I DUNNO, THE COVID-KARENS ARE ALL-IN FOR THESE AND THEY’RE THE ONES RUNNING THE SHOW: Experts urge slowdown on COVID-19 vaccine booster shots.

SHOCKER: CEOs with online social media presence are more likely to have lower self-control and commit insider trading.

WHAT IF THEY IDENTIFY AS ADULTS? U.S. investigates “child bride” cases among Afghan evacuees.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Lamborghini Decided to Bring Back the Countach.

Just remember, meeting the stars of your youth in person can be terribly disappointing:

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Interwar Years Edition.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Joe Rogan Criticized As ‘Anti-Science’ For Surviving COVID.

Related: The Babylon Bee was forced to clarify its Ivermectin joke on Dems refusing ‘to drink water as it’s also prescribed to horses.’

PUNCHING BACK AGAINST COLLUSION: Valparaiso axes its Chinese-funded Confucius Institute after attorney general begins probe.

LAST YEAR, THE NFL’S RATINGS DECLINED SEVEN PERCENT DURING THEIR COVID-HIT REGULAR SEASON.

How to recover viewers this year? Go full Leeroy Jenkins! NFL Will Permit Far Left Slogans on Helmets, Uniforms, and Even in the Endzones for the 2021 Season.

What could go wrong? NBA Ratings Have Plummeted Since 2019 More Than You Think. “While cord-cutting has hurt all TV programs, the NBA is in a league all its own. TV numbers are already down, thus when a brand then tells half the country they are racist criminals, maybe even terrorists, its viewers leave, sinking that number even further.”

HARSH, BUT FAIR:

Also we wouldn’t have abandoned our allies without warning and become an international joke.

A MOVE FOR DIVERSITY: University of Texas set to launch conservative think tank: The University of Texas has plans for a conservative think tank and a goal of bringing intellectual diversity to campus.

EVEN THE HARD LEFT IS TALKING ABOUT the Biden Administration’s “failing” withdrawal from Afghanistan and its “disorganization” in handling refugees.

WITH GOOD REASON: Biden approval rating tanks, and he’d lose to Trump in 2024: polls.

PHILIP MAGNESS: How Activist Academia Destroyed Scholarly Peer Review. “As I learned shortly thereafter, the problems I pointed out about the Mises quotation edits were not unknown to the editors of CEH at the time I brought them to their attention. These issues had, in fact, been flagged over a year prior during the original peer review of Slobodian’s submission to the journal. Despite being aware of the problematic quotations and claims, the editors of CEH decided to accept Slobodian’s article as-is and published it without addressing their own referee’s stated concerns over the same quotation issues. In doing so, the editors of CEH overruled an explicit recommendation to reject Slobodian’s article over its misrepresentation of Mises’s texts.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China launches 4 satellites on 2 rockets within hours of each other.

REMINDER: Fire the military and intelligence bigs who bungled Afghanistan — now.

SADLY ACCURATE:

A friend comments that instead of going down with the ship, “today he’d be the first on the lifeboat.”

GREG GUTFELD IS HUMILIATING LIBERAL LATE NIGHT HOSTS:

On Tuesday, Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld (Gutfeld!) got higher ratings than both one-note liberal hosts Stephen Colbert (The Late Show, CBS) and Jimmy Fallon (The Tonight Show, NBC). Gutfeld drew 2.1 million viewers to Colbert’s 1.9 million and Fallon’s 1.2 million. Even better, Gutfeld won in the coveted 25-54 age range with 434,000 viewers, beating out Colbert’s 423,000 and Fallon’s 354,000.

What must CBS and NBC be feeling to have their mighty networks beaten by Fox News, the frequent butt of their attempts at humor, and a comic right-wing pundit with a staff maybe 20 times smaller than their own?

Gutfeld’s triumph is deserved not because he’s more conservative than the other two, but because he’s much funnier. Colbert and Fallon used to be, before they became embarrassing Democratic shills. They don’t tell jokes, they tell wokes. They don’t earn laughter from the audience, they get clapter — a Pavlovian response signifying audience agreement with their political point. A few genuine chuckles are more rewarding than five full minutes of clapter. And Gutfeld works for every single one.

The (more or less) politically centrist Johnny Carson averaged about nine million viewers a night during his heyday, before the era of demassified media. That splintering of mass media ultimately led to, as Robert Tracinski explored in 2017 at the Federalist: Why Late Night Hosts Like Jimmy Kimmel Are Suddenly So Political.

This is also my theory about the big entertainment awards shows like the Oscars and the Emmys. If the big, broad, general audience you used to have is gone, and deep down you think it’s never coming back, then why not make a harder bid for the loyalty of the smaller audience you’ve got left? In a time when the entertainment industry is (or thinks it is) a one-party state with no dissenters, you had better echo that politics back to your base.

What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.

Now that late night entertainment is so politicized, it’s not surprising that conservatives have finally found a late night host that shares their worldview.

AND THAT’S JUST THE ONES WHO ARE ALIVE: Regrets, you’ve had a few: 20% of Biden voters want Biden vote back.

THE DEMOCRATS DAMNED BIDEN BY IMPEACHING TRUMP:

Tying international aide and military assistance to a presidential favor is what precipitated Donald Trump’s impeachment. It should now lead to the impeachment of Joe Biden in the House, even if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has shot down the idea should the GOP regain control of the Senate.

These are the consequences Joe Biden’s party has reaped — the eventual impeachment of every president going forward should the opposing party control the House. The Democrats are going to have to live with their actions, norms be damned, as they were warned. Joe Biden really shouldn’t be impeached for the conditions he set on that phone call, but that no longer matters. The game has new rules, and he is going to be made to play by them.

Should Biden be impeached over that phone call, or more appropriately for the avoidable deaths of 13 Americans, the most in a single day in Afghanistan since 2011, his party and their media allies will surely call it a sham and a political stunt. However, they won’t be able to say they weren’t warned.

Related: Mainstream Media Outlets Ignore Report on Biden’s Compromising Call with Afghan President.

Except for a few mainstream media outlets, including USA Today and The Washington Post, there has been no reporting on the story from publications like The New York Times.

Additionally, the major networks – CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS and ABC – appear to have completely ignored it, according to a review of transcripts on media monitoring service TVEyes. Fox News media reporter and Mediaite alum Joseph Wulfsohn first brought this to light on Thursday, citing transcripts, in what he called “a media blackout in the bombshell report.”

Evergreen:

More: Tucker Carlson on our feckless joint chiefs and their efforts to undermine Trump, the leaked audio of Biden’s call with Ghani, and our insane postmodern education efforts in Afghanistan:

TO BE FAIR, CNN IS GARBAGE: CNN Analyst Bakari Sellers Says the GOP Is Homophobic. He Lobbies for a Country Where It’s Illegal To Be Gay.

USA TODAY “FACT CHECKER” SUGGESTS GOLD STAR FAMILIES LIED ABOUT WHAT THEY WITNESSED: USA Today issues correction on ‘fact check’ after claiming Biden checked watch ‘only after ceremony’ at Dover.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the sudden rush to drop the “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” shtick makes perfect sense.

PUSHBACK: Profs: Princeton diversity office’s ‘nihilistic’ attack on university’s history and anti-woke dissidents.

The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office of Princeton University has a message for incoming students: It wants them to participate in “tearing down” the very institution they have worked so hard to attend. And to drive this message home, the office is more than happy to tear down those who dissent from its official orthodoxy.

As members of the class of 2025 arrive on campus, they receive a mandatory injection not of a vaccine against COVID, but of indoctrination.

An official video freshmen are required to watch presents an utterly one-sided and negative picture of Princeton’s history. The video and the accompanying Web site are expensively produced. Yet slick production values do nothing to offset the tendentious slant.

The video/site includes a two-minute discourse in which classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta characterizes free speech as a “privilege,” rather than a right, and in which he disparages the speech of others with whom he disagrees as “masculine-ized bravado.” Padilla Peralta goes on to extol “free speech and intellectual discourse that is [sic] flexed to one specific aim, and that aim is the promotion of social justice, and an anti-racist social justice at that.”

While he is certainly entitled to his opinions, the absence of other perspectives on free speech suggests a jaundiced version of our fundamental commitment to free speech, codified in Princeton’s “Rights, Rules and Responsibilities” document.

There’s also a weird, out-of-context presentation of racist views, such as those of the 20th-century physicist William Shockley, a figure with no notable connection to Princeton.

Worst, the site singles out classics professor Joshua Katz in a manner designed to stigmatize him as racist, based on his criticism last summer of a defunct student group calling itself the Black Justice League in an article in Quillette.

The D.E.I. office needs to D.I.E. It serves no valid purpose and it should be shut down, with its budget redirected to actual education.

Plus, from a friend who’s a Princeton alumn: “President Eisengruber, do you endorse the official orientation poisoning the well against a particular tenured faculty member? If not, will you issue an official disavowal and apology? Will you discipline or terminate those responsible?”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Just a few years ago Biden believed human lives begin at conception. Now he doesn’t. Weird.

WHEN YOU GET RID OF GRADES, OBJECTIVE TESTS, AND HONOR ROLLS, YOU’RE LEFT WITH FAMILY TIES AND CONNECTIONS: By getting rid of grades and honor rolls, NYC’s education department will hurt the kids it claims to want to help.

The oligarchy intends the natural and predictable results of the policies it promotes. Ignore the sales pitch.