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The Biden Administration’s diplomacy with Israel over its war against Hamas has reached the Animal House “double-secret probation” stage, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken warning Israel that it may find itself diplomatically “isolated” in the world if it attacks Rafah. Is it possible for Israel to be any more “isolated” than it already is in the joke that is called “the diplomatic community”? Dean Wormer could hardly have done it better, though, to be fair to Faber College, Dean Wormer would make a better secretary of state than Blinken.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Hoodie) is having none of it:
I’m starting to think that instead of banning hoodies on the Senate floor, maybe we should require them. At least for Democrats.
Chaser—I’m finding it harder to dislike this guy for his otherwise liberal views:
dibs on your parking space https://t.co/o9QUhIbKyF
— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) March 21, 2024
Chaser—Fetterman does have some competition this week, from the Ragin’ Cajun himself, James Carville: “A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females [dominating the culture of the Democratic Party].”
Robert “Beto” O’Rourke—remember him?—appeared on Bill Maher’s comedy show Friday night, and accused Big Retail—”the Walmarts, the Amazons, the Krogers of the world” of price gouging. But it is O’Rourke’s explanation that earns him an entire feature display in the Museum of Leftist Stupidity:
“They were jacking prices in the middle of inflation and blaming it on the economy.”
Imagine! Raising prices during inflation! Who ever heard of such a thing? I’m sure his solution will be government price controls, because when you are this dumb, it is too much to expect even a minimal grasp of economics.
Here it is in all it’s full glory:
Bill Maher is convinced Biden is going to lose the 2024 election because of food inflation.
Beto O'Rourke's spin:
"The FTC just yesterday released a report and said they're price gouging. These are the Walmarts, the Amazons, the Krogers of the world. They were jacking prices in… pic.twitter.com/kM31tDJTSC— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 23, 2024
This week’s episode could be mistaken for the Three Martini Happy Hour, because this week’s installment comes with a tangy twist. John Yoo is away this week, so we brought in a ringer to take his place: Prof. Hadley Arkes! Thus this episode become a Positivism-Free Zone, in which we review the deepest ground of the natural law unencumbered by John’s usual alarums, excursions, and errors.
The episode comes in three parts: Hadley made some news yesterday, celebrating the retirement of the noted Notre Dame Law professor Gerard V. Bradley, who will be joining Hadley at the James Wilson Institute on Natural Law and the American Founding.
Gerard V. Bradley
From there Hadley proceeds to answering the question that we’ve been kicking around ever since the Dobbs decision, namely, just how should pro-life politicians break out of their self-imposed muteness about abortion. Hadley has the strategy.
Finally, we spend some time toward the end getting down some of Hadley’s “origin story” that brought him to Leo Strauss’s classroom at the University of Chicago back in the 1960s, and key friendships made along the way—especially our late friend and unsung hero Michael Uhlmann.
Note: We had some internet glitches while recording this episode that weren’t easily edited or smoothed over, so we ask listeners’ indulgence with these hiccups, in return for which we’re presenting this installment ad-free.
As usual, listen here, or at our hosts at Ricochet when it goes live there.
Has there ever been a greater example of media malpractice and malevolence than the way Trump’s mention of a “bloodbath” for the auto industry under Biden (analysis: completely true!) was turned into some kind of MAGA Kristallnacht? I suspect Joe Biden’s new clown shoes are an ironic tribute to this in-kind campaign contribution.
Headlines of the week:
No. Just no.
So glad the Biden regime is protecting us from broken ice cream machines.
Wut?
And finally. . .
We always hear a lot about the expense and difficulty of decommissioning nuclear power plants, but we seldom hear about the cost and difficulty of decommissioning wind mills, which only last half as long (if that much) as nuclear plants. Especially offshore wind, which is much more expensive to begin with. Here’s one estimate of the future problem:
JOHN adds: Offshore wind is possibly the stupidest way to generate electricity that has ever been devised. Someone should do the math, but I suspect it would make more sense to hire 10,000 men to walk on a treadmill. And liberals don’t clean up their own messes. There are already rotting hulks of wind turbines littering the landscape, often having been installed by now-defunct companies whose owners, long gone, have made off with the profits. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the billionaires who have gotten rich on government-mandated wind turbines to take down and dispose of offshore installations that have outlived their insanely brief useful lives. “Green” energy is, in multiple ways, the great scandal of our time.
Right now it seems the airlines (and especially Boeing aircraft) are suffering an epidemic of equipment failures and mishaps. Count me somewhat skeptical. I suspect the Alaska Air door frame blow out a few weeks ago, along with the tire falling off a United 777 the other day, has put the media on high alert, and now many episodes of mishaps and irregularities that might have gone unnoticed or unreported in the general media (the specialty aerospace press is a different matter—Aviation Week and Space Technology was a staple of my household’s magazine subscription pile when I was growing up, and it had lots of neat stories about aircraft problems) and are a source of headlines. (There is a second possibility: that standards for maintenance and manufacturing crews have been eroded on account of diversity mandates. . .)
Here’s the long-term data for mortality from airplane airframe-related accidents:
Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senate leader back in the 1960s, is famous for saying, “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. . .”
That was in the days before multi-trillion dollar deficits. A billion dollars is hardly a rounding error in a federal program these days, and $1 billion is usually considered the entry fee for any proposed new program. A program that only costs $750 million is almost an insult at this point.
And Dirksen also never could have anticipated the utility of high speed-rail spending. If he was alive today, he’d likely modify his statement as follows: “A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, and maybe someday you’ll have a high-speed rail line in California.”
To no one’s surprise, this is in the “news” this week:
As the state faces economic headwinds, California’s mega high-speed rail project between San Francisco to Los Angeles also faces major funding hurdles, the project’s CEO Brian Kelly told state lawmakers Tuesday.
Kelly testified in front of the State Senate’s Transportation Committee on the High-Speed Rail Authority’s updated draft business plan. In Tuesday’s hearing, Kelly told lawmakers the project has $28 billion dollars on hand, but noted it was still a few billion dollars short to complete the Central Valley segment between Merced and Bakersfield. Depending on how long the segment takes to finish, it could cost between $32 Billion to $35 Billion. Kelly said the project is hoping to fill the gap with federal funds. That segment of the project is expected to be fully operational between 2030 and 2033, Kelly said.
Project leaders estimate it will still need an additional $100 billion to finish what voters were originally pitched in 2008: a bullet train that runs between San Francisco and Los Angeles. A timeline on its completion has not been set as the authority waits for environmental clearances for those segments.
Bold emphasis added. Because everyone knows federal money is free, or grows on trees or something. But with a state deficit now likely to be over $70 billion this year, there’s little chance California can pay for the completion of the rail line itself. And there’s no timeline set because everyone with a brain understand the high speed rail line will never be fully completed. The “environmental clearances” make that certain.
So Haiti is back in the news. As I mentioned yesterday, I thought the Clinton Foundation had fixed the place! Or Colin Powell in the 1990s. Or something. How soon until Biden sends in American troops? Or lets 500,000 Haitians come to America?
Anyway, Haiti is in the state of nature right now, with gangs and mobs rampaging. And yet, as a smart left-leaning friend of mine (I do have a few of those—opposition research) points out, the murder rate in Haiti is lower than many American cities:
Our pal Mark Perry reminds is that today, March 12, is “Equal Pay Day” that falsely assumes how far into 2024 the typical woman has to work to earn what her alleged male counterpart earned in 2023. Funny how feminists never consider something like “Equal Job Safety” or “Job Risk” day (Mark proposes “Occupational Fatality Day”), because the data looks like this and the “gap” would take years, not months, to close:
Men are 11 times more likely to die on the job than women. A rather different kind of femme fatale.
Chaser, FWIW (also from Mark):
• I don’t get it. I thought the Clinton Foundation had fixed all of the problems in Haiti. Maybe they should just bring back Voodoo economics.
• I did not have John Fetterman as a robust champion for Israel on my Bingo card:
I’m starting to believe that on this issue at least, Fetterman is a better Senator than Oz would have been.
• Apparently Middlebury, the college that allowed the assault on Charles Murray and a faculty member back in 2017, is feeling left out of the elite university anti-Semitism sweepstakes:
Middlebury Administrators Ordered Students to Remove ‘Jewish’ from Oct. 7 Attack Victims’ Vigil
By Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon
It was October 10, three days after Hamas had murdered 1,200 Israelis and abducted hundreds more, and Jewish students at Middlebury College were trying to organize a vigil for the victims. They reached out to Middlebury’s dean of students, Derek Doucet, with a draft poster promoting the event, which they invited administrators at the elite liberal arts school to attend.
“Stand in Solidarity With the Jewish People,” the poster read. “This will be an opportunity to honor the innocent lives lost in the tragic events that have struck Israel in the past days.”
It didn’t go over well.
In an email to students reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, Doucet, who has oversight of student activities, pushed to rename the vigil and strip it of references to Judaism so as to make it “as inclusive as possible.”
“Some suggestions that might help are stating that this gathering is to honor ‘all the innocent lives lost,’” Doucet wrote, and including a reference to the “tragedies that have struck Israel and Gaza.” He added that calls for solidarity with Jews could trigger “unhelpful reactions.”
To adapt a new saying about the media—you may think you hate college administrators, but you don’t hate them enough.
• Nothing to see here, I’m sure:
In a less than 24-hour span this weekend, two more dead whales have been discovered off the northern Atlantic coast of the U.S., and pro-cetacean activists are blaming President Joe Biden’s offshore wind initiative.
I’m so old I can remember when “Save the Whales!” was a popular bumper sticker on VW Bugs, Volvos, and early-adopter Subaru drivers.
• Another reminder that even Barack Obama was better on border security and uncontrolled immigration than Biden is:
This wasn't 30 years ago. This was President Obama in 2009 on immigration.
"We can't have half a million people pouring over the border…"
About 7 years later these same positions were considered racist and xenophobic by Democrats. pic.twitter.com/X41Qk0Qe2x
— MAZE (@mazemoore) March 11, 2024
Chaser:
It would be a real shame if everybody watched and shared this right now.
A REAL shame… pic.twitter.com/bYKhb5QvlN
— Gain of Fauci (@DschlopesIsBack) March 9, 2024
As mentioned here before, Democrats used to be fairly robust in their opposition to open borders and unchecked illegal immigration, as recently as the Clinton years. But then someone got the bright idea that since immigration had helped to flip California from a red state in presidential elections to a blue state across the board, imagine how much power Democrats could grasp if the California story was repeated across the entire country! (But don’t dare say “Replacement Theory,” because that’s raaaccisttt. Besides, it is a misnomer: it should be called “Replacement Fact.”)
Here’s what the shift in opinion looks like:
Lucretia hosts this week’s episode, which we recorded in the morning over coffee instead of whisky because travel schedules prevented the normal and proper Friday evening happy hour, and guess what? We’re even worse without whisky!
Among the news and issues treated this week: Why Biden isn’t FDR (he’s not even Harry Truman); why this was the worst SOTU (Lucretia offers a different acronym) speech ever; whether there are signs of life for the GOP in California after all; how immigration and abortion are playing out in the campaign cycle so far; how to think about the Supreme Court decision in the Colorado case dealing with Trump’s eligibility for the ballot (hint—it ain’t over till it’s over); and finally, can Harvard be serious in asking for a government bailout? The unifying theme here is galloping dishonesty, which is being normalized more and more every day.
Our articles of the week are (from me): Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s classic essay “Defining Deviancy Down,” newly salient in an age of truth-denying euphemisms like “justice-involved youth” and “newcomers” instead of “migrants” (which was a substitute for “illegal alien”); Lucretia ponders the challenges of Alex Berenson’s Substack article on new threats to free speech; and John draws our attention to the original 14th Amendment article from Baude and Paulson that brought us to the Supreme Court steps earlier this week, plus responses (also here) that got overlooked at the time, now largely vindicated. (I wondered whether Baude and Paulson were a rope-a-dope set up to make liberals look stupid and induce still more MSNBC primal screams.)
As always, listen here, or from our hosts at Ricochet.
The week began with a big bang—the Supreme Court ruling 9 – 0 that Trump had to stay on the ballot, which caused liberal heads to explode and enough tears to irrigate California for a month. One of the heads (or what’s left of it) that exploded was Joe Biden’s, who popped off in a speech that left the impression he must have dipped deeply into Hunter’s stash.
Headlines of the week:
It’s a total mystery. . .
The only kind of worthy crab meat.
This seems like overkill.
And finally. . .
I am sure many readers have noticed how bike lanes are taking over American urban roadways, especially downtowns, often killing a lane for cars, and reducing streetside parking. And I almost never see anyone biking in the lanes. How did this come about? Has there been a massive populist campaign for bike lanes? Has “we need more bike lanes everywhere” been popping up in public opinion polls of top issues and citizen concern?
Of course not. It is an elite preoccupation, crammed down our throat by what I am calling Bike Lane Tyranny. At some point, many cities will reverse course and restore old car lanes. Though it may take a while.
It is the same mentality that has been certain that what America’s cities and suburbs need is more mass transit. Billions have been spent especially on rail lines (when busses would actually be more effective) that are lightly used. And here is the result:
As you may have heard, San Francisco voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed initiative measures to make policing easier and require drug testing for welfare. The horrors! Too bad they didn’t put reparations in the ballot, as I have a hunch how the vote would have turned out. In any case, even progressives, naturally slow learners, are finally figuring it out.
And I know everyone has seen San Francisco’s famous “poop map.” Equally important is the map of the number of businesses in the central core of the city that had enough of the madness. These are all the businesses and retail outlets that closed up and left downtown near Union Square the last three years. Most of the spaces they vacated are still empty.
Tonight is the State of the Union speech. I know it’s hard to contain your excitement. Many Bingo and drinking games suggest themselves.
We all know that Joe Biden is a pretend president, so just who in the White House thought it was a good idea to have him have a Zoom call with actual pretend presidents—Hollywood actors who have played the president, soliciting their advice on how to approach his speech tonight. And what we get it this:
You may’ve heard I’ve got a big speech coming up.
So, I thought I would hear from some folks who have done the job before – sort of. pic.twitter.com/7wFYVQm7Xm
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 7, 2024
Maybe Biden’s staff came up with this exercise just to distract him from doing anything today. Or to make him feel good about himself. If all these Hollywood pretenders say he’s doing a great job, it must be true.
Missing from this roster: Dave. Kevin Kline, that is. Maybe they didn’t want the subtle reminder of an imposter in the Oval Office. Too close to the current truth.
I think it was Glenn Reynolds who posited that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is actually a Karl Rove plant inside the Democratic Party, but it seems equally plausible that this is the case for John Kerry. He has always been so pompously preposterous that you can’t take him seriously. And now he says we might “feel better” about Russia and the Ukrainian situation if only Russia would get on board with cutting emissions.
UNREAL: John Kerry says people would 'feel better' about the war in Ukraine if Russia would 'make a greater effort to reduce emissions' pic.twitter.com/lm2Vq2uBfS
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 6, 2024
Please, Democrats—if you manage to sideline Slow Joe, can you nominate this man again? Pretty please?
You may recall a few weeks ago the Biden Administration backed down in the face of public outrage when it emerged that one of its wokesters in the Department of the Interior proposed to remove a statue of William Penn from federal property in Philadelphia in favor of some kind of statue or public art that would be more “welcoming.”
Well, they done it again. A wokester in the Veterans Administration proposed in a memo to remove and ban any display of the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt photo of the jubilant sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J day in 1945. Because this photo depicts “a non-consensual act,” it has to be banned because it might constitute a hostile environment or cause snowflakes to melt or something. Some people thought the memo must be parody, but it was real:
The head of the VA has reversed this stupidity. However, I propose that if Trump is indeed elected again and allowed to take office next January 20, one of his first executive orders should be to require that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” be played at least once every day, or perhaps at shift change, in every VA hospital.
P.S. Now, if someone proposes expunging every picture of Joe Biden creeping on a child or grown woman, I’d be down for that.
Chaser:
The term “deaths of despair” has caught on in recent years, brought out into the mainstream from academic and specialized literature such as Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. And the problem of drug overdose deaths was already becoming an issue on the campaign trail as far back as the Obama years. And yet the problem has only gotten worse:
Some things even the Babylon Bee can’t make up:
Bed bugs found at MSNBC’s Manhattan headquarters caused staffers to scatter ahead of the left-leaning network’s Super Tuesday coverage, The Post has learned.
According to a memo obtained by The Post, an “unidentified insect” was spotted Sunday in the recently revamped studio 3A — home to special election coverage and “The Rachel Maddow Show” — at 30 Rock in Midtown.
Additional studios on the third floor were also shuttered “out of an abundance of caution.”
Now I know what you’re thinking. How can you tell the difference between a bed bug and an MSNBC news person? They are both repellant parasites. You’d think professional courtesy would make MSNBC welcome bed bugs.
One of the central totems of the modern left and its women’s auxiliary (the feminist movement) is the alleged “wage gap” between men and women. You know the cliche—women only earn 80 cents for every dollar a man earns. This cliche has been exploded countless times, but it refuses to die because it retains endless utility for grievance-junkies who run the Democratic Party. You know the Biden White House will continue to deploy it.
Which makes Mark Perry’s annual analysis of White House salaries under Democrats so much fun:
Last week I observed in “Liberal Fragility” how liberal law professors supposedly break down in tears they are so depressed that the Supreme Court has taken a turn away from the palmy days of their beloved Warren Court (which, recall, Barack Obama once said did not go far enough in the direction of true “equality”). Just imagine how much Xanax is being ingested after yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that leaves Trump on the ballot.
I expected something like this from Keith Olbermann:
Dissolve the Court! Remind me again who is the threat to democracy and trasher of “democratic norms”? Almost makes you long for the good old days of court-packing.
But I hadn’t expected that a supposed conservative could be equally idiotic, but then the side-effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome, for which there is no vaccine, appear to be even worse that I thought:
Churchill remarked that “For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” A similar thing can be said, apparently, for green energy—you can’t subsidize or tax-break yourself to a truly profitable business.
Today’s third NY Times installment about their most recent poll piles on the bad news for Biden: not only are you losing to Trump head-to-head, and are unpopular, but today we learn that more voters like Trump’s policies and record better than Biden’s.
Here’s the graphic depiction:
Some excerpts from the Times:
And despite holding intensely and similarly critical opinions both of President Biden and of his predecessor, Americans have much more positive views of Donald J. Trump’s policies than they do of Mr. Biden’s, according to New York Times/Siena College polls.
Overall, 40 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s policies had helped them personally, compared with just 18 percent who say the same about Mr. Biden’s policies. . .
Women are 20 percentage points more likely to say that Mr. Trump’s policies have helped them than Mr. Biden’s have, despite the fact that Mr. Trump installed Supreme Court justices who ultimately overturned the right to an abortion and that about two-thirds of women in America think that abortion should be legal in all or most instances.
In a separate Times story, the Biden message to doubting Democrats is—drop dead. Well that’s the headline the NY Daily News would have used. Instead the Times headline is:
“For Democrats Pining for an Alternative, Biden Team Has a Message: Get Over It.”
. . . The Biden team views the very question as absurd. The president in their view has an impressive record of accomplishment to run on. There is no obvious alternative. It is far too late in the cycle to bow out without considerable disruption. . . Members of Mr. Biden’s team insist they feel little sense of concern.
• Reminder that once upon a time leading Democrats opposed illegal immigration and called for stronger border enforcement:
Chaser—Once upon a time Democrats also understood that a surge of illegal immigrant depressed wages for unskilled labor. A reminder from Democrat economist and Obama alum Jared Bernstein:
One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.
• I’ve finally figured out why Democrats are indifferent to rising crime and especially massive retail theft—it’s a clandestine tax increase! No, seriously:
• Be careful what you wish for? You may recall a couple weeks ago a short note here about how the repulsive Adam Schiff, now running for the Senate in California, was cleverly trying to eliminate his Democratic Party rivals by boosting Republican Steve Garvey with “attack” ads claiming that Garvey is “too conservative for California” and “voted for Trump twice” (wink, wink) in the state’s perverse top-two jungle primary system. Well guess what:
Ex-MLB great Steve Garvey leads Adam Schiff in California Senate race: poll
Former Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres star Steve Garvey is ahead of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) in California’s nonpartisan Senate primary, a new poll shows. Garvey, a Republican and 10-time MLB All-Star, snagged 27% support in the Los Angeles Times/Berkeley IGS poll released Friday. Support for Schiff in the hotly-contested race for the seat formerly held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was measured at 25% by the pollster.
Still very much an uphill race for Garvey in November if this poll holds up in the primary this week. But still, it would be a matter of cosmic justice if Garvey pulled off an upset, and was able to thank Schiff for all his help. Stay tuned. . .
• Feel Good Story of the Day:
I’ve been quipping for a while that it must be awfully depressing these days for the climate cultists heading out to block a road or yell at some politician, only to find the pro-Hamas anti-Semites got up earlier than they did and beat them to it. But some climatistas are not taking this lying down—that is until someone makes them lie down, as in this clip from Harvard:
BREAKING: we just called Joe Manchin a sick fuck. We humiliated him in front of a herd of Harvard elites. He squared up. We held firm. Barbaric murderer, hideous fiend, he torches humanity and laughs. pic.twitter.com/1ajrQsKnbJ
— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) March 1, 2024
The Harvard Crimson headline is heart-warming:
Climate Protester Thrown to the Ground After Interrupting Joe Manchin’s Harvard IOP Talk
An aide to U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) threw a climate action protester to the ground following a confrontation at a Harvard Institute of Politics event Friday morning.
The incident came just minutes after at least six protesters from Climate Defiance — a climate advocacy group — interrupted a talk Manchin was delivering at the Harvard Kennedy School. The protesters criticized Manchin’s support of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a controversial 300-mile natural gas pipeline in West Virginia that has been condemned by environmentalists.
“You sold our futures and got rich doing it, you sick fuck,” one person shouted, prompting Manchin to stand up from his chair to face the protester.
Meanwhile, across campus at Harvard Law School, this happened:
Skadden is one of the firms that signed a letter to Harvard last fall expressing concern about antisemitism on its campus.
When lawyers from the firm visited Harvard Law today, students accused them of supporting apartheid and being complicit in genocide. pic.twitter.com/4riq3gT9sY
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) March 1, 2024
Down at Penn, a similar story:
Pro-Palestinian protestors interrupt Jameson at Board of Trustees meeting, forcing adjournment
Interim President Larry Jameson’s first University Board of Trustees meeting as president adjourned within minutes on Friday after protestors disrupted the meeting.
The Board of Trustees meeting was scheduled to take place from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Inn at Penn. At 11:33 a.m., a group of 12 pro-Palestinian protestors affiliated with the Freedom School for Palestine started calling for “endowment transparency.” Their chants went on for four minutes, until the Board of Trustees meeting was adjourned at 11:37 a.m, having quickly passed its agenda items.
Meanwhile, down the road at Yale, a Communist group (seriously?) disrupted a lecture by historian Timothy Snyder, who is a left-leaning and rabid anti-Trumper, but apparently that’s not enough for self-styled Communists:
Timothy Snyder evacuated his “Hitler, Stalin, and Us” lecture on Thursday afternoon after a Communist activist group entered the classroom and would not leave.
Around 10 demonstrators affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist Party showed up at the classroom in William Harkness Hall five minutes after the start of class and began shouting at Snyder while holding up signs and recording students. . .
The demonstrators walked into the back of class and held up signs while Raymond Lotta, the group’s leader, declared, “No class as usual today!” Lotta called on Snyder to condemn the United States for its support of Israel’s military offensive against Hamas in Gaza and accused him of “brainwashing” students with “anti-communism.”
Chaser:
“To call DEI useless would be an understatement,” Kestenbaum said. pic.twitter.com/09oLSQx4Du
— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) March 3, 2024
Just a guess, but I think the word has gone out from the Obama redoubt in Martha’s Vineyard and/or his shadow White House in Kalorama that the New York Times needs to lead the push this week to force Biden out of the race. The Times is doom-scrolling its latest poll showing Biden on his way to certain defeat to Trump. Yesterday’s installment gave the raw numbers—Biden is eroding across the board.
Today the Times is out with another headline of doom, whose contents could have been part of yesterday’s story, except the Times wants to mile their poll for maximum effect. Biden’s own voters think he is too old:
Widespread concerns about President Biden’s age pose a deepening threat to his re-election bid, with a majority of voters who supported him in 2020 now saying he is too old to lead the country effectively, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College.
The survey pointed to a fundamental shift in how voters who backed Mr. Biden four years ago have come to see him. A striking 61 percent said they thought he was “just too old” to be an effective president. . . Seventy-three percent of all registered voters said he was too old to be effective, and 45 percent expressed a belief that he could not do the job. . .
This unease, which has long surfaced in polls and in quiet conversations with Democratic officials, appears to be growing as Mr. Biden moves toward formally capturing his party’s nomination.
I’m guessing those “quiet conversations” will start to be less quiet fairly soon. Gavin Newsom has his phone programmed on speed dial.
Here’s one of the graphics:
In case Democratic elites aren’t getting the message, the Times director of polling Nate Cohn offers his own separate “analysis” of the matter:
The Big Change Between the 2020 and 2024 Races: Biden Is Unpopular
Why is President Biden losing? There are many possible reasons, including his age, the war in Gaza, the border and lingering concerns over inflation. But ultimately, they add up to something very simple: Mr. Biden is very unpopular. He’s so unpopular that he’s now even less popular than Mr. Trump, who remains every bit as unpopular as he was four years ago.
President Biden’s unpopularity has flipped the expected dynamic of this election. It has turned what looked like a seemingly predictable rematch into a race with no resemblance to the 2020 election, when Mr. Biden was a broadly appealing candidate who was acceptable to the ideologically diverse group of voters who disapproved of Mr. Trump. . .
That’s gotta hurt. Then there’s this:
We didn’t ask whether Mr. Biden should drop out of the race. We considered it — in fact, we discussed it for days — but many respondents may not know the complications involved in a contested convention.
Subtext: “Doctor” Jill: Get your husband to do the right thing for the interest of the Party. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment.
P.S. It was the suddenly plummeting polls that prompted LBJ to drop out of the 1968 race at the end of March.
As is now more widely reported, President Biden relies on cue cards for just about everything, but it looks like even this extreme measure is failing. Here in reading from a prepared statement on a notecard about getting food to Gaza, at the 30-second mark Biden twice says we’ll be opening up more corridors to “Ukraine.” Italian PM Meloni looks around the room wondering if someone is going to help this poor doddering old man.
Biden: “We are concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza
We will join Jordan and our other partners to airdrop food on Ukraine
Look at Italian PM trying hard not to laugh
pic.twitter.com/FJFFusvYWM— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) March 2, 2024
The New York Times is out with its latest poll today, and they can’t sugar coat the bad news for Biden (and good news for Trump) that it contains. The headline says it all:
The poll has Trump with a five-point lead.
Some internals from the article are even more devastating than these headline numbers:
The poll offers an array of warning signs for the president about weaknesses within the Democratic coalition, including among women, Black and Latino voters. So far, it is Mr. Trump who has better unified his party, even amid an ongoing primary contest. . .
Mr. Trump is winning 97 percent of those who say they voted for him four years ago, and virtually none of his past supporters said they are casting a ballot for Mr. Biden. In contrast, Mr. Biden is winning only 83 percent of his 2020 voters, with 10 percent saying they now back Mr. Trump. . .
One of the more ominous findings for Mr. Biden in the new poll is that the historical edge Democrats have held with working-class voters of color who did not attend college continues to erode.
Mr. Biden won 72 percent of those voters in 2020, according to exit polling, providing him with a nearly 50-point edge over Mr. Trump. Today, the Times/Siena poll showed Mr. Biden only narrowly leading among nonwhite voters who did not graduate from college: 47 percent to 41 percent. . .
Mr. Trump’s policies were generally viewed far more favorably by voters than Mr. Biden’s. A full 40 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s policies had helped them personally, compared to only 18 percent who said the same of Mr. Biden’s.
The gender gap, for instance, is no longer benefiting Democrats. Women, who strongly favored Mr. Biden four years ago, are now equally split, while men gave Mr. Trump a nine-point edge. The poll showed Mr. Trump edging out Mr. Biden among Latinos, and Mr. Biden’s share of the Black vote is shrinking, too.
Memo to Trump: Don’t blow it.
There is no Three Whisky Happy Hour podcast this week, because we practiced a bit of “settler colonialism” by occupying the flagship Ricochet podcast yesterday and expelling the pervious residents.
Well not literally. Rob Long and Peter Robinson were both away, so the producers asked the 3WHH crew to fill in for the whole hour. And hoo-boy, with James Lileks in charge of the discussion, the sparks flew on immigration, as we successfully flushed out and scolded John “Open Borders” Yoo. The comment thread there is taking off like a Starlink rocket launch, but if you’re not a Ricochet member, you can use the comment thread here as usual.
Ricochet calls the episode “Drunken Monkey Business” on account of the whisky reviews we offer at the end, and you’ll definitely want to listen all the way to the very end to take in the daring high seas tale of Lileks “urinating” on a certain former National Review writer. (We also covered some of the latest Trump legal news, the Gaza War, and the hysteria over “Christian nationalism.”
Don’t believe the headlines that Mitch McConnell is really stepping down. He’s going to replicate himself as an AI robot. Just keep in mind the lifespan of turtles, and you’ll know I’m right. And the crash of Google’s Gemini AI is a distraction—it’s just another CIA-Taylor Swift psy-op.
Want:
Headlines of the week:
A rather unexpected combination.
I really thought this is how the computer age would unfold.
I think I’ll pass on this ski resort. . .
Captain Kirk at the DEI review board.
And finally. . . Tulsi Gabbard:
Bryan Caplan, professor of economics in George Mason University’s excellent economics department, has a long article out today with the James Martin Center about the attempt to impose a mandatory “Just Societies” course for all students at George Mason starting next fall, and the course is a total ideological DEI wokefest. He also has a separate Substack article that goes into lengthy detail.
Partly because Caplan blew the whistle on this Orwellian outrage, the course requirement is on hold for the moment, pending “review” by the administration. And naturally the DEI campus Stasi is threatening to “review” Prof. Caplan for this offense.
One passage from his Martin Center article deserves special highlight:
This is quixotic, I know, but let me try to break through the woke academic echo chamber with some harsh truths. If you promote DEI for a living, the reality is that normal, apolitical people see you as a racist, sexist, censorious fanatic. They don’t say so publicly … because they are afraid of you. They don’t tell you privately … because they are afraid of you. But when they’re speaking to people they trust, they vehemently disagree with you—and yearn to see you all fired.
Well, it appears that the University of Florida has figured this out. Today the University (where Ben Sasse is now president) summarily closed down the entire DEI apparatus, and is summarily dismissing, rather than “reassigning” DEI staff to other offices. It has also canceled all outside contracts for DEI consultants. It will save $5 million right away, which Sasse says will be diverted to new faculty recruitment.
Here’s the note that went out:
More of this please. Burn them all down.
Related: Harvard announced today that it is appointing . . . a white male as interim provost. I didn’t think that was allowed any more at Harvard. But not just a white male, but a somewhat conservative white male—John Manning of Harvard Law School. Manning clerked for both Robert Bork on the DC Circuit and Nino Scalia at the Supreme Court. How he snuck onto Harvard Law’s faculty is something to ponder.
Harvard must really be badly rattled if it is willing to violate current progressive dogma and appoint a white male to such a senior position.
One fine sunny Sunday several years ago found me in Helsinki, Finland, where I spotted a rock bacd setting up in a square by a park, and I decided to linger for some free live music. Who knows—I could be catching the next Abba, or Eurovision Song Contest contestant. Well, it wasn’t any of those. What it was is kinda hard to describe. Best I could do at the time was a heavy metal version of a whale being tortured. And thus this chart makes some sense:
As we have noted repeatedly here, people are voting with the feet and moving from high crime/high tax blue states to low tax/low crime red states in increasing numbers. Alongside tax rates as a factor in higher economic growth in red states is that red states are more likely to be right-to-work states than blue states. This is not universally true; heavily unionized Michigan was a right-to-work for a decade, though that ended last week, thanks to Governor Wretched Whitmer’s fealty to unions. Anyway, here’s the data on the rates of job growth in right-to-work versus compulsory union states:
Liberals really are extremely fragile people. This helps explain why they need “safe spaces” with cuddly stuffed animals, grief counselors, and warning labels against “microaggressions.”
The latest evidence is a completely unironic and totally un-self-aware piece in the New York Times about the anguish of liberal law professors having to teach constitutional law at a time when the Supreme Court leans right. It’s so upsetting that some professors are moved to tears and can’t conceive of continuing. The New York Times thinks this is actually “a crisis.”
Seriously, you can’t make this up:
Rebecca Brown, at the University of Southern California, has been teaching constitutional law for 35 years. “While I was working on my syllabus for this course, I literally burst into tears,” she told me. “I couldn’t figure out how any of this makes sense. Why do we respect it? Why do we do any of it? I’m feeling very depleted by having to teach it.”
I’m skeptical that she “literally” burst into tears, though I expect she literally misused the word “literally” here. In any case, shouldn’t the phrase, “I couldn’t figure out how any of this makes sense?” have been applied to Wickard v. Filburn ever since it was put to paper in 1942? And yet somehow the few conservative law professors that existed behind enemy lines in law schools managed for 80 years now to explain Wickard (and dozens of other ridiculous liberal Court rulings) with a straight face and without bursting into tears, or having anxiety attacks.
The Times inadvertently gives away what’s really going on here (beyond general liberal fragility):
“The people who taught us were all Warren court people,” said Pam Karlan, a constitutional and voting-rights expert at Stanford law school, referring to Chief Justice Earl Warren, who through the 1950s and 1960s led a court of both Democratic and Republican appointees to expand civil rights, equalize political representation and liberalize the criminal justice system. “They’d clerked on that court. They valorized it. There was this notion that judges were these heroes who would save us all. Our students do not have that view.”
Ah yes, the glory days of the Warren Court, which invented new “rights” left and right (actually just “left”). There’s never been an era with more result-oriented jurisprudence that the Warren Court, but it delivered results liberals liked. But now that the Court is delivering rulings liberals don’t like, it’s the end of the world. Or at least their world.
It gets worse:
“We’re witnessing a transformation in the New Deal consensus,” said Mark Graber, a leading constitutional scholar and Regents professor at the University of Maryland.
Oh please, don’t get my hopes up like this!
There’s a serious irony here. Back in the late 1990s, after the Supreme Court had once again botched a significant case in Romer v. Evans, overruling a precedent on sodomy laws from just 1986, the conservative journal First Things published as symposium on “The End of Democracy” that called into question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in the wake of its serially bad decisions in Casey v. Planned Parenthood and Romer v. Evans, among others. It caused a huge ruckus on the right, and several leading conservatives attacked First Things and resigned from its editorial board, including Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, and Walter Berns. This “smash the Court” enthusiasm didn’t gain much acceptance, and quickly passed from the scene.
I see no such intramural argument on the left about the Supreme Court. Now it is the left that is bent on delegitimizing the Supreme Court. It is all toddler temper tantrums and hair-on-fire freakouts that some jurists, many with Ivy League law degrees, have a different opinion from theirs.
Prediction: I know that a lot of liberal law professors can’t stand it that Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and J.D. Vance all went to Harvard or Yale for law school. There is likely before long to be an effort to screen out conservative applicants to elite laws schools so that they don’t have an Ivy League credential.
Yesterday we noted Trump’s rising strength among certain voting groups. How about by profession instead of ethnicity, gender, and the other usual things? Like professions perhaps? Everyone likes to say the political divide in America is between red states and blue states. But it looks like the division is more white versus blue when it comes to who is supporting Trump’s campaign—that is, white collar professionals against blue collar workers.
I keep seeing Trump skeptics and their media svengalis say that while Nikki Haley is not coming close to beating Trump in any primary battle, she is getting sufficient support to conclude that there is a critical mass of Republicans who don’t like Trump and may not turn out for him in November, and boy is he in big trouble because of this.
Don’t buy it.
I note that back in 1980, the Michigan primary was held May 20, and even though Ronald Reagan was well on his way to securing the Republican nomination, George H.W. Bush still pulled off an upset in that primary, beating Reagan by 150,000 votes. (Bush also beat Reagan in the Pennsylvania primary in April.) Michigan looks to be the kind of state that favors moderate Republicans.
When all the primaries were over, Reagan had received a cumulative 7.6 million votes, while Bush had received 3.1 million, with John Anderson a distant third with 1.5 million. But add Bush and Anderson’s totals together with the also-rans (Dole, Baker, Connally, Phil Crane, etc) and you conclude that Reagan’s majority was less than a landslide (7.6 million to 4.6 million for the rest of the field—certainly a much smaller margin than Trump’s margin in the current contest. Despite the massive doubts about Reagan—his age, his “controversial” opinions, etc—he walked away with a landslide.
But, you hear, Trump is essentially running as an incumbent, and should have incumbent-level margins. This is an unimpressive argument, especially when you allow for the circumstance, not seen since 1912, of a former president coming back to challenge for the nomination. To the contrary, Trump is running far ahead of his totals from the 2016 contest. He’s gotten stronger, not weaker, since 2016.
P.S. For trivia buffs, Harold Stassen got 25,000 votes in the 1980 GOP primaries.
Social media alerts me to the fact that today would be Sir Roger Scruton’s 80th birthday. Sadly, Sir Roger passed away from cancer in 2020. I got to know Sir Roger fairly well in his last decade, and had several splendid exhilarating dinners with him and his lovely wife Sophie over very expensive bottles of fine Bordeaux (among his 50-plus superb books was, after all, I Drink, Therefore I Am—highly recommended), conversing and sometimes having extensive but very friendly arguments. Roger didn’t like Leo Strauss, for example, and I cross-examined him closely on this subject one leisurely evening. Wish I had run a tape. Anyway, nearby is the last time I got to see Roger in person.
As it happened, I had been working on a long essay “The Greatest Living Conservative” at the time of his death. I lost heart after the premise became obsolete, and I shall someday try to revise and complete it. But here are a couple excerpts from the draft:
In the introduction to The Meaning of Conservatism, Scruton writes that “Conservatism may rarely announce itself in maxims, formulae, or aims. Its essence is inarticulate, and its expression, when compelled, skeptical.”
Why “inarticulate”? Because, has he explains elsewhere, the liberal has the easy job in the modern world. The liberal points at the imperfections and defects of existing institutions or the existing social order, strikes a pose of indignation, and huffs that surely something better is required, usually with the attitude that the something better is simply a matter of will. The conservative faces the tougher challenge of understanding and explaining the often subtle reasons why existing institutions, no matter how imperfect, work better than speculative alternatives.
This kind of conservatism is criticized, sometimes with good reason, as being stand-patism.
I’m reminded of what might be called Hallmark Greeting Card conservatism, though it traces back to Pascal: “The heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know.” The more modern version was offered by Wittgenstein: “There are things that can be known, but not said.”
Or, as Roger put it more succinctly elsewhere in his reflections on the profundity of the common law: “English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.”
From that one sentence entire dissertations could follow.
Postscript—another fragment from my unfinished essay:
Roger Scruton has written more books than I have read, including, beyond philosophy, books on food and wine, art, beauty, sport, architecture, music, and sex; environmentalism, theology, a novel, and a memoir, and, very recently, even a self-help book, How to Be a Conservative. Although I’m tempted to say that if I haven’t figured out how to be a conservative by now, it’s probably too late for a book to help me. To paraphrase an old Woody Allen joke, if Roger was American instead of British, I fear he might have written The Seven Habits of a Highly Effective Conservative. (The original joke: Kant: The Categorical Imperative, and Six Ways to Make It Work for You!) (Though I did notice on Amazon that you can get a Roger Scruton iPhone case.)
Though if asked where to start with Roger’s body of work, I typically recommend his memoir Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life. Having myself reached the galloping years of middle age, I can say that if your regrets are only gentle, you’re doing pretty well. But his chapter “How I Became a Conservative” is a good introduction to the four-way intersection of Roger’s philosophical, political, cultural, and aesthetic thought.
This fall will mark the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the famous “free speech” movement at UC Berkeley. You can find my account of it, written in the aftermath of the Milo Yiannopoulos riot of February, 2017, which I was present for, at this link.
The Yiannopoulos riot was bad enough, but last night there was a sequel at Berkeley. As loyal readers may know, I am not around campus much this semester, as I’m temporarily filling in for a recently deceased professor at Pepperdine’s graduate school. So I missed a mob that prevented Ran Bar-Yoshafat, a reserve combat officer in the Israel Defense Forces who has been deployed in Gaza, from giving a presentation on campus at the invitation of several student groups.
The mob was not peacefully protesting. As has happened to Jewish students at many campuses, the mob was banging on doors and threatening violence. The Jewish News of Northern California offers an account—some excerpts:
Jewish students at UC Berkeley evacuated from a campus theater Monday night after a mass of protesters, chanting “Intifada! Intifada!” and other slogans, shattered a glass door at the venue and shut down a scheduled lecture by an Israeli attorney and IDF reservist.
Several students who were attending or working the event at Zellerbach Playhouse were injured, including two young women, one of whom sprained a thumb wrestling to keep a door shut as protesters tried to muscle it open. Another female student reportedly was handled around her neck, leaving marks. A third student was spit on, he told J.
The lecture was scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. Ran Bar-Yoshafat, who is a reserve combat officer in the Israel Defense Forces and was deployed in Gaza, planned to discuss international law as it pertains to Israel. “He’ll explore whether Israel violates international law, the rules of wartime conduct, and how the IDF can better protect civilians,” a social media post publicizing the event said.
The talk was conceived of as a small lecture in a classroom at Wheeler Hall, but organizers moved it at the direction of campus police for safety reasons after the anti-Zionist group Bears for Palestine, the Cal affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine, called for a protest to “shut it down,” according to Joseph Karlan, a student leader of campus pro-Israel group Tikvah and one of the event organizers.
There’s more at the link.
Separately in the Jewish News, Daniel Solomon, a graduate student acquaintance of mine who was present, reports:
The people who were forced to flee apparently forfeited their right to security after committing the unpardonable sin of coming to hear an Israeli speak on campus. The university, which has touted its commitment to free speech while actually condoning a climate of antisemitic intimidation, did little to protect the safety of the speaker and audience — and even less to protect their free speech rights.
Parading through the campus in a fashion worthy of the finest paramilitary, the pro-Palestinian rioters exulted in their victory.
This latest episode at UC Berkeley caps months of harassment — and on occasion, violent outbursts— from wannabe Hamasniks. On Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas pogrom, Bears for Palestine released a statement praising its “comrades in blood and arms” for their operations “in the so-called ‘Gaza envelope.’” The same organization then mounted demonstrations at which participants clamored to “globalize the intifada” and “free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
Again, more at the link above, and do read the whole thing if you have time.
If there are no consequences for this latest act, which is worse in many ways than the Yiannopoulos affair if you think about it for a few minutes, then it can truly be said that free speech is dead at UC Berkeley.
Here are some related videos and collateral material:
I didn’t know this but apparently students were spat on, called antisemitic insults, and even assaulted at last’s night event @UCBerkeley . Shame on this institution, which still has nothing to say.
https://t.co/AQO7Yu35yw— Daniel Solomon (@DanielJSolomon) February 27, 2024
Last night at @UCBerkeley, Jewish students were threatened, assaulted, and prevented from attending a speech by a Jewish speaker on campus. Campus police shut down this private event when it became clear that they could not protect the students. Multiple students reported being… pic.twitter.com/FKidts1FvZ
— JCRC Bay Area (@SFJCRC) February 27, 2024
I’ve reached the point where I hope a second Trump Administration will propose Nuremberg Trials for campus anti-Semites, on whom who foolish college administrations bestowed tenured faculty positions.
My pal Henry Olsen explains in his recent Telegraph column that Trump is underperforming his polls in recent contests, and appears to be stuck between a very solid floor and a rigid ceiling. Perhaps, but the Telegraph included this graphic, taken from recent Pew polls, that suggests a different picture:
To be fair, a generic Republican ought to be polling about 60 percent of the white vote, and that’s just where Trump is stuck. It would be a delicious irony if Trump wins in November through an increased share of minority votes. It will plunge Democrats into a crisis.
Okay, this is officially the funniest thing on the internet right now: “Tucker Carlson” explaining the real story of Lord of the Rings. (There are a bunch more of these on YouTube, like this one. YMMV.)
As promised,
Here’s an AI Tucker Carlson narrating The Lord of the Rings@MiddleearthMixr @TuckerCarlson pic.twitter.com/eiXtR0m2qz
— Dr. Maverick Alexander (@MaverickDarby) February 25, 2024
Right now the unaffordability of housing has become a national issue, and not just one for the two coasts. The fundamental reason for this is the spread of coastal-style over-regulation of housing to the interior states of “flyover country,” which had for decades mostly resisted the over-regulation of housing. Rising interest rates have something to do with this too. In any case, maybe another housing crash is in the works?
This morning I stumbled across a Tweet linking to an Australian “60 Minutes” segment about the unassimilable migrants that are causing the crime rate and other social dysfunctions to soar in Sweden. Turns out the episode is seven years old, but since we don’t see Australia’s “60 Minutes” here (and our CBS “60 Minutes” won’t touch this subject with a ten meter pole), I doubt little has changed in the last seven years, so here’s the complete seven minute segment—watch to the very end:
I still contend that sooner or later, European nations are going to institute mass deportations of migrants. (If it wants to survive, anyway. It may not have the will to do so any more.) Germany has already said it is going to step up deportation proceedings against recent migrants whose asylum claims are unfounded, but look for other countries to ratchet up from there.
Like John, it would be hilarious to observe the left’s sudden obsession with “Christian nationalism” if it weren’t based on an abysmal ignorance that is itself a grim threat to the continuation of our republic. I guess Thomas Jefferson was a Christian nationalist for the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, although in fairness to stupid leftists, they don’t believe in “self-evident truth” either, because they are unable to grasp the meaning of “self-evident” as Thomas Aquinas, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Lincoln learned from Euclid. (One of my core lessons in the classroom is the continuity of thought between the “Two Tommys”—Tommy Aquinas and Tommy Jefferson. Hardly anyone ever notices this.)
Or how about John Adams: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
But you know who else turns out to be a “Christian nationalist”?
Joe Biden, Christian Nationalist:
"My rights are not derived from any government…they're given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our Creator."
— Denny Burk (@DennyBurk) February 23, 2024
Gosh—I wonder whatever became of that guy?
This episode has everything: a how-to guerilla guide to improving your McDonald’s hamburger experience; a spirited discussion of the Alabama Supreme Court decision that defines frozen embryos as persons (I think the media is willfully misreporting the decision—John is not so sure); those crazy new presidential rankings from political scientists—and even some soft-core porn!
Say what?
Well, it turns out that that Judge Arthur Engoron, who oversaw Trump’s alleged fraud trial in New York City, apparently has a case of Anthony Weiner envy, and posted some rather racy locker room pics of himself some years back. And right in the middle of our discussion Lucretia flashed the pictures up on the Zoom screen, sending John and me rushing for some eye-bleach. There must be something in the bottled water Manhattan Democrats drink. (And doesn’t Engoron sound like the name of a dwarve or elve who goes bad in Lord of the Rings?)
In any case, we do finally get around to a new segment of the 3WHH, where we note three articles from the last week for what they can tell us about something. John chose those stupid presidential rankings; Lucretia chose an MSNBC articlefrom leftist columnist Paul Waldman that unwittingly admits that everything conservatives say about the administrative state is completely true; and I picked Karol Markowitz’s NY Post column reflecting on how recent social science that ratifies the conservative view that two-parent families are the best way to raise children is so controversial with the left, which is no surprise. (Honorable mention to a parallel column on the same subject by Mark Judge in the Washington Examiner.)
So listen here or from our hosts at Ricochet. But have your eye-bleach for your mind’s eye at the ready.
This is the week we got confirmation that Joe Biden is not merely a doddering, senile fool, but a bad dog owner, which is cosmically worse. Meanwhile, the FBI continues its string of comic incompetence, arresting an informant it has had on its payroll for more than a decade (paging Inspector Clouseau!), but only when it became useful to embarrass Republicans. It’s enough to make you want to put a gold-gilted Trump high-top sneaker up something.
Headlines of the week:
Totally want. . .
And finally. . .
• Behold the newest frontier in “equity”—”vaccine equity.” Which is needed to counter “vaccine nationalism.” (And you thought “Christian nationalism” was the worst threat out there.)
You think I am making this up? From Nature magazine today:
Today, nearly one-third of the world’s population has still not received a single dose [of COVID vaccine], and the death toll resulting from vaccine nationalism continues to grow. . . As time runs out, we urge WHO member states to agree on a ‘science-for-science’ mechanism that ensures vaccine equity in the next pandemic.
• Sen. John Kennedy (the good one), speaking at CPAC (only a minute long, but with an epic editorial flourish at the end):
I wish he would run for president someday.
• Some of the best reporting about the rot at the top at Harvard has been done by the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. The Crimson is out today with a long piece exposing the fact that the Harvard Corporation “chose Claudine Gay as Harvard’s 30th president without conducting a scholarly review of her work, according to a person familiar with the process.”
More embarrassing is that the Harvard Corporation chose Gay “over two internal candidates who boasted both administrative experience and far more extensive scholarship credentials: Tomiko Brown-Nagin and John F. Manning ’82. Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, published two books and won the highest award in American History writing, while Manning, dean of Harvard Law School, argued nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and wrote more than 40 legal articles.”
Pretty much confirms what we’ve known all along about why Gay was selected. And raises the obvious follow up question: what are the clearly inept members of the Harvard Corporation going to resign?
• “You’ve lost another spy balloon, Xi?”
According to the polls, the Tory Party over in Britain s heading for a wipeout at the hands of the Labour Party later this year, thereby squandering Boris Johnson’s record Tory landslide of 2019. Has there ever been a greater example of political malpractice in recent decades? There are lots of reasons for this dreadful scene (starting with Johnson’s own terrible handling of COVID and other unforced errors) which can be treated more fully on another occasion. Conservatives in America ought to pay close attention, however, and take some lessons perhaps.
For the moment, it is worth noting is that the Tory Party has especially lost ground among younger voters. Sound familiar? Actually, the Financial Times looked at cross-national survey data, and concludes that Britain’s Tories are an outlier (click to embiggen):
Affordable housing may have something to do with this:
Vaunce News 