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.

LET THEM EAT MASKS: The Coming Post-COVID Global Order.  Lockdowns in the West could leave billions of people in the developing world stranded in a “neo-feudal future.”

BUT OF COURSE THIS CAN’T BE SAID BEFORE THE ELECTION: The American response to Covid has been far better than critics acknowledge.

NO, HE’S WOKE: Is the Pope Catholic? Francis’s new encyclical reads like a UN mission statement. He demonizes capitalism, and his ecological fundamentalism is more pagan than Catholic.

BUT IF IT SAVED JUST ONE LIFE: Lockdown’s Lethal Toll. The Daily Mail tallied up British casualties from the lockdown. The findings are summarized at the Lockdown Skeptics website:

• Delays in treatment are set to cause a 20% rise in deaths among newly diagnosed cancer patients in England – 6,270 excess deaths this year
• Treatment for strokes fell by 45% during lockdown and there were more than 2,000 excess deaths in from heart disease
• More than 50,000 operations for children were cancelled
• Organ transplants fell by two thirds, with the number of those who died on the transplant waiting list almost doubling
• Total waiting lists for routine orthopedic and eye operations are at record levels
• Calls to child abuse helplines rocketed
• As rates of depression and anxiety doubled, thousands of recovering alcoholics have relapsed.

Andrew Cuomo is no doubt too busy selling his book to comment. But he’ll surely give the British a run for their money.

THE LOCKDOWNS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: New York’s Year from Hell. The city lost 16 percent of its jobs, twice the national rate.

New York is faring far worse than the rest of America. By late July, the nation had lost 8.1 percent of its jobs. But locally, industry after industry isn’t just in recession; it’s virtually nonexistent. New York is missing 53 percent of its 471,800 pre-Covid leisure and hospitality workers. The arts and entertainment field has lost 65,200 jobs, or more than two-thirds, and the restaurant and hotel field has hemorrhaged 184,500 jobs, or 49.2 percent. Retail outlets have laid off 45,300 people, or 13.2 percent. All these declines outpace national losses.

Apparently, this still isn’t enough to satisfy New York’s leaders. This month Mayor de Blasio imposed still further restrictions in “hot spots,” and Governor Cuomo added three more states to the 34 already on the list of states whose travelers must quarantine for 14 days if they visit New York. Who needs tourists?  Meanwhile, restaurants in the city are still limited to 25 percent capacity.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SLAVERY IN 1619: Uniquely Bad — But Not Uniquely American. For much of history, slavery was as fundamental to society as agriculture. While slavery was a global multiracial phenomenon, “the abolitionist movement was a white Western invention.”

GET WOKE, GET SICK: Fighting Racism Instead of Disease. The intrusion of critical race theory into medicine and public health threatens the well-being of all Americans—especially nonwhites. More evidence that the public-health profession has become a hazard to public health.

A HOLIDAY FROM CANCEL CULTURE: Don’t Defend Columbus–Celebrate Him. Dozens of cities have taken down their statues of Columbus, but he and the Italian immigrants who paid for those statues deserve tribute, not blame.