White House Bids Fond Farewell to Karoline Leavitt. Hasan Piker Loses It: Round Up Boomers. What Do Kids Learn at Great Universities Today? Is New York Now ‘Habibi City’? AOC’s Frozen Eggs. And More

There soon will be a new face at the lectern for White House press briefings. “White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to Leave Administration.”  From the Washington Post:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will leave the administration at the end of August, one of the most high-profile exits of Trump’s second term, with the midterms less than three months away.

Leavitt, 28, was the youngest press secretary in history and the first to give birth while serving in the role. She has been a loyal adviser to President Donald Trump who played a highly visible role in his efforts to remake the presidency and erode trust in traditional media reporting, in part through aggressive moves to control which news outlets have access to the White House.

For once the “spend more time with my family” reason for a resignation happens to be the truth. Ms. Leavitt, who gave birth to her second child in May, really has discovered that she’d like to be with her family more. She will remain an outside adviser. Ms. Leavitt was especially refreshing coming on the heels of former President Biden’s hostile fashion plate spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre. USA Today recalls President Trump’s White House Press Secretaries from Sean Spicer to Leavitt. Who will replace Leavitt? The New York Post suggests it could be Steven Cheung, who is already serving as the White House Communications Director, but there are quite a few contenders, and the succession has not been decided yet.

There is more on the President’s plane switch in Turkey to avoid an Iranian threat. According to a Wall Street Journal report, some U.S. officials thought the plot was impractical, but the president’s security team had no room for error. CBS reports that shortly before the President’s departure from Ankara, intelligence picked up a credible plot by Iran to fire a surface-to-air missile at Air Force One. We can expect Iran to become more aggressive as the midterms draw closer, according to General Jack Keane.

From Turkey the country to our favorite holiday bird:  “Thanksgiving came early to Wisconsin this year, after Democratic primary voters on Tuesday decided to pass on radical socialism,” is how a Wall Street Journal editorial on the defeat of Francesca Hong, who was vying for the Democratic nomination for Governor. But what does it mean that the “wacky” Ms. Ms. Hong did rack up 40 percent of the vote:

Perhaps the progressive agenda of big government for everything isn’t as popular in competitive states as Democratic leaders think. On the other hand, more than 300,000 Midwestern voters cast ballots to enlist Wisconsin in the project of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a political development that would have been stunning until recently….

Ms. Hong’s narrow defeat was a setback for the socialists, but it won’t halt the Democratic Party’s leftward march. If she’d been a smoother candidate, without a public record of hating a beloved national holiday, she might today be the Democratic nominee.

Red With Rage. Oh dear, Hasan Piker has not taken Ms. Hong’s defeat well:

Mao-adoring Twitch streamer Hasan Piker erupted in fury after Wisconsin state rep. Francesca Hong’s shocking defeat in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, venting that boomers should be outlawed.

“I don’t want to read this because I will f—ing kill myself with a gun in a video game,” Piker griped after reading an article about a late-deciding voter who backed David Crowley but noted they liked Hong as well.

“I can’t. I’m in a good mood overall,” he went on. “I want to put boomers in the machine, in the contraption, and not just boomers, like anyone that says that.”

A Wall Street Journal report says that, though Piker has become “an undeniable force” in politics, he is “driving Democrats up the wall” with the stuff that comes out of his mouth. He has been a surrogate for Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed, who is quoted saying this:

“Hasan is reaching folks no one else is talking to,” El-Sayed wrote in an email before voting started. “Every event I do, I get seniors who ask how I got so many young people to come, and young people who say ‘I saw you on Hasan.’”

Golly, this makes Ms. Must wonder for about the millionth time just how well our expensive colleges and universities are serving young people. England’s Cambridge University is one of the most revered universities in the world. In “From Isaac Newton to Jason Arday,” Louise Perry looks at higher education’s deteriorating capacity for … thinking:

Modern elite universities are trying to do two things at the same time. Their primary, if unspoken, role is to act as a finishing school for the elites. The academic training may be rather lax, but it is offered alongside superb social training. An attentive student emerges from a university like Cambridge with the skills necessary to integrate into any elite profession. That includes a strong grasp of progressive ideology, and particularly an understanding of what one should not say in polite company.

It also includes exposure to more subtle signs of elite status. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vice President JD Vance wrote memorably of attending a formal dinner while at Yale Law School, tasting sparkling water for the first time and spitting it out in horror. A preference for gross water was, he discovered, one of those things that separated the wheat from the chaff. You learn these things at Yale.

Not being able to think can affect grades—so why not get rid of those pesky grades? In “You Should Be Able to Fail,” John Miller takes note of the University if Michigan’s plan to end letter grades for the freshman class. Miller gives the plan an F.

New York mag’s recent cover “Habibi City” celebrates Muslims and Muslim culture in the Big Apple.  The New York Post looks inside the issue, finding it more than just a look at a presumably emerging new demographic:

A tone-deaf New York Magazine “hit piece” that purportedly celebrated Arab and Muslim culture in the Big Apple – but actually fixated on a so-called Israeli “genocide” of Palestinians and referred to the Jewish state as a mere “land mass currently called Israel” – has sparked fierce backlash, prompting outraged subscribers to cancel while insiders reveal the publication’s dubious practices.

“New York Magazine’s evil ‘Habibi City’ cover sends a message: Jews aren’t welcome in Mamdani’s NYC,” is John Podhoretz’s take. “New York Is Not ‘Habibi City,’” is Liel Leivovitz’s headline at The Free Press. Here is Leivovitz’s description of the issue:

In her now-viral cover story for New York magazine, journalist Zaina Arafat—who was born and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., but identifies as SWANA, an acronym that previously stood for the Solid Waste Association of North America but now apparently means Southwest Asian and North African, and represents anyone who is vaguely Middle Eastern and dislikes capitalism, America, and the Jews—kicks things into high gear by celebrating the fact that New York is now “Habibi City,” a full-on SWANA enclave.

“Nazi Sex Money Scandal” is the New York Post cover today. Featured in the art is former Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) former chief financial officer Heidi Beirich, who was arrested yesterday in Pasadena. The arrest was in connection with a federal probe of the SPLC and concerned payments to informants. Apparently, even Ku Kluxers can fall in love if the right girl comes along:

Beirich also allegedly had a romantic relationship with one informant who infiltrated a white supremacist group and stole documents for the SPLC, according to the indictment. The pair also shared a bank account, prosecutors say, which included $140,000 in funds from the SPLC’s payments.

Caitlin Flanagan of The Free Press asks: “Must Egg Freezing Be ‘Normalized’ by AOC?” Meanwhile, AOC and her squeeze have called it quits, leaving the Babylon Bee to “report:” “AOC Has Her Boyfriend Frozen in Case She Wants Him in The Future.”

Let’s End with Some Good News. “Despite What You’ve Heard, the World Isn’t on Fire,” by Bjorn Lomborg, who argues in a Wall Street op-ed: “That Canadian smoke wasn’t pretty, but it was an outlier. Less land is burning than ever before.”