Displaying posts published in

March 2025

The Demowhigs’ Race to Extinction The Democratic Party’s radical stances and cultural missteps could doom it to the same fate as the Whigs. By William F. Marshall

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/13/the-demowhigs-race-to-extinction/

Once upon a time, there was an esteemed American political party called the Whig Party. It was one of the two great American political parties of its time. It stood alongside the Democratic Party in the mid-19th century and produced four U.S. presidents: William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore. It also enjoyed the membership of other eminent American political leaders, like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, William Seward, and John Quincy Adams. Notwithstanding these great achievements, however, the Whig Party managed to destroy itself and was dissolved in 1854, just 21 years after its founding. Could today’s Democratic Party be on the same path to extinction as the Whigs?

It certainly seems that today’s Democratic Party’s “brain trust,” such as it is, is either utterly hapless or has a conservative mole within its ranks deliberately engineering the destruction of the party through the incomprehensible stances it is taking. Given that political conservatives, of which I count myself, are historically terrible at devising Machiavellian tactics against their opponents, I’m guessing there is no mole. Democrats are simply foundering in the wake of a force of nature called Donald Trump, who is simply brilliant at tapping into the sentiments of the majority of the American people and turning his political opponents’ weaknesses against themselves.

To be fair, Trump is benefiting from Democratic policy positions that, on almost every issue, are 180 degrees out of phase with most of the American people and with common sense.

Beginning with the administration of Barack Hussein Obama—that inscrutable, rising-out-of-nowhere community organizer, whose background is still largely a mystery to most of us—the Democratic Party began to take positions on matters of public policy that were real head-scratchers.

Is the Jig Up for Elite Higher Education? Elite universities face a reckoning as public backlash and new legislation threaten their finances, admissions policies, and ideological excesses, forcing them to reform or risk irrelevance. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/13/is-the-jig-up-for-elite-higher-education/

Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal—and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.

Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Graduation ceremonies became overtly racially and ethnically segregated. The same was true for dorms and “theme houses.”

So-called “safe spaces,” in the spirit of the Jim Crow South, reserved areas of campus solely for particular races.

Affluent foreign students often openly protested on behalf of designated terrorist groups like Hamas.

First-Amendment-protected free speech all but vanished on elite campuses. Any guest speaker who dared to critique abortion on demand, Middle East orthodoxy, biological males dominating women’s sports, or diversity/equity/inclusion dogmas was likely to be shouted down, or on occasion roughed up.

University administrators either ignored the violence done to the Bill of Rights or quietly approved when their rowdy students were turned loose on supposed conservatives.

But in their hubris, the universities began a series of blunders that may now end them as they once were.

Antisemitism on the Hill A Senate committee discusses Jew-hatred. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/antisemitism-on-the-hill/

On March 5, the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill was the setting for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that was truly fascinating. The subject: antisemitism, in particular the displays of vicious Jew-hatred that have taken place on college campuses since the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023.

It’s a subject that the Democrats have tried to avoid for years because it sorely divides their ranks. After all, several congressional Democrats – notably members of the so-called “Squad” – are openly antagonistic toward Jews and deeply hostile to Israel. In 2019, a House resolution condemning antisemitism – introduced in the wake of remarks by the appalling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), one of the members of the Squad – was watered down by Democrats into a general condemnation of all hatred and intolerance.

Well, it’s a new day. Hence this two-and-a-half-hour hearing, which was made possible by the fact that the Republicans won a senatorial majority in the November elections. Of the five witnesses, three were selected by the Republicans: Adela Cojab of the National Jewish Advocacy Center; Alyza D. Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law;  and Asra Q. Nomani of the Pearl Project. All had powerful, disturbing things to say about the rise in student antisemitism since October 7.

Cojab, for instance, recalled a college class in Middle Eastern Studies in which she’d asked the professor whether bin Laden should be considered a terrorist. “Everybody laughed,” she said – because, you see, her classmates had all been taught that the terrorist label is vulgar and simplistic. Indeed, Cojab explained, they’d been taught a lot of things – among them, that “the political is personal”; that the world is divided into the “global north and global south,” the former of which is always wrong and the latter always right; and that it’s permissible to commit acts of violence “if your ideology is correct.”

The Moral Inversion of Antisemitism A review of Robert Spencer’s new masterpiece, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-moral-inversion-of-antisemitism/

After Oct 7, Robert Spencer, the eminent scholar of religions and expert on Islamic terrorism, witnessed the irrational return of antisemitism, not just on the left, but also on the right.

“Fervent and articulate opponents of globalism and socialism began sending me articles in which globalists and socialists rehearsed all the alleged evils and misdeeds of Israel,” he writes.

“Vociferous critics of the United Nations began citing its figures on civilian deaths in Gaza.”

In response, Spencer began working on what would become his latest book, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’. Spencer, already the author of numerous critically acclaimed books touching on the intersections of religion and history including ‘Empire of God’, about the Byzantine Empire, ‘The Palestinian Delusion’ and his recent, ‘Muhammad: A Critical Biography’, once again goes back in time and perhaps further so than his past books have ever traveled before.

In  ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’, Spencer traces the origins of antisemitism to an initial pagan reaction against the translation of the Bible until “in the ancient world, revisionist versions of the accounts in the Jewish scriptures became a cottage industry.” Antisemitism became a way to rebut scripture and with it the moral foundations of a divine religion. The more contemptible the Jews were, the less reason there was to respect anything that Moses and later prophets had to say. This echoes the moral inversion that Spencer now sees all around him on social media in which the Jews attacked on Oct 7 become the perpetrators and Hamas becomes the victim.

In trying to understand this present day moral inversion, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’ travels through the ancient pagan world, from Egypt to Greece and Rome, through to the rise of Christianity in which Spencer, a devout member of the Greek Orthodox Church, grapples with the troubled history of antisemitism in Christianity, and then on to the Muslim world.

The escalating leftist violence against conservatives from Trump and Musk on down By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/the_escalating_leftist_violence_against_conservatives_from_trump_and_musk_on_down.html

The news lately has been filled with stories of the escalating violence against conservatives. We already saw it last year with the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump, but it’s now spread to Musk, Vance, and conservatives generally. As with the blasphemous song a so-called “transgender” person sang at the Bernie rally, I can’t say I’m surprised. Some things are predictable, and leftist violence, especially when you’ve driven your supporters insane, is especially predictable.  

I don’t need to rehash the Butler assassination attempt that Trump survived by a millisecond and millimeter. Nor do I need to remind you about the wannabe assassin at Mar-a-Lago.

But for the left, two missed assassination attempts aren’t a sign of societal breakdown; they’re a sign of failure, which needs to be remedied. So it was that a UCLA professor (that is, a man making his money on the public dime) is urging the military to engage in a violent coup against President Trump.