March 14, 2025

Now, on to the news…

Columbia University has been a hotbed of anti-Israeli activity since the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. Starting with the violent pro-Hamas protests that roiled the campus for months last year, activism at Columbia has stood out even among Ivy League institutions. This student-led movement is also supported by some faculty.

Christopher Rufo and Hannah Grossman have examined the record of Columbia’s Jennifer J. Manly, a neuropsychologist with a track record of racialist scholarship. Manly, who participated in a blockade during last year’s anti-Israeli campus protests, is tied to over $100 million in federal funds for research into how, for example, society’s “discriminatory beliefs” lead to higher dementia rates among black Americans.

Rufo and Grossman argue that the Trump administration should intervene. “The only way to restore trust in America’s research institutions,” they claim, “is to focus on real research—not pro-Hamas radicalism or dubious racialist scholarship.”

Read the rest of their piece here.

Progressives seem to have lost sight of a key principle of immigration law: residing in the United States is a privilege, not a right. Former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil served as one of the ringleaders of the post-October 7 riots there, which is why his deportation is perfectly legal under federal law, writes Erielle Azerrad, an attorney at Holtzman Vogel.

Democrats are trying to hedge on gender ideology, talking tough while refusing to break with the activist core on whose support they depend. Even as polls show that a strong majority of Americans—including two-thirds of Democrats—oppose males in women’s sports, Senate Democrats voted unanimously against banning it. The Manhattan Institute’s Jesse Arm explains why prominent party figures like Gavin Newsom and John Fetterman are caught between public opinion and party elites’ ideological fixations.

There’s a good chance that New York City mayor Eric Adams’s proposed tax cuts would simply shift more of the tax burden onto higher earners, writes Manhattan Institute Collegiate Associate Adam Lehodey. “This risks driving away the very people who sustain the city’s finances, further concentrating tax obligations on a dwindling base,” he writes.

Education savings accounts have become increasingly popular since Covid, with 19 states now offering them. ESAs allow families to use a portion of the public funds allocated for their children’s education to cover other expenses, like private school tuition and textbooks.

But Arizona’s ESA plan offers a cautionary tale, warns Jason Bedrick, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy. “What began as a highly popular, smoothly run initiative has deteriorated into administrative chaos,” he writes. “As lawmakers in other states consider adopting or expanding ESA policies, Arizona’s experience underscores the importance of effective implementation and the dangers of bureaucratic overreach.”

Ah, politics and marriage. How much do views on social issues matter before saying, “I do?”

For Love Is Blind contestants, a lot, evidently.

The reality show (contest?) features men and women who “date” one another from behind a wall. The idea is to fall in love purely based on conversation—to get engaged to someone for who they are, not what they look like. (They eventually meet in person before walking down the aisle.)

In the most recent season, contestants Sara Carton and Virginia Miller both said “no” at the altar over their fiancés’ differing political views. In Carton’s case, she was concerned that her partner, Ben Mezzenga, hadn’t given much thought to the Black Lives Matter movement (Carton and Mezzenga are both white) or to LGBTQ rights (Carton and Mezzenga are both straight, though her sister is not). During the reunion episode—the season-concluding episode when cast members discuss what happened—Ben says that he knows he has a lot of “privilege.”

After the bullet he’s just dodged, we’d have to agree.

As one X user notes, “This woman dumps this poor man on ‘Love Is Blind’ because of his views on BLM, LGBTQ, and the COVID vaccine. If Sara were ACTUALLY attracted to Ben, none of these reasons listed would have mattered.”

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If you have Face Palm candidates—embarrassing journalism or media output; cringe-worthy conduct among leaders in government, business, and cultural institutions; stories that make you shake your head—send them our way at editors@city-journal.org. We’ll publish the most instructive with a hat tip to the source.

Photo credits: Spencer Platt / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images