HOW’S THAT CENSORSHIP WORKING OUT FOR YOU, BRAZIL? Glenn Greenwald on about the Brazilian supreme court’s authoritarianism over speech, with 10 members of its Congress banned from social media by order of the court. Meanwhile, Brazilians made January 8 of this year a real version of what everyone pretends January 6, 2021, was in D.C. It’s almost like people think a government that silences its opponents lacks legitimacy!

Now, if you want to be really scared, consider that it’s quite possible that Trump will run under these conditions in 2024, with the connivance of (if probably not at the order of) the federal government.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Biden 2024 Train Wreck Might Be Happening. “The real question that has to be asked is if Biden can physically handle the rigors of a real campaign. He spent most of the 2020 run in his basement with his Legos and baggie full of Cheerios, only putting on his big boy pants to make the occasional video with DOCTOR Mama Jill. He wasn’t mentally sharp enough to run then and we’ve all witnessed his precipitous decline in the last year.”

ANDY KESSLER: The Voting Bloc Against Bossiness: The Dontells don’t want to be told what to think, what to say, or what to do.

Meet the Dontells, sure to be a political force in the next few elections. Their mantra is simple: Don’t tell me what to do, hence the name. Their telltale sign is an obvious case of ODD. What’s that? Oppositional defiant disorder, which, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine, is a behavior disorder, often in children who “are uncooperative, defiant, and hostile toward peers, parents, teachers, and other authority figures.” Yeah, I’ve got that.

Also add: Don’t tell me what to say, to think, to pay. Backlash was inevitable against the metastatic absurdity. Use only paper straws. Don’t tell me what to do. You can’t say “master bedroom” anymore. Oh yes I can. That 6-foot-tall dude winning all the NCAA women’s swimming meets is really a woman. I don’t think so. Every threat is existential. Maybe to you. No abortions ever. What? Your taxes pay people not to work. Make it stop!

Tea partiers and red-hatted MAGA supporters pushed back against Obama-era bossiness. They didn’t want high taxes to pay for open-border welfare, gun confiscation or being woke poked. Heck, they even supported a blundering bloviator for president. That’s how desperate their Dontell dedication was. Note, there is a fine distinction between the Doncares (I don’t care), the Leavmis (leave me alone), and the Dontells. The first two groups rarely vote. But Dontells vote in droves, on both sides of the aisle.

Amazingly, the whole Dontell thing still comes as a huge surprise to self-important city dwellers on both coasts. Yes, most big-city progressives like to be dominated and enjoy being told what to do. Walk/Don’t Walk. Mind the gap. Wait in long lines. Alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations. Calorie counts in doughnut shops. Confiscatory taxes. New York’s (unconstitutional) ban on large sodas. San Francisco’s ban on Happy Meals. The seemingly mandatory use of words such as “positionality” and “performative” in conversation.

Liberals, implied in the name, say they are for freedom, but are they? The progressive wing is full of authoritarians telling others what to do or how to think: America is a racist country. Wear a mask. Limit charter schools. Bees are fish (in California). “A drag queen for every school” (Michigan’s attorney general promises). ESG. CRT. DEI. I could go on. Meanwhile, Dontells are fed up with submission.

Elon Musk, who tweets about a “woke mind virus,” became a card-carrying Dontell in 2020 when California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns closed his Tesla factories. He eventually moved Tesla’s headquarters to Texas. Last year 340,000 others left California. I would bet most are Dontells.

So far, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a Dontell hero—he checks all the boxes. He got rid of lockdowns and mask mandates. He stood up to Disney’s pushback against a law requiring classroom discussions of sex to be age-appropriate. The state still levies no income tax. His appeal, I think, is that he wants voters to make up their own minds about what to say or do.

There is going to be a fight for Dontell swing voters in 2024.

Bossiness is a natural impulse in much of the population. People will be bossy unless and until it’s personally expensive, risky, and unpleasant to do so. Then they will stop. Make it happen.

THE LONG MARCH BACK THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS: A sharp right turn for Florida’s New College: ‘We are recapturing higher ed.’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis plans to turn the very progressive New College of Florida, the state’s liberal arts honors college, into a classical liberal arts school that replaces “diversity, equity and inclusion” with “equality, merit, and colorblindness.” He appointed six new conservative trustees, including the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Hillsdale College’s Larry Arnn.

According to a press release, New College will “hire new faculty with expertise in constitutionalism, free enterprise, civic virtue, family life, religious freedom, and American principles” and “establish a graduate school for training teachers in classical education.”

DeSantis has vowed to fight “philosophical lunacy” in public education, report Ana Ceballos and Jeffrey S. Solochek in the Tampa Bay Tribune.

“We are recapturing higher education,” said Rufo, who’s campaigned against teaching “critical race theory and gender ideology” in public schools.

The knives are already out:

You can read the thread starting here.

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S ONLY BECAUSE IT NEVER HAD ANY: Transgenderism is experiencing a crisis of scientific legitimacy.

NEW YEAR SALE is here. #CommissionEarned

IT’S EASY TO LAUGH AT THIS STUFF, RIGHT UP UNTIL YOUR EMPLOYER’S H.R. DEPARTMENT USES IT AGAINST YOU: ‘Deflective Whiteness’: The Latest Cockamamie Social Justice™ Race Hustle. “A libbed-out white liberal arts professor named Hannah Noel has invented a whole new weapon for corporate diversity trainers and public school social workers to wield against their captive white audiences, which also conveniently serves as a tool for personal enrichment via her accompanying book.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: More Than a Million Students Fled Public School During Pandemic, Report Finds. “The enrollment decline comes as many public schools have taken a sharp turn to teaching left-wing politics. . . . School closures, meanwhile, harmed students. In deep-blue California, for example, students lost six years of math and reading gains because of the lockdowns, particularly hurting poor, black, and Latino children. Eighty-five of the country’s 100 largest districts had enrollment drops, with Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Forth Worth, Texas, seeing declines of around 10 percent. By contrast, charter schools, which Democrats have long opposed, saw a large boost in enrollment from 2019 to 2021.”

Public education, as I have noted, was instituted as a tool of social control, not of enlightenment. It is now actually harmful on net, I suspect.

IT’S LESS FUN TO WORK IN A DECLINING INDUSTRY, AND ACADEMIA IS A DECLINING INDUSTRY: What is behind growing faculty dissatisfaction?

SOFT TARGETS: IRS Audits Targeted Poor at Higher Rate Than Millionaires in ’22. “The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates — five and a half times virtually everyone else — were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit.”

AS IN MOST BANANA REPUBLICS, THEY’RE NOW ABOUT DOMESTIC CONTROL: America’s spy agencies failed to protect us from China’s bio-warfare program.

WHEN TIM TEBOW KNEELED IN PRAYER HE WAS MOCKED. BUT TIMES HAVE CHANGED. How Damar Hamlin Drove A Nation to Pray.

Related item here.

ROBERT SPENCER: Las Vegas Solar Plant Suffers Terror Attack, but What Kind?

KLAS reported that a man named Mohammad Mesmarian is “facing terror-related charges after police said he rammed his car through a gate at a solar plant outside Las Vegas and set his car on fire, disabling the huge facility.” It seems that Las Vegas Metro police responded to a call from the plant on Wednesday morning; “employees at the plant said they found a car smoldering in a generator pit.”

The plant in question is called the Mega Solar Array, and it is no minor installation: it “provides energy to MGM properties,” which are quite considerable in the Las Vegas area, and “is run by a company called Invenergy.” Mesmarian, however, has put the plant out of action for at least two years by “ramming through a fence and setting the car on fire.”

Developing…

ON SUNDAYS, I RUN A PROMO POST FOR INDIE WRITERS:  Book Promo and Vignettes by by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

There is also a vignette challenge.

TO BE HONEST, THAT’S UNFAIR TO PYGMIES: America: a nation of giants led by pygmies. However dreadful its political class, the US’s fundamentals are overwhelmingly strong.

The terribleness of our political class, and a system of selection that makes that terribleness not at all a matter of chance, is a major weakness, whatever strengths obtain elsewhere.

I HAVE SUSPICIONS ABOUT PEOPLE WHO PREFER GRAPE NUTS:  If you eat these cereals, you’re not worth dating: expert.

UH…. WHAT?  Dating coach reveals why guys won’t commit: ‘You don’t respect yourself’.

WELL, SOONER OR LATER WE WERE BOUND TO FIGURE IT OUT:  Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?

WHAT WOULD THEY BE DOING WITH THE DIAGNOSIS?   ‘Groundbreaking’ autism test detects disorder in a single strand of hair.

PLANET OF THE APES, WE’RE WATCHING THE MOVIE BACKWARD:  Monkeys – Not Humans – Made Ancient Sets of Stone Tools in Brazil, Study Finds.

I CAN’T HELP THINKING IT WOULD BE CHEAPER TO NOT SEND THEM TO SUCH SCHOOLS IN THE FIRST PLACE:  Parents say their kids were brainwashed at school, seek deprogrammers.

IT’S A THEORY:  Do the Lascaux Paintings Feature 21,500-Year-Old Writing?