THREE YEARS AGO AMERICAN THINKER WAS THE FIRST TO CALL OUT THE FRAUD OF DR. ANTHONY FAUCI AND WAS VICIOUSLY ATTACKED BY THE WAPO, NYT OTHER MSM OUTLETS:

At the time, the United States was in the first days of an unprecedented nationwide lockdown as a result of the pandemic. The weeks and months ahead would witness the greatest disruption of life in the U.S. since World War II – and arguably the most serious suspension of the constitutional protection of civil liberties, as well as harm to hundreds of millions of Americans’ health and personal freedom – in the history of the country.

Although Fauci, as director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), had a four-decade-long history of questionable influence on the nation’s health care, the media in March 2020, both left and right, were largely swooning over him. Having reported on Dr. Fauci starting in 1985, however, I knew better.

Read the whole thing.

RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Energy Secretary Granholm Admits She Has A Gas Stove While Justifying Push To Regulate Appliances.

They want your life to be worse. They don’t want their lives to be worse.

DESANTIS IS NOT A SOFT TARGET: Nikki Fried Takes Aim At Ron DeSantis. Piers Morgan Levels Her.

Morgan fired right back at Fried, pointing out the fact that the state party she chairs had just lost — and lost big — to the man she was attempting to ridicule.

“No disrespect but if I were a Florida Democrat, I’d probably avoid talking about failing campaigns when it comes to a guy who just flatlined you …” Morgan tweeted in response.

Also, why do all these Democratic pols look like Disney villains?

WHADDAYAKNOW? Joe Signed Off on Hunter/Burisma Statement. “The latest revelations from the saga put the current President much closer to the action than he had previously admitted to. Many Americans are concerned about the influence this might have on the White House’s foreign policy decisions.”

FIGHT THE POWER: Equal Protection Project Files Opposition to Biden Education Dept. Rule Rescinding Trump-Pence Campus Religious Protections: Proposal would remove Trump-Pence era regulation mandating that higher education treat campus religious groups and secular groups equally.

RON HART: Soros-Funded Manhattan District Attorney Predictably Weaponizes His Office Against Trump.

CHRIS QUEEN: Georgia Passes a Bill Against Transing Kids, but Does It Do Enough?

DON SURBER: Don’t Save the Banks. “The collapse of two big Democrat-run banks in Democrat-run states has the Democrat-run Federal Reserve and the Democrat-run Treasury Department telling us we are in a crisis. Democrats tell us the government must save the banks. Democrats want to save the banks by targeting community and regional banks in Republican-run states, not the big banks that failed. Sure, that will work just dandy.”

EXAMPLES MUST BE MADE: Stanford Puts Diversity Dean Who Berated Federal Judge on Leave.

Jenny Martinez, the law school’s dean, said in a Wednesday morning memo to all law students that administrators “should not insert themselves into debate with their own criticism of the speaker’s views.” At future talks, the role of administrators will be to “ensure that university rules on disruption of events will be followed,” Martinez said.
Martinez gave no additional details on the terms of Steinbach’s leave, stating that the “university does not comment publicly on pending personnel matters.” She also ruled out disciplining any of the students who shouted down Duncan—in part, she said, because administrators sent “conflicting signals about whether what was happening was acceptable or not.”

Instead, the law school will require all students to attend a training on “freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession,” which will discuss, among other things, how “vulgar personal insults” can harm students’ “professional reputations.”

That warning appears to be in reference to protesters who hurled sexual invective at Duncan, with one allegedly telling him, “We hope your daughters get raped.” It comes amid calls from Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and others for state bar associations to investigate the hecklers, which could potentially hold up their legal licenses.

Martinez did not respond to a request for comment.

The memo is the latest effort by Stanford administrators to end a weeks-long public relations nightmare.

It’s going to take more than that. People need to face genuine punishment.

Related: Stanford students call for DEI dean to be ‘fired’ for disrupting judge’s speech.

DAVID BERNSTEIN ON STANFORD LAW: “Some might be disappointed that no students will be penalized for their misbehavior. But I think the letter is a much greater victory for academic values than if Martinez had stayed silent and meted out relatively small penalties to the most egregious perpetrators, which is almost certainly the maximum that would have been done. However, I think some additional soul-searching at Stanford is in order. Dean Martinez and her faculty should ask themselves why students at Stanford felt it appropriate to disrupt Judge Duncan’s speech. Surely some of it is a product of illiberal trends in elite academia more generally. Some of it, though, surely has to do with the fact that Stanford Law is virtually a left-wing monoculture.”

For all their talk about diversity, they have achieved left-wing uniformity.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Democrats Vow To Arrest As Many Political Opponents As It Takes To Defeat Fascism. “‘Fascism is a clear and present danger in this country,’ began Senator Chuck Schumer, ‘and the only way to defeat it is with a corrupt, all-powerful police state that can imprison anyone who disagrees with us politically. If we don’t do this, fascism will win.’”

I LIKE THE CUT OF HIS JIB:

DeSantis Privately Called for Google to Be ‘Broken Up.’In previously unreported comments made in 2021, DeSantis said technology companies like Google “should be broken up” by the U.S. government.

DeSantis, widely considered a presidential hopeful, made the remarks at an invite-only retreat for the Teneo Network, a “private and confidential” group for elite conservatives. ProPublica and Documented obtained video of the event.

“They’re just too big, they have too much power,” DeSantis said. “I think they’re exercising a more negative influence on our society than the trusts that got broken up at the early 20th century.” He added that large tech companies “are ruining our country. They’re a very negative influence. And so I think you need to be strong about it.”

Previously: Hotel Googlefornia.

Even if you don’t use Google, the Menlo Park data giant still has you and some of your most deeply personal information deep in its servers. Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill took on a “monumental challenge,” according to the latest from Forbes, of not merely giving up Google’s many services, but actively blocking all communication with every single one of Google’s services on all her devices.

In other words, Hill didn’t just stop using Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Waze, etc., she got “the help of a Motorola engineer who designed a custom VPN (virtual private network) that restricted all of her devices — laptops, phones, smart speakers, everything — from talking to Google servers.”

The result? It pretty much broke her access to the internet.

I’m not generally a fan of antitrust. But when a consumer must remain a profit center for Google or give up anything internet-connected, there’s a clear market failure.

DEAL OF THE DAY: Shark ION Robot Vacuum. #CommissionEarned

THE ESTABLISHMENT HAS ITS PRIORITIES AND THE COURTS GENERALLY GO ALONG: Court ruling in Epstein lawsuits part of a disturbing trend. “The implications in these suits are chilling, no matter how unsympathetic Epstein may personally have been. They suggest that mere allegations against someone should warrant financial institutions canceling their accounts—something that seems not only unfair on its face but also likely to hamper a person’s ability to defend themselves in court. A society where private businesses must reject anyone accused of crimes or face criminal liability themselves is perverse, frightening, and antithetical to civil liberties. Even the expectation that someone who had pleaded guilty to any crime should be excluded from banks doesn’t seem desirable.”

It would have been seen as monstrous not long ago, but the mask has slipped.

And for the most part, the judiciary has chosen sides in the class war.

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: New court docs state that Ashley Biden’s infamous diary does in fact belong to her. Yes, the diary in which she wrote that Joe Biden inappropriately showered with her as a child.

IT ISN’T HELPING: America’s Military Leaders Swear ‘Wokeness’ Isn’t Reason Why Recruitment Sucks.

JUICED AT STANFORD: On the free-speech double standard at Stanford Law School.

In an interview shortly after the fracas, Judge Duncan described what happened as “a staged public-shaming event.” He was right. It was worthy of what happened in Mao’s China. And it was clearly premeditated. Dean Steinbach was allegedly on hand to keep order. Instead, as Judge Duncan said later, “She did exactly the opposite.”

Instead of explaining to the students that they should respect an invited guest at the law school, . . . even one they might disagree with passionately, she launched into a bizarre (and already printed-out) monologue where she accused me of causing “hurt” and “division” in the law school community by my mere presence on campus. So, this had the effect of validating the mob.

Validating the mob.” At Stanford Law School, one of the best law schools in the country. Indeed, as the legal commentator David Lat wryly pointed out, with respect to its aggressive attack on fairness, civil comportment, and impartiality, Stanford had taken over Yale’s place at the top. Judge Duncan again: “This is a law school, for crying out loud. It’s supposed to be training students to enter a profession where respectful disagreement, even about supremely important things, is the most basic tool of the trade.” And remember, those students, abetted by a woman whose very office is an affront to impartiality, are destined to enter American society at the highest levels. How would you like to be represented by, or appear as a litigant before, people who pride themselves on responding to disagreement with snarling abuse and repudiation?

For its part, the Stanford administration emitted one of those non-apologetic apologies meant to save face without acknowledging responsibility and certainly without admitting to anything like remorse. It wasn’t much of an apology, but that didn’t stop hundreds of entitled Stanford brats from lining the halls of the law school to protest against Jenny Martinez, the dean, for apologizing to Judge Duncan.

What just happened at Stanford Law School marks a new chapter in the disintegration of foundational American institutions. Absent the rule of law, civil society cannot exist. The rule of brute force intercedes. The triumph of the therapeutic mindset does not entirely explain that disaster. But it has provided critical rationalizations and emotional fuel for the victory of a worldview in which law, argument, and reason itself are subordinated to the cold calculus of the revolutionary impulse.

They have sown the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind.

VEGETABLES FOR THE VEGETABLE:  King Charles is looking to hire a vegan chef at Buckingham Palace.

Why are all low cognition people enamored of veganism. …. it’s like there’s something we need in certain animal derived fats or something.

CLIMATE CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:  Devastating asteroid hitting the Earth more likely* than previously thought: scientist.

*still not very likely.

I THOUGHT WE’D PASSED “10 YEARS TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING” A GOOD FIFTEEN YEARS AGO (I THINK THEY USE THE SAME CALENDAR AS ‘TWO WEEKS TO FLATTEN THE CURVE”):   ‘nearing point of no return,’ greenhouse gas emissions must be cut: report.

I want them to get India and China to stop greenhouse gases. I want them to film it. I want popcorn.

THAT’LL WARM YOUR GLOBES!  ‘Hellish’ solar tornado erupts 74K miles high: ‘Never seen anything like it’.

NEWS YOU CAN USE:  Parents rave about unexpected beauty item that stops mosquitoes biting.

AS HE SHOULD. THESE RACISTS THINK HIS CHILDREN ARE LESS CAPABLE THAN WHITE KIDS: Black parent blasts school board for lowering standards in name of diversity.

AT LAST WITH GREAT MOUNTAIN OF TUNA’S THEOLOGY DOCTORATE, ENVIRONMENTALISM ADMITS IT’S A RELIGION:  Looking around, springtime edition: Greta Thunberg gets an honorary doctorate in theology?!; Insty on why it should be safe to be impopular; The lapdogification of the Likud.

GOOD:  Pushback: Doctors blacklisted by government for disagreeing on its COVID mandate policies now fighting back.