Briefly Noted: December 2015

The Hungarian-born radical hedge fund manager George Soros, the preeminent funder of border-busting campaigns here and abroad, admits his philanthropic efforts in Europe are aimed at destroying its borders. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, fiercely criticized Soros for trying to destroy the European Union by mass immigration, and Soros responded by claiming that a six-point plan promoted by one of his charities helps “uphold European values,” while Orbán’s actions “undermine those values.” Soros said Orbán’s plan “treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle … [but my] plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.” Of course it was Ronald Reagan who said, “A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.” Soros is proving Reagan right.

Student lynch mobs have been busy ousting college presidents and other senior officials lately for ill-defined acts of racial insensitivity. At the University of Missouri students made life difficult last month for president Tim Wolfe, who apologized for not doing enough about some dubious racial incidents on campus and then resigned. Wolfe took “full responsibility” for students’ “frustration” and said he hoped his resignation would help to “heal” whatever it was he did or didn’t do. Soon after the school’s chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, under student attack for the same reasons, said he would resign at year’s end, even after he unveiled mandatory “diversity and inclusion” brainwashing for students, faculty, and staff.

Claremont McKenna College’s Dean of Students Mary Spellman resigned after sending a sympathetic email to a Latino student offering to talk to her about “how we can better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold.” Paranoid left-wingers interpreted the fitting-the-mold metaphor as a racist insult at the private liberal arts college in California. Campus radicals had ratcheted up tension levels around Halloween by complaining that some white students had worn Mexican costumes that reflected ethnic stereotypes. At Yale University students waged war against Halloween, engaging in disruptive protests over school administrators’ allegedly permissive attitude toward culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. In a widely circulated Internet video, a student mob confronted and verbally abused Nicholas Christakis, master of Yale’s Silliman College, after his wife (who is also the college’s associate master) wrote an email encouraging students not to be obsessed with potentially causing offense and to have conversations with their peers if they were offended. A barely coherent young black woman hysterically shrieked and swore at Christakis, accusing him of creating an “unsafe space” at the university. She said he should resign because it was his “job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman” and not to create “an intellectual space!”

The Left claims it never happens, yet it keeps on happening: a non-citizen has been indicted for voting in the 2012 general election and a 2014 primary election, according to Fort Worth, Texas radio station KRLD. And it’s largely the Left’s fault that legal permanent resident Rosa Ortega, registered as a Republican, participated in the elections. Her lawyer says when Ortega applied for government benefits she was handed a voter registration form and instructed to complete it. The process confused her and led her to believe she was supposed to register and vote. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (the “Motor-Voter” law), lobbied for by Marxist academics Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven as a means of flooding the voter rolls with ineligible voters, makes it illegal to ask persons applying for benefits if they are U.S. citizens.