The British Conservatives rode the coattails of Brexit to historic majorities, and then promptly presided over the highest immigration levels in their small island nation's history.

42% of the U.K.'s total foreign-born population came in after 2010 — all under Conservative rule. As I noted in this column, all signs point to an extinction event for the Tories in this year's election — almost entirely because of this issue.

It’s difficult to think of another time in recent history when an electoral wipeout was more richly deserved.

https://twitter.com/njhochman/status/1788420317519479239

Once, when I was in college, three black kids showed up demanding to be let in to a private, invite-only party at the hockey house. When they were turned away, they dragged the hockey team in front of a makeshift student tribunal and forced them to apologize for their racism: It was one of the more surreal moments in my college experience: Standing in a crowded room of a hundred kids — the hockey guys forced to sit in chairs in the middle — I felt like I was the only person in the world who hadn't completely lost their mind.
nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-la…

Has there ever been a time, in Jonathan Greenblatt's estimation, when antisemitism was not at "an all-time high"?
This isn't just embellished rhetoric. Every single year, groups like the ADL put together studies purporting to prove that "hate" is at an all-time high, which are then fed to the media and repeated everywhere until it becomes conventional wisdom

https://twitter.com/njhochman/status/1768297027899629587

Ireland voters just overwhelmingly rejected an elite left-wing effort to rewrite their constitution.

The amendment would have removed the claim that marriage is the basis of the family, as well as a reference to women's "duties in the home."

More than 67% of Ireland voted no. It's difficult to think of another Western country with a larger ideological gap between the people and the elites. Every single poll consistently shows the Irish people overwhelmingly want less immigration, for example — but the Irish elites are uniformly in favor of more.

As an aside, this map is a good illustration of why a "national divorce" scenario would be so untenable. Unlike the Civil War, the nation's political divisions aren't cleanly divided into North/South geographies. Instead, we'd have three, four or even five distinct confederacies.

https://twitter.com/docMJP/status/1750664563924541864

There are various "radical federalism" options that could, in the event of total breakdown, be amenable. But the long and short of it is that — even if you think it sounds desirable in the abstract (and I don't) — there really is no viable exit plan. The only way out is through.

This is one of the great ironies of American guilt about the treatment of Native Americans: It's only because we documented our sins.

"History" didn't exist in pre-European America. Natives routinely brutalized one another. The difference is, they never thought to write it down. Even the most infamous examples of European mistreatment of the Natives illustrate this fact.

Everyone's heard of The Trail of Tears. But far fewer people know that the march included a substantial number of African slaves, who were then the property of Cherokee slaveowners.

Last week, Bill Ackman pledged to fight DEI "to the end of the earth."

Now, he's donating $1 million to Dean Phillips — a Democratic presidential candidate who has actively worked to expand DEI.

Ackman says that Phillips is "sensible." His record tells a different story 🧵 As I noted in a prior thread, Phillips co-founded the Stakeholder Capitalism Caucus, dedicated to defending and advocating for ESG.

According to RollCall, the caucus is committed to "embracing an economic concept that Republicans have...railed against as 'woke' capitalism."

A substantial number of today's self-styled "defenders of the principles of the Founding" would be horrified by what the Founders actually believed Various people have made this point already in the context of the debate over the Satanic display in Iowa, but the idea that our "Founding principles" compel us to accept these provocations is absurd. This wouldn't have even been a subject of debate with the Founding generation.

The attack on Confederate statues and symbols was framed as a way to right an old wrong — to finally put the issue of racism and slavery to rest.

In reality, it was just the dress rehearsal for a far larger and more radical assault on American heritage.

https://twitter.com/jeremycarl4/status/1735732511014261215

In 2015, neoconservative Peter Wehner wrote that removing the Confederate flag from state grounds was "an opportunity" for the GOP "to finally put to rest an issue that has bedeviled their party."

Of course, as we know, it never put anything to rest. It was only the beginning.

A Tale of Two Harvard Presidents

In 2006, Harvard president Larry Summers was forced to resign.

His crime, among other things, was a speech he had given the year prior, in which he suggested that gender disparities in science and engineering might be the result of innate differences between men and women. The speech led to a furious backlash, and a no-confidence vote from Harvard faculty.

When Summers became president of Harvard in 2001, he boasted an impressive resume: He had served as the Secretary of the US Treasury, chief economist at the World Bank, and the youngest-ever Harvard economics professor to achieve tenure.

He had published six books and well over 100 academic articles. None of his work had ever been accused of plagiarism.

Fast forward to 2022: Harvard appoints Claudine Gay to serve as its newest president.

At the time, Gay had published a career total of 11 academic articles. For context, Summers published more than that in the single year of 1987.

Gay had never published an academic book. As David Randall of @NASorg noted when she was appointed, "very few professors can even get tenure with so thin a publication record — absent the tailwind from [diversity] quotas."

But Gay was able to ascend to the most prestigious position at the most prestigious university in the world.

Now, thanks to the reporting of @realchrisrufo and @realChrisBrunet, we know that Gay's anemic academic output wasn't even all hers. She lifted entire paragraphs of her work from other authors, without proper attribution.

As we saw with Larry Summers, Harvard presidents have been ousted for far less. But in spite of all that, the Harvard board is unanimously standing by Gay — and the legacy media is circling the wagons.

This is business as usual for modern academia: Political favoritism, racial preferences, and corrupt self-dealing. It's a racket. And if the polls are any indication, Americans are finally beginning to realize as much. The latest data on American trust in higher education, published by US News & World Report today (survey was conducted December 8-10):

It's also just a question of political survival: Americans who get married, buy homes and have lots of kids tend to vote Republican. Unmarried, childless renters vote Democrat.

In 2016, homeowners went for Trump by about 6 points. Renters went for Clinton by nearly 30 points.

The "marriage gap" in voting preferences has been a consistent feature of American politics for some time:

2012
Married: R+14
Unmarried: D+27

2016
Married: R+8
Unmarried: D+18

2020
Married: R+7
Unmarried: D+18

The hate speech law that Ireland is preparing to pass is arguably the most radical legislation of its kind we've seen in the West.

It criminalizes the mere possession of materials that are "likely to incite violence or hatred" — books, videos, or even memes on your phone.

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1728435646044451205

The bill defines "hatred" as "hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics."

Protected characteristics include "national origin."

Would criticizing Ireland's open borders even be legal under this bill?

For over a decade, the ADL used undercover spies to conduct a vast, coordinated, and potentially illegal campaign of espionage against the John Birch Society.

Until this year, that campaign was a secret.

It was uncovered by a historian digging through historical archives. 🧵 In March, GWU historian Matthew Dallek published a book about the John Birch Society (JBS), a hard-right anticommunist org that was prominent in the 60s and 70s.

During the research process, Dallek was given access to a trove of internal ADL documents from that time period.

Just for fun, I asked the Midjourney AI to generate images using the opening sentences of books.

Here's "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck:

"To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth." "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams:

"Far Out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."

I'm surprised no one's written about the broader issue here: The Biden administration's embrace of "Indigenous ways of knowing" is one of its more radical concessions to campus ideology. It's a categorical rejection of the scientific method — and ultimately, of objective truth.

https://twitter.com/njhochman/status/1630350388497903616

A good @JoshDehaas essay from back in 2018 detailed the rise of the "Indigenous ways of knowing" fad—it begins at the basic idea that Indigenous communities have different epistemologies (i.e., "ways of knowing") that are just as valid as Western science.
quillette.com/2018/05/22/ind…

The latest from Biden's "equity agenda": Scientists at certain government-funded facilities are now required to attach an Indigenous land acknowledgment statement to all of their published research. @NRO
nationalreview.com/corner/science… This comes on the heels of the new "White House Indigenous Knowledge guidance sheet," which argues that "Western science has been used as a tool to oppress" Native Americans — and also that the "marginalization" of "Indigenous Knowledge" has resulted in "racism and imperialism."

It's true. Straight white men just sat on their hands and did nothing for the first 100+ years of American history

https://twitter.com/espiers/status/1629274706514784257

The cool thing about American history — actual, authentic American history — is that it was a team effort. The effort to re-write its achievements as entirely credited to today's favored identity groups misses what's actually beautiful about the country we built together

In today's America, conservatism is a counterrevolutionary project. If the Right hopes to take back the culture, it will have to become comfortable thinking of itself as an insurgent outsider — just as the Left once was.

My essay for the @NRO magazine 🧵
nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/… If conservatives want to regain a foothold in American institutions, they can learn from one of the Left's preeminent strategists: Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist theorist who died a prisoner of Italian fascism in 1937—decades before the rise of the New Left that he helped inspire.

Today, 200 New York Times contributors published an open letter condemning the Times for its "editorial bias" against transgender people. According to them, the paper's coverage of transgender issues has a right-wing bias.

It's an absurd allegation. @NRO
nationalreview.com/corner/the-new… This isn't a new allegation. Last month, a former Media Matters editor published a blog post titled: "The New York Times Declares War on LGBTQ People With Hire of Anti-Trans Columnist."

That "anti-trans columnist" was...David French.
readtpa.com/p/david-french…

The political movement that declared “the personal is political” — and that everything from Thanksgiving to the national anthem to family dinners had to be the subject of a social justice crusade — is now suddenly concerned about “the right’s intrusion into private life”: Once again, in the Left’s self-understanding, it is metaphysically impossible for progressives to engage in the culture war. It’s only ever “culture warring” when the Right notices what the Left is doing. (And then has the nerve to get upset about it).
nationalreview.com/corner/its-onl…

Identity politics seem hypocritical. But consistency isn't the point. In practice, campus ideology operates on a simple proposition: There are favored groups whom the rules protect but don’t bind, and disfavored groups whom the rules bind but don’t protect.nationalreview.com/2023/02/a-clos… This heuristic obviously originated as a well-known criticism of conservatism — "Wilhoit's Law" — which apparently originated on an Internet forum. But it's the perfect description of how contemporary "antiracism" doctrine operates in practice.
slate.com/business/2022/…