NY TIMES TRIES AND FAILS TO GIN UP A SCANDAL ABOUT MY LAW SCHOOL: How Scalia Law School Became a Key Friend of the Court. Here’s the deal: Law schools like Harvard and Yale used to go to a lot of effort to grow ties with Supreme Court Justices. But given increased Progressive intolerance, this would cause more trouble than its worth. So it provided an opportunity for a few law schools not captured by the left, like Scalia Law, to swoop in. It’s great for the students who get to take classes for them, great for our reputation, and nice for the Justices to get a chance to interact with folks outside the Court (and the Justices, from what I hear, do take their teaching responsibilities quite seriously.)

As for the Times, the quality of the piece can be summed up with these excerpts.
Excerpt 1: “Scalia Law has offered the justices a safe space in a polarized Washington… and their personal needs are anticipated, from lunch orders to, in Justice Gorsuch’s case, house hunting.”
Excerpt 2: “[Scalia Law faculty member Jamil] Jaffer had clerked for [Gorsuch] on the appeals court and counted him as a friend and mentor. After the Supreme Court confirmation, Mr. Jaffer acted as the Gorsuches’ unofficial relocation consultant, meeting with a real estate agent and touring at least one equestrian estate in Virginia.”

I laughed when I got to that. Either the Times reporters are too dumb to distinguish between “Scalia Law helped Gorsuch with househunting” and “a friend of Gorsuch on the faculty of Scalia Law helped Gorsuch,” or they are outright dishonest. I’m guessing they aren’t the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, but in this case dishonesty is the more likely cause.

And by the way, have you noticed all the negative stories, the vast majority ranging from trivial to bogus, that have come out about the conservatives Justices over the past two weeks. It smacks of a coordinated media campaign, with “journalists” regurgitated stories they are spoonfed by left-wing dark money groups. I expect a lengthy investigative report from the Times on who is behind these stories, what they hope to accomplish, and who the funders are… never.

QUESTIONS I NEVER THOUGHT I’D BE ASKING: Why is an NHL team’s Twitter account lecturing fans about gender theory?

THIS IS A PARODY ACCOUNT, BUT IT COULD HAVE BEEN THE BBC:

WHY ARE PROGRESSIVE INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPOOLS OF BIGOTRY?: ‘Antisemitic Invective’ Goes Mainstream at the University of Michigan Law School.

I AGREE, BUT I’M OBVIOUSLY BIASED: New Book Crucial to Understanding Imminent SCOTUS Decisions on Racial Preferences.

COMING SOON TO BERKELEY LAW SCHOOL: From the Brixton Palestine Solidarity Campaign. This is the inevitable next step in the Berkeley Law student groups’ “Zionist” boycott, and it smells a lot like Nazi and Stalinist antisemitic campaigns of old. If they aren’t doing it now, it’s not because they don’t want to.

THE IDEA IS SUPPOSED TO HOW TO REDUCE ANTISEMITISM, NOT HOW TO EFFECTUATE IT:

CHAT GPT, GIVE ME SOMETHING THAT SOUNDS LIKE IT MUST BE SATIRE, BUT IS ACTUALLY FROM AN ACADEMIC PAPER WRITTEN BY A FULL PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AT A BIG TEN UNIVERTSITY: Here ya go:

Our choice to destroy the planet to serve our immediate/capitalistic/technology needs is a form of settler colonialism that perpetuates violence. That is, because a Western worldview does not consider plants, animals, and rocks as living beings of equal value with the same rights to this universe as humans, the result is that plants, animals and rocks suffer the same treatment as Indigenous peoples have endured throughout time. For example, like American Indians who were stripped of their lands and communities and forced to live in boarding schools, plants are yanked from their families and forced to assimilate into Western ways of doing things (e.g., to become suburban gardens). By respecting animals, plants, and even rocks as living beings, we can avoid some of the human/material binary that has plagued the sciences in the past.

NOT QUITE: I googled woke and trans. Google replied: “About 22,300,000 results.” Just for example.

I’LL TAKE HEADLINES YOU WON’T SEE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES FOR $500, ALEX: What’s life like under Hamas? ‘Whispered in Gaza’ offers unique, courageous testimony.

I SEE PEOPLE CLAIMING THAT KANYE CLEARLY GOT HIS NUTTY ANTISEMITISM FROM “WHITE NATIONALISTS,” BUT I’M NOT SO SURE: For example, there is only one other public figure I can recall extolling Hitler’s virtues, and he isn’t a white nationalist.

“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.