SOME WELCOME GOOD NEWS FOR CAMPUS FREE SPEECH: Emory University Open Expression committee issues broadly speech-protective opinion.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1045.

A HALF CENTURY OF THE LEFT’S BIG LIE: Every Republican presidential candidate has been smeared as Hitler:

Goldwater was Hitler. Nixon was Hitler. Reagan was Hitler. Bush was Hitler. None of the latter three men declared the Fourth Reich, made themselves dictators for life and ran concentration camps. But the Big Lie retroactively rewrites the past by claiming that last decade’s Hitler was a decent moderate while the latest Republican Hitler is a terrifying monster. Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan were all resurrected as moderate contrasts to each other and then to Bush. The process of recreating Bush as a moderate has already begun. And so each Republican makes the electoral journey from Hitler to a political moderate whom a latter generation of liberals mourns while complaining that this latest Republican really is Hitler.

Actually, it’s almost 70 years of the big lie — Harry Truman compared Thomas Dewey to Hitler in the bitter last days of his 1948 election bid. (In December 1942, Roosevelt shocked White House correspondents when he presented an iron cross to an isolationist-supporting journalist at the New York Daily News he despised.)

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Decline Of Cash And The Rise Of Government Power.

What’s not to like? Very little. Except, and I’m afraid it’s a rather large exception, the amount of power that this gives the government over its citizens.

Consider the online gamblers who lost their money in overseas operations when the government froze their accounts. Now, what they were doing was indisputably illegal in these here United States, and I am not claiming that they were somehow deeply wronged. But consider how immense the power that was conferred upon the government by the electronic payments system; at a word, your money could simply vanish.

Now consider what might happen if the government made a mistake. When I was just starting out as a journalist, the State of New York swooped down and seized all the money out of one of my bank accounts. It turned out — much later, after a series of telephone calls — that they had lost my tax return for the year that I had resided in both Illinois and New York, discovered income on my federal tax return that had not appeared on my New York State tax return, sent some letters to that effect to an old address I hadn’t lived at for some time, and neatly lifted all the money out of my bank. It took months to get it back.

I didn’t starve, merely fretted. In our world of cash, friends and family can help out someone in a situation like that. In a cashless society, the government might intercept any transaction in which someone tried to lend money to the accused.

Unmonitored resources like cash create opportunities for criminals. But they also create a sort of cushion between ordinary people and a government with extraordinary powers. Removing that cushion leaves people who aren’t criminals vulnerable to intrusion into every remote corner of their lives.

We probably won’t notice how much this power grows every time we swipe a card instead of paying cash. The danger is that by the time we do notice, it will be too late. If we want to move toward a cashless society — and apparently we do — then we also need to think seriously about limiting the ability of the government to use the payments system as an instrument to control the behavior of its citizens.

I think that every citizen should have a once-in-a-lifetime option to have the bureaucrat of his/her choice fired, whipped through the streets naked, and forbidden to hold public employment ever again. This in terrorem effect would significantly reduce government misbehavior. Sure, there will be the occasional injustice, but think of the overall social benefit.

FASTER, PLEASE: Judge Orders White House To Stop Hiding Its Bogus Global Warming ‘Proof.’

MULTICULTURALISM IN ONE HEADLINE: Swedish City Cancels Earth Hour Without Lights, Electricity Because Of Rape Risk. “Fourteen cases of sexual assault have been reported in Östersund since January. The attacks are carried out by both young immigrant gangs and lone-wolf perpetrators, according to descriptions from the victims.”

THE DECLINE OF MALE SPACE: Marginalizing All-Male Groups.

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CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR: Salon tweets, “The gangster candidate: Trump & his supporters behave like the mafia, with veiled threats and acting above the law.” But as Twitchy notes, “That’s rich, coming from Salon. When radicals rioted in Ferguson and Baltimore in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, this was their headline: ‘Violent protesters are right: Smashing police cars a legitimate political strategy.’”

And note this classic exercise in doublethink at the same link: “Watch this video from RebelPundit interviewing some of the protesters [at Trump’s Chicago rally]. Around the 2:43 mark, one woman responds to some ‘F*** Trump’ comments with ‘Yeah! That’s what I’m saying!’ Immediately after, she amazingly continues with, ‘I’m not here for like, hate.’”

FIRED MIZZOU JOURNALISM PROF’S DEFENSE: I DIDN’T KNOW HOW JOURNALISM AT PROTESTS WORKED.

To be fair, there are a lot of “real” journalists who have no idea how journalism works either.

IF YOU GIVE A CRYBULLY A COOKIE: Let ‘snowflakes’ change campus building names and they’ll demand more.

At colleges across the country, student protesters have been complaining about the names of buildings and demanding that their schools change those names.

At Lebanon Valley College, students demanded the school change the name of the “Lynch Memorial Hall” because it included the word “lynch.” At Stanford, students want the name of Father Junipero Serra removed from buildings and streets because he played a role in assimilating — and apparently exploiting — Native Americans. Harvard Law students succeeded this month in removing the unofficial school seal because it bore the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr., a donor who made his money from the slave trade. At Yale (notice how many of these alleged hotbeds of racism are Ivy League schools), students demanded renaming a residential college because it was named after John C. Calhoun, a defender of slavery.

UC Berkeley perhaps had one of the most mind-numbing demands. Protesters wanted to rename Barrows Hall after Black Panther member Assata Shakur, who was convicted for the murder of a New Jersey state trooper and multiple other felonies. Barrows Hall was named for former UC Berkeley President David Barrows, who protesters claimed perpetuated American colonialism. To replace this alleged menace, the protesters wanted the building named after a murderer who escaped from prison and fled to Cuba.

So while protesters claimed to despise terrible people who advocated for the murder and mistreatment of others, they demanded the school honor someone who advocated for the murder and mistreatment of others.

Higher undergraduate workloads and less grade inflation are clearly called for.

THE FERGUSON EFFECT CONTINUES TO FESTER: Jack Dunphy writes that Democrat Mayors de Blasio and Emanuel agree: Better for a city to endure higher crime than see a racially charged incident turned into a political liability.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: WHEN LIBERALS HATE ALMONDS. “Should the great California almond boom be celebrated? Doesn’t it represent the growing prosperity of California farmers and rural communities following years of agricultural depression? Aren’t almonds a healthy and versatile food source that uniquely fit twenty-first-century tastes and diets? Isn’t the upsurge in production helping America win billions of dollars from trade?”

Not to the left. Almonds have become its new bête noir. The nut is blamed for exacerbating the California drought, overtaxing honeybee colonies, starving salmon of river water, and price-gauging global consumers. Almonds may be loved by consumers, but almond growers, it seems, are increasingly despised in the media. In 2014, The Atlantic published a melodramatic essay, “The Dark Side of Almond Use”—with the ominous subtitle, “People are eating almonds in unprecedented amounts. Is that okay?” If no one much cared that California agriculture was in near depression for much of the latter twentieth century—and that almonds were hardly worth growing in the 1970s—they now worry that someone is netting $5,000 to $10,000 per acre on the nut.

It is almost too much to bear for a social or environmental activist that a corporate farm of 5,000 acres could in theory clear $30 million a year—without either exploiting poor workers or poisoning the environment, but in providing cool people with a healthy, hip, natural product. The kind of people who eat almond butter and drink almond milk, after all, are the kind of people who tend to endorse liberal causes.

Read the whole thing.

THE HILL: Cornyn: Trump will need GOP majority in Congress.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) suggested Friday that if Donald Trump wins the White House, he’ll need a Republican-controlled Congress to approve his policies.

“If Mr. Trump does become the president of the United States, he’s going to need a Republican majority to govern,” the Senate’s No. 2 Republican said on “The Mark Davis Show.”

“And I think he would welcome working with Republican majorities in the House and the Senate to move his and the country’s agenda forward.”

Republican senators have walked a fine line as Trump has risen to the top of the GOP presidential pack.

While many have denounced some of the businessman’s policies, they’ve been wary of cutting ties completely with him or the conservative voters they’ll need to keep control of the Senate in November, when Republicans are defending 24 seats.

Hmm.

SOCIALIST DEMOCRAT THREATENS LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL: Bernie Sanders to Sheriff Arpaio: ‘Watch out, Joe.’

Related: “I’m so old I remember when socialists didn’t like the term ‘un-American.'”

SOMEBODY’S TAKING THEIR BOSS’S WHOLE “GET IN THEIR FACES” AND “PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD” RHETORIC A TAD TOO LITERALLY: “Illinois Rep. Cynthia Soto’s daughter and another campaign volunteer are accused of attacking aspiring politician Robert Zwolinski, who ran against Soto in the Democratic primary this week. Jessica Soto and Bradley Fichter, both 26, are each charged with three felony counts of aggravated battery in connection with the assault on the 30-year-old man…. Zwolinski said he saw Jessica Soto and Fichter were putting up signs near his office. When he approached them, both allegedly started hitting him and struck him in the head with a bottle and staple gun before running away.”

Why are Democrat politics such cesspits of blue-on-blue violence?

UNEXPECTEDLY! “New York City has seen a 20 percent increase in stabbings this year compared with last, and police say they don’t understand why it’s happening or what to do about it.”

Violent crime is up in New York under de Blasio? Other than pretty much everybody, who could have seen this coming?

“TOO PRIG TO FAIL:” Ace of Spades on David Brooks.

Read the whole thing.

Related:

Shot: “What David Brooks discovered about the rich on a $120,000 vacation.”

—Headline, the Washington Post, November 16, 2015.

Chaser: Flyover Nation: You Can’t Run a Country You’ve Never Been To.

—The title of Dana Loesch’s upcoming book on the insular existence and hauteur of the Ruling Class, their court stenographers, and bespoke trouser tailors.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Does the President Have A Duty To Nominate Supreme Court Candidates? Does the Senate Have A Duty To Consider Nominees?

WHY THE TRUMP BETRAYAL NARRATIVE?

Trump may steal some traditional Democratic votes, but the fear of him will also generate huge turnout of the same groups that made Obama’s re-election inevitable. More to the point, there may just not be enough white male voters available for Trump to win the presidency even if he gets a higher percentage of them than previous GOP candidates.

But if Trump does lose there must be a scapegoat, and those scattered and depressed conservatives who are vainly flaunting that “neverTrump” hashtag are the most likely candidates for the position. Since Trump’s inability to make good on his boasts will be considered to only have been made possible by another establishment betrayal, expect to hear a lot of talk about the candidate being stabbed in the back by his critics. The big talk about holding the establishment accountable for acts of lèse-majesté against the king of Trump Tower is just as much about setting up an alibi for him if he falls short of his goal as anything else.

Related: Emerson poll: Hillary tops Trump by 17, Sanders beats Trump by 19 — in New York.

EVERYONE IS A MIX: Man’s discovery of bones under his pub could forever change what we know about the Irish.

AT LEAST THEY’RE ENDANGERING THEMSELVES: Congress Kills D.C. Missile
Defense System.

GOOD TRY, BUT I STILL WON’T SUPPORT TRUMP: Romney will back Cruz; so should we all.

THE RIGHT GEEK: Why I’m Backing #NeverTrump: A “Cuckservative” Speaks.