Nice. A pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine student who was the chosen MIT Commencement speaker this week changed her approved speech to condemn Israel for “genocide,” the current code-word favored by anti-Semites to mean “Jews aren’t allowed to defend themselves.” All the Jewish families as well as the Israeli students walked out of the ceremony in protest. Megha M. Vemuri, the speaker and president of the Class of 2025, was banned by the school from attending the later undergraduate ceremony, an MIT spokesperson told Fox. “MIT supports free expression but stands by its decision, which was in response to the individual deliberately and repeatedly misleading Commencement organizers and leading a protest from the stage, disrupting an important Institute ceremony,” the university said in a statement. 

MIT has no one to blame but itself. It has encouraged anti-Semitism on campus (like Harvard and other schools) and teaches its more suggestible students to embrace “intersectionality,” in which Palestinians are equated with “oppressed” minorities, and Jews with “racist whites.”

Meanwhile:

1. Loretta Swit died. She was a minor star who made her name and fame playing the character in “M*A*S*H” that Sally Kellerman had created in the hit Robert Altman movie in the long-running TV adaptation. (The TV show got Swit a lifetime sinecure guest starring on shows like “The Love Boat” and “Murder She Wrote” for the remainder of her career.). The character’s name was “Hot-Lips Houlihan, and because the New York Times cannot stop injecting leftist sentiments and propaganda into every corner of the paper, it wrote in Swit’s obituary,

This is garbage, and it makes me wonder if the writer saw the film. The character was nicknamed “Hot Lips” because a supposedly secret sexual adventure she enjoyed with her obnoxious lover (and ranking superior) Major Burns, had been inadvertently broadcast over the outpost public address system. Margaret Houlihan had been caught saying, “Kiss my hot lips!” and the name stuck. Since “Hot Lips” nicknamed herself, the moniker could hardly be called sexist, but political correctness still reigns at the Times. The movie “M*A*S*H” was about sexual hi-jinks among the doctors and nurses far more extreme than in the moralistic and sometimes oppressively liberal TV version. Writes Ed Driscoll on Instapundit regarding the 1967 hit, “The Times in 2025 looks back at the collective writing, directing and producing efforts of Richard Hooker, Ring Lardner Jr., Robert Altman and Larry Gelbart and concludes “That’s not funny.”

2. Finally, the American Bar Association is stripped of any remaining influence in the Federal judicial nomination process. AG Pam Bondi issued a letter telling the largest U.S. legal association that it was free to comment on judicial nominations like everyone else, but its openly partisan biases entitled it to no special influence. This should have been done decades ago, after the ABA gave only its half-hearted approval of Robert Bork when he was nominated for the Supreme Court, despite his distinguished record as a jurist and legal scholar. The ABA is more openly left-wing now than it was then; it is a prime villain in the politicizing of the legal profession.

3. On this week’s Open Forum I admitted to a bad piece of writing in an earlier post that misleadingly suggested that my sister, as a member-in-good -standing of the Trump Deranged, believed “not supporting socialism, open borders, anti-white discrimination in hiring, trans athletes clobbering women in sporting competitions and Politburo-style executive branch government is crazy.” She doesn’t support any of these things, and I know that and knew it when I engaged in that sloppily constructed paragraph. But I must confess to being constantly flummoxed that people who don’t support the Mad Left’s policies and positions can’t bring themselves to at least give grudging credit to the President who has dedicated himself and his administration to eliminating those abominations and others.

And the Trump Derangement insanity is making it difficult for me to hold on to my respect and affection for people I care about. I recently saw an entry on an old girl friend’s Facebook page. I knew she had been totally hippified during the Sixties, but I have fond memories of her still. Yet there she was approvingly posting a bonkers quote from Commie Robert Reich claiming that Trump had buried in his (stupidly named) “Big Beautiful Bill” a provision making him King. How can I still respect someone who believes something that ridiculous? I write off people who believe that dinosaur fossils were placed on Earth by God to test our faith. I won’t waste time with people who think the moon landing was faked. How is extreme Trump Derangement any better?

4. I’ll see fake conservative David Brooks’ anger and raise him two furies...What a hypocritical, intellectually dishonest asshole David Brooks is! In his latest column for the Times (Gift link!), “I’m Normally a Mild Guy. Here’s What’s Pushed Me Over the Edge,” he purports to be angry at J.D. Vance and political scientist Patrick Deneen’s statements that Americans won’t fight for “abstractions,” only for their homes, families, and comrades in arms. This, Brooks says, shows “two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause — the men who froze at Valley Forge, the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcana” and that this points “to the moral rot at the core of Trumpism, which every day disgraces our country, which we are proud of and love.” “Trumpism,” Brooks writes, “can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.”

I, like Brooks, do not typically get angry, but this astoundingly hypocritical and sinister column did the trick. What utter hypocrisy: Brooks, like the rest of the Times stable of propagandists, stayed silent as Biden’s puppetmasters accused half the country of being racists and fascists who had to be opposed, along with their supposed leader Trump, in order to “save democracy.” Talk about your “abstractions!”

I know why the Left likes abstractions: it allows communists, socialists, extremists and progressives to mislead the public into supporting policies that have been misleadingly described and that are less reasonable and justifiable the more you consider them or, worse, experience them. “Climate change”Critical race theory, “diversity, equity and inclusion, “MeToo,” “sustainability,” “love is love”and the rest are all abstractions, and the devil is in the details, and by devil, I mean exactly that. “The pursuit of happiness” is an abstraction that no two people can agree on. “Make America Great Again” is an abstraction, but Vance is right: soldiers fight for material relationships, loyalties and substance, not abstractions. Soldiers in World War II weren’t fighting for human rights; they were fighting because the United States was attacked. Most Civil War soldiers were fighting because their states were fighting on the Confederacy’s side; they didn’t understand the legal vagueries of “states rights” and whether the Constitution authorized secession, and the North’s armies certainly weren’t fighting to free the slaves.

And what does David Brooks, who has never fired a gun on a battlefield or in training, know about what soldiers fight for anyway?

“Trumpism” is no more and no less than a pragmatic, unsentimental set of policies based on pragmatism, capitalism, strong national defense, law enforcement, personal liberty and merit. That’s only “rot” to advocates of a central government run by elite and arrogant “experts” who presume to know what’s best for everyone else.

“Trump and Vance have to rebut the idea that America is the embodiment of universal ideals,” Brooks writes. That’s a lie: they have never denied that. They both embrace and advocate those ideals; they simply refuse to claim that ideals can be pursued in a vacuum, without regard for reality. Imposing American ideals on every one else who doesn’t live in America is, ironically, contrary to those same ideals. Brooks is using rhetorical tricks to represent common sense and pragmatism as “un-American.”

5. And good night, sweet Curmie, wherever you are…