This week, the president released a video announcing his candidacy for the 2024 election that included four distinct images of Reverend Al Sharpton. John Podhoretz comments:

Sharpton’s key moment as a public figure came when he helped lead a pogrom in Brooklyn in 1991 after a tragic car accident in which a ḥasidic Jew struck and killed a black boy. During those three days of mob violence, Sharpton screamed into a microphone about “diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights” in the vanguard of a horde that shouted, “Kill the Jews!” A student named Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death.

Four years later, Sharpton called the Jewish owner of a Harlem building that housed a store called Freddy’s Fashion Mart a “white interloper” in the midst of a rent dispute. The mob he summoned then referred to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and shrieked about “burning the Jews.” The protests continued for two months, until an armed man stormed the premises with a gun and set Freddy’s on fire. Seven people were killed.

Yes, it’s a quarter-century later, and yes, Sharpton has not lit New York City on fire again or played a role in the deaths of eight people, as he had in the 1990s. [But] Sharpton has never accounted, nor been called to account, for his monstrous words and conduct.

And he never will be. After all, Joe Biden wants African Americans to vote for him in 2024 in record numbers, and to secure those votes, he has decided to run the gamut from Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson—who has spent her adulthood trying to serve as a constructive force in American public life—to Al Sharpton. And that’s an insult to Jackson, to African Americans, and to Americans altogether.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.