Was this the moment the Pendulum of Insanity reached the height of madness? In a brutal and brilliant assault on woke-think, MAUREEN CALLAHAN prays the ‘Jewish genocide’ college presidents’ scandal may REALLY wake up the world

Will the pendulum of sanity swing back in our lifetime?

When will the insanity that has infected every echelon of society – from schools to college campuses, politics, the media and beyond – reach its unbearable zenith?

When will we really ‘wake up’ and walk back from the newfound McCarthyite hysteria that is sending us all mad with rage and injustice?

The wonderfully eloquent yet disturbing concept of the ‘pendulum of sanity’ was coined on Twitter this week by actor James Woods after a breathtaking moment of clarity in Congress.

A moment that didn’t just shock America – its utter shamelessness captured headlines across the world.

The presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT (attended by Woods himself) testified to Congress about on-campus antisemitism — downplaying, denying, minimizing, and excusing.

All three presidents are women. All three, one would assume, are aware of the systematic rape, torture and mutilation of women, children – and men – by Hamas.

The wonderfully eloquent yet disturbing concept of the ‘pendulum of sanity’ was coined on Twitter this week by actor James Woods after a breathtaking moment of clarity in Congress. (Pictured: Harvard President Claudine Gay).

A moment that didn’t just shock America – its utter shamelessness captured headlines across the world. (Pictured: Penn President Liz Magill).

Yet here was Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, questioning Penn’s president Liz Magill on Wednesday.

‘Ms. Magill: At Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?’

Magill took a beat and openly smirked.

‘If the speech turns into conduct’, she said, smiling widely, ‘it can be harassment, yes’.

Stefanik: ‘I am asking: Specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?’

Magill: ‘If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment’.

Stefanik: ‘So the answer is yes’?

Magill: ‘It is a context-dependent position… If the speech becomes conduct. It can be harassment.’

‘”Conduct” meaning “committing the act of genocide”?’ Stefanik asked. But Magill couldn’t give a straight answer.

Fire her. But then, she should have been gone well before this disgusting display, holding her nose above an elected official she so clearly deems beneath her.

Magill was sent an open letter in September by The International Legal Forum, expressing ‘grave concern’ over the speakers Penn was hosting at its three-day ‘Palestine Writes’ event — scheduled during Yom Kippur.

Noted antisemite Roger Waters was one invited guest. Another, Randa Abdel-Fattah, ‘has previously claimed that “Israel is a demonic, sick project and I can’t wait for the day we commemorate its end”,’ the letter said.

Speaker Marc Lamont Hill was also quoted as saying that ‘calls for Palestinians to ‘reject hatred and terrorism’ are ‘offensive and counterproductive’.

Magill allowed the festival to proceed. No speaker was reported to have been disinvited.

Back on the Hill, MIT president Dr. Sally Kornbluth testified that anti-Jewish chants on her campus calling for an intifada ‘can be antisemitic, depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people’.

Harvard’s Claudine Gay said much the same.

All three presidents are women. All three, one would assume, are aware of the systematic rape, torture and mutilation of women, children – and men – by Hamas . (Pictured: Hamas atrocities in Southern Israel).

‘We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful,’ she testified. ‘It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment and intimidation.’

Can you ever imagine this response regarding hate speech directed at black, gay or trans students? Actually, that’s impossible, because there’s not one college campus that would brook the slightest hint of such bigotry.

As my esteemed Mail colleague Andrew Neil tweeted Thursday: ‘Almost 30 years ago the top executives of Big Tobacco appeared before Congress in a performance from which they and their industry never recovered. This week’s disastrous appearance by three Ivy League bosses looks [to be] doing equivalent damage to them and America’s top universities.’

Indeed. The suspicion and distrust average Americans have long held regarding $60,000-a-year educations has now been borne out. And a sane-thinking world is lashing back.

Because the examples of insanity don’t now come weekly or monthly. They arrive hourly.

Let’s just start with academia – a toxic modern breeding ground of indoctrination which impresses on young minds to narrow, not broaden, their thinking.

In September, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Penn third-to-last among American colleges for freedom of speech. Harvard, meanwhile, received ‘the lowest score possible, 0.00, and is the only school with an ‘Abysmal’ speech climate rating.’

Dr. Devin Jane Buckley, who holds a PhD from Duke, was ‘deplatformed’ — Ivy League slang for ‘go f**k yourself’ — from a speaking engagement at Harvard last year because she does not adhere to trans orthodoxy.

Here’s an excerpt from an email, signed by ‘X’ — courage of convictions, that signatory — informing Buckley she was no longer welcome:

‘Dear Devin, I have some bad news… my co-coordinator looked you up on google… [and] was surprised to find that your public profile is largely rooted in controversial issues regarding trans identity and that you’re on the board of an organization that takes a public stance regarding trans people as dangerous and deceptive.’

And Buckley wasn’t even speaking about trans issues. She was scheduled to talk about British romanticism!

So don’t believe it when Magill, Kornbluth, Gay and their ilk say there’s nothing they can do, that they would never prohibit free speech, and that antisemitism is contextual.

Here was the New York Times headline: ‘Republicans Try to Put Harvard, MIT and Penn on the Defensive about Antisemitism’.

Yes, the self-righteous Gray Lady, which hasn’t learned a thing since it routinely buried coverage of the Holocaust in its back pages, is now framing antisemitism as a partisan issue.

The same Times – contemporaneously describing those rounded up by Nazis and sent to concentration camps as ‘persons’ or ‘refugees’ rather than Jews — spent the days after Oct. 7 politely calling Hamas terrorists ‘militants’.

Should we be surprised that Gen Z, in a TikTok frenzy, has adopted Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ as their new favorite treatise?

That a mass murderer, an antisemite who believed there is no such thing as rape, that women exist only to serve men, that any and all members of the LGBTQ+ community should be put to death, whose end goal was for the entire world to live under this barbarism — who wrote, in that letter, that America ‘is the worst civilization witnessed by mankind’ — has young American fans?

Should we be surprised that Gen Z, in a TikTok frenzy, has adopted Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ as their new favorite treatise? 

That a mass murderer, an antisemite who believed there is no such thing as rape, that women exist only to serve men, that any and all members of the LGBTQ+ community should be put to death, whose end goal was for the entire world to live under this barbarism – who wrote, in that letter, that America ‘is the worst civilization witnessed by mankind’ – has young American fans?

Young Americans who also believe that the United States, as much an idea as a country, is the worst place on earth? How do they square that assessment with the hundreds of thousands of migrants pouring through our borders seeking a better life?

This wrongthink is the direct result of a cultural rot that defines all white people as racist colonizers and all brown and black people as powerless, subjugated victims. Hence the Jews and Israel had it coming.

Tell that to the father of Emily Hand, the girl who turned 9 while held hostage by Hamas. Freed after eight weeks, Emily still speaks only in a whisper.

‘She’d been conditioned not to make any noise’, her father Thomas told CNN.

‘Last night she cried until her face was red and blotchy,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t stop. She didn’t want any comfort. I guess she’s forgotten how to be comforted.’

And these ostensible top minds, these advocates for social justice at America’s top universities, defend such horrors with their silence, their refusal to unequivocally denounce this second Holocaust.

It’s an infestation, a malignant cancer, and perhaps our greatest existential threat — truly, McCarthyism for the new millennium.

Most of us now live in one of two Americas — red or blue, bigoted or woke — but almost all of us are afraid to say what we really think or feel.

It’s why Trump’s election in 2016 and Brexit in the UK took the establishment elite in both countries by surprise.

The electorate is sick of being made to feel that because they may question DEI, trans orthodoxy, COVID regulations, or illegal immigration that they must be unenlightened, uninformed, hateful, dumb.

That if they’re not seeing racism and transphobia everywhere, then they are the problem.

For anyone wondering why Trump is posting the numbers he is: This is the silent majority he’s speaking to, the Americans worried about inflation, the destruction of major cities, soft-on-crime policies, a porous Southern border, resulting threats to national security, and a biased media that still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plant, that his lurid hiring of sex workers and alleged financial fraud are unprovable (despite damning new indictments) and that Joe Biden is totally fit to serve another term.

It’s a reaction, too, to a cultural orthodoxy that tells us only certain stories matter now — and if you’re a straight white male, no one wants to hear from you.

Most of us now live in one of two Americas – red or blue, bigoted or woke – but almost all of us are afraid to say what we really think or feel. It’s why Trump’s election in 2016 and Brexit in the UK took the establishment elite in both countries by surprise.

For anyone wondering why Trump is posting the numbers he is: This is the silent majority he’s speaking to, the Americans worried about inflation, the destruction of major cities, soft-on-crime policies, a porous Southern border, resulting threats to national security, and a biased media that still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plant and that Joe Biden is totally fit to serve another term.

In an incredible recent piece for The Free Press, Cuban-American author Alex Perez wrote about the crisis in American book publishing, controlled by the so-called Big Five houses and already near-impossible to break into.

‘The new dogma, industry insiders told me, is two-pronged’, Perez writes. ‘Books should advance the narrative that people of color are victims of white supremacy; and nonblack and non-Latino authors should avoid characters who are black and Latino — even if their characters toe the officially approved narrative.’

After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, the Big Five went on a DEI-led hiring spree, which resulted in editors ‘who were out of their depth’, Perez writes.

He quotes one insider as shocked by ‘young people without previous publishing experience who struggled to write a professional email’.

This newfound ethos extends to what books now get published and heavily promoted. Perez reports that ‘Pageboy’, the memoir by trans actor Elliot Page, was bought by Flatiron Books for $3 million.

It has sold fewer than 68,000 copies – a mere fraction of the number required to recoup that cost.

Random House spent $500,000 on ‘Lucky Red’, a queer-feminist Western that has sold 3,500 copies. The novel ‘Dear Miss Metropolitan’, concerning three black and biracial girls held hostage in a Queens basement, went for more than $250,000 and has sold just over 3,000 copies.

‘All the while’, Perez writes, ‘according to some prominent writers and editors, these publishing houses appeared to be discriminating against white male writers’.

Blockbuster author James Patterson said as much – before inevitably having to denounce himself. ‘I strongly support a diversity of voices being heard’, he said.

Of course. But that’s not the point — just as you now can’t be a biological woman advocating for your right to compete in sports against other biological women without being transphobic.

Riley Gaines, the former UCAA swimmer turned activist, also testified before Congress this week.

It was a consequential appearance, one that will inform the vote on Biden’s proposed rule changes to Title IX, which would no longer protect biological women in sports.

Here was the greeting offered by ‘Squad’ member Rep. Summer Lee: ‘It’s disappointing to me that although the title of this hearing implies a much-needed discussion, we’re likely going to be forced to listen to transphobic bigotry’.

I’m sorry — this is either a discussion or it’s not. Lee contradicts herself here with amazing sophistry. She is basically saying she will not listen to Gaines or any woman who shares her concerns.

And this is in a week where two transgender cyclists, who present quite clearly as biological males, placed first and second in a major women’s race.

But for biological women to question this — well, we are told we must sit down and shut up, lest we too be considered evil transphobes.

Gaines refused to be unfairly maligned by Lee.

‘Ranking member Lee’, she said, ‘if my opening testimony makes me transphobic then I believe your opening monologue makes you a misogynist’.

Riley Gaines, the former UCAA swimmer turned activist, also testified before Congress this week. Here was the greeting offered by ‘Squad’ member Rep. Summer Lee: ‘It’s disappointing to me that although the title of this hearing implies a much-needed discussion, we’re likely going to be forced to listen to transphobic bigotry’. (Pictured: Gaines and Lia Thomas).

I’m sorry – this is either a discussion or it’s not. Lee contradicts herself here with amazing sophistry. She is basically saying she will not listen to Gaines or any woman who shares her concerns. And this is in a week where two transgender cyclists, who present quite clearly as biological males, placed first and second in a major women’s race.

Lee tried to have Gaines’s comments stricken from the record. Yet another insufferable, hypocritical example of the left’s ‘rules for thee, not for me’.

Let’s look at the cover of last Sunday’s New York Times Opinion section.

‘Who You Are is a Choice’, reads the headline. ‘The panic over transgender children is driven by the fear that they’ll regret transitioning. But the freedom to make mistakes is core to discovering your identity’.

What? No one is saying that kids shouldn’t be free to make mistakes. But there’s a difference between having ice cream for dinner and medicalizing yourself into permanent infertility before the age of 18 — not to mention that the human brain doesn’t reach adulthood until age 25.

It’s shallow, specious arguments like these — presented with moral surety and philosophical self-congratulation — that have left a silent majority feeling insulted and abandoned.

People like the nine-year-old boy, in face paint and Native headdress at a recent Kansas City Chiefs game, who was publicly shamed as ‘hating black people and Native American people at the same time’, by Deadspin writer Carron Phillips. Nine years old.

‘He is Native American’, the boy’s mother wrote on Facebook. ‘Just stop already’.

Yes.

That’s the lament of Americans everywhere, outraged by the bosses of top universities quick to assail everything but outright hatred of Jews, that what we’re seeing with our own eyes — be it biological male athletes trouncing women who can’t compete, or a president so feeble he falls up staircases, or terrorism justified as anti-colonialist comeuppance — can’t be believed.

Just stop already.

We see it all. And so the pendulum hopefully begins its swing back to the center of rational, commonsense thinking.

After this week’s deplorable testimony regarding campus antisemitism, major Penn donor Ross Stevens threatened to withhold $100 million unless Magill resigns. I have no doubt she will be the first to go and not the last.

After all, even those of us without Ivy League educations know real prejudice and hatred when we see it.

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