I’ve got the uneasy feeling that there’s going to be a lot of unsettling news as 2024 goes on, but for now the year is fresh and new, and I see a lot to be optimistic about.
FSU got deservedly humiliated in their bowl game, anti-Semitic identity hire Claudine Gay got tossed out of her Harvard presidency, and the Native American president of Penn got tossed overboard even more quickly than Gay did.
Okay, I’m not sure the Penn lady is an Indian, but since she’s as white as Liz Warren and has nice cheekbones, I’m just assuming. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
In the ongoing battle of Hebrews vs. Terrorists, the good guys are putting wins on the board by taking hateful creeps off the board. On January 2nd, a bunch of Bond villains from Hamas, Fatah and other “Palestinian” and Lebanese terror groups were meeting in Beirut. (I picture a bunch of guys with eye patches and facial scars sitting in high-backed chairs around an enormous conference table over a glass floor covering a giant aquarium filled with sharks with frickin’ lasers on their heads.)
Then the Mossad and IDF came calling, as reflected in my super-accurate re-enactment here:
Sound at the door: Knock, knock.
Hamas money and weapons guy Salah al-Arouri: Who’s there?
Door: Kosher drone.
Salah (confused): Did anyone order a kosher drone?
Collection of thugs: We ordered death to Israel, with a side of death to America, but no kosher drones.
Salah: Wait a minute… kosher?
Drone: KA-BLAM!!!
The following day, an assistant commander in Islamic Jihad’s northern Gaza division with the ridiculous name Mamdouh Lulu was recorded live as he walked on a Gaza street, talking to a companion. As the Israeli eye in the sky watched, the two split up and Lulu went on his merry way, probably with visions of having non-consensual sex with a goat dancing in his head.
Annnnddddd… he was vaporized in an Israeli airstrike. Which sounds about right, since lately the leading cause of death for terrorists in Gaza is “spontaneous vaporization.”
I’d like to think that the pilot said, “Screw you, Lulu,” when he fired the missile.
But one thing is clear: Lulu didn’t even have time to say boo hoo before he went bye bye.
That very same day, a huge crowd of terror enthusiasts gathered for an upbeat tribute to the late Iranian super-villain Qasem Soleimani (or, as he became known after Trump found out his whereabouts, “goo in a Jeep”) in a cemetery (appropriately enough) in the Iranian town of Kernan.
Annnndddd… several bombs went off in the crowd, killing over 100 people and wounding at least 140 more. And before you can say, “Yeah, but how many innocent people may have been hurt or killed in those explosions?” remember that the crowd was there to venerate the memory of a Jew-hating mass murderer.
So, zero. Zero innocent people.
As satisfying as it would be to chalk this karmic strike up as yet another successful Israeli chess move, reports suggest that a Sunni Muslim group was behind the bombing. I’m not a Muslim-ologist, but I understand that many Sunnis are not particularly fond of the Shia running Iran.
So let me first applaud those Sunnis. And to the Shia, I just have one question: Are you going to let those guys get away with that?
But it’s not just vaporizing terrorists who are getting this year off to a good start. It’s also some imploding DEI spending initiatives.
One hopeful story on Breitbart reported that after a huge increase in DEI programs and hiring several years ago, “tech giants including Zuckerberg’s Meta and Google have slashed their funding of DEI programs in 2023 by up to 90 percent.” And as AOC could tell you, that’s nearly half!
Even as PR flaks and spokes-castrati at the tech companies continue to mouth platitudes about the value of DEI, their shareholders and bosses have realized that that value is commensurate with the number of innocent people attending Soleimani-Fest ’24, and they’re trying to avoid having the market give them the Lulu treatment.
Meanwhile in Florida, Ron DeSantis has caused yet another big leftist interest group to weep and gnash their teeth. (Man, I wish we could have a conservative door-kicker like that guy as our president!) This time it was a huge teachers’ union – the United Teachers of Dade (UTD) in Miami-Dade county – who is looking at de-certification because of a RDS-backed right-to-work law requiring that a union meets a dues-paying membership threshold of 60% to stay in power.
Despite a panicked push to boost their membership – including sleazy tricks like smearing the law’s backers and kicking substitute teachers out of their bargaining unit to lower the number of teachers required to meet the 60% threshold – the UTD came up short.
And now Florida parents may be about to gain even more control over their kids’ education. And an influential public union that is way less concerned with educating students than with laundering union dues for Democrat candidates and the DNC.
Finally, I’ve got a few thoughts about the very encouraging signs coming out of the Claudine Gay implosion at Harvard. I don’t think that forcing her out means that Harvard and other universities have learned their lesson and will now reform themselves. If they had, they wouldn’t let her return to a faculty position and get paid $900K a year. (That’s more than I make in several years, and I never plagiarized in my dissertation, or anywhere else!) (If by “several years” I mean “ten years!”)
But I do think that the damage to the reputation of Harvard and Penn and universities in general is serious. The public has seen behind the curtain, and now recognizes the corruption and inexcusable and offensive racial politics there. The empress was obviously wearing no clothes.
And very stupid and ugly glasses!
The premise behind affirmative action was always that it would only involve a very light touch on the scale, and only to tilt an outcome when two job applicants or students were very evenly matched in every other way. If that was ever true, it hasn’t been true for many, many decades.
The recent SCOTUS debate and ruling on affirmative action in college admissions revealed the ugly truth that preferred minorities with bottom-quintile test scores and qualifications were being admitted at higher rates than whites and Asians in the top several percent.
And Claudine Gay’s exposure just hammers that home. A non-identity hire trying to become president at a top school like Harvard would need to have published a number of books, at least several of which would have to be ground-breaking, influential works in their field, amongst a large number of articles and decades of high-profile service.
Gay wrote a total of zero books, and only 11 peer-reviewed articles. And she didn’t even write most of those, as her prolific record as a high-volume plagiarizer proves!
Not to mention that every one of those articles was about race – one of the least rigorous fields in academia, to put it nicely – and all of them were predictably banal and unoriginal, as they only re-packaged the fashionable prejudices of the left: whites are evil and racist, the West is terrible and America is worse, “people of color” are eternally oppressed victims.
Gay is a hack and a mediocrity, and she went out as she came in: playing the race card, and playing the victim, and lying her butt off.
It’s right and salutary that the American public got to see that.
More please!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 