education – Martin Simpson

It’s a New Month, but Harvard Has Little to be Proud About, & Hamas is Running Out of Sinwars (posted 6/2/25)

Well, it’s the beginning of another Haughty Spirit month, so if you’re super stoked about your sexuality, you do you. But also, remember that everything doesn’t have to happen in public. Because there’s a time and place—

Sorry. My crack staff has just given me a correction, and here at the Simpsonian Institution we strive for accuracy. It turns out that I’d mixed up my King James texts. To wit, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

So it’s Pride month, not Haughty Spirit month. My bad. Though in past years when I wasn’t able to look away from some parade floats on tv soon enough, I noticed that there was quite a bit of haughty spirit exposed too. Along with a disturbing amount of big bellies and bare arses. So thanks for those visuals, you exhibitionist loons.

I’m not going to ask why there’s no heterosexual pride month, because I think it’s weird to feel proud about sexuality. After all, as Cole Porter pointed out, “Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it.” And I’m not big on recorded sexuality parades of any type, anyway. (Though if you insist on having one, spotting a “reverse-cowgirl” float as I’m going through the channels wouldn’t be as unsettling as a “dudes in arse-less chaps” float would.)

By the way, note to aspiring rappers out there: Re-read those lyrics. They’re almost 100 years old and they’re about sex, but they’re still remembered, and they’re still goofy and fun. And there isn’t a single “b*tch” or n-word in there. (If you think anyone will be remembering “WAP” a century from now, you’re as dumb as your “songs” sound.)

Anyway, there’s no pride month for eccentric males like me, who prefer women, and I’m not asking for one. Although again, if we must have some sort of sexuality-related public celebration, I suggest that a Great Beauties Hall of Fame would be a good alternative. I am even willing to suggest some nominees for the first class of inductees, all of whom had an impact on an impressionable young Martacus: Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett and Nena (of “99 LuftBallons” fame).

Loren and Welch were at the height of their powers before I reached puberty, but when I saw both of them on tv reruns – Loren as a sponge diver in a movie I have no other memory of, and Welch fighting off dinosaurs in a fur bikini (that one was based on a true story, I think)… Well, let’s just say that I knew even then that I wouldn’t be going down the “Mayor Pete Path,” if you know what I mean.

Farrah is self-explanatory, and you wouldn’t think that a doe-eyed, one-named cutie singing in German would stick in one’s mind, but the heart wants what it wants. And of course my smokeshow wife would be inducted as the first winner in the Lifetime Achievement category.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. I’m hoping that since the cultural tide seems to have turned against some of the excesses of woke sexual foolishness (mandatory pronouns, kowtowing to those with autogynephilia or gender dysmorphia, 57 genders fantasies, etc.), Pride cheerleading might be less ubiquitous and annoying this year.

Speaking of “even educated fleas do it,” I am loving Trump’s beat-down of Harvard! As a former academic, I’ve always wondered exactly how much the Ivy League in general hates Jews, free speech, and academic freedom. And now it looks like we might be getting an answer: way more than $3 billion dollars’ worth!

When Trump first fired a shot across Harvard’s bow – telling them to start abiding by civil rights laws and crack down on Jew-hating freaks who have been disrupting their educational mission, or forfeit some grant money – I figured that the bureaucrats would make a token show of resistance and then sheepishly comply. I thought that the horrific optics of standing with obnoxious jihadi brats and their tent-ifada would be enough to make Harvard submit, even without financial pressure.

But no! The arrogant snoots dug their jack-booted heels in for Jew hatred uber alles, even after Trump threatened to take away more federal funds. So then he said he’d be challenging their tax exempt status, and trying to block them from enrolling foreign students, many of whom are a coveted source of both bundles of cash and hatred of America and the West – two coveted resources for the extremist partisans running Harvard.

Harvard got their noses even higher in the air – who would have thought that was even possible? – and filed suit against the president, rather than submit. Of course, partisan left judges are coming out of the woodwork to block Trump (unexpectedly!), but it’s hard to see how they can win this one.

American taxpayers can’t be forced to fund any university who defies federal laws in ways various and sundry, and no university is entitled to billions in funding automatically. As a schadenfreude-tastic beneficial side effect, this case is fortuitously exposing the dark underbelly of academe, not just in its anti-Semitism, but in the way it has been decreasing admissions for American students in favor of unvetted and often anti-American foreign students, and also systematically discriminating against conservative/traditional/pro-Western beliefs in faculty hiring and student admissions.

Over the weekend CO reposted a tweet from Shabbos Kestenbaum (@ShabbosK) (whoever that is), pointing out that within 20 minutes of Harvard President Alan Garber sanctimoniously proclaiming that, “Harvard is not Harvard without its international students,” Garber awarded an honorary Harvard degree (I’m guessing in “Anti-Semitism Studies?”) to Elaine Kim, who supports efforts to “ban Israeli students from all universities.”

Ugh. Kestenbaum summarizes the situation perfectly: “Israel is an American ally. Harvard is not.”

Yep.

I think Trump’s next move was a stroke of genius: he threatened to send $3 billion in grant money away from Harvard and to trade schools instead. It’s probably an empty threat, but I like the idea, and it reinforces Trump’s appeal to working class voters: The Dems are for the rich elites getting grievance studies degrees at Harvard, and he’s for blue collar folks learning a trade.

I’m hoping that if all else fails, and courts stop Trump from letting Harvard admit thousands of foreign students, he can at least give the leftists a taste of their own medicine, and deploy the “due process” gambit. The State Department can say, “Okay, we’re prepared to admit foreign students. But we have to give them very thorough, due-process vetting before giving them a student visa. And if that takes 4 or 5 semesters to get done, so be it.”

I feel bad for some innocent foreign students who get caught up in that process, but that’s the price that Harvard is imposing on them by defying the laws (and the taxpaying citizens) of the United States. Because Ivy League administrators and faculty need to learn the real meaning of something they’ve been chanting for years: no one is above the law!

Finally, speaking of jihad enthusiasts, Hamas might be running out of Sinwars.

You might remember that Yahya Sinwar was the leader of Hamas, until the IDF caught up with him last October. He ran into an apartment building in Gaza, where an IDF drone filmed him throwing a stick at it (rumors that he threw like a girl are confirmed, and hilarious) before they assisted him in assuming rubble temperature.

Well Yahya had a younger brother, and his name was Muhammad. (Unexpectedly!) He had helped plan the October 7^th massacre, and he had taken his brother’s place as a Hamas leader. And on Saturday, Israel announced that earlier in May, they had struck an underground compound near a hospital in southern Gaza, thus sending Muhammad to his eternal reward.

Which, if I understand justice in the afterlife correctly, involves an eternity of rectal pitch-forking.

The Israeli defense minister with the most Israeli name ever (Israel Katz!) named the two most likely senior Hamas successors to the unlamented Sinwar brothers as Izz al-Din al-Haddad and Khalil al-Hayya, and warned them, “You are next in line.”

So if you’re keeping score at home, two Sinwars have been retired, the Katz is out of the bag, and the hyphenated Izz and Khalil are on deck. If you want to see their near future, open Duckduckgo.com and search “MLB Pitcher Randy Johnson hits a bird.”

And then picture a flying keffiyeh, instead of a cloud of feathers.

Hamas delenda est!

Whiny Hunger Strikers, & Hillary’s Play Bombs (posted 5/13/24)

By the time you read this, I will be flying to Massachusetts with my wife and youngest daughter, to spend the better part of a week sightseeing with my oldest and her husband, culminating in watching her receive her Masters in nursing at Amherst. This will likely mean a cold and Simpson-less Friday (i.e. no column that day), but I trust that you all will soldier on.

In the meantime, there are too many things for me to talk about, so I’ll do the best I can.

First, I love me a good hunger strike. In fact, I have been known to participate in a few of my own. When I was ages three through about six, for example, I regularly conducted hunger strikes.

Most often on meatloaf night.

I would begin by advancing my argument, which ran something like this: “C’mon, meatloaf again? This has to violate the Geneva Conventions! You can’t even tell me what kind of ‘meat’ this is. It’s literally a loaf of undifferentiated meat!” (I had a precocious vocabulary at age 3.)

My dad would respond with tales about being born in the depression, and being offered rock soup with a dandelion salad, and all of it sprinkled with coal dust from the mines where grandpa worked 18 hours a day. And all 8 Simpson kids were glad to have it, and would sometimes even fight over who could have a second bowl of rock soup.

I would propose a compromise wherein I would give the dog my meatloaf, and I would have a bowl of Captain Crunch.

Eventually, dad would arrive at his final offer. “There are two choices for supper tonight: take it, or leave it.”

Check and mate.

Fast forward to now, and students at Princeton are less mature than I was at 3. Thus the young hunger-striking woman who is now being roundly mocked for her dramatic reading – from text on her phone – of her complaint:

“This is absolutely unfair. My peers and I, we are starving.” [Sweetheart, it’s a HUNGER strike. Are you really complaining about being hungry during your self-imposed hunger strike?!] “We are physically exhausted, I am quite literally shaking right now, as you can see.”

Have you ever seen video of the police interrogating a sociopath after a horrific crime? The sociopath will often pretend to cry, looking down, covering her eyes, asking for a tissue, and using it to wipe away non-existent tears?

This was like that. And you know how I also know that her supposed shaking wasn’t genuine?

Because SHE READ IT OFF A PRE-WRITTEN SCRIPT ON HER PHONE! OH! OHHHHHH! (That’s right, I slipped a little Sam Kinison in on you.)

The only way her bad acting could have been more transparent would be if she were to “pull a Biden,” i.e. inadvertently read her stage directions aloud: “I’m literally shaking, as you can see. Shake now. Pause. Continue reading.”

Next, she actually said these lines: “We are both cold and hot at the same time. We are all immuno-compromised.”

Yes, if by “immuno-compromised” you mean “riddled with STDs and a severe case of narcissistic personality disorder.”

And “hot and cold at the same time?” That’s not a thing. I mean, if you’re kicking heroin cold turkey, you might have alternating chills and fever. But not at the same time. And not because you skipped a few meals.

By the way, did you see those “hunger strikers?” Some of them would tip the scale in the gray area between Whoopi Goldberg and Lizzo, so I don’t think going on a diet of water and (I’m guessing) surreptitiously gobbled protein bars is going to be life-threatening for them.

The moral of the story? When I was three, stomping off to bed without eating meatloaf never forced my parents to bring a big bag of Fritos and a bowl of chocolate ice cream to my room.

And a bunch of crybully Ivy League brats pretending to dab at fake tears with their keffiyehs ($29.99 at Amazon, made in China) and faux-fainting is not going to result in the murder of all the Jews in Israel. Sorry kids.

Hilarious hunger striking aside, the weekend was full of widespread interruptions of graduations. Some ceremonies were cancelled entirely; others were disrupted by stupid chanting and walk-outs. Jerry Seinfeld was the graduation speaker at Duke, and that event was interrupted by a bunch of selfish jerks getting up and chanting and waving a “Palestinian” flag as they marched out.

Because I’m a cautious optimist, I can see two very silver linings on this pro-terrorist cloud:

1. The shenanigans are mostly affecting leftist colleges with leftist administrations in leftist-run towns, which means that the majority of the inconvenience and disruption is being suffered by those who tolerate and even support it. So they can suck it, Trebek.

2. The antics of these morons – wrapping a George Washington statue in terrorist headgear, blocking traffic, burning American flags, violating various vandalism, harassment and trespassing laws – are infuriating to normal people. They’re making more people hate them every day, and they’re creating a widening rift within the Democrat party.

So keep it up, numbskulls! If we can’t have you dispersed, chased and charred by a pack of flamethrower robot dogs – and tragically, we apparently cannot – the second-best outcome is for you to identify yourselves to the rest of us, and build a huge backlash against your political goals.

(By the way, I was hoping to put my new flamethrower in a checked bag for the trip to MA, but my killjoy wife nixed the idea. So if some Hamas-lovers disrupt my daughter’s graduation and are allowed to escape burn-free, she’s going to hear a lot of, “I told you so” next weekend!)

In other news, Hillary Clinton has produced a Broadway play called, “Suffs.” It is nearly three hours long, and tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement a century ago. It also features an “entirely female and non-binary cast,” including a gal who plays President Woodrow Wilson.

And it is bombing.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

The show’s promotional material notes that “Suffs boldly explores the victories and failures of a struggle for equality that’s far from over.”

Um, the suffrage movement was about getting women the right to vote. They won that in 1920, which my abacus tells me is more than a century ago. So no, the “struggle” is not “far from over.”

Judging by the box office, neither is Suffs. In fact, I’d guess that it’s very close to over.

By the way, as I was about to post this column, I saw an update on the Princeton hunger strike, which I swear I am not making up.

The day after the “literally shaking” gal gave her brave speech from the edge of the grave, the original 13 hunger strikers ended their strike. Because they were very hungry. Unexpectedly!

But never fear, because as their nightmarish bout of peckishness ended (just in time!) seven new strikers took up the cause. Or, as their press statement describes it, “In the tradition of rotary hunger strikes, 7 new strikers are indefinitely fasting for a free Palestine.”

Is that not brilliant? A “rotary hunger strike!” It’s like hunger striking, but then when your stomach starts growling, you pass the baton to another Jew hater who is willing to skip brunch.

Only instead of a baton, it’s a footlong sub sandwich. Which you then mow through like a woodchipper, because you haven’t eaten in several hours.

Which gives me an idea. I propose that all of us in CO nation begin a rotary hunger strike, and we keep it up until all of our demands are met. Or at least our first three demands:

1. All student pro-Hamas protestors be arrested and expelled.

2. All non-student pro-Hamas protestors be arrested and deported to Gaza, even if they are American citizens.

3. The $80 billion appropriated to hire more IRS agents be redirected to the manufacture and purchase of a giant army of flamethrower robot dogs, half of which are to be immediately sent to American college campuses, and the other half to the southern border.

If we all sign up to skip just one meal, we can keep this rotary hunger strike going on definitely! Who’s with me?

I’ll go first. I hereby volunteer to skip supper on Meatloaf Mondays.

Hamas delenda est!

Two Local Stories: How to Handle Protestors, & Foolish Criminals (posted 5/1/24)

Today I’ve got two quick stories for you, both from my hometown. The first offers a case study in how to respond to law-breaking campus protestors, and the second one fits in two of my regular column categories: “Stupid Criminals” stories, and “You Don’t Hate the Media Enough” stories.

One of the many reasons that it’s great to be a Florida Gator is that our governing officials don’t suffer from CCRIS (Congenital Cranial-Rectal Inversion Syndrome), a condition tragically affecting many university administrations across the country.

(For your generous gift of only $10 per month, our team of dedicated, caring surgeons can give Claudine Gay and other Ivy League college administrators the desperately needed operations to remove their heads from their arses, before it’s too late. Won’t you please think of the children? The gullible, low-IQ, Jew-hating children? Our operators are standing by.)

In recent weeks, as many universities spiraled into paroxysms of pro-Hamas idiocy, UF issued clear guidelines delineating free speech on the one hand, and various forms of unacceptable and illegal a-holery on the other.

Among the latter, they identified “protests inside buildings… blocking egress, camping, building structures,” and they warned that student violators would face “a 3-year trespass and suspension,” and that non-compliant employees “will be trespassed and separated from employment.”

When 9 knuckleheads tested those rules a few days ago, they were all quickly arrested. You can see pictures of them online, and they are exactly what you’d expect. The breakdown: 3 males and 6 females; 5 are UF students; 2 have multiple hair colors not found in nature, and all 9 are absolutely un-“friend”-able, if you get my meaning.

All are charged with multiple misdemeanors, and one – Allen Frasheri – got an additional battery-on-an-officer charge for spitting on a cop. (Rumors that he has been tested for rabies so that the officer doesn’t have to go through a preventative series of painful shots have not been confirmed.) And surprise! He was the president of a student chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America in 2022.

So I’d advise that officer to take the shots, just to be on the safe side.

My favorite part of the info about the protestors is that the UF students are listed as “expecting to graduate” in 2025 or 2026. But given the three-year suspension mentioned above, I wouldn’t count on that now, kiddos!

After the arrests, UF spokesman Steve Orlando put out a statement that should be carved into a stone tablet and placed in front of the statues of the three UF Heisman trophy winners (Spurrier, Wuerffel and Tebow), so that parents who care about the important things in life can bring their children there, and train them well.

The statement began, “This is not complicated: The University of Florida is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.”

Sweetness and light!

Unlike at USC and many other schools, UF’s graduation is going to go on this Saturday, as scheduled. NOT unexpectedly!

My second local story is very different. It involves the death of four black males between the ages of 14 and 16 in a terrible car crash two days ago.

Most media reports had headlines that varied only slightly from this one: “Four Teenage Boys Dead after High-Speed Chase with Florida Highway Patrol, Who Performed Pit Maneuver to Stop Them.”

Most of the stories concentrated on how young the boys were, and the fact that one was a football star at a local high school, before providing a few details. A cop had initially pulled them over, but then they sped away, reaching speeds of over 100 mph, before a trooper intervened. It’s not clear how fast they were going when he pitted them (i.e. bumped the rear of their car to one side, in order to make it spin out). But the car ran into a cement pole, killing everyone inside.

If I were one to trust MSM crime stories, I would have been intrigued. At first I might think that maybe they were speeding because they were late for Bible Study. (I hate it when you get in there late, and you missed the first prayer and the reading of the Gospel text!) But a few paragraphs in, the story mentioned that the SUV they were in had been reported stolen.

So okay, they weren’t making great choices. But still, I’m sure that at the tender age of 16, these were just dumb kids, out for a harmless joyride.

Because who amongst us hasn’t driven a little too fast, and possibly slid our dad’s 1972 Gran Torino (white with a blue stripe, and that super-cool hood scoop on it) into a ditch off of a gravel road about half a mile north of El Paso, Illinois?

I mean, just speaking hypothetically, and not at all from personal experience.

Anyway, I’m sure these high-spirited rascals were just—

What’s that? Two of the four of them were wearing ankle monitors? And at least some of them were wearing ski masks? In Florida, on a 72-degree night, as one does?

Well, maybe they’ve got one of those really strict youth pastors, who makes you wear an ankle monitor if you’ve showed up late to at least two Bible Study sessions in the past. Those guys can get pretty Old Testament with—

What? Three of the four of them had active warrants? C’mon, man!

What do you have to do to have active warrants and an ankle monitor when you’re 14 or 16 years old?! And if someone in law enforcement is actually monitoring the ankle monitors, did they not find it strange that two of their ankle monitors were flying through east Gainesville at 110 miles per hour?

It’s obviously a tragic story, if only because the kids were so young, and may have had the chance to overcome their CCRIS if they’d survived their stupidity for a little longer.

And even though I’ve never had a warrant – active or otherwise – and never needed an ankle monitor, I do know that a 1972 Torino’s speedometer goes up to 120 mph, and what it feels like to bury the needle on a two-lane Illinois country road.

Nothing but the grace of God can explain why most of us males are still here at all.

And I wish those boys would have had fathers who put the fear of God in them before they ever got to the ankle-monitor and fleeing-in-a-stolen-car stage.

Hamas delenda est!

Enough of the Doom and Gloom – Here are Stories Worth Celebrating (posted 4/19/24)

I’ve got two quick bits of business to start with. First, OJ Simpson continues to be dead, and rumors that he was related to me have been definitively disproven. Just FYI.

Second is a language note that has been irritating me: If you use the word “journey” around me, you’d better be Vasco da Gama, Magellan or Columbus. Or possibly a fan of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

Otherwise, knock it off. In just the last 24 hours I have either heard or read people talking about “my vegan journey,” “our crypto investment journey,” and “my gender awareness journey.” (I’m guessing the last one took you around the Cape of Good Hope, and then way out past the Cape of Good Sense?) (Ending in the Cape of Good Lord! You Cut That Off?!)

And then I came across a story about an in-house Microsoft pro-DEI propaganda video called, “Work in Progress: Our Diversity and Inclusion Journey.” And that was too depressing for me to investigate any further.

On the bright side, I am SO glad I don’t work at Microsoft.

Okay, with those irritations out of the way, I’m going to focus on the sunny side today. Because even with the many things going wrong in the country, good things are happening, too.

For example, even the uber-woke Google has shown some backbone, and fired some insubordinate workers who were offended because the company was providing a cloud service called Nimbus to the Israeli government and military.

The workers had been protesting, interrupting meetings with shouts and inane chants for months, “demand[ing] that Google stop providing material support to genocide” by killing Nimbus. On Wednesday, they took it up a notch, occupying company offices in NY and CA in a disruptive 10-hour sit-in.

My first instinct was that Google would likely “pull an NBC” and capitulate to the a-holes. (Just as the intolerant MSM workers were able to force their putative bosses to fire Ronna Romney six minutes after they hired her.)

But no! Google warned the protestors to quit it, and when they didn’t, Google had a handful of them arrested for trespassing and then fired 28 of them. It’s a Ramadan miracle!

The resulting social media tantrum thrown by the fired workers was a heart-warming laugh riot, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of the employer-employee relationship in grown-up land. Their statement began, “This evening, Google indiscriminately fired 28 workers.”

Look up “indiscriminate,” you children, because this wasn’t that. They have almost 200,000 employees, and they fired the 28 biggest a-holes among them. That’s some fine-tuned discrimination right there!

The best part was when they whined that their “flagrant” firing was “a clear indication” that Google valued the $1.2 billion contract more than its malcontent workers.

Ya think? Let’s see. Hang on a second while I get my scales-of-justice decision-making tool out…

Okay. On one side, put 28 entitled brats who are a constant source of dissension and stress in the office. Now on the other side put $1.2 BILLION DOLLARS! …. Calculating… carry the 2… calculating…

Annnnndddddd…

You’re gone! Don’t let the door hit you on the burka on your way out, and as they say in Gaza, Fa’aq Mabhouh!

And it’s not just Google, and Vanderbilt, and the Bakersfield city council that’s laying some smack-down on arrogant lefty dimwits.

Even the Ivy League is providing some good news, as when Columbia warned over 100 pro-Hamas anti-Semite student protestors who had set up tents on the school lawn that if they didn’t remove the tents and disperse, they’d be arrested.

Then, when the students didn’t do that… they were arrested!

Unexpectedly! (But in a very good way.)

The NY cops rounded them up, cuffed them, loaded them onto corrections buses and took them downtown to be charged. There’s also talk of suspension! Tragically, no taser therapy was administered, but still: file this under “things I never thought I’d see.”

To provide a little sweet schadenfreude glaze (mmm, schadenfreude glaze!) on this delicious story, Ilhan Omar’s daughter was there, and was arrested too!

I didn’t know Omar had a daughter. Her name is Isra Hirsi, and my second thought about her was the hope that she’s not as obnoxious as her mom. (My first thought? “Please God, don’t let her dad be her uncle!”)

But she’s apparently cut from the same cloth as Jack Petocz, the Vanderbilt narcissist I wrote about last week. Just as he whined about being expelled “for fighting for marginalized people” and “protesting the genocide (sic) in Palestine (sic),” Hirsi complained that she has been suspended “for standing in solidarity with Palestinians (sic) facing a genocide (sic).”

She has a Soviet hammer and sickle on her X account, too. So she’s several different kinds of dumb. She also has a biographical sketch that reads like self-aggrandizing self-parody:

“Isra Hirsi has been organizing for justice and equity since she was 14, bringing national attention to climate change before she graduated high school.”

Got that? You may have thought that the non-stop yammering about climate change has been coming from every self-involved doom scroller in the country for the last 30 years, but it turns out it’s all the fault of this one insufferable teenager in Minnesota!

Isra, if you wanted to bring national attention to an issue that was being overlooked, why didn’t you raise our awareness of the prevalence of incest and immigration fraud in the Somali ingrate community?

Her bio goes on, and I bet you can guess where it ends up. “Finding her voice (ugh!), embracing her purpose, and carrying years of experience as a leading Black (don’t forget the capital letter!) youth in the climate activism arena at such a young age has been…” wait for it, CO nation… “a difficult journey…”

Aagghhhh! I’m out! I hope she gets 5-7 in Rikers for aggravated virtue signaling.

But the cherry on top of this masterpiece of an optimistic column comes to us from another unlikely place: Harvard University! You may remember the school from that time when their President and their top DEI official both got caught plagiarizing their butts off, but now they’ve actually done something smart.

They’ve re-instituted the requirement for applicants to submit standardized test scores. This requirement was dropped by many Ivy League schools in recent years, many of them blaming covid. Which made no sense.

But everyone on the left was blaming covid for everything.

Joe Biden has lost the ability to walk, and speak coherently? Covid! Whoopi Goldberg is gaining weight and losing IQ? Covid! Liz Warren’s DNA has mutated to mysteriously wipe out all trace of her Native American ancestry? Covid!

(#wemustneverstopmockingher)

But the real reason to get rid of standardized tests was that some minorities do great on tests (Asians, Indians from India) and others do badly (Hispanics and blacks). So obviously the tests are racist and white supremacist, or Asian-supremacist, or Hindu-supremacist, or something.

The dirty little secret in academia is that the tests pretty accurately reflect the level of student preparedness to succeed at a high-level university. Which means that the tests accurately predicted that under-prepared minority students who did poorly on the tests would do poorly in college.

Unexpectedly!

Which led in turn to the incredibly moronic – and un-sayable in public – premise behind dropping standardized tests in the first place: These tests reveal that many students will fail at Harvard. So the tests must be killed, so that we can admit them, so they can then fail at Harvard. (And then we’ll blame racism. Or patriarchy. Or covid.)

This phenomenon also explains, IMHO, why MIT reversed itself and required tests again two years earlier than the Ivies did: when your focus is on rigorous STEM coursework – where everything has to work and be accurate – it’s much harder to hide very bad student performance than it is in Grievance Studies programs, where everything is stupid, dysfunctional, and false.

So sure, higher education has a ton of flaws, and needs systemic reform. [This is where, if my column had a soundtrack, you’d noticing the consistent rising volume of the strings asserting themselves…] But for today, I’m going to take this victory, and I’m going to celebrate it.

Because I’m an Ameri-CAN, not an Ameri-can’t, and I’m a cautious optimist, dammit! In fact, like many Martins before me, I’m a dreamer! [Now the brass has joined in, along with the woodwinds…]

And I have a dream, today!

I have a dream that our politicians – just like our college students and my two (relatively) little children – will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin or the juiciness of their booties (her words, not mine), but by their intellect, their work ethic, and the content of their character!

Can I get an amen?

Now get out there and crush the weekend, CO nation! Because you’re not on some simpering “journey” – you’ve already arrived!

And don’t forget…

Hamas delenda est!

I’ve Noticed a Strange Pattern Developing (posted 2/19/24)

If you were an alien who just arrived on Earth from Venus and watched several hours of national news, you would probably ask the question, “Why are so many high-profile black women in very high-powered jobs so laughably terrible at those jobs?”

Then you would be immediately surrounded by a gaggle of MSM “journalists.” You’d probably expect them to pepper you with comments and questions such as, “Holy Schiff! You’re actually a real, live alien, aren’t you?!” and, “How did you get here from Venus, and what is the life on your planet like?” and, “Do you come in peace?”

But you’d only expect that because you’re from Venus, and have no conception of what crapulent, leftist hacks our MSM “journalists” are.

They would certainly bum rush you and start screaming comments and questions. But they’d blow right past the fact that an alien life form has appeared on earth, and get down to the really important stuff.

By which I mean they would turn red in the face (no offense Grandma Squanto) (#wemustneverstopmockingher), stamp their tiny feet, and scream accusations at you. Such as, “How dare you question any black female ever?”

or “Would you say that you’re more of a Venusian supremacist or a Venusian nationalist?”

or “Are you here to colonize earth? Because that is the kind of bigoted question we’d expect from a Venusian colonizer!”

Then they would demand that you check your green privilege, and call you a racist, and spit on you.

And if you then felt like pulling out a death ray weapon that I hope you have and blasting them all, I speak for most of us when I say, “Blast away.”

And after all that, while you and I were enjoying a bottle of bourbon while sitting beside a smoking pile of molecularly disassembled leftist hacks, I would explain how our country has succumbed to the folly of DEI and racial preferences in hiring.

Okay, perhaps I’ve already had a little bourbon, and that introduction might have gotten away from me a little bit.

So let me start again: identity politics and racial and gender preferences in hiring are terrible for everyone.

They’re obviously bad for the people who get discriminated against, and for the public or customers who are supposed to be served by people who are hired for reasons other than merit. But they’re also bad for the individuals and groups who theoretically “benefit” from them.

Let’s look at a few recent examples:

You all remember Claudine Gay. She was the history-making first black female president of Harvard. Normally, any academic wanting a job like that would have to have published at least a few highly respected books, and a stellar record of achievements as an administrator.

Gay had published zero books, and only 11 articles, all of which were boiler-plate, fashionably leftist takes on race. (Without reading them, any liberal arts prof could summarize the abstracts of all of them: “Black people good, white people bad.”)

But as MLK always said, “Judge not by the content of their curriculum vitae, but by the color of their skin.” So Claudine got the job.

Annnnddddd…

When asked whether blood-curdling calls for anti-Semitic genocide are bad in front of a national audience, she couldn’t figure out an answer.

Which made reasonable people scratch their heads, and wonder what kind of qualifications someone that dumb could possibly have to be president of Harvard.

Annnnndddd…

It turns out that her paper-thin publication record is littered with many, many instances of blatant plagiarism.

Speaking of horrifically unqualified Harvard big shots, a few minutes after Gay resigned in disgrace (though her emotional pain was probably eased by being given a Harvard teaching job for $900K per year), some anonymous tipster suggested that Harvard look into the academic record of their chief diversity and inclusion office Sherri Ann Charleston.

Annnnndddd…

It turns out that she plagiarized at least 40 times. Which is even more impressive when you consider that she crammed all of that fraudulence into just two documents: her dissertation, and ONE published article.

Which, it turns out was an article that her husband actually wrote, and that she just re-packaged and claimed as her own.

And it’s not just academics. You may remember Marilyn Mosby, a racial grifter who got herself elected State’s Attorney in Baltimore in 2015. She immediately started blazing a path of leftist incompetence that only added to the travails of the masochistic black Democrat community in Baltimore, who continue to elect incompetent imbeciles who “look like [them].”

She announced that her office would stop prosecuting many “lower level” crimes. You may be shocked to learn that crime in Baltimore then went up. Unexpectedly!

She also made a national name for herself by charging and prosecuting 6 cops who were connected (mostly tangentially) to the death of career criminal Freddie Gray while he was in custody and being driven to jail.

Despite several prisoners’ testimony that Gray had been intentionally banging himself around inside the police van, and no evidence that the cops had hurt him, Mosby threw the book at all 6 cops.

Annnndddddd… all 6 were acquitted.

She was tossed out in the next election, after investigators noticed that she had taken a “hardship” withdrawal from retirement funds (when she was making $250K per year), to buy multiple rental properties in Florida (each of which she claimed was going to be a second home), and lied about several issues on her loan application.

Annndddd…. last week she was convicted on three perjury and fraud charges.

Which brings us to Fani “what ‘chu talkin’ bout” Willis, who showed her fanny and got bitten on it in a glorious day of testimony this week.

This bonehead wanted to make herself a star by prosecuting Trump and 19 others on a raft of ridiculous RICO charges, and never has there been a more hilarious illustration of the bromide, “be careful what you wish for.”

Her testimony on Thursday turned into a glorious self-immolation by a race-card playing dunce who was in far over her head. When searching for a top lawyer to take on the incredibly complicated and high-profile RICO case, she picked a guy who had prosecuted mostly traffic cases, and had zero RICO experience.

And the fact that he and she were sleeping together had NOTHING to do with it.

The best argument she could make was that she started banging the attorney she hired – and over-paid – only AFTER she hired him. Because that makes it all better.

She claimed that she reimbursed her boy toy for all of the money he spent on her for trips and gifts, but that she did so in cash only. Sweet, conveniently untraceable cash.

When asked why she would do that, she said that it was “a black thing” to keep thick wads of cash around at all times. And no, she couldn’t show any records of when she had withdrawn it from her bank, and you’re racist for asking.

In fact, she managed to dig a deeper hole when she said that some of that cash came from when she ran for office, and took campaign cash home for personal use. Which is illegal.

D’oh!

To be clear, all of these black women in high-powered jobs are not transparently corrupt failures because they are black or female. They were only in those high-powered jobs in the first place because they were black and female, and that is a result of the transparently corrupt system of DEI identity politics.

In that way, racial preferences worked for them the same way that nepotism works for rich or powerfully connected white folks.

Ted Kennedy was no more qualified to be a senator than he was to run a shake machine at McDonalds. Hunter Biden couldn’t find Ukraine on a map and knew nothing about the energy business, and my three-year-old daughter made more impressive art with finger paints.

But both of those reprobates were able to fail spectacularly on a big stage purely because of their last names.

The people who should be most outraged at frauds like Fani Willis, Marilyn Mosby and Claudine Gay are black women who work their butts off and legitimately earn their way to a spot at the table, only to be met by a skepticism that they don’t deserve.

And that is all on scammers like Willis, Mosby and Gay.

Hamas delenda est!