IMPROVING LIFE FOR THE ONES WHO REMAIN. A third of Basecamp’s workers resign after a ban on talking politics.

This is a great way to shed the woke losers from your organization.

SCIENCE: Studies: Obesity perhaps the most important risk factor for COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths.

SEND THOSE LITTLE RED GUARDS TO BED WITHOUT THEIR SUPPER:

The absence of supper will teach them a bit — though only a bit — about the realities of leftism in practice.

Though honestly, they’re less Red Guards than Veruca Salt types. Almost any modicum of consequences will shock and appall them, and change their behavior.

RETURN OF THE DEEP STATE, WHICH NEVER REALLY WENT AWAY: When Biden says “America is back” and praises “our democracy,” it’s clear he means a return to the pre-Trump status quo, including the meddlesome and ungoverned Deep State. “Getting Giuliani’s documents and computers will allow various people with their toes in Ukraine—including the Biden family—to figure out what Trump and Giuliani know. It will also allow Biden’s protectors to seal up incriminating documents as confidential because of the ongoing investigation, and to figure out who else may have dirt on the Bidens.”

“Our democracy” is a Democratic slogan meaning “our unfettered rule.” And the DOJ is rotten.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Race demagogues are poisoning our politics.

OPEN THREAD: Here we are now, entertain us.

PROGRESS IN AVIATION: Mars helicopter Ingenuity goes faster and farther than ever on 4th flight.

NRA IN DANGER: Blogging the bankruptcy.

READER LAMENT B. HILTS ON Understanding Nativist Elements Relating to Immigration Policies and to the American Constitution’s Natural Born Citizen Clause.

DUST AND COBWEBS, MOSTLY: Biden Jewish Heritage Month Proclamation Provides a Peek into the Progressive Jewish Mindset.

CHANGE: Latinos are critical to Florida’s ‘conservative momentum’ — and they’re in Trump’s corner.

A FRIEND COMMENTS: “Caitlyn Jenner: Now officially braver, and more sensible, than Asa Hutchinson, Kristi Noem, and most of the GOP.” Caitlyn Jenner: If You’re a Biological Boy … YOU SHOULDN’T BE IN GIRLS’ SPORTS.

SCOTT JOHNSON: The Giuliani Corrections. “I expressed my doubt about two of Rudy Giuliani’s statements to Tucker Carlson last week here. They discussed the search warrants executed at his apartment and his office in connection with the investigation of an alleged Foreign Agents Registration Act violation. In that post I also took a cynical look at two New York Times stories on the case giving rise to the warrants. I don’t take anything either Giuliani or the Times says at face value and I view FARA as the last refuge of a prosecutorial scoundrel. The New York Post has now rounded up corrections on a related point made by the Times, the Washington Post, and NBC. The related point bears on an alleged FBI warning about Russian disinformation. Russia! Russia! Russia!”

Much of our government is corrupt, and most of the media is its tool.

SPENGLER: America’s gender warriors in a deal with the devil: It’s no surprise that today’s US high school students are by any measure far less happy than their antecedents. “The smartphone stands to depression as Xenopsylla cheopis does to Yersinia pestis.”

JORDAN PETERSON, The Man They Couldn’t Cancel: Mobs have targeted Jordan Peterson, but he hasn’t lost his university job and his publishers have stuck by him. What’s his secret?

Since then he has been denounced as racist, misogynist, fascist and transphobic. Occasionally violent protests against him have taken place on the University of Toronto campus, and he is regularly shouted down at speaking events. When Penguin Random House Canada announced that it would publish “Beyond Order,” its staff “confronted management,” according to media reports, in a tearful town-hall meeting.

Contempt for the “working class” by North America’s “liberal educated elite,” is a major reason for his popularity, he says. “There aren’t very many people with an encouraging voice,” Mr. Peterson says. “Most of the things you read by intellectuals—not all, but it’s a failing of intellectuals—most of it is criticism. Look what you’re doing to the planet. What a detestable bunch of wretches you are, with your rapacious structures and your endless appetite and your desire for power. . . . Look at what your ambition has done to the planet. How dare you!”

Mr. Peterson doesn’t directly challenge the substance of these dreary criticisms. Rather he protests that they’re unnatural and unhealthy. “The proper attitude toward young people is encouragement,” he says—“their ambitions, their strivings, their desire to be competent, their deep wish for a trustworthy guiding hand. I think our culture is so cynical that it’s impossible, especially for the established intellectual chattering critics, to even imagine that encouragement is possible.” . . .

In the end, Mr. Peterson hasn’t been successfully canceled. He retains his academic post; his YouTube lectures and podcasts have not been scrubbed from the internet; and his publishers stuck with his books, which are available for purchase. This is true for basically two reasons. The first is that he has tried to understand his would-be cancelers and thinks of them almost as outpatients. He speaks in gentle, clinical terms about a reporter for the New York Times who in 2018 wrote a scathing piece about him headlined “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy” and later posted online what sounded like a confession (“The roar of Twitter on my side meant the kill was justified and good”). He has, as best I can tell, genuine pity for this writer.

The second reason follows from the first. The cancelers’ strange fixations mean that apologizing to them is folly. Mr. Peterson hasn’t apologized or disavowed any previous statement. Now there’s a rule for his next book: Don’t apologize when you haven’t done anything wrong.

In the words of the great Andrew Breitart: Apologize for what?

Related: How to beat the woke: Never apologize, rally friends and punch back harder. “University and corporate bosses give into the woke because it’s painless and easier than fighting them. Make it painful and difficult instead, and they’ll change their ways. Take this to heart. The sane can win.”

WAIT, THE PRESS HAS BEEN TELLING ME HOW POPULAR HE IS: A Plurality of Voters Deem Biden’s First 100 Days a ‘Failure.’ “Only 26 percent of independents rated Biden’s first 100 days as a success.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Kleos Space develops tool for in-space manufacturing of large structures.

GO FIGURE: “Of 70 people bailed out of jail since last May by six social-justice activists, 25 have been charged with 108 felonies and 49 misdemeanors or municipal code violations alleged to have occurred after they were freed…a far higher re-arrest rate than typically seen among people released on bail nationally.”

FLASHBACK: Oh, Spare Me!–Should You Even Bother to Carry a Reload? “Reloading a handgun mid-gunfight, outside of a military or law enforcement context is pretty unlikely. Although he’s talking about carbines rather than pistols, a great quote from trainer Randy Harris springs to mind: ‘If you empty one 30-round mag in civilian-world USA, you’re going to be on the news … if you empty two, you’re going to be in the encyclopedia …'”

On the other hand, there’s this: “Sure, we said the need for a reload was just about as likely as winning the Powerball, but we’ve all seen the commercials: Somebody ends up winning that Powerball every time. And if your day has reached the point where you’ve had to pull a gun and start shooting, it’s already taken a statistically unlikely turn and is unlikely to get any more normal from that point. You don’t want to be the one to forfeit for inability to shoot back.”

And there’s another good reason.