immediately, a stain on on her permanent record that could affect her college opportunities.

At the time, her private school’s teachers were mostly white people who would often discuss the satanic nature of Apache traditions. When Caitlyn was in fifth grade, she was given an F on an art project for drawing the White Mountain Apache crest and including an eagle feather. An “A” student, she was devastated to be chastised this way. As Caitlyn remembers it, her teacher smiled and explained that this kind of project wasn’t allowed because it denoted “pagan worship”. Her father was furious but the family couldn’t do anything about it. It was what the girl and her family expected from the white people who worked on the reservation.

That Apache creation myth is wild. It’s longer and more detailed and far more interesting than what is contained in the book of Genesis, so I can see why Christians were concerned. If, in my youth, I’d been presented with Genesis and the Apache myth as alternatives, I would have rejected both, but I’d have been tempted by the far more appealing Apache tradition. I can see why stuffy old evangelical missionaries would want to stamp out the competition.

The problem here is that this exclusive attitude means depriving young women of an opportunity for a good education, because Christian schools tend to be better supported financially by their sanctimonious and devout external donors, while as usual, public schools limp along — especially reservation schools, which are usually woefully undersupported. I think these girls are better off being evicted from a religious school, and that the secular schools are going to be far more beneficial for their identity and progress.

When it came time for registration, Maria did not receive any notification from the school. It finally notified her two weeks before the school year started that her children would not be invited back. She had to move them to the public school. “Now that they’re in a public school, and they’ve adjusted to it, they are more proud of their traditions or culture, they’re more proud of who they are,” she said.

But there are 80 churches on that one reservation? I am reminded of how ticks can swarm and kill moose.


*My wife was brought up Baptist. Neither of us are at all religious.

The University of Minnesota panders to genocide

It’s inarguable that a state-sponsored genocide is taking place in Gaza. There are people who are experts in genocide (that’s the saddest specialization ever), like Francesca Albanese, who states the consensus view.

Citing international law, Ms. Albanese explained that genocide is defined as a specific set of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

“Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide with the requisite intent: causing seriously serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group,” she said.

Furthermore, “the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians,” she continued.

Another expert, Raz Segal, explains how the actions in Israel constitute genocide.

Raz Segal, the program director of genocide studies at Stockton University, concretely says it is a “textbook case of genocide.” Segal believes that Israeli forces are completing three genocidal acts, including, “killing, causing serious bodily harm, and measures calculated to bring about the destruction of the group.” He points to the mass levels of destruction and total siege of basic necessities—like water, food, fuel, and medical supplies—as evidence.

He says Israeli leaders expressed “explicit, clear, and direct statements of intent,” pointing to Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s statement during an Oct. 13 press conference. In his statement, Herzog said, “It’s an entire nation that is out there that’s responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true,” Herzog said. “They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” (Herzog later said that he is not holding the civilians of Gaza responsible for keeping Hamas in political power, when asked to clarify by a journalist at the same press conference.) Segal says that this language conflates all Palestinians as “an enemy population,” which could help prove intent.

Segal calls it a textbook case of genocide.

Indeed, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly, though there are exceptions. In the early 20th century, for example, German colonial occupiers perpetrated a genocide in response to an uprising by the Indigenous Herero and Nama populations in southwest Africa. In 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, the German military commander, issued an “extermination order,” justified by the rationale of a “race war.” By 1908, the German authorities had murdered 10,000 Nama, and had achieved their stated goal of “destroying the Herero,” killing 65,000 Herero, 80% of the population. Gallant’s orders on October 9th were no less explicit. Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.

You know, the University of Minnesota also has a Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, but they’re not quite so outspoken, for a very good reason. You can be fired in Minnesota if you speak the truth about Israel’s ongoing genocide…or at the very least, you can be denied employment here. Raz Segal — you know, the scholar I quoted up above — was set to be the director of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, but the job offer was abruptly retracted, specifically because of that “textbook case of genocide” article.

A professor who wrote days after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks that Israel’s military operation against Hamas in Gaza was “a textbook case of genocide” has had his offer to head University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies revoked after two members of the center’s advisory board resigned in protest last Friday and several Jewish leaders voiced their concerns.

Jeff Ettinger, the interim president of the University of Minnesota, said during a Friday morning Board of Regents meeting that Joe Eggers, the interim director of the center, would remain in the position as a new director search is conducted. Ettinger noted that the search process may extend until 2025 or 2026.

The official withdrawal of Raz Segal’s job offer came after a pause was announced on Monday amid increased scrutiny of Segal’s comments on Israel, Jewish Insider was first to learn.

I always figured Ettinger would be a chickenshit tool of business interests, uninterested in scholarly integrity.

We actually have Segal’s own account of what happened.

What happened is that there was a completely regular hiring process in a public university. There was a public announcement of the job. There were applications. There were Zoom interviews. There were campus visits. There was actually significant community engagement also during this process. And then, eventually, the search committee deliberated and made a recommendation to hire me to the interim dean, dean of the College of Liberal Arts. I was then, on the 5th of June, sent an official job offer.

And then, as you described, two professors who were formerly on the advisory committee of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota resigned and, together with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, put a lot of pressure, which was really a hateful campaign of lies and distortions against me and based on their political position in support of Israel. And on 10th of June — so within days, right? — the interim president of the University of Minnesota sent me an email withdrawing the job offer.

He goes on to explain what Ettinger said was the reason, and why that’s a contemptible act of cowardice.

He said that due to the public-facing role of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and its director, community members have come forward with some concerns. And that was given as the reason for the withdrawal. And it’s important to say, of course, that this is a crude and very dangerous political — the legitimization — right? — of a political interference in an absolutely legitimate hiring process in a public university. It’s, you know, completely unacceptable that a political pressure group, the JCRC of Minnesota and the Dakotas here, and a political position, of support of Zionism and the state of Israel — right? — especially, of course, at a time when Israel is committing the crime of genocide for eight months now, right? But regardless, actually, any political position, any pressure group is not a criteria — should not the defining factor in a hiring process, and certainly once an official job offer has been made.

This actually might be a case of discrimination, because I’m targeted here specifically as an Israeli American Jew, and I’m targeted because of my identity as a Jew who refuses the narrowing down of Jewish identity to Zionism and to support of Israel, whatever it does, which is the position of the JCRC of Minnesota and the Dakotas in its claim to speak for all Jews in the Twin Cities, which is absolutely false. I mean, I’ve received hundreds, hundreds of emails in support, including from many Jews in the Twin Cities, who say explicitly that the JCRC does not speak for them, does not represent them. A community letter from within and outside the university in Twin Cities, again including many, many Jews, have now attracted more than 500 signatures. There’s also a letter of scholars from around the world, including many in the University of Minnesota, of course, that has attracted about a thousand signatures, maybe a bit more, in support of me. So, this idea that the JCRC speaks for all Jews — right? — is absolutely false.

But again, this kind of crude political intervention in the hiring process, and its legitimization by the university, is extremely dangerous. It joins this attack that we’re seeing in the academic world, that has intensified since October, of really suppressing academic freedom. And this is a very, very dangerous sign. That’s the reason that students and faculty members across the University of Minnesota, not only in the College of Liberal Arts, are furious at this decision of their interim president and are not willing to accept it.

We’re missing out here, and that’s a black mark against the University of Minnesota. All it takes is a vocal conservative group complaining to craven caretaker president, and boom, we lose a prominent scholar.

Chris Rufo has failed so far

Do you have a positive or negative opinion of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives? The right has been howling up a storm, claiming that DEI is a bad, wicked thing and hitching all kinds of anti-DEI campaigns to that idea.

It hasn’t worked. A Post-Ipsos poll asked what people’s attitudes towards DEI were, and a majority said it was a good thing.

The numbers also went up when the pollsters explained what DEI actually meant, which tells us that there’s a lot of bias and misinformation out there. Turn off Fox News, everyone!

I don’t need to know what Tablet is

It’s some online magazine, but I don’t need to ever read it. They just came up with something they call The Sinai Awards, given to the 36 people who have made the world freer for the rest of us, and the list of award recipients will make you gag a little bit.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali • Masih Alinejad • Marc Andreessen • Julian Assange • Olivier Assayas • Nayib Bukele • Ted Cruz • George Deek • John Fetterman • Stephen Friend • Michel Houellebecq • Coleman Hughes • Jon Huntsman • Martin Kulldorff & Jay Bhattacharya • Mark Laita • Bernard-Henri Lévy • Conor McGregor • Douglas Murray • Elon Musk • Anonymous UPenn Student • J.K. Rowling • Christopher Rufo • Salman Rushdie • Natan Sharansky • Michael Solomonov • Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik • Thomas Sowell • Amar’e Stoudemire • Nadine Strossen • Quentin Tarantino • Ritchie Torres • Tu Youyou • Michael Walzer • Bari Weiss • Ruth Wisse

I don’t know half of them, but given the company they keep, I’d rather not know more.