RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/hysterics-for-hamas

The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:

“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”

“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”

“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/10/is-this-bidens-supermarket-scanner-moment/

“They have the money to spend.” — President Joe Biden

Those of us who’ve been around a while remember when the press made an epic deal out of President George H.W. Bush’s apparent amazement at an ordinary grocery store checkout scanner. It turns out the story was a complete media fabrication, but it fed the narrative that Bush was hopelessly out of touch, and it helped cost him his reelection.

This week, Joe Biden actually did do something that shows he is perhaps the most clueless president in American history.

In a softball interview this week, CNN’s Erin Burnett let Biden carry on — uninterrupted — with his usual litany of lies.

That he created 15 million jobs (there’ve been less than 6 million net new jobs under Biden – about equal to Trump’s over the same period).
That Trump told people to inject bleach (a claim repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers).
That a million people died from COVID on Trump’s watch (fewer than 470,000 had died when Biden took office; more than 720,000 have died since).
That “we have got 1,000 billionaires in America. You know what their average federal tax is? Eight-point-three percent” (a completely made-up number that we wrote about here).
That “when I started this administration, people were saying there’s going to be a collapse of the economy” (nobody but Biden was saying that).

But then Burnett, to her credit, asked about inflation.