MATT TAIBBI: On Today’s Absurd New York Times Hit Piece: Correcting the record after a desperate slam job on the Twitter Files, published just before oral arguments in a historic First Amendment case in the Supreme Court.

JOEL KOTKIN: 2024 will be the Latino election: America’s largest racial minority could swing the vote for Trump. “Latinos’ political trajectory is complex and increasingly uncertain. In the past, Democrats imagined that Latinos, being ‘people of colour’, would follow the African-American pattern of near-automatic allegiance to their party. Progressives in publications like Salon scoffed at the notion that Latinos would ever head to the right. But Latinos leaving the Democrats is exactly what has been happening.”

SAME: “I have to admit that I underestimated the mendacity of these people.”

THAT’S WHY THEY’RE KEEPING THEM SECRET: Poll: Strong Majority Opposes Biden’s Secret Migrant Flights.

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Peregrine payloads returned useful data despite no lunar landing.

MATT TAIBBI: On Today’s Absurd New York Times Hit Piece: Correcting the record after a desperate slam job on the Twitter Files, published just before oral arguments in a historic First Amendment case in the Supreme Court. “Michael, Bari, Lee, David Zweig and others involved with the Twitter Files project have been subject to a lot of silly smear jobs in the last year-plus, but this piece of deep state fan fiction in the Times is low even by their standards. It’s clearly intended to re-cast the outing of federal censorship initiatives as Trumpian conspiracy theory before oral arguments begin in Murthy v. Missouri tomorrow.”

SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: Scientists Thought Only Two Animals Lived in The Great Salt Lake. They Were Wrong.

WEREN’T THEY SAYING THIS 20 YEARS AGO? Startling Findings – The Arctic Could Become “Ice-Free” in Less Than 10 Years.

In the Holocene era, hardwood forests grew to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and Norwegian women wore basically grass skirts. That era was known as the “climatic optimum” when I was in school, so I’ll need an explanation as to why a repeat would be awful.

FLASHBACK: The First Two Hours of MTV.

COOK YOUR MORELS: Experts warn of dangers of undercooked morel mushrooms after two deaths.

CIVILIZATION’S THIN VENEER: Haiti Has Fallen, Cannibal ‘Barbeque’ Now in Charge.

A FEW GUYS, A FEW BASEBALL BATS, AND WE HAVE THE TRADITIONAL REMEDY FOR THIS: Toronto Police Recommend Letting Thieves Steal Your Car.

I HATE TICKS, AND I LIKE IT WHEN THEY DIE: Tick-killing pill shows promising results in human trial.

WELL, GOOD: Specialized MRI may predict who will develop treatment-resistant schizophrenia.

I HAD NOT NOTICED THIS: Beverly Hills Cop is a Fourth Amendment Movie.

D.E.I. MUST D.I.E.: DEI Got Me Sacked From My Nursing Job: It didn’t matter that my critical Facebook posts made no reference to the hospital where I worked.

I took the first session of the course in July 2023. I was bombarded with evidence-free claims that implicit bias has caused a crisis of maternal mortality in black women. The course ignored the complex factors that contribute to higher black maternal mortality, including comorbidities, while defining any death from any cause after a year of giving birth as maternal mortality—a logical stretch.

Overall, the course implied that white nurses like me are killing black mothers. I was supposed to internalize this message and somehow apply it to the management of my team. . . .

The mounting politicization of the workplace frustrated me, so on Feb. 7 I posted what I thought was an innocuous message to my Facebook.

page: “No employer has the right to invade the unconscious spaces of it’s [sic] employees minds in an attempt to reprogram them into thinking certain ways. If your employer signs you up for an ‘Unconscious Bias’ aka ‘Implicit Bias’ training, then they are doing exactly that.”

My Facebook page doesn’t link me to Meritus, nor did I mention the hospital by name. I didn’t mention the courses, either. All I did was criticize the idea that people should be forced to accept a hateful worldview.
That was my mistake—speaking out publicly. The next day I received a call from my manager, who informed me that Meritus had placed me on administrative leave. . . .

In the meeting where I was fired, a Meritus representative repeatedly said I had waded into “a touchy subject.” That’s exactly my point. DEI is inherently divisive and discriminatory to boot. No hospital or medical provider should touch something so touchy, much less fire someone for daring to question it.

I love “Meritus” as the name for a company promoting anti-merit ideology.

MAYBE THEY SHOULD TRY JUST WRITING ABOUT, YOU KNOW, ACTUAL SCIENCE? Scientific American’s Latest Foray into Gender-Based Science Analysis.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Marriage promotes ‘white supremacy’: George Mason professor. “Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: High schoolers are losing confidence in the benefits of a college degree: study.

The study, ”Continuing to Explore the Exodus from Higher Education,”compares the results of focus groups and a national survey conducted in 2023 to findings from a 2022 Gates Foundation report titled, “Where are the students?.” Researchers found that high schoolers and non-enrolled adults ages 18-30 still associate some benefits with attending college, but those perceived benefits were in decline compared to findings from 2022.

The percentage of non-enrolled adults surveyed who consider reasons to go to college, such as to gain more money or get a better job, as important or very important has also dropped from the year before.

At the same time, however, non-enrolled adults continue to perceive an increasing benefit to other options such as licenses, certificates, and trade schools.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

BY REQUEST, a Sunday Morning open thread.

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Sorting for Stupidity? Thoughts on the state of the federal government.

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NOTHING TO HIDE, JUST STUFF THEY’RE HIDING: Thousands of Haitians dumped in US, but DHS won’t say where.

JOHN LUCAS: Bits and Pieces – Are Socialists Nuts? Well, sometimes they’re evil, too. And by sometimes I mean often.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Monsters We Have Known. “One of the controversies surrounding the coverage of the chaos in Haiti has been the reluctance of mainstream outlets to mention such matters as voodoo and cannibalism in connection with gang violence, as if the influence of the occult and barbaric were somehow anti-black or racist. But it is universal.”