Is the Blue Wave building?

Posted on November 1, 2026 by Joe Weber

Even if Dems swamp on Tuesday, their challenges will remain daunting.

Several weeks ago, Donald J. Trump asked voters to “pretend that I’m on the ballot” as they voted on or before Nov. 3. On Tuesday, of course, we will learn whether the 61 percent of Americans who disapprove of him will do so.

One can only hope.

Almost certainly, the cake is baked already, the water is running high. Indeed, aside from Trump and select toadies, the expectation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is that Americans will likely vote their best interests in this election. As The New York Times reported, “a grim mood has set in around the White House, which has been rocked by turnover, tension among internal factions and anxiety over what happens should Republicans lose legislative control in Washington …”

The paper suggested that Trump is “an increasingly unpredictable president staring down the possibility that the Republican Party could lose both chambers of Congress” and that “some political advisers and outside Republican groups have warned the president’s aides that Mr. Trump could do more harm than good by holding rallies in battleground states with uncomfortably close races …”

But will voters prove such advisers right? Will there be a blue wave, as polls suggest?

Consider the latest accounting by The Guardian: “With Republicans clinging to a paper-thin 218–214 margin in the House and 53–47 lead in the Senate, opinion polls indicate a rising ‘blue wave.’ A recent Reuters/Ipsos survey gave Democrats an 11-point lead, 47 percent to 36 percent, on the generic congressional ballot, while Trump’s approval rating stood at 32 percent. Voters will also choose governors in 36 states and three US territories, and decide thousands of state legislative contests.”

The only question in the House seems to be how big of a margin Democrats will wind up with. As for the Senate, much turns on the tight races in Michigan, Iowa, Kansas and Texas, while red strongholds in Maine, Alaska, Ohio and South Carolina could also prove decisive.

Texas seems particularly compelling. Will seminarian James Talarico defy recent Texas history and clobber the morally and legally tarnished Ken Paxton in that Senate race? Given their tacit acceptance of Trump’s overwhelming moral and legal baggage, will Texans simply overlook corruption or will they choose a higher road?

Michigan, of course, is also a key race. Anti-Zionist candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is battling millions of dollars in pro-Israel Super Pac efforts as he tries to defeat former Rep. Mike Rogers to become the nation’s first Muslim U.S. Senator. The novice Democrat’s efforts got a gut-punch when his unsuccessful primary rival, Rep. Haley Stevens, endorsed Rogers.

“What our students see, what our children see and who we are as Michiganders is not hate and is not what we are getting out from our Democratic nominee right now,” Stevens said in a video posted on X.

For Jews, the Michigan race is especially problematic. Stevens represents a heavily Jewish district in suburban Detroit and is sensitive to constituent concerns there. As the Forward has reported, Stevens has slammed El-Sayed for his criticism of Israel and for not condemning a PAC ad, made by an outside group to boost his campaign, that blamed Israel for rising grocery prices. El-Sayed has shot back, invoking Stevens’ close relationship with the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.

For Jewish voters who can’t stomach Trump, the question is a matter of realpolitik. Can they can hold their noses, figuring that El-Sayed’s hostility to Israel will make little difference among 100 senators but that tipping the higher house to the Dems would make all the difference?

Will such voters make the same call Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made after his preferred choice, Stevens, lost to El-Sayed? Schumer, who is Jewish, pledged to “do what it takes to win,” brushing off deep disagreements with El-Sayed over Israel, Punchbowl News reported. Other issues — healthcare, the state of the economy and tariffs — matter more to Michiganders, the New York senator added.

As The New Yorker reported, prediction markets are favoring Democrats to win Senate races in North Carolina, Ohio, Alaska and Texas. The party is fighting uphill in Kansas and in Iowa but is drawing close. Even Mississippi seems in play.

“By just about any metric except the obscene, record-setting amounts of cash that Trump and a small circle of billionaires are spending to save the Republicans’ Senate majority, this fall’s contest looks like the wipeout that so many have predicted (and so often been embarrassingly wrong about) since Trump first entered politics 4,146 days ago: historically low approval ratings, an unpopular war with Iran that has led to high prices and surging inflation, corruption so flagrant that two-thirds of Americans now believe he is profiting off the Presidency,” Susan Glasser noted in The New Yorker. “Most notably, Trump’s sagging popularity is not just with Democrats and independents but with many Republicans in red states whose unwavering backing has, time and again, saved him during this insane past decade in American politics.”

And yet …

“So why, then, are so many Democrats no more than what Rahm Emanuel called, in an interview for The New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast the other day, ‘small ‘c,’ small ‘o,’ cautiously optimistic’ about their prospects for dealing Trump a decisive blow by winning the Senate?” Glasser asks.

“History suggests one obvious reason. Trump may never have been President at all if not for the Party’s fatal overconfidence about him, in 2016,” she notes.

Still, the odds look good for a blue wave to swamp Donald J. Trump on Tuesday. The question then will become: what will Dems do with that? Certainly, they’ll investigate his myriad cases of corruption. Perhaps they’ll even find grounds to impeach him yet again.

But can they turn around the inflation, the war, the tariffs and the self-aggrandizing gestures Trump has been making (his arch, his D.C. golf course, his Kennedy Center egomania, his crypto profiteering) that seem to have turned voters against him? The dog may indeed catch the car on Tuesday, but what then?

When is understatement misleading?

Posted on October 22, 2026 by Joe Weber

The New York Times stands accused of calling a “five-alarm fire” a matter of a few sparks

Joseph Weber

In a text journalism students have used for years, University of Nebraska Professor Emeritus John Bender and his colleagues warn against using loaded words. In order to preserve a sense of neutrality, they counsel against terms such as “extremist,” “radical,” “fanatic” and “zealot,” suggesting they convey value judgments by the writers. Use language that helps keep a reporter’s opinion out of the pieces, they advise.

In an era when overstatements or falsehoods by politicians and their critics alike abound on cable news and elsewhere, however, the advice in the text, Writing and
Reporting for the Media, seems almost quaint. Stridency and alarm about the state of the Republic seems the order of the day and journalists, some critics say, should reflect that, not mute it with euphemism and weak language.

The New York Times, “The Old Gray Lady,” has waded into the understatement fray in a new weekly newsletter, The Backstory. Patrick Healy, an assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust (an intriguing title given the widespread lack of trust in media nowadays), answers reader queries in the publication about the paper’s coverage of any number of issues.

The newsletter is home to “Sound Off,” where Healy parries, thrusts and explains things in exchanges with readers. In the debut edition, Healy went back and forth with Mark Jacob, a former metro editor for The Chicago Tribune, about whether the muted language the Times often uses in pieces about Donald J. Trump ill serves readers and the country. Jacob bristles at headlines such as “Trump Has Moved the Ethical Line” and terms suggesting that the president is “sidestepping norms” or is “untethered to the truth,” when the man and his aides are just lying.

Jacob pointed to a piece about former press secretary Karoline Leavitt that described her as fierce, steely, nimble and a homegrown star of the Trump White House. He said the piece “never once mentioned that she had constantly lied to the press during her entire time as press secretary. I mean, this woman, for example, after Renee Good was killed by ICE in Minneapolis, Karoline Leavitt called her a lunatic said that she was deranged and called her a domestic terrorist.”

He said the story “seemed to be awarding her style points, and a fascist liar like Karoline Leavitt is — does not deserve to be like praised for how good she is at lying.”

Instead of couching terms in euphemism and understatement, Jacob contended, The Times should be writing headlines such as “Donald Trump is assaulting democracy.” He added that “The New York Times not taking Trump seriously enough as far as normalizing his behavior and minimizing what I think is just a five-alarm fire in the country. And, I mean, I feel like The New York Times might think it’s being tough on him, but it’s just not being tough enough.”

Healy countered that the paper tends to be “precise but also measured” in its language. It doesn’t lean into terms “like fascist and liar” in its wording, though it does quote others saying such things, he said. He contended that “we do tend to be really careful about the most potent and inflammatory words. And yes, sometimes do use those in our own voice, but we’re very careful about it.”

The AME said: “What we’re trying to do, again, is bring facts to people, accurate information that whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, you would look at it and say, that’s corrupt or that’s authoritarian. We don’t need to tell you that in some blunt terms, we’ll give you those details.”

Healy argued that The Times focuses “on bringing those facts and that revelatory information to light, not just about hurling words at someone and calling them names, ultimately.” And for that effort, he maintained, “a lot of people across the spectrum, including a lot of people on the left and the Democratic Party, trust us because they believe that we’re presenting the facts in a straight way.” He held that “sources trust us as kind of a nonpartisan news organization.”

For his part, Jacob insisted that the paper’s approach soft-pedals the corruption and threats that Trump represents. He faulted The Times and others in the news business for living “on what I call Neutrality Island,” arguing that this approach constituted a lack of bravery.

The argument, a fascinating one, reminds me of hoary battles about “objectivity,” a term many journalism veterans have abandoned. No one can be objective, they say, suggesting that everything from the stories publications pursue — or don’t — to the sources they choose to quote — or don’t — are, in fact, very much subjective. That doesn’t mean good journalists aren’t obliged to be both fair and thorough and, yes, neutral in their choices of adjectives and descriptions.

Anyone who reads The Times consistently would have to agree that in its news columns – and even more so on its editorial page – the paper is almost never in Trump’s corner. In today’s edition alone, we read about how much Trump policies could cost Republicans dearly in Iowa, how young voters are tilting Democratic, how Trump is “openly embracing Mr. Putin and easing the economic pressure on the Kremlin,” and how Trump’s Washington D.C. golf course plan will harm area residents.

These are not Trump-friendly pieces of the sort one might find, say, on Fox News or other right-wing outlets.

So, is it necessary to say outright that Trump is a “fascist,” a “menace” to democracy, a “corrupt self-enriching demagogue?” Would it be helpful to describe his MAGA adherents as underschooled ignoramuses? Or should The Times and others quote folks saying such things, but in its own words stick to restrained language of the sort an old gray lady might favor?

If The Times used the hard-hitting terms Jacob and other critics might prefer – insisting they are more accurate – would it make any difference to readers, moreover? Surely, The Times doesn’t hope to win over Trumpists with its linguistic neutrality. That would seem to be a pipe dream; Trumpists, I suspect, aren’t reading critical news outlets, but instead they opt for Fox News and its ilk to hear their prejudices affirmed by the likes of Leavitt.

And readers of The Times stick with it, I’m sure, similarly to have their biases echoed and reinforced — no matter how much Healy insists it’s only delivering “straight” news.

In the end, The Times does seem to twist itself in knots to avoid accusing the notoriously dishonest Trump of lying, for instance. Still, terms such as “untethered to reality” do bring a certain elegance to reporting that accurately recounts the man’s venality.

Face it, we all know that Donald J. Trump is a corrupt and incompetent buffoon whose mental stability is at least questionable. But in the news columns do we need such rhetoric to make the point? Don’t the facts alone make that case? And doesn’t every new critical story just drive home the point anew, no matter how understated its headline may be?

The dispassionate, even cool-headed, journalistic approach Bender and his old-school colleagues press for may seem out of step in our overheated times. But perhaps they are still onto something.

Can minds be changed?

Posted on October 20, 2026 by Joe Weber

Social media may make the task difficult, perhaps impossible

Joseph Weber

Vanderbilt social scientist Arthur C. Brooks, who styles himself The Happiness Professor, wrote an intriguing piece for The Atlantic four years ago called “A Gentler, Better Way to Change Minds.”

In it, he noted that research “shows that changing minds, especially changing beliefs that are tied strongly to people’s identity, is extremely difficult. As one scholar put it, this personal attachment to beliefs encourages ‘competitive personal contests rather than collaborative searches for the truth.’”

He suggested, moreover, that online arguments make things worse. “Disagreements can feel like a war in which the fighters dig trenches on either side of any issue and launch their beliefs back and forth like grenades. You wouldn’t blame anyone involved for feeling as if they’re under fire, and no one is likely to change their mind when they’re being attacked.”

I’m reminded of this by a couple interchanges I had on Facebook with a couple former BusinessWeek colleagues. One set was based on a piece someone else shared that enumerated historical problems between Palestinians and Israelis. The other was based on a Wall Street Journal editorial that took the Nobel Committee to task for awarding the peace prize to Navi Pillay whose career, it said, “has been marked above all by hatred for Israel and the Jews that support it.”

Provocative as they were, these pieces gave my friends platforms for attacking Israel, the writers and, oddly, AI. Their criticisms, in fairness, did make some valid points, though there were no point-for-point refutations or even any of the real back-and-forth that marks in-person conversation. Mostly, they vented — briefly and sometimes tartly — making their cases or mounting attacks.

One of 55 posts in response to my posting of the WSJ editorial called it “[a]nother tone-deaf misread of history, geopolitics, and the real dangers facing Jews around the world today,” for instance. Another asserted that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to a “genocide,” though it dismissed the matter as “almost a semantic distraction,” contending that the term “massacre” would make right-wingers “just as hysterical.” The writer also defended the use of “apartheid” and “racist” as descriptive terms for Israel and, puzzlingly, referred to the U.S. as still having a “slave-based economy” today. She called Israeli democracy “an outright falsehood.”

Another friend derided opinion pieces that slammed Hamas and held that scholars of genocide broadly concurred that the term for the destruction of a people was suited to Gaza — though evidence suggested that there was far from a consensus on the point. She faulted what she called “poor sourcing and unfounded assertions.” She didn’t single out any examples, when pressed, but instead added, “I’ve said all i can usefully say.” On the matter of Israel limiting access to Gaza for journalists, she faulted an account of how various militaries, including those of the U.S., have limited journalistic access to war zones over time, calling it mere “whataboutism.”

All fair enough, I suppose. We all have deep-set views about such unsettling topics.

But I got the discomfiting sense that pieces I posted in response to their contentions went unread or, at least, unconsidered. It’s as if I cast them into a void, that they couldn’t be bothered reading something contrary to their biases or views. Or, if they did read them, they simply dismissed them as “opinion pieces.” One sympathetic friend, responding separately, noted that opinion pieces do often contain facts, suggesting that I remind my friends of that point.

Disturbing as some of these things may be alone, though, the more troublesome thing is a core problem related to the Net broadly and to social media in particular. Thanks to such vehicles, we are exposed to an astonishing explosion of diverse views. We are awash in more facts and viewpoints than ever before in history – not limited as we once were to, say, three major TV networks or a handful of newspapers. And yet, it seems many of us just see what we want to see, reading or viewing only what reinforces our prejudices.

Do we, in these interchanges, really consider the views of others or facts that contradict our biases? And are we really exposed to such dissenting views? If not, it’s perhaps because we are abetted in this narrowness by social-media algorithms that don’t share contravening information.

Maybe it’s inevitable that, as we sit separately in our homes and sift through information tailored for us, we remain blinkered. It’s far different from, say, meeting in a book club, where we converse with others who open our eyes and minds to different views of a piece of literature. It’s different from a classroom where, as young people, we were exposed to a range of novel views. And it’s far different from BusinessWeek editorial discussions, back in the day, where we were challenged — and challenged back — in live-and-in-person thrusts-and-parries of conflicting ideas about topics.

Along this line, I was privileged a while ago to attend a few dinners in Denver, where a rabbi of my acquaintance invited people in for “Clean Speech” dialogues. His concept, which he has rolled out nationally over the last few years, is to invite people in to talk at tables of eight so about hot topics on which there is likely to be disagreement. Facilitators – and sometimes speakers – provide some context and expert information. But the idea is to debate and disagree civilly — the “clean” part.

These dinners are set in a Jewish context. So, at one session, we discussed whether a two-state solution is still possible in the Middle East. At another, we discussed whether Jews have a home in the major political parties anymore. There was, of course, a lot of disagreement – though the discussions were all done respectfully and, I believe, people learned things they might not have considered. Certainly, I did.

In at least one of the dinners, I believe, one person’s mind seemed to have been changed. I don’t know about others. But, whether that happened or not, we did listen to one another, consider opposing views, and offer our feelings considerately and politely, if at times strongly.

“Showing others that you can be generous with them regardless of their values can help weaken their belief attachment, and thus make them more likely to consider your point of view,” is one of the phrases with with Brooks concludes his Atlantic piece. It’s easier to do that when sitting opposite someone over a meal.

That idea, moreover, echoes something I teach students in an editorial-writing course – that it’s helpful to concede points to your opponents when appropriate. Such an approach can buttress your view by showing that you recognize and consider the other side.

“But for your values to truly be a gift, you must weaken your own belief attachment first,” Brooks holds. “This is the argument of the late Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh. As he taught, we should all promise to ourselves, ‘I will cultivate openness, non-discrimination, and non-attachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world.’”

That’s a tall order when so many of us are so divided on so many things. But, for a host of reasons – not least of which is one’s own emotional well-being – it seems like smart advice. Whether people active on social media can heed it, of course, is a knotty thing.

October 7th

Posted on October 6, 2026 by Joe Weber

Maybe fiction can help us grasp it

Joseph Weber

The October 7 Memorial Wall; source: National Library of Israel

Six years ago, a retired Drake University professor wrote a piece in Psychology Today headlined “Why is Fiction More Believable Than Fact?” Fiction, Patricia Prijatel wrote, “can force us to face our realities far better than any news story.”

Skeptical about that? Well, here are some facts that are scarcely believable:

Three years ago, on Oct. 7th, Israel was subjected to the most horrific assault in the nation’s then 75-year history. Some 6,000 terrorists broke through fences in Gaza to massacre 1,200 people in some 20 Israeli communities. They slaughtered more than 350 people at a music festival. They raped and mutilated women. The terrorists wantonly murdered children and took at least 38 kids hostage, among the more than 250 people they carried off into Gaza, triggering an ongoing war that has taken some 70,000 lives so far.

The terrorists did this despite a Muslim tenet, a hadith that orders the faithful to not kill women or children. They even killed fellow Muslims and kidnapped some of them. Their savagery knew no bounds, as they moved from house to house in Israeli kibbutzim, torturing people as they filmed them and setting fire to entire neighborhoods.

So how can we process such horror, such inhumanity by people who invoke Allah as they commit unspeakable acts?

Lior Raz and Yaakov Zada-Daniel, in Fauda

One way, I believe, is through fiction, as Prijatel contended. Recently, I finished watching the fifth season of Fauda, a Netflix show featuring Lior Raz, a former elite Israeli commando who co-created the series. This latest season is all about coming to terms with Oct. 7th.

Two of the 11 episodes recreate some of the atrocities of the Hamas assault. We see the terror through the eyes of a single Israel family trapped and ultimately killed in their home. Perhaps, I should say, we almost experience that fear, as it has haunted me for days.

It is painful to watch. Indeed, Fauda’s producers issued a warning before the release of episodes seven and eight, saying they “include content, sights, and sounds that may be difficult to watch. It’s important for us to say: These episodes return to that terrible day and stand on their own. If watching is too difficult, it’s OK to give up and connect with the season’s plot, which will continue in” subsequent episodes. A disclaimer to that effect precedes each of those powerfully troubling episodes.

To be sure, Fauda gives us some of the big picture, showing bloodied, wounded and murdered people. But it’s a personal and intimate family story that is most haunting, that takes us beyond the bare statistics to make it seem all too real. It is gut-wrenching to see both those who were killed and those who survived them.

“After all, we have all seen dozens of real videos from the attack, many of them filmed by the terrorists themselves, and they were horrifying enough. But this time, the fictional work takes us directly into the horror,” one Brazilian viewer said, as quoted by The Jerusalem Post. The scenes “do not feel like an attempt to imagine the horror. They take us directly into it.”

After October 7th, Raz and his fellow writer, Avi Issacharoff, scrapped the original script idea and recast it to “show to the world this is what happened,” Raz told a Call Me Back podcaster.

For them, it was all very personal. Raz was in Romania, where he was slated to speak, at the time of the assault. He got a phone call from his sister saying she was hiding in a safe room, armed with a knife, and she needed him to save her. He couldn’t then do anything, of course, but he took the first available flight, got his gun and drove to an embattled town, Sderot, where he helped people flee the murderers. His sister, happily, escaped with her sons.

“Each and every one of us is carrying some kind of memory from October 7^th,” Issacharoff said.

In Fauda’s Oct. 7^th episodes, we do see beyond just the single family, such as when Raz’s character tries to help young people fleeing the Nova music festival. The writers used real events, recreating them for the screen. For instance, they show how 20-30 concert-goers fled into a big container to hide and were all killed. In another scene, a character walks by young people’s bodies piled atop one another in a shelter.

The series, and the Oct. 7 episodes in particular, hit many viewers around the world hard. One man, quoted by The Jerusalem Post, wrote: “I could barely keep my eyes open.” A woman wrote: “Yesterday, a friend called me and told me the same thing. She added, ‘Who knows, perhaps this series will help people understand the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7.’”

A viewer in India wrote: “Sleepless nights. Can someone please erase my memory of this episode?? I can’t stop thinking and worrying. Episode eight of ‘Fauda’ really disturbed me. I don’t understand how there are still Hamas supporters among us. God, please help me get over this series.” Another responded: “I am a huge fan of ‘Fauda’ and of Israel, but I don’t have the courage to watch the fifth season.”

To be sure, the writers struggled with how much to show, how graphic to be. They hint at a rape, for instance, but thankfully don’t depict it.

So, some commenters have said the show didn’t go far enough.

“It spared viewers descriptions of women who were gang raped and burned alive, families who were tied together and whose bodies were dismembered, the killing of pregnant women and children, the sexual desecration of bodies, the mutilation of genitalia, and horrific injuries suffered by children,” one viewer wrote. “Many children were also abducted, including infants as young as nine months old. Kfir Bibas was only nine months old when he was kidnapped; he was later murdered in captivity alongside his four-year-old brother, Ariel. The series did not show fathers who had kerosene poured over them and begged for their lives moments before being set on fire as their attackers laughed.”

Still, the Oct. 7^th episodes – and the whole series for that matter – should be mandatory viewing for Hamas sympathizers. The savagery of the terrorists becomes all too real, even without the worst of their monstrosity on display.

Beyond the terrible events of that day, we also get a sense of how Israelis try to come to terms both with them and with what many of them had to do afterward as soldiers. The Raz character, Doron Kabilio, is especially riveting as someone revolted by the violence he sees and – like most Israelis involved in defending their country, one expects – someone who loathes the violence he commits. Both rip him apart.

It’s reminiscent of a famous comment by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir: “When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.”

But when one contemplates the horrors the Hamas terrorists inflicted – with exultation – on innocent Israelis, one can only wonder whether the same sensibility that Raz portrays in Kabilio can possibly exist in those heavily propagandized Palestinians. They are taught to hate Jews from their earliest days. Indeed, the terrorists have used children as suicide bombers.

And there can be little doubt that Hamas knew that Israel would respond with overwhelming force to the events it triggered. The group’s leaders accepted the deaths of their fellow Palestinians as “necessary sacrifices,” in the words of the Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar, who welcomed high civilian casualties as a tool to generate pressure from the world on Israel. He cynically said, “Israel’s journal in Rafah won’t be a walk in the park.”

Israel’s soldiers killed Sinwar in October 2024 in Rafah.

Meir also famously said that peace will come “when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” Perhaps, however, it will come only when the last Hamas fighter is killed or surrenders. But, thanks to the all-too-real fiction displayed by shows such as Fauda, maybe some in the world who are tempted to excuse the group’s horrors will think twice.

Will you be persuaded? Will anyone?

Posted on October 1, 2026 by Joe Weber

Political ads besiege us, but they can backfire

Joseph Weber

Maybe you’ve seen some of the Trump ads that you, as a taxpayer, are paying for. If not, Donald J. Trump on one of them says “together we will defeat communism, socialism and Marxism in America” and “America will never be a communist country.”

If that ad strikes you as a campaign commercial designed to encourage voters to turn out for the GOP between now and November, the White House says you are just plain dumb. Such ads, which ran on a recent Fox News Sunday show and several college and NFL football games, are “very clearly not campaign ads,” the White House says. No, they just are “a reminder for Americans to love their country and know what it’s worth defending.”

Driving home the point for those numbskulls who might question the pre-midterms timing, Trump’s White House adds, “That’s not partisanship — that’s a government that still believes in the country it serves.”

And Brendan Carr, the Trump toady who runs the Federal Communications Commission, has rebuffed objections from some in the GOP, as well as from Democrats, about the legality of the $20 million TV effort. Asked about complaints from Public Citizen and others, the Trumper said the ad struck him as “normal course public service announcements that you see all the time.”

Never mind the offense taken by some Republicans. For instance, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said: “It’s a great message, I like the message, but it shouldn’t be paid for by taxpayer dollars.” Then there’s Sen. Mike Rounds, who said: “It would not have been something that I would have done…I just don’t think it’s right to be using taxpayer money in that way, particularly if it’s tied to political campaigns.”

And Sen. John Cornyn said the ad, which is nearly identical to one Trump used in his presidential race, crosses a red line. “We all know you’re not supposed to use taxpayer money for that purpose,” he said.

But the larger question is whether such advertising, from Trump or from individual campaigns, makes any difference. If not, the ads are just gifts – whether from taxpayers or unnamed billionaires — to national and local TV operators.

Certainly, plenty of donors and critics believe advertising blitzes can determine elections. “This critical 2026 midterm election may be decided by dark money, big money, tech money,” warns Brennan Center President Michael Waldman. “Above all, secret money. The money storm is now gathering. It could tip the outcome of many races.”

So far, at least $1 billion from anonymous donors has flooded into various campaigns, according to The New York Times. The newspaper tracked TV and digital ad buys, as well as donations to super PACs from nonprofits, saying the dark money surge has “reached industrial scale.” It quoted one critic, Nick Penniman of Issue One, as saying the cash is more than “enough money to manipulate a lot of politicians and to put a lot of poison in the blood of the American political system.”

There’s no doubt that the part about manipulating politicians is spot on. Legislators and others from presidents on down surely will do the bidding of those who fund their efforts to win and keep office — at least if they want their support the next time.

But there’s plenty of reason to think that a public weary of having their football games, news shows and soap operas interrupted by overly loud attacks on some politicians and encomiums for others may just shut down on the messages. For instance, will Trump’s attacks on communism play at all to voters who have plenty of non-ideological reasons to fault him and his party?

For a partial list of recent presidential blunders just read what Karl Rove, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, noted in The Wall Street Journal about Trump’s antics in September alone.

“The big news out of Republicans’ first-ever midterm convention: If the GOP won, Mr. Trump would give every adult $5,000. There was no prior consultation with congressional Republicans, and there were conflicting explanations of how it would be paid for … It was crickets. Then on Sept. 14, Donald Trump Jr. confirmed to the media that a Russian oligarch paid for his lavish post-wedding celebrations. That’s never a good look.

“Two days later, the president asserted Iranian leaders ‘want to make a deal.’ Six days after that, he said he might have to ‘annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly.’ This left voters whipsawed.

“On Sept. 16, the president said the Kennedy Center would ‘end up being ripped down’ unless the administration received ‘recognition’—i.e., his name on the building. Later that week, the president banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House press room. A judge soon restored access with a temporary restraining order as the outlets’ lawsuit against the administration proceeds.

“Even as GOP candidates are trying to make radical New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani the Democratic Party’s face, the president met with the mayor in what a reporter called a ‘lovefest.’ It’s hard to make Mr. Mamdani a pariah—and tarnish Democrats by extension—when Mr. Trump says the self-described socialist has ‘great potential.’

“Then there was last Thursday’s lavish White House dinner honoring Xi Jinping. Mr. Trump’s praise of the dictator as ‘truly outstanding, amazing’ couldn’t hide the summit’s lack of substantive achievement … Then there’s Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post early Sept. 20 that he has ‘agreed to convert’ his planned Triumphal Arch at Arlington National Cemetery into ‘a top grade Military Complex, complete with ‘drones, plus Snipers’ with ‘large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.’ Who will snipers be targeting? Commuters on the parkway the arch will overlook?”

And consider the view of The Washington Sun’s conservative writer Matt K. Lewis, who calls Trump “a greater threat to my conservative values and policy preferences than any Democrat.”

The tide will shift in a few weeks, he argues.

“Besides, what bad, un-conservative things could Democrats do?” Lewis writes. “I mean, are they going to start another forever war in the Middle East? Start socializing industries? Raise the national debt to $40 trillion? Cause abortion rates to rise? Increase the cost of groceries and gas? Pal around with socialists (like Zohran Mamdani)? Suck up to communists (like Chinese President Xi Jinping)? Nominate a bunch of weirdos, drunks and inexperienced hacks to the Cabinet? Pursue self-enrichment? Start building monuments to themselves? Threaten to use the power of government on their opponents?”

Beyond all the GOP failures that voters can see with their own eyes and experience in their lives (say, shopping for groceries or buying gas or perhaps houses), some academic research suggests that ads have at best a marginal effect. Work by a Yale political scientist and two California colleagues on the 2016 election found “small average effects on candidate favorability and vote… During the primary and general election, in battleground states, for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, effects are similarly small.”

A CATO Institute review of the effects of digital ads on Facebook and Instagram in the 2020 election similarly concluded that the messages “had, at most, a minimal impact on political outcomes.” This is so even as digital ads are becoming popular tools for politicians.

To be sure, name recognition for little-known candidates and a reminder effect – encouraging people to not forget to vote – would seem important. Moreover, if one candidate stays on the ad sidelines while his or her opponent blasts the airwaves, voters might feel that absence. And there’s evidence that tone — negative or positive — can have an effect.

Researchers at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, in reviewing the 2000 and 2004 elections, found that positive ads encouraged more people to show up on Election Day, while negative ads slightly suppressed turnout. Still, the marketing professor who ran the study, Brett Gordon, noted “No ad ever convinced me to do something.”

And there’s also the possibility that heavy ad spending can backfire, as it did spectacularly in Illinois earlier this year where tens of millions spent by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee may have helped the group’s opponents win primary contests. One, Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston, turned AIPAC’s efforts against him to his advantage, as he blasted the group for “trying to buy” the Congressional seat he is running for.

Will Americans cut through the noise and vote based on their interests and their life experiences rather than some Mad Ave whiz’s Hollywoodesque imagination? If they do, a lot of billionaires could soon find that they blew a lot of money trying to con people into doing the opposite.

Of wealth and want

Posted on September 29, 2026 by Joe Weber

Must our system be so skewed?

Joseph Weber

Life isn’t fair. We all know that. But does it have to be so unfair?

Recently, we watched a couple extraordinary spectacles on TV. One was a snowboard and ski competition in Alaska’s Chilkat Mountains that drew athletes from across the world to plunge down a breathtakingly steep pitch of impressive powder and occasional rocks.

The skill these folks demonstrated was extraordinary. Surely, the expense – since helicopters were involved, along with travel – was also exceptional.

The other event was simply bizarre. Called footgolf, it featured teams from around the world that kick a soccer ball around a golf course, aiming to pop it into oversized holes. More than 60 nations sent teams to Acapulco for this global competition.

Again, one must wonder how much all this extravagance must have cost.

Mind you, we watched all this after coming from a couple days in Snowmass and Aspen, Colorado. Two family members tested their mettle there against a half-marathon length mountain trail run that featured punishing slopes on a course where one could easily twist an ankle or worse.

Happily, both of our runners fared quite well and stayed healthy.

Later, as we enjoyed an Oktoberfest party near the Snowmass ski lifts, we eyed the extraordinary hillside and hilltop mansions that some of the 1 percenters own. Since places in that neighborhood sell for up to $49 million, “exclusive” is a word that does the area no justice.

It would be churlish to begrudge anyone of their athletic choices, no matter which venues they use.

And it’s true that those ski-area homes put a lot of people to work building them while keeping others employed maintaining them. For that matter, most sporting events spread cash around quite liberally. Just think about how many folks feed off the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, etc., as spectators pay extraordinary amounts to attend games.

Still, our society’s leisure is pricey and growing more so. It costs more than $1,650 nowadays to take a family of four to a Denver Broncos game, according to a recent survey. And in some stadiums where other teams play, the tab tops $2,000.

The problem is that with so much money sloshing around, it’s hard to reconcile such indulgences with scenes that we all occasionally see — even in relatively affluent Summit County, Colorado — of people begging on the street. Near us, for instance, a couple takes their three children along as they either plead for cash or sell flowers at intersections near a supermarket on many weekends.

They wave signs that implore drivers to help them support their little ones.

And, of course, as one drives around Denver or any other city, beggars have become commonplace, a sight as ordinary and often as ignored as a park bench. As we drive our grandkids to shops, playgrounds or kid sporting sites, some of us must steel ourselves for the moral quandary such trips can plunge us into – should we give these folks a few dollars? Or, by doing so, do we just help keep them on the streets by making begging financially rewarding for them? Do we perpetuate a cycle with our modest doles?

If their only alternatives were social service agencies and soup kitchens, would such folks just turn to them instead? Or do they need such things, and spare change as well, just to survive? And, for that matter, in these times when helping the poor seems politically toxic, do such people have enough agencies to turn to? If they are mentally ill or drug-addicted, can they get help?

Against this backdrop we have seen the inequality of wealth in the U.S. fly off the charts. “During three consecutive quarters in 2025, the share of total wealth held by the top 0.1 percent and the top 1 percent reached the highest levels on record since the Federal Reserve started tracking these data in 1989, with the latest data from 2026 showing it just below those peaks,” the Center for American Progress reports.

“Since the fourth quarter of 2024, the share of overall wealth held by the top 1 percent has grown from 31 percent to 31.6 percent, while the bottom half’s share has remained at a stagnant 2.5 percent,” CAP adds. “This gap has been driven wider by things such as soaring stock values and tax policy changes in the congressional Republican-passed Big Beautiful Bill that favor the wealthy, as well as persistently high debts for the middle and bottom of the wealth distribution.”

Now, it’s likely not the 1 percenters (or 0.1 percenters) who are jetting off to Alaska or Acapulco (or Snowmass) for unusual athletic challenges. The athletically minded may well predominantly hail from the middle or upper-middle classes, whose wealth levels have also risen in the last half-century (though not by anywhere near as much as those at the top). After all, it takes a certain level of financial comfort to afford such events and the leisure time to train for them.

But how is it that any of us – the megawealthy as well as those in the middle – can morally tolerate begging in our streets? Why do we not elect politicians who, instead of cutting taxes for billionaires, come up with solutions to help the desperate or the simply unlucky among us? When there is so much money in our system, why is it so unevenly distributed?

In a few weeks in Colorado we will vote on a proposition that would replace the state’s current 4.4 percent flat income tax with a graduated system ranging from 3.7 percent to 8.4 percent. Individuals and corporations earning above $500,000 would see their taxes rise.

If the measure passes, the state is expected to reap about $2 billion annually that advocates say would boost funding for K-12 schools, healthcare and early childhood programs. Perhaps some could help those on the streets, as well, if imaginative programs could be tapped to help them?

However, a competing proposal backed mostly by undisclosed donors – presumably including some of the state’s wealthiest folks — would keep the 4.4 percent rate, and its backers note that voters have twice lowered that rate from 4.63 percent in 2020.

To be sure, there are sound economic arguments against dumping that flat rate.

“Colorado’s relatively low 4.4 percent flat income tax has been a major draw for businesses and young professionals,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized in opposing the graduated tax. “It’s one reason the state’s population has surged over the last couple of decades. But now progressives want to make Colorado more like California and the high-tax states that many of its inhabitants left.”

The editorialists note that the change would disadvantage the state, compared with neighbors. “Colorado’s top rate would rank by far the highest in its neighborhood, which includes Wyoming (no income tax), Arizona (2.5 percent), Utah (4.45 percent), Oklahoma (4.5 percent), Nebraska (4.55 percent), Kansas (5.58 percent) and New Mexico (5.9 percent),” the Journal editorialist argues.

And it’s unlikely that most of the inhabitants of the sprawling ski-area homes actually pay income taxes in Colorado. Chances are good that they keep their main residences in low-tax states.

Still, does it not offend common decency that we live in a system where the biggest challenges for some people are putting soccer balls into oversize golf holes while others beg to feed their children? Is the split-screen universe we inhabit now all too reminiscent of the 16th century Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account of a princess who, when told peasants had no bread to eat, said “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”? (loosely, “Let them eat cake.”)

Life will always be unfair, but maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so unfair. If we can scale mountains to ski and travel the globe to play odd games, can we not find a way to help the hungry to feed, clothe and house themselves?

Someone needs a timeout

Posted on September 18, 2026 by Joe Weber

Trump’s terrible, horrible time is hurting others

Joseph Weber

Donnie Trump has been having a lot of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days lately, kids. It’s like he woke up every day for the last couple weeks with gum in his hair (and he likes his hair), missed out on a window seat in the car and got in trouble at school.

Only, it’s a lot bigger than all that – so much so that cranky Donnie has been stamping his feet, waving his little hands and banning newspeople from his house. Mind you, that’s The People’s House, even if Donnie thinks he can wreck it whenever he wants to, so his new bans on CNN, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) and Politico may just amount to an empty tantrum.

We’ll have to see what judges have to say about that – and a lot of judges haven’t been very nice to Donnie lately.

The problem for Donnie is that these newspeople have been telling everybody about a lot of no good, very bad things happening to him. He doesn’t like it when they do. He says they “constantly write or report FICTION and LIES” about him.

Some judges, for instance, have been spanking him and these people have told the country about that. One judge refused to let Donnie put his name back on the Kennedy Center after he and an appeals court had ordered Donnie’s name off it. This hurt Donnie’s feelings so much that he threatened to wreck the center just as he did the East Wing of the White House so he could build a big golden dance hall.

And a big group of judges in the Supreme Court stopped Donnie from using the U.S. Postal Service to stop some people from voting. Donnie yelled at the judges about that, calling three of his friends on the court “a shell of their original selves.” Donnie’s worried about voting coming up in November because a lot of his friends could lose unless he can scare a lot of voters away.

Donnie doesn’t like MS NOW, which used to be called MSNBC, because he says it mostly is kind to Democrats, people that Donnie calls “Dumocrats.” These are the people who might take a lot of jobs away from Donnie’s friends in just a few weeks.

But Donnie is also unhappy because of a lot of bad news in the economy. High gas prices have been making drivers very sad and they are mad at Donnie about that, giving him record low approval ratings. CNN, one of the places Donnie is most angry at, called this a “crude awakening.” And a friend of Donnie’s got him mad by raising interest rates, which will make everything more expensive for voters.

Some of the newspeople who Donnie doesn’t like have been saying he was fibbing when he said all kinds of things are getting less expensive lately. Most people know that’s not true, but it makes Donnie mad to be told that. He probably thought CNN was nasty when it said his “claim that ‘almost every item’ is getting cheaper comes up against a damning reality.”

Donnie’s fight with people in Iran is not going well, either, which also is making him sad. The Iranians are bombing ships again, so Donnie says he may “annihilate” them. Some newspeople have said Donnie has often said he won the war, but they keep telling people it’s still going on. Politico may have made Donnie especially mad because it has told people that at least one big member of Donnie’s party wants to fire the Secretary of Defense because of the fight with Iran.

But what may be bothering Donnie most about Politico is that it told people that a bad Russian man who is friends with the even badder man who runs Russia rented a private island and paid for fireworks at a party after the wedding of Donnie’s son. Donnie’s son’s wife said it was just a wedding gift, but some people who don’t like Donnie said it raised questions about “pay-to-play schemes and foreign intelligence infiltration” of Donnie’s family.

Donnie didn’t say what was bothering him most right now. Instead, he told people there were “cumulative stories over the last few years.” But he has been mad at newspeople for many years because many of them don’t like things he does, such as pushing brown and Black people out of the country even if that’s illegal and trying to build big monuments that a lot of people don’t want.

Donnie says that there may be other newspeople that he will ban from the White House and some people guess that this could include The New York Times and The Washington Post, which he says are “disgusting.” But the man who runs the Times, A.G. Sulzberger, wrote that lots of presidents have been mean to reporters.

“Presidents of both parties have done their best to pressure the press and discourage reporting they haven’t liked,” he wrote. “John F. Kennedy spied on one of our reporters. Richard Nixon tried to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both used the courts to try to force Times reporters to reveal confidential sources.”

But he said no president has been nastier than Donnie. “No president in modern history has been more hostile than Donald Trump to a press he’s dubbed ‘the enemy of the people,’” Sulzberger wrote. “He accuses reporters of treason, a crime punishable by death. He personally sues news organizations when their coverage displeases him. He directs his administration to use the levers of government power to investigate, subpoena and prosecute journalists for doing their jobs.”

And yet, when he is talking privately, Donnie has been nice. As Sulzberger put it, “… in a reminder of the press’s lasting importance, Mr. Trump, like his predecessors, still reads The Times. He still relies on us, still takes questions from us and still quotes us when convenient. Indeed, during a visit to The Times, he told my colleagues and me that he thinks of us as ‘a great, great American jewel, a world jewel.’”

Still, Donnie has not been a happy boy lately and he’s taking that out on other people, something that most children know is not a good thing. Do you think he should sit in the corner for a while? Might a timeout be a good idea for him? Maybe a really long one?

Do we want “watchful protectors?”

Posted on September 8, 2026 by Joe Weber

Flock cameras ignite a bipartisan backlash

Joseph Weber

A Flock camera opponent makes his view known, source: NPR

In late August, a 23-year-old driver weaving on a west Denver road late at night ticked off an 18-year-old and his passengers in another car. The younger man flashed his lights and his friends made obscene gestures, enraging the older fellow enough that he gave chase and repeatedly fired a gun, according to police.

He hit one of the passengers, who died four days later.

The shooter sped off with a Denver police car in hot pursuit. But, in the end, investigators used surveillance video, including from Denver’s Axon and Aurora’s Flock cameras, to track the car and capture the killer.

Score another win for the more than 100,000 such cameras that have popped up all across the U.S. The Denver case comes atop more than one million criminal investigations and incidents last year that were aided by Flock cameras, according to Flock Group Inc. The Atlanta-based company claims that its ubiquitous cameras were involved in one of every five resolved cases and that they helped authorities find more than 10,000 missing persons.

So, what’s not to love about the cameras, which don’t collect images of people but rather of vehicle information, principally car license plates? Well, according to a strange-bedfellows mix of right-wingers and lefties, there’s plenty to hate about the so-called ALPRs (automatic license plate readers) from Flock and its increasingly popular rival, Axon Enterprise Inc.

On the left, the “creepy cameras” drew the ire of the ACLU. “Just think about how much someone could learn about your life if cameras constantly tracked where you drove,” the group says. “They could find out which doctors you visit, what house of faith you worship at, who you visit or drive around with — even which political meetings and protests you attend.”

The ACLU points to repeated use of Flock by ICE and CBP to go after immigrants without warrants. “Kansas police used them to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the department, while a Colorado police officer wrongfully accused a woman of theft based on a Flock hit and then refused to look at evidence proving her innocence,” the group adds. “A mother and her children were held at gunpoint because ALPR cameras wrongly flagged their car as stolen.”

Meanwhile, on the right, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, recently told police departments to stop spending state money on Flock Safety cameras. As The Texas Tribune reported, Abbott pointed to a Lufkin, Texas, police officer now facing 100 counts of misusing public information for allegedly using the area’s Flock cameras to surveil eleven people for more than a year. At least six police departments and sheriff’s offices across Texas in the past month have announced that officers were being placed on leave, investigated or criminally charged in misuse cases.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis quickly followed Abbott’s move with orders to have the systems pulled off roads in his state. DeSantis, who also opposes using automated systems to clock speeders, describes the surveillance technology as “out of control.”

As Newsweek reported, more than 150 U.S. communities have now rejected, canceled or deactivated automated license plate reader systems, according to the anti-surveillance project DeFlock, marking a sharp increase in just a few weeks. They range from Lynchburg, Virginia, and Asheville, North Carolina, to Gloucester, Rhode Island.

Summit County in Colorado, where I live, suspended its deal with Flock for 30 days to seek public comment. At least nine of the 30 cameras in the county have been taken down or vandalized in recent weeks.

Across the country, the cameras have even become a midterm campaign issue. The Associated Press reported that candidates for governor in Wisconsin have sought limits, while others in Pennsylvania have supported a ban. A Michigan congressional candidate called the cameras “un-American,” and an enterprising Florida Senate candidate began offering campaign merchandise opposing them.

Donald J. Trump seems to be trying to suss out the politics involved, perhaps calculating how many votes his party could lose by taking a stance. “Well, it’s being studied right now,” Trump said, according to the Washington Examiner and PBS News. “You know, you have pros and cons, right? It’s being studied right now. We’ll have an answer soon, as to our views on it, in the coming weeks.”

For its part, Denver canceled its contract with Flock, but replaced it with cameras from Axon, known to police for its Tasers and body cameras. Denver halved the number of cameras to 50 under Axon, which backers say offers better privacy protections. Unlike Flock, which keeps its data in a national database accessible to law enforcers across the country, Scottsdale-based Axon limits its information to individual subscribing agencies. Denver, for instance, owns and controls its data. And that data disappears after 21 days.

Still, in the recent Denver murder, cameras from both companies played a role, it appears. Notwithstanding the abuses – which surely merit prosecution – there’s little question that the heightened surveillance with such cameras has been enormously helpful in nailing bad actors.

It all reminds me of a visit I made a while ago to Singapore, where cameras track not only vehicles, but people. On a bicycle tour of the city-state, our guide asked us why we had not seen any police officers or cars. His answer: there are few of them because everyone knows they are on camera in any public place. The result is an extraordinarily low crime rate, with just 341 physical crimes for every 100,000 residents reported last year.

Singapore “watchful protector,” source Singapore Police Force

Americans and Singaporeans, the guide noted, have different ideas about the tradeoff between safety and privacy. The “watchful protectors,” as Singapore police call them, don’t sit well with lots of Americans.

For me, the issue is something of a no-brainer, though, a case of flailing after a barn door when the thoroughbreds are miles down the road already.

As a matter of principle, I see little difference between my license plate being eyed by a roving police car or a cop on the corner and a fixed camera. Moreover, there are few public places anymore, it seems, where cameras don’t track our movements. Go to any shopping mall, walk into many shops, and trip down most city streets and it’s a good bet you are on candid camera.

Is this a good thing? Not sure about that. Is it creepy, as the ACLU says? No question. Still, that seems to be life in America and much of the rest of the world in 2026. Privacy seems to have become as quaint as the parchment the Bill of Rights was written on.

There’s no doubt for me, however, that abuses of the system by ICE or cops pursuing lovers who jilt them demand prosecution. Such things are far creepier than having my plate clocked while driving down Main Street in Frisco or anywhere else. Perhaps suitable regulation with good oversight would come in handy.

But depriving cops of a tool that can nab murderers or find missing folks? I suspect few of us would be down with that.

Raw antisemitism in the academy

Posted on August 31, 2026 by Joe Weber

An attack on a business-school dean lays it bare

Joseph Weber

Albert Einstein, source: Library of Congress

In April 1933, less than four months after taking power in Germany, the Nazi Party passed a bland sounding law that ended the careers of some 1,200 Jewish academics. The “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” – the Berufsbeamtengesetz — provided that non-Aryans – Jews – could be fired or forced into retirement from their university posts.

Many fled the country, including 14 Nobel laureates and 26 of Germany’s 60 professors of theoretical physics. One theoretical physicist – vocal anti-Nazi Albert Einstein – turned in his German passport and renounced his citizenship shortly before the law was enacted. Einstein, who had been a professor at the University of Berlin and directed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, at the time was teaching at the California Institute of Technology.

“When the Nazis came to power, I looked to the universities that prided themselves upon their intellectual freedom, and they failed me,” Einstein said.

Today, it’s not the government that is assailing Jewish academics in the United States. Rather, the assaults come from within the universities. They are led by students, faculty, staff, and organized faculty-led or endorsed campus groups, including unions.

Dean Yael Grushka-Cockayne, source: Poets&Quants

The most glaring case in point now is an effort to oust a much-decorated scholar from the deanship at the University of Virginia’s prestigious Darden School of Business. Yael Grushka-Cockayne’s offense, according to the shadowy campus group Students for Justice in Palestine, is that she is an Israeli who in the 1990s served in the Israel Defense Forces. Then, a few years later, she worked in San Francisco for an Israeli software company. And in 2018, she took students and current UVA President Scott Beardsley, a business administration professor, to Israel.

In other words, Grushka-Cockayne is a Jew who, like many other Jews in America and elsewhere, has supported her ancestral homeland.

That’s enough to void a doctorate from the London Business School and master’s degrees from that school and the London School of Economics. It’s enough to make meaningless 17 years of service at Darden marked by a string of awards that include the Darden Morton Leadership Faculty Award in 2011, the University of Virginia’s Mead-Colley Award in 2012 and the Darden Outstanding Faculty Award in 2013 and 2022, the Faculty Diversity Award in 2013 and 2018, and the University of Virginia All University Teaching Award in 2015. More recently, she was named among the Executive MBA Transformational Faculty in 2024 and the Part-Time MBA Transformational Faculty in 2025.

Despite such distinctions, the SJP chapter at UVA has set out to fire Grushka-Cockayne, who was named dean on Aug. 1, by way of a petition drive on Instagram. The group, which doesn’t name any of its leaders and which may amount to little more than a thinly populated Instagram site, calls the new dean “UVA’s newest feat in legitimizing genocide.”

Never mind that Grushka-Cockayne has not publicly discussed her feelings about Israel’s policies. And never mind that most Israeli young people serve in the IDF or that when she left the forces, in 1996, she was in her early 20s. And never mind that she has zero influence on the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

As John Byrne, the founder of the Poets&Quants business-school website, writes, it’s one thing to criticize the Israeli government. But “holding an Israeli-born professor personally responsible for the actions of that government is something else entirely.”

Indeed, the petition the pro-Palestinian group is pushing defies the sort of basic logic that even the rawest business-school student would know.

“Would we hold an American professor personally responsible for Abu Ghraib because he once served in the U.S. military?” Byrne asks. “Would we demand that a Russian professor resign because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine? Would we question whether a Chinese-born academic should lead a university program because of Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs?”

Of course not. Unless, that is, we apply the same sort of logic the Nazis did in destroying the careers of so many brilliant academics nearly a century ago. If they were Jews, they had to go. In Grushka-Cockayne’s case, that means if she’s an Israeli, she has to go.

But the call to end the Darden dean’s role is not occurring in a vacuum. It is of a piece with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which the Anti-Defamation League reports forbids people-to-people exchanges, dialogue opportunities for Israelis and Palestinians or even interactions between “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestine” groups and advocates unless the parties involved first recognize Israelis as “oppressors” and “colonizers.”

It also comes amid growing antisemitism – often dressed up as anti-Israeli sentiment – on many campuses. Nearly three-quarters (73.2 percent) of 209 Jewish academics surveyed last year by the Anti-Defamation League and the Academic Engagement Network reported anti-Jewish activities or statements from faculty, administrators, or staff on their campuses.

While much of such activity is focused on Israel, some respondents told of events organized by another group, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine, that “were billed as being anti-Zionist but … posted tropes about Jews and Israel that were clearly antisemitic.”

Half (50.2 percent) of the respondents believed that their campuses have been affected by “soft” or “shadow” boycotts. Of them, 55.2 percent noted that departments avoided co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent reported that partnerships with Israeli institutions and/or academics were discouraged or blocked, the ADL-AEN study reported.

“In their open-ended responses, faculty described being publicly maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed, with repercussions including canceled academic talks, denied professional opportunities, reputational damage, and even withdrawal from the academy,” the report added.

More recently, according to another ADL-AEN report, academic organizations have been hijacked by anti-Israel members.

“Jewish members report hostility from leaders and fellow members for raising concerns about antisemitism, expressing views related to Israel or Zionism, or challenging anti-Israel advocacy within their unions,” the report noted. It quoted one academic as saying, “the term ‘Zionist’ is applied as a slur if you express an opinion other than full condemnation of Israel.”

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a national union of faculty and other academic professionals, in 2024 reversed its longstanding opposition to academic boycotts, particularly of Israel. It now claims efforts such as the BDS movement are “legitimate” tactics. It even hosted a webinar on “scholasticide in Palestine,” and, according to ADL-AEN, did not respond to requests from Jewish organizations to include different perspectives.

And other groups, coopted by anti-Israeli members, have mirrored such efforts.

In 2025, the California Faculty Association, which represents faculty across 23 California State University (CSU) campuses, urged CSU to cut academic ties with Israeli universities. It invoked claims of “scholasticide,” “apartheid,” and “genocide,” according to the ADL-AEN report. The Santa Cruz Faculty Association took similar action by co-authoring resolutions that raised allegations of “scholasticide” in Palestine and supported anti-Zionist departmental statements on the grounds of “academic freedom.”

So, the SJP demand for the Darden dean’s head is consistent. It’s just more of the same, though it puts a face, an individual target, on the antisemitic and anti-Israeli campaign. Tellingly, its proponents are too cowardly to let their own faces be seen or their names known.

“Unfortunately, SJP seems eager to raise a five-alarm fire over anything remotely affiliated with Israel,” a student writing in the UVA newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, noted. “This July, the organization went as far as to call for the cancellation of an event in Tel Aviv, Israel designed to connect with prospective Israeli students — an event having nothing to do with Israeli military action in Iran, Gaza or elsewhere. Rather than advancing any substantive concerns, SJP appears to harbor a personal vendetta against all things Israeli.”

But can there be a “substantive concern” here? Just as was the case in Germany in 1933, the only one here is raw and undiluted antisemitism.

Fear and loathing in Trumpworld

Posted on August 28, 2026 by Joe Weber

Why do a couple conservatives want to limit their daughter’s intellectual growth?

Joseph Weber

In “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner’s Gothic short story, the character Emily Grierson can’t accept the social changes the end of the Civil War brings to her southern town. Once a hopeful and vibrant young girl, she shuts herself off from the outside world, becoming a recluse who clings to dying traditions until she herself dies.

The 1930 story, which ends in a macabre tragedy, makes a bold statement about the heavy costs of rigidity and intellectual and social isolation.

I’m reminded of the tale now because I wonder whether U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and his wife, Fox TV personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, are setting their daughter Paloma up for a similar fate. Certainly, it’s not physical isolation they have in mind, but instead an intellectual and social quarantine.

And it seems their fears speak volumes about the state of Trump-era conservatism.

Recall that Duffy and his family have their own reality-TV show, a YouTube series called The Great American Road Trip. One episode has been getting a lot of attention because in it Paloma tells her devoutly Catholic and very conservative folks that she’d like to go to Harvard – much to their dismay. Mom would prefer a small Catholic university, certainly not Harvard.

“If I send you there, I think what happens is they have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds,” says dad, a graduate of St. Mary’s University of Minnesota and what is now called the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul.

As New York Times columnist David French notes, young Paloma offers a “remarkably mature” response.

“But I went to an extremely conservative school in high school,” she says, “and I’m part of an extremely conservative family, and then if I go to a liberal setting, that’s a way more well-rounded education than if I go to a conservative high school and then go to a conservative college.”

Duffy’s retort: “But they’re so good at it. You’ll see young people go to a conservative school with a conservative family, and they get perverted and contorted.”

As French argues, in urging Duffy to let Paloma go to that supposed bastion of radical-liberalism, the experience would be good both for Paloma and Harvard. After attending Lipscomb University in Nashville, the Alabama-born and Kentucky-raised French himself went to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1994.

David French, source: The New York Times

Back then – perhaps like now – French tells us, Harvard was “in the midst of intense ideological battles, in which conservative students were sometimes ruthlessly booed, hissed and heckled, merely for stating their views.” Nonetheless, at such a school, he contends, conservatives “will make liberal friends, including some who last a lifetime. My three years at Harvard were also three of the best years of my life, in part because they were so challenging.”

The writer says his ideas are stronger now because of the arguments he considered back then.

“We learned from one another, and we still learn from one another. There are times when my friends and classmates can even hear the echoes of our longtime debates and disagreements in my columns,” French writes. “I was a conservative and a Christian when I met them. I’m a conservative and a Christian now, but I’m a better Christian and a better conservative because they tested me. In the absence of that testing, I shudder to think what I’d be like today. To see what right-wing bubbles can do to the Christian mind, one need only look at the strident, conspiratorial — and often downright dumb — discourse in so many parts of the religious right today.”

Perhaps the Duffys prefer the “downright dumb” discourse one hears in Trumpworld now?

Certainly, students like Paloma would find their convictions tested and challenged at a school such as Harvard, but if their ideas are sound and they can back them up, would they not find themselves even more sure of those ideas? French argues that “every person — especially those of us who live in the world of ideas — should spend time in a place where he or she is a distinct religious or ideological minority, even when it’s hard. It can be among the most clarifying and rewarding experiences in life.”

I suggest that the very real problem for her parents, however, is that some of those ideas may be unsound. Harvard, it’s likely, would make Paloma reasonably question them.

The clip doesn’t detail what insidious liberal ideas she might be “perverted” by, but one can conjecture. They could involve topics such as personal sexual diversity, traditional women’s roles, minority rights, systemic racism, religious dogma and a basket full of other modern matters whose investigation would mortify Trumpists.

It’s entirely possible that a seemingly sheltered Paloma would bring home a lot of notions that would upset mom and dad. She could come back at Christmas break with arguments that, maybe, the Duffys would be hard-pressed to rebut, given their narrower intellectual upbringings. (Paloma’s mother is a product of Arizona State University and the University of California, San Diego).

To get personal about this, I attended a religious high school in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time of social and political upheaval that in some ways was worse than today’s. Occasionally, I also went to evening sessions at Rutgers College in a program called “Liberation High School,” in which my ideas — most of which were received wisdom, of course — were challenged. Everything from abortion and capitalism to military service was up for grabs (recall that this was while the Vietnam War raged).

Somehow, I managed to get through all that. Over time and, perhaps surprisingly, thanks to schooling in a graduate program at a different Ivy League school, Columbia, some of those leftish ideas dissipated for me. Liberal values such as fairness, equity and justice remained, but my sense of how to achieve those changed. (Hint: the DSA is anathema to me).

Of course, society changed a lot in the ‘60s and ‘70s – much as post-Civil War society in Faulkner’s story did. Faulkner’s intellectually isolated Rose couldn’t accept the changes the South wrestled with. Perhaps, she has a lot in common with the Duffy parents in this regard.

To get a bit more personal — and more recent — when I was teaching in the journalism school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln just a few years ago, I gave a college tour to a high school boy who was considering attending UNL. Like Paloma, he was a student at a conservative religious high school. And, like the Duffy parents in their attitude about Paloma, he was nervous about going to the big university.

He told me he was afraid of having his values and beliefs threatened in the big school. He wondered whether he would be better off going to a small religious college, where his values would be reinforced, not questioned. He didn’t want to have to defend his ideas but rather to simply have them reaffirmed.

The irony was that UNL – perhaps like the schools the Duffy parents attended – was a fairly conservative place. Catholics had a major presence on campus, with lots of supportive organizations. Indeed, I taught students who proudly spoke of attending annual Right to Life antiabortion marches in Washington. And other denominations had churches and youth organizations for the young and faithful. For better or worse, fraternities and sororities made up a big part of campus life.

Though I don’t know what decision that young man made, I suspect he ran away from UNL as fast as the Duffys would like Paloma to flee any notion of Harvard. As it happens, it appears that Paloma could wind up attending the University of Chicago, instead of heading north to Cambridge. We learn in the Duffy reality show that she’s been accepted there.

The University of Chicago, source: Facebook

If Paloma does opt for Chicago, though, the Duffys might find themselves just as hard-pressed as if she went to Harvard.

“The curriculum made us appreciate that the best way to contend with an argument was to engage with it rather than denounce it, and that the prerequisite to engagement was close and sympathetic reading,” New York Times columnist and Trump loather Bret Stephens has said. “Chicago taught me… never to be satisfied with a first, second, third, or even a fourth opinion. Learning and thinking and progress take place through a continual process of intellectual challenge.”

Could the Duffys’s Trumpism — and perhaps some of their other views — stand up to such a challenge? Their first post-enrollment Christmas dinner could be a doozy.