KEEPING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE: Washington, D.C., Braces for ‘Unite the Right 2’ White Nationalist Rally.

The media is treating this event as if hundreds of thousands of goosestepping Nazis are descending on D.C. In fact, “Permits for Sunday’s ‘Unite the Right 2’ rally indicated that about 400 demonstrators are expected in Lafayette Square, a park adjacent to the White House.” Four hundred is likely optimistic.

Treating these pathetic morons who can’t fill a small high school’s auditorium as if they represent some major national movement is only giving them millions of dollars in undeserved free publicity, albeit in the service of a contrived narrative that the Trump administration has enabled a major neo-Nazi revival. Ignoring them won’t necessarily make them go away, but it will deprive them of the media oxygen that’s making them seem much more significant than they are.

PROPAGANDA IN SUBURBAN BOSTON HIGH SCHOOL: Emails Reveal High School Teachers Plotting to Hide Their Political Bias From Parents. One teacher wrote, “Personally, I’m finding it really difficult in the current climate to teach kids to appreciate other perspectives. . . I don’t feel good about protecting [a nativist] student’s right to a so‐called ‘political’ view.”

OUR MORONIC MEDIA–MSN PUBLISHES ANTI-SEMITIC NONSENSE: MSN has an article on the world’s richest families. It concludes with the Rothschild family which, the article informs us, has wealth estimated at up to $700 trillion (which is almost triple the world’s total wealth).

Apparently, no one at MSN understands that (1) the Rothschilds have been the subject of absurd anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for generations; and (2) the only place you would find such a ridiculous estimate of the family’s wealth would be at websites pushing said conspiracy theories. We all laughed at the DC councilman who thought the Rothschilds controlled the weather. What do we do about MSN? And before we attribute this to some naive intern or such, note that the story has been up for six days, and apparently no one at MSN has noticed it is propounding garbage.

SOMETHING IS AMISS IN THE HISTORY PROFESSION: Over at Volokh, I recount some troubling recent interactions with historians. Can one be shocked, yet not surprised? When I’ve done my own historical research, as with my books Rehablitating Lochner and Only One Place of Redress, I’ve found that conventional historical wisdom often ranges from “inaccurate” to “just made up.” So while I’m not surprised to find low intellectual standards among some historians, I still find it shocking that they openly defend these standards.

SOME DARE CALL IT CONSPIRACY (BUT THEY ARE OUT TO LUNCH): Duke Historian Nancy Maclean’s Wacky Conspiracy Theory. It’s not that the pro-immigration, free-trading libertarian Koch Brothers have real differences with the nationalist, protectionist Trump; it’s all just a smokescreen to distract you while your rights are eviscerated, claims MacLean.

THE AWARD FOR WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE I’VE HAD IN RECENT MEMORY GOES TO: TaskRabbit. I hired a Tasker to move a heavy treadmill from my basement up two flights of stairs. He tried to disassemble it, couldn’t get if fully disassembled, then couldn’t get it back together. Easy-peasy, you’d think, given TR’s “happiness pledge:” either send someone to fix and move the treadmill, or give me credit to buy a new one. Nope. They offered to give me credit to hire another Tasker to move it, with no guarantee it will be fixed or is fixable. And that resolution took weeks and weeks of emails back and forth, and despite the fact that Taskers pay a hefty insurance fee for just such eventualities. And then when the resolution agreement arrived, it had a “non-disparagement” clause and a confidentiality clause, meaning I’d be legally bound to not complain about how awful TR customer service is, nor to explain how they make folks seeking a resolution sign various rights away. To heck with that. I’m not going to sign, I’m going to disparage away, and I’ll find another way of resolving my treadmill problem. Stay away from Task Rabbit, if a Tasker breaks something there is no guarantee it will be fixed, it will take weeks and weeks to reach an unsatisfactory resolution, and then they will want you to sign away various legal and other rights before they will do anything.

By contrast, kudos to Amazon, which eventually offered a generous resolution to a previous problem with Amazon Services.

AND MEDIA PEOPLE WONDER WHY PEOPLE DON’T TRUST THEM: ABC News’ Molly Hunter apparently believes that in democracies, privately-owned newspapers don’t fire cartoonists.

ECONOMIC ILLITERACY FROM FEDERAL JUDGES: Eleventh Circuit invalidates state law preempting Birmingham’s minimum wage increase. The whole opinion is a mess, but I was struck by this:

As an initial matter, we have little trouble concluding that the plaintiffs have suffered concrete injuries as a result of the Minimum Wage Act. According to the amended complaint, Lewis and Adams work in Birmingham and earn less than $10.10 per hour. Birmingham Ordinance No. 16-28 guaranteed them $10.10 per hour, adjusted annually to a cost of living index.

In fact, the Birmingham ordinance didn’t guarantee Lewis and Adams anything, as it didn’t guarantee that their employers would be willing to pay them more than the market wage they had been earning. The rest of the opinion proceeds as if minimum wage laws are an unmitigated good for low-wage workers. The implicit reasoning, in part, is that if low-wage workers, particularly African American low-wage workers, approve of being promised something (a higher wage) for nothing (no negative consequences on the low-wage labor market), they must in fact be getting something for nothing. It’s as if neither public choice nor mainstream labor economics is at all familiar to the judges. More incentive for McDonald’s to speed up its installation of unmanned kiosks, I suppose.

ACLU: WE NEED TO BURN DOWN THE CIVIL LIBERTIES TO SAVE THE CIVIL LIBERTIES: A Pro-Liberty Case for Gun Restrictions

Unless my reading comprehension skills have really deteriorated, the ACLU is arguing that because government tends to react to mass shootings by restricting civil liberties, Americans will ultimately enjoy more liberty if we restrict gun rights to prevent mass shootings. That is, shall we say, a rather odd argument for the ACLU of all organizations to make.

Let’s try out this logic in another context: “Because the government tends to react to terrorism by restricting civil liberties, Americans will ultimately enjoy more liberty if we deny terrorism suspects due process rights, drone suspected terrorists abroad, and ban Muslims from coming to the United States.”

It’s not that the ACLU’s argument is inherently illogical (assuming one believes that gun restrictions will indeed inhibit mass shootings), it’s just that it’s not the sort of utilitarian argument the ACLU would ever make in any other civil liberties context other than with regard to Second Amendment rights.

OUR GOVERNMENT IS IN THE BEST OF HANDS: Plutonium Stolen From the Parking Lot of the Marriott San Antonio Northwest

They left the materials in the back seat of their rented Ford Expedition and went to bed. The plutonium and cesium were stolen out of the Marriott parking lot…. The group that lost the nuclear material is the Off-Site Radioactive Source Recovery Program which is based at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory — is the team charged with recovering plutonium and enriched uranium that has been loaned out by the military. Let that sink in for a moment.

I THOUGHT THE (SOCIAL) SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: How Social Science Might Be Misunderstanding Conservatives

YALE LAW FAILS THE KAVANAUGH TEST: Conor Friedersdorf is right that neither the law school’s official fawning press release nor the literally hysterical response from left-wing law school affiliates puts the law school in a particularly good light. But law school officials, at least, really had no choice; the school put out an equally fawning press release the last time a Yale alum was nominated to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. The school would have faced credible charges of partisan discrimination if it had been less effusive about Kavanaugh.

REMINDER: IF PROGRESSIVES HAD BEEN MORE TOLERANT OF RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVES HILARY CLINTON WOULD BE NOMINATING HER SECOND SUPREME COURT JUSTICE NOW: The Supreme Court oral argument that cost Democrats the presidency.  The key point here is that religious conservatives felt sufficiently under threat that they gave Trump a record percentage of their vote. White evangelicals voted for Trump in a higher percentage than even for fellow evangelical Christian George W. Bush, despite, shall we say, Trump’s less-than-perfect modeling of traditional Christian values. (And while Kennedy might not have retired while Clinton was in office, Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have.)

UPDATE: For some reason, the link above keeps disappearing from the post. Here it is.

UPDATE ON THE BIGGEST ACADEMIC SCANDAL OF THE YEAR: Duke University History Professor Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains has received a tremendous amount of fawning attention from the left, including some of her fellow historians. She was even selected to be the plenary speaker at this year’s American Association of University Professors conference.

The book posits that the late Nobel-winning prize economist James Buchanan, resentful of the Supreme Court’s racially egalitarian jurisprudence in Brown v. Board of Education, invented public choice economics as a means of undermining American democracy. Charles Koch later stumbled upon Buchanan’s work, and used it to mastermind his own well-funded assault on everything good liberals hold dear.

The book is wrong in its general thesis, and in almost all of its particulars, as various reviewers and bloggers, myself included, have pointed out in excruciating detail. When asked about allegations of error and misrepresentation, instead of responding substantively MacLean has claimed that her critics haven’t read the book, and accused her critics of being part of a Koch-funded conspiracy to undermine the book’s “revelations.”

Until now, it’s been difficult to point the curious and non-closed-minded to a single source that summarizes the range of mistakes and fabrications in the book. Fortunately, Phil Magness has posted a spreadsheet listing these, the relevant page numbers, the sources that demonstrate the relevant problems, and a somewhat subjective ranking of the importance of each error to the book’s overall credibility. Historians and others who continue to defend MacLean will show themselves to either lack an interest in truth, or to be incapable of seeing it. Here’s one hint for her fans: whether a statement in a book is true or false has nothing to do with the identity of the individual who has alleged falsity.

BUYER BEWARE (AMAZON.COM SERVICES): So back in February I bought a new garbage disposal from Amazon.com. Amazon.com Services offered a reasonable price for installation at the time of purchase, and I thought I’d try it rather than use my regular plumber. After all, it’s Amazon! Great customer service! What could go wrong? Well, ninety-five days after installation, I noticed water under the sink. The unit had obviously been leaking for a while, because there was some mildew, too. Contacted Amazon, but they would do nothing because their 90-day “happiness guarantee” had expired. They did give me the contact info for the contractor, who responded that they only warranty work for Amazon for 90 days. The fact that it’s obvious the leak had been going on for a while meant nothing to either party, though it surely would have to a contractor with whom I have an ongoing relationship. So, lesson learned. That was my first and last Amazon.com Services experience.

ROSA PARKS, THIS AIN’T: Portland bakery fires employees for denying black woman service after closing.

In one statement, “Back To Eden Bakery” says that according to its own surveillance video, a black woman named “Lillian”, who is well known in the area as a “professional equity activist”, entered at 9:06 p.m., after the bakery’s closing time. Employees had also turned off the “Open” sign, but several customers (all white) who had already ordered were still inside. Two other white women who went to the bakery two minutes before “Lillian,” and were also informed that the business was closed for the night.

The bakery says “Lillian” left the store briefly and began recording video.

The bakery’s statement says that even though it does not consider the employees to be racist and that they were following the business’s protocol of closing at 9 p.m., they were fired because “sometimes impact outweighs intent.” The bakery also says in the statement that the way the employees went about denying the woman service, “lacked sensitivity and understanding of the racial implications at work.”

In the statement “Back To Eden” says the employees were fired because the woman and the “clamoring public” demanded they be fired.

In one statement, the bakery admitted that the employees did not necessarily do anything wrong, “this is more about how a black woman was made to feel” at the business.”

I had a hard time believing a story this stupid actually happened, but it seems to check out.

UPDATE: The bakery owners seem to have modified their story a bit in a new Facebook post. They now claim that the fired workers served the two white women who came in slightly earlier, but only if they took their order “to go,” and that one employee was probationary, and the other had been warned about poor customer service in the past. That would make a certain amount of sense, and yet it doesn’t explain why the owners decided to scrub their earlier posts on the subject.

DOWNLOAD IT WHILE ITS HOT: Prevailing Wage Legislation and the Continuing Significance of Race. My latest academic article:

Since the early twentieth century, labor unions have lobbied federal and state governments to enact and enforce laws requiring government contractors to pay “prevailing wages” to employees on public works projects. These laws, currently active at the federal level and in approximately thirty states, typically in practice require that contractors pay according to the local union wage scale. The laws also require employers to adhere to union work rules. The combination of these rules makes it extremely difficult for nonunion contractors to compete for public works contracts.

Meanwhile, construction unions have been among the most persistently exclusionary institutions in American society. Not surprisingly, in many cases, the history of prevailing wage legislation has been intertwined with the history of racial discrimination. Economists and others argue that prevailing wage legislation continues to have discriminatory effects on minorities today. Union advocates, not surprisingly, deny that prevailing wage laws have discriminatory effects. More surprisingly, they deny that the granddaddy of modern prevailing wage legislation, the federal Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, had discriminatory intent.

Part I of this Article discusses the discriminatory history of the most significant of all prevailing wage laws, the Davis-Bacon Act. As discussed below, Davis-Bacon was passed with the explicit intent of excluding African American workers from federal construction projects, and its discriminatory effects continued for decades.

Part II of this Article discusses the controversy over whether prevailing wage legislation continues to have discriminatory effects. The section begins with a discussion of the empirical literature on the effects of prevailing wage discrimination on minority employment. The section next presents evidence that construction unions continue to discriminate against members of minority groups, albeit much more subtly than in the past. The section concludes by recounting allegations that prevailing wage legislation serves to exclude minority contractors from obtaining government contracts.

HOW TO GET THE LEFT TO CONDEMN HAMAS: (1) Charter a flight to Charlottesville for Hamas’s leaders; (2) Give them a march permit; (3) Have them say what they always say about Jews. Because apparently shouting anti-Semitic slogans in Charlottesville is far more egregious than running a terrorist army in Gaza dedicated to genocidal anti-Semitism.

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES AND THE BIKINI WAX: Transgender woman files human rights complaint against Windsor spa:

The owner of a local waxing spa is mounting a public campaign to clear the name of his business after he was served a human rights complaint for denying service to a transgender woman.

Jason Carruthers, the president of Mad Wax on Walker Road, said he was surprised at the legal move since he had explained to the complainant that the spa did not offer Brazilian wax services on male body parts.

“I have no male wax staff,” Carruthers said Friday. “We are not able to provide that service.”

A local transgender woman claims she was denied services based on her gender identity and gender expression and is seeking $50,000 for “immense harm to my dignity.”

The good news, such as it is, is that this is Canada, and the hierarchy of intersectional harm is a bit fuzzy in this case: “the female employee working that day was a practising Muslim who refrains from physical contact with males outside of her family.” And in an age of Me Too!, are we really arguing about whether a woman should be forced to groom the male genital area?

BOYCOTT NOT, LEST YE BE BOYCOTTED: Did Columbia Law Dean Gillian Lester Troll Professor Katherine Franke? Me at Volokh: “Dean Lester’s critique of trying to constrain the ‘global exchange of ideas’ applies to Franke herself and her support of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI)…as much as it does to Israel’s refusal to admit her.”

WHY DO AMERICAN INDIANS JOIN THE ARMED FORCES?: Adventure? Patriotism? Remunerative employment? In other words, the same reasons as everyone else? Not according to this ridiculously PC and condescending exhibit at the Smithsonian.

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, JOHN BRENNAN EDITION: Have you ever see an ex-CIA director attack the United States and its allies, and express sympathy with America’s enemies? Well, you have now.

I’ve never been a Trump fan, but I try to judge his policies based on whether I think they are good or bad policies, not whether I’m a Trump partisan. And I acknowledge that overall his policies have been far better than what I expected in most areas. But there is a whole coterie of people out there who will take the opposite position of Trump just because its Trump. People who, for example, were in favor of moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem when Rubio promised to do it, but suddenly turned against it when Trump moved it, or who suddenly changed their position on the Iran deal when Trump chose to end it. Brennan is just an example of a troubling phenomenon where people are saying and doing things they would never otherwise, simply to oppose Trump.

EMPTY  VIRTUE-SIGNALING, GAZA EDITION: My Twitter yesterday and today:

They: Israel is using excessive force against Gaza protesters.

Me: What level of force should Israel use to protect against breach of its borders by violent Hamasniks, and what expertise do you have to determine that?

They: Israel is using excessive force against Gaza protesters.

THE STRATEGIC CASE FOR MOVING THE U.S. EMBASSY TO JERUSALEM IS VERY SIMPLE: Since Oslo  in 1993, Israel has allowed Palestinian terrorists to set up a government in Ramallah, made three peace offers within internationally-accepted parameters, withdrawn from Gaza and parts of Samaria, suffered an intifadah, and in return has gotten… a worldwide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign? The Palestinians have believed that they could win by stalling, waiting until the world’s impatience forced Israel to concede. Moving the U.S. Embassy without a peace agreement demonstrates to the Palestinians that things can and will move on without them, as do the growing ties between Israel and the Sunni powers. Either accept that Israel is here to stay and make the necessary accommodations, or be left in the dustbin of history.

BECAUSE LEFTIST POLITICS HAS BECOME A RELIGION: Two thousand years waiting for a restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem, and for some American Jews, today’s significance is that it gives them a chance to emote their hostility to Trump. Sad!