Dennis Patterson

@JonathanTurley The AAUP is not just a joke, it's a disgrace.

President Michael Kotlikoff was cleared by a university investigation, but the Cornell Chapter of the American Association of University Professors has condemned him fir merely trying to evade protesters who surrounded his car. jonathanturley.org/2026/05/24/cor…

@thestustustudio pathetic

CUNY Law graduates used commencement to stage another pro-Palestine protest, accusing CUNY of “complicity in genocide and colonialism.” Meanwhile, CUNY Law’s 2025 first-time bar pass rate was 69.04%. The national first-time pass rate for ABA-accredited law school graduates was 84.10%. Maybe less revolutionary theater, more bar prep!

By the 1930s many Western intellectuals reluctantly realised that classical Marxism had failed and the proletariat wasn’t revolting. But then a group of exiled German Marxists led by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse decided to change the battlefield. Instead of economics, they targeted the “cultural superstructure”: family, religion, tradition, sexual norms and the very idea of objective truth. Their weapon was Critical Theory - a relentless campaign of negative criticism designed to portray every Western institution as inherently oppressive and capitalism as not just economically flawed, but psychologically and morally corrupt. Marcuse gave the strategy its most powerful tactical manual in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”: true liberation, he argued, required “liberating tolerance” - tolerance only for progressive ideas and outright intolerance for conservative or “regressive” ones. Free speech, in other words, was only legitimate when it served the revolution. The intellectual poison of the Frankfurt School was extraordinarily influential and as its graduates and intellectual heirs colonised universities, media, NGOs and corporate HR departments, Critical Theory evolved into today’s identity politics, DEI mandates and cancel culture - a cultural Marxism that attacks the individual in the name of group grievance. What began with a small circle of German émigrés in the 1930s now shapes the moral vocabulary of much of the Western elite. The result has been a softer, more pervasive authoritarianism: the dictatorship of the politically correct.

@Variety Such penetrating analysis

Javier Bardem speaks out in #Cannes on toxic masculinity: "That problem also goes to Trump, Putin and Netanyahu... the big balls man saying 'my cock is bigger than yours and I'm going to bomb the shit out of you' is a f*cking male toxic behavior that is creating thousands of dead people." variety.com/2026/film/fest…

The reporting on Duwaji's Tumblr comes from @LevineJonathan—read his full report here: freebeacon.com/democrats/zohr…

@brivael Great posts. But what about Nietzsche? Surely the Will to Power has a place in this French story. See 'Why we Are Not Nietzscheans', Ferry and Renaut

Tu confonds deux choses, et c'est exactement le piège que la French Theory a tendu. Liberté, égalité, fraternité — égalité *de droits*, égalité *devant la loi*, égalité *de dignité*. C'est la promesse républicaine, et personne ici ne l'attaque. Le wokisme, ce n'est pas ça. C'est l'égalitarisme des résultats. Et l'égalitarisme des résultats, contrairement à l'égalité des droits, n'est pas un élargissement de la liberté — c'est sa négation. Quelques exemples concrets : — San Francisco supprime les classes de maths avancées au collège pour "réduire les inégalités". Résultat : les écarts entre élèves explosent, les familles aisées prennent des cours privés, les pauvres se font enterrer. L'égalitarisme a creusé l'inégalité. — Les politiques de discrimination positive à Harvard : étudiants admis avec des scores très en dessous de leurs camarades, taux d'échec dispropportionné, sentiment d'imposture, ressentiment généralisé. On a saboté ceux qu'on voulait aider. — L'aide humanitaire qui distribue du riz gratuit pendant 30 ans en Afrique : effondrement des filières agricoles locales, dépendance institutionnalisée. Donner un poisson, c'est empêcher d'apprendre à pêcher. Le wokisme ne détruit pas l'humanité dans le sens dramatique. Il fait pire : il dessert systématiquement ceux qu'il prétend protéger, et il génère du ressentiment des deux côtés — ceux qu'on infantilise et ceux qu'on culpabilise. La fraternité républicaine dit : tu es mon égal, donc je te traite en adulte capable. Le wokisme dit : tu es ma victime, donc je dois te protéger de toi-même. L'un élève. L'autre infantilise. Ce n'est pas la même chose, et confondre les deux est exactement le tour de passe-passe qu'on dénonce.

Brett Kavanaugh, a man in his 50s, had been valedictorian of his high school, at Yale College and a star student at Yale Law, had clerked for the Supreme Court, had a top career as an appellate lawyer and federal judge and a pristine reputation, and then a random woman from the town he grew up in claimed he had groped her at a party 35 years earlier when they were in high school. Kavanaugh didn’t try to argue that the incident was consensual. He didn’t claim he remembered things differently than she did. He immediately stated that he had never even met the accuser. Denying ever meeting the accuser is a much stronger claim than merely denying assaulting her, and much easier to refute. After Kavanaugh made this denial, Christine Blasey-Ford no longer had to prove he had sexually assaulted her to scuttle his nomination, she only had to prove that the two of them had attended a party together at which such an assault might have occurred. She was unable to do so. She did not know whose house the alleged assault occurred at. None of the people she claimed attended the party corroborated any aspect of her account. Leland Keyser, a friend of Blasey-Ford’s, who the accuser claimed was at the alleged party, said she recalled no such event and had never met Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh produced a detailed calendar he had kept during the summer Blasey-Ford alleged she was assaulted, which included his whereabouts of every weekend night and listing who he was with. Kavanaugh argued that he could alibi himself and provide witnesses for any night Blasey-Ford claimed she might have been at a party with him. Blasey-Ford responded that she did not know the date of her assault and was not entirely certain it even occurred that year. Instead of being seen as persuasive, Kavanaugh’s calendar was mocked in both mainstream and social media because the reason he kept it was for a drinking contest he was having with his friends. Nearly a decade later, there is still not a single shred of proof or a single witness who will corroborate the claim that Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey-Ford were ever in the same room before she testified at his confirmation hearing. Nonetheless, people like Nick Kristof still claim Kavanaugh was “credibly accused” of sexually assaulting this woman.

@benryanwriter @JonHaidt pathetic

NYU professor @JonHaidt, who has stood at the forefront of the movement to challenge academia’s culture of suppressing the free exchange of ideas, is facing a campaign to cancel his graduation address. nytimes.com/2026/05/13/us/…

@zerohedge Riots averted

MAMDANI SCRAPS PLANNED NYC PROPERTY TAX HIKE IN REVISED BUDGET

@nypost What an idiot

NYC's elites are tired of being painted as the enemy by Mamdani and his ilk trib.al/71DoT0t

@BreitbartNews Drivel

Zohran Mamdani reacts to Citadel CEO Ken Griffin saying he is focusing on Miami projects instead of NYC after the mayor's "tax the rich" video singled out his home in the city Mamdani expresses no regret and confirms he will press forward on his project to have "the wealthiest New Yorkers paying their fair share"

@JohnMTillman @ZohranKMamdani Superb diagnosis

Watching @ZohranKMamdani's oafish, unprovoked attack on Ken Griffin blow up in his face in real time tells us so much about how contemporary leftism has been reconfigured by its elite practitioners. Firstly, Mamdani is not a "have-not." He is a Bowdoin graduate, the son of a Columbia professor and an internationally celebrated filmmaker, whose path to a New York City mayoralty ran through exactly the credentialed-creative pipeline that produces most of his voters. His base is not the working class. It is the downwardly mobile but college-educated, who were promised a particular kind of life by their degrees and are furious it didn't arrive, and who have decided the people standing between them and that life are not the radicalized professors who sold them seductive fictions or the ideologically captured universities that took their money, but a hedge fund manager in Miami. This is what I'd call Privilege Populism. The aesthetics of class struggle, performed by people whose parents or grandparents technically already won the class struggle, but with the appropriated symbolism recast in the direction of people who won it slightly more. It is war between the "haves" versus "have-mores," as some others have put it. The Mamdani's inciting video, gleeful in its innumeracy about about whether a $500 million pied-à-terre tax can actually fund anything it claims to, defiant in its ignorance about the dynamic effects of such taxation on human behavior and wealth outmigration, is the genre's mature form. Griffin's response is the part worth watching. He didn't argue or issue a statement offering a philosophical defense of capitalism. He simply pointed to his Miami construction project and said: this is the way. Then he said the part that should make every blue-state mayor uncomfortable: that what's happening in New York is "triggering the trauma I went through in Chicago." I watched that trauma play out for twenty years. Progressive politicians perform to excite the grievances and resentments of credentialed creatives, the productive class that subsidizes the city quietly relocates, the tax base hollows out, and the people who stay behind look at the resulting societal decline around them and misinterpret it as proof that they must vote even further to the left than before in order to improve things. In a warped but unignorable way, liberal mismanagement of states like Illinois and New York helped nurse the conservative governance triumphs of Florida and Texas. The Privilege Populists never figure this out, because the point is never truly to improve the lives of the "have-nots." It's to *perform* therapeutic acts of Resistance for them, on camera, against "villains" who can afford to leave and do.

@RuthDE The Man! A class act

Like the great Trevor Phillips, all of us gentiles should be standing with British Jews thetimes.com/comment/column…

'Antiracist Critical Pedagogy': Penn State Law School's New Strategic Plan, Devoted to 'Antiracism,' Raises Legal Questions @aaronsibarium @FreeBeacon freebeacon.com/campus/antirac…

Ken Griffin at Milken: “How did you feel about the Mayor’s little video?” “It was creepy and weird.”

Ken Griffin at Milken: “What the mayor of New York has made clear to my partners, and principally my New York partners, is that we need to double down on our bet in Miami"

Profound and moving monologue from Trevor Phillips - one of Sky’s greatest assets and the country’s increasingly bravest journalist.

🎓 Where academia went wrong, in under 60 seconds. Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier keynote address set the tone at HxA's recent conference:

@HdxAcademy I can only hope that more administrators and faculty (not holding my breath) come around to this view. The corruption of scholarship in the interest of "social justice" has been pervasive, deep, and deleterious in the extreme.

Wow! Zack Polanski and his motivations are not pure.