JONAH GOLDBERG: Everyone’s (Kinda) a Rebel.

I had Matt Continetti on the podcast earlier this week to do some rank punditry and to wallow in some conservative intellectual history nerdery.

[I interrupt this paragraph to report that my spell checker says “nerdery” is in fact a word.]

He distilled a point I’ve written about a million times with a concision that has eluded me. The American right is the only dissident right in the world. Normally, the right is the defender of orthodoxy, established institutions, and longstanding tradition. Much of the right does that in America, but to do so is a rebellious act here. I’ve got my criticisms of the nationalists and post-liberals, but you’ve got to admit they are imbued with the venerable American spirit of rebellion and dissent, too. But you know what? So are the more traditional social conservatives. And, come to think of it, so are the paleocons and the neocons, the fusionists, and the libertarians. Even the Trumpists—perhaps especially the Trumpists—see themselves as besieged rebels and martyrs in a war against the Powers that Be, the Deep State, the Establishment, and Mainstream Media. The Alt-Righters and QAnonsters—whom I loathe to even mention—lurk in the digital catacombs plotting their next campaign like Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts, ready to raid pizza parlors and Wayfair like some Orc lair. They all see themselves as insurgents of one kind or another, both within the conservative movement and in the larger culture.

But wait. Pull out the camera lens even further, and it turns out that nearly everyone on the left thinks they’re rebels, too. Certainly the anarchists, Marxists, and socialists do. Black identitarians, LGBTQ activists, and feminists all think they are members of a righteous resistance. But, if you listen closely, so do the more moderate liberals and progressives. Pretty much everyone on the left sees themselves as members of the happy few in a culture war Agincourt.

You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals!

OF COURSE NOT, THESE THINGS WERE NEVER ABOUT DIVERSITY: UW-Madison prof: ‘next to no chance’ conservative could be hired via minority recruitment program.

And everybody knows it.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Atlanta teacher resigns after disturbing comment on photo of man kneeling on white toddler’s neck.

The comment, posted on Facebook Wednesday, read: “Again! Your [sic] doing it wrong! One knee on center of the back, one on the neck, and lean into it until death! You saw the video! Get it right or stop [expletive] around!”

Classy stuff.

Related: Race Hate Comes Down On A Toddler’s Neck. Putting a knee on a sobbing white child’s. neck to support Black Lives Matter.

I’m sure all of the above is extremely well-intentioned, because Orange Man Bad, or something. Or as James Taranto tweeted in 2018, “A lot of the complaints about Trump’s departures from norms seem to me to be justifications for the critics’ own departures from norms.”

HIGHER ED SEEMS TO BE A REAL SNAKEPIT OF CHINESE COLLUSION: Former WVU prof admits to wire and tax fraud following official travel to China.

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MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTORS: Federal agents likely permanently blinded by Portland protesters’ lasers, White House says.

THIS ISN’T EVEN SATIRE: ‘Trump Might Not Accept The Results Of The 2020 Election,’ Says Movement That Still Hasn’t Accepted Results Of 2016 Election.

INSURRECTION: Balt. State’s Atty Mosby: Federal agents sent to Baltimore ‘will face criminal charges.’

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? ‘Wake-up’ call: Violent protests stirring backlash, could help Trump. I remember some lefty tried to point this out, and even cited research from the 1960s/70s, and wound up getting cancelled. Oh, well. If we wind up with a Trump supermajority, the left will have only themselves to blame, though no doubt they’ll blame someone else.

MAKE THEM PAY: Conservative Students Sue SUNY-Binghamton and Leftist Campus Groups Over Anti-Conservative Bias And Disruptions.

Complain to grantmaking agencies under Executive Order 13864.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Judge denies request to stop US agents from making arrests in Portland.

Related: U.S. authorities say 18 Portland protesters face federal charges.

SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS PITCHER SAM COONROD REFUSES TO KNEEL DURING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM, CITES HIS CHRISTIAN FAITH:

“I’m a Christian, like I said, and I just can’t get on board with a couple of things that I have read about Black Lives Matter. How they lean toward Marxism and they’ve said some negative things about the nuclear family. I just can’t get on board with that,” Coonrod explained to the media, according to the same NBC Sports report.

He also said that he “can’t kneel before anything besides God.”

Or to put Coonrod’s decision into graphic terms:

A SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY: Meet the Steele Dossier’s ‘Primary Subsource’: Fabulist Russian at Democrat Think Tank Whose Boozy Past the FBI Ignored.

KATHERINE KERSTEN:  The Woke Movement is the new Puritanism.

SO IS THIS THE NEW, NEW, NEW DEAL? Joe Biden’s $2 Trillion Green New Deal Is Just a Worn-Out Democratic Jobs Program. New video from Reason TV:

So we had FDR’s original New Deal (which itself was staffed with lots of WWI retreads under the motto of “we planned in war”), then LBJ’s Great Society, his Texas-sized version of the New Deal, then Obama’s “New, New Deal,” (which was dubbed the “Green New Deal” in some quarters in 2009), then AOC’s stillborn Green New Deal last year, which promised to ban “farting cows and airplanes,” and pretty much everything else, and now Biden’s version of the Green New Deal.

And Biden has also promised to ban all the things:

• Joe Biden Just Lost Any Claim to Being a Moderate With His Embrace of the Green New Deal. As Brandon Morse warned at Red State, “At this point, America has two options in 2020. It’s either Donald Trump or socialism. There doesn’t seem to be an option outside of these two.”
• Ruthless Joe Biden Admits He’ll Sacrifice Hundreds of Thousands of Blue-Collar Workers for His Green Dream.
• Biden ‘100 percent’ supports nationwide plastic bag ban.
• Biden Obliviously Tells Press that Fossil Fuel Execs Should Be Jailed.

And of course: AOC Says Joe Biden Is Too ‘Conservative’, Would ‘Not Be in Same Party’ Outside of America.

So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added last year. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

The moral equivalent of war has been the organizing principle of the left since the start of the 20th century, trapping them in the moral equivalent of a quagmire, with no sign of an exit strategy in sight.

But to paraphrase Tim Blair last year, when AOC and Bernie Sanders were playing the “moral equivalent of war” card to sell her “Green New Deal,” Fair enough — nuking Beijing it is, then.

SAN FRANCISCO MUNI DRIVER BEATEN WITH BAT AFTER ASKING PASSENGERS TO WEAR MASKS.

THE SHIFTING SCIENCE OF COVID: Following the Science—Where? Medical evidence is not always clear, and it rarely mandates a clear policy direction.

EUGENE VOLOKH: Laws Protecting Private Employees’ Speech and Political Activity Against Employer Retaliation.

SAN FRAN. PAYS WHISTLEBLOWER $400K AFTER RETALIATION FROM PROGRESSIVE PROSECUTOR.

THE SUICIDE OF EXPERTISE (CONT’D): The Models Were Wildly Wrong about Reopening Too.

More than 8 weeks have passed since the publication of the ICL team’s warnings against reopening, meaning we can now see how their model performed.

As with other examples of ICL COVID modeling, their attempt to predict the effects of a US reopening can only be described as an embarrassing scientific failure.

The image below shows the three modeled scenarios from May, as depicted in the ICL report for the five states under consideration. Note that even under the “constant mobility” scenario of remaining under lockdown, their model predicted an increase in COVID deaths for every state except New York, which had already peaked. Under the reopening scenarios where mobility increased 20% and 40% respectively from its lockdown state, all five states were predicted to surge into apocalyptic territory by the middle of July. Under the 40% scenario, this even entailed upper boundaries of more than 4,000 deaths per day (the bands represent the 95% confidence interval). Massachusetts and New York, two of the hardest-hit states from the first wave back in March and April, would easily match or exceed their previous COVID-19 daily death records.

To see how these predictions held up, I indicated the daily death totals for each state for July 20th with a small red dot on the graphs above. As you can see, the actual totals are below the ICL model’s predictions in every scenario. In Massachusetts, the current daily death totals are even falling below the lower boundary of the ICL model’s projections for both its 20% and 40% mobility increase scenarios.

Coronavirus cases and deaths have spiked in two of the modeled states, Florida and California. As of the week of July 20th, both are averaging between roughly 100 and 150 deaths per day. Yet even with this “second wave” spike, Florida and California are only showing about one-tenth of the projected deaths that the Imperial College modelers predicted for this time back in May.

In New York, Washington, and Massachusetts, daily death counts have dropped to the low double-digits and remain a tiny fraction of the ICL predictions for mid-July.

Nobody’s perfect, but come on.

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