REWRITING THE RACIST NARRATIVE: Stories and Data. For every story of a black person killed by the police, there’s a story of at least one white person. “If the challenge for the Left is to accept that the real problem with the police is not racism, the challenge for the Right is to accept that there are real problems with the police.”

CRISIS FATIGUE: Years of Rage. It’s been three and a half years of more or less continual protests — good for the left-wing media, terrible for the country.

CRITIQUING THE RACE HUSTLERS: A History Professor’s Anonymous Letter to His Woke Colleagues at Berkeley.  He identifies himself as African-American but says that he must remain anonymous because his career would otherwise be doomed by his heretical thoughts on racism, George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter. Read the whole thing.

AND WHY DOESN’T THE MEDIA HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE?: Why Can’t Big-City Democrats Reform the Police? Accusations of police brutality have persisted in our bluest cities for decades. But when a cop does does something wrong, it gets blamed on the Republican in the White House.

#RENAMEYALE: As Glenn noted this morning, Yale University needs to change its name, given Elihu Yale’s association with the slave trade. Fortunately, there’s an excellent alternative who played a more pivotal role in the school’s early history and had better scholarly credentials.  He was one of the first American-born students to get a PhD in Europe and went on to become a prominent colonial clergyman, politician and author. It was he who put the college on a secure footing by bringing in donations from Elihu Yale, a merchant, and prominent intellectuals like Isaac Newton and the Irish writer Richard Steele.

His name was Jeremiah Dummer, perfectly fitting for what my alma mater has become: Dummer University.

GLENN LOURY: Racism Is An Empty Thesis. An African-American professor says that blacks hold their fate in their own hands. And that America is experiencing a “collective hysteria” about racial relationships.

IT WAS NEVER REALLY ABOUT SAVING BLACK LIVES: False Prophets. If you really want to help black America, don’t look to Black Lives Matter. Those promoting the defund-the-police idea either live in low-crime areas, can afford private security, or are radically misinformed about the nature of crime in the United States.

FOR DRUGS AND MOST OTHER PRODUCTS: “Buy American” Isn’t Always Best. Onshoring all drug manufacturing would make us less resilient — and no, 80 percent of our drugs don’t come from China.

INCONVENIENT NUMBERS: Repudiate the Anti-Police Narrative. In testimony to Congress, Heather Mac Donald presents the facts on police and race — including the statistics that the Washington Post has retroactively altered to fit the current narrative.

“PEACEFUL” PROTESTS CONTINUE: Anarchy in Seattle. Antifa-affiliated activists seize control of a city neighborhood and declare an “autonomous zone.” A member of the Seattle City Council calls it a “victory” against “the militarized police force of the political establishment and the capitalist state.”

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Why We Need the Police. People in high-crime neighborhoods want more officers, not fewer. The manufactured anti-cop outrage in New York City comes despite a dramatic reduction in shootings by officers, to the lowest level since records have been kept. But of course the activists — and their flacks in the media — can’t be bothered with such  inconvenient facts.

OUR NEW ORACLES: They Blinded Us With “Science.” Throughout the pandemic, political leaders have consistently relied on questionable expert guidance—and ducked responsibility for their own choices. They’ve imposed disastrous policies by surrendering power to public-health officials who only pretend to be unbiased, and who lack the knowledge or perspective to make wise decisions.

A LONELY VOICE OF SANITY IN ACADEMIA: I Must Object. A rebuttal from Glenn Loury, the Brown University economist, to his university’s letter on racism in the United States: “The roster of Brown’s ‘leaders’ who signed this manifesto in lockstep remind me of a Soviet Politburo making some party-line declaration.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Gospel According to Peter Thiel. Wherever there’s a major shift in the American landscape, one can usually find Silicon Valley’s iconoclastic investor.

JOURNALISTS LIED, PEOPLE DIED: Race, Riots and the Cops. The facts about police shootings and racism — and the deadly consequences of the media’s disinformation campaign.

SOUTHERN SANITY ON COVID: Let the Sun Shine In. Florida and Tennessee have proven that a measured, evidence-based response to reopening works. Kentucky is another story, despite the media’s attempt to cover for a Democratic governor.

(Bumped, by Glenn).

SELECTIVE MERCY: No Clean Slate for Karens! Progressives demand a second chance for perpetrators of violent crimes, but they consider one unwoke comment to be unforgivable.

NO, A LOCKDOWN WOULDN’T HAVE HELPED: Understanding the Deaths in Stockholm. Proponents of lockdowns have seized on the large number of deaths in Stockholm’s nursing homes to criticize Sweden for not shutting down its economy. But it’s doubtful that a lockdown would have made much difference. Residents in nursing homes are particularly vulnerable to infection, as Chris Pope has explained in City Journal, because they live in a group setting and require so much hands-on care from health-care workers who are treating other people. They also typically suffer from other chronic illnesses that make them likely to die in less than a year once they enter a nursing home in Stockholm, as Charlotta Stern and Daniel Klein calculate. The researchers conclude:

Most Covid-19 victims had already been in the nursing home for some time. The disease tends to strike down the most vulnerable, and the disease takes some time. From all considerations, it is reasonable to say that those who died of Covid-19 in Stockholm’s nursing homes had a life-remaining median somewhere in the range of 5 to 9 months. . . .

The overall number of deaths of people in nursing homes in Sweden has not, in fact, been much elevated, compared to recent years. Over the period January through April 2020, the number of deaths among those in nursing homes was about 11,000, whereas for the previous year it was about 10,000. And that previous year was unusually low, partly because the 2019 flu season was relatively mild. It is possible that come 2020 the nursing-home population was even more vulnerable than usual.

Sweden’s approach is looking better and better.

A PROPER MEMORIAL DAY: The Tradition Goes On. Despite the lockdown, a Pennsylvania city’s Memorial Day rituals endure thanks to volunteers who decorated 1,500 graves.

BAD NEWS FOR LOCKDOWN PROPONENTS: The Results of Europe’s Lockdown Experiment Are in. Elaine He of Bloomberg crunches the numbers for 17 European countries and concludes that “the relative strictness of a country’s containment measures had little bearing” on the death rate.

OIL STILL RULES: The Global Economy’s Fuel Gauge. Oil powers almost all transportation — and Covid-19 will only intensify its dominance. The open-plan office will fall out of favor, but people will still be driving to work as the suburbs and exurbs keep growing (and as mass transit becomes even less appealing).

THREE FEET SOUNDS A LOT BETTER: There’s little “science” behind the six-foot social-distancing rule.  A U.K. expert says that the country’s two-meter rule is based on “very fragile evidence” and is probably excessive. Sweden, Norway, Austria and Finland are getting by with one-meter distancing, which makes it much easier for restaurants and other businesses to reopen.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Academic Descent. Fred Siegel reviews two excellent new books on the triumph of ideology over ideas on campus: The Lost History of Western Civilization, by Stanley Kurtz, and The Breakdown of Higher Education, by John M. Ellis.

EVERYTHING IS PROCEEDING AS HE HAS FORESEEN:  The Politics of Fear. Nobody understands politicians’ power grab during this pandemic better than Robert Higgs, who should have already won the Nobel in economics for his work. In Crisis and Leviathan, he famously demonstrated the “ratchet effect” of government growth, which mostly occurs in spurts during wars, financial panics and other crises, real or imagined. Higgs also identified the underlying psychological cause: the negativity effect, which is the universal tendency of bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly good ones, a cognitive bias that politicians and journalists exploit to foment fear and promote bigger government.

Roy Baumeister and I drew on Higgs’ work in our book on the negativity effect, The Power of Bad, to argue that the greatest problem in politics is what we call the Crisis Crisis — the never-ending series of hyped crises that lead to cures worse than the disease. The pandemic is just the latest and scariest example, in Higgs’ view. “I have an overwhelming feeling,” he told me, “that I am reliving a bad experience I’ve lived through several times before, only this time it’s worse.”

RUNNING OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: California’s Budget Bust-Up. Facing the largest budget deficit in the history of any state, $54 billion, California’s politicians are blaming their woes on the coronavirus. But give credit where it’s due: the state’s progressive policies.