THE PROCESS IS THE PUNISHMENT, RIGHT UP UNTIL THE NASTY PUNISHMENT IS THE PUNISHMENT:Elon Musk tells a judge the SEC’s ‘endless’ investigation is stifling his free speech.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest men in the world (depending on the day) says the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has tried to “chill” his free speech in an “unrelenting investigation” of him and the automaker he co-founded. The SEC, Musk’s attorneys allege, “has broken its promises” in a 2018 settlement over a tweet Musk posted saying he had funding secured to take Tesla private.

“Worst of all, the SEC seems to be targeting Mr. Musk and Tesla for unrelenting investigation largely because Mr. Musk remains an outspoken critic of the government,” the letter states, “the SEC’s outsized efforts seem calculated to chill his exercise of First Amendment rights rather than to enforce generally applicable laws in evenhanded fashion.”

Twenty years ago I would have dismissed Musk’s complaint as that of a crank.

These days, using whatever means are available to silence critics is just how our federal government conducts itself.

IF YOU CALL PEOPLE DEPLORABLE ENOUGH, THEY RETURN THE SENTIMENT: ‘I Feel Like We’re on the Run’: The Hatred for Democrats in Rural America Has Reached Biblical Levels. “Well, this isn’t exactly a new story. The bleeding has been occurring for years, and Democrats have ignored it. it reached critical levels under Obama, where state party apparatuses truly withered away and died. Hillary Clinton pledged to fix that in 2016 but she lost the election.”

To be fair, her campaign did have a rural outreach office. It was in Brooklyn, though.

ANN ALTHOUSE: No, this is not an “option to opt their children out of learning about Black History Month.”

I read the letter. What exactly is the proposed lesson? It may take place during Black History Month, but it’s not a lesson in black history (or, as the tweeter ineptly puts it, a lesson about Black History Month).

It’s something else. I’d need to guess exactly what, but the lesson comes from the “school counselor,” who signs his name with the letters “LSC” and “M.S.Ed,” which I believe stands for Life Sciences Communication and Master of Science in Education. . . .

The words of the letter suggest — vaguely — that the children will receive some sort of psychological training in cross-racial relationships. I suspect that the school officials wanted to extract consent from the parents: “If you would like your child to receive these lessons in class, then you do not have to do anything.” It’s hard to opt out both because it will be stigmatizing and because it’s so hard to understand what the lesson is.

But those who are sharing this document are pushing you to think it’s a history lesson. I would like to give them a reading lesson.

Oh, they know what they’re doing. Weird how lefty stuff always needs to be lied about to sell. This is like saying that a ban on Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a “ban on teaching Jewish history.”

BEIJING 2022 WINTER OLYMPICS: Kamila Valieva was ‘thrown to the wolves’ ahead of figure skating final, says weeping Katarina Witt. “Witt was continually fighting off tears herself and at one point asked the editorial team to cut the camera from her. ‘This is actually unbearable,’ she said. ‘She’s a 15-year-old kid and she’s broken from it. She’s really been thrown to the wolves now. ‘She was a shadow of her former self when she walked out of there. She couldn’t win in this whole game.’”

HMM: Hillary Campaign Is Now Panicking Over Durham Probe.

ICYMI: WaPo Removes Claim That Justice Thomas’s “Rulings Often Resemble the Thinking of White Conservatives.”

ICYMI: RASMUSSEN REPORTS: Worse Than Watergate? Most Voters Believe Clinton Campaign Scandal ‘Very Important.’

ICYMI: THE PARENTS’ REVOLT: Why Asian Americans like me are the rising new parental power.

Chinese people in the United States, especially first- and second-generation immigrants, have historically paid little attention to politics because Chinese culture does not encourage civic engagement. We are either too busy making money to support our families or we think the games that politicians play do not affect us.

To be honest, I was like that, too. But the pandemic has made me realize that the decisions made by local elected officials do affect our actual lives!

During 18 months of online classes, my son was completely unengaged in school and wasted his time all day, every day, playing video games. But San Francisco Board of Education members Gabriela López, Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga did not recognize or try to fix the problem — instead they focused on renaming schools.

Then they ignored protests from the Asian American community and canceled the merit-based admissions system at Lowell HS. Adding fuel to the fire, Collins blatantly discriminated against Asians with her racist tweets. “Many” Asian Americans “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead,’ ” she wrote, and added, “Being a house n—-r is still being a n—-r.”

She chose . . . poorly.

NEW LEFTY TALKING POINT: Civil Rights Laws Are “Undemocratic.”

Would a win for the plaintiffs challenging race-preferential admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina be an anti-democratic result — an example of how, as progressive legal commentator Mark Joseph Stern of Slate has put it, “Republicans have outsourced large chunks of their agenda to the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court”?

First, some general legal background: While the Constitution’s structural provisions put in place a democratic system of representative national government, the Bill of Rights ensures that some fundamental individual rights will be protected from overreach by that government. There are some things that are wrong for a majority to do, no matter how democratically it does them. . . .

When it hears these cases next fall, the Supreme Court will exercise its constitutionally granted judicial power to apply the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment and relevant anti-discrimination laws. This is hardly a matter of a particular political party outsourcing its agenda to the courts.

Thoughtful legal scholars occasionally have wrung their hands about the counter-majoritarian difficulty — the idea, first advanced by Alexander Bickel, a Yale Law professor, that judicial review of democratically enacted laws is illegitimate because it permits unelected judges to overrule the decisions of elected officials and thus subverts rule by the majority.

Whatever the merits of Bickel’s theory generally, there is no real counter-majoritarian difficulty here. Decades of polling data show that race preferences are consistently unpopular with the public. Referenda to amend state constitutions to ban race preferences in public employment,

public contracting, and public employment have been extremely successful at the polls. By my count, there have been seven examples of these successful state referenda. First, and most famously, California in 1996, but also Arizona, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Washington and most recently Pennsylvania. Two other states — Idaho and New Hampshire — have passed similar statutes restricting governmental race preferences.

Efforts to overturn these prohibitions in two deep-blue coastal states — California and Washington — failed. Prop 16, the California initiative, lost the state by 14 points in 2020, a year in which Democrat Joe Biden won the White House by 29 points.

The right thing to do, alas, often isn’t the popular thing to do. But when it comes to upholding the bedrock civil rights principle that individuals should be treated as individuals, and not as representatives of their racial groups, the right answer and the popular answer are the same.

Naturally, it’s not the Lefty Answer.

UH OH: DCCC internal polling show majority of voters agree Dems pandemic response went too far.

If the Democrats’ leadership was just smart enough to read InstaPundit, they’d do much better. But, of course, they aren’t.

YEP:

OPEN THREAD: Let me think about it.

BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. Cold War-era East Berlin had armed checkpoints — now Ottawa does too.

It has already been nicknamed Checkpoint Trudeau.

Actually, like Cold War East Berlin, there may be need for many checkpoint names.

“The secured area includes almost 100 checkpoints that will have police presence to ensure that those seeking entry to that secure area for a unlawful reason, such as joining a protest, cannot enter the downtown core,” acting Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell said Thursday.

Canada’s capital, operating under the Emergencies Act, now has ‘no go zones” similar to a police state. Authorities set up checkpoints with armed police officers in downtown Ottawa on Thursday — from Highway 417 (Queensway) to Parliament Hill, where dozens of trucks have been parked for three weeks.

To get through the Berlin Wall under communism, people had to go through entry points known as Checkpoint Alpha, Checkpoint Bravo and, of course, Checkpoint Charlie. Now to get into through Ottawa’s police manned border points, people must produce papers to prove they live in the area or have a reason to be there.

Related: Creating precedents.

By positioning the protestors as “those who fly racist flags” – as a fringe minority with unacceptable views – Trudeau committed a fatal error: he left himself no face-saving exit from the imminent and predictable crisis that would befall him. No respectable politician can strike a deal with such undesirables after libeling them in the way that he did. The only path left was to crush them.

By granting himself the discretion to freeze the banking privileges of citizens without a court order or judicial review based on nothing more than a politician’s nebulous definition of “involved,” Trudeau has indeed gone full dictator.

What a long strange trip the last two years have been:

More: War Of The Worlds.

But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class. In a world in which knowledge is the primary component of value-added production (or so we are told), and economic activity is increasingly defined by the digital and the abstract, they have been the overwhelming winners, accumulating financial, political, and cultural status and influence.

In part this is because the ruling class is also a global class, and so has access to global capital. It is global because the world’s city-brains are directly connected with each other across virtual space, and are in constant communication. Indeed their residents have far more in common with each other, including across national borders, than they do with the local people of their own hinterlands, who are in comparison practically from another planet.

But the Virtual ruling class has a vulnerability that it has not yet solved. The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world.

The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts. So when the Physicals of the Canadian host-body revolted against their control, the Virtual class suddenly faced a huge problem.

Exit quote: “Again, this is class warfare. The Left hates not only the working class, but the Physicals. Leftist culture will continue to push the Virtualization of all aspects of life, because this is what dispossesses the Physicals and increases the control of the Virtuals. This is a story of the World Outside One’s Head clashing with the World Inside One’s Head.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

OLD AND BUSTED: Follow the Scientists.

The New Hotness? Follow the Polling! Democrats’ internal polling shows swing voters believe party went ‘too far’ on COVID. “The slide deck provides a snapshot into some of Democrats’ strategies as their outlook for the 2022 midterms grows increasingly grim.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Shanghai signs agreement with China’s megaconstellation group, aims to foster commercial space hub.

THE PROBLEM WITH ANTI-WOKE LIBERALS: They are foot soldiers for the status quo.

For [John] McWhorter, “the Elect” win by duping well-intentioned modern people into adopting a malignant worldview. Wokeness, in this telling, is just a set of bad ideas. Bad religious ideas, to be precise, which assail the rational, individualistic pillars of the “post-Enlightenment society we hold dear”. If that’s the case, the “solution” is for the rest of us to double down on secular individualism. We, the non-Elect, should simply recognise that we’re dealing with faith-based fanatics, people who can’t be reasoned with, and “work around them”.

The author is less than clear on what this might mean in practice, other than answering progressive claims with a resounding “No”: No, we won’t apologise. No, we won’t recant. No, we won’t mouth your inanities.

There is much that is sensible here. It’s especially commendable for a black, liberal intellectual, for example, to warn that the quest to extirpate all racist thoughts, once for all, is quixotic and dangerous.

But I’m afraid his diagnosis, and the treatment that follows from it, are woefully lacking. For one thing, the anti-woke liberals, who trend heavily toward Christopher Hitchens-style New Atheism, badly misunderstand religion, McWhorter especially so.

In fact, he admits early on that the book is likely to get pilloried for “disrespect[ing] religion.” But the problem isn’t so much his mean caricatures of traditional faiths as his sloppy definitions and the unaccountably sharp divisions he draws between religious and “secular” reason. These lead him to lose sight of the liturgical character of all political society, even the ardently godless.

Certainly, it’s hard to deny the religious characteristics of wokeness. The woke have their own liturgies (like the ones I witnessed in Houston). They believe in original sin (slavery, colonialism) and exalt themselves as a sort of secular Elect and excommunicate heretics (cancel culture). They’ve built a hieratic structure, composed of high priests (the UCLA critical theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, say), popular preachers (Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo) and ordinary pastors (your workplace diversity consultants). And because theirs is a messianic faith, they are hellbent on imposing it on the rest of us.

So far, so familiar. After all, it isn’t exactly ground-breaking to notice the religious dimensions of secular ideologies. The classic of the genre remains Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), which exposed the messianic dimensions of Communist ideology. But where Aron was nuanced and sophisticated, and obviously learned when it came to a Christian faith that wasn’t his own, McWhorter is too often downright crude. Straight-faced references to The Da Vinci Code as a guide to understanding how believers think? Check. Blanket assertions that the Bible “makes no sense”? Check. Constant evocations of “the medieval” as shorthand for superstition and barbarism? Check.

Read the whole thing.

In other dispatches from the religious left: The left’s Nicene Creed. Those ‘IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE’ signs are very revealing.

JEFF DUNETZ: We’re Screwed! Always Wrong Fauci Says It’s Time to Move Toward Normalcy. “History teaches us that if Dr. Fauci tells us something is getting better–, we’re screwed. You may remember that on January 21, 2020, Fauci told the press, ‘I think the risk is very low right now for the United States.’ Fauci explained that we had ‘14 days to slow the spread less than two months later.’ On 2/17/22, we are 703 days later, America is still trying to slow the spread? . Remember how he’s flip-flopped on masks? When he said no masks, then masks, two masks, and then wear masks again? This guy flip-flops daily —he doesn’t follow the science. He follows who will put him on television.”

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: The left is losing its war on parents.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot:

● Chaser:

At Commentary, Chrstine Rosen writes: The Masking Regime Is Coming Apart.

We’re in an odd cultural moment when an organization that was traditionally dedicated to protecting civil liberties goes to federal court to argue for more restrictions on those liberties. It’s a moment in which school administrators refuse to protect children from sexual assault if the act is committed by someone who has chosen to change genders, but they’ll eagerly punish students for observing a democratically elected governor’s order giving them the choice not to wear a mask.

The ACLU lawsuit also fails to make sense on its own terms. The organization claims to speak for the rights of disabled children in the Virginia school system, and hyperbolically invokes the Civil Rights movement to justify claims like, “Universal mask use may be necessary to protect some children . . . For many of these children, Governor Youngkin has effectively barred the schoolhouse door.” But as any parent of an autistic or hearing-impaired child will tell you, masks prevent their children from being able to participate fully in school. And what of the vast majority of students who struggle to hear each other speak and make meaningful, normal social connections because their faces are obscured by masks all day. Do their rights not matter?

Related: Former ACLU leader Ira Glasser slams organization’s ‘progressive’ new agenda.

HEY, IT CAN’T HURT: Does Drinking Red Wine Really Protect Against COVID? Let’s Look at The Data.

RASMUSSEN REPORTS: Worse Than Watergate? Most Voters Believe Clinton Campaign Scandal ‘Very Important.’

GOOD: Decades-Old Drug May Help Protect Against Severe COVID-19 Symptoms: Study. “Disulfiram, approved to treat alcoholism, protected rodents infected with COVID-19 from lung injury in the preclinical study done by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Certain white blood cells called neutrophils form inside some people suffering from COVID-19, damaging the lungs. No drugs have yet been found to prevent this from happening, researchers said. Disulfiram, though, dramatically reduced the formation of neutrophil extracellular traps (NET), which cause fluid to accumulate in the lungs and sometimes lead to blood clots. Researchers dosed the mice with disulfiram a day before and three hours after infecting them with the virus that causes COVID-19. Some 95 percent of those mice survived, compared to 40 percent not treated with the drug.”

BURNING RUBBER, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Cargo Ship Full of Porsches, Bentleys and VWs Is On Fire and Adrift in the Atlantic. “Thankfully, the 22 crew on board have been reported as successfully evacuated from the ship,” but: “With the fire still burning and salvage plans being hatched, The Drive can now also confirm that the ship is also carrying 189 Bentleys and an unspecified number of Audis, with VW Group estimating the total number of vehicles on board to be close to 4,000. The Felicity Ace is regularly used as a charter vessel for VW Group, and also carried at least 21 Lamborghinis on its most recent voyage from Europe to America in January.”

THE KEPT AND THE KILLED. I agree that the killing was “barbaric.”

YOU CAN USE YOUR BMW POLICE CAR FOR ANYTHING EXCEPT CHASING CROOKS, BECAUSE THEN THEY CATCH FIRE: “As the N57 is reserved for the Bavarian automaker’s ‘high-performance pursuit vehicle,’ a fire hazard that has a propensity to manifest during the very task that gave it its namesake is pretty embarrassing.”