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.