Free Republic

‘We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.’Someone asked me the other day how I planned to commemorate October 7. I found myself speechless, befuddled by the question. How do you offer an elegy when the war is not yet over—and 101 hostages, those still alive and the bodies of the murdered, are not yet home? How do you remember a catastrophe when it is still unfolding? How do you mark a past event that feels as though it was a prelude to a much deeper darkness, whose dimensions we are still discovering? How do...

University Middle East expert Hussein Mousavian was a former Iranian official A former Iranian official who is a faculty member at Princeton University recently bragged in an interview about how his hardline government’s death threats against a former top Trump administration official had him and his family "trembling" with fear. Hussein Mousavian, a former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team who works as a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University, said in a recent interview that the Iranian regime’s threats to murder Brian Hook, the Trump administration’s special envoy for Iran, have heavily impacted Hook’s family...

group of Princeton University graduates stood up and turned their backs on the Ivy League school’s president while he spoke at commencement Tuesday amid ongoing tensions on campus over Israel-Hamas war protests. More than 30 members of the university’s Class of 2024 — including many wearing keffiyehs, the traditional Middle Eastern headdress often worn by pro-Palestinian protesters — turned their backs to Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber as he closed out commencement with his address. About ten students sitting near the front row of the graduation ceremony also quietly walked out midway through Eisgruber’s speech in a pro-Palestinian demonstration similar...

Students at Princeton University protesting Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza have called an end to their hunger strike after just 10 days. Princeton Divest Now, the student protest group that is calling for the New Jersey Ivy League university to divest from America’s Middle Eastern ally due to the high civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip, said additional strikers would be continuing their efforts.

VIDEOBe honest. Does this Princeton hunger striker look like he's been fasting for eight days? I've never seen a hunger striker look so well fed. Obviously this guy has been hiding snacks in his Keffiyeh. Snickers? Cocoa Puffs? Gummi Bears? And now he wants others to join in with his Solidarity Hunger Strike Picnic. Yes, those Keffiyehs make great tablecloths to serve pizza slices on the sly.

Three things are certain: antisemitism is on the rise; hatred of Muslims is increasing; and everyone – but especially those at universities with time to reflect – should be very, very troubled by this. Without taking account of the hate waves, it is impossible to understand why the seemingly mundane act of pitching a tent on campus has become so high stakes: is it announcing a desire to annihilate Israel, or is it a perfectly legitimate way to protest against particular US (and university) policies

WEST (Credit: CEA-IRFM). A new record in fusion has been achieved using a device internally clad in tungsten, a development that could set the pace for helping make fusion energy viable at the commercial scale. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facility, reports that the device was able to sustain hot fusion plasma nearing temperatures of 50 million degrees Celsius for a record-breaking six minutes. Relying on 1.15 gigajoules of power, the latest achievement saw a 15% increase in energy, as well as twice the density of previous experiments. The new milestone was set using...

Pro-Palestinian protesters taking part in an encampment at Princeton University began a hunger strike to raise awareness for starving people in Gaza.The Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest (PIAD) student organization posted a series of photos on Instagram announcing that pro-Palestinian protests would be launching a hunger strike “in solitary with Gaza.”“PRINCETON STUDENTS LAUNCH HUNGER STRIKE IN SOLIDARITY WITH GAZA!!” the group wrote.PIAD explained that as part of the hunger strike, protesters would “abstain from all food and drink” except for water until their demands were met.“We commit our bodies to their liberation of Palestine,” the group continued. “PRINCETON, hear us now!...

Princeton students dressed in Islamic attire announce they are going on HUNGER STRIKE. “We will abstain from all food and drink except water until the following demands are met.” Demands: • Divest from Israel • Cultural Boycott • Complete Amnesty from all criminal charges

Princeton University students took over an administrative building at the Ivy League school Monday afternoon, according to the Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment, while Rutgers University protestors have set up an encampment of at least a dozen tents on Voorhees Mall in New Brunswick. The escalating protests come five days after Princeton arrested two students Thursday for starting to put up tents. Protestors there have continued their presence on McCosh Courtyard, with teach-ins and visiting poets, as they called on the university to divest its investments from firms profiting from the Israel-Hamas war. Similar encampments have led to weeks of tensions...

An LGBTQ activist with top degrees from Harvard, Yale and Princeton is facing up to five years in jail on charges of downloading child porn. Roy 'Trey' Farmer, 53, was arrested at his home opposite the gates of Princeton in New Jersey on Friday after a tip-off from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) The former 'piano prodigy' sits on the board of the New York Philharmonic and is president of Queer Princeton Alumni, but it has since had his details removed from their website. A successful banker and entrepreneur, he is a former president of the...

Migration and free trade impose huge unrecognized costs on ordinary people, says a Nobel-awarded Princeton economist who previously supported the unpopular, elite-backed policies. “I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing,” Professor Angus Deaton wrote in a post for the International Monetary Fund. He continued: Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open [to migration], was much lower when the borders were closed [to migrants], and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965)...

EXCLUSIVE: The influential House Committee of Education and the Workforce on Thursday launched an investigation into the role of a former Iranian official, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, at Princeton University. It is claimed that he is suspected of advancing the interests of Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism. Twelve Republican committee members sent a letter to Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber with detailed questions about the influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran via Mousavian’s activities on the campus of the New Jersey-based Ivy League institution. Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., who along with Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., spearheaded the letter to...

…and hollow women, too.I’ve been writing for years about the rise of toxic ideologies on America’s college campuses – totalitarian, anti-Israel, outright anti-Semitic – but still have been surprised by what has happened in these places since October 7. We need to discuss the reasons why it’s gotten so bad.A few days ago, someone republished an essay, written in 2016, by a professor who has taught at several ‘elite’ colleges. Excerpt:My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be...

Hussein Mousavian headlined STRATCOM's Deterrence Symposium U.S. military leaders earlier this month hosted a former top Iranian official who came under fire last year for bragging about the hardline regime’s efforts to assassinate American leaders. U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) tapped Hussein Mousavian, a former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team who works as a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University, to headline its 2023 Deterrence Symposium, a high-level powwow that brought the former Iranian official shoulder-to-shoulder with America’s top military brass. Mousavian’s appearance at the mid-August gathering, which came to light on Monday after STRATCOM posted...

Today is the 247th anniversary of the mysterious, Providential fog that covered the evacuation of the Continental Army from Long Island to Manhattan in 1776. The term Providence was very common in this era. The president of Princeton College, John Witherspoon, defined Providence as the operation of God’s presence. After the evacuation on August 29, 1776, one soldier sent a report to a Boston newspaper that said: “Providence favored us. The night was remarkably still. The water as smooth as glass, so that our boats got all over. At sunrise a great fog came up. The enemy did not discover...

Earlier this year, in a landmark action, the Kansas legislature passed the Donor Intent Protection Act, which helps ensure that donors’ wishes are respected when they make a charitable gift as an endowment. This is a significant step forward for philanthropy, as it will help to build trust between donors and beneficiaries, on campus and elsewhere. Donor-intent protections are intended to uphold the details of an explicit written agreement between a donor and a charitable organization. Such agreements typically specify how the endowed funds will be used, such as for a specific program or purpose. When a donor makes a...

Jon Wang, an Asian-American, achieved a nearly perfect sore of 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and attained 4.65 grade-point average in high school — well beyond perfect. Most folks likely would assume that waves of red carpets would come rolling in from elite colleges that would love nothing more than to scoop up a student boasting such numbers. Indeed, Wang told Fox Nation he applied to six "top-tier" institutions of higher learning — Harvard, Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Mellon, and the University of California, Berkeley. But the verdict —...

Abortion activists have moved into the realm of trying to make killing unborn babies seem funny. Some are blatant about it, such as Princeton University senior Jenni Lawson. She named her musical comedy, “To All the Babies I’ve Killed Before: A Love/Hate Letter to Storytelling,” according to Campus Reform. The student performance took place April 21 and 22 on campus. The play “investigate[s] the challenges of being heard and cultivating self-empowerment as a queer, cognitively-disabled (ADHD) woman in artistic spaces that traditionally center archaic, western, patriarchal narratives grounded in firm structures of storytelling and comedy,” the program states. But throughout...

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork ... Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as...