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in 2024, I have a different thought. I have seen and endured right-wing institutions engaging in the same (and sometimes much worse) intolerance as left-wing institutions. When I wrote about my own recent cancellation at the hands of my former denomination, I was flooded with hundreds of personal emails relating similar stories.

Even the smallest deviations from the required right-wing orthodoxies were being met with a withering response in conservative churches and conservative religious organizations across America.

Confessore’s Michigan report. He wrote that the growing D.E.I. bureaucracies “represented a major — and profoundly left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power.” University faculty members lean far to the left, yet “administrators were even more politically liberal than faculty members, according to one survey

Charlie mentioned this interesting back-and-forth between Bret Stephens and my old friend David Brooks about how they became politically homeless

I was struck by how much of their analysis of what happened to conservatism / the Republican party is based on the movement of the elites. They talk about misunderstanding what people like Laura Ingraham wanted and the evolution of Fox News and the discrediting of the establishment.

hat changed isn’t the ideological preferences of the elites, but the power of the elites. The power of party structures started waning in the 1970s and has only accelerated. The power of media elites and intellectual elites has similarly collapsed.Republican powerbrokers and media figures like Bill Buckley could once wield influence to shape what the party (and conservatism) would be. Today those decisions emanate largely from the demos.

In their hearts, of course, most of them know it’s bullshit. But Trump world and its media ecosystem are an intellectual monoculture that demands this. There’s no room around this particular campfire for a plucky commander to speak the truth—which is that Birnam Wood has, indeed, come to Dunsinane while the mad king is busy tweeting about witch hunts.

It’s easy to understand why nobody is willing to approach the mad king and describe honestly the situation he faces—indeed, why Fox News can’t even deal candidly with its viewership on the subject: The situation is dire and it is worsening, and saying so would require very tough choices.

the United States Department of Justice allowed him to enter a guilty plea whose factual basis was that Trump had directed him in the commission of a crime. That is to say that the significance of the Cohen plea is not merely that Cohen alleges that Trump had him arrange to pay hush money to a porn star and a model in a specific effort to influence the election with illegal corporate contributions. It’s that the Justice Department believes this allegation to be true and is willing to proceed criminally against Cohen on that basis.

in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, de Souza and his colleagues describe the mound village and 80 other newly discovered archaeological sites from the years 1250 to 1500.

They predict that the region hides hundreds more undiscovered sites, and that as many as a million people might have carefully managed the rain forest long before Europeans arrived.

Fifty years ago, she said, “prominent scholars thought that little of cultural significance had ever happened in a tropical forest. It was supposed to be too highly vegetated, too moist. And the corollary to those views was that people never cut down the forests; they were supposed to have been sort of ‘noble savages,’ ” she said. “But those views have been overturned,” Piperno continued. “A lot of importance happened in tropical forests, including agricultural origins.”

Conservatives have long loathed it as the axis of liberal politics and political correctness, but now progressives are carping, too. They mourn it for what has been lost, a city that long welcomed everyone and has been altered by an earthquake of wealth. It is a place that people disparage constantly, especially residents.

Real estate is the nation’s costliest. Listings read like typos, a median $1.6 million for a single-family home and $3,700 monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment.

“This is unregulated capitalism, unbridled capitalism, capitalism run amok. There are no guardrails,” says Salesforce founder and chairman Marc Benioff, a fourth-generation San Franciscan who in a TV interview branded his city “a train wreck.”

the thing that struck me about the presidents’ answers wasn’t their legal insufficiency, but rather their stunning hypocrisy. And it’s that hypocrisy, not the presidents’ understanding of the law, that has created a campus crisis.

If Harvard, M.I.T. and Penn had chosen to model their policies after the First Amendment, many of the presidents’ controversial answers would be largely correct. When it comes to prohibiting speech, even the most vile forms of speech, context matters. A lot.

For example, surprising though it may be, the First Amendment does largely protect calls for violence. In case after case, the Supreme Court has held that in the absence of an actual, immediate threat — such as an incitement to violence — the government cannot punish a person who advocates violence. And no, there is not even a genocide exception to this rule.

The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.

I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.

Gay interpreted the question not at face value but as pertaining to whether Harvard students who had brandished slogans like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” which many people interpret as tantamount to a call for genocide, could be prosecuted under Harvard’s policies. Though the slogans are simplistic and reprehensible, they are not calls for genocide in so many words. So even if a university could punish direct calls for genocide as some form of harassment, it might justifiably choose not to prosecute students for an interpretation of their words they did not intend.