What? Osama Bin Laden's kids can't go to Harvard?

Harvard University has contracted a nasty case of antisemitism, which it has been unable to shake. President Trump, highly dissatisfied with Harvard's effort to stamp out anti-Jewish racism, recently barred Harvard from enrolling foreign students. 

Losing international students would be a severe financial blow to Harvard. Twenty-seven percent of its students are foreigners, and most pay the university's full, exorbitant tuition price.  

Harvard responded like all universities respond when their perks get cancelled; it sued. Fortunately, the hoary old institution is located in Massachusetts, which is chock-full of judges sympathetic to the higher education industry. Judge Allison Burroughs, an Ivy League law school graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, enjoined the Trump administration's action.

Harvard not only enriches itself with tuition money from foreign students but also receives substantial funding from foreign countries and global elites. For example, the Bin Laden family (Osama Bin Laden's kinfolk) donated $1 million to Harvard Law School to establish fellowships for students from the Middle East to study Islamic states that apply Sharia law.

Why did the Bin Ladens give Harvard this money? It could be because Osama Bin Laden's half-brother, Abdullah Mohammed Binladen, earned two advanced degrees from Harvard Law School.

Osama Bin Laden is dead, of course. But the Bin Laden family is filthy rich, and the Bin Ladens may want to send more relatives to Harvard. Osama himself had at least 20 kids, some of whom may aspire to getting a Harvard MBA or a master's degree in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School.

Suppose Trump prevails in cancelling visas for Harvard international students. In that case, the poor Bin Laden kids might be forced to attend Yale or Princeton, and Harvard would miss out on receiving more Bin Laden money. Oh, the horror!

I have no sympathy for Harvard concerning its dispute with the Trump administration. This arrogant behemoth has gotten filthy rich taking donations from wealthy influencer peddlers, including countries that are hostile to the United States and its values.

Perhaps that's why Harvard has been unable to get antisemitism under control. It may not be trying very hard. After all, there's no money to be made fighting antisemitism.

Photo credit: AP, WCHS Fox Eyewitness News, Charles Krupa

No Country for Old Neckties: A Spring Wedding in the Chihuahuan Desert

Earlier this month, my wife and I drove to Terlingua, Texas—a ghost town in the Chihuahuan Desert—to attend our niece's wedding. Terlingua is a two-day drive from our home in Mississippi—about 1,000 miles.

We spent the first night on our journey in San Antonio, where we ate dinner at Mi Tierra, my favorite Mexican restaurant. Beloved by tourists and locals alike, Mi Tierra features roving mariachi bands, a Mexican pastries counter, sturdy margaritas, and old-fashioned Tex-Mex food.

The next morning, we traveled west on Interstate 10 into the northern stretches of the Chihuahuan Desert. When we crossed over the Pecos River, we officially entered the Trans Pecos--the most stark and desolate region of Texas.

We arrived in Fort Stockton in the early afternoon, one of the few substantial towns in West Texas. Founded as an Army post before the Civil War, Fort Stockton owes its existence to Comanche Springs, an aquifer of artesian springs that once produced 60 million gallons of water a day — a desert miracle. The fort's soldiers protected Overland stage coaches from marauding Comanche and Apache Indians.

We turned south at Fort Stockton and ended the day in Alpine, Texas, where we spent the night in the historic Holland Hotel.  Had we reached the end of our journey? No, on our third travel day, we drove another 80 miles to the tiny hamlet of Terlingua, the wedding destination.

Our niece was married in Terlingua's St. Joseph's Church, attended by four bridesmaids and groomsmen. No male in attendance wore a traditional necktie, but all were appropriately attired. Some wore open-collared shirts, and some wore bolo ties. A few men wore cowboy hats, and many wore their best western boots. 

After the wedding, the guests retired to a sumptuous reception to eat barbecue brisket and drink 'horny toad' margaritas and ice-cold Mexican beer. I couldn't find a shady spot to sit, so I watched the young folks dancing the Texas Two-Step in the late-afternoon sun, amply shaded by my Stetson hat.

Terlingua is just a few miles from the Mexican border, and one can see the mountains of Mexico shimmering in the distance.  This region is Cormac McCarthy country, the setting for several of McCarthy's novels, including No Country for Old Men.

For the coastal elites traveling by jet from the West Coast to the East Coast, Far West Texas is Flyover Country--boring to look at from 30,000 feet. For me, however, this region has a mystical quality. Its harsh immensity is achingly beautiful.

Life in the Chihuahuan Desert of the Trans Pecos is stripped to the essentials. Air-conditioning and four-wheel drive vehicles don't change the fact that water is the most basic necessity of life and is always in short supply.

I like and admire the people of West Texas. There is a directness about them and an easy hospitality that is missing in urban America, perhaps most especially in the Blue State cities. Fortunately for West Texans, it's damned hard to get there and mostly unappealing for people who own private jets.  

Two-stepping in the Chihuahuan Desert

The U.S. is not like 1930s Germany, or is it?

 Progressive Democrats are tirelessly accusing the Trump administration of being a fascist regime and comparing it to 1930s Germany.  Kamala Harris insinuated that  Trump is a Fascist during the 2024 presidential campaign. Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz recently compared ICE agents to the Gestapo. Al Gore compared the Trump administration to Nazi Germany, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker made a similar comparson last February.

This is bold talk coming from the Democratic Party, which hoodwinked the American people by installing Joe Biden, a cognitively diminished grifter, as the leader of the Free World, and then backed perpetually befuddled Kamala Harris to succeed him. 

Nevertheless, these gasbags are right to compare contemporary America to the Weimar Republic during the years that saw Hitler come to power.

First, the Weimar Republic was racked by political violence fomented by both the Left and the Right. Similarly, our country has seen a rise in political violence in American cities--most notably the George Floyd riots.

Second, like Germany, America is wracked by vicious antisemitism in the nation's universities. Who could have foreseen this ugliest form of racism springing up in academia, which has been obsessed for more than three decades with diversity, equity, and inclusion?

Finally, and most disturbingly, the United States, like Germany between the World Wars, is seeing the frightening specter of political assassinations, including two assassination attempts against President Trump and the recent murder of a young Jewish couple in Washington, DC.

Our nation has endured periods of violence, bigotry, and racism before. Americans weathered the Salem Witch Trials, the rise of anti-Catholic Nativism in the 1850s,  the Klan eras of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and McCarthyism. Those were ugly times, but American democracy survived.

However, the present unrest, which progressive Democrats have misdianosed, is different. This time around, our political malaise is stewing in an inflationary economy, and inflation, like a match thrown into a barrel of gasoline, threatens an explosion that can destroy our society.

When Money Dies, Adam Ferguson's masterful study of the German economy in the years before Hitler came to power emphasized the existential threat that inflation posed to Germany:

Undoubtedly, . . . inflation aggravated every evil, ruined every chance of national revival or individual success, and eventually produced precisely the conditions in which extremists of Right and Left could raise the mob against the State, set class against class, race against race, family against family, husband against wife, trade against trade, town against country. It undermined national resolution when a simple want or need might have bolstered it.

 Drawing on the German experience after the Central Powers lost World War I, Ferguson concluded that the collapse of a nation's currency is catastrophic.

If what happened to the defeated Central Powers in the early 1920s is anything to go by, then the process of collapse of the recognized, traditional, trusted medium of exchange . . . unleashes such greed, violence, unhappiness, and hatred, largely bred from fear, as no society can survive uncrippled and unchanged.

Today, while progressive Democrats indulge in incendiary rhetoric, the dollar is running the danger of being replaced as the world's reserve currency. At the same time, President Trump confronts a ballooning national debt and stubborn inflation.

I'm pessimistic about the prospect of Trump getting inflation under control. Nor do I think he'll be able to rein in the national debt. Indeed, it is probably politically impossible for him to do so.

When it becomes clear to the average pensioner, Social Security recipient, and Medicaid beneficiary that their standard of living is plummeting and they cannot purchase their basic needs, we will see big trouble. God help us if the United States stumbles down the path of the Weimar Republic.

It's time for America to end its love affair with Harvard University

 I live in Baton Rouge's College Town neighborhood, where every street is named after a prestigious university: Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and, of course, Harvard.

A Harvard Street can be found in cities across the United States--even in Los Angeles, which is 3,000 miles from Harvard Yard. 

Harvard is revered worldwide because it represents the zenith of academic prestige. As a recent  Associated Press news article put it: 

For students around the world, an acceptance letter to Harvard University has represented the pinnacle of achievement, offering a spot among the elite at a campus that produces Nobel Prize winners, captains of industry, and global leaders.

Like many others over four centuries, I came to Harvard believing a Harvard degree would dramatically change my life. I was a country boy from Oklahoma who was practicing law in Alaska. As a friend told me, a Harvard degree would erase Oklahoma from my resume. I would leave its hallowed campus, I naively assumed, with the credentials to speak at the national level on the public issues of the day.

I was disappointed. Harvard's Graduate School of Education, where I had obtained a berth, was not nearly as exclusive as I had imagined. HGSE's one-year master's program in education was a diploma mill, where students could obtain a Harvard credential merely by sitting through eight courses over nine months.  Some of those classes had enrollments of 200 students or more.

One of my classmates, an accomplished Connecticut attorney, researched the career prospects for HGSE graduates and shared her findings with me. The Education School's placement office data revealed that most doctoral graduates worked in the Northeast at modest salaries. My classmate concluded that a doctoral degree from HGSE was not worth the time or money. She left the program and went back to practising law.

Leaving the program was not an option for me. I had two small children enrolled in the Boston area schools. After disrupting my family and moving them across the North American continent, I felt I had to see it through.

After three-and-a-half years, I left Harvard with a master's degree and a doctorate and accepted a tenure-track job at a Southern university, making less than a third of what I had made as a practising lawyer.

My years at Harvard were the most miserable years of my life. I found the campus to be ugly, a jumble of dreary buildings in a multitude of discordant architectural styles and a far cry from the beautiful college campuses of the American South. To my surprise, Cambridge and Boston were shockingly provincial. The general population was surly, sullen, and cynical--as if they all lived in a Ben Affleck movie. 

As for the Harvard academic community, I found most (but not all) of the faculty arrogant, self-centered, and mediocre. As a white male student, I was a racial minority in a culture obsessed with race and gender. I was told not to bother applying to the Harvard Education Review: I was the wrong color

I hated the bleak and sunless Boston winters, which were oddly more depressing than the Alaska winters I had experienced. The subways were dirty, and the narrow, winding streets seemed designed to make it impossible to drive around a block.

When people compliment me on having a degree from Harvard, I tell them this: I was intelligent enough to get into Harvard but not smart enough to realize I shouldn't go.

Ain't we got fun!

Three Yale Professors Flee to Canada to Escape Trump. We'll miss 'em

 Three Yale Professors are leaving the United States to accept teaching jobs at the University of Toronto, ostensibly to escape Donald Trump. Professor Marcie Shore, one of the emigres, compared herself to the political refugees who fled Germany as the Nazis came to power. "The lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later."

In fact, there are similarities between Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the contempory United States. Like Germany (Paul von Hindenburg), the U.S. was governed for a time by a senile octogenarian (Joe Biden). 

In the waning days of the Weimar Republic, Germany was racked by political violence formented by Nazis, Communists, and para-military groups. Our nation is likewise plagued by political violence perpetrated by a new generation of thugs: Antifa, criminal immigrants, and anti-Israel protesters.

Racism gripped the German universities as Hitler came to power, which later spread to the general German population. Today, American universities are harboring anti-Semitic racists. Fortunately, Jew hating in the U.S. has so far been confined to Academia.

Nevertheless, Professor Shore and her fellow fleeing colleagues have misinterpreted today's political climate. It is Trump's political enemies who are behaving like Nazis, not Trump. More than 1,500 January 6th protesters were imprisoned far too harshly, while the hoodlums who burned down Minneapolis got away with arson during the George Floyd riots.

Indeed, it is self-serving and inaccurate for the departing Yale professors to compare themselves to the refugees who fled Germany to escape the Nazis.

The people who escaped Germany lost everything because Hitler's goons confiscated their property and their bank accounts. 

My guess is that Professors Marcie Shore, Jason Stanley, and Timothy Snyder are retaining all their investments and wealth as they immigrate to Canada. They may even have vacation homes in the U.S. that they are free to visit on their holidays.

Shore, Snyder, and Stanley may even profit from their political stunt. There could be book deals in their future and paid speaking engagements.

In the South, we have a saying when someone leaves a situation in a huff, Don't let the screendoor hit you in the butt on your way out.

And please do the nation a favor and take some Harvard professors with you.

Yale professors fleeing to Canada

The Democrats Need a New Code Talker

 Last week, Tim Walz spoke before a forum at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he revealed Kamala Harris's reason for choosing him as her vice presidential running mate. 

“I could code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck,“ Walz explained. “I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can do this and vote for this.’”

Apparently, the Harris campaign team realized Kamala had no credibility with working-class white dudes. Harris needed a middle-aged, midwestern, Caucasian male on the ticket who could talk like Clint Eastwood did in the barbershop scene in Gran Torino. 

Barber Martin: Perfect! A Polak and AND a Chink!

Walt Kowalski: How ya doing, Martin, you crazy Italian prick?

How did that work out? Not so well. Kamala lost ground in three critical demographic groups compared to Joe Biden's performance in the 2020 presidential race. A higher percentage of Hispanics, African Americans, and younger voters voted for Trump in 2024 than in 2020. Indeed, Trump won a majority of the popular vote among Hispanic men.

Even in New York, a reliably Blue state, Trump won new voters.  Trump carried 41 of the Empire State's 62 counties, including two counties on Long Island. Harris won New York by 11 percentage points, but Biden won by 23. 

If the Democrats want to win the presidency in 2028, they will need a better team on the ticket than Dumb and Dumber. No code talker will persuade a working-class guy from Flyover Country that America needs open borders. 

And no beer-drinking, football-watching dude in the Heartland will consent to have his high-school-aged daughter compete at a varsity track meet against a guy in the shot put event just because he's changed his name from Rufus to Linda.

Tim Walz: Code Talker

Did Pope Benecict XVI Go to Hell?

 I grew up in a small Oklahoma town where most people were Evangelical Protestants. These folks were grouped in several denominations, but they all held one central belief: The Bible is the word of God and must be interpreted literally.

For example, the Nazarenes, a little-known sect that began in North Texas, prohibited women from cutting their hair or wearing makeup based on church leaders' interpretation of a few obscure verses in the Old Testament. The Church of Christ, almost unheard of outside the South, allowed no musical instruments in their worship places because the Bible did not mention pianos.

All these sturdy groups shared one iron-clad belief: dancing and the consumption of alcohol were grave sins. Thus, Jesus did not change water into wine at the wedding in Cana; he transformed it into Welch's grape juice. And Jesus didn't dance.

In midlife, I converted to Catholicism, and I now believe that at least one verse from the Bible must be interpreted literally. This is the verse:

But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Matthew 18:6 (NCB)

Sexually abusing a child is a great sin, and all the experts agree that a child or youth never recovers psychologically from it. Surely, an adult who molests or rapes a child deserves to have a stone attached to his neck and be thrown in the ocean and drowned.

Tragically, the Catholic Church has been cursed for more than half a century by the sexual abuse of children by priests--hundreds of thousands of children across the globe.

Much of this abuse took place while Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger presided over the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican agency in charge of handling sexual abuse allegations.

In Jesus Wept, published this year by Alfred A. Knopf, Philip Shenon established conclusively that Ratzinger knew about the sexual abuse crisis and did virtually nothing about it. 

Shenon wrote:

Vatican documents made public in court records proved Ratzinger had always been involved personally in the handling of especially notorious child-abuse cases and that he regularly acted to delay the punishment of pedophile priests, even though that put more children at risk.

Shenon's book describes the sexual abuse calamity in detail, and Ratzinger was not the only person in the Vatican who fell short. Pope John Paul II probably knew almost as much as Ratzinger did. John Paul was surely aware that Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ, was a serial child abuser, but he continued to pal around with him.

This week, the cardinals will convene to choose a successor to Pope Francis. I hope they all will have read Shenon's book and will choose a new pope with the courage to tackle the sexual abuse crisis that continues to scandalize the world. 

Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI upon the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005. He stepped down from the papacy in  2013 and died in 2022. It's too late to tie a millstone around his neck and cast him into the sea.

I don't believe in a literal hell, but Ratzinger might dwell there if it exists.  Catholics should pray for his soul and the souls of all the children who were ravaged by priests over the past several decades. 

May God have mercy on the abusers and the men who covered it up. And may the balm of God's compassion heal all the children and youth who were sexually abused by Catholic priests.

Pope Benedict XVI