The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, last month quietly updated the demographic information it releases about its staff. The newspaper deserves some credit for its transparency about these dimensions of diversity, or the lack of it, which goes beyond what many other news organizations release. The actual data, however, is staggering. Here is a breakdown of political views of Crimson editors for the years:

In 2022, the most recent year for which data was released (in November of 2023), 77.7 percent of the Crimson editors described themselves as "progressive," "leftist," or "liberal," and only 1.8 percent described themselves as conservative. That's even worse, in terms of conservative representation, than in 2020 or 2021. The number of student Crimson editors describing themselves as politically moderate has also diminished sharply.

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency today announced a successful test interception of an intermediate range ballistic missile. The test was of something called the "Ground-Based Midcourse Defense." The press release explains, "The GMD element of the Missile Defense System defends the U.S. homeland against ballistic missile threats from rogue Nations such as North Korea and Iran. It provides the Commander, USNORTHCOM the capability to engage and destroy intermediate- and long-range ballistic missile threats to the U.S. homeland. Though the United States maintains the right to defend itself against attacks from any source, GMD is neither intended for, nor capable of, defeating large and sophisticated ICBM, air-, or sea-launched ballistic missile threats from Russia and the People's Republic of China."

The Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, which flagged the news as a
"tremendous success," notes that the interceptors come from silos at Fort Greely, Alaska.

"Who Could Fix Harvard? Change of Leadership Would Have to Go Beyond President Gay" is the headline over my most recent New York Sun column. Please check out the full column over at the Sun.

From the account @FriedrichHayek: "The day that Harvard invites Thomas Sowell back as its commencement speaker without faculty and students rioting to stop Sowell from speaking will be the day we know that the Harvard board has done its job to clean out Harvard's enemies of knowledge, truth & liberal civilization."

The chairman of FedEx Corporation, Frederick W. Smith, has posted the text of the speech he delivered on December 5, 2023 at the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation Gala. It is worth a look for a sense of what is on the mind of a self-described "center-right corporate executive."

Some of it is surprising, such as a call for an "energy value added tax" that he says would "produce a new broad-based stream of revenue while incenting individuals and businesses to become more energy efficient." Part of the revenues "should cover a reduction in income taxes for those earning less than $100,000 per year, which will encourage people to rejoin the workforce which will increase GDP and tax revenues."

Here is Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen reacting to Harvard President Claudine Gay's interview with the Crimson in which she said about her congressional testimony, in part, "Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth":

Anyone who says the words "my truth" has no business leading a university. "Truth" is not subjective. There is no "your truth" and "my truth" there is only "the truth." There is "my opinion" and "my lived experience" but "truth" is an objective reality. The purpose of a university is the pursuit of truth. So anyone who does not understand what truth is has no business leading one. When you hear someone say "my truth" you should stop listening because that person has just exposed their intellectual vapidity. She should resign over this statement alone.

It may be that when historians look back on December 2023, the most important story may not be anything from Israel or Gaza or Harvard or Penn or MIT. Instead, it could be a story that didn't even make the Wall Street Journal, and that the New York Times covered with a brief article on the bottom of page A22 under the headline "Three Laser Fusion Research Hubs Picked by Energy Department."

An Energy Department press release has the details:

"Aren't you too tight with the banks and the billionaires?" moderator Megyn Kelly asked Nikki Haley at last night's Republican debate.

This was a debate staged by the Republican National Committee. Kelly became famous as a Fox News anchor. The question was a tone-setter, and the accusations came not only from the moderators but from the other candidates.

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, claimed, "Nikki will cave to these big donors when it counts." He faulted Haley for what he called "Wall Street liberal donors."

Vivek Ramaswamy made extreme statements, referring to "toxic neocons," the "pointless war in Ukraine" and claiming, "the only person more fascist than the Biden regime now is Nikki Haley." He said, "you can put lipstick on a neocon, it's still a fascist Dick Cheney." He repeatedly used the conspiratorial term "puppetmasters." He claimed, "the 2020 election was stolen by Big Tech" and "January 6 now does look like it was an inside job." Governor Christie called Ramaswamy ""the most obnoxious blowhard in America."

Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill appeared for hours December 5 before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which held a full committee hearing on "Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism."

"The War Against the Jews Is a War Against Capitalism" is the headline of my latest New York Sun column. Please check the full column out over at the Sun. After it was published I got an email from the Nation, the political magazine that leans far left and anti-Israel, promoting an article with the headline, "The 'Friends of the IDF' Gala Was Like a Rich Kid's Bar Mitzvah—Until the Protest Started." It underscores the connection between the hatred of wealth and the hatred of Israel and the Jews. These positions are fundamentally irrational and also closely associated. The Sun article gets into the college campuses, the Congress, Hamas, Iran, and even Greta Thunberg.

As a political scientist I have never been a fan of third parties. A comparison of America's longtime two-party system with the multiparty regimes of countries like Italy, Israel, and France demonstrates that multiple parties not only contribute to political instability but also give small minorities of the population outsize influence, as a major party may be unable to form a parliamentary majority in without making unreasonable concessions to those minorities. (Of course, none of this applies to Israel's current military emergency, when all non-Arab parties have united in support of her survival.)

A study by Joshua Mitts of Columbia Law School and Robert J. Jackson Jr. of NYU Law School found unusually high levels of short-selling activity on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in advance of the October 7 terrorist attack, prompting speculation that Iran or Hamas used advance knowledge of the attack to reap profits. The Israeli business newspaper Globes quotes the head of trading for TASE, Yaniv Pagot, describing the study as seriously flawed, both in terms of a math error with decimal places and in terms of the feasibility of such a large trade by terrorist-linked traders going undetected. "There could not be such a scenario. It is regrettable that the researchers did not check with Israeli TASE members and they could have asked how these things work in Israel," Pagot is quoted by Globes as saying.

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Austan Goolsbee, was on Marketplace the other night, with a couple of exchanges worth passing along:

Ryssdal: ..what is your level of concern about overshooting, about keeping rates too high for too long?

A newly issued working paper from four economists, including the late Nobel prizewinner Edward Prescott, reports that easing regulations on commercial land use would unleash a boom, producing, "large allocative efficiency effects, with output gains of about 3 percent to 6 percent and welfare gains of about 3 percent to 9 percent of lifetime consumption."

The other authors of the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, "The Impact of Commercial Real Estate Regulations on U.S. Output," are Fil Babalievsky of the Census Bureau, Kyle F. Herkenhoff of the University of Minnesota, and Lee E. Ohania of UCLA. They use the CoreLogic commercial real estate database to look at what would happen nationally if real estate regulation—zoning and also community and environmental review—were rolled back to the unrestrictive levels of Midland, Texas.

They found:

"Biden, Israel Are Headed for Clash Over Palestinian-Arab Statehood" is the headline over my latest column for the New York Sun. Please check the full column out over at the Sun.