MY LATEST IN CITY JOURNAL: New York City’s Composting Delusion. The city is too broke to maintain basic services, but it’s wasting tax dollars to make life a little grubbier for everyone. Garbage police are now searching through trash so they can fine New Yorkers who don’t separate all their food waste into bins for composting. Curbside recycling has never made sense, but composting is the most idiotic form of it: the least benefit at the highest cost. The composting edict makes political sense only when you consider the motivations of the industries and progressive activists who lobbied for it: money and power.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Racist–But Underfunded? Universities have gone from arguing that science is biased to claiming that even the overhead on their massive federal research budgets must not be cut by the Trump administration. Academic bureaucrats often collect surcharges of more than 50 percent on the federal grants that go to researchers. How could science ever progress without taxpayers subsidizing the six-figure salaries of deans of inclusion and community engagement?

THEY SILENTLY CONCEDED THE LOCKDOWNS WERE INDEFENSIBLE: Jay Bhattacharya’s Confirmation Hearing Was an Embarrassment for Democrats. It was as close as we may ever get to a formal surrender in the long war over Covid policies. Senators who had once denounced the NIH nominee’s “dangerous” ideas — and supported the unprecedented authoritarian restrictions — had nothing to say at the hearing about lockdowns, mandates for masks and vaccines, or anything related to Covid. Pandemic? What pandemic?

AND NOT JUST ON VALENTINE’S DAY: Why Did We Evolve to Feel Romantic Love? One of the last interviews, just posted by the neuroscientists Heather Berlin and Christof Koch, with the world’s most quoted authority on love, the great anthropologist (and my late wife), Helen Fisher.

A MISSION FOR ELON: America’s Air-Traffic Control System: An International Disgrace. Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ DEI mandates, America’s system was already one of the worst in the developed world. And it’s only gotten worse since then. It could fixed with a reform that would help drain the D.C. swamp, shrink the federal budget deficit, improve aviation safety, reduce flight delays, conserve fuel, lower carbon emissions, and save money for airlines and passengers. Are you listening, DOGE?

A BIG WIN FOR SCIENCE: From “Fringe” to Mainstream. Trump’s nomination of Jay Bhattacharya to head NIH is a major victory for science and academic freedom — —and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, as I explain in City Journal. Elite universities annually receive more than $500 million apiece from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, which is one reason that so many academics were afraid to challenge Anthony’s Fauci’s version of “The Science” — they needed his agency’s money.

Under Biden, the NIH used its financial leverage to promote critical-race research and the expansion of DEI bureaucracies. Those priorities are about to change. Assuming the Senate confirms Bhattacharya, one of the few scientists who did challenge Covid orthodoxy, he can use that leverage to promote genuine scientific debate on campus.

UNLEASH RFK JR.: Shake up HHS. The department, exposed during the pandemic for its incompetence and groupthink, is in desperate need of reform—which Robert Kennedy Jr., whatever his flaws, will pursue. As Jeffrey Anderson points out,  RFK rightly criticized the public-health establishment for protecticing Big Pharma by promoting remdesivir, an expensive drug with no proven effectiveness against Covid, while ignoring evidence that low-cost ivermectin might be effective — and bizarrely launching a public-relations campaign to convince the public that  this widely used drug was suitable only for horses.

Yet the FDA wouldn’t even grant that ivermectin was suitable for humans, let alone that it could help fight Covid-19. Channeling its inner Snowball from Animal Farm, the FDA effectively insisted that when it comes to ivermectin, “Four legs good, two legs bad!” The mainstream media then dutifully bleated out the same.

That wasn’t the end of the public-health establishment’s Covid-era depredations. Bureaucrats and officials denied natural immunity, defiantly insisted that masks work, refused to admit that masks undermine human social interaction and cause other harmful effects, and groundlessly asserted that rapidly developed, experimental mRNA vaccines were almost entirely safe and effective in stopping the spread of Covid-19. None of these claims was true.

These examples illustrate that our public-health establishment needs to be shaken up, whether by RFK Jr. or someone else. It is high time for the CDC’s, FDA’s, and NIH’s arrogant rule by “experts” to come to an end.

Read the whole thing.

NO, NATE, THE TRUMP ROMP WASN’T HARD TO CALL: The New Election Gurus. From City Journal:

Six days before the election, the statistician Nate Silver issued a warning to his 3.4 million followers on X: “Just Say No to analysis of early voting. It probably won’t help you to make better predictions. But you may fool yourself.” He received a prompt reply from a Utah woman, posting anonymously under the handle @DataRepublican.

“Nate, sit down,” she wrote. “You don’t know anything about early voting.”

She turned out to be right, at least about this election. While Silver and the rest of the punditocracy were calling the election an unpredictable tossup, @DataRepublican and her collaborators — an informal network on X of mostly anonymous and unpaid number-crunchers like her– were fearlessly forecasting a decisive Trump victory based on their computer models of early-voting data. They started calling Nevada and other battleground states two weeks before Election Day. By the campaign’s final weekend, they had correctly called six of the seven battleground states (they still weren’t sure about Michigan) as well as the national popular vote for Trump.

How did they do it? In interviews for my article in City Journal, they described their methods — and criticized the polling industry’s methods as well as the leftist biases of the media’s favorite experts. @DataRepublican described her mission: ““This is about me taking a dagger to the current state of punditry.”

A SCORECARD FOR TONIGHT: Which Way Will It Go? An expert’s guide to the battleground states — and which polls are most trustworthy — from Jeffrey Anderson, the former director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

HINT: THIS CANDIDATE GREW UP IN A MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY: Who’s the Fascist?  The presidential candidates’ records contradict the media narrative. My latest in City Journal.

JOHN STOSSEL: Activists Profiting Off Panic Are Wrong. The World Is Getting Better. Some optimism — and outrage at profiteering activists — in this Reason article and video, which draws from my City Journal article, “The March of Dimes Syndrome.”

OUT: THE ENLIGHTENMENT.  In: The Endarkenment. Martin Gurri has a name for our age.

The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning and lost sight of all paths to a happier future. It’s the triumph of wish over facts, the infantilization of top echelons of the social pyramid—of hyper-credentialed, globally mobile people, wielders of power and wealth and media, who, on a routine basis, confuse their self-important imaginings with the world itself. It’s the widespread descent of everyone else, now deprived of teachers, preachers, and role models, into a cognitive underclass, prone to the most bizarre theories about how things work.

The Endarkenment is experienced collectively as the disintegration of institutions, a traumatic fracturing of social life, and the seemingly ceaseless perpetuation of political conflict. But it is also experienced at the personal level in the form of heightened anxiety, depression, drug addiction, “deaths of despair,” and a loss of interest in family and procreation—even in sex.

Read the whole thing.

TEVI TROY: The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry. An excellent chronicle from the best-selling historian on the White House’s long-running battles against entrepreneurs from John D. Rockefeller to Elon Musk.

JOHN STOSSEL: The Crisis Industry: How Activists Profit from Panic.  An entertaining video exposing the charlatans doing well by doing bad: promoting fake scares about racism, hate crimes, homophobia, vaping, and environmental doom. Stossel and I discuss my City Journal article about activists desperately switching to new causes, “The March of Dimes Syndrome,” and my book with Roy Baumeister, The Power of Bad.

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE: Prosecute Criminal Protesters. Criminal anti-Israel demonstrators often go unpunished, even as other groups face severe sanctions.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Girling the Boy Scouts. Progressives notch another victory in their war on American institutions.

JULY WAS BAD ENOUGH: Watch Out for August! Think July was historic? Tevi Troy looks back on previous summers and concludes: Beware the eighth month.

KAY HYMOWITZ: The New Girl Disorder. Why are young women so prominent in anti-Israel protests?

UPDATE: Link was bad before; should be working now.

THE BOSS FROM HELL: VP Kamala Harris Had 92-Percent Staff Turnover During Her First Three Years. Only four of the initial 47 staffers stuck it out until March of 2024, according to the auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

JAMES MEIGS: How the Secret Service Failed. What disaster science tells us about the Trump assassination attempt.

POWER CORRUPTS: “I Represent Science.” Anthony Fauci’s autobiography unwittingly reveals his transformation from an open-minded scientist to an imperious, unaccountable public-health bureaucrat. As James Meigs concludes in his review of Fauci’s memoir: “No federal official should have so much power, with so little accountability, for so long.”

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: A Compromised Secret Service. The agency has sacrificed its basic mission on the altar of DEI.

TEVI TROY: Another Chapter in a Grim History. The long chronicle of presidential assassinations and attempted assassinations reveals certain commonalities and one overarching lesson.

NOT WHAT THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE VOTING FOR: Moving Backward in the Land of Lincoln. Illinois’ progressive government fails minority communities.

THE MEDIA’S QUANDARY: What Do You Do with a Failed Coup? Biden’s refusal to succumb to the media’s demands for his ouster reminds Dave Seminara of  failed coups against African leaders that he monitored during his career at the State Department.

Of course, being the president of a democratic country, Biden doesn’t have all the tools these authoritarian leaders have at their disposal. He can’t singlehandedly rig elections, shut down independent media, imprison enemies, and terrorize the populace like a proper dictator. And yet, repression wasn’t the key factor that enabled these dictators to survive coup attempts and cling to power. Each was able to retain the loyalty of people who mattered—rank and file soldiers, party leaders, tribal elders, and so on. Biden has sagely done much the same during his five decades in politics. The media has deserted him, but key Democrats and Democratic constituencies (unions, the Congressional Black Caucus) have not.

When I was the State Department’s desk officer for Chad, French diplomats made many overtures to Idriss Deby, offering significant incentives and soft-landing sinecures to try to convince him to retire. He wasn’t interested, largely because he enjoyed being in power. President Biden is the same. He thinks Trump is beatable (and he is) and doesn’t want to be a one-term president. In the same way that Third World tyrants disregard public opinion, Biden brushes off polls showing that close to 80 percent of the country thinks that he’s too old to be president. That’s not what our polls say, Jack.

Unless something changes — like a whistleblower leaking evidence of a Parkinson’s diagnosis — journalists will need to adapt.

The media thought that they could take Biden down, but it’s becoming clear that he’s not stepping down just because armies of polyamorous, Brooklyn-dwelling sub-editors have soured on him. The question now is: In the wake of their failed coup attempt, how will the media go back to shilling for Biden? It seems like an impossible pivot, but somehow I’m confident that the same lying, dog-faced pony soldiers who told us the president was as sharp as a tack will return to business as usual. That is to say, after a brief hiatus, they will go back to promoting the perceived interests of the Democratic Party, hoping that voters forget all the mean things they said about Joe Biden during the brief, heady days when it looked like the coup was on.

Read the whole thing.