AMICI:  If you’d like to view all the friend-of-the-court briefs filed in support of Students For Fair Admissions in the Harvard/UNC case, here they are.

LANCE IZUMI:  “Woke Math Returns to California.”

#HIMTOO? Three young women have accused James Bond director Cary Fukunaga of sexual misconduct and “grooming” after his “women’s rights” post on Instagram.

Flashback: Kyle Smith in 2018: Hollywood is a sex-grooming gang.

READER FAVORITE: Merrell Men’s Moab 2 Vent Hiking Shoe. #CommissionEarned

IS THERE A POSITIVE CASE FOR INTELLIGENT DESIGN? Geologist Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute insists there is and he has a new book out that makes the case. HillFaith is pleased to begin re-publishing a series of pieces by Luskin based on the book. It is offered here for informational purposes, not as a claimed last word.

WILL IT TAKE ANOTHER 90 YEARS? Back in February, Prof. Glenn linked here to a New York Post Op/Ed wherein it was raised (quite rightly, IMHO) that The New York Times ought to give back the Pulitzer Prize awarded them for their breathtaking, page-turning and epically false reporting on “Russiagate”, where the NYP pointed out:

“With the entire Russiagate affair exposed as a Clinton campaign fabrication, it’s the clear duty of The Washington Post and New York Times to give back the Pulitzers they won for “reporting” the fake news. Clinton campaign cash ordered up the “Steele dossier,” with Democratic operatives providing some of the rumors and a cynical Russian exile asking buddies to supply rank speculation for the rest. Other Clintonites actually hacked Trump computers, including White House ones after he took office, to create another smear, as Special Counsel John Durham’s latest filing revealed.”

Just as Harry Ried (D-NV) when caught lying about “Mitt Romney never having paid taxes”  responded, “Romney didn’t win, did he?” So too, the DNC stenographers at The New York Times all but helped ensure that even normally intelligent people — some to this day — insist that Trump was a “Putin puppet” and do whatever they could to keep The Bad Orange Man out of the White House. After all, what’s lying to a bunch of rubes when compared to Saving Democracy From The Worst Man Ever?

So it was with a fair amount of interest I read  David Folkenflik’s NPR story published yesterday wherein it seems that — at least regarding a 90 year-old story — higher-ups at The Times are openly reconsidering giving back the 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded to the infamous Stalinist Walter Duranty, who published falsehood under the Times‘ banner. Most famously, Duranty dismissed claims that there was a deadly famine, and one that historians have roundly argued was engineered by Stalin himself.

As a professor of media law and ethics, I’ve lectured quite a bit on “fake news” and in teaching that it has been around for quite some time, I share this graphic with students:

Folkenflik does a nice job of revisiting the Times‘ revisiting the issue. He notes that:

“In 2003, public pressure led the Times and the Pulitzer Prize Board to conduct parallel reviews of Duranty’s work and the prize. The board found no “clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.” It decided against withdrawing his award. (The Pulitzer Prize administrator at the time, Sig Gissler, declined to comment for this story.) Then-Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said he had concluded stripping Duranty’s work of the award would be like airbrushing history — in essence, a “Stalinist” approach. (A historian hired by the Times as a consultant in evaluating Duranty’s work would publicly denounce that conclusion shortly after.) The newspaper publicly posted an essay representing its institutional position, calling his work discredited and explaining why.”

Fast forward to today, where there is perhaps a glimmer of hope that major news organizations actually start to take responsibility for knowingly false stories:

“It was a very different time and place,” says Joseph Kahn, who is about to rise from managing editor to executive editor at the paper. “The notion that you have a single correspondent on his or her own defining a take on a major story doesn’t feel like the world we live in today.” Kahn, a former foreign correspondent and top international editor for the paper, says the Times has 40 journalists in Ukraine right now. He says what the Times is doing now is in some ways making up for the paper’s past shortcomings. The paper has shined a light on potential Russian war crimes and Russian propaganda efforts.”

Perhaps it will take less than 90 years for The New York Times to reconsider their prize-winning and utterly false “Russia” reporting.

MICHAEL WALSH: In the Ukraine Proxy War, What Price Victory?

DEAL OF THE DAY: Generator Cord and Generator Power Inlet Box Waterproof Kit. #CommissionEarned

YES, BUT NOT IN THE WAY SHE MEANT IT: Hillary Clinton Says Something True and Accurate for Once.

RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: WashPost Publishes Hit Piece on Black Republican Herschel Walker, ‘Useful Fool.’

SATANIC TEMPLE CONSIDERING OPENING ABORTION CLINICS, SAYS IT’S THEIR RELIGIOUS RITUAL. Super on-brand for Satan, or brilliant pro-life psyop?

GROOMER ALERT: Not Even Your Kids’ Breakfast Cereal Is Safe Anymore.

BIAS IS FAIRNESS: Utah Was Warned Racial Rationing of COVID Drugs Was Illegal. It Did It Anyway.

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? The Password for Hunter Biden’s Laptop From Hell Is…What You’d Expect. “‘My password is f–ked up. Don’t be offended!’ he said, before announcing that it was ‘analf–k69’ or something to that extent. His inebriated condition made it difficult to understand is speech. My eyes widened a bit, and I told him that maybe it would be best if he tried to log in himself. Big yikes. But also, what did we expect Hunter Biden’s password to be? As the computer repair store owner continues explaining in the excerpt, the laptop password was only the first hint that the laptop would become much more than a usual file recovery job for John Paul Mac Isaac.”

BECAUSE OF COURSE: Facebook Blocks Christian Children’s Book Publisher From Advertising.

RELEASE THE FINAL DOBBS OPINION NOW. Justice Alito has reportedly been moved to an “undisclosed location” as angry protesters show up at justices’ houses. If Roberts waits too long in the name of the Court’s inexplicable desire to dump big-time opinions on the last day of the term and someone hurts or kills a justice in the meantime, that’s going to be on him, and the resulting explosion will be a disaster for all of us.

This may be the new normal and justices will just have to learn to deal with it going forward (like other politicians, which is what justices unavoidably are now thanks to years of bad decisions), but they’re not ready yet.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Blake Masters takes HACK who deliberately used wrong email to ‘fact-check’ his hit-piece APART in MERCILESS thread.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Here’s What Biden Doesn’t Want You to Know About His New Press Secretary.

ROGER SIMON: I Am a Soviet Writer Now.

Long may The Epoch Times—and those few others like it—thrive. And thank you so much to the readers who keep them alive!

Nevertheless, this is all starting to remind me of the Soviet Union that I visited twice on cultural exchanges during the early glasnost (in the late ’80s). In fact, the America of today has for some time.

I remember visiting two apartment buildings that were named Screenwriter I and II. They housed favored writers, screenwriters or not, and were sought after because, I was told, they contained the best medical clinics in Moscow on the ground floor.

In the Soviet Union, decent medical care was only available to party officials and others—scientists and cultural workers—who played along.

Writers who didn’t had to find other access. The greatest writing of Soviet times was the clandestine samizdat (literally “self-publishing” in Russian), those who obviously had the courage to buck a vicious system—the Solzhenitsyns, the Mandelstams, and so forth. Financial remuneration, not to mention the best medical care, was not for them.

Of course, we are building our own more open-minded structures, some in publishing, others in film. They all have good intentions. But for the most part, we are only allowed to preach to the choir. We are kept off in a corner, segregated.

Somehow this must be overcome. We must be able to reach the masses because we are the masses, not them.

What is going on in our country today is a full-on attack on free speech under a duplicitous, fascistic facade of making sure the public is correctly informed, that there is no “misinformation” (the big lie word of our times).

So when I say I’m a Soviet writer now, I hope you know I mean those great writers who wrote samizdat in opposition to a totalitarian state. I have nowhere near their courage. I have nowhere near their depth. But I identify with them because my country is on the verge of being turned into theirs.

As Glenn Greenwald tweeted last month, April 14th “was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it. Even if Musk doesn’t buy Twitter, never forget what [Thursday] revealed.”

HMM: Rumble says it’s under ‘unprecedented attack’ ahead of ‘2000 Mules’ launch. “The documentary ‘2000 Mules’ is expected to ruffle more than a few feathers. It tackles the ultra-controversial subject of the November 2020 presidential elections and claims to provide rock-solid evidence of ballot stuffing and fraudulent electoral practices in several key states.”

THIS IS REALLY OUTRAGEOUS:  “UNC Journalism School Downgraded to Provisional Accreditation in the Wake of DEI Concerns.”  This is punishment for the L’affaire Nikole Hannah-Jones.

You won’t go too far wrong if your conceptualize accrediting agencies as cartel enforcers.  Specifically, they enforce DEI norms.  The treatment of George Mason University Law School on admissions policy several years back is still astonishing to me.   A strong case can be made for legislative action to stop accreditors from insisting on race-preferential admissions.  But it will require a different Congress and President from what we have now.

IT’S THE KIND OF STORY YOU HOPE DOESN’T PAN OUT… BUT IT DOES SOUND VERY PUTIN: Camps Discovered in Russia House Thousands of Ukrainians Forcibly Removed From Home.

CHANGE: MSNBC Removes Host Chuck Todd’s ‘Meet The Press Daily’ From Cable Lineup.

KEEP OUT THE GLARE: Reading Sunglasses, 2 PACK. #CommissionEarned

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Already Unhinged Abortion Cretins Sink to New Lows. “I hate to begin the week with this, but I’ve got some bad news for the optimists out there: the rift between the right and the left in America isn’t going to get better. In fact, it’s not really a rift anymore. It’s more of a widening ideological chasm that will no doubt soon reach Grand Canyon proportions.”