REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: Conflict of Interest: New Washington Post National Editor Recused From FBI Coverage. Everyone in the establishment is related to, married to, in business with, or sleeping with everyone else. Or several of the above.
Archive for 2022
February 1, 2022
ADMISSIONS COUNSELOR WHO BRAGGED ABOUT DISCRIMINATING AGAINST REPUBLICANS “REASSIGNED.” “In a statement to Fox News, Joe Galbraith, Clemson’s vice president of strategic communications, said that the university is committed to evaluating applicants on merit and not on ‘political affiliation,’ adding that an internal investigation has been launched and that the school has “reassigned” Rozman’s role in the meantime.”
AND IT’S WISE TO DO SO: The GOP Dials Up Its Attacks on Critical Race Theory. Nobody really likes it in any numbers except woke white people and some grifters.
Related: Critical Race Theory Is Dividing Democrats—and Rallying Republicans.. That’s because it’s dumb, destructive, and fundamentally anti-American.
STEALTH REGISTRATION: Biden Admin Has Records on Nearly One Billion Gun Sales. “The ATF disclosed to lawmakers that it manages a database of 920,664,765 firearm purchase records, including both digital and hard copy versions of these transactions. When a licensed gun store goes out of business, its private records detailing gun transactions become ATF property and are stored at a federal site in West Virginia. The practice has contributed to the fears of gun advocacy groups and Second Amendment champions in Congress that the federal government is creating a national database of gun owners, which violates longstanding federal statutes.”
WHEN SLATE THINKS A DEMOCRAT HAS BLOWN IT: How Biden’s Vow to Name a Black Woman to the Supreme Court Backfired.
THE POLICY WAS A FAILURE AND THEY KNOW IT. PEOPLE SHOULD BE SACKED AT THE VERY LEAST. Dr. Fauci and the Coronavirus Policy Blame Game. “At a recent Senate hearing, Dr. Anthony Fauci did not even attempt to defend his policies. Instead, he insisted that: ‘Everything that I have said has been in support of the CDC guidelines.'”
I HAD FOOLISHLY EXPECTED BETTER: Profile In Cowardice: Georgetown Law Dean Bill Treanor Suspends Conservative Legal Scholar Ilya Shapiro. “Georgetown’s embarrassing capitulation [to the ‘online outrage’] is antithetical to the tenets of liberal education. . . . Dean William Treanor has made the wrong decision in authorizing this witch hunt, and every day that it continues is an affront to free speech and fairness at Georgetown.”
RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA! Pinocchio Alert! Lickspittle Canadian Reporter Suggests Russia Might Be Behind Historic, Patriotic Trucker Rally.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Flashback: Russians! Under my bed!
WHEN STUDENT PRESS HAS AN IMPACT: UChicago Reverses Discriminatory Policy Against Unvaccinated After Thinker Starts Asking Questions.
Related: 7 Ways Absurd Campus COVID Rules Defraud and Abuse Students.
BEZOS: YOU WON’T CANCEL ME. Jeff Bezos’s $200 Million, 50-Year Naming-Rights Deal With The Smithsonian Does Not Include A ‘Morals Clause.’ “[T]he requirement to prominently display Bezos’s name for the next 50 years comes as naming rights have been under scrutiny. Most notably, the Sackler family name has been removed from museums and other institutions they helped fund with profits from OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, which is now seen as playing a pivotal role in the opioid epidemic that’s killed some 500,000 people since 1999.”
CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION:
Our population is older than Mexico’s, though I believe Mexico’s is actually more obese than ours. Anyway, I don’t like it but I’d be hesitant to blame the vaccine.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
Indeed it is.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Public Health Has Become An Ideological Monoculture.
Harold Pollack is a distinguished professor of public health at the University of Chicago and self- described “emphatic liberal Democrat.” In an August 2021 Politico op-ed, Pollack writes that COVID-19 vaccination efforts are lagging in part because “the people spreading the message about the Covid vaccine”—that is, public health professionals—“don’t look or sound much like the people who need to heed this message.”6 Pollack implied that vaccine hesitancy is largely a phenomenon among political conservatives. As such, he decried the lack of conservatives in schools of public health, leading to “palpable absolutism and lazy groupthink among progressives.”7 . . .
The problem is not merely one of ideology, but also of elitism. It appears that during the pandemic, public officials at times withheld information from the public, disseminated false information, and suppressed dissenting voices. . . . Public health officials seem to discount the goals of ordinary Americans that may compete with goals of public health. For example, whereas reducing the spread of COVID-19 is good, mitigation measures involve some bad things: e.g., school closures, business closures and bankruptcies, damage to mental health, and loss of community. Done properly, lawmakers and regulators must consider both costs and benefits when making policy.
All true.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Real Americans Are Sick of COVID Kabuki Theater. “There have been signs and anecdotes all over for months that indicate Americans are tired of the drama being forced on us by the peddlers of COVID panic porn. Sadly, a relatively small portion of the population seems to get off on being controlled by the petty tyrants. These two groups get a disproportionate amount of the press which can make it feel as if they are in the mainstream.”
FLASHBACK: “To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.”
Much of the current tension in America and in many other democracies is in fact a product of a class struggle. It’s not the kind of class struggle that Karl Marx wrote about, with workers and peasants facing off against rapacious capitalists, but it is a case of today’s ruling class facing disaffection from its working class.
In the old Soviet Union, the Marxists assured us that once true communism was established under a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the state would wither away and everyone would be free. In fact, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship of the party hacks, who had no interest whatsoever in seeing their positions or power wither.
Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies. Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought imported delicacies in special, secret stores. (In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: “But what if the communists come back?”) . . .
But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.
Their first response is always to call their critics bigots:
Talking about the yellow-vest movement, French geographer Christophe Guilluy observes: “Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist, but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore.”
That’s right. It’s class war masquerading as something else, but people have seen through the mask.
Indeed.
COLORADO: Democrats set to kill GOP effort to make Colorado’s hospital provider charge transparent. “While Colorado Democrats and Governor Jared Polis continue to tout new state and federal regulations that went into effect Jan. 1 requiring all emergency medical costs to be disclosed before a patient is treated, an opaque charge collected on hospital stays, passed under previous Democrat legislation isn’t getting the same reception.”
FLASHBACK: Trump and the Crisis of the Meritocracy.
Donald Trump has been president for a month now, and it’s been months more since he was elected. But the division over him, and his presidency, hasn’t settled down. If anything, it’s gotten worse. But why?
I don’t think it’s Trump’s policies, which seem to be morepopular than he is. And though many of his pronouncements are portrayed as extreme, his statements on, say, immigration seem eerily like what former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were saying not all that long ago. So why all the anger over Trump?
As I’ve pondered this, I’ve gone back to Tyler Cowen’s statement: “Occasionally the real force behind a political ideology is the subconsciously held desire that a certain group of people should not be allowed to rise in relative status.”
I think that a lot of the elite hatred for Trump, and for his supporters, stems from just such a sentiment. For decades now, the educated meritocrats who ran America — the “Best and the Brightest,” in David Halberstam’s not-actually-complimentary term — have enjoyed tremendous status, regardless of election results.. . . .
In the United States, the result has been Trump. In Britain, the result was Brexit. In both cases, the allegedly elite — who are supposed to be cool, considered, and above the vulgar passions of the masses — went more or less crazy. From conspiracy theories (it was the Russians!) to bizarre escape fantasies (A Brexit vote redo! A military coup to oust Trump!) the cognitive elite suddenly didn’t seem especially elite, or for that matter particularly cognitive.
In fact, while America was losing wars abroad and jobs at home, elites seemed focused on things that were, well, faintly ridiculous. As Richard Fernandez tweeted: “The elites lost their mojo by becoming absurd. It happened on the road between cultural appropriation and transgender bathrooms.” It was fatal: “People believe from instinct. The Roman gods became ridiculous when the Roman emperors did. PC is the equivalent of Caligula’s horse.”
The rage of our privileged class is thus about loss of status. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous. Nations have blown up over less.
Still true, only worse and crazier.
Plus: “Strong nations can fail when their leadership class, or a part of it, succumbs to pettiness, and places its narrow factional interests above those of the nation. Americans have often assumed that we are immune to such things. Perhaps earlier Americas, with a more disciplined, more patriotic ruling class, were. But today’s America is not. Beware.”
I REMEMBER WHEN WE THOUGHT OF LAW SCHOOLS AS PROMOTING A FREE SOCIETY: The Emory Law Journal Scandal: Coda.
In my last article, I detailed the cancellation of Professor Lawrence Alexander’s invited contribution to the Festschrift honoring Emory University law professor Michael Perry. As I and many other commentators pointed out, the actions by the editorial board of the Emory Law Journal (ELJ) were a shocking abandonment of fundamental principles of scholarly discourse in favor of wokeism and the ELJ’s self-declared partisanship.
Since then, there have been a few developments. First, another scholar who yanked his Festschrift contribution in protest over the ELJ board’s immature tantrum has written on the controversy. Northwestern University law professor Andrew Koppelman published his account at the Chronicle of Higher Education, in a piece accurately entitled “Scandalous Suppression at a Law Review.”
Professor Koppleman notes that a Festschrift invitation “normally includes a commitment to publish if basic scholarly standards are met,” and that the demands by the student editors of the ELJ to bowdlerize Alexander’s article were a “fundamental betrayal of the mission of a scholarly journal.” Koppelman’s views are particularly poignant because he supports the “systemic racism” thesis that Alexander’s piece challenges. Despite this disagreement, Professor Koppelman nevertheless condemned the ELJ’s editors’ decision to nix the article because they found it “hurtful” and “divisive”. . . .
Per my communication with Professor Alexander, here is the complete memo that Executive Articles Editor Shawn Ren sent him. . . .
Thus, contrary to Emory’s official statement, it was only after Professor Alexander declined, as the ELJ told him he could, to accept certain “suggestions” that the editorial board decided the article was so “hurtful” and “divisive” that it could not publish it. As noted by law professors Koppelman, Turley, Heriot, and others with decades of experience working for and with law reviews, this was hardly the typical or expected editorial behavior of a student-edited law journal.
Nope. It was highly unprofessional.
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Matt Margolis: The Top Five Worst Affirmative Action Picks By Democrats. (You’re gonna need a bigger blog.)
Robert Spencer: Not Content with Destroying U.S. Economy, Biden Now Destroying Ukrainian Economy.
Yours Truly: Ranking the Bond Movies: Part 005 (Shaken and Stirring). “These are the Bond flicks elevated beyond mere popcorn thrills, but don’t quite rise to the level of classics.”
And another: Ranking the Bond Movies: Part 006: Bond, Essential Bond. “These are the very few movies — minus two I’m holding in reserve for a very special Part 007 — that for me define a James Bond movie.”
AND IT MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER: Sketchy Economic Data About to Surface, White House Proactively Seeds MSM Narrative.
I mean, if they’re going to lie to us, make it good.
FLASHBACK: The Ballooning Debt.
It’s not that the problem isn’t noticed — a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 53% of people view the federal deficit and thus the debt as a serious problem, significantly outweighing other more-discussed issues such as climate change, terrorism or racism.
Right now, yearly deficits are going up, but the debt — essentially the sum of all previous deficits — is skyrocketing. It has done that for a decade, except for a couple of years when it briefly leveled off due to the influence of the Tea Party movement. I’m sorry to say I’ve kind of given up talking about it because nobody seems to care, and I’m afraid the politicians in both parties will kick the can down the road until something really drastic happens.
When it does, Republicans need to be ready to pounce, and use it as an opportunity to drastically shrink the government.
THINGS CONSERVATIVES FIGURED OUT LONG AGO AND LIBERALS ARE ONLY JUST DISCOVERING: Dunkin’ customer reveals why some stores have height charts.
MANY KIDS ARE BEING REDPILLED THIS WAY: A college-age changer mugged by the reality of COVID restrictions and the narrowness of “liberal” schools.
BECAUSE SOME THINGS IN THE WORLD MATTER: Parents And Truckers Lead The Revolution.