WHY DOES ANYBODY STILL LISTEN TO THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER?:  Each red-blooded American must teach five people the truth about these corruptoids.  Start with your sister-in-law who still reads the New York Times.  If we all work hard we can have this taken care of by August–well ahead of the vaccine project. Here’s some ammunition.

ONE OF AMERICA’S BEST JUDGES:  Judge Ho Tells It Like It Is.

The only downside of “the Honorable James Ho” is that his appointment to the bench makes me feel elderly.  I knew him before he went to law school (but a good 15 years after I had graduated).  I remember I urged him to attend my alma mater–the University of Chicago Law School.  But I don’t think I can even claim partial credit for having influenced his decision; if I am remembering correctly, he was already leaning heavily toward Chicago.  Now he’s a Fifth Circuit judge–one of quite a few great judicial appointments by Donald Trump.

WHY NOT BAN WRITING ALTOGETHER?:  Oxford considers scrapping sheet music for being “too colonial.”

GEORGE LEEF:  On “Panics and Persecutions:  20 Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age.“

“ACTION CIVICS”—ONE MORE THREAT TO THE BODY POLITIC: And one more reason to home school your children.

HILARIOUS: Bruce Gilley writes at the James Martin Center: “[I]n December of last year, the [Portland State University—American Association of University Professors] ‘voted overwhelmingly’ to officially condemn my research on colonialism. In a bizarre twist of logic, the PSU-AAUP justified its action by declaring that it ‘stands for academic freedom’ but does ‘not stand for hostile work environments created under the guise of academic freedom.’ In other words, by conducting research according to accepted methods and publishing my findings, I have somehow created a hostile work environment for my colleagues who have repeatedly attempted to censure me.”

This kind of problem is everywhere these days, including, most recently, at my own cute little law school.

JOHN FUND:  IDs for a Vaccine Shot, but Not for Voting?

THE POWER OF PRESIDENTS TO ACT UNILATERALLY LEADS TO POLITICAL POLARIZATION:  John O. McGinnis and Michael Rappaport explain.  (repost after technical difficulty fixed).

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF: Yesterday a Georgetown law professor was fired for getting too close for comfort to the truth about the effects of race-preferential admissions. But it was not the first hullabaloo on that topic to erupt at Georgetown. Here’s the story:

In early 1991, a third-year law student—I’ll just call him “John Doe” here—took a job as a part-time file clerk in the admissions office. He probably figured it would be a good way to earn some extra money without cutting too much into his study time. If he had only known …. In a few weeks, this former Peace Corps volunteer would be vilified by the Georgetown University faculty, his fellow students, and the editorial pages of some of the nation’s major newspapers. Over the course of the next year and a half, he would be fighting for his right to practice law.

(more…)

AMERICA’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION CONTINUES: Yesterday Glenn linked to a story on the firing of a Georgetown University law professor.  Speaking the truth can get you in trouble these days.  That’s why we’re hearing less and less of it.  Powerline has more.

History is repeating itself at Georgetown.  That law school had a similar blowout on the issue of race-preferential admissions more than two decades ago. I’ll blog on that later today. In the meantime, this article explains in detail why the professor was right:  On average, affirmative action beneficiaries tend to struggle academically.  Alas, Georgetown prefers to cover it up rather than fix the problem.

IF IT HAD BEEN TRUMP, THEY’D BE GOING FOR IMPEACHMENT #3:  Biden Fires EEOC General Counsel for Protecting Religious Rights.

POWERLINE:  Coke Demands that Its Law Firms Engage in Unlawful Discrimination.

Note that Mirengoff is asking any lawyers with knowledge of how law firms are reacting to the Coke policy to write him.  Confidentiality is guaranteed.

BIDEN MOVES TO FIRE EEOC GENERAL COUNSEL:  Sharon Gustafson’s term as General Counsel at the supposedly independent EEOC doesn’t expire until 2023.  So far, she has refused to resign.  (Of course, if Trump had done this, it would have been an outrage.)

FAKE NEWS FROM AL JAZEERA: Sorry, but I take this one personally. As many of you know, last year, I co-chaired the “No on Proposition 16” campaign here in California. I was also the campaign’s second largest donor (behind the first highest by 1 cent), even though I am by no stretch of the imagination a wealthy woman. Our campaign was outspent by about 14 to 1. We tried as best we could to make up for that disadvantage by working 14 times as hard. And somehow, we managed to win. (It helped a lot that California voters agreed with us .)

Al Jazeera, however, has managed to find an American academic who attributes Proposition 16’s defeat to the supposed big money financing of an “anti-affirmative action industry.” I know … it’s just Al Jazeera.   What was I expecting?  Still, it’s annoying.  I assume I’m not supposed to cuss on this blog, so I’d better stop now …

A TRILLION HERE, A TRILLION THERE, PRETTY SOON YOU’RE TALKING REAL MONEY:  Stanford University panel on ethics puts price tag on slavery reparations:  $10 to $12 TRILLION.

NO BOYZ ALLOWED IN THE GIRLZ TREE FORT:  Biden’s new “Gender Policy Council” focuses  only on women’s issues.  But these days it’s boys and men who are struggling most. 

OF COURSE:  Berkeley teachers’ union honcho videotaped while delivering his child to an in-person private pre-school (while arguing for continued closure of public schools).

ARE WE REALLY THAT FAR GONE?:  Senator Rand Paul asked Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, “Do you support the government intervening to override the parents’ consent to give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breast and genitalia?” This was not a crazy question.  The nominee–Dr. Rachel Levine–is a trans activist and self-described champion of transgender youth.  He got a deliberately evasive non-answer to his question.

How could any responsible U.S. Senator vote yes without an answer to that question?  As Paul notes, 80 to 95% of prepubertal children with gender dysphoria snap out of it by late adolescence.  Minors can’t even go to the movies without parental consent.  How can it be that they can decide whether to the chop their body parts off?

ON THIS DAY IN 1732, THE MAN WHO WAS FIRST IN WAR, FIRST IN PEACE, AND FIRST IN THE HEARTS OF HIS COUNTRYMEN WAS BORN: Never did I imagine that it would one day be considered transgressive to point out that George Washington was a great man.  But since that time has apparently arrived, let me say this:  George Washington was a great man.  

GEORGE LEEF:  How the College Board Mangles the Teaching of History.

AND WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THEY CARE ABOUT THE DISABLED?: The various bills pending in Congress to raise the minimum wage to $15 will also eliminate the special provision in the law that allows Down Syndrome and other seriously disabled adults to take jobs at less than the minimum wage.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report a few months ago endorsing that move (despite receiving comments from thousands of parents of Down syndrome workers pleading with us not to). My colleagues either (1) don’t understand that a $15 minimum wage for Down syndrome workers will be a huge job killer; or (2) don’t care. My dissent is here.

JOHN FUND:  Remembering Rush–A Conservative Messenger Who Changed the Dialogue.

ON DRAMATICALLY RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE: Here’s a passage from a 1990 article by historian James C. Cobb about the effect of the extension of the federal minimum wage to agricultural workers in 1967. The article is specifically about the effect in the Mississippi Delta area:

Another crucial reason for reduced agricultural employment in the Delta was the $1 per hour minimum wage law that went into effect on February 1, 1967. Social scientists and planners had seen such a law as the key to freeing black farm workers from the archaic system of credit and paternalism that had throttled them since the end of the nineteenth century. At first glance, a mandated wage of $1 per hour might seem a blessing to workers accustomed to receiving $3.50 for a twelve-hour day. Those who advocated the minimum wage law had presumed that planters would maintain employment at pre-1967 levels. Instead, the new law jerked the slack out of a system that was not yet fully mechanized and modernized. A year after the law took effect, a planter explained:

“Hell, last year was the first time we really found out what labor efficiency could mean. We knew we couldn’t use any more casual labor because of the minimum wage, and now we’re finding out we don’t need as much specialized labor either…”

One estimate suggested that the new law put twenty-five thousand able-bodied hands in the Delta out of jobs …. The elderly and partially disabled who were unable to move were thrown into far more desperate situations than when they had clung to bare subsistence as occasional field hands who could usually count on thirty days work in June and July chopping cotton and pulling weeds at $3.50 per day. … The wife of a day worker found the new law no blessing: “That dollar an hour ain’t worth nothing. It would have been better if it had been 50 cents a day if you work every day.”  Although planters continued to allow elderly or totally destitute blacks to remain in their shacks rent fee, when such dwellings became vacant, planters put a torch to them.

Yes, I know this is obvious:  Minimum wage laws put people out of their jobs.  But it looks like a lot of people are going to have to learn the hard way soon.

MINIMUM WAGE MINIMIZES EMPLOYMENT:  Fast-food workers demand that their jobs get automated.   Or at least that’s how I read it.

DAVID LEWIS SCHAEFER:  Russia 1917, America 2021.