WHY YOU SHOULDN’T APOLOGIZE: How Georgetown Law School Used Ilya Shapiro’s Apology Against Him.

BARI WEISS: The Washington Post’s Descent Into Middle School Antics: And why we’re building something new.

So let’s get this straight: at the paper that cracked wide open the biggest presidential scandal in history, the paper that has long defined great political reporting, the paper of Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee and David Broder, journalists lie and publicly attack their colleagues and remain comfortably in their positions. And a reporter is suspended without pay for a retweet. . . .

It’s not that the excellent, old-school reporters aren’t there. They are. They just don’t—or can’t—control the culture.

Partly that’s because of weakness and cowardice at the top of the masthead. Partly it’s because you can pretty much guarantee the kind of worldview you’re going to get when you hire journalists pedigreed by Harvard and Brown and Yale. They tend to think almost exactly the same way about almost every situation—and Twitter only reinforces the groupthink.

So whether the staffers and editors at places like the Times and the Post ignored the riots of summer 2020 while genuflecting to the lunatic idea that op-eds are violence because they were true believers in the new dogma or because they were careerists or because they were just plain scared only meant that some of them broke your heart more than others.

All our institutions have been corrupted. Some of them put up some resistance. Others didn’t. Plus:

What there’s too little of—and here is the second unignorable problem—is trust.

A huge and growing audience of Americans no longer believes the stories the establishment media tells. This has been building for years, decades maybe, and now that skepticism, that irritation with the “liberal press,” has morphed into a gag reflex: tens of millions of readers and watchers who once took for granted that you could more or less depend on The Times or CBS or even CNN to report the facts, to give it to you straight, don’t think that anymore. Their breaking points were different—maybe it was dismissing the Trump phenomenon as a joke; or calling the lab leak theory misinformation; or maybe it was seeing reporters act like mean girls on social media. The upshot is that they are out of trust.

This loss is nothing to celebrate. I would love to live in a world where I trusted what I read in the paper.

Maybe you never could.

HE’S CERTAINLY THE MASTER OF HIS DOMAIN: Was ‘Seinfeld’ a Prophet?

“JUSTICE” IN THE BLUE ZONES: A cab driver was beaten to death with a pipe and DA Chesa Boudin’s office treated it as an accidental death.

BY MAKING THIS MORE TRANSGRESSIVE, FEMINISM MAKES IT MORE COMPELLING:  More women than men turned on by ‘aggressive’ porn: study.

In fact it was the only reason I could figure out for the success of Fifty Shades of Gray.

MISINFORMATION DEFINED: DOES NOT FIT THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE:  YouTube deletes Post interview with judge’s son who stormed Capitol, citing ‘misinformation’.

ALAS, IT’S A RECORD DESTINED TO BE BROKEN:  New Jersey gas prices top $5 a gallon for first time ever.

NEWS YOU CAN (ESPECIALLY IN THIS ECONOMY) USE:  8 foods you can safely eat even if they’re past their best before date.

INDEED:  The Ukraine War: After a third month of fighting the battlelines clarify.

OH THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR … 50 YEARS. NOW IT’S OUT IN THE OPEN:  Today’s blacklisted American: Georgetown University succeeds in blacklisting conservative for having opinions.

AND EVERYONE CAN SEE IT:  Progressives are evil gun-grabbing idiots.

THE QUESTION OF COURSE IS HOW BIG IS THE MARGIN OF CHEAT? IN 2020 IT WAS OVERWHELMING:  “It’s the economy, stupid”: Polls predict 80-year D blowout #dontGetCocky; Sri Lanka as a cautionary tale for the USA, others.

FANTASY ENERGY DOESN’T KEEP YOU FROM FREEZING IN WINTER:  More on Energy Fantasy Versus Reality in Woke-Land.

MODELS AND OTHER FAIRYTALES:  Model vs Model: Is the North Atlantic Current Collapsing?

THE LAST TWO YEARS HAVE UPENDED EVERYTHING, INCLUDING RELIGION:  Very Interesting.

AND THEN THEY OBJECT TO US CALLING THEM NON-PLAYER-CHARACTERS:  Yes this all seems collegial and collaborative and most of all fun.

VOTERS OUST CHESA BOUDIN AS DISTRICT ATTORNEY IN SAN FRANCISCO, NBC News Reports.

HE’S RIGHT, YOU KNOW:  Another Washington Compost article that has aged like fine milk in hot sun.

FLASHBACK: WaPo reporter sues paper for not assigning her to cover Kavanaugh matter.

Felicia Sommez is a reporter for the Washington Post — part of the Post’s stable of lefty journalists. She has contributed to some of the dishonest anti-Trump stories we’ve critiqued on Power Line. See here, for example.

Sommez has sued the Post and some of its editors for alleged discrimination and retaliation. Her core complaint is that she has not been assigned to cover stories about alleged sexual assault and harassment, including the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

A few years ago, Sommez herself alleged that she was sexually assaulted by a bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times while she was drunk. Later, she spoke publicly about her experience as a “survivor” of sexual assault.

As a result of her experience and her advocacy, the Post apparently barred her from covering such allegations by others. The Post’s theory, it seems, was that Sommez’s experience might affect her reporting or at least create the perception that her reporting was slanted.

Sommez says that as a result of missing out on these assignments, including the Kavanaugh story, her career has been harmed. In addition, she claims to have been “humiliated” to the point of suffering emotional distress and requiring therapy.

Also from last year: Journalists Are “Centering” Their “Trauma” Because It Enables Them To Acquire Power.

We can just take Sonmez at her word and grant that this professional adult journalist genuinely did undergo the debilitating trauma she described, vacant staring spells and all. It’s impossible to judge the precise veracity of these trauma-related claims anyway, given how inextricable they are with the interior mental state of the individual in question. So we’ll have to just accept that Sonmez being “attacked online,” as she put it, really did result in the kind of extraordinary psychological turmoil she says she experienced. (Here’s some additional background information on the other alleged sources of Sonmez’s trauma.) What can be judged, however — and what has to be judged given its rapidly increasing prominence in public life — is the wider impact of the rhetorical style used so adroitly by Sonmez. Because it very clearly gets results. Call it therapeutic trauma jargon.

And she’s still going strong today:

NOEM, THUNE SURVIVE GOP CHALLENGES FROM RIGHT IN SOUTH DAKOTA.

OPEN THREAD: Rockin’ All Over the World. I like it.

OLD AND BUSTED: What is a Woman?

The New Hotness? What is a Bee! California Court Puts Bees in Category Of Fish and Aquatic Life Under State Endagered Species Law.

Meanwhile, at the Bee itself: Child Playing In Meadow Stung By Fish.

SPACE: Maine looks to grow space economy, for students, research and business.

LET THEM BUY TESLAS: Electric car owner Stabenow says gas prices don’t matter. “Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI): ‘On the issue of gas prices, I drove my electric vehicle from Michigan to here last weekend and went by every gas station and it didn’t matter how high it was.’”

I hope Stabenow won’t mind when video of her quote appears in numerous Republican campaign ads this fall.

RIP: Jim Seals, of soft rock duo Seals and Crofts, dies aged 80.