THIS DOESN’T SURPRISE ME: Coronavirus Anxiety Costs More Lives Than the Lockdowns Save From COVID-19, Study Finds.

SUPREME COURT OVERTURNS ‘BRIDGEGATE’ SCANDAL CONVICTIONS: “The Supreme Court on Thursday overturned the fraud convictions of two New Jersey officials for their roles in the ‘Bridgegate’ scandal, the intentional grid locking of traffic on the George Washington Bridge in 2013 by former Governor Chris Christie’s administration.”

‘MURICA: Cops Appear to Stand Down after Marine Vet Calls Them Out for Harassing Protesters: ‘I’d Rather Lose My Job Than My Soul.’

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Child’s Public School Apocalypse.

When I was on the editorial board at the Dallas Morning News, my colleagues cared a lot about school reform. Really passionate folks. Once we were doing election season interviews with school board candidates. We had one session between incumbent Lew Blackburn, an African-American man representing some of the poorest school districts in the city, and his challenger. I don’t remember the specific question one of my colleagues asked, but it had something to do with testing, and the district’s very poor results. Blackburn’s response was something to the effect of (I paraphrase), “What do you expect? These kids come from poor families. Lots of them only have one parent. Those with two parents, the mom and dad are often both working long hours.” After the meeting, some of my colleagues were really hot at Blackburn. They couldn’t believe that he was so fatalistic.

I remember thinking, though, that Blackburn, who may or may not have been a deadhead in his job, understood something about human nature that us middle class people do not. What made me think that is all the stories I had from friends in Texas and Louisiana who taught in public schools serving poor populations. These were all idealistic liberals whose ideals were taking a hellacious beating in the real world. One of them, a Dallas man who had been teaching for only a few years, but who had already won an award, told me that one of the most important lessons he learned was to keep his little girl out of public schools if he possibly could — not because of the teachers, but because of the children of the public.

Education is not a mechanical process (inputs + process = outputs), but an organic one. It requires students, teachers, and parents working together, in harmony. The role parents play is to create a habitus in which the student is prepared to learn, and to acquire the self-discipline to participate in the process. If parents do not or cannot do that, the system breaks down. I have heard this from public school teachers and private school teachers alike (the private school version is: “These parents think that if they’ve written a tuition check, they’ve done all they have to do.”) A friend who teaches at a very poor rural school here in Louisiana told me at length that the biggest obstacle to his students learning is the culture they bring with them into the classroom. It is a culture of natural hatred of authority, of chaos, and in the worst cases, contempt for schooling. He said that when you meet the parents of these kids, you know exactly where it comes from. He told me that he does his best to single out the few kids in each class who really do want to be there, and tries to give them extra attention, but the whole thing feels hopeless.

As George Will asked in 2017: What if Major Causes of Poverty Are Behavioral?

That’s a topic that Thomas Sowell and Theodore Dalrymple have been writing about for decades. As Sowell wrote in 2015, in a piece headlined, “The Inconvenient Truth about Ghetto Communities’ Social Breakdown,” “Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read [2001’s] Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.”

F.I.R.E.’S ROBERT SHIBLEY TAKES A VICTORY LAP: A Victory for Campus Justice: The Education Department’s new Title IX rule will make university kangaroo courts a thing of the past.

With accusations of sexual misconduct front and center for the second presidential election in a row, it may be hard to believe that the U.S. is making progress on this serious issue. But on Wednesday, the Education Department brought Americans a step closer to having such allegations tried more thoroughly and fairly—at least on college campuses.

More than a year after issuing a draft rule, the department released final regulations on how colleges and universities must treat students involved in disciplinary procedures under Title IX, the federal law that bans sex discrimination—and has been interpreted to include sexual misconduct—in federally funded education programs. Institutions will finally have to guarantee due process for students caught up in campus kangaroo courts.

Consider the presumption of innocence. The most recent survey of due process protections at U.S. News’s top 53 national universities by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education determined that 72% of them—including Georgetown and Caltech—didn’t explicitly tell accused students that they are presumed innocent until proven guilty. The new rules will correct this abuse.

Current law requires campuses to investigate even felony-level sex crimes like rape and sexual assault; they may not simply be turned over to police and courts. Yet university investigations and hearings under Title IX lack thoroughness and impartiality. Students struggle to navigate proceedings without the rights to receive written notice of the exact charges, to see all relevant evidence (including exculpatory evidence), to cross-examine accusers and witnesses through a lawyer or other adviser of one’s choosing, and even to a live hearing.

None of these protections are unusual off campus. All are routinely denied on campus. More than 40% of top colleges don’t even specify that their equivalents of judges and juries must be impartial. This madness will end when the rules take effect.

Basically, nothing that is done on campuses comes from the text of Title IX. It’s the product of judicial and administrative expansions that go inexcusably far beyond the language of the statute. It should all be overturned.

KEEP TEXAS RED: Anti-Gun Brady PAC Throws Weight, Money Into Texas Races. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says Texas is ‘ground zero’ to the 2020 election.”

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Judge refuses to toss anti-male bias Title IX lawsuit against university, sends to jury trial.

V-2 SCHNEIDER: RIP Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk Co-Founder Dies at 73.

SO IN RETROSPECT, TRUMP SHOULD HAVE BANNED FLIGHTS FROM EUROPE, AND BLOCKED TRAVEL FROM NYC, WHEN HE BANNED CHINA TRAVEL? Travel From New York City Seeded Wave of U.S. Outbreaks: The coronavirus outbreak in New York City became the primary source of infections around the United States, researchers have found. That was when De Blasio was encouraging New Yorkers to ride subways, go to bars, and attend Chinese New Year’s parades. Maybe he should be called to account for this destructive behavior.

UPDATE: Seen on Facebook:

PIVOT: Trump says coronavirus task force will continue ‘indefinitely,’ shift focus to reopening and vaccines.

Trump took a lot of heat — from the people who give him heat no matter what — for floating the idea of shutting down the task force. But this redirection makes a lot of sense.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT YESTERDAY: Coronavirus lessons on density, mass transit, bureaucracy and censorship: They kill.

THE DEMAND FOR HATE CRIMES IN AMERICA FAR OUTSTRIPS THE SUPPLY: Smells like Smollett: California student faces felonies for allegedly faking violent hate crimes. Or there’s this scalding hot take from LaVerne professor Judy Holiday: “One professor told Campus Reform that rather than the students’ lies being indicative of a lack of real racism in the community, her actions reflect just the opposite: that racism is such a problem that people feel compelled to make up incidents.”

Um, yeah.

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REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: The Growing Backlash Against Female-Only School Programs.

Created to counter sexual harassment and discrimination, these programs are now being reviewed by the Trump administration’s Department of Education. The federal department’s Office for Civil Rights has opened more than 90 investigations of the programs to date, in all 12 of the office’s regional branches nationwide, and the total grows nearly every week as complaints are reviewed and accepted for investigation.

The complaints started off as a trickle, lodged mostly by men who found the programs offensive, and have come fast and furious in the past few years. Nearly 300 complaints now await resolution.

The charges of anti-male discrimination may soon balloon as advocates expand their campaign to K-12 schools that receive federal funding and are subject to federal regulatory compliance and Title IX oversight.

We either have equality or we don’t.

UPDATE: Data.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: The One Poll Stat That Has Biden People Sweating. “As we survey this ever-shifting coronavirus landscape here in 2020, Trump supporters should be relieved about this Biden unfavorability news. When that is coupled with an overwhelming voter enthusiasm gap the prospects for the president’s reelection look far better than the rest of the polling would indicate.”

“CUE THE GHANAIAN PALLBEARERS.” Mic Drop: McEnany Scorches Media for Early Coronavirus Stories After Gotcha Question.

MAKE SOUTHEAST ASIAN NAVAL HARBORS GREAT AGAIN: Will Vietnam Lease Cam Ranh Bay to the United States?

AND SADLY IT WAS PRETTY TENUOUS ALREADY: Majority of Democrats say virus ‘worsened’ their mental health.

LIKE JOHN KERRY, THEY’RE FORGAINST IT: China Demands, Prevents Coronavirus Investigation.

BELIEVE ALL WOMEN PROVIDED IT IS POLITICALLY EXPEDIENT TO DO SO: “Victoria Nourse, who also served as Biden’s chief counsel in 2015, told the Washington Free Beacon by email that Reade’s allegations against Biden don’t ‘make sense’ based on her personal experience with the former vice president. She also pointed to Reade’s ‘changing story’ and said that Biden once saved her when she was sexually harassed by a public official in the early 1990s.”

CLAUSEWITZ DEAD IS A BETTER THINKER THAN A LOT OF Y’ALL ALIVE: “You Really Think I’m Irrelevant? LOL.” A Letter to Clausewitz Haters from Beyond The Grave. “MASS IS RELATIVE! When I wrote about decisive mass, it meant something different at Jena-Auerstedt than it does today. I’m dead and I understand that. What’s your excuse?”