President Trump’s moves against Harvard University for discrimination have spread horror among the liberal elite, including those on publicly funded television. Christiane Amanpour, host of Amanpour & Co., talked to Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, coauthor of How Democracies Die. (Hint: He means Trump.) A full 21 minutes of the Friday show was devoted to both host and left-wing guest defending Harvard by attacking Trump as a resurrected Joe McCarthy, rantings that Amanpour infused with self-congratulation, even airing a segment of her own recent self-righteous graduation speech in which she regaled a captive audience at Harvard with similar comparisons. As caught by NewsBusters’ commencement-speech connoisseur Alex Christy, on Wednesday Amanpour went on an anti-Trump rant under the guise of an address to graduates of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, even quoting Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as well as Mr. “Red Scare.” She noted Trump pulling federal grants and banning international students from Harvard. [Click "Expand.") AMANPOUR: I want to play something that Trump said yesterday. I mean, we know that the administration claims that all this is about antisemitism, combating antisemitism. We also know that Harvard, even, you know, last year and beyond, have taken measures against antisemitism and apparently DEI. Trump has also pulled, as we've talked about, billions in federal grants and the latest he's doing with international students. Do you believe that is what this is all about? And then I'm going to play a little soundbite of Trump. LEVITSKY: Absolutely I do not believe that. This is not about antisemitism. It's not about DEI. These are pretexts authoritarian governments. We need to be very clear. This is an authoritarian government that is using the machinery of government, the state as a weapon to punish, to bully, to silence business, media law firms, universities and other elements of civil society....there are more anti-Semites in the Trump administration than there are at Harvard. For the record, Harvard is apparently crawling with anti-Semites, as proven in a damning recent report issued by Harvard that does not get referenced. Amanpour also ignored the anti-Israel activists perversely honored at various Harvard graduation ceremonies, right under her nose. AMANPOUR: ….I just wonder what you make of the philosophy coming from President Trump or his administration. Do you think there's a concerted -- I mean, is it a plan that will work? How do you characterize what they're doing? LEVITSKY: I think it needs to be understood as a combination of authoritarianism and ineptitude. So, I don't know if you discerned a philosophy there in the vomiting that we just heard….What I see is an effort to attack, punish, and weaken institute -- civic institutions that the Trump administration views as opposition or as they view as enemies of the government. Again, that's what autocrats do. Amanpour then turned the spotlight on herself. AMANPOUR: Professor, I'm not an entirely disinterested party. I was a foreign student in the United States 45 years ago, and I actually gave the graduation speech just yesterday to the Harvard Kennedy School of Graduates [sic], more than half of whom are, as you say, internationals. But I spoke about something, which I know that you've spoken about and even a former Harvard president, Drew Gilpin Faust, has just written about, the apparent lack of resistance, not just -- not at Harvard but around the country to this assault that you've been discussing. I just want to play a little bit of what I said and get you to comment on how you feel about it. And I was quoting basically the patron saint of broadcast journalists, Edward R. Murrow, who after his distinguished World War II. Korea as a foreign correspondent took on McCarthyism and the Red Scare at home. This is what I said. Sure enough, up popped Amanpour speaking to Harvard Kennedy School grads, self-righteously spouting “always remember, as Edward R. Murrow said, that dissent is not disloyalty.” AMANPOUR: Professor Levitsky, I wonder what you think about that quote from Morrow, that, you know, it seems that everybody's terrorized in the United States, or am I wrong? LEVITSKY….it's a shame that Morrow's words are so relevant, so pertinent today, but I think you were right to raise them. My sense -- I share the view that Americans have been very slow to react to Trump's authoritarianism…. There was only a mild interjection near the end, so vaguely expressed it could have been misunderstood, that perhaps Harvard had become an echo chamber of leftism: AMANPOUR: And finally, do you think there is any room at a place like Harvard or elsewhere to diversify? I don't even know what real word to use, but that it's not just one echo chamber of one type of thought. I'm not talking about, you know, raising lies to the level of truths, but just diverse opinions and diverse ideological views. Predictably, Levitsky dismissed the criticism. LEVITSKY: You know, I think that these issues of ideological diversity have been somewhat overstated…. Amanpour then spoke with Harvard’s Dr. Kari Nadeau, who worried about canceled government contracts for health research. Nadeau whined, “When you degrade science, you also degrade the health of the American people in the globe.”

As you may know by now, there was in Boulder, Colorado what in all likelihood appears to be a terrorist attack against local Jews marching in support of the hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza. Far-left networks CNN and MSNBC viewed their coverage of the attack as an opportunity to bash senior Trump-appointed FBI leadership. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and throws Molotov cocktails at Jews while shouting “Free Palestine”, “End Israel”, and “this will end when Palestine is free and for us”, well, it’s a terrorist. There it is. The alleged suspect after the attack where he threw Molotov cocktails at people saying “this will end when Palestine is free and for us” https://t.co/TbXWmYIlcf pic.twitter.com/nIg71dDDoa — AG (@AGHamilton29) June 1, 2025 This didn’t stop the brilliant analytical minds at CNN from dumping on FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino for assessing for terrorism. First, disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe: ?Here's a few examples of what I was talking about with CNN's coverage of the Boulder terror attack, bashing FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino for using the word "terror"... Jessica Dean: "[T]he local authorities are saying one thing, and the FBI is saying… pic.twitter.com/P1G33d8MNS — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 1, 2025 JESSICA DEAN: Local authorities are saying one thing, and the FBI is saying something slightly different. ANDREW MCCABE: Yeah. That's never -- that's never a great start. I think that the press conference that we saw, one thing was abundantly clear is they, the local authorities – and I'm not sure we got the name of that person who was speaking, seems to be a chief or somebody in charge there. DEAN: Yes, same, yes. MCCABE: He is really being very, very careful and I think that’s the right approach at this point. They don’t have a clear idea… Enter CNN law enforcement analyst Juliette Kayyem, joining in the smears of Patel and Bongino: CNN law enforcement analyst, Harvard professor, and former Obama DHS official Juliette Kayyem refers to FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino as "disorganized" and "juvenile" for saying the attack in Boulder was terrorism, adding no one should listen to them...… pic.twitter.com/wuwK6FS2Tf — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 1, 2025 JULIETTE KAYEM: [W]hen the Boulder police chief comes out and says, we don't have two plus two equaling four yet. In other words, it's that this is obviously, an anti-Semitic attack and the victims were obviously part of that group. Therefore, we're not calling it terrorism. It adds a lot of – it's not – it's not good for the community. It's not good for the potentially targeted community. It makes law enforcement look disorganized, and it makes the FBI look so juvenile, like, why are you getting ahead of the police chief who – who says, I don't know what this is? It sounds – maybe it is what we all think it is, but maybe it's not. And he has no incentive to get it wrong. So, we're going to take a step back, not be responsive to tweets by two heads of the FBI who don't have a long history in local law enforcement. And we will wait and hope it isn't what we all worry it is and if it is, then there'll be an investigation. But that was – that's like nothing I'd ever seen before – you normally actually, Andrew knows this. You normally get the local people getting way ahead on motive and the FBI saying we don't have it yet. You now have the opposite here. And until we know that the victims were members of that org – of the – of the Jewish org – event, we don't have the nexus and – and I will believe the Denver [sic] police chief that they do not have that nexus now. And if they do, I will be the first one out here saying that that is a hate crime. But until we do, we all need to – to not follow the FBI's tweets. More of CNN's Juliette Kayyem slamming FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, saying they disregarded the work of groups like the Joint Terrorism Taskforce and "not great" they said what happened in Boulder is terrorism... “[P]art of it was, was because the FBI… pic.twitter.com/FF56ItX0Kw — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 1, 2025 KAYYEM: [P]art of it was, was because the FBI came out so quickly with their tweets, the FBI director and the FBI deputy director, using words like violence, targeted terrorism, injuries, suggesting that they knew the sort of nature of this book. Look, there's these things, there's these entities called Joint Terrorism Task Forces. There's one in Boulder. It involves local, state and federal entities and normally and probably even now, they are working together to determine the motive. It may be very clear to people what the motive is because, at least I just have to acknowledge it, there are things online about the assailant and what he has said regarding the – the – the Jewish organization and – and them – them being together, those aren't verified. And that's why the Boulder police are saying, can we not jump the gun? And that's why I have to acknowledge it – is that one of the reasons why we don't jump the gun is because Boulder has to – Boulder police have to make a case. And if you go out believing it's one thing, you are going to miss lots of other things. And so, the Boulder police chief was clear we don't know if the victims were specifically attacked for their, you know, for who they were and we don't know exactly who the perpetrator is. So, this is a really not great for the FBI to get so far ahead that everyone is sort of now having to sort of unwind and then maybe rewind or – or – or state the same thing consistently in the future if it does turn out being terrorism. But I want to just say two quick things on this. It's really a bad look overall and I don't mean that politically. I just mean, like, people need law enforcement to work in a unified fashion to determine what happened, in particular, if this is a hate crime or terrorism directed towards the Jewish community, that – that community in particular needs law enforcement to not be in all different places and look, look confused. The tone here is one of clearly taking shots at Patel and Bongino, despite the fact that the terrorist video, which speaks to motive, was available for a while. Speaking of which, here's McCabe again, to close out the segment, taking one last shot at FBI leadership: Here's disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, dumping on the agency for having the temerity to assess that a Molotov attack on Jews marching in support of the hostages might be an act of terror. pic.twitter.com/XHjq2fuCAk — Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) June 1, 2025 McCABE: This is the sort of thing that the FBI can help out the local police department with- providing manpower, technology and resources to do that sort of work. THAT's what the FBI does. We don't step in and take over and draw conclusions five minutes after the attack about what happened. We reach out to the local authorities, we provide people and we offer assistance in any way that we can. The Bureau's there to help the first responders.  DEAN: Thank you so much to both you. One thing we know for sure that, you know- certainly thinking about these victims and their families- a truly horrific thing that has happened to them as we await more on their condition. Wrapping up a subsequent segment with Brian Stelter wherein he acknowledged the apparent antisemitic motivations behind the attack, anchor Jessica Dean invoked the constitutional right to safety: BREAKING: CNN anchor invokes constitutional right to safety pic.twitter.com/aAWBGXDKcA — Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) June 1, 2025 DEAN: Look. This is the United States of America, where everyone is guaranteed safety no matter your color, race, your creed...um, and so, of course, just a sad event as we learn of- more details and work to learn exactly what unfolded there in Boulder, we are getting more and more details, Please stay with us. We will have more on the other side of this break.   Just a few minutes later, Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst John Miller would come on and completely demolish what Kayyem and McCabe said in the segment prior, validating the early terror assessment and linking it to other recent violent antisemitic attacks: Literally one segment later at 638pm Eastern, CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller calmly nuked all of these histrionics with his sources working the case.... pic.twitter.com/FhcIbU9X5l — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 2, 2025 JOHN MILLER: Well, right now, what we have is this group- Run for their Lives, which does this weekly event where they walk through or run through Boulder to raise awareness for the hostages, the Israeli hostages being held by Hamas. We're in the midst of their event. As they got to Pearl Street, by 13th street, by the old courthouse in that downtown area, an individual who was there before they arrived throws these bottles. It's 2 or 3 bottles, apparently filled with a flammable liquid. This is very consistent with what we would call Molotov cocktails, where you put gasoline in, you light a fuse, usually a rag. You throw the bottle, it bursts into flames. This injured somewhere between 3 and 5 people. They're still sorting that out. Two were taken to a local hospital. They're being treated. And at this point, you've got one subject who is in custody, a possible suspect. You have a cordon that has been expanded to about four blocks where they have evacuated that area of civilians. They have located a car that they believe is connected to this suspect, the person they have in custody. And what they're doing now is going through that process where whoever dropped a bag or a backpack as they ran or fled, each one of those is going to be treated on some level as a suspicious package. So their bomb squad, their SWAT team are clearing that area of those packages. Then the bomb squad is going to clear that car to make sure it doesn't contain explosives, it's not booby trapped, and so on. And then once they have that, they'll be processing the actual crime scene for that evidence. In the meantime, they're running the background of this individual they have- we have a name, we're looking into that background as well, to determine if he is known to police. If he has been on the radar for something else, if he has a criminal record. And while all of that's going on, we have to stand back and remember the environment that we've been working in. We had the attack on the Pennsylvania governor's house. You recall that- it was- it was over the Passover Seder. He was upstairs with his family, an individual claiming that he was doing this on behalf of, quote, “his people” in, in the Middle East used Molotov cocktails in that case, caused a very serious fire. No serious injuries from that incident. He's in custody. Turns out that he is somebody who has a background of mental health issues. No background with terrorism or that particular cause prior to that. Obviously a couple of weeks ago, we had the incident at the Jewish Museum in Washington, where we see another attack, this individual with a firearm who made it clear that he was doing that because of the connection of that target and his position on the- the situation with Hamas and, and in Palestine. So multiple terrorist organizations have put out these calls for people to act individually, and to do what they can. And what we are seeing is this spate of attacks, not just in the United States, but around the world that are basically low cost in terms of what they use, low tech in terms of how it's formulated, but potentially high impact. Now, the FBI director has tweeted that the FBI is responding to what he termed as a terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado, and that they are fully investigating that. Police, locally, are being far more cautious. They're delving into the background of this individual, trying to determine if that was the motive or if something else or something in that person's background. But that's where we are right now, Jessica, and a lot of work to do and a lot of information to gather. And obviously all of this is preliminary as well, because as we learn from these things, sometimes these accounts will shift and change over time. But that is the latest information we have from law enforcement officials at the scene and sources who tracking it. It should be noted here that senior FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson issued a proper response to CNN's earlier disparagement and speculation: "Kick rocks." The guy shouted “Free Palestine” while throwing fire bombs at a crowd of Jewish people. We correctly referred to an investigation of terrorism, will continue to do so, and we have zero interest in what either these CNN guests have to say. Kick rocks. https://t.co/SJaHZMZOML — Ben Williamson (@_WilliamsonBen) June 1, 2025 UPDATE: The terrorist has been identified as an Egyptian national that entered the U.S. in 2022 and overstayed his visa. Stand by for CNN anchors to freak out when people start talking about illegal alien terrorists entering the country during the Biden administration: BREAKING: Three senior DHS sources tell @FoxNews that the Boulder terror suspect is an Egyptian national in the U.S. illegally as a visa overstay who entered the U.S. during the Biden administration. I’m told Mohamed Sabry Soliman arrived at LAX on 8/27/22 on a B1/B2 nonimmigrant… — Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 2, 2025

With President Donald Trump back in The White House, the legacy media have rekindled their interest in stories on presidential corruption- refreshed after ignoring the cornucopia of corrupt acts attributable to the past occupant of The White House. The latest instance: ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos. Watch as Stephanopoulos delivers yet another hysterical opening monologue to open the latest edition of ABC’s This Week: ABC THIS WEEK 6/1/25 9:01 AM GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Good morning and welcome to This Week. The scale is staggering. President Trump and his family are making hundreds of millions, potentially billions of dollars, as Trump and his administration take official actions that benefit contributors and investors. Just this week we learned of pardons to tax cheats, including a man whose pardon was granted weeks after his mother attended a million-dollar-a-head fundraiser with the president. The Trump Media and Technology Group raised nearly $2.5 billion from 50 institutional investors whose identities have not been disclosed. The SEC dropped its lawsuit against the cryptocurrency firm Binance days after Binance began listing the cryptocurrency launched by World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm started by Trump's family. This unprecedented money-making by a sitting president and his family summarized by critics like "The Atlantic's" David Frum. “Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency,” he writes. “Throw away the history books, discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African dictatorship.” The overwrought opening monologue came ahead of a related reporter item and a panel segment, which stuffed the show’s A-block. And this is by design. Time spent on perceived Trump corruption is time not spent discussing the conspiracy to hide President Joe Biden’s decline from the American public- media bias by filibuster. The record will reflect that Stephanopoulos’ monologue alone devoted more time to Trump crypto than he did to the various schemes surrounding the Biden family concern: the sale of The Big Guy’s influence. There has been zero time, investigative or otherwise, spent on ABC air with regard the various allegations of Biden corruption: the well-known Burisma, the lesser-known but more troubling CEFC, and the troubling arrangement that had Biden sharing Penn-Biden Center office space with potential Chinese intelligence operatives. Likewise, there is zero intellectual curiosity in exploring the related pardons of the latter Biden days and whether whoever was incharge of the autopen executed those by usurping the pardon power of a non compos mentis Biden. Instead Stephanopoulos, like the media, goes from ignoring the former president to going all gas no brakes on the current. Stephanopoulos is half right, though: “the scale is staggering”, indeed. The scale of the media’s hypocrisy, that is.  

Russell Contreras at Axios is touting a new movie streaming on Tuesday called White With Fear, in which CNN media analyst Brian Stelter proclaims the buildup of the "white fear industrial complex, where many people get very rich and very powerful by telling white America that they are under constant assault." Filmmaker Andrew Goldberg aimed to explore “the U.S. conservative political machine amassing power by exploiting racial fault lines." The film “examines the origins of white grievance” in America and how it contributed to the “rollback of decades of civil rights gains.” That includes critiques “from former President Richard Nixon using crime as a racist dog whistle to racist Tea Party attacks on former President Barack Obama.” The trailer includes former Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron and for unintentional humor, Hillary "Bill Just Gave Monica a Poetry Book" Clinton proclaiming "We are just overwhelmed by the lies!"  In the trailer, the mere words "critical race theory" and "Black Lives Matter" and "radical Islamic terrorism" are somehow scare words instead of actual ideologies that are divisive and anti-American. It's obvious that America has been fiercely divided on racial matters, but to the Left, they never acknowledge that they have been fierce dividers. Any journalism that focused on inner-city riots or crimes by illegal immigrants is categorized as racist:  Katie McHugh, a former writer/producer at Breitbart, said she would write racist news stories for the website while getting cheered up by Trump supporters. McHugh said the film strategy was to take "reactionary, racist feelings" against non-white immigrants and show how the "elites" betrayed the working white man. McHugh said that after she wrote such pieces, prominent Trump officials would email her and flatter her as a young twenty-something. Stuart Stevens, a former Romney 2012 campaign strategist and co-founder of The Lincoln Project, said "the environment now isn't about solving problems but stirring racial animus for election victories." As if the Democrats don't stir racial animus for election victories? 

Back on May 19, ex-CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley hijacked the Wake Forest graduation ceremony to vent against Trump administration policies as well as the President’s lawsuit against CBS. “Journalism is under attack, universities are under attack, freedom of speech is under attack,” Pelley pompously proclaimed. Then on Wednesday, CNN/PBS host Christiane Amanpour pitched a similar message to graduating seniors at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government: “No matter how many words are banned, how many news organizations are shuttered and threatened, how many journalists are threatened and intimidated, we will not be silenced... and no administration should be surprised.” They aren’t the first media personalities to use the honor of speaking at a commencement ceremony to steal attention away from the achievements of those graduating in order to push their favorite liberal theories. Speaking at Benedictine University in 1996, for example, 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley took a whack at former President Ronald Reagan: “I remember the campaign slogan one year, ‘It’s morning again in America.’ Well, it may have been morning for some but, for a lot of people, it’s become a nightmare.” Four years later, White House reporter Helen Thomas pushed graduates to be lefty activists: “Don’t let the politicians chip away at the New Deal and the Great Society programs like Social Security, Medicare....” In 2005, former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw instructed them to be environmental activists: “It will do us little good to achieve peace on Earth if Earth becomes a dead planet.” The next year, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., indulged himself by blasting then-President George W. Bush’s foreign policy: “You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land....You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where oil still drove policy and environmentalists have to fight relentlessly for every gain. You weren’t. But you are. And for that I’m sorry.” More recently, media celebrities have used graduation ceremonies to electioneer against Donald Trump. “You must do everything you can to defeat the retrograde forces that have invaded our democratic process,” filmmaker Ken Burns told seniors at Stanford University in 2016.  And just two years ago, CNN’s Amanpour suggested censoring Trump (then a declared candidate for re-election): “The American press, and maybe the world’s press, still hasn’t learned out to cover or deal with Donald Trump. Maybe we should revert back to the newspaper editors and TV chiefs of the 1950s, who in the end refused to allow McCarthyism onto their pages unless his foul lies, his witch hunts and his rants reached the basic evidence level required in a court of law.” From the files of the Media Research Center and NewsBusters, here are a few of the most obnoxious examples of liberal media personalities commandeering commencement ceremonies to inflict their agenda on graduates and their families: ■ “The presumptive Republican nominee [Donald Trump] is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems, when in fact with him you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction, and addiction. ‘A bigger delusion,’ James Baldwin would say; the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesied. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.” — Filmmaker Ken Burns’ commencement address at Brandeis University, May 19, 2024. ■ “The fact that the American people voted three times against Trump and Trumpism — 2018, 2020, 2022 — also speaks volumes....People have had the opportunity to make their choices and they have done it....The American press, and maybe the world’s press, still hasn’t learned how to cover or deal with Donald Trump. Maybe we should revert back to the newspaper editors and TV chiefs of the 1950s, who in the end refused to allow McCarthyism onto their pages unless his foul lies, his witch hunts and his rants reached the basic evidence level required in a court of law.”— CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour delivering the commencement address at Columbia Journalism School, May 14, 2023. ■ “Right now, as we speak, we are defining the future of the United States. We have to decide in the next few years, maybe in the next few months, if we want to be an inclusive, diverse country, or if we tinker with democracy and politics and change that direction.”— Univision anchor Jorge Ramos delivering the commencement speech at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, May 13, 2017. ■ “For 216 years, our elections, though bitterly contested, have featured the philosophies and characters of candidates who were clearly qualified. That is not the case this year. One is glaringly not qualified. So before you do anything with your well-earned degree, you must do everything you can to defeat the retrograde forces that have invaded our democratic process, divided our house; to fight against, no matter your political persuasion, the dictatorial tendencies of the candidate with zero experience in the much maligned but subtle art of governance; who is against lots of things, but doesn’t seem to be for anything, offering only bombastic and contradictory promises, and terrifying Orwellian statements; a person who easily lies, creating an environment where the truth doesn’t seem to matter.”— Filmmaker Ken Burns delivering the commencement address at Stanford University, June 12, 2016. ■ “One of the problems with being a trailblazer is, sometimes you get burned. In those first few months at CBS, TV critics wrote about my clothes, my hair, my make-up, even the way I held my hands. Some said I lacked ‘gravitas,’ which I’ve since decided is Latin for ‘testicles.’...My story may have played out in the public eye, but it’s by no means unique. Every one of you will at some point be confronted by naysayers and learn that life isn’t always fair. You’ll feel cheated, you’ll be mistreated. You’ll wonder, when will I be loved?’”— Ex-CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric delivering the commencement address at the University of Virginia, May 20, 2012. ■ “The vital signs of your mother, Mother Earth, have taken a turn for the worse....How we live on a smaller planet with many more people is a reality that will define your generation for the rest of your lives....We need you to celebrate one another in a common cause of restoring economic justice and true value, advancing racial and religious tolerance, creating a healthier planet.”— Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw giving the commencement address at Fordham University, May 16, 2009. ■ “I come here today with a request for the Class of ’08: We need you to fix the country....Start with climate. Something tells me this may be a challenge in the years ahead; tomorrow’s predicted high for Columbus is 220 degrees.”— Then-NBC anchor Brian Williams addressing graduates of Ohio State University, June 8, 2008. ■ “It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, whether it’s the rights of immigrants to start a new life, or the rights of gays to marry, or the rights of women to choose. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where oil still drove policy and environmentalists have to fight relentlessly for every gain. You weren’t. But you are. And for that I’m sorry.”— New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s May 21, 2006 graduation address at the State University of New York at New Paltz. ■ “Our best efforts will be for naught if we fail on another front: if we fail to love our mother, Mother Earth. It will do us little good to achieve peace on Earth if Earth becomes a dead planet....Individually and collectively, you’re also stewards of the air we breathe, the water that we drink, wild lands and creatures large and small. Develop a sense of proportion about your personal and professional needs. Eschew excess and embrace moderation in your consumption habits. Sackcloth and kelp soup are not required, but the Buddhist reminder of the need to live lightly on the Earth is a helpful guide to the daily habits and needs of us all.”— Tom Brokaw, delivering the commencement address at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, June 12, 2005. ■ “I want to speak to you today about war and empire.... We are embarking on an occupation that if history is any guide will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security....We have forfeited the goodwill, the empathy the world felt for us after 9/11; we have folded in on ourselves....We are far less secure today than we were before we bumbled into Iraq. We will pay for this, but what saddens me most is that those who will by and large pay the highest price are poor kids from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance and joined the army because it was all we offered them.” — New York Times reporter Chris Hedges in a May 17, 2003 commencement address at Rockford College in Illinois. ■ “All you have to do is look around you and see that there is so much to be done to make this a more equal society. For starters, don’t let the politicians chip away at the New Deal and the Great Society programs like Social Security, Medicare, that puts a floor beyond which the elderly, the sick, the powerless do not starve or lack for medicine or shelter....    “Members of Congress have bottled up a gun safety bill, refused to vote on it....The world is also a more dangerous place because Congress turned down the nuclear test ban treaty. That vote deprived the United States of its moral authority to urge other nations not to test or build nuclear weapons. So you see, there is a lot of work cut out for you.”— Former UPI White House reporter Helen Thomas during her May 19, 2000 commencement address at the University of San Francisco. ■ “The legacy of the Reagan administration will be with us for years. The deficit under Reagan totaled more than a trillion dollars. Someday we’re going to have to pay those bills. As officials look to cut spending and taxes at the same time, we can’t afford another round of voodoo economics....I remember that campaign slogan one year ‘It’s morning again in America.’ Well, it may have been morning for some but, for a lot of people in this country, it’s become a nightmare.”— CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley in an April 28, 1996 speech to Benedictine University in Illinois. ■ “More is not always better. We’re moving into an era when the less we use, the better off we will be. Is a 400-pound wife better than a 130-pound wife?....If only one third of the money we spent on the Cold War could have been spent differently, we could have had decent housing, health care, and education for all Americans.”— CNN Founder Ted Turner’s commencement address at the University of Denver, quoted in the Rocky Mountain News, June 7, 1992.  For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.