Biden Is a Phony
Plus, “send American flags to the class of 2024”
Plenty has been said already about the devastating foreign policy consequences of President Biden’s announcement that he is holding up an arms shipment to Israel. Yet after the fall of Kabul and the Russian invasion of Ukraine it was already clear that Biden was a disastrous foreign policy president. This move reinforces that impression, but it was an already widely held impression.
The less appreciated element of the decision is its potential to reinforce the idea that Biden is a phony. He falsely claimed he opposed the war in Afghanistan from the start, he falsely claimed to New Hampshire voters that $400,000 is “a lot more than I ever made,” and now he falsely claims that his support for Israel is “ironclad” while holding back weapons shipments. And he held back the announcement until after a scheduled Holocaust-remembrance speech. As the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, who endorsed Biden in 2020, put it, “there seem to be 2 Bidens.”
Harvard latest: There is a lot of action on the Harvard front, at least some of it modestly encouraging.
Former Harvard Hillel student president Sabrina Goldfischer, whose excellent senior thesis interviewing students about their experiences helped to expose Harvard’s antisemitism and stifling ideological conformity problems, has been admitted to Harvard Law School and will be starting there in the fall, adding to the pool of pro-Israel and pro-Jewish voices on the campus.
The Robert Beren professor of government, Eric Nelson, has a well-argued opinion piece in the Crimson (“The Case Against Negotiation”) laying down a marker on the issue of divestment from Israel. “Many other Harvard affiliates, myself included, feel at least as strongly that Harvard should do no such thing — so strongly, indeed, that a large number of us would surely leave this place if the University did in fact bow to the demands of the encampers,” he writes. (emphasis mine.)
This seems to me to be a hugely important point, and one I made already publicly back in December 2022 (when I was still employed by Harvard) and said, “All of us who care about the University really need to work urgently to improve the situation or else face a real risk of Harvard losing Jewish talent and excellence to other, less hostile institutions.”
The market forces—whether the bond market (see yesterday’s piece here “Harvard Bond Offering Raises Less Money Than Expected” and the related New York Sun editorial “The Bond Vigilantes Come for Harvard”) or the market for faculty and prospective student talent—are really key, in my view, to improving the situation.
There'd be no more dramatic message than 10 or 20 really first-rate star Harvard faculty picking up and moving en masse to Brandeis or Yeshiva University or Dartmouth or Tulane or University of Florida or Tel Aviv University or Brown like a bunch of law firm partners leaving Cravath for Paul Weiss or departing Kirkland and Ellis for Gibson, Dunn. I hope it doesn't come to that, but Nelson’s mere mention of the risk of it should help concentrate peoples’ attention.
Speaking of first-rate Harvard faculty, a group of them, including former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier, computer science professor Boaz Barak, medical school professor Jerome Groopman (who is friendly with interim president Garber), divinity school professor Jon Levenson, business school professor Raffaella Sadun, Nobel laureate economist Eric Maskin, and former dental school dean Bruce Donoff, have signed a letter to interim president Garber that says, “recognizing that there can be no academic freedom in an atmosphere of lawlessness, we fully support your efforts to end the encampment swiftly and as peacefully as possible, so that the academic missions of our community, including exams and commencement, can go forward without further disturbance.”
It’s a counter to an earlier faculty letter urging Garber and his provost, John Manning, to negotiate with the protesters. One way out of this for Harvard might be a divorce. Let the faculty signers of the “negotiate” letter spin out their own university, let the faculty signers of the “end the encampment swiftly” letter spin out their own university, and let students and alumni and donors and the other faculty choose which of the two institutions they’d prefer to be associated with.
Not that a university shouldn’t include a range of views and beliefs on the Arab-Israeli conflict or the boundaries of campus activism and the techniques for managing it—that’s part of what education is all about, conversation with people who have different ideas, rather than stifling conformity. Yet you look at someone like Professor Walter Johnson, an avowed enemy of capitalism, who the Antonin Scalia professor of law at Harvard Law School, Stephen Sachs, really nails in a letter to the New York Review of Books, and you’ve got to wonder what exactly positive he’s contributing.
The Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, the official Harvard Jewish alumni affinity group, is out with an emergency email recommending, “fire the faculty who are violating community standards, Harvard’s policies, and/or their terms of tenure. Do so immediately.”
It also recommends: “send American flags to the class of 2024.”
Scott’s latest: Senator Tim Scott has dropped a new episode of the video series he’s doing with black Republican members of Congress.
This latest one features Rep. John James of Michigan taking aim at black prosecutors like Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis who are prosecuting President Trump. “It’s ironic that they actually found black folks to protect white liberals’ power. They found token black folks, Letitia James, Alvin Brag, and Fani Willis, to protect white liberals’ power….They have their Stepin Fetchits going after their number one adversary.”
Senator Scott said, “if any group of people opposed unfair, inconsistent application of the legal system— people that look like us.”
At one point Rep. Burgess Owens says traditionally Democratic demographic groups are moving toward Trump: “Black, Hispanic, Jewish, it doesn’t matter, we don’t like injustice, we don’t like bullying.”
Rep. Byron Donalds says, “You just gotta have one juror to say, this is some bull-jive, and I’m not gonna be a part if it.”
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The challenge with calling out Biden as a phony or a liar is that the politicians you quote later in the piece are at least his equal as phonies. There have to be some politicians you can find on the right who are far less phony (Romney? Thune?).