I used to be inclined to think that flag-burning laws were a slam-dunk First Amendment issue. I'm not as sure any more, at least at the state level (not sure where in the enumerated powers the feds get the power to ban it.)
1/ Can a state decide that certain symbols are sacred, and can't be messed with, so long as (a) people are warned clearly and in advance by the law; and (b) there are many alternative ways of expressing the same point of view without touching the sacred symbol? 2/

I find Trump's blanket pardon of Jan. 6 rioters, well, unpardonable. But I also can't forget that while the Biden Justice Dept. had a very different attitude toward prosecuting Jan. 6-ers and lawbreaking Hamasniks. 1/ The Biden Justice Dept. prosecuted every individual who entered the Capitol Building on 1/6, even if they just moseyed in late, and just stood around and gaped, no violence, no property destruction. By contrast, again, Hamasniks were a low priority. 2/

The Guardian claims to have done an analysis showing that only 8K of the Palestinian casualties in Gaza have been combatants. There are lots of problems with the analysis, but let's start with the fact that around February 19, 2024, Hamas itself acknowledged losing 6K fighters. 1/ This was widely reported at the time. Here, eg, is Reuters. 2/

I'd have more sympathy with the Smithsonian here if I hadn't visited the National Museum of the American Indian, and seen ridiculous woke claptrap presented as fact. 1/

https://twitter.com/Hebro_Steele/status/1958004252087091572

In particular, there was an exhibit on Native American soldiers. It asked why Native Americans served in the military despite the severe discrimination they faced. 2/

The anti-Israel IHL people can't have it both ways, to wit: (1) Screaming Israel is committing GENOCIDE! and (2) when you question them about how Gaza is a "genocide" they come up with a definition of genocide so broad that genocide is mundane. For example, 1/ In Ezra Klein's recent interview with Phillippe Sands, Sands wants to rehabilitate what he considers Lemkin's conception of genocide. He gives an example: 6 Villagers from B and C get together and kill 3 people from a different group who live in village B. GENOCIDE! 2/

Re my post below about whether Sephardic Jews are "Hispanic" in the American context, one thing that undermined affirmative action was that it came to be seen by many as an Elizabeth Warren-esque scam. It wasn't always. 1/ First, w/r/t race it almost exclusively benefited African Americans, by design. Back in the 60s and 70s, there was typically little doubt about who "counted." 2/

Much of the problems universities invited with DEI are based on the following conundrum: they accept "URM" students with academic qualifications well below those of white and Asian students. As one would expect, these students struggle to keep up 1/

https://twitter.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1954973775230795807

and wind up, in law schools for example, with much lower grades on average, much higher fail-out rates, and much lower bar passage rates. For example, in the Grutter litigation, African American matriculants had LSAT in the 155-158 average range, white and Asian students 2/

In April 2024, George Washington University requested assistance from the DC police to break up an illegal encampment set up by Hamasniks. The police refused, citing "optics."
In August 2025, the Jewish Community Relations Council puts out a statement 1/ talking about how great the local police are and how local law enforcement shouldn't be taken over by the Feds. Maybe not, but why is the *JCRC* of all groups going to bat for the local police? 2/

A batshit crazy statement from professors at UVA, suggesting that there are more false claims of antisemitism in the post-10/7 world than there is actual antisemitism. 1/

https://twitter.com/CvilleBubble/status/1953182806118678895

This, the same day the FBI reports that over 70 of hate crimes by religion are against Jews, 2 pc of the population. 2/

@dilanesper The secret to US support for Israel since 1967, save arguably during the two Trump administration's, is that it's based on an implicit bargain: (a) The US has Israel's back and in exchange (b) The US gets to restrain Israel when it thinks Israel is going "too far" militarily. 1/ @dilanesper In Gaza, the "too far" mostly involved humanitarian concerns. Originally, the "too far" was "provoking the Soviets to intervene" or "creating too much instability in neighboring countries." US policy-makers realized after 1967 that you can't have a nuclear-armed regional 2/

Below, I link to a bizarre study from Brandeis University that purports to show that faculty are much more moderate than we might think. It shows nothing of the kind. 1/ As a preliminary manner, it's important to note that this study includes any faculty who teach undergraduates, including STEM. So it's not limited to the Humanities and social sciences. 2/

21 years ago, Omer Bartov writing in the New Republic recognized Hamas as successor to the Nazis in its genocidal antisemitism. 1/ He also recognized that when you are dealing with murderous fanatics, you must kill them before they kill you. 2/

When the US faced an intractable enemy that refused to unconditionally surrender after it had been militarily defeated, we bombed Tokyo, leaving over 100K dead and over 1 million homeless. When that didn't work, we nuked two cities.
I am at best ambivalent about these actions, 1/ I don't feel a permanent moral stain as an American because of them. It's extremely difficult to figure out how to defeat fanatics that don't care about the well-being of their civilians.
Israel faces the same problem, though it hasn't been as inflexible in the US. Israel has not 2/

I'm embarrassed for all the Jews who were kvelling when Sanders was competing for the Democratic nomination. As a practical matter, he's about as Jewish as a blueberry bagel with ham and swiss.

https://twitter.com/ShabbosK/status/1947737262352969935

(the bagel is also of Jewish origin, but at some point it's essentially an unintentional mockery of actual Jewish stuff.)

For my money, Liberman was right all along and Israel should have paid the diplomatic price of deposing Hamas long before 2023. But people who were strongly against that, now say that Bibi was at full for "supporting" Hamas by trying to reach a modus vivendi with it /1 by limiting Israel to tit-for-tat retaliation and allowing Qatari money to come in for allegedly humanitarian purposes. Ok, the money thing is a clear error in retrospect, though Israel was of course under extreme thematic pressure for humanitarian conditions in Gaza. BUT: 2/

This captures a very important phenomenon. Hamas has been a remarkably evil, depraved terrorist group at least since the 1990s, when it blew up school buses and the like to undermine the Oslo Accords and present itself to the Palestinian public as a "resistance" alternative /1

https://twitter.com/ShMMor/status/1713893678643634380

to Fatah. But even with that as background, even five minutes of reading about or watching videos from the 10/7 atrocities, proudly filmed by Hamas terrorist themselves, give you a window into a level of depraved evil that is hard to fathom. /2

People keep repeating that American Jews are increasingly becoming antizionists b/c they hope it's true. But the data is to the contrary. 1/ Indeed, 78% of American Jews go beyond supporting Israel's existence, they think it's antisemitic to oppose it. Opposition among Jews is almost entirely concentrated on the political far left. 2/

On @Peterbeinart and other supporters of a "one-state solution" and why they are ultimately in favor of genocide, a thread. 1/
When someone like Mamdani or Beinart says they want a one-state solution with equal rights for all, they aren’t calling to elevate the rights of Druze, Christians, Muslims, or Bedouin in Israel.

This, by Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, is just weird. George Mason University has about 40K students. 500 or so are at its law school, another 400 or so study economics. 1/ At the rest of the university, faculty politics is more or less what you'd expect at a large state university in a liberal metro area: almost uniformly left-wing. 2/

Yales' Robert Post has a new piece out in which he says that "academic freedom, by contrast, seeks to protect the self-regulation of faculty, understood as a professional community of inquiry." That's just wrong. Academic freedom is the freedom of an individual academic /1 to pursue truth. The "professional community" of faculty (a) are self-interested; and (b) are the most likely group to try to protect the orthodoxies of their various niche fields. Faculty need "adult" supervision, and the fact that they haven't been getting any 2/

I read or listened to several competent analyses of Israeli strategy in Gaza and concluded that it has been tactically brilliant in achieving a sweeping military victory against an entrenched enemy rather quickly and with relatively few IDF casualties. BUT 1/ It seems like it was predicated on Hamas being a relatively normal military enemy that would concede once it had been militarily decimated, along the lines of Arafat in Beirut in 1983. /2