Category: Featured Articles

Chronicles – New York City mayor and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani admonished his city’s property owners in a recent X post, saying owners of second homes worth $5 million or more will have to pay a new “pied-à-terre” tax.

“Check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs—because you’ve got mail,” he wrote.

The “mail” to which Mamdani referred is an official letter from the city about the new tax that Mamdani says he needs to assess because of the city’s troubled budget.

Mamdani’s comment was not entirely accurate, however. The new pied-à-terre tax, which New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced in April, applies not only to $5 million “luxury properties,” but also to co-ops and condominiums worth just $1 million or more—which is not a high ceiling in New York’s inflated real estate market. In Manhattan, both average and median apartment prices in 2025 were estimated to be nearly twice that amount, according to the real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens. That means that virtually all nonresident owners of places larger than a small studio apartment will qualify for the new tax.

The Mamdani administration has gone far beyond punitive fiscal measures, which the mayor claimed would be confined to extremely rich individuals like hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. (Mamdani famously taunted Griffin in an X video on April 15—tax day—about taxing the “richest of the rich.”) On July 27, New York’s Department of Finance published a searchable list available to the general public of city property owners who it says may qualify for the tax.

Initially, according to an April public announcement from Gov. Hochul, the tax was only meant to apply to only about 13,000 people, and there was no indication that their identities or addresses would be disclosed to the general public. The Finance Department’s list, however, contains more than 960,000 properties and the full names and addresses of their owners. According to an analysis by The New York Post, many individuals who appear on the list may not, in fact, be liable for the tax. Some appear to inhabit the listed properties as primary residences, while some listed properties are in neighborhoods where average values are under the $1 million tax threshold. Still other properties appear to be commercial real estate and thus not “residences” that might otherwise be liable for the new tax.

Regardless of their tax liabilities, residence statuses, and individual net worths, all of the people on Mamdani’s list have been “doxxed,” that is, publicly identified with private information in a government register indicating where they live.

While the imposition of the pied-à-terre tax may or may not ultimately force all of them to pay more for their city dwellings, the list’s mere existence suggests that the people on it are members of a suspect class of citizens—deserving of both higher taxes and public shaming. This categorization and doxxing recalls the Soviet Union’s treatment of “the possessing classes.” Then, as now, the point was to single them out for separate, and therefore discriminatory, treatment by their government.

This is in keeping with the left’s ongoing efforts to categorize people into classes of “oppressors” or “the oppressed” and claiming to champion the latter. The ideological point is to marginalize and ostracize disfavored social groups, much as DEI theorists today advocate discrimination on the basis of race to correct perceived past injustices. In practice, however, it places practically the entire population at risk of being subject to discriminatory treatment if a party hack or government bureaucrat decides to place an individual in the objectionable category. Many of the 960,000 property owners on Mamdani’s list are likely not what anyone would call “rich,” and many more—perhaps even all—are not engaged in the “oppression” of others, but city officials now, apparently, have the power to determine that for themselves.

What could happen to the people named, whose addresses and property values are now publicly listed? One might ask criminal defendant Luigi Mangione, who allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York in December 2024. According to diary entries and other written statements cited by the prosecution, Mangione acted out of alleged “hostility toward the health insurance industry and wealthy executives in particular.” CNN says he has a “cult-like” following and had by June 2025 received over $1 million in donations to his legal defense.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and identifies as a socialist, has frequently said that “billionaires should not exist.” Shortly after winning New York’s Democratic mayoral nomination in 2025, Mamdani himself said, “I don’t think we should have billionaires,” announcing that he intended to transfer residential real estate from private owners to government-aligned institutions.

President Donald Trump, a billionaire who long resided in New York City, has been the target of at least three assassination attempts since July 2024. According to the Washington Post, leftist groups routinely use doxxing to identify, shame, humiliate, ostracize, and cause harm to those who disagree with them. Doxxings of conservative Supreme Court justices have led to multiple arrests amid suspected assassination plots.

Now New York City has doxxed nearly a million property owners that any angry leftist can now research, classify negatively, and take action against. The commissars of revolutionary Moscow would be proud.

Chronicles  – “Will we remain a party of conservative beliefs, or will we follow the siren song of populism?” asked former Vice President Mike Pence in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed adapted from his dud of a new book, What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience. One could easily wonder what conservatives have to learn from a man who polled so abysmally in the campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination that he was one of the very first candidates to drop out as President Trump rode the “populist” wave all the way back to the White House.

The false dichotomy of Pence’s question, which rests on the dubious premise that “conservative beliefs” and the ideas he calls “populism” diverge to the point of incompatibility, reveals the sad truth: What Mike Pence does not know about conservatism could fill the vast plains of the Midwest.

Readers appear to agree. Less than two months after the release of What Conservatives Believe, according to its Amazon listing, which advertises it at a 42 percent discount, Pence’s book languishes in 73^rd place among books about conservatism, with overall sales registering below more than 56,000 other commercial titles. What Conservatives Believe has turned out to be considerably less popular than the former vice president’s first book, So Help Me God, a 2022 memoir that landed on the New York Times bestseller list at least in part because, as a spokesman later admitted, Pence’s associated PAC spent $91,000 to purchase thousands of copies of it.

This time around, the deficiencies of Pence’s analysis are readily apparent from his Wall Street Journal op-ed. The “siren song” of populism, he argues, “would replace our faith in limited government and traditional values with an agenda stitched together by opinion polls, personal grievances and performative outrage.” “Populists,” he says, “follow urges, not principles. They would erode our commitment to the Constitution and abandon U.S. leadership in the world.”

In the very next paragraph, however, Pence concedes that “the failures of big government and public officials who have broken our trust” generated populism’s rise. He gives short shrift to the kaleidoscopic range of perspectives that led Americans to reject establishment candidates of both parties in 2016 and 2024, but acknowledges that globalization, economic change, drug addiction, and attacks on traditional values played definite roles.

Despite his swipe at “populism,” Pence either fails to comprehend or willingly ignores that taking a stand on all these topics—and many others he did not mention—does and ultimately must rest on clearly discernible principles. Supporting economic measures to reshore domestic manufacturing, incentivizing job-creating foreign investment, placing U.S. interests ahead of foreign interests, seeking to end socially destructive drug abuse, and wanting one’s values upheld rather than cast down are fundamentally all positions of principle that follow from empirical analysis and rational evaluations of the common good. The true distinction is that those principles are not Pence’s principles—a motley and outdated assortment of priorities that both Republican and Democratic leaders adapted after World War II to refloat devastated foreign markets, buy Cold War foreign allegiances, and amplify economic issues that they believed vital in electoral politics.

Equally unconvincingly, Pence argues that Trump’s emphasis on “common sense” also departs from the “principles” he believes should lie at the heart of the conservative movement. Why Pence thinks it would be a good idea to dissociate his ideology from common sense is anybody’s guess, but once again his argument degenerates into an assertion of what he and the tiny minority of Republicans who support him believe to be correct principles over the contradictory or clashing ideas of the vast majority of Republicans who despise him and support Trump.

Ultimately, Pence’s hollow appeal to “principle” is far more about the power to shape American conservatism than to advance pretensions to unyielding ethical or philosophical truth. He felt the power dynamics perhaps more acutely than any other anti-Trump conservative on Jan. 6, 2021, when he resisted calls not to certify the 2020 election results by appealing in yet another case to “principles” that allowed him to avoid controversy. It did not help him in the long run.

When he ran for president in 2024, Republicans remained almost totally unconvinced and registered their resentment in his low polling. Nor was the country at large convinced. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released just weeks before Pence dropped out found that 57 percent of American adults viewed him negatively, while only 28 percent held a positive view.

Appealing to what he called “principle” on Jan. 6 is almost certainly what Mike Pence will remain best known for. His new book, which is endorsed by vocal but superannuated conservative figures such as George Will, Paul Ryan, Phil Gramm, Mitch Daniels, and other names ousted from prominence and influence in the GOP a decade or more ago, is but one prong in a strategy to build up think tanks, media posts, and other artifacts of outsized establishment influence to try to counter the populist tide favored by conservative nationalists now who control the commanding heights of electoral politics.

But what hope does this fading GOP establishment have? Its neoconservative leaders never bothered to mentor protégés, cultivate acolytes, or delegate power. Now they find themselves without successors as real power in the GOP fluctuates with no reference to them between different strands of Trumpism. “It’s become clear to me: This is not my time,” Pence said when he withdrew from the 2024 primary after less than five months of campaigning. In all likelihood, it never will be.

Chronicles – Christopher Nolan’s Long, Woke Voyage to Nowhere

The Odyssey (2026) 

Directed by Christopher Nolan ◆ Screenplay adaptation by Christopher Nolan ◆ Produced by Universal Pictures and Syncopy ◆ Distributed by Universal Pictures.

“Hahaha. Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” Lawrence, Massachusetts, high school teacher Heather Levine tweeted in 2020, responding to a post from a fellow “scholar-educator” who called Homer’s epic poem “trash.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the teachers were part of an online group of left-wing activist educators who tried to get Homer’s epic and other classics of Western literature banned from classrooms because of their supposedly racist, sexist, and ableist contents.

These undoubtedly enlightened purveyors of knowledge have yet to register any reaction to this summer’s blockbuster release of Sir Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic. Nolan’s film, which he co-produced with his wife Emma Thomas and for which he wrote the script, debases The Odyssey so cheaply that Hellenophobic New England schoolmarms might well be pleased, assuming they are not too triggered to see the film.

Nolan was on tap to direct Troy, an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad executed more than two decades ago by Wolfgang Petersen, but the studio eased Nolan out of the project, giving him Batman Begins as a consolation prize. Nolan has said in interviews that at the time, he felt ill-prepared to tackle The Iliad. He only conceived his Odyssey project in 2024, after the stunning success of Oppenheimer, his disjointed biopic of the troubled atomic bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won seven Academy Awards. According to interviews, Nolan kept the subject of his next film secret for nearly a year while he read several translations of Homer’s epic, along with various related media, apparently including comic book adaptations.

Perhaps naturally, Nolan contextualized The Odyssey within his larger oeuvre of feature films, many of which, including Memento, Interstellar, and his Batman trilogy, relate existential quests involving emotionally tortured men who suffer from familial loss. From that perspective, Homer’s epic—a hero’s 10-year voyage home from a distant battlefield to a faithful but beleaguered family—may have seemed a natural fit. Nolan had the time, money, and opportunity to make a stirring and searching literary adaptation of great significance, if for no other reason than that a serious film adaptation of The Odyssey hasn’t been undertaken since Italian director Mario Camerini’s flawed 1954 attempt in technicolor, Ulysses, starring Kirk Douglas.

Much work certainly went into Nolan’s version of The Odyssey. Notably, it is the first feature film to be made exclusively with IMAX cameras. IMAX cameras have the highest possible resolution, but they are also limited to shooting segments of about three minutes, separated by breaks to reload the next sequence. The film’s acting, such as it is, looks seamless to anyone unaware of this technical challenge. On-location filming spread across much of the globe, including Greek and Italian settings identified with the epic as well as remote locations in the United Kingdom, North Africa, and even Iceland, which was the setting for Odysseus’s sojourn in Hades. Nolan took great care to capture the gritty experience of soldiers at war and returning from it. His production and costume designers, both Oppenheimer veterans, invested a great deal of time and energy into recreating Bronze Age clothing and weapons to capture as much authenticity as possible from the extant material record.

Although it has gone largely unnoticed, the film also incorporates recent archeological scholarship to situate the time of the Trojan War and its aftermath within the so-called Late Bronze Age collapse, a period of several decades around 1200 BC, when a series of cataclysms around the Mediterranean littoral caused several powerful civilizations to disappear or decay. Nolan’s dialogue makes ominous references to the “Sea Peoples,” marauders of theorized provenance who are believed to have wrought havoc in the region around that time.

Indeed, the film concludes with Odysseus musing that his civilization stands on the verge of a “dark age”—a period of several centuries following the collapse—in which his deeds will only be sung, because writing will become a lost art amid general cultural degradation.

The theorized historical dimensions of the epic are thoughtful, if debatable, and Nolan might have made more of them. Alas, the drama does not rise to the intellectual challenge. Most of his nearly three-hour film falls flat, with visually impressive but poorly scripted action scenes alternating with tedious meditations on the characters’ misfortunes. Their hurts and losses are acute, not because they represent the moral messages of The Odyssey, but because they myopically miss its timeless messages about the nature of courage and hubris, duty and ambition, fate and resignation, heroism and triumph.

The ensemble dialogue was so trite and peppered with hackneyed American slang that I found myself rooting for the Cyclops and the sea monster Charybdis. Matt Damon’s wooden Odysseus plods through the character’s tasks and challenges, but he never seems to care much about returning home to Ithaca. Even when he uncovers the nymph Calypso’s ruse—feeding him lotus leaves to keep him sensual and sedated—he reacts like it was a schoolgirl’s trick and departs with all the conviction of someone leaving a bad party. Ironically, it is Charlize Theron’s performance as Calypso that is the film’s most alluring. Her charms are lost on the unemotive oaf she keeps around, if not on the viewer who witnesses their drama.

It is often said that contemporary films about the past inevitably say more about our own times than the times they are meant to relate. In Odysseus’s occasional meditative moments, Nolan imagines him guiltily dwelling on the destruction of Troy—an action that, for most of world history, was regarded as a heroic deed. Nolan casts it as a crippling source of “trauma” that Odysseus spends much of his 10-year voyage home trying to reconcile with the ethics of a culture he believes he has betrayed. In the process, our “hero” emerges more as an “anti-hero,” and a guilty white male one at that.

If Odysseus is dogged by self-doubt, his ancient civilization certainly has far more room for notions of female and minority empowerment than I recall from my childhood reading of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the poem. In Nolan’s film, a reminder of Odysseus’s chronic guilt emerges in frequent visits—or are they hauntings?—from the goddess Athena, whose corporeal vision turns out to be that of a Trojan woman executed at the goddess’s altar when her city fell. The specter of gender-based violence sweeps away any notion of martial achievement.

Perhaps to strengthen the point, Athena is played poutingly by Zendaya Coleman, a biracial actress whose appearance recalls the late political scientist Martin Bernal’s thoroughly debunked 1987 thesis—presented in a controversial work titled Black Athena—that the ancient Greeks were really of African origin. Odysseus’s crew and other actors have Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern heritage, but seemingly as a matter of course, the work’s foundational victim—Helen of Troy—is played by black actress Lupita Nyong’o.

In Odysseus’s absence, his wife Penelope—played with grating stridency by Anne Hathaway—must manage the household of suitors who abuse ancient hospitality laws to court her. They intend to win Ithaca’s throne on the assumption that Odysseus has died and that she is now an available widow. Led by Robert Pattinson’s hissable Antinous, they are an obnoxious lot. But does confounding them really require an anti-patriarchal screed against a system that denies a woman’s right to rule even as she claims to do all the work of a king?

Between Athena and Penelope, Odysseus must also grapple with Circe, a Homeric siren whom Nolan reimagined as a liberal white woman. The men she has transformed into pigs, she explains with passive-aggressive rage, are not victims of diabolical witchcraft but merely realizing their true nature. According to woke Hollywood, the true nature of men is that of bottom-feeding predators who must be neutralized—and, one might presume, eliminated—for the good of the world. Samantha Morton’s plain features and disheveled appearance make Circe look like she just returned from the nearest protest march. Odysseus instructs his rescued men to leave her be, essentially mandating that they validate her “truth.” Even in ancient Greece, apparently, we must “believe all women.”

This appears to include when they claim to be men. Nolan lifted a small episode from Virgil’s Aeneid—the Latin epic that chronicles Rome’s founding by Trojan survivors—to present the audience with Elliot Page, a biological woman who started her life and career as Ellen Page, in the small role of Sinon. She/he announces the “gift” of the Trojan Horse that will carry Odysseus and his warriors into the walled city. One can only wonder what the real infiltration is.

Alas, even a woke film is not immune from ideological error. At least one scene was filmed in Western Sahara, a United Nations-designated “non-self-governing territory” that Morocco has occupied since 1975. Angry commentary published in The Guardian on the eve of the film’s release accused Nolan and his production team of cultural insensitivity because the indigenous population claims to be oppressed and facing “erasure” while also suffering severe limitations on self-expression, including in filmmaking. A boycott of the film has been demanded. Apparently, the human struggle can only continue.

Throughout the 16 years of former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s second premiership, which lasted from 2010 until his Fidesz Party’s devastating defeat in April, liberals on both sides of the Atlantic derided his government as “authoritarian” and even “autocratic.” In the end, however, it proved neither “authoritarian” nor “autocratic” enough to avoid losing, in what were universally recognized free elections, to the opposition Tisza Party. Tisza, which was formed and led by Orbán’s former acolyte Péter Magyar, ran on an anti-corruption platform and captured a supermajority large enough to change Hungary’s constitution.

The left was ecstatic to see the world’s flagship national conservative government fall, but recent developments have begun to make Orbán’s international critics think twice. For one thing, upon Magyar’s assumption of office on May 9, he demanded the resignation of Hungary’s constitutionally elected president Tamás Sulyok. Sulyok was an Orbán ally and as president, he had the power to veto parliamentary legislation. Magyar also asked for the resignations of several appointed judicial officials. Tisza, Magyar’s party, has abolished government agencies that promoted Fidesz civil society initiatives and it established government conservatorship over NGOs and educational institutions perceived as being too closely affiliated with people sympathetic to Fidesz.

Magyar’s government has taken decisive steps to prevent Orbán personally from ever returning to power. In June, Tisza passed term limits barring any individual from serving as Hungary’s prime minister for more than a lifetime total of eight years. The legislation is retroactive to 1990, the first complete year after Hungary emerged from communism, and applies only to Orbán, the sole person in the country who has exceeded the newly imposed maximum.

Magyar’s supermajority is only getting bolder. On July 13, it passed a constitutional amendment, part of a reform the new prime minister calls “Operation Purgatory Fire,” to remove Sulyok from Hungary’s presidency, as well as Hungary’s constitutional court president and three other judges serving on that body. The amendment also limits all members of parliament to serving a maximum of three four-year terms. This measure, which is also retroactive, will indefinitely bar more than half of Fidesz’s remaining deputies from standing for reelection. Tisza’s deputies, all of whom were just elected for the first time, have another 12 years before the term-limiting legislation applies to them. No wonder the government block greeted the winning vote with a standing ovation.

Critics have argued that removing Sulyok in this way would violate the rule of law. Magyar dismissed such concerns, deriding the president and other Fidesz-aligned officials as “puppets” of “the political and economic mafia that has ruled our country for the past 16 years”—suggesting that Fidesz officials were unworthy of legal niceties. According to the letter of the amendment, the constitutional court jurists are being retired because they are over the age of 70, but all four of the ones affected are allegedly aligned with Orbán. Notably, in 2011 Orbán introduced a similar age limit on Hungary’s constitutional court judges but backed down after the European Union’s Court of Justice ruled the move unlawful.

EU institutions, in contrast, have offered no criticism of Magyar’s unfolding reforms. To the contrary, on the day parliament passed the new amendment, the European Commission approved a $2.3 billion cash infusion to Hungary’s government-owned national development bank as a reward for improving on Orbán-era governance issues. On July 10, the previous business day before the amendment vote, the EU unfroze an even larger $11.5 billion package of grants and loans long withheld from Orbán that was originally meant for post-COVID pandemic recovery.

Under Hungary’s constitution, the recent amendment could not be adopted without Sulyok’s signature, effectively requiring him to consent to his own removal from office. Fidesz leaders had the option to refer the amendment to the constitutional court, which could have reviewed it for possible procedural laws, but Magyar argued that passing the amendment alone is sufficient to make it legal and threatened to bring impeachment proceedings against Sulyok if he refused to sign it.

On July 18, Sulyok, who described the amendment in a somber video posted to X as “unconstitutional,” a “grave and shameful example of abuse of power,” and a “serious blow” to the rule of law, signed it to avoid a political crisis. The Tisza speaker of parliament will now replace him. Orbán took to X to declare that “today, the final barrier fell. Arbitrary rule is no longer a looming threat; it is a reality. If they can do this to the President of the Republic, they can do it to anyone.”

Orbán may well be right, since Tisza’s parliamentary supermajority can alter any aspect of national law, and now can do so with little or no prospect of a presidential veto. International leaders, particularly EU officials who spent more than a decade and a half excoriating Orbán, have yet to say anything critical of Hungary’s apparent democratic backslide under Magyar. But some cracks may be forming in the united front against him. In June, Human Rights Watch, a longtime Orbán critic, issued a report arguing that Magyar’s “rushed constitutional changes undermine the rule of law.” In response to the amendment’s passing on July 13, Amnesty International, one of Orbán’s harshest critics, stated on social media that “we think the government’s current solution is not okay” because it “ignores the fact that Tamás Sulyok has the right to fair proceedings” that observe “appropriate legal guarantees.”

In April, Hungarians voted decisively for change and were motivated above all by an animus against perceived corruption. But if Magyar continues to act in fact the way his old boss was only accused of acting, they may regret their choice.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” states the Fourteenth Amendment.

But are those whose parents are here temporarily as tourists or illegally because they have snuck across the border or overstayed a visa really “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”?

To the Supreme Court, yes.

The bench ruled in a 5-4 decision that the clause grants unrestricted citizenship to virtually all individuals born on American soil. Practically speaking, the only newborns excepted are those of foreign diplomats.

The ruling voids President Trump’s executive order barring citizenship to children born of parents present illegally or on a lawful but temporary basis. That includes as many as 250,000 babies a year.

Conceived in the aftermath of the Civil War, the citizenship clause was written to ensure that freed slaves and their children counted as citizens. It was not written to enable “birth tourism” or the barbarous “surrogacy networks.” These schemes cater to foreigners specifically to produce American citizens — or worse, to sneak in children of hostile foreigners.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used hip-hop slang in her opinion favoring this travesty of a ruling. The creators of the Fourteenth Amendment “understood the assignment,” she wrote, referring to a song by the rapper Tay Money. The “assignment,” in Jackson’s view, appears to be to import as many new Democratic voters as possible, since the Left can’t seem to win with the native-born population.

Justice Clarence Thomas has a better understanding of the citizenship clause. He notes that it gives lustre to the idea of American citizenship. Unfortunately, as he adds in his dissenting opinion, the court’s ruling “devalues” that very citizenship.

The Supreme Court’s ruling runs against the prevailing sentiments of most Americans. A May Harvard/Harris poll shows 56% of the country favors the deportation of all illegal immigrants. Some thinkers who believe America should be allowed to protect its own borders are predicting the end of America as we know it. “If your ruling requires you to suicide your civilization,” White House adviser Stephen Miller told Fox News, “your reading of the Constitution is wrong.”

But solutions can be found. The most obvious move — though it’s a long shot — would be for Congress to adopt an amendment redefining citizenship eligibility in unambiguous terms to exclude those who come here illegally or temporarily. Sen Rand Paul (R-Ky.) proposed such an amendment in April. If adopted, his amendment would narrow the category of individuals “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” to US citizens and foreign nationals who have permanent and active residency or who serve in the military. Thus, only the children of those people would get birthright citizenship.

This more focused definition would align US policy on birthright citizenship with that of about 170 other countries, including all of our adversaries, who do not allow it.

Simpler solutions are possible too. President Trump has suggested he would support legislation to make the circumstances that allow for birthright citizenship harder. This already includes, for example, limiting illegal border crossings, which have been practically eliminated in his second term. You can’t drop an anchor baby here if you can’t get here in the first place. And he has overseen some 3 million repatriations — voluntary or otherwise — since returning to office and promises more.

And more can be done. On the same day as the Supreme Court’s ruling, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) announced his “Anchors Away Act.” This would prohibit pregnant foreigners from entering the country. There’s already precedent for such a move — immigration officers can deny a woman entry if they believe her reason for entry is birth tourism. The Justice Department issued a memo the same day urging the prosecution of unlawful birth-tourism schemes.

The Supreme Court’s ruling may have sold out the country’s national interest. But Republicans should understand their assignment.

“Versailles is the real deal,” said President Trump when his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron invited him to dinner at the royal palace during this month’s G-7 conference. G-7 leaders praised the US’ latest agreement with Iran as a “breakthrough,” but if anyone thinks the Trump-touted “deal” Vice President Vance negotiated with Iran is “real,” they should have another thing coming — a massive attack.

Vance spent last week defending the deal, which isn’t even a deal but a “memorandum of understanding.” Typically, “MOUs” are “good faith” documents issued to express non-binding notions of future relationships. Upon the signing of this MOU’s official text ahead of schedule on Wednesday, US officials reportedly said it was a “political document” that failed to account for undisclosed backchannel discussions. Even Vance admitted its terms are “very general.”

That’s a generous assessment since many of them are worryingly vague. The Strait of Hormuz, for example, is to be opened, but only for 60 days, after which the Iranians can engage in “dialogue” with other Gulf states to “define the future administration and maritime services” international law nominally prohibits. Iran has suggested this could include resuming its illegal toll regime.

The US will fully unfreeze Iran’s foreign assets, but on terms to be negotiated later and with no enforcement mechanism to ensure Iran doesn’t spend the funds on its depleted military. Iranian oil can flow under US waivers, though existing sanctions will remain in place, also pending later negotiation.

The Iranians will theoretically benefit from “at least $300 billion” in “reconstruction and economic development” for which the US will facilitate “financial transactions.” The MOU is mum on where those funds will come from, though Vance has promised no taxpayer cash will go to Tehran. That could be true. Or not.

American warships will stop blockading Iran’s ports but not withdraw from the region until after a final agreement is reached. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week that the ships will linger offshore and could return to blockade duty at a moment’s notice.

The MOU includes Lebanon, from which Iran has said it expects Israel to withdraw, possibly, its leaders have suggested, under American compulsion. The Israelis have said they’re not a party to the agreement and will act in self-defense. As they continued to exchange fire with Hezbollah last week, some Israeli hardliners said they are prepared to continue the war on their own.

The MOU creates a new 60-day cease-fire window, which can be extended by mutual agreement for an apparently unlimited time, to discuss the intractable issue at the heart of the US-Iranian conflict: whether or not Iran will become a nuclear power.

The MOU says Iran “reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons” and maintain its general nuclear program’s “status quo.” We’ve heard that one before. The mullahs hiding deep underground are the same fanatics who have wanted the bomb for more than 40 years and just killed 40,000 of their own people to stay in power. In any case, the MOU unpromisingly relegates resolution of all relevant nuclear issues to further negotiation.

Assuming all this succeeds, the MOU provides that the final deal will be enforced by a “binding resolution” . . . of the UN Security Council. Home of the brave, indeed.

We can continue negotiations until we are blue in the face, but there is no guarantee that Iran’s leaders, who survived decades of isolation and the massive air war earlier this year, will ever give up their nukes. Even if they do sign a deal “guaranteed” by some toothless UN resolution, their regime has a long history of pocketing any concessions and then renegotiating terms at the last minute, or just ignoring them on the sly, as with Obama’s failed nuclear deal of 2015.

With tough midterms looming less than five months from now and the prospect of what Trump on Wednesday called “economic catastrophe,” the mullahs have every reason just to wait him out.

Iran poses an existential threat. Even after the MOU’s terms were agreed on, into this weekend Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire — prompting Iran to threaten to call off the whole deal, suspend the negotiations before they even began and, on Saturday, to announce that they had closed the Strait of Hormuz again after less than 72 hours of traffic going through.

Nobody knows, moreover, how long it will take the Iranians to get at the near-weapons grade enriched uranium under the rubble of their nuclear facilities.

But the longer diplomacy drags on, the more time they will have to do that and, potentially, emerge fully nuclearized. That’s not a chance we should take, especially when we have the military muscle for the massive attack Trump has repeatedly promised if the mullahs don’t play ball. When they say, “Death to America,” I believe them. And so should you.

City Journal – More university administrations are refusing to cave to student activists’ demands to cancel commencement speakers.

“We are living through a period of extreme narcissism,” comedian and late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien told Harvard University graduates assembled for his commencement address on May 28. O’Brien, a Harvard alumnus, used his platform to poke fun at the Trump administration. But in recent years, laughter has been less common at college commencement addresses, which have become lightning rods for militant and performative activism by students who hijack what should be joyous celebrations. Thankfully, some university administrations are finally pushing back.

Ask New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose institution chose him as this year’s commencement speaker. Ignoring Haidt’s best-selling books, prize-winning research, and decades of dedication to his calling, angry students—including the executive committee of NYU’s student government—denounced his selection as “deeply unsettling.” As grounds to demand his removal and replacement, detractors cited Haidt’s alleged “anti-LGBTQ” comments, long-standing advocacy against DEI, support for campus viewpoint diversity, and empirical critique of Gen Z digital device use.

They had a reasonable hope of success. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has documented 350 attempts to cancel campus commencement speakers since 1998, many of them successful. So far this year, South Carolina State University, a historically black institution, has canceled a planned commencement address by Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, a candidate for governor in 2026. Students expressed dismay over Evette’s vocal criticism of DEI policies and support for President Donald Trump, who has since endorsed her gubernatorial bid. Two commencement speakers— David Kaganovsky at Drexel and Morton Schapiro at Georgetown’s law school—were forced to withdraw after their support for Israel became public knowledge on campus.

Rutgers University also canceled its scheduled commencement speaker Rami Elghandour, an alumnus who is Chairman and CEO of Arcellx, a biotech company, following complaints about his past online posts accusing Israel of “genocide” amid its war in Gaza. And at Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September, author Sharon McMahon’s commencement invitation was canceled following outrage about posts (later deleted) in which she was critical of Kirk in the days after his murder.

In an encouraging sign, however, NYU held firm. Responding to the controversy, a university spokesman described Haidt as “one of the most consequential thinkers of the 21st century.” President Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker who has launched a collaborative initiative with Haidt to reduce student reliance on digital devices, said that she is “inspired” and “moved” by his work. At NYU’s commencement on May 14, she proudly introduced Haidt to the assembled crowd and presented him with an honorary doctorate. Some students booed and others walked out, but Haidt delivered his remarks in full—and neither the world nor NYU came to an end.

Fortunately, NYU was not alone this season. At the University of Arizona, former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt survived a cancelation attempt launched against his commencement speech by students aggrieved by his former girlfriend and business partner’s allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Arizona’s Women and Gender Student Council circulated a petition demanding his cancelation, a move supported by numerous other student groups.

But Arizona’s administration avidly backed Schmidt, with President Suresh Garimella praising “his investments in scientific discovery and emerging technologies” and “research that shapes the future.” When Schmidt appeared before the graduating students, he was heavily booed—but apparently for comments promoting AI, which many graduates regard as an obstacle to employment. An arbitration court has since ruled that Schmidt’s ex’s accusations against him were false, and awarded Schmidt $10 million in defamation charges.

Morehouse School of Medicine, another historically black institution not far from censorious South Carolina State, similarly stood by its chosen commencement speaker, Georgia Republican Congressman Richard McCormick. A white alumnus, McCormick faced vocal student opposition due to “statements, views, and policies” that his critics alleged “directly go against our institution’s mission and training.” McCormick’s detractors, who included over a thousand signatories to a petition opposing his selection, singled out as disqualifying factors his opposition to DEI, “gender affirming care,” and illegal immigration.

A Morehouse spokesman said that its administration had heard out student concerns but declared that the school “is a nonpartisan institution, and Dr. McCormick was invited because of his distinction as an alumnus.” Like Haidt, McCormick faced some booing, but more and more colleges seem to be deciding that a speaker’s accomplishments are what should matter.

Showing some backbone is increasingly the wise choice for the controversy-adverse administrators now facing scrutiny from government, media, civil society, donors, alumni concerned with free speech, tuition-paying parents, and students who just want an education. As higher education begins to encounter the long-predicted “enrollment cliff” of fewer students and lower revenues, the spotlight will only intensify. At least in the realm of commencement speakers, the pressure seems to be bearing fruit.

Chronicles – “The University of Florida should not hire Stuart Bell as president,” warned the Manhattan Institute’s director for higher education policy, John Sailer, in a recent op-ed for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Sailer, who last month broke the story of Bell’s unanimous nomination by UF’s presidential search committee as its only choice for the top job, has done yeoman’s work documenting the extensive, and indeed, “award-winning” DEI regime Bell created in his previous job as president of the University of Alabama.

Alarm bells went off across the conservative commentariat, with criticism of Bell’s nomination appearing in these pages, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Signal, the National Association of Scholars’ newsletter, and in statements from Florida Senator Rick Scott, Florida Congressman Greg Steube, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, and Florida state university system Board of Governors chairman Alan Levine, among others.

In a live interview with Salem News Channel host Josh Hammer—Bell’s only interview since he received the search committee’s nomination—the would-be UF president came off as shifty, evasive, and unconvincing. Hammer quickly posted that he was “less than fully impressed” by Bell, casting doubt on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s quick and possibly knee-jerk endorsement of him in an X post as a “great candidate” who enjoys “my full support.”

Even the Chronicle of Higher Education, a left-leaning industry publication for college and university professionals, acknowledged Bell’s overpoweringly strong commitment to DEI by describing his policies at Alabama—many of which would now likely be illegal under federal law and both Florida and Alabama state laws—as “robust and successful.”

If there is any remaining doubt that Bell is a horrible choice to lead UF, faculty and alumni at the University of Alabama are beginning to speak out about their experiences with his leadership. In a statement to 1819, a state news source named for the year in which Alabama entered the Union, a current faculty member who asked to remain anonymous recalled participating in two search committees to hire professors during Bell’s tenure that began with “a presentation by DEI personnel” including “calls for special consideration of candidates that were racial or sexual behavior minorities.”

“We were to submit three candidates without any ranking,” the faculty member said. “If none of the three submitted candidates were among those ‘special’ folks, we were to submit a fourth named candidate that was, along with recommendations on what it would take to move the person up to the top three.”

A department chairman currently serving in Alabama’s College of Arts and Sciences told 1819 that after Bell arrived as president in 2015, DEI “efforts were redoubled” and characterized by “hypocrisy.” “One notable policy” identified by the source included a scheme to hire “diversity postdocs,” short-term professional residencies open to recent Ph.D. recipients. “The university would advertise diversity postdoc positions … that were open only to applicants from ‘underrepresented groups,’” the source alleged, claiming that “those hired for these positions would be automatically transitioned onto tenure-track positions,” full-time and potentially career-long professorships normally filled after a lengthy open application process and job search. As the source elaborated, “this was, in effect, a way to discriminate on the basis of race and sex in hiring tenure-track faculty, without ‘officially’ discriminating in hiring.”

Bell’s choices for senior administrative personnel have also raised concern. Dr. Earl Tilford, an Alabama undergraduate alumnus and retired history professor who authored a book on the university’s 1960s civil rights struggle, told 1819 that Bell “initiated the influx of DEI programs and allowed radical faculty to prosper.” Tilford further claimed that Bell “inserted three solidly woke faculty into leadership positions in the provost office before leaving office,” and thereby made it difficult “to diminish the grasp DEI already had on faculty, curriculum, and programs” after Alabama’s state legislature outlawed DEI programs in 2024.

As identified in a recent Daily Signal article by Scott Yenor, a Claremont Institute fellow and former DeSantis higher education advisor, these hires included G. Christine Taylor, whom Bell engaged in 2017 to serve as Alabama’s inaugural vice president and vice provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Taylor, who still holds her job under what appears to be a cosmetically altered title to conform to current law, focused her academic research prior to taking on a series of DEI posts on the intersection of race and gender in media leadership, examining what Yenor calls “the supposed barriers that black women face entering the broadcast industry.”

Alongside Taylor serves Tiffany Sippial, hired by Bell in 2023 to lead Alabama’s honors college and promoted in 2025 to associate provost for undergraduate education. Her magnum opus, a book titled Prostitution, Modernity, and the Making of the Cuban Republic, 1840-1920, claims to demonstrate what its publisher’s website calls “the central role the debate about prostitution played in defining republican ideals in independent Cuba.” Move over, José Martí.

Alabama Graduate School dean Susan Carvalho, whose undoubtedly page-turning book about Latin American fiction explores how “female protagonists challenge the spatial barriers erected by capitalist hegemony,” was appointed by Bell in 2016 and stayed in the job for 10 years, only stepping down to retire this summer. Chapman Greer, a business professor who presided over Alabama’s faculty senate in 2021, suggested in a meeting reported in the campus newspaper in that year that she was privy to “indirect” efforts that she could not publicly discuss aimed at “making sure that the integrity of what we teach does not get touched if at all possible” by anti-DEI state legislation. Two years later, she was promoted to associate provost of general education.

Such appointments will matter at UF, where the provost’s office and at least four deanships are currently held by interim appointees. Among many other powers and responsibilities, the university’s new president will presumably appoint permanent administrators in those roles. Given his track record, let us hope Stuart Bell is not the man who will do it.

New York Post – “Safe to Pee.” That was just one wacky woke initiative Stuart R. Bell oversaw as president of the University of Alabama, in this case to prevent “discrimination against gender variant people in public restrooms.”

Earlier this month, a search committee at the University of Florida—the flagship institution of the state where Gov. Ron DeSantis says “woke goes to die”— unanimously recommended Bell as the sole candidate to be UF’s next president. DeSantis almost immediately endorsed him as a “great selection” who enjoys his “full support.”

Say it ain’t so, Ron! The critics are out, and so is the déjà-vu.

Less than a year ago, UF picked former University of Michigan president Santa J. Ono to take the top job in Gainesville. Ono, who was poised to make $3 million a year at UF – almost twice his Michigan salary – claimed a sudden conversion from his DEI-saturated past. Not everybody was fooled. After sailing through the search committee and UF’s Board of Trustees, the Florida State University System’s Board of Governors nixed his candidacy in a 10-6 vote.

The stakes are higher now. UF’s rebuffed trustees whined about Ono’s rejection, alleging the Board of Governors overstepped its role despite state constitutional language suggesting otherwise. Now they seem to want to try again with Bell, who implemented DEI policies at Alabama.

As soon as he became president, the university launched a DEI-infused program building on an earlier commitment to “diversity as part of its educational mission.” This included race-based recruitment programs for students and faculty, which are now illegal.

In 2017, Bell hired G. Christine Taylor, a DEI guru, as Alabama’s new vice president and associate provost for DEI, a job paying nearly $300,000. Taylor was joined by 30 other DEI personnel, including DEI deans in six of Alabama’s nine colleges, at an estimated payroll cost of $2 million per year. The university boasted that 36% of undergraduate courses were “diversity-related” and hosted what Bell said were “over 70 student organizations which have diversity and inclusion as a focus.”

Between 2016 and 2021, whites in Alabama’s student body fell by 10% while the percentage of blacks and Hispanics nearly doubled. In 2022, Alabama won an award for DEI excellence.

Under Bell, Alabama renamed campus buildings that honored distinguished whites in favor of blacks, an action some have alleged violated a state law on the preservation of public monuments.

The university opened a dedicated “Intercultural Diversity Center,” a “Hate & Bias Hotline” for denunciations of alleged discriminatory conduct, and, yes, the “Safe to Pee” initiative, which appears designed to make sure biological men can freely urinate in campus ladies’ rooms.

What happened to reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, you might ask? Among national universities, Alabama’s US News & World Report ranking tumbled from 88th place when Bell arrived in 2015 to 169th when he left in 2025. Some achievement!

After Alabama’s legislature banned DEI in universities in 2024, Bell appears to have kept many of his policies and personnel in place but renamed them, a common ruse in academic institutions. In a statement no longer available on Alabama’s website, Bell promised that nothing would change.

Taylor retained her lucrative job under a new title, “Vice President and Associate Vice Provost Opportunity, Connections and Success.” Alabama’s Intercultural Diversity Center became simply its “Intercultural Center.” Who knows where men masquerading as women can pee?

Bell is heavily championed by UF’s Board of Trustees chairman Morteza “Mori” Hosseini, an Iranian immigrant and state-level Republican donor who also championed Ono. Bell’s “academic achievements and experience at a flagship state university makes [sic] him the obvious choice to lead UF going forward,” Hosseini dubiously said in a press release.

Authorities are taking notice. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) wants to know why UF’s interim president, Donald Landry, has a $2 million payoff if he is not hired permanently. Landry spent his year on campus promoting institutional neutrality, campus free speech, and the elimination of DEI—all things

Floridians voted for.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon, whose department can suspend federal funds to universities on civil rights grounds, posted that “UF deserves a president who will continue to drive [anti-DEI] reforms.” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, whose office has sued universities for civil rights violations, posted a potentially ominous “Uh oh” when the UF story first broke.

Florida Board of Governors chairman Alan Levine has asked whether Hosseini overstepped his authority in the selection process. If DeSantis has any regard for his legacy and political future, he should scrap this boondoggle now and tell Stuart Bell not to pee on our legs and tell us it’s raining.

Chronicles – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis famously described his state as the place “Where woke goes to die.” When it comes to the presidency of Florida’s flagship public university, however, it could end up being the place where woke goes to lead.

Following last year’s widely reported and humiliating rejection of former University of Michigan president Santa J. Ono from the top job at the University of Florida (UF), this week the university announced that its search committee had unanimously chosen former University of Alabama president Stuart R. Bell as its “sole finalist” for recommendation to the university’s board of trustees. Unfortunately, despite this outpouring of support, Bell turns out to be yet another disciple of the woke religion infecting our universities.

If UF’s trustees approve Bell, Florida’s state Board of Governors will have the final say, likely at a public meeting scheduled in late June at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

In 2025, Ono, on closer inspection, turned out to be a rabid proponent of DEI on his campus in Michigan and in his previous post leading the University of British Columbia. He was suspiciously also the UF search committee’s only finalist and was unanimously recommended to the UF trustees, who then unanimously voted to hire him. After a major media outcry, political opposition, and behind-the-scenes advocacy, the Board of Governors voted 10-6 to reject Ono, who left the room jobless and shamefaced. A similar outcry is needed now.

Distinguished medical academic and American Academy of Sciences and Letters President Donald Landry was hired to serve as UF’s interim president in the 2025-2026 academic year. During Landry’s nine-month tenure, according to news reports, he promoted institutional neutrality on political and social issues, pledged to enforce state and federal laws to demolish UF’s DEI policies and institutions, stood up for free speech and free inquiry, and built up UF’s conservative-leaning Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education into what he called “the remedy for what ails the academic enterprise of this nation.” Landry is understood to have been a candidate for the full-time job, but it now appears he has been passed over for Bell, who will be presented to the trustees with no competition.

UF’s Board of Trustees chairman Morteza “Mori” Hosseini, an Iranian immigrant real estate developer and notable state-level Republican donor, heavily advocated for Ono and is now pushing Bell’s candidacy, calling him in UF’s official press release “a candidate whose academic achievements and experience at a flagship state university makes [sic] him the obvious choice to lead UF going forward.” DeSantis, who has held out education reform as a major focus of his administration, almost immediately—yet inexplicably—congratulated Bell in an X post, declaring “He is a great selection and has my full support!”

Bell may be the “obvious” choice because UF’s search committee made him the only choice, but who is he really?

According to publicly available data analyzed in a 2023 report by Claremont Institute fellow and center director Scott Yenor, Bell jumped on the DEI bandwagon as soon as he became the University of Alabama’s (UA) president in 2015. Within a year under his leadership, UA launched a long-term DEI-infused “Advancing the Flagship” program that built on UA’s earlier commitment to “diversity as part of its educational mission.” This included race-based recruitment programs for students and faculty members. In 2017, Bell hired DEI guru G. Christine Taylor as UA’s new Vice President and Associate Provost for DEI, a role that, in 2023, paid her nearly $300,000 per year. By 2021, she was joined by 30 other dedicated DEI personnel, including DEI deans in six of UA’s nine colleges, at a cost of $2 million per year, according to Yenor’s estimate. By 2019, UA boasted that 36 percent of its undergraduate courses were “diversity-related,” a statistic that Bell repeated in a 2021 promotional video, in which he added that UA has “over 70 student organizations which have diversity and inclusion as a focus.”

Reflecting on George Floyd’s death in 2020, Bell stated in an official message to the campus community that UA’s “core principles” included “fostering a culture of inclusivity.” That same year, Bell convened a presidential advisory committee on DEI, chaired by Taylor and, as documented in Yenor’s report, adopted a stricter protocol for implementing DEI.

In what Yenor suggests was an illegal act under an Alabama state law protecting historical monuments, UA under Bell’s leadership renamed one campus building that had been dedicated to a previous state governor, who was white, in favor of the university’s first black student. Another building that had been named for the first dean of UA’s graduate school, who was also white, was renamed for its first black faculty member. Among other measures under Bell, UA opened a dedicated “Intercultural Diversity Center,” a “Hate & Bias Hotline” for anonymous denunciations of alleged discriminatory conduct, and a “Safe to Pee” initiative to combat “discrimination against gender variant people in public restrooms.” Perhaps predictably, between 2016 and 2021, as documented by Yenor, whites declined as a percentage of UA’s faculty and student body, while the percentage of blacks and Hispanics in both categories increased.

When state law prohibited DEI on UA’s campus, Bell altered the presentation of the university’s DEI efforts to conform but followed the path of some 43 percent of university presidents who, according to an Inside Higher Ed survey, self-reported either restructuring or rebranding DEI initiatives under alternate frameworks. Citing an official statement that appears to have been scrubbed from the university’s website, Bell promised that nothing substantive would change, while a subordinate confirmed that no DEI personnel were terminated. According to G. Christine Taylor’s LinkedIn page, she remains employed at UA as its “Vice President and Associate Vice Provost Opportunity, Connections and Success,” a designation also adopted by what used to be UA’s “Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” UA’s “Intercultural Diversity Center” is now identified on its website as merely the “Intercultural Center,” though its LinkedIn and Facebook pages still retain the old name.

As Stuart R. Bell’s dubious leadership at the University of Alabama shows, a leopard cannot change its spots. If the UF trustees have any integrity, they will reject his candidacy. If they don’t, the Board of Governors should show the backbone it had last year when confronted with the horror of Ono and add a “Bell” to the sleigh on which they drove “Santa” out of town.