REVISITING THE VINCENT CHIN CASE: Most of you have probably heard of the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese man who was killed in Detroit in 1982. The way the killing was and still is reported in the media, it was several white auto workers who attacked him with a bat because they thought he was Japanese. In light of recent publicity surrounding anti-Asian violence, the Chin case has renceived renewed attention.

The reality, it turns out, is much more complicated than the received story, as I discovered accidentally while researching my forthcoming book on racial classifications. Chin was drinking at a bachelor party at a strip club. He got into a verbal dispute with some white patrons. An eyewitness testified that the whites, auto workers, made racial remarks related to the loss of auto jobs to the Japanese. However, the white men denied it, and the witness who so testified received a lighter sentence for another matter in exchange for her testimony, calling her credibility into doubt.

As for the violence, Chin threw the first punch. When they were all kicked out of the club, he yelled to the white men in the parking lot, “Come on you chickenshits, let’s fight some more.” Eventually, the white guys tracked him down at a McDonald’s and beat him, he became unconscious and died.

That’s enough for me for a second-degree murder charge, which is what they were charged with, though they pled guilty only to manslaughter, and, outrageously, received probation based on their lack of criminal history. In any event, I always find it disturbing when an incident that “I know” turns out to have been nothing like how it was consistently reported. In short, the killers were let off too easily, and that seems to have been a result of the judge giving them undue sympathy. But the altercation itself may have had no racial motivation, and the notion that Chin was set upon randomly by autoworkers, which is how I have seen it consistently reported, is false.

RIPPED-OFF BY SPRINT/T-MOBILE: So I’ve been a Sprint customer for 23 years. I upgraded my Iphone to a 12 last Fall. There were two offers at the time, one for a $200 credit from Apple, one for an additional $200 credit from Sprint for “loyal customers” (over five years) who traded in their old phone. Got the first, sent in my old phone for the second. Got a text that I wasn’t eligible for the credit because my phone wasn’t in working order. This was a lie. I called to complain and they agreed to give me the $200 credit. Never showed up. Contacted Sprint twice. Twice was assured credit would show on my next bill. It didn’t. Contact Sprint’s Twitter team. First they told me the phone I traded in wasn’t in working order. They then gave up on that and claimed there was only one promotion, not two. I managed to find an email showing the two promotions were simulatneous: “Because T-Mobile loves loyal customers like you, we are giving you an extra $200 off,” and an article from the same time stating “The carrier is also giving those who have been with T-Mobile or Sprint for five years or more an extra $200 off ‘any new iPhone’ when you ‘trade or turn in any active iPhone on an eligible plan.'” You would think that would be that. Nope. “Our managers reviewed your information and we would not be able to apply any further credits.” Not only did I not get the $200, I also don’t have my phone, which I could have given to my son who now needs one. And I wasted several hours on this, less for the $200 and more on principle… Caveat emptor. I likely would have kept the records showing exactly what the promised at the time, but I was recovering from Covid and was a bit out of it.

THE MORE A SUSPECT DENIES GUILT, THE MORE GUILTY HE IS: Wisdom from Ibram Kendi, an utter charlatan whose books are now required reading in schools across the country.

STRANGE MANIFESTATIONS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE: My county public library poobahs claim to care a lot about social justice.
Quiz for Instapundit readers: That has manifested itself in:
(1) Doing everything possible to open up the libraries, especially in poorer neighborhoods, and finding creative ways to bring books to poor kids whose schools have been closed, such as bookmobiles;
or
(2) Sending out an email with deep thoughts about Dr. Seuss and the need for the library and parents to ensure kids are reading diverse books.

I suspect you will not be surprised to learn that the answer is (2) (and our libraries remain almost entirely closed).

GETTING ABDUCTED BY ALIENS IS NOT THE ONLY WAY TO GET A MANDATORY ANAL PROBE: Passengers Arriving in Beijing And Shanghai Being Forced To Undergo Covid-19 Anal Swab Testing.

THE REVOLUTION DEMANDS YOUR ACQUIESCENCE: SUNY student suspended for Instagram post saying, “A Man Is A Man, A Woman Is A Woman.” The college’s rationale for suspending the student is that he is an education student, and his professed ideas would prevent him from treating all students appropriately. In cases like this, the question should not be what one’s personal ideology is, but whether one is willing to comply with whatever rules are established. For example, if a school district was to require this young man in the future to call a biologically male transgender boy “he,” and it’s lawful to require him to do so, would he do it? If so, then his personal ideology should matter no more than that of a Communist or libertarian teacher who agrees to use the prescribed textbook and curriculum even though they disagree with it. To suggest that only teachers who buy into the prevailing ideology are allowed to teach is worthy of the USSR, not the U.S.

A “WITCH HUNT” INVOLVING ACTUAL WITCHES: The New York Times and American Communism.

One can certainly debate whether, in the absence of criminal liability, being a Soviet stooge during Stalin’s reign merited blacklisting. One cannot argue, however, that Soviet stooges were not Soviet stooges, but that seems to have become the default assertion about blacklisted Hollywood writers among the cultural elite.

THE LEFT IS BUSILY CREATING A BIZARRO-WORLD NARRATIVE IN WHICH MOST OF THE VIOLENCE LAST SUMMER CAME FROM THE POLICE ATTACKING PEACEFUL DEMONSTRATORS: Gaslighting Last Summer’s Riots and the Law Enforcement Response.

IN THE WAKE OF LAST WEDNESDAY’S DISASTER, PRESIDENT-ELECT BIDEN FOCUSES ON WHAT UNITES US AS AMERICANS: Just kidding.

MOUNT ST. VINCENT UNIVERSITY IN CANADA WILL HIRE FACULTY CANDIDATES OF ANY COLOR–SO LONG AS THEY ARE BLACK: I’m a bit surprised that the Chronicle of Higher Education would publish this ad, give potential legal liability if nothing else.

WHEN ARE WE GOING TO ADMIT THAT TRUMP IS UNFIT TO BE PRESIDENT?: I know this isn’t going to win me any popularity contests with most Instapundit readers, but I’m here to express my opinion, not to reflect readers’, so here goes.

There is no evidence of widespread fraud that could plausibly be said to have cost Trump the election, nor even a single state. It’s true the media and big tech were overtly pro-Biden, and while that’s not good for democracy it’s also not illegal or fraudulent, and thus has no bearing on whether Biden won the election or not. And all that is why Trump’s lawyers lost every single case they brought before judges of all parties and ideologies, including a dozen or so rulings by Trump-appointed federal judges who would undoubtedly have preferred that he won.

But it’s more serious than that. Even if you accept any of the not-completely-crazy theories I’ve seen of how the election was “stolen,” at best that gets Trump to a narrow victory in the Electoral College. Yet the president continues to insist not just that he won, not just that the election was stolen, but that he won in a “landslide.”

There is no excuse for political violence, and Trump, admittedly, did not ask anyone to engage in violence. However, if you tell people that their votes didn’t count, that the election was a sham, that the election you lost wasn’t even close but in fact a landslide in your favor, it’s only natural to expect that some people will be inclined to resort to violence, because the whole point of elections is to settle political matters without violence. If the election process is a total fraud, then violence is to be expected.

Even in the face of the violence yesterday, Trump, while telling the rioters to go home, also continued to insist that he really won in a landslide, thus continuing to foment violence. He is unfit to be president. And no, that doesn’t excuse all the examples of bad behavior on the left over the past 4 years, and that bad behavior undoubtedly created an atmosphere in which violence becomes more acceptable (not least by the tacit and sometimes explicit acceptance of the mass violence last Summer). But the basic moral principle of “two wrongs don’t make a right” still applies. Sometimes if you fight fire with fire, you burn down your house.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT LIVE: Webinar: The Future of the Second Amendment and the Right to Carry.

I MISSED THIS WHEN IT HAPPENED–DIVERSITY NONSENSE COST TENS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES!: Moderna Slows Coronavirus Vaccine to Ensure Minority Representation.

This is particularly egregious because apparently Moderna felt the need to ensure sufficient representation of Hispanic Americans. Even if you buy the dubious notion that there is a significant chance that vaccines will have significantly different effects by “race,” what race are Hispanics supposed to be, exactly? The average American Hispanic is about 3/4 European by descent, based on DNA studies. Essentially, then, Moderna allowed tens of thousands of people to die to ensure that “enough” white people who happen to have Spanish-speaking ancestors were included.

Like many stupidities, the very unscientific focus in biomedical research on American racial categories is the product of government policy. Even if you believe in “race” as a biological concept likely to have significant medical salience, our American civil rights/affirmative action categories don’t make any sense in that regard, e.g., putting Caucasian people from India in the same “racial” category as East Asians such as Chinese and Austronesians such as Filipinos. A chapter of my in-progress book on American racial classification (preview here) will discuss this in detail, but a shorter version can be found here. [BTW, if we have any readers with relevant medical/scientific expertise who would be interested in “peer reviewing” my chapter, please let me know.]

Serious question: Why did I only hear about this today? Why wasn’t there mass outrage when this was reported in September?

SECOND AMENDMENT WEBINAR THIS WEDNESDAY AT 1PM EST (BUMPED–Happening Now!): Register here. The Future of the Second Amendment and the Right to Carry In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and again in McDonald v. Chicago (2010), the Supreme Court established the individual right to possess a firearm in the home for self-defense. Since then, the Court has been urged to review whether laws imposing restrictions on carrying guns in public and prohibitions on assault weapons violate the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court had consistently declined to take on cases addressing these issues, leaving the scope of the Second Amendment uncertain. The confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett has raised hopes (and fears) that the Court may be poised to once again address the Second Amendment. To discuss what may lie ahead, the Liberty & Law Center will host a live webinar on Wednesday, December 16, 2020. Experts will include Professor Nelson Lund and Assistant Professor Robert Leider from the Antonin Scalia Law School. The discussion will be moderated by Liberty & Law Executive Director, Professor David E. Bernstein.

IT’S REALLY ABOUT RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL TRADITIONALISTS FIGHTING FOR THEIR FREEDOM TO BE JEWS AGAINST ENEMIES WITHIN AND WITHOUT: If you want to know what Hanukkah is NOT really about, watch this video from Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff explaining what they think Hanukkah is about. At least Harris knows how to pronounce the Hebrew “KH” that starts Hanukkah, unlike her Jewish husband. But really, the way American Jews have been dumbing down Hanukkah to make it universalistic is to emphasize the Maccabees fight for religious freedom, which is at least, unlike Harris/Emhoff talking about “tikkun olam,” not wildly inaccurate and anachronistic.

I’M CALLING BUBBLE, IT FEELS A LOT LIKE LATE 1999/early 2000: Airbnb skyrockets 115% in public market debut Airbnb skyrockets 115% in public market debut.

Airbnb, which has never made an annual profit, is now valued at over $100 billion. From Wikipedia: “On August 19, 2020, Airbnb announced that it had filed for an initial public offering. The company has been privately valued at $31 billion and is projected to be listed as a public company in mid-December 2020 at a targeted evaluation of between $30 and $33 billion.”

Door Dash, which has also never made a profit, and has lots of well-funded competitors (Grubub, Slice, Uber Eats, etc., plus various local delivery rivals), also soared in its IPO yesterday, closing yesterday at a valuation of over $70 billion.

Tesla, which CEO Elon Musk, no master of modesty, said was overvalued like 300% ago earlier this year, is hovering around $600 billion in valuation.

This is not normal.

IF UNIVERSITIES REALLY WANTED “DIVERSE” PERSPECTIVES, THEY WOULD HIRE MORE PROFESSORS WITH ATYPICAL BACKGROUNDS, RATHER THAN FOCUSING ON SKIN COLOR: BYU Professor Ryan Davis on Guns and the Rural Vote: “Growing up in my family, the calendar was marked not by the list of traditional holidays, but by the opening days of various hunting seasons and the associated family trips. Guns are a marker of shared identity.”

DEEP BLUE URBAN JURISDICTIONS SEEM INTENT ON SUICIDE:Los Angeles prosecutor plans to seek release of thousands of criminals. As a friend on Facebook noted in a related context, Americans under 40 or so think relatively orderly, low-crime cities are a natural phenomenon. Those of us who came of age in the 70s and 80s know better. Unfortunately, a lot of young urbanites are about to learn how easy it is for a hip, “edgy” neighborhood to turn into a hellhole of crime and disorder.

THIS CALLS FOR A LAWSUIT AND MASS CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: Stars and Stripes: Minority veterans to receive priority for coronavirus vaccines. What do I mean by civil disobedience? White and Asian veterans should sign up for vaccines as Native American, Hispanic or African-American. It’s hard to think of anything more un-American (and unconstitutional) than the government favoring one group of veterans over another based on race.

UPDATE: When the possibility of distributing Covid vaccines by race first reared its head over the Summer, I wrote:

There are obvious dangers to allocating medical resources by race … especially in a politically sensitive an area such as vaccines, where the public is already all-too-prone to accept various conspiracy theories and quackery that leads them to oppose vaccination. Instead of expanding the use of race in this way, science and medicine should be moving away from considering race and ethnicity at all.

SCHOOLS CLOSED, MINORITIES HARDEST HIT: Seriously. In my county, Arlington, schools closed in March and the geniuses in the public school administration told the teachers not to do online instruction, and not to teach anything new (lest there be some kid, somewhere, who couldn’t log in despite free county-provided Ipads and Internet, because that would be inequitable). Below is a chart showing how kids did on the test they give at the beginning of each school year. As you will notice, black and Hispanic kids have been really hurt, white and Asian kids not so much. I suspect you would see similar, maybe even more inequitable results if you just went by income status. Yet, oddly (not really), it’s the progressives in the county who have been shouting “equity, equity, equity” from the rooftops for the last several years and their allies among the teachers who have been most vociferously lobbying to keep the schools closed.

The gray line is Fall 2020, the lines before are 2019 and ’18, respectively.

I’VE GIVEN UP ON GOVERNMENT MAKING RATIONAL DECISIONS: Long-Term-Care Residents and Health Workers Should Get Vaccine First, C.D.C. Panel Says. Comment from my friend Kate Litvak:

This is unbelievably stupid. What is the point of prioritizing nursing home residents? They are stationary. They aren’t going anywhere. We should not spend vaccines on them, but instead, we should create safe bubbles around them by prioritizing the people with whom they have contact. That means all workers of nursing homes (not just medical workers). These workers are not only bringing disease into nursing homes, but after work, get on public transit to go home and spread the disease through the community.
We should prioritize people who have the highest number of (necessary) interactions with others — health workers, transportation, supermarket, police, workers of meat processing plants, etc.
And among the first should be TEACHERS!! This will destroy the excuse that the teachers’ unions use to justify not working while getting paid in full. Once we vaccinate all the teachers, we must open the schools. Teachers who will then refuse to show up should be fired for cause. Kids aren’t much at risk and are in low probability to spread the virus. Families who don’t want their kids to attend live classes can continue online, but that will be their choice — not the choice of the teachers’ unions.
When the kids are out at schools, we preserve their education and sanity, and also preserve the ability of their parents to actually work and get the economy back on track.
But instead, we are giving the vaccine to nursing home residents. Who are stationary, can be effectively isolated, and have little impact on the economy, education of kids, and our sane future. Sheer idiocy.

UPDATE: I’ve received some feedback that nursing home residents should be vaccinated early so they can receive visitors after months of isolation from their families. But do we think that the homes are going to let visitors in unless and until those visitors are also vaccinated? The vaccines are 90-94% effective, so given the liability issues involved, the odds that they would allow unvaccinated visitors to see vaccinated residents when a month or two or three later the visitors will also be vaccinated seem low to me. Not to mention that if staff aren’t vaccinated, the visitors could infect the staff.

UPDATE: The CDC has published the underlying report that their panel approved. The report suggests that “health care personnel” is defined very broadly, which means that nursing home staff will be vaccinated–which raises the question as why residents also need to be vaccinated quickly. A dissenting panelist raised an additional objection: Nursing home residents tend to be elderly and unhealthy, and generally safe vaccines might not be safe for that population, and we have no data on that. It’s also not clear to me why pharmacy staff are more of a priority than any other retail worker, unless they work in a medical facility.From the report:

Approximately 21 million U.S. health care personnel work in settings such as hospitals, LTCFs, outpatient clinics, home health care, public health clinical services, emergency medical services, and pharmacies. Health care personnel comprise clinical staff members, including nursing or medical assistants and support staff members (e.g., those who work in food, environmental, and administrative services) (8). Jurisdictions might consider first offering vaccine to health care personnel whose duties require proximity (within 6 feet) to other persons. If vaccine supply remains constrained, additional factors might be considered for subprioritization.*** Public health authorities and health care systems should work together to ensure COVID-19 vaccine access to health care personnel who are not affiliated with hospitals.

Approximately 3 million adults reside in LTCFs, which include skilled nursing facilities, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities. Depending upon the number of initial vaccine doses available, jurisdictions might consider first offering vaccination to residents and health care personnel in skilled nursing facilities because of high medical acuity and COVID-19–associated mortality (6) among residents in these settings.

OUR BUSINESS ELITES ARE BECOMING AS ABSURD AS OUR ACADEMIC ELITES: NASDAQ proposes illegal racial quotas for corporate boards ACLU applauds. One interesting aspect here is that the requirement is for “self-identification.” I’ll self-identify as anything a NASDAQ company wants if it will get me a lucrative do-nothing board position.

AMERICA’S RIDICULOUS “RACIAL” CLASSIFICATIONS: Speaking of East Asians and Covid, it would be useful if we could compare Covid rates among Americans of East Asian descent to other Americans, to see if there is an indication that genetics plays a role in infection rates. But the U.S. gathers health and medical data via the same unscientific categories it uses for civil rights enforcement and affirmative action programs. So we have an “Asian” category, but 40% or so of that category is made up of people with origins in the Indian subcontinent or the Philippines; both groups are genetically distinct from East Asians. I address the implicit racism and stupidity of the U.S. government requiring researchers to use racial rather than genetic classifications in medical research here, and I have a forthcoming article on the origins of our official racial and ethnic classifications. Want to know how Indian-Americans got lumped into the same category as Chinese-Americans? Read on.

WHY HAVE EAST ASIAN COUNTRIES FARED SO WELL WITH COVID-19?: Maybe it’s genetics: An ancient coronavirus-like epidemic drove adaptation in East Asians from 25,000 to 5,000 years ago. A lot of commentators, including one I heard on the radio this morning, have suggested that China, Japan, South Korea, and so on have had few deaths from the Coronavirus because of some combination of an obedient, public-regarding culture and good government. But in China, the virus was raging undetected for two months or more, and during peak holiday season. Culture and government can’t respond to a pandemic that no one yet knows exists. In fact, back in the winter I was optimistic about how bad Covid would be, in part because the Chinese, even accounting for state censorship, didn’t seem to be hit that hard even though they had many weeks where the virus was silently spreading. So, a higher level of genetic or other immunity makes intuitive sense, and here’s a study that backs that theory up.

DISARMING MINORITIES RARELY ENDS WELL: Private Arms and Civil Unrest: Lessons from the Black Freedom Movement.