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The hostile New York City business environment has claimed a new victim: the legendary China Fun restaurant, which has been in operation for 25 years. A letter on left on the door of the restaurant on January 3, 2017, outlined the reasons:
“The climate for small businesses like ours in New York have become such that it’s difficult to justify taking risks and running — nevermind starting — a legitimate mom-and-pop business,” read a letter posted by the owners in the restaurant’s front door.
“The state and municipal governments, with their punishing rules and regulations, seems to believe that we should be their cash machine to pay for all that ails us in society.”
For 25 years, China Fun was renowned for its peerless soup dumplings and piquant General Tso’s chicken.
According to the NY Daily News, “the endless paperwork and constant regulation that forced the shutdown accumulated over the years.” Other reasons included: the requirement to provide an on-site break room, minimum wage increases, health insurance, business insurance, and onerous Health Department rules and regulations.
The government essentially acknowledges the burdens it places on small businesses; “free compliance advisors are available for on-sight consultation aimed at helping small businesses comply with regulations” are a part of the Small Business First initiative.
So instead of making it easier for a business to start, operate, and grow a business, NYC makes it easier to comply with overbearing regulation, rules, and taxes. Businesses go into business to make a product or provide a service — not to respond to government red tape. The loss of China Fun is a microcosm of the entirely hostile, anti-business environment that plagues the NYC government.
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Newt Gingrich warned that Trump’s “Drain the Swamp” verbiage was really a lot of bluster. His presidential appointments seems to be reflecting that — but is it really Trump’s fault? Or are his hands tied? Or a mix of both? Jay Cost over at The Weekly Standard, gives some insight into the history of presidential appointments and how the system works. It’s definitely worth a read in its entirety:
As a candidate, Donald Trump promised sweeping change in the way Washington functions. He would tell voters that the system is rigged, it’s broken, it’s run by losers, and only he could fix it. And yet, for all this rhetoric, it is striking how typical his presidential appointments have been: Jeff Sessions, Mike Pompeo, John Kelly, Rick Perry, Elaine Chao, Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, Andrew Puzder, Nikki Haley, Seema Verma. Most of these appointees are conservative, of course, but they are conventionally conservative. It is striking, indeed, that the most controversial appointment so far is Rex Tillerson to the State Department. He is an outsider to the ways of Washington but he is still the CEO of a company with $380 billion in total assets and 75,000 employees. A populist barbarian storming the establishment gate, Tillerson is not!
Little wonder that Politico reported last week, “Donald Trump’s White House-in-waiting is already being roiled by divisions, with the conservative outsiders who helped power his historic victory colliding with a Republican Party establishment muscling its way in.”
Something similar happened eight years ago. Barack Obama promised a major break with the previous practices of both parties. Still, his appointments were conventionally liberal: Hillary Clinton, Tim Geithner, Robert Gates (who was actually a holdover from the George W. Bush administration), Eric Holder, Ken Salazar, Tom Vilsack, Gary Locke, Kathleen Sebelius, and so on. Obama largely sampled from the upper echelon of Democratic politicians and policymakers in forming his cabinet—certainly an ideological change from the Bush era but not a fundamental break from past practices.
The system, as it turns out, is much more resilient than presidential candidates on the trail want voters to believe. Electing a new president certainly changes the course of public policy in Washington, but presidents are nevertheless constrained actors. Presidential candidates want us to think they have free rein to make over the government, but the truth is that the occupant of the Oval Office is boxed in from all sides, including in the appointment process.
Trump faces several challenges in using the appointment power to reshape the government. The first is Congress. The Senate possesses the constitutional authority to review certain appointments and reject those nominees it thinks are unfit. This could be why Trump passed over Rudy Giuliani for a cabinet appointment; he may have judged that the confirmation process would be a difficult one for the former mayor of New York City. This might also explain Trump’s decision to make Michael Flynn his national security adviser: The Senate does not review or confirm West Wing appointments.
Congress imposes broader constraints as well. The cabinet departments are, after all, legislative creations, and Congress has the power to write legislation regulating which employees are and are not subject to the appointment process. Starting with the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, Congress sharply curtailed the presidential nominating power, setting the overwhelming majority of executive department employees outside the discretion of the commander in chief. By and large, the same civil servants who worked under George W. Bush and Barack Obama will continue to work under Donald Trump, without worry that the president can dismiss them.
John F. Kennedy summarized the limits the president faces better than anybody:
The fact is that I think the Congress looks more powerful sitting here than it did when I was there in the Congress. . . . When you are in Congress, you are one of a hundred in the Senate or one of 435 in the House . . . but from here I look at . . . the collective power of the Congress . . . and it is a substantial power.
Executive appointments are just the tip of the iceberg. When Trump enters office, he will find Congress to be a potentially implacable foe on any matter where his will runs contrary to its own.
And Trump—or for that matter any outsider president looking to effect sweeping change—must confront the problem of asymmetric information. The federal government is so complicated that one must possess a great deal of technical, specialized information to manage it properly. The president typically does not possess that information, at least not outside a few policy domains (for instance, as Dwight Eisenhower did with the military). He must appoint officials who possess such knowledge. But where do people acquire this? They usually gain it from participating in the affairs of state—the very same affairs that the president has promised to alter.
There are, of course, experts who are nonetheless looking for big changes—for instance, Rep. Tom Price, whom Trump nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services, and who came to Congress after a successful career as an orthopedic surgeon, is intent on rolling back Obamacare—but the president still faces a substantial challenge. Oftentimes, those whom he taps to change the system have been longtime participants in sustaining it. This problem is compounded when one considers the large number of lower-level appointments the president is authorized to make, where he can only afford to spend a small amount of face time with his nominees. Quite often, he is forced to trust that the people he has delegated responsibility to will, in turn, make good appointments.
Expertise, in other words, can create a subtle bias for the status quo, which was on full display in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. As Ron Suskind reports in Confidence Men, President Obama wanted to reorganize Citigroup in 2009 and instructed Treasury Secretary Geithner to put together a plan. But, per Suskind, Geithner never followed through. As one high-level banking executive explained to Suskind: “The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t—he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob. And the guy we figured we had to thank for that was Tim. He was our man in Washington.”
The irony is that the president, in many respects, is less able today to fulfill his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” than he was in George Washington’s time. The Senate constrains him, via its advisory role, as always. But now the vast bulk of the executive branch is outside his aegis, easily able to resist his political or ideological agenda. Moreover, the technical expertise required to manage the government means that the relative handful of appointments he does get to make is often from the “establishment” he ran against.
All of this runs contrary to the image of the presidency that candidates wish to cultivate on the campaign trail. They want voters to think of the president as a kind of superman—able to work his will on any policy issue that confronts him. But this is just not the case. The president, in truth, is a restricted government agent, just as all officials are in our system of checks and balances. In this nomination process, we are witnessing an early glimpse of how our system of government will constrain and frustrate Trump, just as it has his predecessors.
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After telling the American electorate that he wants to repeal and replace Obamacare, Trump has now stated that he may not do this entirely. The way he worded his remarks indicates that he is willing to keep “ObamaCare’s preexisting condition and the 26 year old provision to stay on their parent’s plan” to remain.
These two provisions are not “Obamacare” provisions – they are provisions that could – and maybe should – be part of a new health care law. The new replacement for Obamacare could have provisions for people with preexisting conditions to get insurance and even keeping 26 year olds on the plan — but it should be funded in a new healthcare plan that is able to charge competitively using a Health Saving Account structure, with tort reform, interstate competition, no mandated coverage that people don’t want – and government subsidies for the needy – and not by mandates and intentional overcharges.
The fact that some provisions of ObamaCare are also in the new plan does NOT mean that part of ObamaCare remains. Socialism and Capitalism are not the same just because they both have a police force.
ObamaCare must go in its entirety.
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Congress heard a report this week that evidenced interference by the Obama administration into Congressional process with regard to a piece of radiation legislation in 2014. The Administration appears to have used the Department of Energy to forward his particular climate change package while simultaneously remove opposing viewpoints and sour lawmakers on a certain bill that would possibly conflict with his agenda.
The Washington Free Beacon produced the overview; I have reprinted it below in its entirety so as to not leave out any pertinent details:
A new congressional investigation has determined that the Obama administration fired a top scientist and intimidated staff at the Department of Energy in order to further its climate change agenda, according to a new report that alleges the administration ordered top officials to obstruct Congress in order to forward this agenda.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas), chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, released a wide-ranging report on Tuesday that shows how senior Obama administration officials retaliated against a leading scientist and plotted ways to block a congressional inquiry surrounding key research into the impact of radiation.
A top DoE scientist who liaised with Congress on the matter was fired by the Obama administration for being too forthright with lawmakers, according to the report, which provides an in-depth look at the White House’s efforts to ensure senior staffers toe the administration’s line.
The report also provides evidence that the Obama administration worked to kill legislation in order to ensure that it could receive full funding for its own hotly contested climate change agenda.
The report additionally discovered efforts by the Obama administration to censor the information given to Congress, interfering with the body’s ability to perform critical oversight work.
“Instead of providing the type of scientific information needed by Congress to legislate effectively, senior departmental officials sought to hide information, lobbied against legislation, and retaliated against a scientist for being forthcoming,” Smith said in a statement. “In this staff report based on lengthy record before the committee, much has been revealed about how senior level agency officials under the Obama administration retaliated against a scientist who did not follow the party line.”
“Moving forward, the department needs to overhaul its management practices to ensure that Congress is provided the information it requires to legislate and that federal employees and scientists who provide that information do so without fear of retribution,” Smith said.
The report goes into Congress’ efforts to regulate the Low Dose Radiation Research Program, or LDRRP, which sought to test the impact of radiation on human beings. The program, started in the 1990s, was meant to support research into waste cleanup and the impact of nuclear weapons.
In mid-2014, lawmakers introduced legislation, the Low Dose Radiation Act of 2014, to help regulate the program and minimize harmful side effects.
During an October 2014 briefing with senior DoE staff on the matter, lawmakers heard testimony from Dr. Noelle Metting, the radiation research program’s manager.
Less than a month later, lawmakers discovered that Obama administration officials had “removed Dr. Metting from federal service for allegedly providing too much information in response to questions posed by” Congress during the briefing, the report states.
Congressional investigators later determined that the administration’s “actions to remove Dr. Metting were, in part, retaliation against Dr. Metting because she refused to conform to the predetermined remarks and talking points designed by Management to undermine the advancement of” the 2014 radiation act.
Emails unearthed during the investigation “show a sequence of events leading to a premeditated scheme by senior DoE employees ‘to squash the prospects of Senate support’” for the radiation act, a move that lawmakers claim was meant to help advance President Obama’s own climate change goals.
“The committee has learned that one of DoE’s stated purposes for Dr. Metting’s removal from federal service was her failure to confine the discussion at the briefing to pre-approved talking points,” according to the report. “The committee has also established that DoE management … failed to exercise even a minimal standard of care to avoid chilling other agency scientists as a result of the retaliation against Dr. Metting for her refusal to censor information from Congress.”
The investigation concluded that “DoE placed its own priorities to further the president’s Climate Action Plan before its constitutional obligations to be candid with Congress,” the report states. “The DoE’s actions constitute a reckless and calculated attack on the legislative process itself, which undermines the power of Congress to legislate. The committee further concludes that DoE’s disregard for separation of powers is not limited to a small group of employees, but rather is an institutional problem that must be corrected by overhauling its management practices with respect to its relationship with the Congress.”
These moves by the administration were part of an effort to secure full funding for the president’s climate change agenda, the report claims.
“Instead of working to understand the value of the LDRRP for emergency situations, DoE Management engaged in a campaign to terminate research programs that could divert funds from the president’s Climate Action Plan,” the report states.
Congress is recommending a full overhaul of the DoE’s management structure in order to ensure this type of situation does not occur again.
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I’m sick and tired of reading over and over again in places, both liberal and conservative, that the Trump and GOP-proposed tax reforms are going to give the lion’s share of the cuts to the top 1%. The entire concept is utterly distorted, especially in light of the fact that nobody talked about the litany of tax increases that occurred when Obama and his Democrat cronies passed the Obama and Obamacare increases.
Obama raised the Bush tax rates on only the wealthiest earners from 36% – 39.6 % and then again raised the tax rates on only the same wealthiest by adding a Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT) of 3.8%, — otherwise known as the “Obamacare Tax” — which covered all investment income of individuals, estates, and trusts. What’s more, Obama also raised capital gains on the wealthiest earners from 15% – 20%, but when the NIIT 3.8% tax was added to it, it actually raised the capital gains rates on the highest earners from 15 – 23.8% — an effective increase of nearly 59%!
Those ludicrous tax increases that no one talks about were principally responsible — along with the hemorrhage of regulations coming out of the Obama administration — for the horrific economic performance we’ve experienced since Obama took office. The first step the new Trump administration should take would be to reverse those very tax increases that Obama inflicted, which went 100% to the higher income individuals, and 0% to the middle class and lower income earners. The reversal of those insane tax increases should in no way be considered a tax cut as part of any tax reform package. Such a change would be a mere restoration of more reasonable rates from what was in fact an insane toxin on our entire economy.
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Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) won a major court victory last week in a lawsuit against New York Attorney General Schneiderman. They demanded he disclose documents under New York’s Freedom of Information Law that outlines agreements he made with other attorneys general and allied non-profits regarding Attorneys General United for Clean Power – the coalition which subpoenaed CEI about our climate and energy work.
CEI’s General Counsel, Sam Kazman noted: “CEI’s court victory is a blow to the anti-free speech campaign led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. While the campaign by him and his cohorts that began in March continues against those who disagree with him on global warming, we are glad to see that it is being held subject to the basic laws of the land. By requiring Schneiderman to fully comply with our freedom of information request, the court is ensuring that agencies cannot use shortcuts as a means of skirting New York’s Freedom of Information law.”
While the litigation victory gained attention across several media platforms, my favorite headline came from The New York Post editorial yesterday, “The disclosure that could end Eric Schneiderman’s career.” Read the full editorial below:
State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s witch hunt against supposed “climate-science deniers” became an even more embarrassing debacle late last month — and just might wind up ending his career.
A state judge ruled in favor of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank whose Freedom of Information request the AG had denied. That gave Schneiderman 30 days to cough up documents concerning his agreements with other states’ AGs, and with a group of green activists, about their joint persecution of ExxonMobile and other entities for supposed “climate fraud.”
CEI had been targeted by one of Schneiderman’s co-conspirators, the Virgin Islands AG, with legal demands that plainly aimed at suppressing free speech and scientific inquiry that the nonprofit sponsors.
The think tank’s lawyers believe the documents could show improper conduct by the AGs. If they do, Schneiderman faces serious trouble.
Oh, and New York taxpayers are out some more cash over the AG’s bid to dodge the Freedom of Information Law: The court ordered Schneiderman to cover CEI’s court costs, because his defense of his denial of the FOIL request was so transparently lame. (His brief merely quoted New York law, without even making any argument as to why it applied in this case.)
It all began in March, at a press conference where Schneiderman and 16 other AGs seemed to join Al Gore to announce joint operations against Exxon. In fact, more of the AGs were never on board — they’d shown up for a far less ambitious announcement.
And both of the two AGs who did mean to work with Schneiderman have now backed out, with the Virgin Islands AG completely abandoning his suits and the Massachusetts AG “suspending” her work until further notice.
Schneiderman, meanwhile, has dropped his initial claims that Exxon covered up scientific findings. He had to: The evidence is clear that for decades the company’s been publishing scientific results that fit neatly into the mainstream.
Instead, the AG is now (supposedly) chasing a legal case based on the company’s failure to report the value of its oil reserves in the way he thinks it should.
(Seriously: The charge is that Exxon is overvaluing its oil reserves, because it doesn’t note the risk that anti-warming laws might make the petroleum worthless. Hmm: How is that going to fly with “climate science skeptic” Donald Trump sitting in the White House?)
Schneiderman maintains he shouldn’t have to come clean because he signed confidentiality agreements with the other AGs. But his office won’t say whether it’s going to appeal the FOIL ruling or obey the judge’s order.
If he does keep refusing to comply with the Freedom of Information Law, you have to think he’s worried about what those documents will reveal.
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Nick Timiraos’ recent article in the Wall Street Journal ( Donald Trump’s Spending Push Rankles Fiscal Conservatives, 11/28/16) , is rather disingenuous with his so-called analysis of Trump’s fiscal roadmap. He clearly aims to torpedo Trump’s plan to cut taxes by tying the discussion to deficits — though correlation, of course, does not necessarily mean causation. Timiraos’ analysis is full of half-truths, but it is not entirely certain if that is willfully written or just plain economic ignorance.
First, Timiraos suggests that budget deficits “fell from 2010” but “are on track to climb in the next decade,” yet doesn’t even give any hard data to back that up — because their really isn’t any. A deficit is still a deficit. Going from a $1.4 trillion budget deficit, as Obama had in 2009, down to a $600 billion deficit in 2016, is still a massive deficit. And of course, Timiraos also doesn’t even mention that the “the total national debt nearly doubled to $19.3 trillion from $10.6 trillion when Obama took office.” Those two data points indicate an enormous spending problem on the part of Obama, something Timiraos totally ignores.
Timiraos then has the audacity to try to link rising deficits to tax cuts by Republicans. Timiraos writes, “the last two times Republicans reclaimed the White House from Democrats—in 1981 and 2001—they also successfully pushed for large tax cuts. Deficits nonetheless rose during their administrations.” Again, another instance of Timiraos telling only part of the story. Both tax cuts resulted in huge revenue increases, but it was even greater spending that created larger deficits. The tax cuts were not the problem; the deficits were not caused by a lack of revenue. Even Republicans can overspend.
Once more, near the end of the article, Timiraos tries again to make Obama’s economics to be the pinnacle of fiscal responsibility, when he writes, “Concerns about deficits over the past few years have faded because economic growth remains disappointing and because Washington took several steps to cut spending and increase taxes after deficits jumped in 2009. Deficits have also fallen below projections in recent years due to a surprising decline in the growth rate of health care spending and because interest rates have been lower than projected.” Only the Democrats are unconcerned about deficits — because their deficit spending is so astronomical, it’s better not to talk about it at all! Suggesting that Obama “cut spending and increased taxes” and that “Deficits have also fallen below projections in recent years” again ignores Obama still spent $600 billion – $1.4 trillion more than his revenue receipts were. When deficits are projected to be $1 trillion, and the actual deficit comes in a bit lower than that (but still in the hundreds of billions), you still have a deficit problem! Timiraos also ignores the fact that Obama regularly had record tax receipts each month (noted on this blog numerous times), and yet Obama still could not control his overspending.
To ignore this economic reality of the past eight years, and the simultaneously try to suggest that a tax plan with tax cuts will alarmingly increase the deficit is reckless. Timiraos ought to be ashamed at such blatant hypocrisy.
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On Election Day, many people were willing to overlook Donald Trump’s personal weaknesses because they realized that the biggest factor in this election was the economy — it affected their day-to-day lives more than anything else.
Many people – uniformly partisan Democrats – have accused Trump’s supporters of being bigots; but facts dispute this. A simple look at the voting changes between 2008/2012 and 2016 shows that fully one-third of counties that went for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 went for Trump in 2016. Clearly these Obama supporters were not bigots, and show that the move to Trump was based on real issues. You can hardly play the race card with such data. The electorate understood and believed that Trump’s economic policies were superior to Hillary’s, and they would be better off economically going forward with a President Trump instead of President Clinton.
Every single policy that Clinton advocated would have made the standard of living worse for the poor and the lower middle class – her major constituency. And this would have substantially increased inequality, the opposite of what she had promised. Her policies included:
- raising taxes on the upper middle class and the wealthy (who are already at an obscenely high tax rate). This stifles new growth by reducing the capital that would otherwise have gone into new or expanding businesses, and the jobs they would have created.
- increasing regulations, including overtime, sick pay, child care, union rules, environmental restrictions, etc. This places huge additional costs and burdens on job providers and creators, reducing the likelihood that they could provide new jobs.
- raising the minimum wage. This makes it too expensive for businesses to keep the least productive people on their payroll, as well as incentivizing business use of technology instead of people to grow.
Those that voted for Trump have been left behind or worse by Obama’s economic strategies. A vote for Hillary meant a vote for more of the same. So much of America is tired of that status quo, and wants to be able to not just try to survive — but thrive once again. For those who want to cast aspersions and heap cries of racism and other -isms upon the Americans who voted for our next President, they would be wise to remember the famous slogan of the other Clinton Era: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
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The New York Post had an article recently regarding the continuous stream of New Yorkers leaving the state. An analysis found that “in 2014, 126,000 tax filers moved out of New York,” more than any other state in the nation. Also significantly, “The Empire State also lost the most “high earners,” who reported making more than $200,000 a year.”
This particular phenomenon has been going on for years, as I have written about in previous articles. But it seems like some people and groups want to downplay the exodus. The executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, Ron Deutsch, was sure to point out “that those who earn at least $1 million per year are more likely to stay put.”
It was a curious observation from the The Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI), which purports to be “an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit research and education organization committed to improving public policies and private practices to better the economic and social conditions of all New Yorkers.” It is curious because their observation proves our point. Of course those who earn more than one million a year would be more likely to stay put. They are the ones who can afford to be abused by the NY government – its outrageously high taxes, nanny state rules, and public education and other cronyism that creates ridiculously high prices- that is borne disproportionately by NY’s well-off. The super-wealthy put up with it because they don’t want to give up their luxuries — the theater, the restaurants, museums and attractions – and they have the super-wealth to afford it. That $200,000 – $1 million threshold? It’s really New York’s well off upper middle class, the backbone of the City. They refuse to tolerate the burden of staying, and vote with their feet by leaving.
If Texas ever did to their oilmen, or Kansas ever did to their farmers, what New York does to its well off financial community, they’d be run out of town on a rail!
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I recently attended a dinner in NYC and sat next to a very nice professor from NYU. He was non-tenured, and have moved to the United States from Europe a decade ago. Because he was somewhat low-level, he felt he could not speak out any anything controversial or conservative, which is anathema to the idea of a university being a free exchange of ideas.
What’s more, this professor relayed how he had gotten an email from senior level administration at NYU after Trump was elected; the email pretty much stated how terrible it was the Trump one. This type of email from a high-ranking NYU official, could only be sent to faculty and staff if such positions were overwhelmingly singular-minded (in this case liberal) so that there would be little-to-no blowback for articulating such a position on a controversial matter.
Unfortunately, this anecdote represents a mindset that seems to be infecting NYU; two other, recent incidents support this. First, NYU decided to cancel a talk given by Milo Yiannopoulos that was scheduled this month. Mr. Yiannopoulos is the tech editor of the Breitbart website, and “has been criticized for his comments on Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists and feminists.” NYU’s official position cited “security concerns,” because the talk “was going to be held near student groups at NYU’s Manhattan campus ‘that are subjects of Mr. Yiannopoulos’ attacks.’” Of course, the real reason for this is that Yiannopoulos is popular among the alt-right, and giving him a platform to espouse his views — as controversial as some may find — would be bad. Better to silence someone with whom you disagree instead of mutual engaging and exchanging of viewpoints.
NYU has extended this mindset to one of its own professors. On October 30, “An NYU professor crusading against political correctness and student coddling was booted from the classroom last week after his colleagues complained about his ‘incivility.’” Michael Rechtenwald was a professor of liberal studies, and was put on paid leave for the rest of the semester. According to the NY Post, “Rectenwald launched an undercover Twitter account called Deplorable NYU Prof on Sept. 12 to argue against campus trends like “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings” policing Halloween costumes and other aspects of academia’s growing PC culture.
Once his identity became known, a “12-person committee calling itself the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, including two deans, published a letter to the editor:
“As long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility in a community that predicates its work in great part on rational thought and the civil exchange of ideas. We seek to create a dynamic community that values full participation. Such efforts are not the ‘destruction of academic integrity’ Professor Rectenwald suggests, but rather what make possible our program’s approach to global studies.”
The same day the letter was published, Rectenwald was summoned to a meeting with his department dean and an HR representative, Rectenwald described how, “They claimed they were worried about me and a couple people had expressed concern about my mental health. They suggested my voicing these opinions was a cry for help.”
Apparently, expressing an opinion counter to the prevailing liberal cultural at NYU will silence you (if you are a professor), cancel you (if you are a speaker), or remove you and claim you have a mental health crisis (if you are an undercover and outspoken critic). This is what passes for academia these days, and it is truly reprehensible.
