No melanin, big problem: When we published documents showing the Harvard Law Review uses race to select articles, the prestigious journal insisted they were taken out of context. Now, our Aaron Sibarium is back with 500 more of the review’s internal documents—and they show that journal editors “eliminate more than 85 percent of submissions using a rubric that asks about ‘author diversity.'”
The rubric, which you can review for yourself here, is only one part of the selection process. Articles that survive it are assigned to editors who write an analysis. Those editors “complained that a piece had cited ‘A LOT of old white men,’ attempted to guess whether a scholar was ‘Latina,’ complained that an author was ‘not from an underrepresented background,’ and praised an article for citing ‘predominantly Black singers, rappers, and members of Twitter,'” writes Sibarium.
“The new documents are all from 2024 and 2025—after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action at universities—and span four distinct stages of the article selection process. They provide the most comprehensive picture yet of the racial and ideological preferences at the elite law review, which has become a key front in the Trump administration’s war on Harvard and is now the subject of three federal probes.”
Raining steel: Donald Trump hasn’t yet ordered an attack on Iran, but he delivered a message to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the meantime: “Keep going.” Bibi didn’t need to be told twice.
From Tuesday evening into Wednesday afternoon, Israel “launched some of its most devastating attacks to date,” scoring “direct hits on Iran’s uranium enrichment sites, internal security headquarters, and more than 40 missile depots,” our Adam Kredo reports.
“The most significant strike came very early Wednesday, when more than 50 Israeli fighter jets struck a ‘centrifuge production site and multiple weapons manufacturing facilities in Tehran,’ the IDF said. Centrifuges are used to enrich uranium quickly, bringing it to levels needed for a nuclear weapon. Israel telegraphed the operation late Tuesday with a warning for residents in the area to evacuate.”
The strike on Iran’s security HQ, meanwhile, destroyed what Defense Minister Israel Katz described as “the central arm of the Iranian dictator’s repression.” The Islamic Republic’s domestic security officers work to suppress protest movements and maintain the mullahs’ rule. It appears they’ll have to find a new office.
READ MORE: Israel Hits Iranian Weapons Depots, Internal Security HQ As Trump Weighs US Involvement
You can’t nuke Father Time: As Israeli strikes decimate his country, Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, 86, has become increasingly incoherent, releasing statements that vow to inflict “heavy blows” on the “terrorist Zionist entity” that never materialize. Our Andrew Stiles, who has been to Iran, reviewed those statements. He found “compelling evidence to suggest the supreme leader is,” like the 82-year-old Joe Biden, “suffering from severe cognitive decline.”
Khamenei, for example, “warned, with considerable delusion, that the Iranian ‘triumph’ and ‘conquest’ over Israel was ‘imminent,'” Stiles writes. “We’re still not sure what that means, although Iran did launch a handful of missiles at Israel last night that inflicted no casualties. Delusions, or ‘strongly held false beliefs,’ are commonly associated with cognitive decline, according to the Alzheimer’s Society.”
“To paraphrase the honorable actor George Clooney and the esteemed members of the New York Times editorial board: Apart from the war against Israel, the one war Ali Khamenei cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. Is it fair to point these things out? It has to be. This is about age. Nothing more. The supreme leader is not the Ali ‘Death to America’ Khamenei of 1989. He’s not even the Ali Khamenei of 2020.”
In other news:
- A new J.L. Partners poll found that GOP voters back U.S. strikes on Iran by a 58-25 percent margin, but that’s not the full story: Limit the results to self-described “MAGA Republicans” and support goes up to 65 percent.
- Donald Trump said he relayed a simple message to Tucker Carlson during a recent phone call: “I did ask Tucker, ‘Are you ok with nuclear weapons being in the hands of Iran?’ And he didn’t like that. I said, ‘If it’s ok with you, then you and I have a difference.'”
- Zohran Mamdani picked up a pre-election condemnation from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which blasted the NYC socialist’s attempts to “sanitize” the anti-Semitic slogan “globalize the intifada” as “outrageous and especially offensive to survivors.”
