“POTENTIALLY 2022’s MOST CONSEQUENTIAL AMERICAN BOOK”: Okay, this counts as shameless self-promotion, but how often do relatively obscure academics like myself get praise like that from someone as prominent as George Will, in a column devoted to said obscure academic’s book, no less? Money quote:

This story-beyond-satire of government is recounted in Bernstein’s slender (185 pages) Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America, potentially 2022’s most consequential American book. It reveals the rickety foundations of today’s identity politics. And because it is distilled in an amicus brief he filed for the Supreme Court as it considers racial preferences in college admissions. The brief demonstrates that such preferences depend on irrational classifications that mock their users’ intellectual and moral pretenses.

NO: Do America’s Racial Categories Make Sense?

YOUR GUIDE TO ARGUING WITH WOKESTERS: Borrowed from the other David Bernstein, a trenchant critic of woke ideology.

MURDERED FOR OPPOSING COMMUNISM: ‘Shocking’ discovery of huge 100-year-old Jewish mass grave.

EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM! AGGREGATE WORLD HAPPINESS! OPERATIONALIZING CURRENCY!: Now that I’ve repeated the apparently magic mumbo-jumbo, where is my $36 billion to blow?

WELL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS DIED OUT IN THE 90s AND RETURN 20 YEARS LATER AS EVEN-WORSE WOKENESS, SO WHO KNOWS WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS: Ruy Teixeira asks whether America has reached “peak woke.”

LOVE HIM OR NOT, TRUMP’S ENDORSEMENT WAS POISON IN GENERAL ELECTIONS 2022: Hans Bader: Republican Trump ignored wins in a landslide, while Trump-backed candidates lose in the same state. Seems to me in DeSantis you get similar policies without the baggage.

THE MONEY WOULD BE BETTER SPENT DIGGING A BIG PIT, FILLING IT WITH CASH, AND COVERING IT: The Extended Parasite: On the Design of the Diversity Bureaucracy.

SORDID, AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE AT BEST: The Sordid Business of Dividing Us Up.

WHY ARE PROGRESSIVE INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPOOLS OF RACISM: Concern about Discrimination against “Asian Americans” in University Admissions–in 1987!

I WISH I COULD SAY IT’S THE ONLY MAJOR EXAMPLE OF CAMPUS LUNACY: Rich Lowry: The Lunacy of US Racial Categories.

IT’S HARD TO THINK OF A POLICY THAT HAS HAD SUCH STAYING POWER DESPITE BEING SO UNPOPULAR: David Lat: Affirmative Action Is Going Down—And It’s A Good Thing Too.

PROFESSOR JACOBSON FTW: Affirmative Action: My Argument Against Racial Preferences Prevails at Cornell Political Union Debate. Jacobson emphasizes the irrationality of the racial classifications used by admissions officials, with a nice shout out to my book Classified.

AT THE TIME NO ONE WAS REALLY PAYING ATTENTION: Diversity by diktat: An obscure 1977 OMB memo forms the basis for today’s affirmative-action programs. I don’t mention it in this op-ed, but to give you an idea of how ridiculously arbitrary the classifications are, the government literally got three volunteers, a Cuban American, a Mexican American, and a Puerto Rican, and asked them to come up with a name for people of Spanish-speaking ancestry, and to define the scope of the relevant classification. One of the volunteers vociferously advocated for “Hispanic,” which includes everyone with Spanish-speaking ancestry, and she wore the others down until they agreed. But the classification just as easily have been Latino (added in 1997), Spanish surname, Spanish-speaking household, Hispano, Mestizo, or Chicano/other Spanish-heritage, among other classifications floating around at the time. And the main reason Cubans were included with Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, despite having much higher socio-economic success and mostly perceiving themselves and being perceived by others as “white immigrants” rather than members of a minority group is that Richard Nixon had insisted on including them because they vote Republican. He wanted to make sure they were also eligible for affirmative action programs that were ramping up and included Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. More details can be found in my new book.

DAVID BERNSTEINS, FTW: (A different) David Bernstein’s Woke Antisemitism: How A Progressive Ideology Harms Jews is out! Highly recommended. And while you’re on a David Bernstein kick, you might as well pick up my Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.

Fun fact: The editor for both books was another guy named David Bernstein. #CommissionEarned

AMERICA’S FUTURE MAY DEPEND ON IT: Debate/Discusssion–Can We Separate Race and State?

SELF-DELUSION ON THE LEFT, MARK JOSEPH STERN EDITION: The Supreme Court Is Blowing Up Law School, Too. Inside the growing furor among professors who have had enough.Stern writes that constitutional law professors are “giving up on the Supreme Court.” He writes:

The problem, it’s worth emphasizing, is not that the Supreme Court is issuing decisions with which left-leaning professors disagree. It’s that the court seems to be reaching many of these conclusions in defiance of centuries of standards, rejecting precedent and moderation in favor of aggressive, partisan-tinged motivated reasoning. Plenty of progressive professors have long viewed the court with skepticism, and many professors, right- and left-leaning, have criticized the reasoning behind certain opinions for decades. But it’s only in recent years—with the manipulation of the justice selection process combined with clear, results-oriented cynicism in decisions—that the problem has seemed so acute that they feel it affects their ability to teach constitutional law.

Actually, the fact that the Court is solidly conservative, and the constitutional law professoriate overwhelming liberal or further left, is exactly the problem. In the past, the left could count on the Court for sporadic big victories: same-sex marriage, affirmative action, abortion. Now they can’t, so they have turned against the Court. We all know that left-learning lawprofs would be dancing in the streets if SCOTUS were equally aggressive to the left. And indeed, while Stern portrays discontent with the Court as a question of professional standards rather than ideology, he does not manage to find a single right-leaning professor to quote in his article.

[Crossposted at Volokh]

IN CASE YOU THOUGHT THE SECRETARY OF EDUCATION’S PRIORITY MIGHT BE EDUCATION:

AND YOU CAN’T BEAT FREE: A prominent lawyer recently told me that the best possible advertisement for my book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America was the introduction, which left him “salivating” to read the rest of it. He suggested I post it online, for free. Here it is.

Given that the Supreme Court is going to consider the constitutionality of affirmative action based on these classifications later this month, the book, and its call for the separation of race and state, is especially timely.

RES IPS LOQUITUR:

UPDATE: It’s been suggested to me that Mossad got wind that Khamenei was ill, and decided that they could preeemptively “take credit” for it to freak out their enemies. If so, still good show.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Just Amnesty International’s Middle East Director retweeting an obviously play-acting photo purporting to be Israel chaining up a 13 year old Palestinian girl. You don’t have to be an expert to note that those aren’t IDF uniforms, the guns are fake, she is not chained in a way that would prevent her from escaping, and if she were being detained she’d be in zip ties, not chains, in any event. But then again, Amnesty itself is in the business of crude anti-Israel propaganda, so this is entirely consistent.

LIVE WEBCAST TODAY AT NOON EASTERN TIME: I will be talking about my book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America at the Cato Institute, with comments from Joan Coaston of the New York Times and Robert Cottrol of George Washington University. You can register here.

THIS MIGHT MAKE YOU CURIOUS ABOUT THE UNTOLD STORY OF RACIAL CLASSIFICATION IN AMERICA: Credit is also due Cory Liu, who actually authored the brief on my behalf.

IT WOULD BE A GREAT LEAP FORWARD:

WHAT IT TAKES TO GET OUR POLITICAL ELITES RILED UP: Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’ suggestion that Israel has committed “fifty Holocausts” against the Palestinians is grossly inaccurate and offensive. But he was answering a question in Germany about whether he would apologize for his involvement in the Munich massacre of Israel fifty years ago. The lack of apology is more important than overheated, offensive rhetoric, because it shows that either deep-down he’s still the same terrorist as always, or at least that he thinks it would be very harmful in Palestinian politics to acknowledge that murdering innocent athletes was wrong. Similarly, his government continues to pay generous pensions to terrorists who murder Israeli Jews, not just rewarding those terrorists but encouraging others to follow in their footsteps. Abbas is also a dictator who has not held elections in almost two decades, and as corrupt as the day is long. None of that gets the elites nearly as agitated as making an offensive Holocaust-related remark. It’s almost as though if you pay lip service to the memory of the Holocaust, you will get a free pass for current crimes committed against Jews and others… In fact, it’s exactly that.