Campus beat: Penn’s Dishonorable Bribe
“The University of Pennsylvania tried to cut a deal” with law prof Amy Wax, offering “to water down” sanctions against her “if she agreed to stop discussing — and criticizing — her treatment at the hands of the university. She refused,” reports the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium.
“The university took no action against a cartoonist who depicted ‘Zionists’ drinking the blood of Gazans” or “against students and professors who celebrated the worst pogrom since the Shoah.” But it punished Wax for saying that diversity officials “couldn’t be scholars if their life depended on it.”
“It is rare for universities to sanction tenured professors and all but unheard of for them to do so over political speech. Penn made an exception for Wax” — “a precedent-setting blow to academic freedom.”
Libertarian: North Fork Eminent-Domain Outrage
If New York “can hide behind false claims of public use, property rights — and the Fifth Amendment — become meaningless,” warns Arif Panju at Reason.
Brothers Ben and Hank Brinkmann in 2017 “tried to build a hardware store on their own land in Southold, Long Island.”
Officials “tried myriad ways to stifle the brothers’ plans”; when those failed, “Southold took the Brinkmanns’ land using eminent domain,” crucially “lying about the ‘public use’ to feign compliance with the Fifth Amendment.”
The town claimed it needed “the land for a ‘passive use park.’ That’s an empty field. In other words, the public use was a sham.”
“Brinkmann v. Town of Southold is now at the Supreme Court’s door”; the justices may hold “the government accountable for its lies” and ensure “that constitutional protections mean something.”
Conservative: Climate Activists Infiltrate Courts
“Courthouse bureaucrats are helping a left-wing dark money group exploit the judicial system to destroy American traditional energy companies,” flags Sen. Ted Cruz at The Hill, of collaboration between the “Federal Judicial Center (FJC), the federal agency in charge of research and education for federal judges and judicial staff” and the “leftist” Climate Judiciary Project, in which court staff seem to be “helping far-left climate activists lobby and direct judges behind closed doors.”
The Environmental Law Institute “launched the Climate Judiciary Project to provide judges with ‘education on climate science’ ” and the law.
Yet CJP’s “funding comes from the same sources bankrolling the climate change lawsuits”; its partnership with the FJC is thus “contrary to judicial independence and to the FJC’s mission. It must stop.”
Social-media watch: Vance Leaves Harris in the Dirt
If you hadn’t noticed, Sen. JD Vance is “extremely online,” observes Steve Krakauer at The Hill — and that’s a “good thing”: The GOP veep nominee “uses social media in a way no American political figure has before,” exemplified earlier this month when he “responded to a brief comment on X about daycare” with “a point-by-point, 350-word policy dissertation.”
Talking heads deemed it “hilarious how JD Vance dropped a whole policy manifesto in a Twitter reply,” when “Kamala Harris can’t describe one policy in this level of detail” in her interviews.
And social-media output in Harris’ name suggests she doesn’t even know “the password to get into her accounts.
It’s all meaningless and hollow.” “Maybe being Extremely Online isn’t such a bad thing — especially when it’s juxtaposed with the stilted emptiness on the opposing ticket.”
Energy desk: Bullies for Wind Power
After a nearby offshore-wind blade broke off, “Nantucket residents expressed concerns about officials’ handling of the turbine breakage and the environmental hazards of enormous fiberglass blades tumbling into the sea,” recounts Emmett Hare at City Journal.
Environmental groups “downplayed the episode,” with the Sierra Club arguing that it shouldn’t “adversely impact” harnessing “offshore wind.” Complaining Nantucketers have been smeared as “tools of the fossil-fuel industry.”
But it will take more than smears “to convince the residents of New England and coastal states that the fiberglass and foam washing up on their beaches is nothing more than a conservative talking point.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board