ON THIS DAY IN 1856, CONGRESSMAN PRESTON BROOKS (D-SC) BEAT SENATOR CHARLES SUMNER (R-Mass) WITHIN AN INCH OF HIS LIFE ON THE FLOOR OF U.S. SENATE: Two days earlier, at the height of the “Bleeding Kansas” crisis, Sumner had given an impassioned speech against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and against slavery itself. Brooks, whose cousin Senator Andrew Butler had been instrumental in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, viewed the beating with a cane as an acting of retaliation for defamation. Sumner was lucky to survive.   It was years before he was able to continue his work at the Senate full time.

If you think we’re polarized now, try 1856: William Cullen Bryant in the New York Evening Post wrote: “Has it come to this, that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters?… Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves? Are we too, slaves, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?” On the other hand, the Richmond Enquirer editorialized that “vulgar abolitionists in the Senate” should be “lashed into submission.”

THE MEDIA SEE ONLY ONE COLLUSION STORY:  Anyone examining FBI and Justice Department abuses is smeared and ridiculed, writes John Fund.

RESOLUTION REJECTED: “BE IT RESOLVED, WHAT YOU CALL POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, I CALL PROGRESS”: Friday night’s Munk debate in Toronto shows that Canadians (in general not exactly a rough bunch) reject political correctness.

Even before Michael Eric Dyson & Michelle Goldberg (FOR THE RESOLUTION) squared off against Stephen Fry & Jordan Peterson (AGAINST THE RESOLUTION), the crowd was already strongly against the resolution (36% FOR vs. 64% AGAINST). But after the debate it was overwhelming (30% FOR vs. 70% AGAINST). The shift of 6% to AGAINST made Fry & Peterson the declared winners of the debate.

Ho hum, right?  It’s not like this is surprising.  Yet the identity politics juggernaut marches forward both in Canada and the USA, aided by a strong and effective ethic of political correctness, which makes open discussion of the issues more difficult than is should be.  The Trump Administration has had only the most marginal effect. There is a special look of terror that comes over the eyes of conservative political leaders when one brings to their attention the opportunity to say or do something that would help. Alas, I have witnessed that look too many times to count.

MORE YALE STUDENTS DEMAND EMOTIONAL SUPPORT ANIMALS: Federal law says universities have to make “reasonable accommodations” for students who claim emotional trauma.  But if anyone believes this can be reasonably contained, they are being naive.  I had a student a couple of years ago who was gleefully upfront about how he was taking advantage of the law just to be annoying.

Your constitutional right to free speech may not be secure on campuses these days. But your roommate’s right to bleating, pooping aardvark may be. Not that there’s anything wrong with that …

RESPECT VOLCANOES:  On this day in 1980, Mount St. Helens blew its head off.  Fifty seven people were killed.  Among the dead was 30-year-old vulcanologist David A. Johnston, who was stationed as an observer on a ridge six miles away.  His famous last words were radioed:  “Vancouver!  Vancouver!  This is it!”  And indeed it was.

Over 230 square miles of vegetation and buildings were flattened.

It could have been worse.  Swarms of earthquakes had started in March.  Because of the work of people like Johnston, we knew enough about volcanoes at the time to close the park and tell people in the vicinity that this one was likely to get ugly and that they should get the heck out of there.  (There was apparently pressure not to close the park, but caution prevailed.)

One guy who refused to leave was 83-year-old innkeeper Harry R. Truman.  He’d lived nearby for 54 years.  Like Johnston’s, Truman’s body was never found.

FLASHBACK:  UC DAVIS LAW SCHOOL COMMENCEMENT 1978:  California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk’s Finest Hour.  (Yes he did have a finest hour.)  At the Volokh Conspiracy.

GOOGLE  EXPANDS LIST OF REASONS IT MAY DE-INDEX A WEB SITE:  When an administrative agency (like the FDA) finds that a site illegally distributes material that risks physical harm to consumers …

FATHER JACQUES MARQUETTE AND LOUIS JOLLIET: On this day in 1673, a 35-year-old Jesuit priest and a 27-year-old fur trader began their exploration of Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River, leaving from St. Ignace at the north end of Lake Michigan. From there, they went up the Fox River and then overland (carrying their canoes) to the Wisconsin River, which took them to the Mississippi River. Out of fear of running into the Spanish, they turned back at the Arkansas River. By then, they had confirmed that the Mississippi does indeed run to the Gulf of Mexico.

The route back was different. And this becomes important to the history of the country and especially of the City of Chicago: Friendly Native Americans told them that if they go up the Illinois River and the Des Plaines, rather than the Wisconsin, it would make the trip easier. That’s because the portage distance from the Mississippi watershed and the Great Lakes watershed was shortest there. The Chicago River, which dumped into Lake Michigan was only a short distance away.

If you’ve ever wondered why Chicago grew into a major city so quickly, this is why: Location, location, location.  In the modern world it’s easy to miss how much topographical issues like that mattered (and in different ways continue to matter).  But cities don’t just crop up in random places.

HE’D HAVE MY VOTE (IF I LIVED IN DOUGLAS COUNTY, OREGON):  Paris train hero runs for Douglas County commissioner.  Electing heroes to office doesn’t always work out well, but … well … I can’t help but have a good feeling here.  Go Alek Skarlatos!

TODAY IS THE 52^nd ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION:  The consensus minimum death toll figure for that period in Chinese history is 400,000. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday place the number at up to three million in Mao: The Unknown Story. But even without a single death, the Cultural Revolution would have been horrific. It was an attempt—in some ways entirely successful and in other ways not—to destroy the fabric of Chinese civilization.

The opening event was the Politburo’s issuance of the so-called “May 16^th Notification.” That fevered document laid out Mao’s justification for the attack:

Chairman Mao often says that there is no construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation; it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which is construction. Put destruction first, and in the process you have construction.

The May 16^th Notification is full of class warfare and conspiracy-minded paranoia:

Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khrushchev for example, who are still nestling beside us.

In the coming months, things spun out of control. Red Guard students (often financed by the Party) were instructed to attack the “Four Olds”—old customs, cultures, habits and ideas. And attack they did. Entire libraries, temples, monasteries and mosques were destroyed. Clergy were arrested and sent off to camps. The national police chief declared that it was “no big deal” if Red Guards were beating “bad people” to death. Countless enemies of the people were denounced, humiliated, and made to confess their sins.  Many were tortured.  Many were sent off to the countryside for re-education, where they often died, since the villages did not have enough to feed them.  China was brought to its knees by gangs of thuggish teenagers, drunk with power.

Can it happen here? Probably not—at least not the way it happened in China.   America’s equivalent of the Chinese “counter-revolutionaries” have more resources to fall back on and hence can afford to push back.  (They are also increasingly armed. Even I, the original Miss Fumblefingers, have a mean-looking (though antique) firearm in my bedroom.  Just thought you’d want to know.)

Still, when faint echoes of the Cultural Revolution occur here—as they frequently do these days—I get butterflies in my stomach.  Our civilization, like every civilization, is in many ways more fragile than most people understand.

AS CROSS-RACIAL ADOPTIONS BECOME COMMONPLACE, HANDWRINGING SEEMS TO HAVE INCREASED: We’ve come a fur piece since the 1980s, when the President of the National Association of Black Social Workers declared at a Senate hearing, “We view the placement of Black children in white homes as a hostile act against our community. It’s a blatant form of racial and cultural genocide.” Congress didn’t buy the argument. Noting that Black children had been languishing in foster care, because adoption agencies were hesitant to allow white families to adopt them, it first passed the Howard Metzenbaum Multi-Ethnic Placement Act of 1994 and then it strengthened that Act with Inter-Ethnic Placement Provisions of the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996. These statutes essentially prohibited federally funded adoption agencies from discriminating on the basis of race.

These days, cross-racial adoptions happen frequently. But I’ve started noticing more and more and still more worrying about possible downside consequences. What happens to a child when nobody in his family looks like him? Won’t it be traumatic? I guess that view is just one more sign of the times.  As race becomes less important, people worry about it more.

A generation ago they used to laugh about adoption agencies of the generation preceding, which had gone out of their way to match the hair and eye color and adopting parents and children. This was thought to be excessive. Now the worriers seem to have come full circle.   This is not to say that adopted children don’t have thoughts about their origins.  But this would be so no matter who adopts them, and the way to handle it will differ enormously from child to child.  I would put the current attention the issue is getting in the category of “first world problems.”

By the way, as recently as 2003, Randall Kennedy wrote that his experience with the National Association of Black Social Workers was that its members hadn’t changed their minds.  They did change their rhetoric.

VOLOKH CONSPIRACY TEMPORARILY BLOCKED BY NORDSTROM’S WIRELESS AS A “HATE AND RACISM” WEB SITE:  Eugene Volokh says, “The culprit was apparently the blacklist run by a company called Brightcloud; I asked [the Nordstrom media relations people] to review their categorization of our site, and within a few hours we were unblocked.”

This nevertheless gives me the willies.  Conservative and libertarian bloggers could, of course, wait until things get worse before they start to get really upset.  But by then, of course, it will be too late, since we won’t be able to communicate with anyone anymore.

EDUCATION MYTHS PERPETUATED: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ most recent significant offering is entitled Report on Public Education Inequity in an Era of Increasing Concentration of Poverty and Resegregation. Alas, like many such reports, it perpetuates several destructive myths. For example, it suggests that school districts with high concentrations of minority or low-income students get fewer actual dollars per students than the average school district. Nope. While pockets of underfunding exist, low-income and high-minority school districts tend to get somewhat more money than the average school district on a per-pupil basis (though they get less per-pupil than some mostly-small, mega-wealthy school districts). This “fewer actual dollars per pupil” myth needs to be corrected; it gives rise to unnecessary resentments. It’s hard to have an honest and productive discussion about how schools should be funded, when people are being led to believe that things are worse than they are (and that racism is to blame). I am certainly willing to entertain the possibility that schools with high concentrations of low-income students need more money than the average school. Indeed, I’m inclined to believe it.  But I’m not willing to start from the notion that more money for schools is the primary thing that’s needed to solve the nation’s educational problems.

My Dissenting Statement to the Report on Public Education Inequity in an Era of Increasing Concentration of Poverty and Resegregation tries to deal with some of the realities of school finance. Among other things, it makes the point that the relationship between funding and student success is pretty tenuous. (E.g. Washington, D.C. schools are both the highest spenders and the lowest performers.)

I’m not sure I can fix all that’s wrong with schools today.  But I least I can point out when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is on the wrong track.

HATE CRIMES LAWS ARE A BUST:  Robby Soave reports on what he learned at Friday’s hate crimes briefing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.  Soave wasn’t just a journalist there; he was also a witness.  Indeed, he was the only witness in the all-day briefing who argued against these problematic laws.

ARKANSAS JUDGE ISSUES TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER AGAINST POLITICAL AD ALLEGED (BUT NOT YET PROVEN) TO BE LIBELOUS:  Uh … I thought judges weren’t supposed to do that.  More significantly, First Amendment guru Eugene Volokh agrees.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO L. FRANK BAUM (1856-1919), author of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  The poor guy never got to see the movie.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION DOESN’T QUITE CONVENE:  On this day in 1787, what became the Constitutional Convention was supposed to convene in Philadelphia.  But it didn’t.  There was no quorum yet.  Things didn’t get off the ground till May 25th.  In the meantime, there was plenty of time for food, librations and informal discussion at the Indian Queen Tavern.

GET WELL SOON, MELANIA:  In hospital.

THE CRAZY LEFT MIGHT BE SMALLER THAN IT SEEMS: For decades, the same group has been turning up over and over again–often with the same individuals and usually with the same lawyers.

Here’s what’s new this week: A Sacramento County Superior Court Judge declined to drop felony charges against a leader of the so-called “Antifa.” The individual—47-year-old Yvette Felarca–was involved in a riot between approximately 300 Antifa types and 30 Alt-Right types in Sacramento in 2016. At that event, she was caught on video punching out one of the attendees. Unlike others in positions of authority, the Sacramento District Attorney wasn’t willing to ignore it.

Felarca was the subject of a fawning blurb in Newsweek back in September.  This was during the period the media thought Antifa activists were the good guys, here to save us from the fascist right. By now, I think they’ve figured out the Antifa is at least as fascist as anything on the right—or at least I hope they have. But it shouldn’t have taken them (or anybody else) so long. Felarca is a member of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary (a Detroit/Oakland-based organization that calls itself “BAMN”). Alas, I’ve been dealing with BAMN for more than 20 years now. During the campaigns for California’s Proposition 209 in 1996, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative in 2006 and the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative in 2010, this violent offshoot of the Revolutionary Workers League was always there, often engaged in violent and disruptive activity. We just had to work around them. Mercifully I’ve never been in physical proximity to any of them, but my colleagues in these campaigns haven’t always been so lucky.

Just one among dozens of examples of BAMN’s willingness to use “any means necessary” was its attempt to intimidate the Michigan Board of Canvassers into refusing to certify the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative for the ballot. BAMN brought in busloads of mostly-teenaged protesters who shouted down officials, chanted “They say Jim Crow, we say hell no,” jumped on chairs, and stomped their feet, flipping over a table in the process. As the director of elections of the Michigan Secretary of State put it, “Never before have I see such absolutely, incredible and unprofessional behaviors from lawyers urging this disruption.” BAMN’s co-chair and attorney saw things differently: “Our tactics win. That’s the bottom line.” (They didn’t win in that case. The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative was certified and passed by Michigan voters. BAMN even took the initiative to the Supreme Court, where in the final round, BAMN lost.)

I find some comfort in the fact that the same few people from BAMN turn up in so many places. Perhaps there really aren’t that many utter nut cases out there.

THE LEWIS & CLARK EXPEDITION: On this day in 1804, Lewis and Clark set off on their fabled expedition from Camp DuBois in Illinois.

The fame of these two adventurers has had its ups and downs. By the late 19^th century, their feat wasn’t quite so fabled anymore. But in 1904, two expositions marking the expedition’s centennial—the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis and the Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland—revived interest in them. By mid-century they had become the rock stars of many American History books for school children.

These days the biggest star of the expedition may be Sacajawea. It seems not as many folks like white guys in buckskin they way they used to. But they’re still all rock stars to me.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I really enjoyed Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis & Clark expedition.

WRONG QUESTION, EH?: Earlier this year, by act of Parliament, the English lyrics to “O Canada” went gender neutral. The BBC now looks back and wants to know why there was so much opposition to changing the reference to “all our sons” (which was apparently intended to honor Canada’s WWI dead) to “all of us” (which isn’t).  But that’s the wrong question. The right question is why the new lyrics were changed at all, given so much opposition. The only poll I know of was taken in 2010. At that point three-quarters of Canadians opposed the change. Since when is it a good idea to annoy voters that way?

Here’s a version “O Canada” sung by WomEnchant, which bills itself as “a community ensemble with a feminist and social justice perspective.” It contains the new gender neutral language along with a few other changes.  Canada may see further demands for lyrics alterations.

THE LATE 1940s SAW A LOT OF MAJOR MOVEMENTS OF REFUGEES:  In 1945, there were almost 1 million Jews living in Arab lands.  Within just a few years, that had changed radically.  When India was partitioned, 14 million were displaced. Large centuries-old German settlements in the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia disappeared as ethnic Germans, were expelled or deported, fled or died. Only in the case of Palestinians is the refugee issue still alive, says Jeff Jacoby.

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS:  The Logan Act seems silly to me.  But when Trump is suspected of violating it, the FBI swings into action.  When John Kerry violates it by meeting with Iranian “diplomats” in Paris , nothing happens. (And arguably he’s made it a practice of violating it since 1970).

There is a lesson that extends far beyond the Logan Act here:  When law enforcement has a lot of discretion, it gets abused.  Sometimes this occurs because a legislature passes a statute that is intended to give law enforcement discretion.   Sometimes, on the other hand, the statute’s over-breadth isn’t obvious until well after it is passed, and prosecutorial discretion evolves from there.   And sometimes the law is arguably narrow and specific, but over time law enforcement comes to view it as unwise and hence enforces it only when it suits them for other reasons (arguably the Logan Act case).   Too much discretion leads to corruption.  And if it doesn’t ALWAYS happen, it’s close enough to always for government work.

THE LEFT CONTINUES TO EAT ITS OWN: Police were called in to restore order at a legislative town hall in Arlington, Va. on Saturday. Immigration activists calling themselves “La ColectiVa” object to Virginia Delegate Alfonso Lopez (D-Arlington), because he once did a small amount of consulting work for a private company that operates detention facilities for ICE. They want him to apologize, promise never to do it again and return the money.

The officeholders at the meeting appear to have all been Democrats.

“It’s one of the most stressful meetings I’ve been in my 21 years of office,” said state Sen. Barbara Favola (D-Arlington). …

“I’ve been [in office] for 27 years and no one has fought harder for immigrants or immigrant rights than Delegate Lopez,” [state Senator Janet Howell (D-Fairfax)] said.

It’s funny how politicians expect to be loved.

In connection with my work on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, I investigated conditions at two immigration detention centers located in Texas a few years ago. I found the center run by a private company to be quite nice.   The government-run center run by the federal government was decent and conscientiously run too. I wrote about them.

I SHOULDN’T POST THIS. IT WILL ONLY FEED EVERYONE’S HYPOCHONDRIA: But after three years of having a runny nose, a woman has learned that it was not allergies. It was brain fluid.