“PROGRESSIVISM,” WHERE TIME STANDS STILL:

● Shot:

It’s not surprising that Buck v. Bell was decided in the Roaring Twenties, a decade even more culturally charged than the one we live in today. The Ku Klux Klan was riding a wave of anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic fervor, creationists were battling Darwinists over the teaching of evolution, and Prohibition was pitting rural Protestant values and prejudices against a looser, more diverse urban culture. In Washington, Congress was busily writing the most restrictive immigration law in our history, the National Origins Act, to protect the country from foreign contamination. In the words of The Saturday Evening Post: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn.”

According to Thomas C. Leonard, who teaches at Princeton, the driving force behind this and other such laws came from progressives in the halls of academia — people who combined “extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise.” “Illiberal Reformers” is the perfect title* for this slim but vital account of the perils of intellectual arrogance in dealing with explosive social issues. Put simply, Leonard says, elite progressives gave respectable cover to the worst prejudices of the era — not to rabble-rouse, but because they believed them to be true. Science didn’t lie.

But barring undesirables was only half the battle; the herd also had to be culled from within. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to legalize forced sterilization, starting a landslide endorsed by progressive icons like Theodore Roosevelt and the birth control champion Margaret Sanger. And when eugenicists needed an ironclad case to bring before the Supreme Court, Virginia’s medical elite supplied it in the person of Carrie Buck.

—‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers,’ the New York Times, March 14, 2016.

● Chaser: Having children is one of the most destructive things you can to do the environment, say researchers.

—Headline, the London Independent, July 12, 2017.

● Hangover (because hey, it’s the Independent): Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.

—Headline, the London Independent, March 20, 2000.

(Via Power Line.)

* No, there is another.  

WHEN YOU’RE A LEFTY JOURNALISTIC OUTLET AND GLENN GREENWALD IS BEATING YOU LIKE A RENTED MULE OVER BIAS:

Related: The Left’s Mueller Madness, or, It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Another Blue Fitzmas.

THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Fake Camel Toe Underwear is One of the Weirdest Fashion Trends Ever.

LOOKING BEHIND THE CURTAIN: The usually left-leaning Columbia Journalism Review takes a thoughtful and fair look and what Rep. Nunes’ Twitter lawsuit really means, and makes a fair case that the data giants should be treated just like any publisher and not behemoths immune from responsibility:

“The definition of a publisher should more closely mirror the expectations that journalists face in their work each day. Organizations that outline expectations and ethics for what is published and edit or delete certain accounts and posts, should be considered publishers. In other words, social media outlets should be expected to take some responsibility for what they publish – just as news organizations are.”

FLASHBACK: Castro, Chavez, and ‘bad luck’: Castro and his ilk showed us that under socialism, the powerful grow rich — and everyone else grows poor.

SO LATELY QUITE A FEW PEOPLE HAVE ASKED ME ABOUT WEBHOSTING, I suppose as people start moving away from Twitter, etc. Anyway, I strongly recommend HostingMatters, which I’ve used since 2002. Good people, good service, reasonable rates.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Mueller Time at Last!

MAYBE SHE MEANS THEY WEREN’T THRILLED-THRILLED: Barbra Streisand says Michael Jackson’s accusers were ‘thrilled to be there’ and his ‘sexual needs were his sexual needs.’

(Classical allusion in headline.)

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Black conservative fellow of University of California’s free speech center says it’s a sham.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: At the University of Florida, it’s par for the course for conservative speech to be censored or silenced.

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YES:

We have the worst political class in our history. The challenge is replacing them with something better. They’re not going to give up their sweet gigs just because they suck, and are terrible for the country.

Related: Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad.

BUSH IN DRY DOCK: The port side anchor of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) is lowered into a dry dock for maintenance.

OUT: THE MUELLER REPORT IS GOING TO BLOW THE ROOF OFF THAT PUTIN-PUPPET WHITE HOUSE. In: We Don’t Need to Read the Mueller Report.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Subsidized privilege: The real scandal of American universities.

Related: To Reduce Inequality, Abolish The Ivy League.

TOM WOLFE MAY BE GONE, BUT WE’RE ALL STILL LIVING IN HIS VIRTUAL REALITY PROGRAM:

● Shot:

Infectious diseases—some that ravaged populations in the Middle Ages—are resurging in California and around the country, and are hitting homeless populations especially hard.

Los Angeles recently experienced an outbreak of typhus—a disease spread by infected fleas on rats and other animals—in downtown streets. Officials briefly closed part of City Hall after reporting that rodents had invaded the building.

* * * * * * * *

The diseases sometimes get the “medieval” moniker because people in that era lived in squalid conditions without clean water or sewage treatment, said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine and public health at UCLA.

— “’Medieval’ Diseases Flare as Unsanitary Living Conditions Proliferate,” Scientific American, March 15th.

● Chaser:

In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroll, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.

The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero. At one point the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people in the communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning . . . the laws of hygiene . . . by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. This process, namely the relearning—following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero—seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America.

—Tom Wolfe, from his 1987 essay “The Great Relearning,” included in his 2000 anthology, Hooking Up. 

Earlier, from Reason TV: We Shut Down State Mental Hospitals. Some People Want to Bring Them Back.

MICHAEL BARONE: Old political rules of thumb are yielding to even older ones.

One reason old political rules stop working is that one generation of voters has different experiences from those of the generations before. Voters who remembered the Depression and World War II in the 1940s rewarded incumbent presidents who seemed to have produced prosperity and peace with landslide re-elections.

They were willing to cross party lines to express their gratitude for policies that seemed to prevent horrors that were then all too familiar. So incumbent presidents of both parties won between 57 and 61 percent of the popular vote in 1956, 1964, 1972 and 1984. Since 1988, only a shrinking sliver of voters remembers what Americans used to call “the Depression” and “the War,” and no president has won more than 53 percent.

Just as Trump has not been able to raise his job rating to the improving economy, so his political enemies have not been able to lower it significantly. Each new supposedly shocking personal revelation has failed to shock; each eagerly whispered allegation of criminal collusion has failed to disenchant.

It’s apparent now that Trump’s support (the 21st-century Republican core, minus a couple million white college grads, plus a couple million white non-grads) is sticking with him pretty much regardless of events or outcomes. And the coalition that makes up the 21st-century Democrats, with the reverse adjustments, is solidly arrayed against him.

This is actually in line with old political rules, rules with origins going back long before the 1930s and 1940s. The Republican Party, from its formation in 1854, has been built around a core of people considered to be ordinary Americans, but not by themselves a majority. The Democratic Party, from its formation in 1832, has been a coalition of those regarded as out-peoples, often at odds with each other, but together often a majority.

Both parties’ voters today are acting in characteristic fashion. The vast body of Republicans has no truck with the complaints of Never Trumpers. The Democrats are in turmoil, panicking at the possibility of having enemies on the Left, to the point that House Democrats couldn’t pass a resolution decrying the blatant anti-Semitism of one of their own.

Well, it’s hard to decry blatant anti-semitism when a major constituency of yours consists of blatant anti-semites.

SAME:

WHY DO DEMOCRATS WANT TO LET 16-YEAR-OLDS VOTE? Why is 18 the age of adulthood if the brain can take 30 years to mature?

WHEN THEY COME FOR THE JEWS, They Won’t Ask Questions.

Only recently, a Belgian parade featured a float of grotesquely distorted Orthodox Jews in religious garb, perched on bags of money, à la the art of Nazi Julius Streicher. What makes this sickening display even more alarming is the official sanction given to it by the Mayor of Aalst, Christoph D’Haese, who stated, “It’s not up to the mayor to forbid such displays” and that the carnival participants had “no sinister intentions.” No sinister intentions? Adolf Eichmann also had no sinister intentions when he organized transportation to the death camps. After all, he himself had no part in the actual killing process; they just did their jobs.

We have our own anti-Semitic scandal with newly elected congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D), a Somalian hijab-wearing Muslim who tweets anti-Semitic tropes “without sinister intentions” or retractions. Democrat leadership won’t condemn, censure, or remove her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, leftist Jews have defended her, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi excused her inadvertent offense. Yes, Congress passed a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and anti–everything else, without singling out Omar and the Jews. Thus, the Democratic Party is falling farther left toward Islamic ideology. . . .

American Jewry is at a crossroads. The vast majority of American Jews will continue to cling to their familiar ancestral belief system; it’s all they know. To change now would be to deny everything their family members and they, themselves, have lived for. But before they bury their heads in the sand once again, they should at least hear these simple truths. When our enemies came for us during the Holocaust, they did not ask if we were Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or secular Jews. Neither were they interested in any past service we rendered for the state. We were Jews. That was all that mattered. If history repeats itself, when our enemies come for us once again, they will not ask if we are Israelis or Zionists. They will not care if we marched in Selma, Alabama; protested against apartheid in South Africa; supported equal rights for women; advocated for the LBGTQ community; and campaigned for Hillary or Bernie. It will matter that we are Jews.

Today’s anti-Semitism, unleashed by the Left and Islamists, is so visceral, virulent, vile, vicious, and vitriolic that it can no longer be justified under the guise of anti-Zionism. In form, content, and message, it is exactly what was seen and heard during the heyday of the Third Reich. It is what made the Holocaust possible. What begins with a parade float in Belgium inevitably ends in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. This is the fate our enemies want for us. This is why Tehran’s Ayatollah Khamenei rejoices that more Jews are moving to Israel — for one grand target.

This trend has been visible for 20 years, but . . .

NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME: AOC claimed Fox hosts were not using her full last name but transcripts show they have been.

THE APOCALYPSE PRIMARY:

Predictably, much of the doomsday rhetoric is focused on the issue of climate change. The United State must act now. Eliminate the filibuster. Enact the Green New Deal immediately to authorize trillions of dollars in new spending to reduce our country’s 15 percent (and falling) share of global carbon emissions, even though most Americans say they are unwilling to spend even $10 a month to accomplish that goal.

But absent some ambitious military campaign to carpet bomb Chinese and Indian industrial centers, it’s unclear how eliminating cars, euthanizing the U.S. cattle population, and installing solar panels on every single building in America is going to forestall the end of the world, should the most dire predictions prove accurate.

All the Democrats have to do is not be crazy, and they can’t even do that.™

But to paraphrase Kathy Shaidle on Trump as Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse.