FIGHT THE POWER: Trump Wants Jack Smith Held in Contempt of Court in DC Criminal Case: “All substantive proceedings in this Court are halted. Despite this clarity, the prosecutors began violating the Stay almost immediately.”

DON SURBER: President Nothing: Voters realize Joe Biden is a figurehead for Obama.

ESTABLISHMENT-SANCTIONED INSURRECTIONS ARE FINE: Why No Arrests at the Insurrection in California?

The point of the J6 persecution is to tell righties they can’t expect to get away with what lefties routinely do.

BEFORE THIS IS OVER, MOST WILL VIEW THEM AS MARTYRS FOR DEMOCRACY: ‘Sympathy’ surging for Jan. 6 rioters, 43% agree ‘they had a point.’

UNIVERSITIES MAKING BIG PAYOUTS OVER COVID CLOSURES: COVID class-action splurge continues: GWU university near White House pays $5M for shutting down class.

Class-action lawyers may have frowned when Cornell University agreed to pay just $3 million last fall to settle a lawsuit seeking tuition refunds from its shutdown of classroom instruction early in the COVID-19 pandemic – a far cry from Ivy League peer Columbia’s $12.5 million payout for the same actions two years earlier.

They are likely grinning now that a comparably sized but less prestigious private university, blocks from the White House, has agreed to pay much more than Cornell, raising the prospect of more big payouts for class counsel well into 2024.

They were warned.

Cheering for the litigation and resulting settlement: one of GWU’s most vocal and feisty law professors, John Banzhaf, who pioneered public interest lawsuits against Big Tobacco and has needled the administration on free speech and students’ rights for years.

Banzhaf took a victory lap Thursday after GWU alerted eligible students, noting he publicly encouraged Revolutionaries and students nationwide to sue for refunds from COVID dorm evictions and warned colleges resuming “Zoom U” amid the Omicron variant surge they were legally vulnerable.

He also promoted and celebrated early rulings against universities, such as a Florida federal court’s rejection of Barry University’s argument that in-person and online education were functionally the same, which laid the groundwork for a $2.4 million settlement in fall 2021.

Longterm, though, universities may be better off losing these than having courts rule that their in-class product is no better than Zoom classes. . . .

MEDIA MATTERS HAS ALWAYS JUST BEEN A SELF-HERDING MECHANISM FOR LEFTY JOURNALISTS: Democratic Megadonors Bankroll Media Matters, Leaked Donor List Shows.

BUT IT’S BEEN VERY LUCRATIVE FOR HIM! Ibram Kendi’s Simplistic View of Equity, Race and Success Overlooks a Lot.

MIKE STOPA: Can ChatGPT Reason?

PHIL HAMBURGER ASKS ME TO POST THIS, AND I’M HAPPY TO:

Dear Instapundit readers,

Please forgive me for intruding on your time, but if any of you are members of the Supreme Court bar and would be willing to file an amicus brief pro bono in defense of the Texas free-speech law in NetChoice v. Paxton, I would be grateful if you could please contact me at .

The social media platforms represented by NetChoice seem to have spread their legal work across almost all of the substantial law firms in the United States, and therefore many lawyers who are inclined to file amicus briefs on the other side have been conflicted out. This has become a serious problem for those of us defending the Texas free-speech law. In the last round at the Supreme Court, several amici were therefore unable to file. So if you don’t have a conflict, and have time to file a brief pro bono next week, please let me know.

Gratefully,

Philip Hamburger

He’s a smart guy and if you can help him out I think you should.

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE IOWA SCHOOL SHOOTER.

UPDATE: A friend writes:

Re Iowa.

I used to wonder, when there was a mass shooting and pols started calling for gun control, why doesn’t anyone want to know why our society is producing young men who want to kill children? Seems like the pressing question at the heart of the matter.

Now I wonder why nobody wants to know why our society is producing young genderfluid men and women who want to kill children.

I don’t.

OPEN THREAD: Come inside, come inside. There behind the glass stands a real blade of grass. Be careful as you pass. Move along, move along.

OH NO! ANYWAY . . . Iraq Condemns U.S. After Drone Strike in Baghdad: The attack, acknowledged by the Pentagon, killed a senior militant leader of an Iran-allied group with ties to the Iraqi government’s security apparatus.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Starship, Starlink and more: SpaceX poised for huge 2024.

MICROBIOME NEWS: Chemical Produced by Gut Microbes Seems to Prevent Obesity in Mice.

LONGEVITY UPDATE: Aging’s Antidote? The Crucial Role of HKDC1 in Keeping Cells Youthful.

HEH:

To quote Ron Burgundy in Anchorman when his dog pooped on the inside of the refrigerator: “I’m not even mad. I’m impressed.” https://t.co/hTi0hoCTgU

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) January 3, 2024

REVIEW: The Acura Integra Type S Is One of the Best New Cars Under $100,000. “It is one of the finest front-wheel-drive cars ever sold, it is an incredible performance bargain, overachieving on the track, and its back seat is big enough that you could pay for one by using it as an Uber.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: So you’ve just bought an AR-15. Now what?

IF YOU WALK WITHOUT RHYTHM, YOU WON’T ATTRACT THE WORM: ‘Giant’ predator worms more than half a billion years old discovered in North Greenland.

Or maybe swim without rhythm.

THAT’S CRAZY TALK. REAL AMERICANS TAKE A PILL: Kelly Clarkson says she lost weight by ‘listening to my doctor’ and eating a ‘protein diet.’

MICROBIOME NEWS: Mouse study shows gut biome plays a role in social anxiety disorder.

JIM TREACHER: Stealing Is Wrong (Sometimes): It literally depends on skin color, you racists.

They accused her of plagiarism! They actually claimed a Black woman rose to a position of power by stealing the work of her peers. They had the gall to allege that she did so for decades.

Now, admittedly, this is absolutely correct. She did steal other people’s work. A lot. Like, a lot a lot. The accusation is 100% true.

Which raises the obvious question:

So what?

She’s not only Black, but a woman. Those immutable physical characteristics are more important than anything she may or may not have done, even if, as in this case, she totally did it.

That is the essence of her defense.

Related: The Real Harvard Scandal:

The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it. (Soon after Rufo and Brunet made their initial accusations last month, Gay issued a statement saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.” She did not address those or subsequent plagiarism allegations in her resignation letter.)

Every institution has been corrupted. And even dictionaries are willing to change their definitions to fit the political needs of the moment.

WELL, GOOD: Heart medications may ease symptoms of muscular dystrophy.

LOL: Black leftist scholars blame Harvard president’s resignation on racism.

WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SUCH A CESSPIT OF ANTI-SEMITIC HATE? Coordinated social media campaign attempts to smear Gay’s Jewish replacement as agent of ‘Zionist control.’