NOT IF WE’RE FOLLOWING THE REAL SCIENCE: Do We Need Mask Mandates? Connor Harris takes a deep dive into the research on masks and epidemics, from the 1910 Manchurian Plague and 1918 Spanish flu through Covid-19. After surveying the reported benefits and harms – including the possibility that some face masks make fatal infections more likely — he concludes that Dr. Fauci’s version of “the science” bears little resemblance to the scientific literature.

It would be an overstatement to say that cloth and surgical masks are unambiguously ineffective or harmful. But neither is there a firm case that they provide any meaningful benefit. Limited mask mandates may be justified in circumstances with unavoidable face-to-face contact within the range of droplet spread, such as public transport, and private businesses should be free to require masks if they like. Citizens at high risk should be free to wear effective N95 masks for their own protection, and federal regulators should clear away barriers to domestic production.

But mandates of cloth and surgical masks impose major inconveniences and potentially serious health risks on citizens, for no clear benefit either to themselves or to others. Leaders who pride themselves on following the science should consider ending them and letting citizens protect their health as they see fit.

But then what would that leave for our leaders to do?

LEARNING FROM HISTORY: How to Defend Free Speech. The 1980s and 1990s battles against campus political correctness offer lessons for pushing back against cancel culture today. While cancel culture is indeed broader and more worrisome than campus PC was, Tevi Troy writes, the earlier effort was successful in four major ways: by unifying conservatives in the effort against PC; by enlisting some prominent non-conservatives to join the cause; by gaining broad attention outside the think tank and university world; and by using humor to highlight PC’s excesses.  All of these tactics could be useful in the anti-cancel culture fight of today.

THE WORST SCANDAL OF THE PANDEMIC: Death and Lockdowns. There’s still no proof that lockdowns save lives but plenty of evidence that they end them, as I found by looking at the toll of “excess deaths” during the pandemic. Last year in the United States  there were 130,000 more deaths than normal that were not attributed to the coronavirus.

These excess deaths occurred disproportionately among the young and middle-aged, minorities and low-income workers — groups hit especially hard by the lockdowns. The toll has been especially high in locked-down California but not in unlocked Florida. The mortality rate among younger people soared in America but not in Sweden, where it has been below normal.  All of which confirms that the lockdowns are “trickle-down epidemiology” — protecting the laptop class at the expense of the working class — and constitute one of the greatest public-health mistakes in history.

DEMOCRATS BRAVELY DEFEND THE LEISURE CLASS: Schumer Insists on Keeping Beachfront Bailouts for Wealthy Americans’ Vacation Homes.

BARI WEISS: The Miseducation of America’s Elites. Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret.

One private school parent, born in a Communist nation, tells me: “I came to this country escaping the very same fear of retaliation that now my own child feels.” Another joked: “We need to feed our families. Oh, and pay $50,000 a year to have our children get indoctrinated.” A teacher in New York City put it most concisely: “To speak against this is to put all of your moral capital at risk.”

Home schooling looks better and better.

BUT THEY WERE FOLLOWING “THE SCIENCE”: Lockdown States Suffer More Covid Deaths on Average.

FROM BAD TO WORSE: Biden’s Retreat on Crime.  Violent crime is soaring, police departments are shrinking, local activists are further hamstringing law enforcement, and now the Biden Justice Department seems likely to press for more of the “reforms” that drove up crime in the cities targeted by the Obama administration. In a podcast (which includes a transcript), Rafael Mangual and Brian Anderson of City Journal discuss the grim prospects for New York and the rest of the country.

HOW’S THAT DEFUNDING THE POLICE WORKING OUT FOR YOU? Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike. Progressive politicians and journalists are pretending the nationwide surge in shootings and murders was due to the pandemic, as in this ridiculous NPR report. But numbers don’t lie. The spike was clearly due to the decline in “proactive policing,” which was caused by the war on cops that started with the George Floyd protests.

THE NEW URBAN FLIGHT: Remotely Competitive. As workers abandon office buildings in New York and San Francisco, they’re collecting relocation bonuses from small cities and moving into apartment buildings designed as “remote work hubs.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOWER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Secretary of Ethnic Studies. President Biden’s choice to lead the Education Department has a thin record—except in one trailblazing area.

A Practical Wish List for Joe Biden. Some doable libertarian ideas from Reason’s writers and editors.

CRIME, LIKE ANTIFA, IS JUST AN IDEA: Soft on Crime. A Biden administration policy of weak policing and lax prosecution would be a disaster for the nation’s cities.

TRAINING RED GUARDS: Spoiled Rotten. Students at a private school in New York City — tuition $44,000 a year —  launch an anonymous social media campaign denouncing their teachers as “racists” and “oppressors.” And the school’s director surrenders, of course.

JOEL KOTKIN: Making America California. Now that Californians are filling top spots in the Biden administration and Silicon Valley is an arm of the Democratic party, they’ll be working together to ruin the rest of the nation’s economy — and impose California’s new version of feudalism.

JOURNALISTS AGAINST FREE SPEECH: The New Censors. When I wrote in 2019 about journalists’ new antipathy to free speech, it seemed bad enough that they were targeting rivals in their own profession with advertising boycotts and smear campaigns that led to conservative journalists being fired and banished from social media. But since the Capitol riot, they’ve gone beyond “de-platforming” individual heretics. Now they want to eliminate the platforms, too.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Words of Division. Cloaked in an appeal to unity, President Biden’s inaugural speech hit all the expected themes of racial resentment and blame.

STEVEN MALANGA: Crime and Diminishment. If crime keeps rising and the social order distintegrates, New York City’s 30-year economic miracle will likely go with it.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: On Regulating Big Tech. Donald Boudreaux critiques Richard Epstein’s argument for using common law to force Big Tech to respect the First Amendment. Boudreaux says market competition is still the best way to protect the First Amendment.

AND WHAT RACE GRIFTERS WON’T ADMIT:  What Martin Luther King and Others Wrought.

What is most remarkable about the American civil rights movement, perhaps, is how little bloodshed took place, despite the passions that it raised. The Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, lists the names of only 41 people martyred in the cause of equal rights between 1954 and 1968.

That is an astounding fact. Never in human history has so deep a national divide involving racial, religious, or ethnic groups been healed so quickly and at such a low cost in lives. For comparison, as many as 2 million people died in the violence that accompanied the transformation of the British Raj into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India in 1947.

But the Left, stuck in the past, and always looking to belittle the United States and its accomplishments, insists that the country remains “systemically racist.”

Today’s “anti-racism” movement is one more demonstration of the March of Dimes Syndrome, named after the institution that did not go out of business after its mission (conquering polio) was achieved. It found new diseases to combat. For the Al Sharptons of the world, acknowledging progress against racism would be a career killer, so to stay in business they must ignore facts and foment new hatred.

A CONTRARIAN TAKE: Is the Great Deplatforming of 2021 an Assault on Free Speech? No, says Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, but he wants to see a more decentralized Internet and thinks the solution is relying on protocols, not platforms.

IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM: The 10 Worst Helicopter Parenting Hysterias of 2020.

THE PROFITS OF DOOM: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? In 1995, Kevin Kelly, a cofounder of Wired, challenged Kirkpatrick Sale to a $1,000 bet. The Luddite-loving doomsayer was predicting that society would collapse by 2020.  Kelly, inspired by the economist Julian Simon’s bet against Paul Ehrlich, got him to put his money where his doom was. Now, despite a biased referee, the better prophet has collected his winnings.

BIDEN’S PLAN FOR HIGHER UNEMPLOYMENT: Feel Good Now — Pay Later. Biden’s stimulus is a feel-good populist measure that will ultimately harm the most vulnerable people in the American economy.

MAD AS HELL: Americans Are in Full Revolt Against Pandemic Lockdowns. Across the country, restaurants and other businesses are defying lockdown orders, as J.D. Tucille reports. But politicians aren’t about to give up their newfound powers easily, as  James Bovard points out in his essay, “Covid and The Rise of Cage Keeper Democracy.”

JOHN TAMNY: Will 21 Club’s Demise Finally Awaken People to New York City’s Slow Suffocation?