Western Civilization and the Discontented Pundit

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell in Cambridge and Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights

If you think that the real crisis in America was that democracy was under attack, that must be because you’re not reading the pearls of wisdom nested inside the hard shells of deep thinkers like New York Times columnist Bret “Bretbug” Stephens and former Times columnist David “My Dinner With Jeffy” Brooks.

According to these savants, all of our problems can be traced back to a single cause: the supposed assault on Western Civilization by a non-Western elite which has supposedly banned the teaching of great chestnuts of that civilization in elite universities.

Bretbug: Why aren't they reading Plato?

Here’s Brooks, taking a break from whining about the high price of Scotch at Newark Airport:

Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism — and they did — students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans

Name three educators who decided that. Three is a good number because it equaled the number of drinks Jeffrey Epstein’s boon dinner companion sucked down before decrying the death of the liberal social order at the Newark Airport Food Court.

Not to be outdone, here’s Likud spokesman Bretbug beating the same drum (probably a timpani to avoid any pollution by bongos or African percussion instruments):

What, exactly, is Western civilization? Americans younger than 50 might be excused for hardly knowing. A 2011 report from the National Association of Scholars found that not one of America’s top colleges and universities had a required survey course in Western civ and only 32 percent even offered it as an elective. In 1964, 80 percent of these institutions had some form of introduction to Western civ. What many universities do offer...is what amounts to an education in anti-Western civ: the examination of all the ways in which Western civilization is, purportedly, an extended act of imperialism and colonialism, human exploitation and environmental despoliation, misogyny and white supremacy and phobias of every kind.

As for his smears about “Anti-Western civ,” Bretbug, like his illustrious ignorant reactionary forebear Col. Robert McCormick, “cited no authority, being it.” 

If only she had been taught Aquinas, mourns Brooks

At the risk of polluting this elevated debate with dreary facts, let’s take a look at what actual universities are actually offering their students. (We’ll let you decide for yourself whether historical facts justify a critique of Western countries due to tiny flaws like slavery, genocide, mass warfare, oppression of women and minorities, environmental catastrophe, and giving reactionary gasbags like Bretbug a no-heavy-lifting sinecure as a New York Times columnist). 

Not far from here there’s a well-known university that offers a lot of courses on Western Civilization to their undergraduates, even if most of them involve sitting in the second balcony of Sanders Theater listening to some tenured gasbag bloviate.

Here’s one:

A course called “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times”, featuring readings from “Aristotle, Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls,” all of whom sound pretty Western to us.

Or how about:

The Ancient Greek Hero, based on translated versions of ancient Greek classics. That’s as Western as Gunsmoke.

And if you really want to learn how we got so wrapped up in the distinction between Western Civilization and other stuff, try

The Crusades and the Making of East and West.

We’ll recommend that one to Bretbug specifically.

And these are plucked just from Harvard’s General Education offerings (the survey courses that Bretbug holds so dear).

The only civilization worth fighting for, says Bretbug

There’s more stuff in the departments for those interested in Western Civilization from Plato to Netanyahu:

The Department of Classics offers a mere 31 courses this spring, although we’ll leave to greater minds like David Brooks whether the study of Hittite counts as Western Civilization.

The Department of Government, home to generations of reactionary white men bemoaning the supposed assault on Western Civilization, offers 57 undergraduate courses this spring, of which 10 are focused on non-Western states, as might be expected given that the Department, even in the halcyon days before wokeness ruled, regarded Comparative Government and International Relations as part of its remit.

Over in the History Department eager young minds can partake in 29 courses on various aspects of Western Civilization, including, for this purpose, the Holocaust,which last we looked did not occur either in Asia or Africa. 

Columbia, now accused of all sorts of dastardly crimes against thought, has in fact pioneered just the kind of mandatory survey course that gets Bretbug hot.  All Columbia undergrads must take a year long course called Contemporary Civilization.  Here's the fall reading list (instructors choose from this list; if you tried to read everything on it in one semester you'd throw yourself in front of the 1 train):

The only highlight of Western Civilization Columbia omitted is the Colonel's 20-piece bucket.

Just for s***s and giggles, let's take a look at what is offered by the alma mater of David “Jeffrey, you're a genius” Brooks, the University of Chicago:

They too have a core curriculum requiring courses in civilization. 

Shockingly however, their offerings include not only courses on Western Civilization but also the civilizations of cat and dog eaters and even some that dare to examine all civilizations, not just the one that gave us Bretbug and the Likud.  But no one ever accused the University of Chicago of any pretensions to intellectual rigor, so we'll have to cut Dave's school some slack. 

We could go on to obscure rural schools like Dartmouth, but the drift seems pretty clear: there’s plenty of attention paid to courses in Western Civilization in American higher education.  Any claim to the contrary is simply falsified. 

If their argument is just crap, what's the point of harping on it?

Many reasons.

First, it's an effort to shift blame for the corrupt white racist misogynist Mad King regime, which continues to be supported by unanimous Republican support and most powerful plutocrats, from white racists and plutocrats to these pundit's liberal adversaries.  David “ Pass the Lafite, Jeffrey” Brooks actually claims that the Mad King's reign can be explained by the false narrative that Western Civilization is no longer being taught to  eager young minds prepping for Rush Week at 'Bama.

Related to that argument is their prescription: not curbing the power of plutocracy and fostering a climate of tolerance and inclusion, but sending us back to church and Western Civ classes until in some distant era these problems magically vanish.  It sounds astonishingly vacuous, but this is an accurate summary of Brooks's, um, thought.

You can learn so much from the ancient Greeks!

Note that a key feature of these pundits' lament about the supposed decline of Western Civilization is the mockery of those who point out its modest shortcomings, like slavery, exploitation, genocide, and mass warfare.  Bretbug might regard these defects as trivial compared to the magnificent achievements of Western Civilization including the endless pasta buffet at Olive Garden or cars that autonomously trap and kill their passengers, but the rest of us don't have to.

The Bretbugs of the world are in fact terrified about rigorous inquiry into the, shall we say, imperfections of our current culture because an honest reckoning with them might lead to discussions of appropriate remedies, like the triple horrors of diversity, equality, and inclusion.  You can't understand DEI without knowing what makes it necessary, and the last thing that Bretbug and Brooks wants is for college students, or anyone else, to understand that reality. 

Worst of all, it's the faculty lounge version of white supremacy, which sounds so much better in well-crafted if empty sentences on the Times Op-Ed page than in the mainstream Republican version as articulated by defenders of Western Civilization like Marco Rubio, Nick Fuentes and Rupert Murdoch's parade of racist sock puppets.

Now we have nothing against Western Civilization. We think more students should read Plato. And if they read the Symposium, they’ll learn one vital truth about the founder of Western philosophy that Republican bigots may prefer you didn't know: he was gay af.

Dispatches from the War Fronts: V-ICE Day!

  Dispatches from the War Fronts

V-ICE DAY!

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! 

Mad King's troops withdraw in disgrace!

MINNESOTA CELEBRATES VICTORY; STARTS REBUILDING  

By War Correspondent Douglas MacArthur with
Minnesota Bureau Chief Murray Slaughter 

MINNEAPOLIS – Mad King Occupation Army Commander-in-Chief Tom Homan unconditionally surrendered to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz Thursday at 12 midnight, Minnesota War Time.

The Mad King's rabble surrendered in droves

Gov. Walz announced that he had accepted Homan's unconditional surrender and the bag of cash Homan tendered to him.  In accordance with the Midwest customs of war, Gov. Walz returned the bag to Homan, who retreated to the Mad King's Mar-a-Lago headquarters in disgrace.

News of the unconditional surrender was greeted with cautious optimism by the long-suffering residents of the Twin Cities.  At first, the terrorized populace remained in their homes, still fearing attacks by the undisciplined rabble that constituted the Mad King's Army of Occupation.  

As word of the surrender sunk in, the people cautiously emerged, blowing their whistles no longer in warning, but in triumph.

The normally-impassive Minnesotans took the streets proclaiming, “Hey, this is pretty good” and bringing out their victory hot pots brimming with kielbasa and melted Velveeta.

The surrender followed months of violent attacks on the defenseless people of the Twin Cities, including the killings of two innocents whose only crime was to nonviolently express their displeasure with the cruel occupation army.

And hundreds of Minnesotans, including many small children kidnapped on their way home from school, remain trapped in the Mad King's gulags located in the wastelands of faraway Texans.

The sneak attack had come without warning or justification.  Later, in a futile effort to manufacture a rationale for their naked aggression, the Mad King's flacks and commanders claimed that the war was made necessary by ongoing fraud investigations, which had been successfully prosecuted for years without war crimes.  Some of the Mad King's apparatchiks like Attorney General and Mean Girl Pam Bobndi had even suggested ending the war in exchange for Minnesota surrendering their voting lists.

At first the Mad King's undisciplined heavily armed hordes achieved success with their surprise attacks on Minnesotans taking their kids to school or simply driving around trying to carry with their lives.

Having alienated the population with their policy of relentless cruelty and war crimes, the locals responded with a well-organized guerilla war featuring whistles, video cameras, and law suits.

Military commentators noted that the opposition forces wisely avoided rioting and the use of force, thereby making it impossible for the Mad King to invoked martial law and thereby justify wholesale slaughter of the population.

Others commented that the Mad King's ill-trained ill-led ill-clothed forces never had a chance against the united opposition of millions of people.  “What a pitiful effort this was to destroy a great city!” one commented.

Another noted that the Mad King's hope to lure the citizens into joining their violent assaults against immigrants were doomed from the start.  “This isn't Texas.  You can't expect the residents to join a lynching,” they said on background.

ICE was no match for General Winter

Many commentators observed that perhaps the strongest ally the people had was “General Winter.”  “These untrained clowns didn't have proper winter equipment or training.  That's why they were always falling on their asses on the ice and unable to withstand the people opposing them in the freezing streets,” noted one military expert.

But even in victory Minnesotans assessed the damage and the lives that were ruined or lost.  Thousands of noncitizens were marched into captivity and their homes destroyed by the Mad King's looters.

“It will take years to recover from this war,” Gov. Walz told his state.  “But we will rebuild better than before.”

The brutal war has left Minnesotans with bitter memories of the collaborators in their midst.  A number of prominent politicians surprisingly collaborated with the Mad King's occupying forces or at the very least refused to support the brave resistance forces.

These collaborators included many of the state's largest corporations and one of its Senators, Amy “Hot Mess” Klobuchar, who urged Minnesotans to engage in “bipartisan cooperation” with the forces that were killing civilians and kidnapping children on the way home from school.

Is this Amy Klobuchar's fate?

Klobuchar, considered a wily politician, is now planning to run for Governor.  To do so, she will need to defuse the anger over her lack of support for the resistance in its darkest hours.  Historians noted that she is attempting the kind of political reinvention pioneered by French and German collaborators after the Second World War.

The murders and other atrocities committed by the Mad King's forsaken army have led to calls for war crime tribunals.  However, most believe that as long as the Mad King rules, there will be no justice for the fallen.  “We'll be lucky to get our kidnapped children back,” one resistance leader said.

Some Minnesotans have cautioned that the danger is not over.  They note that despite the surrender, the Mad King has thousands of violent stormtroopers at his command, and could always mount a second invasion.

Such a decision would raise further concerns about the Mad King's sanity.  But as he sulks in his Mar-a-Lago bunker surrounded by his toadies and fanatics, one thing is clear: as long as the Mad King remains in power, no one in America is safe.

Or for that matter anywhere else. 

There's good news tonight: David Brooks signs off

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

It was another week of terrible news in the ongoing coup against American democracy perpetrated by the Mad King and his goons.  Americans murdered and terrorized; journalists indicted for committing journalism; millions of children threatened by insane science-free vaccine recommendations; the destruction of America's alliances; and the Department of Justice committing criminal obstruction and perversion of justice every day.

Did we miss anything?  We did, but we'll get back to Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.

But there was one ray of light amidst the storm:  David Brooks is signing off.  

Or so he said:

After 22 years at The New York Times covering up the truth about the Republican attack on America and its free institutions, Dave is heading off into the sunset.

He summed up his Times career in a column in which he, wait for it, continued to cover up the truth about the Republican attack on America and its free institutions.  (He did not cover his earlier career at the Murdoch mouthpiece Weekly Standard shilling for George W. Bush and the insane Iraq War debacle.)

He looked back on his legacy, not entirely inaccurately:

We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country....Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream.

Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. Trump is nihilism personified, with his assumption that morality is for suckers, that life is about power, force, bullying and cruelty. Global populists seek to create a world in which only the ruthless can thrive. America is becoming the rabid wolf of nations. 

Notice how Brooks, as he has done throughout his entire miserable career, blames the public for its malaise, rather than considering whether real events in the world have contributed to the public's disaffection with its lot.

For example, the reason why large majorities believe that elites don't care about regular people might well be because elites don't care about regular people. Since 2009, according to Robert Reich, 95% of the growth in wealth has gone to the top 1%, a statistic never quoted by Brooks, who strenuously avoids any criticism of the revolting rich.

Perhaps that's because he gets a lot of free stuff for his service to the rich and powerful, including free meals (a point of some concern to Brooks, who once wrote an entire column complaining about his $78 bar tab at Newark Airport).

In 2011 he enjoyed a free trip to a Napa resort to mingle with his fellow edgemasters like:

 

Let's see – that's billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire former Microsoft CEO and STD victim Bill Gates, billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, billionaire former Google CEO Sergey Brin, billionaire former Amazon CEO Jeff “Steroids” Bezos, and some rando named Epstein.  Ring any bells?

Sounds like a fun weekend.

But Brooks couldn't get enough of these guys.  He managed to get an invite to another Billionaires' Dinner with some of the same folks, including this Epstein guy again:

The Moral Nine must be the gasbag version of the Magnificent Seven.  At any rate, we're certain the assembled plutocrats were struck by the brilliance of Brooks's insights (like the ones he chucked into his valedictory):

We’re abandoning our humanistic core. The elements of our civilization that lift the spirit, nurture empathy and orient the soul now play a diminished role in national life: religious devotion, theology, literature, art, history, philosophy. Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism — and they did — students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans.

Fun fact: nobody decided that. Can he name one university in America that stopped teaching great Western philosophers?  Other than Texas A&M which banned Plato for his lack of “family values?”

The New York Times loses David Brooks!

There are of course a few evils that never seem to penetrate Brooks' work or apparently skull.  You'll search his litany of social ills in vain for trivia like white racism, sexism, the ravenous greed of his plutocrat dinner partners, environmental destruction, corruption, exploitation of workers, abandonment of civilized values like democracy and human rights, religious intolerance, and wallowing in violence and corruption.  None of which have anything to do with expanding the college curriculum to include studying these phenomena.

Racism and bigotry would seem to be assaults on our “humanistic core,” but not in Dave World.

He wanders further away from reality in his farewell:

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values.  

What shared moral order? The one that said all rewards in society should go only to rich white men? The one that persecuted and stigmatized LGBTQ individuals, often driving them to suicide? I sure hope that individuals abandoned that evil and oppressive social order that has benefited Dave as an untalented white man.

And David remains committed to his non-solution:

Where do people and nations go to find new things to believe in, new values to orient their lives around? Where do they go to revive their humanistic core? They find these things in the realm of culture. In my reading of history, cultural change precedes political and social change. You need a shift in thinking before you can have a shift in direction. You need a different spiritual climate. 

Here's a suggested change in spiritual climate:  Stop supporting and apologizing for vicious violent bigots and racists and start supporting human rights for all, ranging from immigrants seeking to adjudicate their status to women trying get Ross Douthat's hands out of their uteruses.  We don't need a shift in thinking.  We need to oppose and overcome the violent Republican campaign against the values we already hold, but Dave can't bring himself to express.

There's so much more but we'd refer to Mr. Driftglass for his decades-long dissection of David's “thought” in the service of Republican tyranny and corruption. 

But the biggest disappointment is the punch line of his farewell address: he's not really shutting his yap.  He's just moved to The Atlantic, at the invitation of his fellow Iraq warmonger, Jeffrey “Bombs Away” Goldberg.  Does this mean that we'll soon see Moral Mountain Dave on The Atlantic's TV gabfest, Washington Week?  If so, we have some bad news for Bombs Away.  We'll be shunning any episode that includes the ol' Perfessor in lieu of real journalists like Susan Glasser.

And he'll be pontificating at one of the leading universities in Southern Connecticut, where for the next five years he'll be a no-heavy-lifting “fellow” at some bullshit school not located within Yale's School of Arts and Sciences:

The Atlantic has even conned Yale into paying for a video podcast starring Brooks.  It's all part of rebranding  this long time lazy hack a “pop sociologist.”  That's like calling me a “pop neurosurgeon.”  Apparently at Yale “pop” means “not a.”  

We've always tried to avoid New Haven so it's unlikely we'll bump into the Fellow down at Mory's.  

But we can't avoid the lasting effects of the astonishing intellectual dishonesty and moral bankruptcy of generations of Republican apologists and bulls*** artists like David Brooks.   At least though, unlike Renee Good and Alex Pretti, we're alive to fight on.

Report from Occupied America: Minneapolis fights on alone

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki with Spy Minnesota Bureau Chief Murray Slaughter in Minneapolis

The attacks come from anywhere, anytime.  One minute it's a peaceful school, restaurant, or residential neighborhood.  The next minute, heavily armed paramilitary forces of the Fascist Mad King regime roll in, occupying, wounding, capturing and even murdering the residents going about their business.

The business could be picking their kids up from school, buying gas or groceries, or even going to the hospital.  The invaders don't care.  Anyone, anywhere can be a target, regardless of age, ethnicity, or immigration status.

Sometimes the terrified residents of Minneapolis get a minute or two of warning from the network of whistle blowers pressed into service to guard the streets.  Sometimes they are attacked or shot without warning.

The only offense committed by the traumatized citizens of Minneapolis: they voted against the Mad King's tyranny in the last election.

This is Minneapolis in the 250th year of American independence.

And yet the unarmed overwhelmed citizens of the city continue to resist the invaders valiantly.

Here's the front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune, still publishing despite the occupation:

The crimes against humanity committed by the Mad King's rampaging hordes are by now familiar, but still shocking:

● The brazen murders of an unarmed 37-year-old woman driving away from her murderers because the shooter was insulted by her wife and of a male nurse coming to the aid of another innocent victim.

● The repeated beatings and torture of unarmed civilians (whose only offense was to bear witness to the carnage) already tackled and immobilized:

Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.

[image or embed]

— John Abernathy (@john-abernathy.bsky.social) January 17, 2026 at 9:57 AM

● The use of small children as bait to seize their parents and the subsequent kidnapping of the kids after their parents have been arrested despite pending claims for asylum or other immigration relief.

The youngest victims of the Mad King's desperadoes 

That outrage sparked a deluge of Poland-invades-Germany lies from the Mad King's mouthpieces, who claimed that his stormtroopers had no alternative but to lock up the child because it had been “abandoned by its parents.”

The Department of Homeland Security has generally been unapologetic and defiant in the face of criticisms of ICE’s actions in Minneapolis....the department’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, limited her comments to [the child]'s father, who she called “an illegal alien” who had “fled on foot – abandoning his child.”

“ICE did NOT target a child,” she said. “For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended [his father].

“Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”

What they mean by that brazen lie is that the parents were fleeing or fearing unlawful arrest, which would lead to the seizure of their child no matter what they did.

It's the parents' own fault if they don't report to the transports. Got it. 

The list of brazenly unlawful attacks is endless.  We'll mention only one more: the willingness of the occupying forces to break down the doors of private homes without a warrant issued by a judge, in defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and hundreds of years of its application by all three branches.

The Mad King's legions are now falsely claiming that they can issue their own “warrants” to invade and rampage through your house.

This would in practice repeal the Fourth Amendment and represent a long march toward nationwide tyranny.

But, you say, the courts will surely protect us.

Let's check out that hypothesis. 

On January 16, 2026, the federal district court in Minneapolis, after carefully reviewing the evidence submitted by both sides, issued an 83-page preliminary order preventing the occupying troops from engaging in certain brazen illegal acts:

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez in an 83-page order blocked federal agents who are deployed to Minnesota as part of the Trump administration's immigration operations from using pepper spray or nonlethal munitions on peaceful protesters. The order also barred them from arresting peaceful protesters.

It also barred federal law enforcement from stopping or detaining drivers and passengers when there is "no reasonable articulable suspicion" that people driving near protests are forcibly interfering with law enforcement operations. 

The injunction lasted four days.  The relevant court of the appeals, the Eighth Circuit, decided to liberate the occupying troops from the fetters imposed on them by the lower court with the following order, included in its entirety:

 

At this point an observer may be compelled to pose that classic legal query:  What the f***?

And what is an “administrative stay” anyway?  Those who practiced before Courts of Appeals in the previous century never heard of them.  But in recent years, they have been used to block lower court decisions the appeals court doesn't like, for reasons they don't have to disclose.  They are only supposed to last a few days while the appellate court figures out what to do, but in some notorious cases beneficial to Republicans they have lasted for months. 

Notably the appeals court has no obligation to explain why it is issuing a stay, or even which judges authorized it.  

What could possibly explain this appellate thumb-twiddling while Minnesota is under violent and unconstitutional assault? 

Let's start by looking at the distinguished thumb-twiddlers of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

There are 11 active judges who are eligible to sit on motions panels and rule on things like administrative stays.  Here they are:

A minute's analysis will demonstrate that 10 of the 11 are Republicans appointed by Republican Presidents, including 4 by the Mad King and 5 by George W. Bush.  What are the chances that a Court 90% of whose members are Republicans will vote to call a halt to the depredations of a Republican administration?  So far, they don't appear too terrific.

Just for the fun of it, let's learn more about these great jurisprudes.

Chief Judge Colloton as a mere law student advocated bravely for the rights of white male Princeton a******s to eat and vomit in the comfort of their eating clubs without those pesky women telling them to chew with their mouth closed.  Later he clerked for two insane reactionaries: Laurence Silbermann and Bill Rehnquist.

Not great.  

Ray Gruender voted consistently to impose forced-birth ideology on unconsenting women.  What do you think he'll do with respect to federal stormtroopers rampaging through an unconsenting state?

And whom did the Mad King install on this august court?

L. Steven Grasz won an unusual and prestigious “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association, citing his “temperament issues, particularly bias and lack of open-mindedness.”  So of course a Republican Senate confirmed him. 

David Stras wrote an opinion stating falsely that Section 2 of the Voting Rights could not be invoked by minority voters who alleged disenfranchisement in violation of that law because – that outcome is good for Republicans who want to disenfranchise minority voters.

The ABA rated this distinguished nominee “not qualified” 

Jonathan A. Kobes was also deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association.  His confirmation squeaked through thanks to a tie-breaking vote by Mother Pence.

So how likely is it that the Eighth Circuit will protect the innocent citizens of Minnesota from outrages perpetrated by the Mad King's goons?  Anything is possible but based on their backgrounds and the issuance of the ridiculous administrative stay, we're going on Fan Duel and put a unit on not bloody likely.

And even if the Eighth Circuit upholds the law, what will happen when the regime's body snatchers appeal to the Republican-bent Supreme Court? 

Which brings us to the larger point.  The bent Eighth Circuit, like the equally bent Supreme Court, is not solely a confection of the Tangerine-Faced Traitor.  They were built, human brick by human brick, by over 30 years of Republicans, including lovable mainstream Republicans named Bush, to serve as tools of permanent Republican domination of all three branches of government.

That means that anyone who supported or shilled for any Republican Presidential candidate since 1988 owns a piece of this cracked edifice, including our wonderful and wonderfully-pious Republican allies, some of whom, like Mr. Kellyanne Conway, have the great brass balls to seek elective office as Democrats.

If it turns out that the Eighth Circuit fails to enforce the law and protect the citizens of Minnesota from summary execution at the hands of the Mad King's sadistic content-generating goons, assign the blame not just to one demented tyrant, but to the entire Republican Party apparatus that supports his reign of terror. 

Why is the US Government trying to destroy Harvard? According to The Boston Globe, Harvard had it coming!

 

By Meta-content Generator A.J. Liebling with additional reporting from Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell and Twin Cities Correspondent Murray Slaughter

We start this New Year in exactly the same place we left 2025: with liberal democracy under relentless attacks from fascists, bigots, and plutocrats, while institutions that were supposed to protect it continue to fail miserably.

No less than The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, wrapping up the miserable year just ended, commented:

Yet the biggest disappointment of 2025 may well have been not what Trump did but how so many let it happen. Trump has always been a mirror for other people’s souls, an X-ray revealing America’s dysfunction. If this was a test, there were more failing grades than we could have imagined.

Preach. And maybe you can deliver your powerful sermon to an audience that includes your husband, New York Times conventional wisdom geyser Peter Baker and his many colleagues who have failed (unlike Ms. Glasser) to write the objective truth about the crisis we are in.

We’ll get to the Times another time but we start today closer to home, on the front page of our local rag, The Boston Globe.  Recently, it churned out thousands of words about why Harvard is under relentless attack from the Mad King and his regime.

To the Globe hacks, it’s simple: Harvard, like the freshman in the miniskirt at the fraternity party, was asking for it.

According to the Globe, she had it coming*

It’s worth deconstructing the Globe’s bad faith and unpersuasive effort at victim blaming not just as an illustration of the failure of the press to do its job of reporting the truth and protecting free thought. It also opens a window that allows us to view the current assault on Harvard and other institutions of higher learning as the culmination of a 70 year Republican campaign to demonize universities as hotbeds of godless Communists who have the nerve to question insane reactionary bigoted views.

The Globe put it rather more euphemistically:

But [since 2014], Harvard paid less attention to other issues, including a growing intolerance on campus for any views that might seem to challenge its egalitarian mission. Students and professors alike became increasingly afraid of speaking their minds, especially if their ideas clashed with the progressive ethos. By 2024, Harvard found two out of three graduating seniors feared sharing their beliefs about controversial subjects in class.

While Harvard was embracing the ideals of racial justice and global involvement over this decade, many Americans outside the university’s ivy-clad walls were turning away from those values. Or perhaps had never supported them in the first place. A conservative narrative rose that Harvard was full of itself and worse, in ways undermining what was best for America.

How did this intolerance manifest itself? Were members of the Harvard community assaulted or punished? Or were they told by other members of that community, in the exercise of their own equal freedom of speech, that they were full of s***?

Being told that you just said something stupid may be one of the most valuable experiences any Harvard student will ever have. If what you said was in fact horrible and stupid, then the shame you feel is warranted. Don’t worry; it’ll pass. If what you said was not horrible and stupid, then you are entitled to tell your interlocutor (unless of course it’s a faculty member you need to suck up to) that they are the ones who are full of it, and you need not feel any shame.

By the way, if two out of three Harvard students have kept their mouths shut to avoid being called out for their garbage takes, that might be a good thing. Indeed, up until 2024 it was hard to find anyone who thought that the problem with Harvard was that people talked too little. Rather the opposite.

The Globe then hints that maybe it’s not all Harvard’s fault that the nation does not universally share its commitment to once-uncontroversial virtues like diversity, equity, inclusion, and free thought. Why Harvard is supposed to be bankrupted for that is unclear.

Indeed, the available evidence supports the conclusion that the attack on universities is largely attributable to white racists like the Mad King and his bent minions, including a dumbbell proprietor of rigged wrestling matches who now has a chokehold over the money supply to higher education in America.

Another count of the Globe’s indictment against Harvard was the lack of “balance” in the political affiliations of its faculty:

There were signs the balance was even further tilted away from conservatives among faculty, instructors, and researchers. Between 2011 and 2014, a separate Crimson analysis found, 84 percent of federal contributions from those groups went to Democratic campaigns and political action committees. The number rose to 96 percent among people affiliated with the faculty of Arts and Sciences.

This whine has been a standard talking point of right wing attacks on academia for decades. Here’s a typical example:

Right-wing professors feel muffled by Harvard

On too many college campuses today, ideas are muffled and perspectives are one-sided.

At Harvard University, for example, new data reveal that the faculty’s ideological leanings are growing increasingly skewed to the left. Results from The Harvard Crimson’s annual spring faculty survey show that 37 percent of the 1,100 professors polled indicate that their political views are “very liberal”.... Forty-five percent of respondents characterize their political views as “liberal,” while only one percent indicate that their views are “conservative” and no faculty identify as “very conservative.” Moreover, only 16 percent of Harvard faculty members classify their political views as “moderate.”

Harvard is hardly alone in its political bias. University faculty identifying as “liberal” consistently outnumber their “conservative” colleagues. This trend has accelerated in recent years, with left-leaning professors rapidly displacing their right-leaning counterparts on college campuses nationwide.

But of course there is no connection between the political affiliations of faculty and supposed muffling of ideas. Why should anyone care about the private political views of your Archeology, Applied Math, or Mechanical Engineering professor?

We’d submit that the reason the professoriat leans to the left is because intelligent people are repelled by the orgy of greed, plutocracy, bigotry, and corruption that constitutes “conservative” political discourse. More simply, the more you think, the less likely you are to accept idiotic conservative “ideas.”

By the way, who finances these endless smears against college professors?

FEE’s mission is to inspire, educate, and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society. These principles include: individual liberty, free-market economics, entrepreneurship, private property, high moral character, and limited government. 

So it’s a dark money front for pushing right-wing ideas? Doesn’t sound like they’re suffering from too much muffling.

Another sad tale of literal muffling at Harvard comes from a senior tenured white male member of Harvard’s historically pisspoor History Department, James Hankins, who announced he was leaving Harvard for the paradise of academic freedom that is Ron DeSantis’ Florida because of the intolerable restraints the University had imposed on him: 

[In] the fall of 2021,...I decided I no longer wanted to teach at Harvard.   We had just endured almost two years under the university's strict Covid regime.  This was a form of emergency governance that mirrored to a fault the whole country's uncritical acceptance of The Science and its...tyrannous invasions of private life.  At Harvard, professors were told we had to lecture in masks and give seminars on zoom[sic].  Neither practice accorded with my idea of liberal education. 

If he really found lecturing with a mask on (which thousands did during the pandemic that claimed over one million American lives) impossible, he could have emulated Socrates, who lectured outdoors. There’s plenty of trees in Harvard Yard Prof. Hankins could have held forth under.

His other gripe was that Harvard, unlike the Grapefruit League institutions of higher learning in Florida, supplemented teaching of “Western civilization” with learning about other civilizations on this planet. This he concluded made Harvard undergraduates uncivilized (so that explains it!).

By the way, Harvard first began offering courses in East Asian Languages and Civilization in 1879 and has done so continuously since 1928. The eponymous department was founded in 1941, long before the delicate Prof. Hankins ever set foot in Harvard Yard.

Like his fellow “conservatives,” he found the atmosphere at Harvard uncongenial to expressing his “conservative views” like this 1991 production he dumped on his History 10a students:

During the lecture, which centered on the age of chivalry and courtly love, Hankins allegedly said "'Feminists have invented sexual harassment and date rape in order to gain dominance in our society,'”

For freely expressing these conservative views, Hankins was driven from his position and punished harshly. 

Nah, we’re just s***in’ you - nothing happened until he decided more than 30 years later he just couldn’t take the assaults on his free speech anymore. 

To return to the larger point, that the victims of the Mad King’s attack on democracy and human life itself got what they were asking for is a frequent theme struck by apologists for Fascism, by which we mean Republicans.

This week, after an unarmed and innocent woman was gunned down in cold blood by an ICE goon busily creating content for his version of Der Stürmer, the regime and its apologists reacted as usual: she had it coming.

The video evidence definitively proved otherwise, but by platforming the regime’s lies as if they were credible, our beloved mainstream media gave those lies a patina of credibility, not to mention visibility.

Rupert Murdoch’s bulls*** volcanoes erupted on schedule. Here’s the cover of his New York Post.

On his crapcan “news” network, Jesse Watters told us that the innocent victim was not only LGBT, but had pronouns in her bio.

Clearly she deserved to die young.

We’d expect this sort of evil victim-blaming drivel from anything owned by the Dirty DiggerTM (apologies to Private Eye).

We expected better from The Boston Globe.

 

*Yes we know this is Columbia, another victim of government tyranny that was also begging for it. – Ed.

Dispatches from the War Fronts: Regime change always works!

  Dispatches from the War Fronts

VICTORY!

The jackal of Caracas
behind bars!

GLORIOUS FUTURE FOR VENEZUELAN OIL!  

VENEZUELANS TO BE RETURNED TO ASYLUMS!

Department of Justice says Maduro trial will delay release of Epstein files to 2029

By War Correspondent Douglas MacArthur with
Florida Correspondent Jenny Herk in Palm Beach 

America rejoiced Saturday morning at the thrilling news of our magnificent victory over the tyrant of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, who was kidnapped in chains and flown to an undisclosed U.S. location to stand trial for crimes yet to be created. 

The brilliant military success of the Mad King followed closely on his humiliating defeats at the Battles of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, which ended this week with the unconditional withdrawal of defeated U.S. troops from those crime-ridden hellholes.

Iraq 2003: Another mission accomplished!

But now the nation has forgotten all about those military humiliations, not to mention the continued illegal refusal to release the Epstein files and the crushing financial burden on 22,000,000 Americans who buy their own health insurance.  Now who cares?

Instead, America basked in the glow of another tremendous U.S. military victory, following equally successful attacks on Iran, Yemen, and Nigeria and the murders of scores of sailors unknown on the high seas.

Americans can take pride in the decision to force regime change by kidnapping a foreign tyrant.  They know, based on their extensive study of world history, that it's always worked out great before.

Considers these great U.S. victories that followed dispatching a foreign leader, tyrannous or otherwise:

Iran

In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence, angry about the  nationalization of Iranian oil concessions, fomented a copy aginst the democratically elected President of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh.   The successful coup installed the Shah of Iran as the absolute dictator of Iran for the following 26 years.

The Iranians overthrew the Shah in 1979.  Since then, Iran has been a model of democracy and stability in the Middle East and hasn't bothered anyone.

Guatemala

Just a year later, the same CIA, still basking in the glow of its successful Iranian coup the previous year, overthrew the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, at the request of the United Fruit Company, because, why not?

They weren't killed in the Guatemalan genocide!

Since that 1954 success, Guatemala has enjoyed a 70 year run as an idyllic tropical paradise, with only a few minor blemishes that seem hardly worth mentioning.

In the 1980's with the enthusiastic support of St. Ronald of Bitburg, Guatemalan dictator José Rios Montt conducted what he claimed was a war against Marxist insurgents.

In fact it was genocide:

The Mayan people were targeted during the conflict because of their ethnicity. It wasn’t because of their political affiliations or involvement in the guerrilla. Many of the survivors testified that, to this day, they don’t know why the army came to kill them. Army documents presented in trial outlined how the entire population was defined as the “internal enemy.” Being Mayan in the Ixil region of Guatemala during the dictatorship of Rios Montt was, quite simply, a death sentence.

One of the most damning arguments that supported the charge of genocide is that military forces targeted indigenous children. Soldiers cut unborn infants from their mothers’ wombs, threw babies into the air to spear them with bayonets, and swung children by their ankles, smashing their heads against trees until they were dead. Children were shot. Children were stabbed. Children were burned alive.

Why were the children killed? Because they were Mayan Ixil.

But other than that, regime change in Guatemala worked out great! 

Vietnam

Lest you think that dispatching a country's leader at the whim of the CIA is an honor reserved for Republicans, let's remember that in 1963, Jack Kennedy, in between rogering Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, faced the prospect that America's invented nation of South Vietnam would inconveniently collapse before the 1964 elections.  His team of best and brightest had the brilliant idea to get rid of unpopular dictator Ngo Dinh Diem.

After Diem, the Vietnam War went great!

That would solve all their Viet Cong problems, at least until his second term.  So through the CIA the Kennedy Administration gave the green light to a bunch of crooked generals to take care of all the unfinished family business.

And it was a thoughtful and carefully considered decision as this memcon of an October, 1963 meeting with President Kennedy makes clear: 

General Taylor cautioned against looking at the Vietnam situation as if it were a football game. He said a few key people are crucial to the success of a coup and are more important than total numbers.

The President asked that we try to find out who these key people are.

Nothing got by Jack Kennedy, especially if it was wearing a tight skirt!

It must have worked out great, because today Vietnam is a united, prosperous nation that seeks to ally itself with the United States.  [Claude, Is this right? – Ed.] 

Iraq

One of the stated, i.e., false, premises for the Bush Administration's decision to launch an unprovoked attack on Iraq was the supposed grave danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his apocryphal weapons of mass destruction and alliance with al-Qaeda. 

So when Saddam was finally apprehended by U.S. forces in December, 2003, it represented total victory in Iraq and everything was hunky-dory after that, right?

Unrepentant Iraq warmonger Tom Friedman could barely restrain his enthusiasm:

The capture of Saddam merits celebration in and of itself, not only because this terrible man will be brought to justice, but also because it really does improve the chances for a decent outcome in Iraq.  

Great. Really.

For those of you who have memory-hold the Iraq catastrophe, there was no decent outcome in Iraq. The war dragged on for nine more bloody years, and resulted in a weak, corrupt Iranian client state.

But there was a decent result for Hot Air Force stalwarts like Friedman: just this week, he was the star attraction on a very special edition of Washington Week in which he was interviewed as a foreign-policy savant by fellow unrepentant Iraq warmonger Jeffrey “Bombs Away” Goldberg.

Libya

Having learned nothing from the bootless capture (and subsequent lynching) of Saddam Hussein, in 2011 the Democrats back in power decided to rescue Libya from its loathsome strongman Muammar Qaddafi, urged on by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Clinton exulted in the news with her characteristic ability to say the most maladroit f***in' thing imaginable:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had been killed.

"We came, we saw, he died," she joked when told of news reports of Qaddafi's death by an aide in between formal interviews.  

Good one, Hillary!

In fact she had been pushing his ouster for months, according to a New York Times investigation.  Back then you could rely on the Times for accurate headlines:

That about sums it up.

More specifically, 

Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.

The Times post-mortem was published in 2018. In the seven years since, the situation in Libya has become only more dire, with an endless Hobbesian nightmare of civil war and ineffective government, spiced by Libya's reputation for mistreating if not torturing desperate African refugees seeking to reach safety in Europe. 

 💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣

You would think after these dismal examples of U.S. support for decapitating the leadership of a foreign sovereign state, the reaction to the current pointless outrage in Venezuela would be massive, immediate, and bipartisan.

Not so much.

It turns out, to steal Stephen Colbert's observation that history, like facts themselves, has a liberal bias.  Which is why when the current stooges in charge of our Government wanted to brief themselves in real time while their latest debacle is unfolding, they turned to that unimpeachable source, X.

Mitt Romney gets a revelation on the ski lift to Damascus

By Andrew Mellon
Tax Correspondent

Whatever happened to Mitt Romney, millions were not asking?

Last week, we found out: he landed on the terrible New York Times Op-Ed pages with a stirring call for...higher taxes on the rich!

Wait a minutes, this Mitt Romney?  The Mitt Romney who told his plutocratic funders in 2012:

Mitt Romney's back! 

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for [Obama] no matter what. [They] are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it....And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax....[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. 

It was hardly the first time that the Mittster showed his contempt for the lowly peons whose suffering had made a fortune for him in his career as a flipper and stripper of once-great enterprises.  He was one of the pioneers of the private-equity formula for success: find some old company, buy it with mostly-borrowed money, strip it of its assets, cash, and workers, and then flip the carcass to some other sucker.  Repeat as frequently as needed to amass $270,000,000.  

Don't believe us?  Here's what well known lefty Maureen Dowd said just before her retirement from journalism:

Romney may have been a Wall Street predator, looter and vulture gnawing at the carcasses of companies and plotting a White House bid in diapers to finish what his dad started, as his Republican rivals have portrayed him. “Make a profit,” a younger Romney laughingly says in the attack film financed by supporters of Newt Gingrich. “That’s what it’s all about, right?”  

Lighten up, Emma Goldman.

What caused Mitt Romney, surveying the world from atop his mountain of loot, to have a change of what we'll call for argument's sake heart?

It's not that he was moved by the plight of the less affluent 90% of America who, except for a brief period during the Biden Administration, enjoyed none of the huge gains in national income since oil prices stabilized in 1980.

No, he's worried about the projected shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund, an artifact of Roosevelt's genius idea to prevent Republicans from slashing Social Security.  This 23% shortfall would have to be made up from general revenues.  Like the trillion-dollar defense budget.

This in turn, combined with the generations of tax cuts for the rich championed by plutocrats like the Mittster, would according to him lead to higher debt and hyperinflation.

Now we're getting somewhere.  If you've got a, to use the technical macroeconomics term, s***ton of money, nothing scares you more than the prospect that you money might become next to worthless.  And you can't eat car elevators.

This terrifying possibility (ridiculous according to anyone who actually knows economics) has led Romney to embrace the fearful alternative: higher taxes.

What's on his menu?

First, he wants to raise or remove the current limit on payroll taxes (currently $176,000).  This tax increase would fall most heavily on upper middle class professionals like doctors and lawyers.  But they vote Democratic anyway, so they deserve it!  The tax might not affect the ultra-rich plutocrats who don't rely on wage income, or if it does, it would be not even a grain of sand to the likes of Ketamine Leon Musk and his $500 billion hoard, on which he has paid precisely zero taxes.

Even a mind as clouded as Mitt's realizes this.  So he goes on to propose tax increases, not on plutocrats, but on their mouth-breathing offspring.  He points out that under the current tax regime, Ketamine Leon can pass on his $500 billion without ever paying even capital-gains tax due to an obscure loophole which provides that the basis of such windfalls is valued on the date of death.

This means that Ketamine Leon's 563 children, or whoever inherits his wealth, should they sell their $500 billion (or whatever its value on the holiday of Leon's demise) windfall for cash, would only owe taxes on the difference between $500 billion and what they sold it for (if higher).  If they got less than $500 billion, they pay nothing.

The ostensible rationale for this pro-Don Jr. windfall is that it is too difficult to apply the dead guy's basis to calculate tax due on sale.  We still remember brilliant tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg telling us some 40 years ago that this was, to use his hypertechnical jargon, “bullshit.” 

There's another tax though that might hit Leon's Master Race offspring: an estate tax which plutocrats have tried to repeal for decades.  This is a tax levied on the value of very large estates. Mitt doesn't mention it, although he knows about it.

We know this because he has avoided estate tax liability on untold millions through a loophole he pioneered.  Under this scheme, when Mitt or one of his fellow plutocrats sets up a new fund for flipping and stripping – excuse me, private equity, he takes one simple step on day one.

“A wealth tax?  On one million dollars?”

Although he expects the fund to raise billions of dollars and his own partnership interest to be worth tens if not hundreds of millions, on day 1 he and his co-conspirators “seed” the new fund with say $1,000.  He then contributes his, let's say, 30% partnership interest into an IRA for his kids.  The contribution limit for IRA's, intended for small savers, is $3,000.  On the day of contribution, his interest is nominally worth 30% of $1,000, or $300.  

He knows full well that it will be worth more like $50 million, but by then it's safely tucked into the IRA tax-free until his heirs many years from now take relatively small taxable distributions from it.

Funnily enough, he doesn't mention closing that loophole.

There's a similar scam involving putting interests in early-stage companies and funds into a Roth IRA with similar huge tax-dodging benefits for the truly greedy.

Romney also doesn't mention the straightforward wealth tax, which would require those with huge wealth (say at least $50 million) to pay a modest amount (between 2% and 5% of that total) as a wealth tax, in recognition of the outside rewards such plutocrats garner from a government that protects their property and their necks from the guillotine.

This proposal has garnered furious opposition from those subject to it, who have threatened to flee to Florida or Mars to avoid paying it.  We suspect they're not leaving their Woodside compounds anytime soon.

So while Mitt gets a caffeine-free cookie for admitting that he and his ilk need to pay more, he hasn't quite been able either to admit the reason: so that all Americans can enjoy some level of economic security without worrying about how to pay for fripperies like staying alive when they're sick.

He also hasn't been able to embrace the fairest solution: the wealth tax.

Finally, having written one column, Mitt seems content to rest on his skis.  He could go on to do the hard work of advocating for tax equity, and even funding that advocacy. You could call it “missionary work.”  Mitt knows about that too.

But we should applaud his baby steps. Maybe someday other New York Times hacks like David “My Dinner With Jeffrey” Brooks will be inspired to take a step into the light.

You'll pardon Mitt if he doesn't bet even a minuscule percentage of his $270,000,000 on it, though.