GOVERNMENT OF, BY AND FOR THE ELITE: What Progressives Wrought. Today’s divisions in America are the result of a century-long campaign by progressives to discard the nation’s founding principles.

FAKE STATISTICS: Hyping the Covid Burden on Hospitals. In the U.K., as in the U.S., health officials and the media have been exaggerating the number of people hospitalized for Covid because the tallies include those who test positive but don’t need treatment. In Britain, about 25 percent of these so-called Covid patients are actually being treated for other ailments.

STEVEN MALANGA: Heaping on the SALT. Democrats press Biden to reinstate a tax break for the wealthy.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Ripping Off the Veil. By firing nearly half its musicians in order to “prioritise diversity,” a British classical music organization exposes the sordid business behind all racial-preference regimes.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Playing the Race Card on Larry Elder. Engaging in shameful duplicity regarding crime and policing, the media attempt to portray the California gubernatorial candidate as anti-black. Columnists in the Los Angeles Times say he distorts facts, but they’re the ones making false claims — and ignoring the evidence in their own paper.

Unfortunately for Elder’s critics, the statistics showing vastly disproportionate rates of black crime and victimization come from some of the Left’s favorite sources. CDC data show that in 2015, for example, the homicide victimization rate for blacks aged 10–34 (37.5 per 100,000) was 13 times the rate for whites (2.9 per 100,000). That disparity is undoubtedly much greater now, given the record-breaking increase in homicides since the George Floyd riots—an increase disproportionately affecting blacks.

Those black victims of homicide are not being killed by cops or whites. They are being killed by other blacks. In Los Angeles, blacks this year have committed 46 percent of homicides whose offender is known, even though they are just 9 percent of the Los Angeles population. Whites make up 28 percent of the Los Angeles population but have committed 4 percent of homicides, mostly involving domestic violence. These data, reported by the Los Angeles Times, mean that a black Angeleno is 35 times more likely to commit a homicide than a white Angeleno. Homicide data are the gold standard for crime statistics. Alas for Jeffrey Fagan and the Los Angeles Times’s other experts, the statistical conclusion that blacks are “more inclined toward violent crimes” is indisputable. . . .

Elder’s dismissal of Black Lives Matter claims about systemic police violence is also grounded in fact. Police officers are at greater risk of civilian violence than blacks are at risk of police violence. And a disproportionate source of that danger to cops comes from black criminals.

Read the whole thing.

HOW TO AVOID A VACCINE MANDATE: Religious Exemption for Covid. Dan Klein, the George Mason University economist, offers a quick and easy way at Cafe Hayek to avoid vaccine mandates in Virginia. And what works in Virginia should work elsewhere.

NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE — OR END: Keeping Fear Alive. Reluctant to set the public free, politicians and the public-health bureaucracy are falsely claiming that the Delta variant is deadlier than the original virus. In reality, as I write in City Journal, the mortality rate among infected children is lower than it was last year — and last year many more children died of the flu than of Covid. Yet the fearmongers won’t let up. They’re forcing unnecessary vaccines on people with natural immunity, and forcing masks on children despite the evidence that the masks are both ineffective and harmful. As usual, Florida’s Ron DeSantis is one of the few politicians actually following the science.

STEVEN MALANGA: An Epidemic of Bad Budgeting. Even the tens of billions of dollars the Biden administration is showering on local governments won’t fix their long-term financial troubles.

BUT IF THEY SAVED JUST ONE LIFE: Another Cost-Benefit Analysis Finds that Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It. The cost of the lockdowns was up to 10 times greater than the benefits.

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS: Charles Murray’s ‘Facing Reality’ — A Review. Razib Khan reviews and summarizes Murray’s unwelcome findings regarding “systemic racism.”

Comfortable white people—“nice white parents” in affluent neighborhoods who support efforts to “defund the police”—can refuse to look into the data or insist that those data are the product of racist systems and structures. They can “interrogate their privilege” and “confront their white supremacy,” or better yet, demand that others do so. But they won’t be any closer to understanding why poor African Americans and Latinos in inner-city neighborhoods want more police officers in their neighborhoods and not fewer, nor why poor African American parents clamor for access to strict charter schools that activists condemn for being “anti-black.”

. . . These are not data that foster peace of mind, because they disrupt the delusion that there are easy answers to hard problems or scapegoats we can drive from the village to restore purity and order. But we are not a society in a state of equanimity as it is. Serenity evades us as long as we build upon a foundation of lies. Screaming about injustice, spreading the blame to others less fortunate than ourselves, or denying it outright will not bring us peace, help the less privileged, or fortify our fragile republic.

Read the whole thing — and Murray’s book.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Classical Music’s Suicide Pact (Part 2). Another cultural institution succumbs to the race-baiters. (In case you missed it: Part 1).

THE LEGAL CASE AGAINST BIG TECH CENSORSHIP: How to Interpret Section 230. The tech giants may not enjoy as much immunity as they think.

THE HYSTERIA OF THE LAPTOP CLASS: Still Panicking. Brian Anderson of City Journal and I discuss the moral panic that brought us lockdowns — and caused the nation’s elite to flout the norms of journalism, academic freedom and science during the pandemic.

DEADLIER THAN COVID: The Panic Pandemic. The worst plague to hit America last year, I argue in City Journal, was the moral panic that swept the nation’s guiding institutions — and the laptop class that prospered at the expense of the most vulnerable members of society.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom—and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.

If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession.

While the journalistic and scientific establishments panicked (et tu, Scientific American?), a few scientists and leaders kept calm. Instead of blindly following Anthony Fauci’s version of “the science,” Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, consulted with Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution and the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration, who were astonished to speak with a politician already familiar with just about every study they mentioned to him.

“DeSantis was an incredible outlier,” Atlas says. “He dug up the data and read the scientific papers and analyzed it all himself. In our discussions, he’d bounce ideas off me, but he was already on top of the details of everything. He always had the perspective to see the larger harms of lockdowns and the need to concentrate testing and other resources on the elderly. And he has been proven correct.”

Yes, he has, but Fauci and his followers will never admit it. Now they’re  calling for even stricter social-media censorship of their critics — and threatening even greater power grabs in the future.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Is Young-Adult Fiction So Popular? “The rise of the young-adult novel is the most significant literary event of this century,” writes Tanner Greer, who analyzes the fantasies in The Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter and other phenomenally successful young-adult (YA) novels.

This is the defining feature of the YA fictional society: powerful, inscrutable authorities with a mysterious and obsessive interest in the protagonist. Sometimes the hidden hands of this hidden world are benign. More often, they do evil. But the intentions behind these spying eyes do not much matter. Be they vile or kind, they inevitably create the kind of protagonist about whom twenty-first century America loves to read: a young hero defined by her frustration with, or outright hostility toward, every system of authority that she encounters. . . .

Yet if these novels speak to the sum of our anxieties, they are a poor guide to escaping them. In the world of YA speculative fiction, those who possess such power cannot be trusted. Even worse than possessing power is to seek it: our fables teach that to desire responsibility is to be corrupted by it. They depict greatness as a thing to be selected, not striven, for. This fantasy is well fit for an elite class whose standing is decided by admissions boards, but a poor guide for an elite class tasked with actually leading our communities.

Of course, it’s a great guide for millennials marching in pointless protests.

FOLLOW THE REAL SCIENCE: The Question Everything Lockdown Summit.  Toby Young of Lockdown Skeptics and others lay out the case against lockdowns at a conference in London.

ACCORDING TO FACEBOOK’S CENSORS: This Article Is “Partly False.” After Facebook’s “fact-checkers” blacklisted my previous City Journal article on the harms of forcing children to wear masks, we appealed the ruling. It was a futile but revealing exercise. Facebook refused to remove its “Partly False” label on the article, but at least we got an inside look at the tactics that social media companies and progressive groups use to distort science and public policy. They exploit Facebook’s News Feed algorithm to reduce the visibility of conservatives at the Wall Street Journal, libertarians like John Stossel, and others who challenge progressive orthodoxy.

These “fact-checkers” are actually fact-blockers.

THE ORIGINS OF COVID: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Lab-Leak Theory. Donald McNeil, who was the lead reporter on Covid for the New York Times until being forced out by a woke revolt in the newsroom, was long skeptical of the theory that Covid leaked out of a lab in Wuhan. But after considering a recent article by Nicholas Wade (another former Timesman), McNeil now says the evidence has gotten “considerably stronger.”

FOLLOWING THE DATA:  Death and Lockdowns. There’s no proof that they save lives, but plenty of evidence they end them. The latest: Alcohol Deaths Rise in England and Wales. 

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Diversity Over Discovery. Biden’s war on merit puts America’s scientific edge at risk. “His candidate to head the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest funder of the physical sciences in the U.S., is a soil geologist at the University of California, Merced. She has no background in physics, the science of energy, or the energy sector. She has never held a position as a scientific administrator.”

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is, however, a black female who has won “accolades for her work to promote diversity in science,” as Science puts it. Berhe would be the first black woman to head the $7 billion office, and that is reason enough, according to the diversity mantra, why she should oversee X-ray synchrotrons, the development of nuclear weapons, and ongoing research on nuclear fusion. Her nomination requires Senate confirmation; if Berhe will not commit to hiring and grantmaking on the basis of scientific expertise alone, irrespective of race and sex, senators should vote her appointment down.

Previously, this office was typically headed by a physicist with managerial experience in a major physics lab. But then, none of her predecessors could boast of co-authoring an article titled, “A critical feminist approach to transforming workplace climate in the geosciences through community engagement and partnerships with societies.”

AN URBAN EXPERT’S POST-COVID FORECAST: Urban Growth Will Continue.

The glue that binds information-rich industries to cities can be summarized in a word: meetings. The need to meet will return. Hurried businessmen and women will again run from meeting to meeting, iPhones glued to their ears. The business lunch will return, to the relief of downtown restaurant and bar owners. This optimistic prediction, I understand, is of scant solace for those who have borne the brunt of urban lockdowns, which have turned many downtowns into wastelands. But it will happen, I believe.

But hasn’t Covid demonstrated that transactions previously requiring a physical presence can be replaced by electronic communications? Won’t downtowns be less necessary? We’ve been here before, too. With each new technology, pundits predict a major shift—think of Frances Cairncross’s 1997 bestseller, The Death of Distance. Yet distance did not die with the Internet. Instead, the concentration of knowledge-rich jobs in large cities accelerated. More than a century ago, the arrival of the telephone and other communications improvements didn’t slow urban growth, either.

But how many people will value meetings enough to stay in Democrat-run cities with rising taxes and soaring crime?

DONALD J. BOUDREAUX: The Covid-19 Emergency Did Not Justify Lockdowns. 

While I believe that the evidence is now decisive that lockdowns were a huge mistake, my point here is not, strictly speaking, anti-lockdown. My point here, instead, is pro-science and good sense: Whatever the novelty and dangers of Covid-19, the novelty and dangers of Covid-19 lockdowns are at least arguably of the same magnitude. The dismissal of the unknown possible horrors of lockdowns in order to focus attention exclusively on the unknown possible horrors of SARS-CoV-2 is as unjustified by science as it is unpardonable as policy.

The lockdowns were trickle-down epidemiology serving the interests of politicians and the laptop class, as Boudreaux has been chronicling at Cafe Hayek.

THE LONG MARCH THROUGH INSTITUTIONS: Bearing False Witness. Leading civil rights organizations lend their voices to false claims about police.

THE CLUES LEAD TO A LAB IN WUHAN: Origin of Covid — Following the Clues. Nicholas Wade, one of the best science journalists in the world, meticulously reviews the structure of the Covid virus and the evidence for the competing theories of its origin. He concludes that “proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.”

People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.

And then let the reckoning begin.

Read the whole thing.

NOT THE NEW CENSORS IN THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY: What’s “Normal” in America? More than 200 employees of Simon and Schuster want to stop publishing anyone involved with the Trump administration because it wasn’t a “normal” chapter in American history.

For a long time, dictators, from the European tyrants of the 1930s to the military leaders of the Latin American juntas, skillfully used the violent excesses of dissenters to seize and preserve power. Now so-called liberal “resistance” to “fascism” justifies its attacks on freedom of speech by citing the threat posed by a former American president. Susan Sontag famously enraged the New Left by calling Communism “fascism with a human face.” The current woke movement has all the trappings of fascism with an anti-fascist face.

And fascism seems perfectly normal to them.