JOHN FUND:  “We Should Fear Free-Speech Curbs More Than Exposure to Racist Manifestos.”

I KEEP TELLING THESE GUYS THAT I CAN REALLY HELP FIX THIS:  “Colleges Vie for Resources to Address STEM Disparities.”  But the most effective thing they could do is cost-free:  Stop trying to “help” minority students by giving them an affirmative action leg up.  It’s backfiring.

SOCIALISM WORKS LIKE A CHARM:  The problem is that charms don’t work.

MY WASHINGTON TIMES OP-ED:  Threatening Teachers’ Ability to Control Their Classrooms.

(The full-length dissenting opinion here.  Update: It’s now the 3rd most downloaded article on SSRN for the week.)

HELP WANTED:  If you are a conservative or libertarian lawyer living in the DC area with a strong interest in civil rights issues, click here.  Yes, this is a paying job.

“CALIFORNIA WANTS TO TEACH YOUR KIDS THAT CAPITALISM IS RACIST”:  Bill Evers has an essay in the WSJ about the California Department of Education’s new “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”  Yes, it’s bad, but I’m sure you figured that:

Begin with economics. Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.

On politics, the model curriculum is similarly left-wing. One proposed course promises to explore the African-American experience “from the precolonial ancestral roots in Africa to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and enslaved people’s uprisings in the antebellum South, to the elements of Hip Hop and African cultural retentions.”

Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever.” Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform.” The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.

Housing policy gets the treatment. The curriculum describes subprime loans as an attack on home buyers with low incomes rather than a misguided attempt by the government to help such home buyers. Politicians—Republicans and Democrats—imposed lower underwriting standards on the home-loan industry. Republicans billed it as a way to expand the middle class, while Democrats crowed that it would aid the poor.

A friend of mine wrote this morning calling Bill “a brave man.”  But he didn’t mean Bill was brave to write the op-ed.  He meant that only a brave man could plow through the thousand pages of material Bill had to read in order to write his op-ed.  “Reading it all would be a fate worse than death,” wrote my friend.

The Republic won’t survive too much of this kind of stuff, you know. Yes, there’s a lot of ruin in a nation.  But it’s not infinite.  I may be a Cassandra. But never lose sight of the fact that Cassandra was right.

THE FATHER OF THE MODEL T: On this day in 1863, during the depths of the Civil War, future automaker Henry Ford was born.

Ford didn’t invent the automobile. Nor did he invent the assembly line. But he put those two ideas together and combined them with a relentless … and I really mean relentless … effort to make a product that was both functional and affordable. Said Ford:

I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Of course, as he acknowledged, he had great people working for him. When we pay tribute to Ford for putting ordinary Americans behind the wheel of a Model T and other early Ford automobiles, don’t forget Ford’s many bright boys–Clarence Avery, Gus Degner, Eugene Farkas, Jozsef A. Galamb, Henry Love, Peter E. Martin, Charles E. Sorensen, C.J. Smith, Childe Harold Wills and others–who supplied their share of that relentless effort.  I suspect Instapundit readers can fill in some names that I don’t know.

Yes, I know Ford was an anti-semite. And not your garden-variety turn-of-the-century anti-semite either. He was hardcore, feels-it-deep-in-his-gut kind.  I bet he had other bad qualities too. But the Model T was a marvel.

SAD BUT TRUE:  Max Eden:  “The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Embraces Alternative Facts.”

(My dissent is here.)

ISN’T THIS WHERE THE WORD “KOW TOW” COMES FROM?:  American movie studios appease Chinese censors.

“UC IMPOSES POLITICAL LITMUS TEST“:  Dan Walters reports on the University of California’s “loyalty oath”:

Although UC’s Board of Regents officially declares that “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee,” a new UC policy seems to be doing exactly that.

BREITBART:  Breitbart’s Susan Berry weighs in on the Civil Rights Commission’s ill-considered school discipline report.  (My dissenting statement here.)

WARREN KANDERS SHOULD GET HIS $10 MILLION BACK:  And the Whitney Museum staffers who chased him off the board of directors should have to cough up the money out of their own pockets.  What pompous fools.

WHO SAYS COWS CAN’T BE HEROES?:  Irish bovine assists police in catching a burglar.  Moo.

PETER KIRSANOW:  “Racial Disparities and School Discipline.”  The Commission on Civil Rights has come to the wrong conclusions. Again.

CONSTITUTIONAL ORIGINALISTS HAPPILY COMMUNING TOGETHER: The Federalist Society is going back to basics this year by holding its annual lawyers’ convention on the theme of originalism, which is a tiny bit easier to do now that Mike Rappaport and John McGinnis have written Unifying Original Intent and Original Public Meaning. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend it. Mike and John do a great job at reconciling these two approaches to originalism. And they do it in an approachable style.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Some related thoughts on originalism, from me, can be found here.

“TIME TO DIE”:  Glenn just noted the passing of Rutger Hauer at the age of 75.  Here’s the You Tube of the “Time to Die” scene from Bladerunner.  It’s still haunting after all these years.

WHEN THE COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS LOSES THE WASHINGTON POST …: Even the Washington Post seems to understand that the report the Commission released yesterday on school discipline is not on the up and up. It writes: “[T]here was little, if any, evidence in the report to back up the conclusion that there are no racial disparities in behavior.” (Thank you, WaPo.  I would have said “zero evidence anywhere,” but I understand you have to be careful in dealing with issues you haven’t been studying for a long while.)

Here is my dissent. Please take a look if you have the time and the inclination. The report is not just on race. It is also on disability (or rather the intersection between race and disability) . One of the weirdest parts of the Commission report is its finding that disabled students are disciplined more often than non-disabled students. Well duh. These are students whose disability is defined in terms of misbehavior. We’re not talking about students in wheelchairs (who are disciplined less often than usual). The Commission’s finding is the equivalent of a finding that says “Students who misbehave a lot misbehave a lot.” Students who have meltdowns in class prevent other students form learning. From time to time, they must be removed.  Yet the Commission fails entirely to point this out. Readers are left to imagine that teachers have it out for the deaf and the blind.

THE TOW-HAIRED TORY SPEAKS: “The people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts.”

THE NIXON-KHRUSHCHEV KITCHEN DEBATES: On this day in 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon, on a trip to Moscow to open a trade show exhibit of American wares, engaged Soviet First Secretary and Premier Nikita Khrushchev what came to be known as “the Kitchen Debates.”

The Exhibit contained a full-scale model of a modern American kitchen. Khrushchev insisted that the Soviets had such things. But Nixon countered by telling him that “any steel worker” could afford them in America.

The debate was friendly and inconclusive. But no doubt many Soviet citizens who visited the Exhibit knew they didn’t have such things. And … well … some of them probably got to wondering about how things were in America.

THE SCARIEST TITLE IX STORY EVER TOLD:  I believe that women overwhelmingly know better than to get themselves into this kind of a situation.  But guys?  Some do not.

HOT OFF THE PRESS!: Today, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is releasing a new report on school discipline at the intersection of race and disability. Just one example of its many errors: The report claims that students of different races misbehave at the same rates. That would be great if true it were true.  But it isn’t true.  And it isn’t doing students any favors to pretend.

If you prefer truth to the Commission’s many errors, please read my dissent.

Local control of schools is important.  The Commission’s majority is trying to justify federal control.  Don’t let them.

“PROGRESSIVES ARE CONVINCED THAT TRUMP IS TOAST”:  That could hurt them.

THE PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF ULYSSES S. GRANT: On this day in 1885, Ulysses Grant died at the age of 63, essentially penniless. Only a few days before he had completed his final task—writing his memoirs. Those memoirs would soon make his widow a wealthy woman. And that is exactly what he had been praying for.

Grant had been diagnosed with throat cancer not quite a year before his death. In order to run for President, he had forfeited his military pension, and a series of bad investments had left the Grant family in a dire financial condition. So he feverishly set about to write his memoirs so that his beloved Julia would be supported after his death. Mark Twain, an admirer of Grant, arranged for a book contract on very favorable terms to the former President.

The book was a hit, and Twain’s marketing strategy on behalf of Grant’s family was shrewd. Union army veterans flocked to buy it.

Historians, although enthusiastic about his literary talent, are sometimes surprised to find themselves praising Grant as possibly the best book-length author among the nation’s Presidents. They should not be. Those who knew Grant knew that he was a wonderful storyteller with a detailed memory for the events of the Civil War and much else. They weren’t in the least surprised at his ability to put it all down on paper.

Yes, the book is still available.

(p.s. these days former Presidents seem to do pretty well financially. There is no need to worry about penniless widows, widowers, or starving Presidential offspring.  Obama’s net worth has been estimated at $40 million. The Clintons have made $240 million since leaving the White House.  George W. Bush has been estimated to come in a little behind Obama, which may be surprising to some given that, unlike Obama and Clinton, he was born to wealth.)

PUT ME IN THAT LAST DORM:  UNLV provides separate dorms for African Americans, LGBT, and students who go to college to study.

FEDERAL SCHOOL DISCIPLINE POLICY:  The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will release a perfectly terrible report on school discipline at the intersection of race and disability in the morning.

If you have an interest in the issue and would like to call in to hear the Chair Catherine Lhamon discuss the report, there will be an opportunity to do so at 10:45 am Eastern time tomorrow morning.  Details here.  I will not be on the call.  I was not invited.  But my dissent should be available on Instapundit a little before then.