Saturday, December 21, 2019

Right Sized: Pastor Jim Garlow Responds to the Attack of President Trump Launched by the Editor in Chief of Christianity Today

MY RESPONSE TO CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S EDITOR IN CHIEF MARK GALLI’S PATHETIC ARTICLE CALLING FOR THE REMOVAL OF THE PRESIDENT

When the CT Editor’s Feelings Trump Facts
by Dr. Jim Garlow
 
Mark Galli has used his platform as Editor in Chief of Christianity Today magazine to demand that Donald Trump be removed from office. At one point in the article, Mark Galli compares Trump to Clinton, Strangely, Mark Galli avoided a key issue: Was a law violated?  Bill Clinton actually committed a crime. Donald Trump didn't. Galli fails to make the distinction.
 
Galli speaks of Clinton’s “immoral acts” in the context of our current President. He fails to note that the President’s acknowledged immoral conduct occurred a dozen years ago and not while he was in the White House, in contrast to Clinton’s conduct, while in the Oval Office, serving as President. Galli states that Clinton lied. Yes, but more than that, he perjured himself, which is legally serious. Trump didn’t.

Remarkably, Galli claims "the facts in this instance are unambiguous." The "facts" are "unambiguous?" Many in the House of Representatives - all 196 Republicans and two Democrats – who have access to key documents - don't see it that way. In addition, Americans who are not aligned with either party - Independents - don't view it that way.

The keys to understanding authentic facts in this case are the actual transcript of the call and the Ukrainian President’s recollection of the phone call. Galli fails to note those two critically important “witnesses” to truth. They might get in the way of his “facts.”
 
Galli further asserts that the President's phone call was "a violation of the Constitution." It is precisely at this point that so many strongly disagree with Galli.  Simply put, many contend that there was no violation of the Constitution. Again Galli chooses to state his opinion as “fact.” Even liberal Democrat Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz contends that there was no violation of the Constitution. Amazingly, the Democrats could not even get all of their own to vote for impeachment, let alone any of the Republicans.

Furthermore, those who know the President, with all his flaws, past moral failures and sins, have discerned and commented that he is a man who really wants to do what is right. This fact has been noted by many of the evangelicals who are closest to him. Godly discerning people around him see it and know it.

Galli writes "the impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see." There you have it, according to Christianity Today’s Editor in Chief.  Based on Mr. Trump's failure to model sanctification, he should be impeached? Hardly.

And while we are talking about character - which is one of Galli's key issues - it is important to point out that what Mr. Trump promised as a candidate is exactly what he has delivered as an elected official. It is indeed a rare treat for a politician to fulfill his word. That is a wonderful indication of character. It's called honesty.

Condescendingly, Galli lectures evangelicals who support Trump, saying that they "brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency." To my knowledge, I know every one of the persons who have served as the President's faith advisors. (In the interest of disclosure, I have been one of them.) Not one of these faith leaders "brushes off" anyone's immorality or behavior, including the President’s. Not one. They never have. Not one of them has ever said or believed that the (using Galli’s words) "bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end.” Not one. I could speak with specificity here, but I will not. In that one sentence, Galli is participating in character assassination, a favorite tool of many these days.

Closely related to that is the fact that Galli has no grasp of the kind of healthy spiritual input that is coming from evangelicals to our president. Admittedly, this is a side issue, not Galli’s key issue, but it is still important. The CT editor apparently has no knowledge of the internal meetings which have been constructively pastoral in nature. Numerous high visibility evangelicals have had opportunity to be with the President, to counsel him and to pray with him. Some have spoken truth to leadership. Wisely, they do not discuss the content of those meetings publicly. Nor should they. They are considerably more aware of the "heart" of the President than is Mr. Galli. If he knew what they know about Mr. Trump, Galli would not have written such an article.

Offensively, Mark Galli seems to invoke the name of Billy Graham to bolster and credential his viewpoint not only in the first sentence of the article, but again in the third paragraph. The only one who can use Billy Graham's name with integrity is Billy's son Franklin or daughter Anne Graham Lotz or one of his other children or grandchildren. Interestingly, Franklin Graham is standing 100% with the President. And he even felt compelled to reveal for the first time that his famous father – who knew Donald Trump – voted for him. Franklin Graham is more qualified to speak for Billy Graham than a CT editor.

While it is admittedly not of profound significance to Galli’s article, it still might be important to note that Christianity Today has been losing influence for some time. Why is this relevant? The Left will fall all over themselves loving this article, not knowing that CT’s influence among rank and file evangelicals peaked a long time ago. Had there not been outside funds to prop CT up, the magazine would likely have folded years ago. It is not the voice it once was. How do I say this nicely? It is rather "yesterday."

It is hardly news that CT is not a fan of the President. For purposes of transparency, it might be interesting if the editor – since journalists ought to acknowledge their bias - would reveal for whom he voted for in 2016. The once-solid magazine, like the National Association of Evangelicals, has moved leftward for some time. They once reigned. They were supreme. But ask the typical evangelical churchgoer today if he or she reads CT or knows what the NAE is. They don’t. These once prestigious organizations have now been displaced in influence by other groups, organizations, magazines and news sources.
 
But one thing is for sure: Mr. Galli will now be exalted by the Trump-haters. They now have a new hero. The Left loves CT's Trump-bashing.  CNN and New York Times, for example, were two of the first to run with this story on the national scene. Other disdainers of Trump will do the same. More hated of Trump has been fueled. The self-proclaimed pious ones will be eagerly casting stones at Trump. Mr. Galli has done our nation a great disservice.
 
Meanwhile, the President will continue saving the lives of preborn babies, helping families, supporting Israel, defending religious liberty in the US, trying to stop religious persecution globally, blessing the nation with a healthy economy - especially impacting the middle class and most notably Blacks and Hispanics with jobs, as opposed to Obama’s debilitating massive food stamps increase, reducing governmental intrusions into our everyday lives, advocating for healthy entrepreneurship-driven capitalism, rebuilding the Obama-era broken military, saving young girls from sex trafficking, appointing justices and judges that actually respect the US Constitution, leading in prison reform that is giving many incarcerated persons a new opportunity in life, defeating terrorist organizations like ISIS, stopping the transgender experiments that would destroy our military, stopping nations from taking advantage of America, arresting and removing MS13 gang members and making America truly a great nation. He will continue doing what the Bible admonishes a governmental leader to do: to protect the citizenry and to punish evil.

But to Galli, and his groupies who will Facebook post his article repeatedly, this does not matter. Why? Because according to Galli, Trump acts wrongly. He is bad. His personality is not that of St. Francis. Trump is not Mother Teresa. Trump, you see, is a bad man, and that qualifies as a “high crimes.” Trump – according to Galli – must be removed.
 
And in case you have not noticed, those advocating impeachment are not merely after the President. They are impeaching those of you who elected him – all 63 million of you. They are impeaching the values of those who voted for him.
 
It is interesting that Galli never once called for the removal of President Obama, who was responsible for supporting the mutilation of preborn babies more than any President in US history, who helped destroy the definition of marriage and who was the first to defend men dressed as women using women’s bathrooms.
 
How should we respond to all this? Is there a better response? Yes. For starters, how about a call to pray for our President? (I have followed politics closely, virtually every day since I was age nine years of age. I know that is strange, but I have.) I have never seen a national leader so castigated and attacked on a continual basis. I know few if any who could handle the pressure that our President is under.

What if Galli had interviewed some of the people who are on the “inside” (I am not one of them), who are helping to spiritually guide the President, and have inquired how believers could and should pray for the President in very specific ways at this time? How much better if he would have described ways to help our nation come through the massive divide.
 
But while Mr. Galli did not do that, you can. You and I can make a difference. We can do these things.
 
Will you pray for your President?  Right now? Will you pray for those who have the opportunity to speak and provide spiritual counsel to our national leaders? Galli condemns them. It might be better to pray for them.
 
Will you commit to try to bring healing to our severely divided nation? Will you pray that Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler would work with our President to address the greatest challenges in our nation?

Would you pray with me that there would be a massive release of scriptural truth to those in high government positions of our nation? Would you pray that there would be a Holy Spirit release of the biblical principles of governance to all of those in governmental authority? In doing so, you would help make American great – and good – again.
 
(Garlow, has a governmental ministry in Washington, DC, New York City and Jerusalem. You can learn more at www.WellVersedWorld.org )

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Chad Topaz of Williams College Begs You to Associate with His Stigmatized Charity, QSIDE, After Rebuke From Top Math Leaders


WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Chad Topaz appears to be desperate for legitimacy now that his widely condemned plans to get a white female professor at UC Davis fired have backfired on him. As you may know, Topaz called for his Facebook and Twitter followers to subject Abigail Thompson to a merciless public shaming and to pressure her employer to punish her for expressing her personal opinions in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

In response to outrage in the mathematics profession, Topaz took both his Facebook and Twitter pages private. Bizarrely, he also began redirecting links to his QSIDE Institute website created by his critics over to the landing page of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The insinuation, of course, is that anyone who disagreed with him was a dangerous white supremacist.

One of Chad Topaz's Williams College colleagues, Colin Adams, created a petition condemning Topaz's efforts to censor and punish Thompson. This petition has attracted over 625 supporters including two famous Fields Medalists, former presidents of the American Mathematics Society (AMS), and math and biology faculty at Williams College including his own department chair Richard de Veaux. If you wish, you can sign the petition here.

In his most recent missive, which I have included below the break, he calls for his supporters to join QSIDE and promote it by including mention of it in their e-mails and other channels of community. Unfortunately for Topaz, anyone who joins his brand new, family-run QSIDE Institute will share in the stigma of his appalling effort to get a white female professor black listed and the negative publicity now associated with the QSIDE Institute brand.

Finally, the story of Topaz's campaign to get Abigail Thompson fired has come to the attention of a national news blog, The College Fix.

Among the comments are the following gems:
  • Say it with me, kids: "The university is no longer the place for academic discussion." Your degree is worthless.
  • The irony is she is AGAINST making a decision based on skin color. This makes her the anti-racist, yet they will say the opposite.
  • Those who support totalitarianism and loyalty oaths need to consider the consequences for their own future. Eventually, they will need to go out into the world. And, of course, there is always the possibility that they will some day find themselves on the wrong side of the "party."
  • Chad Topaz? Since when have 2nd rate porn stars become mathematicians?
  • There is no God but the Party, and the Dialogue is his prophet.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND. His pronouns are Master/Commander.

Monday, December 2, 2019

Answer - Pamela E. Harris, Question - Who At Williams College Supports Chad Topaz's Campaign to Get a White Female Math Professor?

Pamela E. Harris, Ph.D. Mathematics
at Williams College.
I scanned the list of people who signed the petition favoring Chad Topaz's efforts to silence, boycott, and fire a white, female math professor named Abigail Thompson. I was curious to see if anyone from his own department at Williams College was supporting him. I found there is only one signatory who claims Williams College as their institutional affiliation: Pamela E. Harris.

According to a recent article in the AMS Notices, it looks like she was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. She came here with her parents when she was 12. She appears to have lied on her paperwork to get into a community college. The article states: "It took some creative form-filling, and hoping that nobody found the inconsistencies in the paperwork, for Pamela to be on her way to the Milwaukee Area Technical College, where she earned two associate degrees."

She arrived at Williams College about four years after getting her doctorate. Here is how Williams described her in 2016:
Dr. Pamela E. Harris received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in May 2012. Her research interests focus on combinatorial problems related to representation theory. Dr. Harris has previously taught courses in number theory, linear algebra, calculus, and statistics and probability. In addition to enjoying working with students on original research, Dr. Harris actively works to improve diversity and retention rates among women and minorities in the mathematical sciences through her work and involvement with the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). Dr. Harris enjoys cooking all types of spicy food, playing tennis, and she is looking forward to joining a new jiu jitsu dojo.
As far as I can tell, she is used to teaching Linear Algebra and Calculus 1. Her CV is largely filled with travel, small grants, woke activities and articles on which she is a contributing author. I looked through a talk she gave at a conference and she talks openly about how she feels less pressure to perform when she is just one in a series of authors and not the sole author of an article herself. She claims she has found her "place" in the mathematics community as a member of one of these teams.



I believe her husband, Jamual Harris, works as a campus safety and security officer. I'm assuming this is how she ended up with a non-Mexican last name.

Curiously, I found that she was one of the "co-authors" of a paper Chad Topaz did about the horrifying shortage of non-white guy artists in the major collections of prominent art museums. The paper was written by a number of Williams College math department professors including Chad M. Topaz, Bernhard Klingenberg, Daniel Turek, Brianna Heggeseth, Pamela E. Harris and Julie C. Blackwood. Of these, only Harris appears to have signed up with Topaz's attack on Abigail Thompson.

Julie Blackwood, however, signed the anti-Chad Topaz petition. This puzzled me a little because Blackwood, who recently got tenure, appears to be deep into ecology, global warming, and anti-Trump ideology. Nevertheless, she took a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (2010) from UC Davis, the same institution as the beleagured Abigail Thompson. Awkward...

Listening to Pamela E. Harris speak, I think she is someone, like Chad Topaz, who has been taking advantage of an unearned, inter-sectional harvest of academic privilege including being Mexican, female, and - best of all - an illegal alien DREAMER. She is the sort of person who - for purely selfish reasons - I would expect to support a partisan, anti-white, McCarthy-like purity test designed to screen out the job applicants, the sort who might always beat her at theorems but will never enjoy her ethnic, sex or legal status advantages.






Monday, November 25, 2019

Are We All White Supremacists? Ayatollah Chad M. Topaz Decrees All Links to His QSIDE Website From His Critics Will Be Redirected to SPLC


WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Ayatollah Chad Topaz has decided you are a white supremacist if you are critical of his hateful campaign to get a white female professor fired and to boycott her UC Davis math department. On Facebook, Chad Topaz announced he was setting up redirects for links to his QSIDE website created by bloggers critical of his extremist fatwa. In many cases, he altered his QSIDE website so that clicking on an author's link will now take the reader to a Southern Poverty Law Center web page instead.



Currently, his list of white supremacist bloggers include many of us who are surprised to be labeled as such including those posting at Anonymous Political Scientist, Campus Reform, Economic Job Market RumorsEphblog, The College Fix, The Other DunwoodyThe Reference FramePost Tenure Tourettes,  The Leitter ReportWhy Evolution is True and Williams Liberty. Chad Topaz's efforts to redirect traffic away from his website have continued as late as December 10, 2019 when he created redirects for a second article from The College Fix which quotes his colleague Colin Adams who reports that the petition critical of Topaz was signed by four Fields Medalists and eight past presidents of the American Mathematical Society.

All in all, it is easy to defeat these redirects. All you have to do is set up a new link, or link to a third party he deems safe which then links to his QSIDE website. For a while, it was a kick to simply use the Internet Wayback Machine to link to the earlier posts.

Now, however, Chad Topaz has used a simple insert to block the the Internet Wayback Machine from scanning his site. This, of course, may be seen as a good thing because it makes his posts at QSIDE less reliable and less accessible to future researchers.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND. His pronouns are Master/Commander.

Darkside: Funniest Ayatollah Chad Topaz Memes

Shameful Chad M. Topaz Meme - UCLA

Chad M.  Topaz fades to Emperor Palpatine.

Quantitative research on being a jerk at Williams College.

Hannibal Lecter Fades to Chad M. Topaz


Pennywise fades to Chad M. Topaz.


Chad M. Topaz Fades to Hannibal Lecter.


Error Code - What's Up with the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity?

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Williams College math professor, Chad M. Topaz, is asking for donations to pay for consulting services for graduate students seeking to craft winning diversity statements. While this looks like an open invitation to commit academic plagiarism, it may be among the least worrying ethical issues surrounding Chad Topaz and his non-profit organization.


I had an intuition something was up with Chad Topaz when I noticed some odd things in his description of his Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE). I have worked for a couple of decades in the non-profit field, so I'm sensitive to the red flags. In particular, I know that it makes board members anxious when the president of the charity is stirring up trouble by calling for employers to fire people and for others to boycott an institution.

This might not be so much of a big deal if Chad Topaz's ranting only endangered himself. Unfortunately, he is using the name and resources of his charity in his attacks and is thus involving others in his shenanigans, particularly the members of his Board of Directors.

In this regard, we can visit the MA Secretary of State's website to get the names and addresses of the board members for Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE). They include:

President              Chad Higdon-Topaz         Williamstown, MA 01267
Treasurer              Jude Higdon-Topaz          Williamstown, MA 01267              
Clerk                    GeraldineShen                  Palo Alto, CA 94301
Director                Derek Kaufman                Greenwich, CT 06831     
Director                Noel Bakhtian                   Idaho Falls, ID 83406       
Director                Sharifa Wright                  Williamstown, MA 01267

It would be nice if an enterprising reporter from the Williams Record like Nicholas Goldrosen would look into whether or not the board members who are responsible for Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE) have decided whether or not they approve of Chad M. Topaz using the resources of their organization to advocate the firing of an innocent white female math professor working at UC Davis who's only mistake was to articulate her views on diversity statements.

Depending on how he is running Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE), Chad's board may have some unwanted legal exposure. As the folks at the Legal Center for Non-Profits write:
We’ve all heard of the all-volunteer nonprofit whose board president—often the founder—runs the whole show, with the board coming together only occasionally to rubber-stamp the president’s acts. It happens in organizations with staff as well, when the executive director is allowed to be the sole organizational decision-maker. In these cases, the board has abdicated its responsibility to oversee and manage the entire nonprofit. But ultimately, the board is responsible, and the officers (volunteer as well as paid) are accountable to it. When things go wrong, the board—collectively and, in certain circumstances, individually—will be liable.
If I was a board member at Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE), I would be particularly anxious about whether or not the organization is run in a manner that protects board members from being sued for their decisions. This can happen if the non-profit does not hold its annual meetings on schedule, fails to keep accurate minutes, or allows Chad Topaz to act on their behalf but without their permission.


As an aside, I should point out that it is suspicious Chad Topaz has his significant other, Jude Higdon-Topaz, serving as the treasurer of the organization. This is a situation ripe for the misuse of non-profit funds. This may not be a big deal. As far as I can tell, Chad Topaz submitted one of those cheap quickie IRS non-profit determination applications in which you have to promise that your charity will make less than $50,000 a year for three years. So there won't be much there to embezzle if the temptation become too great. As far as I can tell, the position of clerk, basically the secretary, looks okay.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND.

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Chad Topaz - Enemy of Free Speech - Denounced by His Own Math Department Colleagues at Williams College


WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Academics offended by the extremism of Chad M. Topaz, a woke Williams College math professor, have organized a petition in response to his campaign to silence Abigail Thompson, a white female math professor at UC Davis. You can read and sign the petition here. So far, the petition has been signed by over 725 people including the chairman of his own math department, Richard De Veaux and four winners of the prestigious Fields Medal including David Mumford and Terence Tao. Colin Adams has told The College Fix that signatories also include eight former presidents of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

The petition is worth reading in full. Its authors appear to be most alarmed by the efforts of Chad Topaz made to get Thompson fired from her job because he disapproved of an article she wrote in the December issue of the Notices of the AMS. The petition reads as follows:
To the American Mathematical Society
We write with grave concerns about recent attempts to intimidate a voice within our mathematical community. Abigail Thompson published an opinion piece in the December issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. She explained her support for efforts within our community to further diversity, and then described her concerns with the rigid rubrics used to evaluate diversity statements in the hiring processes of the University of California system.
The reaction to the article has been swift and vehement. An article posted at the site QSIDE urges faculty to direct their students not to attend and not to apply for jobs at the University of California-Davis, where Prof.Thompson is chair of the math department. It recommends contacting the university to question whether Prof. Thompson is fit to be chair. And it recommends refusing to do work for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society for allowing this piece to be published.
Regardless of where anyone stands on the issue of whether diversity statements are a fair or effective means to further diversity aims, we should agree that this attempt to silence opinions is damaging to the profession. This is a direct attempt to destroy Prof. Thompson’s career and to punish her department. It is an attempt to intimidate the AMS into publishing only articles that hew to a very specific point of view. If we allow ourselves to be intimidated into avoiding discussion of how best to achieve diversity, we undermine our attempts to achieve it.
We the undersigned urge the American Mathematical Society to stand by the principle that important issues should be openly discussed in a respectful manner, and to make a clear statement that bullying and intimidation have no place in our community.
What is most interesting to me about this statement is that it was written by liberal academics who are, for the most part, in favor of affirmative action. The issue, for them, is that Chad Topaz has taken on the role of enforcer of the most extreme policy expectations of critical race theory and identity politics. I was surprised to see who has signed the petitions complaining about Topaz.

Other signatories include at least eight from his own college - Luana Maroja, Matt Carter, Joan Edwards, Daniel Lynch, David Gurcay-Morris, David C. Smith, Phebe Cramer and Susan Dunn - and no less than five from his own math department - Colin Adams, Julie Blackwood, Richard De Veaux, Thomas Garrity and Steven J. Miller.

As you may know, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Williams College was the 2014 top recipient of the AMS Award for an Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department. According to the American Mathematical Society the department was honored for “excellence in providing exceptional teaching and research experiences for its students, as well as those in the wider mathematical community.”

I was startled to see that one signatory might even be the disgraced Williams College trustee, Joey Horn. Check out the whole list below:

Colin Adams Williams College
Luana Maroja, Williams College
Matt Carter, Williams College
Charles Frohman
Rob Kirby, UC Berkeley
Julie Blackwood, Williams College
Clifford Henry Taubes (Department of Mathematics, Harvard University)
Martin Scharlemann, University of California at Santa Barbara
David Eisenbud, U.C. Berkeley
David A. Cox
Michael Freedman Microsoft and UCSB math
Benedict H Gross, UCSD
Steven J. Miller, Williams College
Michael Kapovich, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Davis
D.D. Long UC Santa Barbara
Bruno Nachtergaele, University of California, Davis
Mladen Bestvina, University of Utah
Marc Culler, University of Illinois at Chicago
Laurence R. Taylor University of Notre Dame
Wilfried Schmid, Harvard University
Eric Babson, UC Davis
Joan Edwards, Professor of Biology, Williams College
Dan Romik, UC Davis
David C. Smith, Williams College
Mohamed Elhamdadi
Jozef H. Przytycki, George Washington University
James Glimm Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Stony Brook University
Robert Gompf, The University of Texas at Austin
Ronald Fintushel, Michigan State University (Emeritus)
Darij Grinberg, Drexel University
Emily Hamilton, California Polytechnic State University
Theodore Slaman, University of California Berkeley
J. Elisenda Grigsby, Boston College
William Goldman, Professor, University of Maryland
Elbridge Gerry Puckett, Full Professor, Department of Mathematics, UC Davis
Shiqian Ma, UC Davis
Nicolai Reshetikhin, University of California, Berkeley
Hung-Hsi Wu, Univ. of Cal., Berkeley
Adam Jacob - UC Davis
Louis H Kauffman, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Chicago
Vivek Shende, UC Berkeley
William H. Meeks III, Professor of Mathematic, UMass Amherst
Jennifer Schultens
Robert Ghrist, University of Pennsylvania
Barbara Nimershiem, Franklin & Marshall College
Fernando Q. Gouvêa, Colby College
Thomas Garrity (Williams College)
Phebe Cramer Williams College
Marjorie Senechal, Smith College
Sergei Tabachnikov, Penn State
Susan Dunn, Williams College
David Gabai (Princeton University)
Thomas Crawford (Swarthmore College)
Sergiu Klainerman Princeton University
Gigliola Staffilani, MIT
David Auckly, Professor Kansas State University, Director Indigenous Math Circle Communities
Daniel Ruberman, Brandeis University
Hans Riess, University of Pennsylvania
Boris Khesin (University of Toronto)
Dr. Bert Frank Smits
Bastian Rieck (ETH Zurich)
Alek Vainshtein, University of Haifa
Sara A. Solla - Northwestern University
James Arthur, University Professor, University of Toronto. Past President of American Mathematical Society, 2005-2007
Alex Kontorovich, Rutgers University
Lev Rozansky, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Richard Montgomery, UC Santa Cruz, distinguished professor
Richard De Veaux, Williams College
Joey Horn
Michael Stay, CTO, Pyrofex Corp.
Lev Reyzin, Department of Mathematics (MSCS), University of Illinois at Chicago
Dionne Kunkel, The George Washington University
Walter Neumann, Barnard College, Columbia University
Robin Blankenship, Morehead State University
Ivan Izmestiev (TU Wien)
João Nogueira, University of Coimbra
R. Douglas Chatham, Morehead State University
Casey Rodriguez, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bill Casselman, UBC
Alan Isaac, American University
Carolyn Gordon (Dartmouth College)
Vladislav Vysotsky (University of Sussex)
David Farris, National Centre for Biological Science, Bangalore
Dmitry Fuchs, professor emeritus at University of California, Davis
Chandler Davis, University of Toronto
Vadim Zharnitsky, University of Illinois
Adebisi Agboola (UC Santa Barbara)
Erica Li
Aaron Kaestner, North Park University
Alexandre Chorin, Mathematics, UC Berkeley
Alexander Tumanov, Professor, University of Illinois
David A. Meyer, UC San Diego
Animesh Ray, Professor, Keck Graduate Institute; Extended Faculty, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Claremont Graduate University; Visiting Faculty Associate, DBE, Caltech
Erik Postma, Maplesoft (on personal title)
Gregory Benford UC Irvine
Mikael Sundqvist, Lund University, Sweden
Daniel Allcock (U.T. Austin)
Yakov Pesin, Penn state University

To understand the full viciousness of Chad M. Topaz's fatwa against Abigail Thompson, you have to read his Facebook post on the topic. It is much more raw and extreme than his later comments, especially one of the last posts I read at QSIDE where he deleted his call for getting her fired for her politically incorrect views. My observation is verified by a bright comment maker at Ephblog who noticed this retreat. He calls it the motte and bailey technique. I'm embedding a link to Chad Topaz's Facebook post and the text of that post after the break.

Finally, I should point out that Chad Topaz has retreated from social media. Initially, he was only blocking Twitter accounts. Later, he took his Twitter account completely off line. Now it is only visible to his approved followers. In reaction to negative publicity, he was quick to remove incriminating statements on his Facebook page. His virtually all of his Facebook posts were removed from public view by November 28, 2019. In inexplicably, Chad Topaz also disrupted links to his QSIDE website that were created by authors critical of his views. These redirects steered readers away from his posts at QSIDE to website of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND. Pronouns - Master/Commander.

Thursday, November 7, 2019

For Good? Moody's Investor Services Down Grades Occidental College Debt in Middle of Capital Campaign

Thanks to an article in the Wall Street Journal, I recently learned that I'm not the only white guy who gave up on giving money to Occidental College. According to the WSJ, the school - which is in the middle of a capital campaign - is choking so hard that Moody's Investor Services just down grade its debt from stable to negative. The timing of this announcement couldn't be worse. No rational donor wants to throw good money after bad. There are details on the cringe worthy "Oxy Campaign For Good" on the school's website.



According the the Occidental College spin, the school's financial failures are its punishment for not being nicer to wealthy white families who - perhaps illegally - were willing to pay for their otherwise ineligible children to attend the school. This, of course, is a joke. The school admits tons of black and Latino kids who wouldn't have been eligible to attend the school back when I was a student with extremely high test scores and a number of high school track records too.

In reality, Occidental College has ticked off potential white donors and white alums like me by embracing anti-white bigotry, socialist professors, and identity politics. Moreover, it ruined the prestige of the school by lowering its standards in order to make the school less white.

I remember how its first black president, John Slaughter, told a group of alumni with white faces that he looked forward - essentially - to a future where there were fewer white faces around. I was offended. I still think Slaughter  was a sick jerk. He was completely unqualified to serve as a college president. He had no experience as a fundraiser or as a liberal arts college administrator. Under his feckless leadership, support for students shot up so high and so quick that the Board of Directors had to draw down the endowment to keep the school going.

I complained to him in writing once and he ended up calling me. He denied having said he wanted to see fewer white faces around even though his comments had been printed in the Los Angeles Times. I complained, as I remember, about affirmative action and he said it was clear I had a personal beef with the college. Duh. He was especially incensed when I complained about how admission standards at Occidental College had been dropped to allow for more non-whites on campus. His response, as I recall, was quite odd. "Are you suggesting these students aren't qualified to be here?" This was freaky, in part, because my concern is not whether or not the students were qualified, but whether they were the best of the best. To be sure, I have to give Slaughter credit for calling me back. Subsequent presidents of this declining school haven't done even that...

Since then, Occidental College has been a leader in rolling over to please leftist students and professors with everything from denying guys due process to fight sexual assault and giving in to the demands of black students who took over the administrative building. The article in the Wall Street Journal is reprinted below, after the break. There are a number of really twisted people on the faculty including Lisa Wade, a leader in the fight against toxic masculinity. Or, to be more correct, just masculinity itself. As has been reported by The College Fix, Lisa Wade rejects the notion of "toxic masculinity," saying it is time to recognize that "it is masculinity itself that has become the problem."

Heroes of the school include ethical lightweights like leftist journalist Steve Coll '80 who - as far as I can tell - left his wife Susan for an intern working at his non-profit organization. (I used to be friends with Steve and Susan.) The husband of one of my Occidental College friends, Joe

The capital campaign, of course, is being led by president Jonathan Veitch who distinguished himself as among the nation's most groveling academic leaders who allowed students to occupy his office, terrify his staff, and get away with a number of absurd identity based policy changes. 

I have a couple of hot takes on this....

Occidental College has been a victim of politically correct nonsense for a number of years. It reduced standards to allow more black and Latinos to attend. The negative consequence of this reduction in standards is that subsequent alumni are both less bright and less wealthy than earlier alumni.

Occidental College leaders like John Slaughter, the first black Oxy president, went out of their way to discourage whites from teaching at the school or sending their children there as students. The problem in Slaughter's view was basically that the school was too white.

The school has gone off the deep end in hiring socialist/Communist faculty members who despise whites in principle and who certainly have no respect for those who have acquired any large amount of wealth. Such people, to these socialist/Communist faculty members, are their enemies...not their donors.

I attended at talk at Oxy in 2012 where I overheard Eric Newhall, quoted in the WSJ article, bragging about how much better Oxy was now that it had fewer white people on the faculty. He didn't realize I was a young white guy who was pissed off at the discrimination the school practiced against young white conservative scholars. He looked shocked that a white guy would be upset at a system where he and his relatives got screwed just because of their race.

I wouldn't give a dime to these people. If affirmative action isn't evil, nothing is evil.

I got a request from the school asking me, as an alum, to give to their capital campaign. I've considered the school my enemy for years. I wish I had read this article before I filled out the questionnaire. If they are a bad bet for Moody's Investor Services, then they are a bad bet for me too.


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