THE COLLEGE OF CLERKS: “Today’s nomination of Judge Jackson makes me wonder if any future Justice will be selected without having previously clerked on the Supreme Court. Justice Sotomayor was the last Justice nominated without such a clerkship, though Justice Thomas and Justice Alito also did not clerk for a Justice. The Pope (at least in modern times) must come from the College of Cardinals. That may work well for the Church, but I’m not sure it’s a great model for picking Justices.”

As my colleague Ben Barton notes in his about-to-appear book, The Credentialed Court: Inside the Cloistered, Elite World of American Justice, the Supreme Court is becoming more and more isolated. Interestingly, back when the Justices rode circuit, as they did for roughly the first century, it was actually the branch that had the most contact with a wide spectrum of Americans.

HOW THOUGHTFUL OF THEM: Under the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, there is a hot line for relatives of Russian military servicemen.

HOW’S THE U.S. WHEAT CROP LOOKING? Arabs fear for wheat supplies after Russia invades Ukraine.

FLASHBACK: Hunter Biden received $3.5M wire transfer from Russian billionaire: Senate report.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: How today’s elites war against the working class. “In the old days, Russia would send communist agitators to rile up the working class. Nowadays, they don’t have to. The West’s ruling class is happy to do the agitating.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE SOCIAL MEDIA VIRUS: I’ve been waiting 15 years for Facebook to die. I’m more hopeful than ever.

Fifteen years ago, it was safe to make a Facebook-MySpace bridge that would let you leave MySpace but stay in touch with your friends there by scraping your MySpace inbox and moving the waiting messages to your Facebook inbox. Try to build one of those bridges today – blasting an escape tunnel through Facebook’s walled garden – and Facebook will sue you until the rubble bounces.

But high switching costs have their limits. If you make your service terrible enough, a certain number of users will find the cost of switching preferable to the pain of staying. And as users leave, network effects start to work in reverse: though every user that joins makes your service more valuable, every user that leaves makes the service less valuable. If you’re only on Facebook to stay in touch with a small group of friends, each one of those friends who departs makes it easier for you to make the jump, too. And once you go, it’s even easier for the rest of the group to bail.

This is very bad news for Facebook. After years of slowing US growth, Facebook just experienced its first-ever US shrinkage, which precipitated a $230bn stock crash, the largest in global corporate history.

Though most of Facebook’s users are global, its US users generate far more profit than users in the rest of the world. Losing a US user is expensive. Even more important: the US is Facebook’s home base, and its US user base is its main bargaining chip in resisting US regulation, and in securing US support in its regulatory battles abroad.

Speaking of regulatory battles abroad: Facebook is on the brink of having its business model declared illegal under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Fending off that scenario will depend on vast capital expenditures and friendly European regulators, and Facebook’s running short on both. Oh, and Europeans are Facebook’s second most valuable users.

Abandoning the decentralized Blogosphere for the walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was a huge mistake, particularly for conservatives. Somebody should write a book about the reasons why.

COVERING THE IMPORTANT STORIES: Applebee’s apologizes and blames CNN for placement of very light-hearted ad that aired during live coverage of the Ukraine invasion — and says its pulled ads from them.

A FRIEND MESSAGES: “Can we trade Biden for Zalensky? I know nothing about the president of Ukraine other than he speaks in coherent sentences, is brave, and cares for his country. All qualities that would make for a vast improvement.”

Well, she’s right.

Related: “Do presidents matter? Why, yes, they do.”

Zelensky’s comment when the U.S. offered to get him out of Ukraine? “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

OUR RULING CLASS IS RIDICULOUS: Feds: Saying you’re ‘colorblind’ is racist.

Not only are federal workers urged to consider what they say, but also how their comments are received. In one chart, a white male is shown saying he is “colorblind.” The black woman shown beside, however, takes as an insult that the white is denying her “racial/cultural being.”

And, it advised men, don’t interrupt a woman speaking because they hear, “Women’s ideas are not valued.”

When I hear a diversity trainer, I hear them sounding like an idiot.

Flashback:

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.”

Or at least some part of said horse.

OLD AND BUSTED: Follow the Science.

The New Hotness? Salvage the midterms! We found the science behind Democrats’ COVID flip-flop.

If President Joe Biden joins Democratic governors from around the nation in backing off COVID restrictions at his first State of the Union address next week, we have found the scientific study that informed this completely objective and not in any way politically motivated decision.

Impact Research, a Democratic polling firm, published a memo yesterday calling on Democrats to “declare the crisis phase of COVID over and push for feeling and acting normal.”

Hence this headline: New CDC Guidance Ends Mask Recommendation for Most U.S. Counties.

FEDS: SAYING YOU’RE ‘COLORBLIND’ IS RACIST.

A newly revealed federal diversity program greatly expands earlier critical race training by creating a whole new minefield of “microaggressions” that some could believe are stereotypes and racism.

In the training package used at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, offering a black student a basketball should be considered offensive.

Not only are federal workers urged to consider what they say, but also how their comments are received. In one chart, a white male is shown saying he is “colorblind.” The black woman shown beside, however, takes as an insult that the white is denying her “racial/cultural being.”

So Kafkatrapping, in other words.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Federal Judge Rules Virginia School’s Race-Driven Admissions Policies Unconstitutional.

A federal judge ruled Friday that Fairfax County Public Schools’ racially driven admissions policies for its magnet high school unconstitutionally discriminated against Asian-American applicants.

The Coalition for TJ, a parent group for students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in March sued the Fairfax County School Board after they adopted admissions standards that intentionally reduced Asian-American admittance by 43 percent. Judge Claude Hilton of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division ruled against the district.

In October 2020, the Fairfax County School Board eliminated the entrance exam for Thomas Jefferson. The board then capped the number of students each of the district’s middle schools could send to the elite, STEM-focused high school. The number of white students admitted to Thomas Jefferson’s freshman class skyrocketed after the district changed the admissions policies. The school admitted 43 percent more white students, and 16 percent fewer Asian students, to the class of 2025, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented Coalition for TJ, claimed the updated practice targeted Asian Americans, as three Fairfax schools known for farming students to Thomas Jefferson are largely Asian-American schools. Two Fairfax County school board members admitted in texts revealed as part of the lawsuit in January that anti-Asian sentiment influenced the entrance policy change.

A Pacific Legal Foundation attorney hailed Hilton’s decision in a statement.

It’s good.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Scientists ‘should not be immune from critique:’ Professor details ‘Darwinian racism’ and its link to Nazism.

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S ONLY BECAUSE HE’S TERRIBLE: Two new polls give Biden ‘rock-bottom numbers.’

WAS IT OVER WHEN RON DESANTIS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR? Libs Blame Ukraine on… Ron DeSantis?!?

CRISES BY DESIGN: Biden’s war on fossil fuels has strengthened Putin and weakened America.

AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD: America’s Armed Forces Ramp Up Diversity And Inclusion Training In Face Of Looming War In Ukraine.

FLASHBACK: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.

WELL: