Author, columnist, critic. @WSJ weekend news quiz. Editor and publisher @tivolibooks. https://xitter.cf/t.co/jGuovodkVK

Joined April 2009
It's important to read this for a look behind the mask of sanity . . .
NEW: Haverford Professor Guangtian Ha has been arrested and charged with cyberstalking a Jewish colleague. Posing as a MAGA anon on X, he allegedly messaged another Haverford professor around 50 times between October 2025 and May 2026. In addition to posting vile antisemitic messages (see below), he allegedly posted his colleague’s “home address, infant child's name, a photograph of the family's mailbox, countless antisemitic slurs and threats, and reference to real-time observation of their home.” The target’s wife twice moved out of the home with their three children because they were so terrified. Ha is a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine. He has called complaints about antisemitism on campus “Zionist witch hunts.” Originally from China, he is an associate professor of religion at Haverford who studies Islam in China. He holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia. His dissertation is entitled, “Religion of the Father: Islam, Gender, and Politics of Ethnicity in Late Socialism.” He won the 2023 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion for his book, The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China. He is “charged with one count of cyberstalking pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 2261A(2). The statutory maximum for cyberstalking is five years' imprisonment, three years of supervised release, a $250,000 fine, and a $100 special assessment.” Here are some of the messages he posted (brace yourself): “Jew, get the fuck out of my country” “Jew pig, get the fuck out of Lower Merion” “If jews are so special then they should also be placed in special camps and receive special treatments” “LM jews are going to have it big time, jew. Remember this. You scums have had it too easy. Goyim are taking America back, blood-guzzling demons.” “@[Victim 1] Eliminate the jewish cockroaches. Exterminate the jewish state. [Victim 1], you will have nowhere to go. Your family has no future in the US. Give it another 10 years, and you shall see a true holocaust.” “@[Victim 1] Fat jew, leave lower merion.” “@[Victim 1] Jew, watch your [Victim I's minor son's true name]. There shall be a sign.” After the victim took security precautions: “@[Victim 1] The goyim have woken up, jew. Run. Flee. Leave. Blurring your home on google map and installing a security camera next to your mailbox won't help.” “[Victim 1], the jewish state will stop existing, whether you like it or not, which is why as an Israeli zio jew you want to recreate america in 'iSrAeL's' image. This won't work. You and your family have no future here. Homeless dogs jews will once again become, if you do survive.” “That's right[Victim 1]The end of American jews is close. Let's start with the jews in Lower Merion. Watch out jewish nigga.” “[is] that blood, [Victim 1]? We know jews are blood-sucking demons. Only the libtard niggas [...] will protect you. But soon we are going to make sure you have no place to hide, fat rat.” “Nothing wrong to hate jews. We started to decline the moment we stopped hating, eradicating and expelling jews. Babylonians knew, the Romans knew, the Spaniards knew. American jews have been exposed. Fuck anti-Zionism. HH [i.e., “Heil Hitler”].” Haverford College has placed Ha on administrative leave and barred him from campus. His information has been wiped from the college’s website.
1
1
101
Daniel Akst retweeted
At my alma mater NYU Law, a terrorism front group masquerades as a student org. Shameful that anyone pretends this is normal.
26
61
4
739
19,461
I have long called attention to the “toxification of Jewish life” making anything associated with Jews — organizations, cultural entities, authors, actors — toxic, off limits, rejected. The story the film tells and the rejection of it are prime examples of this trend.
From today’s Australian Financial Review
5
78
6
291
13,767
Trump came back to office with a golden opportunity to make the GOP a majority party for a generation, while accomplishing everything the country elected him to do. He wasted that opportunity, and today's post is an attempt to explain why and how he wasted it.
In terms of helping the country or his party, Trump's second presidency is a spectacular failure so far. But what if all he ever wanted was to enrich himself? If that was the only goal, his presidency is a resounding success! noahpinion.blog/p/the-second…
38
62
4
627
50,249
The crisis of the liberal institutions is thriving at Harvard.
Harvard Medical School Stages Panel On "Unruly Bodies" That Is A Masterclass of Medical Misinformation and Denialism About Obesity's Health Risks and GLP-1s "Well, free Luigi, for one," Roxane Gay, artist in residence at Harvard Medical School's Media, Medicine and Health program and a visiting professor in the HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, notably said at the program's Against the Pathology of Unruly Bodies panel tonight, as she lambasted the evil of health insurers. Da'Shaun Harrison, the theorist and author, denounced the "GLP-1 apocalypse." The evening was rooted in sweeping and fervent medical denialism about the health harms of obesity by a group of people who by and large saw GLP-1s as an existential threat to their identities rather than as an effective, if imperfect, solution to a chronic medical problem. The panelists uttered streams of misinformation about medical research and practice that went unchallenged, despite the fact that this was a Harvard Medical School event. Ironically enough, Gay lambasted people who "do their own research" about measles vaccines and who simply "look for people who are going to affirm their worldview." This was precisely what this evening was about, except it was for people who see any effort to treat obesity as an offensive and stigma-infused challenge to their personal dignity. The rule of the evening was that the medical establishment should, for the most part, not seek to treat obesity and that it should instead do everything in its power to meet the needs of and cater to fat patients as they are. (The fat-acceptance movement uses the word "fat" rather than obese, just FYI. I'm using their words.) Harrison, fresh off what he said was a "two-week-long @FoxNews anti-Da'Shaun run," said quite a number of astonishing things about body fascism, which he managed to tie in both to Zionism and Nazism. The book he's writing is called Body Fascism. In it, he said, "I intend to take the reader through the years 1930 to present day, thinking through the ways that neoliberalism has cojoined with or has worked very closely with neo-fascism to create the conditions where a GLP-1 is possible to be deployed politically as a fascistic tool to eradicate fatness. And so I'm thinking specifically through five Western countries and Western-backed countries like the U.S., Israel, Britain, Nazi Germany, and France. "Thinking through the ways that the Israeli formation of the new Jewish body, through the several councils that Eisenhower and Nixon and Michelle Obama helped create to indoctrinate fat children into a culture of fitness to be prepared for military... So that's what the book is about, and how basically we've been preparing for a Trump since 1930s, and that's why we're here now." GLP-1s, Harrison said, were the latest iteration of a century-long, fascistic effort to engineer bodies to serve in the military on behalf of imperialism. "Fascism," he said, "is the very foundation of the Western society, the very foundation of the U.S., through the transatlantic slave trade and through colonialism, and so body fascism is to me the perfecting of such a state, wherein everything that we know about how bodies are supposed to exist in the world, are supposed to function as, and are supposed to look like, has been perfected and overemphasized in modern society, as a way to discipline and punish... fat folks and fat bodies. "This practice of forcing people into manipulating or changing or shifting how they look is oftentimes about making bodies militarizable, building up a military to defend an imperialist state... A lot of doctors, medical professionals, and folks who collaborate with them, be it through the government or media or whatever, are advocating for atrocities that are directly impacting our citizens, but also citizens around the globe. "GLP-1s I think at this point act as the very next iteration of that, that says by choosing to not be on the GLP-1, not only are you choosing to not be a patriot or not defend the state, you are also in many ways suicidal." Fresh off his appearance at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago, Harrison had plenty of criticism to spare about Israel, Zionism and Jews, saying: "I'm hesitant to say this because I don't want to sound combative, but I do think it's important to name that in this moment where Zionists are conflating their Jewishness with this Zionist formation, it is very important to name that you, white Jewish person, are in fact white, and your Jewishness does not cancel that out." He was referring to a generic white Jewish person, and no one in the room. That said, his assertion was remarkable given that Gay had said the following about her wife roughly 30 minutes prior, referring to the different experience she has going to the doctor as an obese black woman compared with her thin white wife: "So it's partly racism because she is of the Caucasian flavor, but she's Jewish, and so that for me cancels it out," Gay said. "And she's thin." No one in the room seemed to draw the connection between Gay and Harrison's remarks. Gay falsely claimed the following: "Most medical facilities do not have the appropriate equipment for 70 to 80% of the American population." She meant that 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. But that does not mean that no one who has a BMI over 25 can fit into basic American medical equipment. Panelist Ragen Chastain, who holds the Guinness record for heaviest woman to finish a marathon, said of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the major GLP-1 manufacturers: "They want weight stigma to be defined as just the poor treatment of fat people, and absolutely not defined as the pathologization of fat people. So it becomes a message of, well, we don't want fat people treated badly, but we absolutely must eradicate them from the earth and make sure no more ever exists." No one stopped to suggest that prescribing a GLP-1 to a fat patient does not eradicate them, it just makes them thinner, and might save them from death. Instead, the panelists tore into research finding that obesity is tied to a higher risk of death and that GLP-1s are, for example, tied to lower rates of certain cancers. So much of what they said was false, misleading or lacking context. A 2016 Lancet meta-analysis of nearly 11M people, for example, found that the risk of death rose steadily above a BMI of 25, with hazard ratios of 1.45, 1.94 and 2.76 for the three obesity classes. And yet Gay and Harrison both made glib remarks about the notion that they might "have a snake tomorrow" or "die tomorrow... from a car accident," so why should their doctors make suggestions about their health going south due to their obesity? Suffice it to say it is remarkable that Harvard Medical School (where my dad did his surgical residency and fellowship, incidentally) is putting on a panel this rife with misinformation.
85
Nice review of Arthur R.G. Solmssen’s Alexander's Feast, a love story and a courtroom drama wrapped up in the cold war (as well as the usual legal and business doings in these irresistible novels). From @TivoliBooks wsj.com/arts-culture/books/a… via @WSJBooks
73
If this is not sobering, I do not know what is @rafaelmedoff …
10
313
3
1,057
40,682
Daniel Akst retweeted
I recently received a paper on the Ottoman Elections of 1918 at Explorations . . . but it turns out there were no such elections! It turns out that the paper was an elaborate fraud. The author rewrote an excellent JCE paper on the industrialization and the Russian Revolution. They put it through AI to rewrite the text but they kept everything else the same. So there are regressions with "distance to petrograd" and "distance to Moscow" in them. The maps they produce have the geo-coordinates of Russia, not the Ottoman Empire. More on this ridiculous paper and the new age of academic fraud at open.substack.com/pub/markko…
10
116
10
446
59,508
Those are bullet holes in a stained glass window at a synagogue in Canada, which was shot at tonight while Jews prayed inside during Yom Kippur evening services. Last year, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, were murdered in a terrorist attack during Yom Kippur at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in north Manchester. Jew hate has been normalized—by pin-wearing celebrities who claim to be humanitarians, by bookstores refusing to sell books by Jewish authors, by people who call Jews “baby killers”…and then, when the violence follows, scripted statements are released like clockwork. Tonight, during our Yom Kippur services, we heard a sermon about the critical need for Jewish unity. Yes, it’s important. As is the need for Jewish courage—Robert Kraft style courage. What’s been normalized by other communities cannot be normalized by ours. Those who feed the flames of Jew hate must be de-platformed.
The Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville was shot at tonight while worshippers gathered for Yom Kippur. This was a photo sent to me by a worshipper. An officer was on duty and is being called a hero. This is disgraceful. No Jewish person in Belleville should ever have to fear walking into their synagogue. No family should have to wonder whether they are safe while worshipping. To Belleville’s Jewish community: we stand with you tonight. You deserve to feel safe here. And to the officer who put himself in harm’s way protecting others: thank you.
10
86
6
254
10,278
Daniel Akst retweeted
On the decline of literacy and a ruling class filled with midwits (link in reply, free to reply)
11
31
8
277
21,213
Daniel Akst retweeted
A 12-year-old Jewish girl at Etiwanda Intermediate School was walking in a hallway when another student started beating her with a stick. Staff told the attacker to stop — then walked away. The girl was then pinned against a table and choked. She was told to “shut her stupid Jewish ass up.” Then come the Nazi salutes in the hallways. Swastikas on school property and on the textbooks on her desk. Hitler jokes. Holocaust taunts. Harassment about missing school for a Jewish holiday. What did the Etiwanda School District do? Nothing that stopped it. The family filed a federal complaint in March 2025. The abuse got worse. That failure is exactly why the U.S. Department of Education just opened a federal civil rights investigation. In a statement, the new School Superintendent said that "targeting of Jewish students because of their Jewish ancestral and ethnic identity is contrary to Etiwanda's institutional values and nondiscrimination and conduct codes and is unacceptable." That is California doublespeak for: we let it happen. This is not “kids being kids.” This is a school that looked the other way while a Jewish child was isolated, assaulted, and hunted. cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/…
85
847
51
2,879
109,843
Daniel Akst retweeted
Two days ago, GPT-6 Astra broke a yet unsolved German Army Enigma message from 1941. Amazingly Astra was able to autonomously: - Search historical archives - Compare uncertain letters - Find contextual clues - Build an Enigma simulator - Write cryptanalysis code - Run parallel experiments - Test competing keys - Recover the plaintext - Cross-check the results 1/n
132
457
140
3,949
1,094,919
Ellie and Yogi of course
Let’s test your baseball timeline. Without saying your age, who was the catcher on your favorite team when you first started watching?
113
We have most of our fall books up at tivolibooks.com & they are a compelling collection indeed. Please take a look & place an order. Independent publishing cannot survive on congratulations, no matter how robust. We're also on Amazon, B&N, etc. Thanks from Tivoli Books.
2
3
432