BOSTON MARATHON CALLED OFF OVER CORONAVIRUS, RACE WILL BE ONLINE ONLY. “Boston Athletic Association officials said they plan a ‘historic virtual marathon.’”

More details at the Boston Athletic Association Website: “Virtual offerings for participants during that week will include exclusive panel discussions, champions interviews, and a downloadable Boston Marathon toolkit that includes signature race elements such as a printable finish line, winner’s breaktape, and more. Further details will be sent to all entrants in the near future. Participants in the virtual 2020 Boston Marathon will be required to complete the 26.2 mile distance within a six hour time period and provide proof of timing to the B.A.A. All athletes who complete the virtual race will receive an official Boston Marathon program, participant t-shirt, medal, and runner’s bib.”

YOU CAN GET A HINT BY WATCHING HOW THE CHINESE REACTED: NIH director: ‘No way of knowing’ if coronavirus escaped from Wuhan lab.

CAN WE BE SUED? When asked that question by countless reporters and editors, I reply that “any idiot can file a lawsuit. Filing a winning one is another story.”

Here’s a case of a moronic lawsuit brought by some Seattle SJW’s who thought it was a novel idea to claim that Fox News should be treated like a defective product. The Washington state group known as the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics, or WASHLITE, filed a suit in Superior Court of Washington State in April, calling for an injunction that would keep Fox News from “publishing further and false and deceptive content” about the coronavirus pandemic. The law has rejected this kind of idiocy multiple times, and I have litigated (and won) this issue before. Ideas can be wrong, but not “defective.” Here’s an example of one such case that explains it nicely.

Fortunately, the court gets it right, quoting precedent in its ruling dismissing the case:

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

You don’t like Fox? Great, change the channel.

You scared it will “teach” people the “wrong” ideas? That’s the most condescending, paternalistic elitism of the worst kind.

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HERE’S A COPY OF PRESIDENT TRUMP’S Draft Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship.

And here are some comments by Eugene Volokh on what Section 230 does and doesn’t do.

PROJECTION: Reeling From ‘You Ain’t Black’ Comments, Biden Accuses Trump of Racism.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD CRUSHED BY THE REALITY OF 2020: To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim.

SHOCKING NEWS: Use of high-THC cannabis doubles risk for anxiety disorders.

OUT ON A LIMB: Is there such a thing as a left-wing authoritarian? Authoritarianism is a trait generally thought to belong to those on the right, but a new study claims the personality type can also be found on the left.

Prominent leaders of National and International Socialist movements say that’s un-possible.  

SCIENCE: Historians: Women Invented Grilling To Trick Men Into Cooking.

SUPER GAFFE-O-MATIC ’76: Joe Biden Mangles History In Mash-Up Of D-Day, Pearl Harbor And Delaware’s Independence.

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MATT MARGOLIS: No, Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin Was Not Photographed at a Trump Rally.

AND WE’RE LUCKY THAT THAT’S THE CASE: American Spaceflight Is Now In Elon Musk’s Hands.

KURT SCHLICHTER: This Election Is Republicans v. China – Oops, I Mean Democrats.

UGH: All China’s Lies And the Sad Death of Hong Kong.

THE MOST IMPORTANT COVID-19 STATISTIC: 43% Of U.S. Deaths Are From 0.6% Of The Population.

JOEL KOTKIN: THE CORONAVIRUS IS ALSO SPREADING A DARK NEW ERA OF NEO-FEUDALISM.

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the global shift already underway towards a neo-feudal society. With the middle-class economy largely shut down and, in the best-case scenario, in for a long and painful recovery, the population that is barely hanging on is expanding rapidly in America and around the world. In the U.S. alone, the ranks of the poor are projected to increase by as much as 50 percent, to levels not seen in at least a half century.

Neo-feudalism is reprising the kind of society that existed in Medieval times, characterized by declining social mobility and greater concentrations of power. In the neo-Feudal world, as in the original, the middle class loses its primacy, as small businesses fail and even affluent families face the prospect of joining the ranks of ever expanding class of property-less serfs.

Yet not all will be losers—the tech oligarchs, whose net worths have surged during the pandemic, are now positioned to pick up the pieces of a devastated analog economy. But the class that may benefit most may be the Clerisy, encompassing professions such as teachers, consultants, lawyers, top level government officials and medical specialists. Their share of the labor market has grown while those of the traditional middle class — small business owners, workers in basic industries and construction — have shrunk.

Many in the Clerisy has barely been discomfited by the pandemic as they continue to have checks deposited while working largely from home. Some members of the “expert” class — medical professionals in white coats, empowered bureaucrats and the media that interprets their prognostications — have emerged as “the privileged stratum”, in the words of the French leftist Christophe Guilluy, operating from an assumption of “moral superiority” that justifies their right to instruct others.

Just as the tech oligarchs, having conquered and consolidated the digital economy, have assumed the predominant role of the old feudal aristocracy, the Clerisy reprises the role once played by the Catholic clergy. Samuel Coleridge coined the term in the 1830s to define a class of people whose job it was to instruct and direct the masses, as traditional clerics were joined by university professors, scientists, public intellectuals and foundation heads.

Like the elites of Medieval times, today’s clerisy has become increasingly hereditary in part due to the phenomena of well-educated people marrying each other; between 1960 and 2005 the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25% to 48%. “After one generation,” Daniel Bell noted in 1972, “a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.”

And one notably lacking in anything that could be called “merit.”

ABOUT TIME: Trump administration to expel Chinese graduate students linked to China’s military schools.

FASTER, PLEASE: Democrats are Panicking at the Prospect of Quick Economic Recovery.

A JOE, DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF, CANNOT STAND: The Morning Briefing: Can Joe Biden Survive a Battle With…Joe Biden?

DOES ANYBODY STILL BELIEVE IT IS? It’s Time To Stop Pretending Twitter Is a Neutral Platform.

Related: “There are literally hundreds of millions of tweets far ‘worse’ than Donald Trump’s that go up every day and they won’t be able to police them all. And that opens them up to a full range of possible legal problems. Twitter could have stayed on the sideline and avoided this trap. If they really think that the President’s tweets are so misleading or terrible, they could have let the community make that decision and essentially leave Trump free to hoist himself on his own petard. But now that they’ve put on their editor’s hat, a new game is afoot. And I doubt they’re going to enjoy it.”

More: Twitter Exec In Charge of Fact-Checking Once Called Trump and His Team ‘Actual Nazis.’

CHANGE: Trump Will Act on Big Tech Censorship, White House Says.