Apr
21
2025

I'm Expecting to See "J.D. Vance Killed the Pope" Theories

And on my dead-trees copy of the WSJ this Easter Monday:

Requiescat in pace, Jorge.

Also of note:

  • It's Point/Counterpoint Monday here at Pun Salad. Taking the pro-Harvard point is Angel Eduardo, writing at UnHerd: Harvard's resistance to Trump is a model for US universities.

    They say that where Harvard goes, others follow. For the first time in a while, supporters of free expression on American campuses should hope that’s true.

    Late last week, the Ivy League university received a letter from the federal government demanding changes to its governance, leadership structure, hiring practices, and admissions processes, as well as a “discontinuation of DEI” and reform of “programs with egregious records of antisemitism or other bias”. If it failed to carry out these changes, Harvard would risk losing its government investment. In other words, “Nice school you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

    Thankfully, Harvard pushed back. Yesterday the university’s president Alan Garber published a response, firmly committing to the preservation of academic freedom and institutional independence on campus. The government’s mandates, Garber wrote, “[threaten] our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

    Fine. I'm a fan of free expression on American campuses too.

    I will only point out that it's been 14 years since a similar ("Dear Colleague") letter went out to all universities demanding significant changes handling alleged sex-related misbehavior, significantly eroding due-process protections for the accused. There was pushback on that, but not much significant resistance came from university administration or faculty.

    In fact, one University Near Here scheduled a big ceremony celebrating that announcement.

    So go figure.

  • Jonathan Turley's counterpoint does not lead off with "Angel, you ignorant slut." His headline at the Hill: Crimson chide: Harvard makes the case against itself

    Harvard faculty members are finally upset about free speech and viewpoint intolerance. Hundreds of professors signed a letter of outrage over what they called an attack on the “rights of free expression, association, and inquiry” in higher education.

    The cause for this outcry is the threat to end the university’s tax exempt status, freezing federal grants, and other punitive measures. Some of those measures raise serious concerns over academic freedom and free speech.

    The problem is that Harvard faculty members have spent decades denying those rights to teachers and students alike.

    There is an almost comical lack of self-awareness among Harvard faculty members who express concern about protecting viewpoint diversity and academic integrity. The letter gives off that same queasy feeling as when CBS morning host Gayle King insisted she is an astronaut, just like Alan Shepard, due to her 10-minute jaunt in space on the Blue Origin. One is just left speechless, looking awkwardly at one’s shoes.

    Many of these signatories have been entirely silent for years as departments purged their ranks of conservatives to create one of the most perfectly sealed-off echo chambers in all of higher education. Harvard ranks dead last for free speech, awarded a 0 out of 100 score last year by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. There has been no outcry about this from most of these professors.

    I have to give gold stars to both Angel and Jonathan. "Both make good points."

  • Tired of all the "winning". Karl Rove takes the pulse of the electorate and diagnoses: America Gets Trump Fatigue (gifted link). .

    We aren’t 100 days into Donald Trump’s second term and many Americans are already exhausted. They’ve had way too much thrown at them.

    Voters made crystal clear what they sought during the 2024 election. They wanted prices to come down and the economy revved up. The Southern border had to be closed, our military strengthened and a strong leader installed in the Oval Office.

    Some of that we’re getting, especially regarding the border. Other things—the rebuilding of the military—appear to be in the works.

    But on the key issue of the economy, Americans aren’t happy. Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to break inflation has been replaced by a fixation on raising tariffs, which nearly three-quarters of Americans expect to hike prices. We’re also confused: Is the goal getting trading partners to lower their tariffs on U.S. goods and services? Or replacing our income tax with high tariffs on foreign goods?

    Rove represents Conventional Republican Wisdom, which is out of favor these days. Sad!

  • Written before he killed the Pope. Andrew C. McCarthy reminds us that the Veep should, and almost certainly does, know better, but JD Vance Pretends Due Process Is Beside the Point (gifted link).

    JD Vance is a smart fellow. That’s why he’s often infuriating — too smart not to know that the nonsense he spouts is nonsense. Well-framed nonsense, to be sure. Demagoguery, to be effective, has to be well framed: A grandiloquent rationalization for shredding the Constitution has to be pitched as a defense of constitutional principle if, as the speaker intends, the former is to be taken by the listener as the latter. All the while, though, the speaker knows exactly what he’s doing.

    Vice President Vance issued one of his claptrap-laden diatribes on social media Wednesday, slamming “the media and the far left” who are “weeping over the lack of due process” in the Trump administration’s illegal deportations of people it alleges — probably correctly in most instances — are members of criminal gangs. Vance spotlights Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the illegal alien and Salvadoran national whom — the Trump Justice Department itself has confessed to the Supreme Court — the administration unlawfully deported to El Salvador.

    It is natural for Vance to dwell on Abrego Garcia. It’s topical, after all, with the administration cruising toward being held in contempt by a federal judge (I should say, yet another federal judge) because it is stonewalling about its flouting of an order, endorsed by the Supreme Court, that it facilitate his return to the United States. It’s an order with which the administration could easily comply but it has decided to ignore. The best explanation is the simplest: Trump intends to illustrate that he has amassed uncheckable power. That is, having extirpated what made the Republican Party conservative and constitutionalist, and with Congress thus no obstacle (at least for the next 21 months), the president wants it known that such constitutional constraints on executive power as courts and due process are no longer operative.

    If you want to hit Andy with arguments involving hypocrisy and whataboutism, feel free. You won't be wrong. But that doesn't make him wrong.