BOMBSHELL: Bill Gates’ Ties to Jeffrey Epstein Feature in Billionaire’s Divorce. “Sources told The Wall Street Journal that Bill Gates’ dealings with Epstein feature in the divorce, however. A former employee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation told the Journal that Melinda Gates’s concerns about the relationship with Epstein trace back as far as 2013.”

RELIGION ON CAMPUS: A good thing unless it’s “Western Religions.”

2+2= WHATEVER THE PARTY NEEDS IT TO IN THE MOMENT: California’s New Math Framework Demands Educators ‘Teach Toward Social Justice.’

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Is Joe Biden Trying to Make Jimmy Carter Look Good?

Insanity Wrap needs to know: Is anyone else looking forward to Joe Biden becoming the most reviled failed Democratic former president since Jimmy Carter, or are the Dems past that kind of accountability now?

Answer: Yeah, they’re past it.

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

• The magnetic attraction of getting vaccinated
• Andrew Cuomo is not only more disgusting than you imagine, he’s more disgusting than you can imagine
• Russiagate conspiracy theorist appointed to Biden DOJ National Security post

Bonus Sanity: Sweden says “Nej!” to hormones and puberty blockers for children.

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

COUSTEAU WAS THE BOULEVARDIER OF THE OCEANS:

In 2004, Wes Anderson released The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film that tanked at the box office despite an all-star cast and lavish budget. One reason the film may have failed to find its audience is that this send-up of Cousteau, played by the dyspeptic, thin-skinned, money-grubbing Bill Murray, seemed so unlike the beloved Cousteau we thought we knew. As it turns out, the film portrayed Cousteau more honestly than Cousteau did himself.

The ownership of Calypso was not the only secret the diver maintained in life. He also kept a secret family and married his much younger mistress upon Melchior’s death in 1990. As his philandering has come to the surface, the dysfunction exhibited between the two sides of the family has divided the Cousteau legacy and kept Calypso rotting in dry dock after it was sunk and salvaged in the port of Singapore in 1996. A 2016 French biopic called L’odyssée took even more air out of Cousteau’s reputation, focusing on the troubled relationship he maintained with his sons — leading up to the death in 1979 of Philippe Cousteau, who died while piloting the Calypso II, the PBY Catalina flying boat that featured in the opening credits of the television series.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was the boulevardier of the oceans. He explored the seas as a post-Napoleonic savant. He told its story as a latter-day Jules Verne. He was not, as it turns out, a saint in life. But nor should he be seen as a sinner in death. Cast aside our Anglo morality, our enviro-puritanism, and the Cousteau who bubbles up is, simply put, French.

Read the whole thing.

THE MOST RADICAL DEMOCRAT TO HOLD THE OVAL OFFICE SINCE THE LAST ONE: Yes, Biden Is Swindling Americans: White House Staffer Lets the Cat Out of the Bag.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Susan Hennessey Brings Resistance Twitter to the Biden DOJ.

More here: CNN’s Susan Hennessey announces new job with Biden DOJ as ‘a ton of tweets’ suddenly disappear (here are just a few).

CORRECTION: THAT SHOULD READ ‘ANTI-HUMAN,’ NOT ‘FEMINIST.’ Feminist Jill Filipovic On Mother’s Day: I Want To Hear More Men And Women Who ‘Regret Having Children At All.’

CENTRAL MICHIGAN U. FORCES PROF OUT FOR QUOTING THE N-WORD. Prof. Timothy Boudreau, having settled his lawsuit, speaks out for the first time about his concerns. His “crime?” Pronouncing the forbidden words while quoting and discussing important First Amendment cases like Matal v. Tam and Dambrot v. CMU (the latter, an early campus speech code case, even involved his own institution).

This is how you make a generation dumber and more easily led.

LET ME JUST GET OUT AHEAD OF THE STORY AND SAY THAT BILL GATES DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE: Melinda Gates Warned Bill About Jeffrey Epstein.

UPDATE: Report: Bill Gates’ Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein One Factor Behind Divorce.

(Updated and bumped. Classical allusion in headline.)

CIRCLE BACK HOME: Jen Psaki Is Already Planning to Step Down Next Year.

ROGER SIMON: How ‘Woke’ May Be Leading Us to Civil War.

The other day I wrote that “Woke” was the new conformism.

It is, of course, but I undersold it. It is much more than that and more dangerous.

As Tal Bachmann notes at Steynonline, it is now our state religion, a state religion in a country that—constitutionally and for good reason—is not supposed to have one.

* * * * * * * *

“Woke” gains adherents much in the manner of “est”—the cult-like Erhard Seminars Training—that I attended in the 1970s at the behest of a movie producer interested in making a film about it. (It never happened.)

If you’re too in, you’re out.

For est, several hundred people sat in a large conference room listening to the “training” for hours under instructions not to get up, even to go to the bathroom, until they raised their hands signaling they “got it” (i. e., effectively joined the cult). Nature’s calling being what it is, most eventually did.

Although operationally similar, “woke” is exponentially more perilous than the now defunct est training. Our position in society, our livelihoods, our childrens’ educations and futures are being held over our heads, not our mere use of a rest room.

An iron-fisted, ideologically extreme minority has our country under its thumb—play along or face excommunication. This is stronger than anything in our history and almost identical to what we see and have seen in totalitarian countries.

It is a psychosis approaching mass hallucination. In Franco’s Spain, they shouted “Viva la muerte!” (“Long live death!”). Here we are asked to proclaim just as loudly “Black Lives Matter,” to display signs saying as much on our lawns, although we never thought otherwise, always thought (naively, we are told) that all lives mattered.

Earlier: John McWhorter on how to respond to the woke: ‘We need to start telling them no.’ “‘We have to understand that you can not reason with people like this,’ he said. ‘It’s very rare that you teach somebody out of their religion and this is a religion. And so to try to talk these people down doesn’t work. All they know is that you’re a racist and that’s all you’re going to get. So the idea is not to try to have a dialogue with them about these sorts of issues…I think we simply need to start telling people like this no.’”

COLORADO: After Facing Numerous Recall Attempts, Democratic Lawmakers Want To Change Rules.

Now, as part of a larger election law “clean up” bill, lawmakers could change some of the rules for future recalls.

If the bill becomes law, recall petitions would be required to include an estimated cost of conducting a special election, as well as a statement from the official being targeted for recall, if they provide one.

“This is a big, disruptive force in our democratic process. I think it’s important that voters have, maybe not the full picture, but at least a sentence from both sides,” said Sen. Majority Leader Steve Fenburg, one of the bill’s sponsors. “It’s really just to make sure the information is out there, in that these recall efforts are being used for legitimate purposes and not for purely routine political attacks.”

I’m not a huge fan of recall elections, but I’m even less a fan of politicians telling me what’s “legitimate.”

REMEMBER WHEN HIGHER EDUCATION WAS SUPPOSED TO FOSTER CRITICAL THOUGHT? University: Charles Darwin a ‘racist’ because theory of evolution ‘justifies white male superiority.’

AMITY SHLAES ON BIDEN AS THE NEW FDR: It’s the same old bad deal for jobs.

Not until World War II did joblessness finally begin to subside, in good measure because of military mobilization — important, but not the same as peacetime employment.

As often discussed, errors in monetary policy contributed to the misfortune that was the 1930s. The cause of the duration of the Depression, though, was Washington’s persistent intervention. The chief economist at Chase, Benjamin Anderson, noted that after failing by playing God, the government chose not to retire but simply “to play God more vigorously.”

The first lesson of this sorry account is that an arbitrary national economic campaign from atop generates damaging uncertainty in the economy. However charmingly it reverberates, the very phrase “bold persistent experimentation”  stifles growth.

The second point is that what helps the union hurts the worker. President Biden’s proposal to end “Right to Work,” if it becomes law, will dramatically stifle employment.

Flashback: FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.

GOING FOR BROKE: Mickey Mouse Goes Woke and Customers Don’t Like It.

ANYTHING THEY DON’T LIKE COUNTS AS WHITE SUPREMACY NOWADAYS: WMU administrator reportedly calls ‘Back the Blue’ and ‘All Lives Matter’ slogans ‘white supremacist.’

DECLINE OF THE WEST, LIVE ON BBC:

The interview is a dead medium, mostly because nobody alive today—whether interviewer or interviewee—is interesting enough to hold most people’s attention. Occasionally, a public figure comes along with enough of a personality and intellect to almost merit watching (think Boris Johnson); or an host presents enough raw energy to draw a captive audience and hide the lack of substance (like Joe Rogan); or the sheer weirdness of a subject reels a few people in (Bruce Caitlyn Jenner on Hannity).

Every once in a while though, somebody actually says something worthwhile, and the rarity alone of such occurrences means that people will take notice. The source of such a standout, too, is often unexpected—as in the case of Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, a clip of whose November interview with BBC journalist Orla Guerin went viral last week on Twitter. Aliyev—who, despite his reputation as a pro-Western moderate Muslim, is hardly known as a champion of civil liberties and democratic values—is not the first person one would expect to speak with moral clarity about the state of free society in 2021.

REDSHIFT: Trump Red-Pilled Hispanics. “Strangely enough, things always seem to get in the way of this ‘natural’ Democratic Party majority. First the white working class started defecting, then came the 2010 and 2014 Democrat off-year election wipeouts. Now the good ship ‘Demographics Favor Democrat Destiny’ has run aground on the rocky outcropping known as ‘Donald Trump.'”

UNITY! Analysis: The Biden Regime Has Declared War on Trump Supporters.

THE RETURN OF THE BLOGOSPHERE? So now Donald Trump is, basically, blogging in response to being kicked off of Facebook and Twitter.

And in response to having her posts throttled, Hannah Cox now has her own website. Is it back to the future? When you abandon the big platforms, you lose a ready-made audience, but you also gain freedom. And the “audience” on social media is pretty thin: My experience was that people almost never followed links, and quitting Twitter didn’t cost me any detectable traffic; rather the reverse.

HE ALSO GOT THOUSANDS OF ELDERLY PEOPLE DEAD: Cuomo in More Hot Water as Investigation Widens to Include Using Vaccine for Political Gain.

SOCIAL JUSTICE — FREE COKES AND NIKES FOR BLACKS: Woke Companies Must Provide Their Products, Services to POC for Free. It’s simple fairness.

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Northwestern Law Faculty To Vote Today On New Dean Hari Osofsky’s Tenure In Controversial Search Process. To the extent there was a “process” at all.

UPDATE: From a source on the faculty: “The faculty folded. I expected this much, but the pressure and fear where palpable. Procedural rules were ignored. We have a rule of a five-day notice for all meetings, and the interim Dean nonchalantly said, let’s just vote on her tenure, and this vote will constitute a waiver of the notice requirement. No written reports were ever produced to the faculty. Surreal. And never any coherent explanation for the process.”

SPACE (AGAIN AND AGAIN): SpaceX launches 60 Starlink satellites in record 10th liftoff (and landing) of reused rocket “The veteran Falcon 9 rocket blasted off before dawn from Space Launch Complex 40 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2:42 a.m. EDT (0642 GMT), marking the company’s 14th launch of the year. It was also one for the record books as the flight was this particular booster’s 10th launch and landing attempt. The rocket’s once pristine exterior was almost black, charred by its many trips to orbit and back. “