In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I'm convinced that Victor Davis Hanson is actually an AI bot, but the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit are linking to his latest essay, Pseudo-Recessions : As the 1992 campaign approached, incumbent president George H.W. Bush was seen as a shoo-in for reelection. The First Gulf War ended in 1991 with a spectacular U.S. victory at the head of a coalition that had expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with few losses. For much of 1991, Bush’s approval ratings hovered between 90 and 70 percent. By February 1992, an obscure Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, emerged as the favorite Democratic nominee. But he was written off as having little chance to knock off the popular Republican incumbent president with far more foreign affairs experience. Bush, however, had just lost his brilliant 1988 campaign manager, Lee Atwater, to cancer. And third-party prairie-fire candidate Ross Perot had entered the race, drawing off conservative Bush support. I'm even older than...

A week ago, I linked to YouTube testimony from a disaffected Brown student , Alex Shieh, who pointed out that applicants from designated prep schools that act as Ivy "feeders" have a big advantage over other applicants, and that the Ivy system is effectively designed around the wealthy and the upper bourgeoisie, whose offspring attend these schools. This simply repeats an observation about the Ivies that's become commonplace. Then, earlier this week, I began to wonder if the Brown shooting rampage would affect Brown's standing in the US News college rankings. That in turn reminded me that Brown has traditionally been regarded as at the bottom of the Ivies. Chrome AI mode says, "In the mid-20th century, Brown was sometimes viewed as a 'poor relation' or 'on the fringe' compared to the older, more established social prestige of the 'Big Three'". However, this has changed: The bottom of the Ivies is now Dartmouth, which tied with B...

🚨 BREAKING: Brown University just put its police chief on LEAVE after the emergency response was horrifically BOTCHED, letting the shooter get away and kill an MIT professor Trump administration is also INVESTIGATING. BROWN MUST CLEAN HOUSE! Don't stop with him! This was a… pic.twitter.com/RDAn66pvdy — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 23, 2025 Continuing the trend, most of the aggregators haven't picked this up. Via the UK Daily Mail , University officials announced Monday that Rodney Chatman, the head of public safety at the school, was placed on leave effective immediately, and his day-to-day responsibilities were given to former Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements. The decision comes amid intense scrutiny over the school's security policies in the wake of the December 13 mass shooting, during which students Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov were tragically killed and nine others left with injuries. Remarkably, as I noted yesterday, Chatman had ...

I've been puzzled that so little attention has been paid to the Brown shooting in any media, mainstream or alt. This is partly because the holidays started on Columbus Day. Oddly, the only analysis or opinion that's run at all at Real Clear Politics was its link to a Conservative Treehouse piece that suggested Brown may have disabled its surveillance cameras at the behest of left-wing groups, which I discussed here , but so far, we've had no corroboration that this was or wasn't done. About the closest any media outlet has come to serious analysis of the issues surrounding the shooting is an interview over the weekend Fox did with its contributor Paul Mauro, who held policy-level positions with NYPD in a 23-year career. He touches on several key issues in the interview, embedded above. At 2:10, he begins: Brown University police leadership really has to own a lot of this. They really seem to have had no provisions in place for hardening that target. That was an o...

Via The New York Post : In 2021, Brown University allegedly refused to call Providence police after a caller claimed to have placed bombs throughout campus and was carrying an AR-15 gun, according to the Brown Daily Herald. The local K-9 unit was finally called an hour later — after the school’s public safety officers spoke up, according to the paper. But it took Brown another hour to send out an alert to students. One of the officers later claimed the university went as far as altering its officer’s report of the incident to remove mention of his concerns, and references to the delay. . . . So far in 2025, security officers have issued two votes of no confidence against the university’s police chief Rodney Chatman and the school’s department of public safety. A scathing October editorial in the Brown Daily Herald called the problems with the school’s security a “threat to public safety” and said the university was “failing in its obligation” to keep students safe. Mr Chat...

I found the video embedded above in my YouTube feed this morning. While it doesn't specifically note the circumstances, it appears to be the testimony of Alex Shieh. a former Brown undergraduate, before a House Judiciary subcommittee last June regarding rising tuition costs and institutional bloat at Brown. One of the first points he made has been borne out since the 1960s by Ferdinand Lundberg, Alan Dershowitz, and Jerome Karabel: I'm a legacy student at Brown. I went to a prep school that feeds to the Ivy League. My parents are doctors who can afford the $93,000 a year sticker price. In other words, I'm exactly who the Ivy League was built for. . . . According to The New York Times, the median student's family makes over $200,000 a year. Half the student body comes from the top 5% of earners. Shieh appears to have dropped out of Brown since his testimony to form a corporate startup, and not long before his testimony, he barely avoided disciplinary action ...

The news that the Brown shooter, who also apparently killed MIT Professor Nuno Loureiro, has been identified as Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente doesn't seem to have been well covered by any media. Resal Clear Politics has nothing on it this morning, nor was it in my Google news feed. This story from the New York Post is probably as thorough as any, but it leaves a great many questions unasked. In the clip embedded above, Brian Llenas, a Fox reporter, posed just two of those many possible questions to the Providence police chief: Why did it take a citizen to notice a suspicious person right next to Brown University and not the police? And also, how long was the vehicle parked where it was? Was it days, hours, minutes? The chief's answer reveals how poor his communication skills are -- he just replies in a heavy, almost comical barrio accent, "Some people are more interested than others", which still raises the question of why the police weren...