Harvard grad shows ignorance of history

Local paper publishes claptrap

Remember when Elise was calling Andrew Cuomo the worst governor ever? She kept it up for months, and how she gloated when he resigned! 

Now she is gloating over her grilling of three female university presidents, leading to resignations at Harvard and UPenn. Put on the spot, the women stumbled over Stefanik’s hypothetical question, which asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their universities’ codes of conduct.

Most congressional witnesses are savvy enough to avoid hypotheticals. But the three women tried in a sincere but academic way to answer her, saying context matters and offering overly careful responses that gave Stefanik an opening.

Since then, she has hammered them daily in interviews and online statements, crowing when first one, then another quit under pressure.

“ONE DOWN, TWO TO GO,” she said on X, and then, “TWO DOWN, ONE TO GO.” 

Stefanik went to Harvard as an undergraduate, and three years ago was kicked off the advisory committee of the university’s Institute of Politics for pushing lies about the 2020 election. 

Was it bitterness over her removal that fueled her anger? Here is the mouthful she wrote on X after Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, resigned:

(Harvard) “knows that this long overdue forced resignation of the antisemitic plagiarist president is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history.”

That statement does require context.

In the 1920s, concerned that too many Jewish students were getting into Harvard, the university changed its admission policies to keep their numbers down.

In the 50 years from 1890 to 1940, Harvard admitted an average of three black students per year, which, while shameful, is better than colleges in the South where no Black students were admitted right into the 1960s and then only under orders from the federal government.

Clemson University in South Carolina still honors the legacy of Ben Tillman by calling one of its main campus buildings Tillman Hall. Tillman was governor of the state from 1890-’94. He was also a white nationalist who advocated for lynching and took part himself in killing innocent Black people. 

Tillman Hall at Clemson University is named after a famous racist.

So Stefanik’s assertion that the bumbled responses of three university presidents to her hypothetical question are the beginning of “the greatest scandal of any college or university in history” is dubious. 

She is either ignoring U.S. history or is ignorant of it.

The university presidents were tone deaf. But those who look for opportunities to praise Stefanik have celebrated her performance beyond all measure of its importance.

Mark Frost, editor and owner of the Glens Falls Chronicle weekly newspaper, said she “crashed the ivory tower.”

Frost expounded on his praise, writing that when a reader criticized him for it —  “I thought of responding: You’ve got your opinion, I’ve got my opinion. By the way, did you go to Harvard?”

His comeback captures the way people like Stefanik use the reputation of elite universities they attended to silence their critics, even as they mock and scorn those same institutions.

A less well-known institute of higher education, the College of Saint Rose in Albany, has been struggling financially for years and recently announced it would close this spring. One of my kids went there, as did hundreds of other children from Stefanik’s district over the past century. She has been a member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for several years — did she try to help St. Rose?

The colorful emojis and exaggerations and context-free speculation employed by politicians like Stefanik can be momentarily entertaining. But all the energy that could be used on issues that matter to her constituents is getting wasted instead on nonsense.

Glance at the “education” page of her website and you will see highlighted her “strong stance against critical race theory and racist indoctrination in our schools.” Whatever actions that stance entails (probably none), it has done nothing to help schools in upstate New York.

In the North Country and in the United States, we have real problems, not hypotheticals, cultural grievances or imaginary conspiracies, that need attention. If Stefanik wants to deal with big issues (she is supposedly investigating antisemitism on college campuses), she should look into the flouting of the rule of law by Donald Trump and the threat he poses to our status as a democracy.

That would require her to put the country’s long-term welfare over her own short-term political advancement. It’s not impossible — Liz Cheney did it — and it’s not too late. In this new year, I’m hoping Stefanik abandons her frivolous, mendacious politics and follows Cheney’s patriotic example.

I disagree with Liz Cheney on many things, but she’s a patriot. I can’t say the same for Elise Stefanik.

Heartland Baloney

The Post-Star in its recent edition used on the editorial page an opinion piece from the Heartland Institute, based in Illinois and notorious for disseminating misleading propaganda. The Heartland Institute downplayed the risks of smoking while being funded by tobacco companies. It downplayed the risks of climate change while being funded by oil companies. Now it is downplaying the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in the pages of local papers. 

It’s a low point for the Post-Star to run this piece, written by Chris Talgo, editorial director of the Institute, and arguing that the attack was a riot that arose spontaneously out of a protest, not a planned assault on our government.

 No one has been charged with insurrection, Talgo argues, and offers a definition of the word: “a violent uprising by a group or movement acting for the specific purpose of overthrowing the constitute government and seizing its powers.”

But Talgo doesn’t mention that 13 of the attackers, including nine members of the Oath Keepers and four members of the Proud Boys, have been charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy. Here is the definition of that crime:

“If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.”

Talgo’s argument that the attack was not organized and planned ahead of time has been proved false in court. 

Organized right-wing groups sought on Jan. 6, 2021 to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in office. Many leaders of the conspiracy have been convicted of serious crimes and sentenced to long terms in prison.

Others, the foot soldiers, likely knew little about the planning that led up to the attack but allowed themselves to be used in a violent assault on the country’s seat of government.

In the bland language of the propagandist, Talgo argues the rioters “inflicted property damage and violated the law. But they did not engage in insurrection.”

They did assault and beat police officers with their fists, with helmets, flagpoles and the officers’ own shields. Scores of officers were injured, some very seriously. The rioters did smash their way into the nation’s Capitol. They did desecrate it.

Here is what Fox News correspondent Chad Pergram, who was on the scene, wrote two days after the assault:

“Marauders roamed the Capitol. Trashed the Senate parliamentarian’s Office. Wielded Confederate flags in the Ohio Clock Corridor outside the Senate chamber. Ripped down the nameplate to the entrance of the office suite of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Vandalized a statue of President Zachary Taylor. Carved ‘Murder the Media’ in a Capitol doorway. Extremists defecated in the hallways, stomped in their own feces and tracked their excrement across the encaustic, Minton tiles.”

Jan. 6 was a planned assault on the U.S. government. It was a violent attack on the physical symbols of that government and the officers stationed to protect them. It was an attempt to assault the representatives of that government in Congress.

It’s a shame to see our local paper, where I worked for 29 years, publishing claptrap that tries to diminish the seriousness of what happened that day.

Ice

A skim of ice has formed on the surface of Hovey Pond.

Ice has formed on the pond at Hovey Park, and a bit of snow has fallen now. It’s fascinating how quickly my perspective shifts as the climate changes. Temperatures in the 20s feel very cold, and more than a couple of inches of snow is a lot. My reactions are like the comparison of annual temperatures to the “normal,” when the normal is calculated by the average of the past 10 years. That means, as temperatures rise, the “normal” keeps rising, too. Back in the 1970s, the “normal” temperature was dramatically lower than now, and my tolerance for cold and snow dramatically higher.