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

HEATHER MAC DONALD: White Supremacy in Tutus. Classical ballet has largely escaped the revisionist destruction that hit the opera and theater stages years ago. But no more: Diversity and bias obsessions come for Swan Lake. 

LEAVING CALIFORNIA: Flight of the Icons. Anti-business policies are driving flagship firms and young residents out of California. Once the ultimate land of youth, the state is now aging faster than the rest of the nation.

Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that he would never start Facebook in today’s California. Yet he seems unconcerned about the fate facing smaller firms. His foundation gave millions to Proposition 15, a measure that would have increased property taxes on businesses and was opposed by most legacy businesses, and particularly by minority-owned firms. In a letter to Zuckerberg, the business owners noted: “Unlike Facebook, restaurants, dry cleaners, nail salons and other small businesses can’t operate right now and many may never open again. The last thing they need is a billionaire pushing higher taxes on them under the false flag of social justice.”

Not to be outdone, New York City has been chasing people out of town by stifling housing and industrial development. Many are  crossing the Hudson River to Jersey City, which built seven times more housing per capita as Manhattan last year.

UPDATE: Headline link was incorrect before. Should be working now.

ANOTHER REASON FOR ALUMNI TO STOP GIVING: What’s Up, Doc?  Northwestern University hastens to cancel Joseph Epstein for advising Jill Biden to drop her favorite honorific. How dare he question a doctor of education?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): It’s good to see the weight of our journalistic and academic establishments being brought to bear to protect the self-esteem of a rich, powerful white woman.

FREE THE MARKETS: How to Fix Capitalism. Why do half of younger Americans want to live in a socialist country? It’s not just because of the nonsense spewed in schools, says Edward L. Glaeser.

Over the past 40 years, insiders have increasingly captured the American economy—from homeowners opposed to new housing construction near them to incumbent firms that benefit from the overregulation of employment to interest groups that have transformed the federal government into the equivalent of a pension system with a nuclear arsenal. The young are usually outsiders; the bill for the insiders’ triumph has been laid in their laps. The Covid-19 pandemic reinforces this dynamic. Middle-aged teachers, protected by powerful unions, Zoom their classes from the comfort of their homes, and students get lost in the shuffle. The mortality risk of the disease to the young is tiny; yet they are told to give up the freedom of their youth to protect the rest of us. . . .

What many young people today don’t realize is that socialism is a machine for empowering insiders.

Capitalism, from its inception, was designed for outsiders, but it’s been corrupted by politicians and special interests. To make it attractive again to young outsiders, Glaeser proposes restoring four fundamental freedoms.

FOR A HAPPIER NEW YEAR: The Gratitude Diaries.  Janice Kaplan’s latest podcast offers tips for overcoming the brain’s negativity bias (which will help you forget 2021).

NEWS YOU CAN USE FROM REASON: The Ultimate 2020 Libertarian Gift Guide.

APPALACHIA ON FILM: Criticism for the Sake of It. Lefty critics have attacked the film (as a proxy for the Trump voters they despise), but Ron Howard’s adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy has remained one of the most watched movies on Netflix — and deservedly so.

REFILLING THE SWAMP: Biden’s Choice to Head HHS Is a Lawsuit-Happy Government Nanny.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Bias Fallacy. It’s the achievement gap, not systemic racism, that explains demographic disparities in education and employment.

The median black eighth-grader does not possess even basic math skills. “Basic” skills, as defined by the National Assessment of Education Progress exam, means partial mastery of grade-related knowledge. Fifty-three percent of black eighth-graders scored “below basic” on math in 2017. Only 11 percent of black eighth-graders were proficient in math, and 2 percent were advanced. By contrast, 20 percent of white eighth-graders were below basic in 2017, 31 percent were proficient, and 13 percent were advanced. Only 12 percent of Asian eighth-graders were below basic, 32 percent were proficient, and 32 percent were advanced.

The picture was not much better in reading. Forty percent of black eighth-graders were below basic in reading in 2017, 17 percent were proficient readers, and 1 percent were advanced readers. Sixteen percent of white eighth-graders were below basic in reading, 39 percent of white eighth-graders were proficient readers, and 6 percent were advanced readers. Thirteen percent of Asian eighth-graders were below basic, 45 percent were proficient, and 12 percent were advanced readers.

But the only number that matter to today’s activists — and the woke executives desperately vowing to change their hiring and promotion policies — is the percentage of minorities in a company or a profession. When you’ve got diversity, who needs basic skills?

FROM BEATDOWNS TO LOCKDOWNS: Pandemic Penitents. During the Black Death, the day’s public-health experts prescribed public floggings to stop the plague. Today’s experts favor a less bloody but more damaging form of penance. Instead of prescribing simple and easy steps like taking vitamin D, they insist the public suffer lockdowns.

THE REAL SYSTEMIC RACISM: Set-Asides Are Unconstitutional. Andrew Cuomo (among many other leaders) makes race the basis for dispensing money and opportunities to entrepreneurs and small businesses.

ANOTHER PROGRESSIVE FIASCO IN NEW YORK: New York’s Homeless Crucible. Bill de Blasio has doubled spending on the homeless, put a progressive activist in charge of policy, and created the largest affordable housing program in city history. And the problem has just gotten worse.

ANOTHER GREEN MYTH BUSTED: Let Us Now Praise Plastic Bags.  Banning single-use plastic bags hurts the environment (not to mention humans), as Yan Shvalb explains in a short video summarizing this inconvenient heresy so clearly that even AOC could understand it — if she were actually serious about reducing carbon emissions. (For more on the virtues of disposable products — and the motives of those trying to outlaw them — see my City Journal article, “Let’s Hold on to the Throwaway Society,” and an earlier one, “The Perverse Panic over Plastic.”)

DEMOCRATS FOR SAFETYISM: A Red/Blue Risk Divide. The pandemic revealed strikingly different outlooks on the balance between safety and freedom.

THEY HAD IT COMING TO THEM FOR WEARING MAGA HATS: Lies and Violence. As the recent assaults on Trump supporters illustrate, averting our gaze from political hyperbole and violence empowers the mob.

STEVEN MALANGA: Maradona of Naples. The soccer great brought hope and victory to a depressed city, as sports superstars can do.

SO OF COURSE THE LEFT WANTS FEWER OF THEM: Beat Cops Cut Crime. A clever study tracking police officers’ movements in Dallas shows that simply walking the beat is one of the most powerful tools available to reduce crime.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Politics in Academia: A Case Study. Which values matter most to professors? Researchers at the State University of New York at New Paltz surveyed nearly 200 academics around the country and found variations according to the professors’ gender, political ideology, and department. Females, liberals, and professors of education prioritized prioritized social justice and students’ emotional well-being; males, conservatives and business professors prioritized academic rigor and knowledge advancement.

The lead author, Glenn Geher, is a tenured psychology professor who has published more than 100 academic papers, but he couldn’t find any journal to publish this one. So he published it himself along with an account of his saga. Good for him — and shame on the journals that turned it down.

THE NOT-SO-SOFT BIGOTRY OF THE ANTI-RACISM GRIFT: Black Fragility? Coleman Hughes exposes the absurd premises of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, starting with the assumption that all whites in America are racists at birth — the progressives’ version of Original Sin, which can be expiated only through the rituals of the woke church. (She’ll officiate — for a fee.)  That’s bad enough, but her view of blacks is even worse.

The second unstated assumption in White Fragility—and this is where the book borders on actual racism—is that black people are emotionally immature and essentially child-like. Blacks, as portrayed in DiAngelo’s writing, can neither be expected to show maturity during disagreement nor to exercise emotional self-control of any kind. The hidden premise of the book is that blacks, not whites, are too fragile.

Read the whole thing (the essay, not the book).

UNEXPECTEDLY, CRIME IS SOARING: “Burn It Down.” In Seattle, the movement to “abolish the police, prisons, and courts” is not simply the dream of marginalized radicals; it has also been adopted at the highest levels of municipal government. “Burn it down” has evolved from a street slogan into a political platform.

THE DATA DOESN’T FIT “THE SCIENCE”: Lockdown Addicts. A new — and impressively huge — study of a natural experiment in Sweden shows that closing schools does practically nothing to save lives or stop the spread of Covid. Swedish economists compared Covid infection rates and medical records for all the parents (hundreds of thousands) at senior high schools, which went online during the spring pandemic, against the parents at junior high schools, which stayed open and did not encourage students or teachers wear face masks.

The parents whose children kept going to school were no more likely to be treated or hospitalized for Covid than were the parents of the online students. And the teachers who remained in the classroom had lower rates of infection and hospitalization than did the parents.

A study of this quality ought to be the final word on the subject. But as I write at City Journal, it doesn’t fit “the science” that’s guiding Joe Biden’s Covid advisory board — and the Democratic politicians eager for more lockdowns.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Biden Threat to Law Enforcement. His plan for “strengthening America’s commitment to justice” reads like a Black Lives Matter wish list. Police departments need to start fighting back.

STOP THEM BEFORE THEY TALK AGAIN: The Last Presidential Debate, Please. Let’s scrap this format and get rid of the biased journalist moderators. My plea for a new approach in 2024.

NO, BUT THEY STOP RATIONAL THINKING: Can Lockdowns Really Stop Death?

To the calm (rational) mind, it is clear that “suppression” is a set of “brakes” that should only be imposed to the minimum extent necessary to manage hospital capacity. Any “extra” suppression just saves infections for later — when you may or may not have a vaccine or improved treatment — at extraordinary cost. To scared (irrational) people, however, suppression provides at least some “hope” of avoiding a horrific early death. You cannot blame terrified people for their feelings, but you can and should blame the media and government for misrepresenting personal risk during a pandemic.

Read the whole thing — a thoughtful explanation of the collective hysteria.