The Morning Brief +

Since it's Wednesday (isn't it?), time for the weekly memery.

• Let’s start with a good news story today, and a total victory over Communism: Florida’s Board of Governors, which overseas the entire state university system, has rejected Yoko Santa Ono as the sole candidate to be the next president of the University of Florida. Throughout Ono’s career as current president of the University of Michigan and previously at the University of British Columbia he was a cheerleader for all of the worst cliches of DEI, “anti-racism,” and the rest. At Michigan, Ono presided over the building out of one of the largest and most expensive university DEI campus Stasi tyrants in the country (with over 200 employees—79 of them paid over $100K a year—and a budget topping $30 million), which Ono shut down recently only after the New York Times (!!!) published a devastating news feature, by one of their most left reporters, about how counterproductive Michigan’s DEI program was.

Ono appeared to undergo a “confirmation conversion” as he campaigned for the $3 million a year post at the University of Florida, telling the UF board of trustees that he had been inexpert at the issue, and that “I am here to ensure that DEI never returns to the University of Florida.” It may have fooled the UF trustees, who were unanimous in recommending him for the job, but who failed to ask themselves whether such a weak-minded person could make the tough decisions going forward to change UF in a better direction. Santa Ono was more likely to be the Yoko Ono of UF, and good for the Board of Governors for rejecting him.

Seriously—who thought this was a good idea for the University of Florida?

Hat tip to Chris Rufo and Peter Wood, who both blew the whistle on Ono. Next step: cleaning house at the UF board of trustees, who clearly don’t know what they are doing. Why did they want to hire such a transparently spineless person (which, to be sure, is in the job description for most college presidents)?

(P.S. The great thing about this outcome is that no liberal university, which is nearly all of them, will dare hire Ono now after his recanting the DEI creed.)

• Other university news, however, continues to be dismal. At Yale, ROTC students have been told not to wear their uniforms on campus for their own safety because pro-Hamas ideologues are still running rampant as such ROTC members might not be safe.

Meanwhile, Harvard is pulling out the “people will die from Trump funding cuts” card (though aren’t millions already dead from killing “net-neutrality” during Trump 1? I was told there would be mass deaths because of that change—or was it the tax cut?—I can’t keep up). The Times of London claims that “Harvard researcher Dr Sarah Fortune was only two years away from creating a vaccine that could have saved the 1.25 million people killed each year by tuberculosis. But last month, she received a letter telling her that the $60 million grant funding her research was being halted by President Trump.”

Only $60 million a year to save 1.25 million people? That’s couch-cushion change for the Gates Foundation. (Leave aside Harvard’s apparently untouchable $50+billion endowment.) Why won’t lefty foundations step up to fill the void?

Actually, a lot of those people will die from climate change before tuberculosis. At least according to the distinguished climate scientist John Kerry: “‘Every year, now, millions of people around this planet are dying because… of greenhouse gas pollution.” But as Marc Marano notes: “‘Annual death rate from air pollution has decreased by 46.2% since 1990 and deaths from extreme weather have decreased by 96.2% since the 1920s.”

Who you going to believe—statistics, or this face?

• Did you know there is a “Fish Industrial Complex”? Me neither. Great: now we need to worry about Big Fish along with Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Hips, etc. (And you thought Moby Dick was fiction.) From Nature magazine:

• Enough of these silly people. Let’s do memes, starting with taking note of the new mainstream media editorial directive intended to legitimize illegal immigrants, since “undocumented” has clearly failed:

Reminder: You can’t hate the media enough.

Boulder leftism summarized in one pic.

The glory of the Nixon White House tapes

Pretty sure this is fake, but how can you be sure these days?

This is wrong on so many levels. . .