Free Republic

The Twitter executive responsible for blocking stories about Hunter Biden's laptop is one of several advisers to the Aspen Institute's disinformation commission. Yoel Roth is one of several questionable advisers to Aspen's Commission on Information Disorder, which on Monday released its much-anticipated report. Commission members include Katie Couric, who recently acknowledged that she edited comments on National Anthem protests out of a 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to preserve the justice's reputation with liberals. Another commissioner, Rashad Robinson, helped fuel actor Jussie Smollett's hate crime hoax. Commission members' censorship of legitimate news stories could undercut their lofty mission. The...

Surgeons at a New York City hospital have successfully attached a pig’s kidney to a person, whose immune system didn’t immediately reject the organ — a ground-breaking procedure that may one day lead to the use of animals in life-saving transplants. The recipient at NYU Langone Health was a brain-dead woman who received the kidney of a pig whose genes had been altered so its tissues no longer harbored a molecule known to trigger almost immediate rejection, according to Reuters. The family of the patient — who showed signs of kidney dysfunction — consented to the experiment before she was...

From the moment I stepped foot on campus at NYU three years ago, I’ve been taught that there is right-think and wrong-think. Everywhere I look, professors, administrators and peers all fervently parrot the same beliefs. I have sat through orientation events that were highly politicized, assuming “community values” of radical progressivism — values I don’t share. On the first day of the semester, a professor blatantly disparaged conservative politicians and their supporters as uneducated and ignorant. Even Mayor de Blasio intervened in October of 2018 to prevent right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking to a class of about 25 freshmen...

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Wednesday that former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch will advise her office's fast-moving probe of the New York Police Department and its clashes with protesters at demonstrations sparked by the fatal arrest of George Floyd. James announced that Lynch and Barry Friedman, a New York University professor who serves as faculty director of the NYU Law Policing Project, will join the investigation as special advisers. "The right to peacefully protest is one of our most basic civil rights, and we are working without rest to ensure that right is protected and guarded," James...

Lawrence Mead, a long-time proponent of welfare reform, is a professor of politics and public policy at New York University. On July 21st this year, an ill-advised article he had written, ‘Poverty and Culture’, appeared in the academic journal Society. The article began by asking, “Why do so many Americans remain destitute… even when jobs are available?” According to Mead, the answer is not “social barriers, such as racial discrimination or lack of jobs,” but rather “cultural difference.” Noting that “the seriously poor are mostly blacks and Hispanics,” he argued that such individuals have not internalised Western norms of individualism....

New York University officials signaled they are open to a student group's demands to create Black residence floors on campus next year, but the petition is already receiving backlash for proposing students segregate themselves. "[Residential] Life staff have reached out to the authors of the petition to discuss how we might move forward with their goals," an NYU spokesperson told Washington Square News, NYU's student newspaper. "Given the COVID-related challenges to the student housing system for 2020-2021, these conversations would be aiming towards 2021-2022.” A "themed engagement floor" for Black students is being pushed by a group called Black Violets...

Congress wrote to the nation’s top universities on Monday demanding they hand over all records of donations they have accepted from foreign governments and rogue regimes, citing concerns that the multimillion-dollar gifts are a growing national security threat, The Post can reveal. The letters obtained by The Post were sent to the presidents of six of the country’s leading colleges — including Harvard, NYU and Yale — after a Department of Education investigation this year found American universities had accepted $6.4 billion of hidden foreign donations. The University of Chicago, the University of Delaware, Harvard University, New York University, the...

NEW YORK - Researchers at NYU's Grossman School of Medicine found patients given the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine along with zinc sulphate and the antibiotic azithromycin were 44 percent less likely to die from the coronavirus. "Certainly we have very limited options as far as what we have seen work for this infection so anything that may work is very exciting," said Dr. Joseph Rahimian, Infectious Disease Specialist at NYU Langone Health. The study looked at the records of 932 COVID-19 patients treated at local hospitals with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. More than 400 of them were also given 100 milligrams of...

On picking up What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus, one might expect a book urging those who dismiss today’s college students’ complaints about institutional racism, persistent sexism, and other societal ills to take them more seriously. To engage with their arguments and to try to empathize with them, rather than ignoring or lambasting them, even when they engage in what seems to many people like unjustified histrionics. What Snowflakes Get Right is not that book. In fact, on completing NYU comparative literature professor (and former vice provost) Ulrich Baer’s book laying out his views on...

Students at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts want some of their tuition money back because they say virtual classes aren't what they paid for — but instead of addressing the situation, the school's dean sent them a video of herself dancing to REM's "Losing My Religion." Following several communications between students and the school administration, Dean Allyson Green earlier this week attached her dance video to an email to students in which she explained that she doesn't have the authority to refund tuition and that it's "challenging" for the school to give students their money back...

A New York University professor is one of the masterminds behind the anarchist group that organized the rampage through the subways last month, destroying turnstiles, stranding thousands of commuters and spray-painting “F–k Cops” on station walls. Amin Husain, 44, is a co-founder of Decolonize This Place, which urged its radical followers in a social media campaign to “f-ck sh-t up” on Jan. 31 in a violent assault on the city’s transit system that concluded with 13 arrests and $100,000 in damage. Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was “repulsed” by the hooliganism, and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea called the so-called...

Margo Kaplan is not very popular today. In the Monday edition of the New York Times, the Rutgers-Camden law professor, an NYU and Harvard graduate, takes to the op-ed pages to argue that we’ve got it all wrong when it comes to pedophilia. She writes that pedophiles don’t necessarily turn out to be child molesters and that pedophilia is not a choice, i.e. a pedophile might be born that way. We reached her in her office in Camden to discuss. pedophilia-not-a-crime-rutgers-margo-kaplanYou really lit up the comments section of the op-ed page today. Yes, but I have to be honest. I...

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) seized on newly released emails surrounding President Trump's decision to delay aid to Ukraine, arguing they underscored the need for witnesses and documents as part of an impeachment trial. “The newly-revealed unredacted emails are a devastating blow to Senator McConnell’s push to have a trial without the documents and witnesses we’ve requested," Schumer said in a statement. "These emails further expose the serious concerns raised by Trump administration officials about the propriety and legality of the president’s decision to cut off aid to Ukraine to benefit himself," he added. Schumer's comments come after Just...

Given that a large number of the leprosy cases in the United States involve Latinos coming up from Mexico, Dr. Marc Siegel, an internal medicine specialist with NYU Langone Health, said "it seems only a matter of time before leprosy could take hold among the homeless population" in Los Angeles County. There are close to 600,000 homeless people in L.A. County and 75% of those people lack "even temporary shelter or adequate hygiene and medical equipment," Dr. Siegel wrote in The Hill. "All of those factors make a perfect cauldron for a contagious disease that is transmitted by nasal droplets...

Mark S. Zaid, the activist attorney representing the so-called whistleblower at the center of the impeachment movement targeting President Donald Trump, advocated for Robert S. Mueller III to become an anti-Trump whistleblower. On April 25, 2018, while Mueller’s Office of the Special Counsel was investigating ultimately collapsed claims of collusion between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign, Zaid co-authored an oped in the New York Times calling for Mueller and his staff to become “lawful whistle-blowers.” The scheme outlined by Zaid was an option to be implemented if Trump had moved to fire Mueller and dismantle the Special Counsel’s office. Zaid...

New York University has cancelled a class entitled “Reporting on the Far Right” after only two students signed up for the elective course. The course was scheduled to be taught by former New Yorker fact-checker Talia Lavin. Lavin resigned from the magazine last year after a Twitter dust-up surrounding her mistakenly identifying the tattoo of a wheelchair-bound ICE agent as a Nazi cross. Lavin later deleted the tweet and sort of apologized for her mistake. “Some vets said this ICE agent’s tattoo looked more like a Maltese Cross than an Iron Cross (common among white supremacists), so I deleted my...

New York University has canceled a "Reporting on the Far Right" elective undergraduate class after just two students signed up to take the course. NYU attracted headlines earlier this year after its decision to hire former New Yorker fact-checker Talia Lavin to teach the class. In June 2018, Lavin resigned from the magazine after making a false accusation against ICE agent Justin Gaertner for sporting what she believed was a Nazi tattoo, which turned out to be a 'Titan 2' symbol for former Marine veteran's platoon while serving in Afghanistan. “Canceling the class had nothing to do with Talia’s writings,...

Ian Bremmer is a political scientist who teaches at New York University. He also apparently works at Time magazine and appears on television occasionally as an expert in foreign affairs. Sunday he created quite a firestorm when he tweeted out a fake quote attributed to President Trump. For a while, Bremmer doubled-down and refused to delete the tweet or apologize, even after other blue-checked progressives began sharing it widely. Today, Bremmer finally apologized: My tweet yesterday about Trump preferring Kim Jong Un to Biden as President was meant in jest. The President correctly quoted me as saying it was...

Talia Lavin’s undergraduate course “Reporting on the Far Right” will kick off in the fall semester of 2019 New York University has hired Talia Lavin as an adjunct journalism professor less than a year after the former New Yorker fact checker resigned after falsely accusing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of having a Nazi tattoo. Lavin’s undergraduate course “Reporting on the Far Right” will kick off in the fall semester of 2019 at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. In its official faculty bio, the university billed Lavin as an expert in “far-right extremism and social justice.” At least one current NYU...

Talia Lavin, who resigned from the New Yorker in disgrace last year after helping whip up a Twitter mob claiming a disable Marine veteran was a Nazi, has been hired by NYU’s journalism school to teach a class titled “Reporting on the Far Right.” From the Wrap: Lavin’s undergraduate course “Reporting on the Far Right” will kick off in the fall semester of 2019 at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. In its official faculty bio, the university billed Lavin as an expert in “far-right extremism and social justice.”At least one current NYU journalism student questioned the decision to...