WALLS CLOSING IN: AG Tish James calls in big guns for Cuomo harassment investigation.

Related: Kirsten Gillibrand, the incredible shrinking women’s champion.

Plus: Andrew Cuomo’s Favorability Drops to 21% amid Multiple Scandals.

OUT ON A LIMB: Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse.

The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.”

That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform.

That is deliberate. Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch — including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people — then you are guilty of harassing a “young woman” and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it’s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters insist on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she’s a fragile high school junior; it’s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way).

This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation’s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz’s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life — that’s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life.

Read the whole thing. As Iowahawk tweeted yesterday:

Or to use a meme that’s slightly newer than Casablanca:

GOOD: New surgery may allow better control, sensation for amputees.

SO SAY WE ALL. Jim Treacher: I Am Really Freaking Sick of Anthony Fauci.

“When you don’t have the data and you don’t have the actual evidence, then you’ve got to make a judgment call.”

What? I need to look at that again:

“When you don’t have the data and you don’t have the actual evidence, then you’ve got to make a judgment call.”

Yes, Anthony Fauci actually said that. On national TV. Well, on CNN, at least.

Isn’t that great? Hey now, don’t worry about all those pesky numbers and all that confusing technical jargon. Just trust the guy who knows what he’s talking about because he says he knows what he’s talking about. Who do you think you are, anyway? Are you a scientist? No? Then shut up and do as you’re told.

This isn’t science. This is religion. Fauci has styled himself as the Pope of COVID, and his enablers in the media have been more than happy to confer him with papal infallibility. He’s established himself as the only true mediator between the unwashed masses and God Science. And whenever he says something that doesn’t make sense or he contradicts himself, well, don’t you fret your little head about it. You just need to have faith. Pope Anthony the First would never lie to you.

Well, except when he lied to you about masks. (“Absolutely do not wear a mask. On second thought, you must wear a mask at all times. You know what? Make that two masks! Would you believe… three masks?”) And when he lied about herd immunity. And whatever else he’s lied about that he hasn’t admitted lying about yet. That was different, because you just weren’t ready to hear the truth. You couldn’t handle it. And Pope Anthony’s impeccable judgment in protecting you from reality is all the more reason for you to trust him.

Those are Fauci’s principles. If you don’t like them, he has others:

Treacher’s article is just for our VIP members; please use the discount code LOYALTY if you’ve been thinking of becoming a supporter.

MORE TV COMMERCIALS NEEDED: Study finds low awareness of PrEP, the highly effective medication that protects individuals from HIV.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Implementing Layered Security in Your Daily Life.

CALIFORNIA AB-5 GOING NATIONWIDE: The federal labor legislation that would kill my livelihood.

In early February, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), with dozens of cosponsors, introduced the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) of 2021. Backed by labor unions, opposed by industry groups, and dubbed by Jacobin the “most ambitious labor law reform bill in generations,” the PRO Act has chiefly gotten attention for its import for union organizing. But that’s not all the bill does.

The PRO Act is also concerned with how freelancers like me are classified as workers. As written, it’s intended to force companies to hire us as employees — with all the benefits, like insurance and vacation time, that entails — rather than as independent contractors. That won’t happen. If this legislation passes as-is, it will instead destroy my livelihood by making all my work contracts illegal.

Needless to say, I’m against it. And I’m worried, because the PRO Act has enthusiastic support within the Democratic Party, which controls both houses of Congress. Worse yet, President Biden has explicitly endorsed the exact part of the bill that would put me out of work.

As a contract worker myself — by longstanding preference, I’d add — I’m deeply concerned about this bill becoming law and effectively outlawing my freedom to contract.

REVISITING THE VINCENT CHIN CASE: Most of you have probably heard of the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese man who was killed in Detroit in 1982. The way the killing was and still is reported in the media, it was several white auto workers who attacked him with a bat because they thought he was Japanese. In light of recent publicity surrounding anti-Asian violence, the Chin case has renceived renewed attention.

The reality, it turns out, is much more complicated than the received story, as I discovered accidentally while researching my forthcoming book on racial classifications. Chin was drinking at a bachelor party at a strip club. He got into a verbal dispute with some white patrons. An eyewitness testified that the whites, auto workers, made racial remarks related to the loss of auto jobs to the Japanese. However, the white men denied it, and the witness who so testified received a lighter sentence for another matter in exchange for her testimony, calling her credibility into doubt.

As for the violence, Chin threw the first punch. When they were all kicked out of the club, he yelled to the white men in the parking lot, “Come on you chickenshits, let’s fight some more.” Eventually, the white guys tracked him down at a McDonald’s and beat him, he became unconscious and died.

That’s enough for me for a second-degree murder charge, which is what they were charged with, though they pled guilty only to manslaughter, and, outrageously, received probation based on their lack of criminal history. In any event, I always find it disturbing when an incident that “I know” turns out to have been nothing like how it was consistently reported. In short, the killers were let off too easily, and that seems to have been a result of the judge giving them undue sympathy. But the altercation itself may have had no racial motivation, and the notion that Chin was set upon randomly by autoworkers, which is how I have seen it consistently reported, is false.

UM…: Court Case Accuses Panda Express of Subjecting Employees to ‘Cult-Like’ Training That Forces Them to Strip With Co-Workers.

BREAKING: House Passes COVID-19 Spending Bonanza With Zero Republican Votes

BIDEN MAY BEAT OUT OBAMA AS TOP GUN SALESMAN EVER: February Sees 79 Percent Increase in Sales Over 2020.

CALIFORNIA’S NORMAL WAS PRETTY AWFUL ANYWAY: Newsom To Californians: Let’s Face It, We’re Never Getting Back To Normal.

BIDEN’S RETURN TO NORMALCY: Homeland Security Chief Calls for ‘Volunteers’ as the Southwest Border Crisis Spins Out of Control.

Seems like the kind of thing a really competent president like Biden would want to hold a press conference about.

CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND: Banjo player for “Mumford & Sons” apologizes, leaves band for reading and liking a conservative book.

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: What Full Autonomy Means for the Waymo Driver. “While humans may not be directly in the loop with Waymo’s vehicles, there’s a team of them on remote standby to provide high-level guidance if a vehicle finds itself in a novel or ambiguous situation that it isn’t confident about handling on its own. These situations won’t require a human to take over the operation of the vehicle, but they can include things like construction zones, unexpected road closures, or a police officer directing traffic with hand signals— situations a human might be able to interpret at a glance, but that autonomous systems notoriously find difficult. There’s nothing wrong with the approach of having humans available like this, except that it raises the question of whether a Level 4 autonomous system should really be called fully autonomous and fully independent from a human driver if it sometimes finds itself in situations where it may decide to ask a remote human for guidance.”

ONE YEAR AGO TODAY: Coronavirus: UK epidemic ‘will soon peak in same way as China.’

(Via.)

KRUISER: Predictably, the New York Times Sends Lincoln Project Off Into Useful Idiots Land. “Despite being vehemently #NeverTrump, the best case scenario for the Lincoln Project would have been for him to still be in office. If he were, the ‘useful’ part of useful idiots would still be in play. Now they’re just idiots.”

Now?

FASTER, PLEASE: Team discovers new organelle involved in cancer metastasis.

LOSE LIPS SINK CHIPS: Biden admin planning retaliatory cyber attacks against Russia within 3 weeks.

IF IT HAD BEEN TRUMP, THEY’D BE GOING FOR IMPEACHMENT #3:  Biden Fires EEOC General Counsel for Protecting Religious Rights.

EXTREME MAKEOVER: Some sea slugs sever their own heads, grow whole new bodies.

YOU STAY CLASSY: Yes, Merrick Garland Found ‘Hilarious’ a Song About ‘Rapes for Sale.’

I was surprised and, I admit, incredulous to run across this recent Breitbart article reporting that Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland, as a college student, wrote a review of the musical The Fantasticks in which he labeled “hilarious” a song that (in his words) “provides a shopping list of rapes for sale (e.g. ‘the military rape—it’s done with drums and a great brass band.’).” But the Breitbart account turns out to be accurate. (Here is Garland’s article from the Harvard Crimson’s archives.)

I have no interest in defending Garland’s observation from his college days nearly fifty years ago,* but I will try to put it in some context. What a theatrical performance can make amusing is often difficult to fathom in the abstract, as Mel Brooks’s The Producers, involving a musical comedy about Hitler, demonstrates. I will note that The Fantasticks (according to this Wikipedia entry) ran, on and off Broadway, for 42 years (from 1960 to 2002), “making it the world’s longest-running musical.” So it would seem that many folks shared Garland’s enjoyment of the song.

I’m so old, I can remember 2018, when this news would have been played in a loop by the DNC-MSM.

GASLIGHTING: Biden’s DHS Secretary Says There’s ‘No’ Border Crisis, but His Recent Actions Prove Otherwise.

NOW DO MEN: W.H.O.: 1 in 3 women worldwide experience violence.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Biden Has Lost Total Control of the Border, White House in Denial.

Insanity Wrap needs to know: Suppose they abdicated a border and everybody came?

Answer: The scene along our southern border will shock you.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

• Jen Psaki consults her Newspeak dictionary, can’t find the word “crisis”
• Comics can’t make fun of Biden because he’s just too competent (seriously)
• “You Are Now Entering the Free State of George Floyd,” say people claiming January 6 was an insurrection

Bonus Sanity: CU-Boulder students have had it up to here with COVID restrictions, take to the streets.

And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.