Donald Trump Could Turn on Gun Activists, Too

By Stephen Gutowski

Thursday, May 02, 2024

 

As presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump sits in a Manhattan courtroom facing one of the several criminal trials that could permanently strip him of his ability to own firearms (he already can’t acquire new guns while under felony indictment), the gun rights movement faces an unstable and under-discussed precipice: Its national fortunes are tightly entwined with those of an unpopular politician who has threatened to cross them before and just got done crossing similarly situated pro-life activists. 

 

Gun owners haven’t been on shakier ground in years, and their marquee organization—the National Rifle Association—is poorly positioned to steady things this time around.

 

That shouldn’t necessarily be the case, given some recent trends in American gun ownership. We’re just a few years removed from the greatest run on firearms in history. Industry estimates indicate more than 13.8 million Americans bought their first gun during the COVID pandemic. A 2023 NBC News poll found 52 percent of American voters now say they have a gun in the home, up 10 points in 10 years. A slew of surveys have found those new firearms owners are concentrated among demographics that traditionally buy guns at a lower rate, namely minorities and women.

 

Additionally, nearly a majority of Americans who don’t own a gun told Gallup in 2023 they are open to the idea.

 

None of these trends have resulted in a realignment among Democrats who, if anything, are more hostile to the gun rights movement than they were five, 10, or 15 years ago. President Joe Biden has enacted a series of broad, unilateral gun restrictions through ATF rulemaking and made a ban on sales of the nation’s most popular rifle his top legislative priority, and is running to the left of any other presidential nominee on guns since Bill Clinton.

 

Regardless of whether Democrats modulate their positions on guns, the recent trends should offer fertile ground for recruitment to gun rights activists, especially by the NRA. But that hasn’t happened. That’s primarily because as gun ownership surged, the NRA became embroiled in a drawn-out corruption scandal that still hasn’t ended.

 

The year before COVID pushed millions of Americans into their local gun stores, accusations of self-dealing and lavish personal spending funded by donor dollars pushed millions away from the NRA. While longtime NRA leader Wayne LaPierre—who was recently found by a jury to have taken millions from the group—has retired, the group’s future remains in limbo as the civil case against it continues. But the ordeal has already left the NRA’s finances in shambles, and its political operation is currently being outraised and outspent by gun-control groups. Meanwhile, no other gun rights group has supplanted the NRA.

 

This decline might explain why gun rights activists seem to have lost power even among Republicans, who were indifferent to their votes during the presidential primary.

 

As much as the Republican primary was filled with pulled punches from Trump’s opponents, they at least occasionally tried to draw a policy contrast with the former president. Former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked Trump for being insufficiently committed to the pro-life cause on several occasions. 

 

No one did the same for his commitment to the pro-gun cause, which was perplexing since the Trump administration’s accomplishments on guns are actually very similar to its pro-life accomplishments. Trump didn’t usher in much legislative change, but—as they did with the Dobbs case overturning abortion protections—his Supreme Court appointments delivered a ruling long sought by gun rights advocates: the expansion of recognized Second Amendment protections in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.

 

Trump’s pro-gun bonafides beyond Supreme Court appointments are probably more mixed than his pro-life ones, which should have opened him up for criticism from his Republican challengers. Though he signed a bill rolling back an Obama-era restrictions and established gun manufacturers as essential businesses during the pandemic, he also unilaterally imposed the bump stock ban using ATF rulemaking to bypass Congress (which is currently being challenged as unconstitutional at the Supreme Court). 

 

Trump even defended that ban in the middle of the primary, eliciting only crickets from his opponents and top gun rights activists alike.

 

“As you know, the bump stocks are actually a very unimportant thing,” Trump said during a CNN town hall in May 2023. “NRA I went with them, and they said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything, or actually all they do is teach you how to shoot very inaccurately.’ So, we did that.”

 

Trump also suggested enacting more gun restrictions during his first term. In the wake of the February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, he held a meeting with lawmakers of both parties in the White House where he attacked his fellow Republicans as beholden to the NRA and expressed interest in pursuing so-called red flag laws and other gun-control proposals.

 

During that meeting, Pence said such measures can “give families and give local law enforcement additional tools if an individual is reported to be a potential danger to themselves or others.”

 

“Allow due process so no one’s rights are trampled,” Pence said. “The ability to go to court, obtain an order, and then collect not only the firearms but any weapons in the possession of that individual … ”

 

“Or, Mike, take the firearms first and then go to court,” Trump interrupted. “Because, a lot of times, by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court, to get the due process procedures—I like taking the guns early. Like in this crazy man’s case, that just took place in Florida, he had a lot of firearms, they saw everything—to go to court would have taken a long time, so you could do exactly what you’re saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.”

 

Similarly, the New York Times has reported Trump considered supporting a ban on AR-15s and other guns in the wake of the 2019 El Paso shooting. “What are we going to do about assault rifles?” Trump asked, according to the paper.

 

Trump eventually abandoned both ideas, multiple sources with knowledge of the discussions told me, at least in part because of conversations he had with NRA officials. Trump has put a lot of weight in what the NRA has to say since it was one of the few major groups to enthusiastically back his unexpectedly successful 2016 campaign. The group spent nearly $20 million running ads against Hillary Clinton, more than $11 million boosting Trump, and $54 million overall that year.

 

But the NRA isn’t in a position to muster anything close to that sum in 2024.

 

Polling also suggests the pro-life movement and gun rights movement each have some similar and significant vulnerabilities. Americans consistently say they want stricter gun laws and oppose abortion bans. Each movement is also on the wrong side of some specific policy questions, with Gallup finding 84 percent of Americans want abortion legal in all or some cases and Fox News finding 87 percent want universal background checks.

 

Trump has taken a variety of positions on both issues over the years, too. He was much more liberal on guns and abortion before entering politics in earnest. Since then, he’s tried to triangulate a position he seems to think is most politically advantageous.

 

Still, there are several reasons to think Trump won’t go against gun voters the way he has with pro-lifers.

 

Personal factors might partially distinguish the two issues in Trump’s mind. He has owned and carried guns. His sons are even more interested in hunting and gun rights than he is, and it’s not clear anyone in his family has the same personal connection to the pro-life movement that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have to the gun rights movement.

 

But the two issues’ political volatility (or lack thereof) probably has more to do with where Trump is headed for now. Gun rights activists haven’t seen the series of defeats in ballot initiatives that pro-lifers have. Instead, red states have predictably passed pro-gun bills, while blue states have reliably passed new restrictions.

 

The landmark Supreme Court cases themselves have also seen a stark divergence in approval. While just 33 percent of Americans approve of the Dobbs case overturning Roe in the latest Marquette Law School poll, 64 percent approve of Bruen. 

 

Additionally, Trump spent quite a while telegraphing his abortion pullback. He hasn’t done the same with guns. In fact, just a few months ago at the NRA’s Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he made a series of policy promises and presented a stark contrast between himself and President Biden on the issue.

 

“Joe Biden and his thugs will do everything in their power to confiscate your guns and annihilate your God-given right to self-defense,” he said. “A meaningful Second Amendment, which you have, it’s under siege. They got nowhere with me, but there are a lot of other things happening with Biden.”

 

Of course, even if Trump does stay true to the NRA and gun owners, having the gun rights movement’s hopes tied up in him isn’t necessarily a great place to be. Again, he could be prohibited from owning guns for life when he asks for the support of gun voters this fall. But, with Trump in control of the only party that even feigns interest in winning over gun voters, his continued support is the most immediate test of the movement’s political influence.

 

The next test of Trump’s current opinion of the gun rights movement is whether he shows up at the NRA’s Annual Meetings later this month in Dallas. That’s how he has primarily shown his continued support for gun rights in the past, and he has spoken to every such event since he started running for president in 2016.

 

But the NRA and Trump haven’t yet announced that he’ll attend. The group has also lost the top executives Trump used to have direct relationships with, including LaPierre, who took over much of the direct discussion with Trump himself.

 

Whether Trump takes time out of his campaign schedule, one already strained by all his legal troubles, to give a speech to gun-rights activists almost certain to support him in a state that isn’t in play will indicate how he’s feeling about their importance—at least for now.

A Crisis of Columbia’s Own Making

National Review Online

Thursday, May 02, 2024

 

After weeks of letting a pro-Hamas mob rule its campus, Columbia University finally called on the New York Police Department to retake a university building and clear out the surrounding encampments of protesters.

 

Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York — who, admittedly, has some experience evacuating buildings — said he was “outraged by the level of police presence called upon nonviolent student protesters.”

 

In reality, a show of overwhelming force by the NYPD — which included hundreds of specially trained officers in riot gear — was the only way to minimize the risk of violence by showing the entitled hooligans, who were illegally occupying a university building, that grown-ups were finally back in charge.

 

The NYPD said that they had arrested 119 people at Columbia without reported injuries and charged them with offenses including burglary, trespass, and criminal mischief. However, it remains to be seen whether Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will actually prosecute them.

 

What is abundantly clear is that things never would have gotten to this point were it not for Columbia’s feeble administrators, starting with Minouche Shafik, the university president. Instead of intervening deliberately the moment that protesters began breaking rules, she coddled the protesters and gave them every reason to believe that they would never face any consequences for their actions.

 

After initially calling in the NYPD to remove the encampment on April 18, the university allowed students to reestablish it immediately after. Deadline after deadline for the protesters to leave the encampment — a clear violation of multiple university rules — passed with no action, as the university attempted to “negotiate” with the protesters. Faculty members were allowed to join with students and shield them from consequences.

 

Rampant antisemitism and harassment of Jewish students were on display throughout the protests. Demonstrators called for “intifada” — a reference to the waves of terrorist attacks that killed over 1,000 Israelis well before the October 7 massacres — and shouted at a Jewish student, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you.” Chants called for erasing Israel, with its 7.2 million Jews, from the “river to the sea.” And — rejecting the idea of even a Palestinian state that exists beside a Jewish one — the protesters yelled, “We want all of it.”

 

While sympathetic media tried to make the students appear less radical by distinguishing between the encampment itself and the crowds who were gathered outside the gates of the university, this was a distinction without a difference. To start, the protesters just outside the entrance to campus were drawn to the campus by the encampment, and they harassed Jewish students. And practically speaking, it’s Columbia’s responsibility to create a safe environment for Jewish students — so it doesn’t really matter whether it was on the way to the library, or just outside the gates of the university on the way to their dorm rooms, that they were told to “go back to Poland.”

 

Besides, it isn’t as if the protests inside the university — which created no-go zones for anti-intifada Jewish students and canceled in-person classes — were tame.

 

One leader of the protests, Khymani James, led a group of students to form a human chain to forcibly drive “Zionists” from the encampment. When video surfaced of James saying that “Zionists deserved to die”  and declaring — in a January disciplinary hearing — “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” he was finally barred from campus.

 

The mob that broke into Hamilton Hall was not nonviolent, either. They smashed windows. They prevented a janitor in the building from leaving. And they hung a giant Intifada sign on the side of the building. Despite their lawlessness, the sense of entitlement never left the protesters, who followed the lead of their Hamas role models by breaking the rules and then claiming to be victims. A spokeswoman for the action, Marxist poetry Ph.D. candidate Johannah King-Slutzky, held a press conference in which she demanded that Columbia ensure the flow of “basic humanitarian aid” to the students who had barricaded themselves inside the building with a mix of industrial-grade chains, furniture, and vending machines. All which required the police to take a large truck with a ramp that allowed officers to enter through a window on the second floor.

 

Columbia could have saved itself a lot of grief had it adopted the posture of the University of Florida, run by Ben Sasse, the former U.S. senator. The university communicated to protesters how they could exercise their free-speech rights and what crossed the line into disrupting university life for other students, and then it punished those who crossed the line. “This is not complicated: The University of Florida is not a day care, and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences,” the school announced.

 

Only in the bizarro world of higher education does a university deserve special recognition for treating grown college students as adults who can be held responsible for their actions.

Let’s Stop Romanticizing the Cult of Protest

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, May 01, 2024

 

The current campus demonstrations are a reminder that of all the mossy clichés and puffed-up pieties of polite (and impolite) American discourse, the sanctity of protest is the hardest to question.

 

Doubting the loftiness of protest invites elite scorn more than any other skepticism about a constitutional right. Proposing limits on free speech, for example, attracts far less outrage. Indeed, people question free speech all the time: in debates about “hate speech,” campaign finance, social media, and more. (Let’s not even get into the fashionableness of questioning Second Amendment rights.)

 

But if I say that most protests are performative cosplay, or mass meetups of the angry, the radical, the lonely, and the misinformed, someone is bound to point to the civil rights protests of the 1960s or the campaign for women’s suffrage, followed by a string of righteous how-dare-yous.

 

This gets to part of my objection. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about protesting. Organized protest is a form of speech, and, like speech, it is rightly protected by the First Amendment. But, also like speech, its morality—though not its legality—is wholly dependent on the content. You have a right to say, or protest for, awful things. Invoking that right doesn’t make your view any nobler.

 

The Jim Crow-era civil rights protests were noble because the cause was noble. They did not prove that protesting is always good, merely that it can be. Replace the March on Washington with the Nazi march on Skokie, Illinois, and you get the point.

 

The aesthetics and psychology of protest are often ugly because crowds encourage extremism and intimidation. Well-intentioned protest organizers know this better than anybody; they often struggle to keep the crowds from becoming dangerous mobs. The core message of mass protest is “strength in numbers,” a primordial feeling that can often lead to a kind of illiberal power-drunkenness. “The hallucinations of alcoholics provide us with an opportunity to study crowds as they appear in the minds of individuals,” Elias Canetti writes in his brilliant book Crowds and Power.

 

Some argue that democracy is all about strength in numbers, and that’s partly true. But democratic will is exercised by the private actions of individual voters casting secret ballots. The strength in numbers invoked by most large protests is better understood as populism, and populism has an uglier history than democracy, from the long history of race riots to January 6.

 

The irreducible political unit in America is the individual, not the crowd. The highest form of protest (and speech) is captured by Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of a lone, working-class dissenter standing up for his conscience as his neighbors listen politely, not by images of mobs shouting insults, blocking traffic, occupying buildings, or worse.

 

Again, not all protests are ugly riots or mass tantrums. But the tolerance often shown for both is a product of romantic impulses driven by ’60s nostalgia. As a generation, progressive baby boomers take a backseat to nobody in their stunning self-regard and overestimation of their historical importance. But these people have shaped the narratives of academia, entertainment, and journalism. They’ve convinced themselves, and the young minds they shape, that protest is self-justifying, a rite of passage of enlightened youth.  

 

Elite universities, run by acolytes of this cult, struggle to deal with protests because they believe, as a matter of educational philosophy, that giving voice to authentic passion is the route to self-actualization. As one headline conveniently summarized, “Student Protest Is an Essential Part of Education.” Who says? People who love student protest, duh.

 

I could have salted this column with examples of today’s protesters revealing how precious little they know about the issues supposedly motivating them—or of fawning coverage of mobs openly siding with terrorists. But my point isn’t about these protests in particular. It’s about the broader cult of protest.  

The nostalgic champions of the campus protests of the ’60s would have Americans believe they were a heroic success, stopping the Vietnam War. But what they actually helped achieve was Richard Nixon’s election and seven more years of war. 

 

Performative protest feels good for those drunk on their own, unearned sense of importance. But such spectacles are often terrible for their intended ends. That’s one more reason not to glorify protest for its own sake. 

There Is No ‘Immunity Clause’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

 

By this point, I have read a good number of takes on Trump v. United States, the “presidential immunity” case that is currently being considered by the Supreme Court, and, a week or so into that endeavor, I have precisely the same question as I did going in: Why, as a constitutional matter, would anyone think that the president of the United States enjoys any such thing?

 

As a purely practical matter, the president enjoys a de facto inoculation against federal prosecution for as long as he serves in his role. But that inoculation is a byproduct of our system of separated powers, not of some hidden “immunity clause” that can be inferred from the text and exquisitely delimited by the courts. In recent years, we have come to talk about the various agencies and departments that have been added to the executive branch of the federal government as if they exist independently of the president. But this, of course, is ridiculous. The president is the head of the federal executive branch, and, as a result, everyone who works there works for him — including, yes, those who work within federal law-enforcement bodies such as the FBI and the DOJ. To argue otherwise is to demand the establishment of a free-floating, unelected fourth branch of government that can wield the executive power that is vested in the elected president without actually being accountable to that elected president. In most cases, this arrangement is a boon to self-government, but does contain an obvious downside: That however strong the evidence of the president’s criminal guilt, he cannot be forced to do what he would need to do for a successful prosecution, which, under our system, is to bring a case against himself. Ugly as it may sound, by virtue of having won the prior election a sitting president can indefinitely prevent this state of affairs — and do so perfectly legally — simply by declining to assent to the process and then by removing anyone within the executive branch who would prosecute him.

 

Does this make the president a dictator? Of course not. For a start, it applies only to federal prosecutions; courtesy of the same constitutional document from which the president derives this power, the states remain mostly unimplicated (though, given federal supremacy, state prosecutors would potentially face legal obstacles were they to try and imprison a sitting president). More important still: While the president can block himself from being held criminally accountable at the federal level, he cannot do anything about the political remedy for such behavior, which is impeachment. Congress can, if it so wishes, remove the president of the United States at any point, and for any reason. Certainly, there exist some interesting questions about what limits the Founders intended to place on the impeachment power, but, given that the process is uniformly non-justiciable, they remain just that: interesting questions. In consequence, the response to the question, “What if?” is “Congress.” Within our magisterial scheme of government, Congress remains the safety valve.

 

By definition, a diametrically opposite case can therefore be made for the immunity claims of presidents who are no longer in office. Because there is no constitutional immunity clause, ex-presidents lack the per se appeal to special treatment under the law; because they are no longer in office, they lack the Article II powers that are necessary to block their own prosecution. They are, for all intents and purposes, the same as you and me. During oral arguments in Trump v. United States, Justice Clarence Thomas asked where in the Constitution any form of immunity was to be found. That, as ever, was the correct question. And the correct answer is “nowhere.”

 

When one points this out, one is usually met with an argument from practicality: “But,” the cavilers cry, “without immunity, our former presidents could be the target of politicized prosecutions!” And . . . well, yeah, they could. But, as a constitutional matter, that isn’t really relevant, is it? The Constitution is law. It means what it means, and if what it means isn’t working, then it can be amended — not by the Supreme Court, but by the people. Last week, I listened to the nine justices of the Supreme Court discuss this issue, and I was irritated to observe that most of their time was taken up with the consideration of consequences. “If the president is immune, then what?” “If the president is not immune, then what?” “What about his private conduct?” “What about the public decision-making process?” “What about the public’s expectation that the executive branch is honest?” In a vacuum, these are fair questions, but it is simply not the role of our courts to consider them at any length. The role of our courts is to look at the text of the Constitution — and to the ratifying public’s original understanding of that text — and to pronounce without fear or favor what it means, leaving the rest to the political branches. If the Constitution is creating problems for those branches, then so be it. It is not the Supreme Court’s job to clean up our cultural messes.

 

That the Supreme Court has, at various points in our history, chosen to involve itself in this area should not alter that fact. It is telling that the cases and laws that were bandied around last week all came from the recent past. We heard about United States v. Nixon, and Operation Mongoose, and the Vietnam War, and the Administrative Procedure Act — all of which arrived not during the early republic but after the New Deal. As a rule, originalists do not find “but the Court has already made stuff up in this area” to be a persuasive riposte, and they ought not to here, either. If the Court has made false declarations in the past, those false declarations must be reversed. It is true that, at the time of the Founding, there were not many federal laws from which a president might plausibly need immunity, but it is also completely irrelevant. Over time, Congress has added significantly to our body of laws. If that decision is causing trouble, it is up to Congress to provide the remedy.

 

Ultimately, every hypothetical that has been raised in this case represents a challenge to our national legislature. As it is the role of Congress to impeach a president who can legitimately prevent his own prosecution, so it is the role of Congress to clarify the law if the law has made a mess of the government. I am not insensitive to the idea that our modern Leviathan presents problems that did not exist in 1789, or to the claim that we now have a problem with political retribution, or to the notion that partisanship has deranged our tripartite system. I am, however, deaf to the claim that these matters should be superintended by the judiciary where the Constitution does not directly touch on them. If, for whatever reason, the president of the United States needs to be excluded from certain federal laws, then our lawgivers ought to exclude him. If, for whatever reason, some of our statutes needs massaging to avoid their abuse, then our statute-makers ought to massage them. This, as is so often the case, is a question of prudence; it needs a scalpel, not a broadsword. To demand that, because Congress will not, the Supreme Court must address a live political controversy by finessing the interpretation and application of a constitutional provision that does not, in fact, exist, is in effect to give up on self-government. Why, I’ll ask again, would anyone wish to do that?

‘Occupying’ Columbia Protesters Demand Global Intifada, Free Food

Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

 

Early this morning, in response to the Columbia University administration’s repeated orders to clear the pro-Hamas tent city on the quad, protesters — suspiciously thirtysomething-looking tattooed activists decked out in ski masks and freshly bought matching “Columbia”-branded sweatgear — smashed out the windows of Hamilton Hall on campus, “occupied it,” and barricaded themselves inside, festooning it with banners calling for the elimination of Israel.

 

But they are now entrenched inside the building, have set up camp and barricaded the doors, and are refusing to budge in the face of threats of expulsion. (Only now, at this late moment, is expulsion finally on the table for Columbia.) And they have found a spokeswoman. Allow me the pleasure of introducing you to one Johannah King-Slutzky, Ph.D. candidate in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia. She focuses on . . . well, “stuff,” near as I can gather from her biography page on the department’s website. (Note: Her page was taken down almost immediately after the publication of this piece.) She IS also (and unsurprisingly) happy to mention she comes from a lengthy background in left-wing protest:

 

My dissertation is on fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860. My goal is to write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism. I am particularly interested in theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination. Prior to joining Columbia, I worked as a political strategist for leftist and progressive causes and remain active in the higher education labor movement.

 

I’m guessing that this is a lady with a lot of free time on her hands, is all I’m saying. (Look, some theses just take longer to draft than others.)

 

So out comes this Mouth of Sauron this afternoon, emerging to address the media with the protesters’ key demands, which although poorly articulated are generally understood from the slogans shouted to include (1) immediate divestment by Columbia from Israel, (2) an end to the Israeli war in the Middle East, and (3) an end to the Israeli state in the Middle East. Ms. King-Slutzky has added a new one: (4) access to free meals and drinks while they wait for Nos. 1-3 to be addressed. Because darnit, they’re thirsty.

 

Standing outside Hamilton Hall this afternoon, she addressed reporters wearing a keffiyeh scarf (always, always with the keffiyeh scarves) and demanded they allow the occupying army of protesters to “resupply” from the outside. I guess someone has to go out there and make a complete ass of themselves in the name of impossible demands, so it might as well be the protest “professional,” but I still marvel at the delusional strength of this woman, to stand in front of the cameras and speak as she did. I commend the brief video to all as a memorable up-close experience of the caliber of minds we’re dealing with here:

 

REPORTER: Why should the university be obligated to provide food to people who’ve taken over a building?

 

KING-SLUTZKY: Uh, well first of all we’re saying that they are obligated to provide food to students who pay for a meal plan here.

 

REPORTER: But you mentioned that there was a request that food and water be brought in. Unless I misunderstan—

 

KING-SLUTZKY: To allow it to be brought in. Well, I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students. Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you?

 

At this point, if you’re like me, you’re half-jokingly thinking to yourself, “well . . . why not? Worked well enough in those medieval sieges, I guess.” (The other half of me wonders why we haven’t yet begun to seriously consider catapulting plague-infested bodies over the ramparts to hasten the matter.) But she continues as reporters begin to crudely assault her with commonsense questions:

 

KING-SLUTZKY: If the answer is no, then you should allow basic—I mean, this is crazy to say because we’re on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for, could people have a glass of water?

 

REPORTER: But they did put themselves, very deliberately, in that situation and that position, so it seems like you’re sort of saying we want to take over this building — now would you please bring us food and water?

 

KING-SLUTZKY: Nobody’s asking them to bring anything, we’re asking them to not violently stop us from bringing in basic humanitarian aid.

 

OTHER REPORTER: They’re stopping the delivery of food?

 

KING-SLUTZKY: We’re looking for a commitment that they will not do it.

 

OTHER REPORTER: But they haven’t stopped it yet.

 

KING-SLUTZKY: Well, I don’t know to what extent it has been attempted, but we’re looking for a commitment.

 

First things first — a round of applause to those reporters. The video is worth watching only so you can hear how hilariously neutral their tones are when incredulously asking obvious questions of King-Slutzky, as if they cannot believe they’re lucky enough to be interviewing anyone this stupid. (“This doesn’t normally happen to beat reporters like me,” their internal monologues are screaming. “I am living the dream.”)

 

As to the administration’s proper response, it should be this: Nothing. Let them wonder, and then interdict any supplies that occupiers are attempting to smuggle into the building. Form a complete cordon to accomplish it. And then say: If you want your free lunch then by all means, come to the cafeteria and get it.

 

What is going to be left of Columbia after this is all over? How does this disastrously handled mess end with anything except incredibly humiliating footage on the evening news? On Saturday morning, I wrote a piece I hope you’ve read titled “You Don’t Need to Be A Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind’s Blowing at Columbia.” (If you happen to be a Bob Dylan fan familiar with the history of the Columbia chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society in the late Sixties, then you get my gist already.) It was framed around the memorably crazed undergrad zealot Khymani James but was much more about the lost nature of an entire generation of children. I intended a subtext with that title: The logic of all this inevitably leads to insanity, irrational escalation, and ultimately (I fear) bloodshed. I ended by noting “make no mistake, James and his ilk will return until they are wholly uprooted, and until they are they will only radicalize further and further.”

 

At every single step of the way during this rolling debacle, the behavior of Columbia University’s administration has been a disgrace that encouraged that radicalization — in fact made it inevitable. They have acted with cowardice, incompetence, hesitance, confused messaging, and a manifest failure of will. And if anyone gets hurt, they will likely be held civilly liable as well, particularly given their refusal to ask the New York Police Department (as professional an organization as it gets when it comes to riot control) to help on campus. I can’t well call on an entire college administration to commit ritual public seppuku to expiate its failures, but I certainly can suggest the idea in a friendly manner to them in this column.

 

King-Slutzky ended her press conference today by threatening upcoming commencement ceremonies. She places the blame squarely on the administration, which she accuses of “participating in and fueling a genocide”: “It’s really up to Columbia to come to a peaceful solution as soon as possible if it wants to preserve graduation, but that’s entirely something in their control.”

 

Give us the impossible — or else. Are we surprised that the defenders of terrorists have escalated rapidly into the leveling of terroristic demands themselves? I am instead shaking my head at the grim irony — or was it entirely predictable? — that it is well in the process of happening at Columbia University for the second time in 56 years. The wind blows ill at Columbia, and we have seen from the past which way it threatens to blow.

Khamenei Seems Nervous as Israel and Saudi Arabia Get Closer to a Deal

By Jimmy Quinn

Wednesday, May 01, 2024

 

Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei unveiled a new hashtag, #No2Normalization, to express opposition to a possible normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. With a drumbeat of reports suggesting that a deal could come soon, Khamenei sounds nervous about what that would mean for his country’s ambitions.

 

“Governments in West Asian region that ignored Zionist regime’s crimes & extended a hand of friendship to it should be awaiting their own people rising up against them. #No2Normalization” he said in a post to X today. (The Iranian government refers to the Middle East as West Asia.) He also said that, while nations in the region are arrayed against the “Zionist regime” today, they’ll be “against their own” governments if normalization happens.

 

Saudi Arabia’s accession to the Abraham Accords could be strategically devastating for Iran. After all, the Saudis provided intelligence for use by the coalition that took down the missile and drone barrage that Iran directed at Israel last month. Khamenei can expect more of that sort of cooperation if formal diplomatic ties are established between the two countries. That’s a far cry from how things looked last year, when Tehran had leveraged the Biden administration’s alienation of the kingdom to resume normalized ties in a deal brokered last year by China.

 

But the October 7 massacre, which was intended in part to prevent a Saudi-Israel deal from emerging, seems to have moved such a deal along. Haaretz reported on Monday that Riyadh has decided to seek normalized ties but that it has yet to decide on the timing. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Saudi Arabia this week to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to a State Department summary, they “discussed ongoing efforts to achieve lasting regional peace and security, including through greater integration among countries in the region and enhanced bilateral cooperation between the United States and Saudi Arabia.” Blinken said after the meeting that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were “very close to completion” of the agreements between Riyadh and Jerusalem that would accompany normalization.

 

Of course, there remain plenty of possible obstacles. The Biden administration, for instance, is demanding concessions from Israel on its conduct of the war in Gaza; Blinken said that “calm in Gaza” and a pathway to Palestinian statehood are prerequisites for a deal. The Saudi requests of the U.S., such as Washington’s assistance on civilian nuclear-energy development, are a tough lift. And for its part, Riyadh would need to believe that the benefits of normalization outweigh the domestic consequences of embracing Israel — clearly a factor that Khamenei is trying to exploit in today’s clumsy attempt to throw a wrench into the talks.

Rocky Loses

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

 

I have four little boys, so I think a great deal about the kind of example I’m setting and the things I’d like to teach them. Right now it’s about not throwing mom’s homemade applesauce at the dachshund, but one of these days we’ll get around to some of the big issues. For some reason, one of them is on my mind today:

 

Rocky loses. 

 

There’s some kind of “Mandela effect” thing going on with the plot of Sylvester Stallone’s 1976 masterpiece, a perfect, moody little film that has almost nothing in common with the sports juggernaut franchise it inspired. (Or, rather, had almost nothing in common with those films, until the recent Creed and Creed II.) Some of those later films were pretty good (don’t sleep on Rocky XXXVIII), but they were mostly more conventional sports movies. 

 

The original Rocky is something different, but it has sunk so deep into the cultural bloodstream that the icon has to some extent supplanted the thing itself. On more than one occasion, I have heard somebody talking about the film clearly under the impression that Rocky Balboa, the hardworking underdog, trains hard, beats his hands bloody on some sides of beef, and then defeats sneering champion Apollo Creed in the big fight. But that isn’t what happens at all. Rocky is treated with contempt and condescension, written off as a joke opponent who has no business being in the ring with the heavyweight champion. Then he gets beaten to a pulp and loses the big fight. 

 

And it is glorious. 

 

Rocky’s vindication doesn’t come from victory; it comes from showing up, doing the work, going the distance, and enduring everything Creed throws at him. He demonstrates an important and often overlooked principle: You cannot humiliate a man who declines to be humiliated. You can beat him bloody, defeat him, deny him the fruits of victory—but he decides how to play his part. 

 

It was Muhammad Ali who strutted around proclaiming, “I AM THE GREATEST!” Rocky can make no such boast: Beaten to the point of near-blindness and disfigurement, in the end he thinks of his friends and of the woman he loves. His victory cry is the anguished and exhausted: “Yo, Adrian!” (As with so many actors in Rocky, it is impossible to think of Adrian as anyone other than Talia Shire. But Susan Sarandon auditioned for the role, and was rejected on the grounds that she was too pretty.) Rocky doesn’t beat Apollo Creed; he masters himself and, in doing so, honors his family and his friends. Rocky’s friends are a pretty motley bunch—awkward, unattractive, failures in different ways, accents so thick that parts of the film practically need subtitles—but that friendship is the real subject of the film.

 

If you don’t know the real-life story of how Rocky got made, it’s worth appreciating. As hard as it is to believe, there was a time in American cinema when Sylvester Stallone was not a big deal. He was nobody when he wrote the Rocky script in three days after being inspired by Chuck Wepner’s surprising 15-round performance against Ali in 1975. Everybody had expected Wepner to go down ignominiously early in the fight, but he held on. (Unlike the fictitious Rocky, who was never knocked out, Wepner lost in a 15th-round TKO.) Everybody loved the Rocky script, and producers immediately started dreaming about making the film … with Burt Reynolds or Robert Redford in the lead. Stallone, who was not exactly independently wealthy, turned down some substantial cash offers and insisted that the film be made only with him as the star and—this part is sometimes underappreciated—the principal writer. 

 

Stallone was fortunate to be friends with Henry Winkler, who at the time loomed large in American pop culture as the star of Happy Days, and Rocky was shepherded through to production by the Fonz himself. They kept the budget low—right around $1 million—to make the film they wanted without having to go through too much studio greenlighting. In a way, Stallone’s success as a filmmaker paralleled Rocky’s career in the ring. He held out when the people in charge thought he didn’t have it in him to be in the big show, did things the hard way, and persevered. But unlike Rocky, Stallone won in his first outing: Rocky won Best Picture at the Academy Awards that year, and it was nominated for a total of 10 Oscars, winning three. That’s what Stallone got for not taking the six-figure offer to sell Rocky to somebody who was going to have Burt Reynolds running around Philadelphia in his shorts.  

 

But Stallone’s win and Rocky’s loss both were testaments to the same virtue: perseverance. And that is a virtue available to those of us who are not heroes: The guy who gets up every day and goes to a modest job and does good work because good work is the only kind of work worth the time is in the ring, too. Time and circumstance didn’t ask him to storm Omaha Beach. All anybody can ask is that he perseveres in the life he has. 

 

It is important to the story that Rocky loses, but equally important is why he loses: Rocky loses to Apollo Creed because Apollo Creed is the better fighter. There isn’t any suggestion that Rocky was cheated or that he was treated unfairly or that the contest was—how do they put it?—“rigged.” (Part of the Rocky lore is that there is a secret final fight between Rocky and Creed to establish once and for all who is the superior boxer—and Creed wins, again.) Rocky wasn’t some overlooked gem. (The character gets shined up in the sequels, of course.) There is a reason Rocky came into the match as an underdog. He’s a small-time criminal (a collector for a mafia loan shark), an unglamorous man living a lonely life in an unglamorous city (the film’s urban geography was famously screwy, but few people have ever seen Philadelphia with as much sympathy and clarity as Rocky cinematographer James Crabe). The great transformative opportunity of his life was given to him by people who thought, not without good reason, that he was a chump, a forgettable piece of meat fit only to be abused for spectacle. 

 

So Rocky’s stated ambition is modest: “All I wanted to prove was I weren’t no bum.” It’s a small thing. And it’s not a small thing.