IT EXPLAINS JUST ABOUT EVERY CURRENT “CRISIS” DECLARED BY THE LEFT: The March of Dimes Syndrome. Why have activists declared a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why, as radical prejudice declined, was there a rise in the number of “hate groups”? Why, as sexual violence declined in America, did academics and the #MeToo movement discover an “epidemic of sexual assault”?

These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes Syndrome. That organization, founded to combat polio, didn’t go out of business after it succeeded. It switched to a new cause, preventing birth defects. When activists achieve their original goals — like their victories for civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights — they immediately find new ones. It doesn’t matter how bad the new mission is — or even whether it actually sets back progress toward the original goal. What matters to the activists is to stay in business.

REAL CLEAR POLITICS: The Myth of American Inequality. Everything you’ve been hearing from academics and journalists about about income equality in America is wrong. No, it hasn’t been increasing. No, it’s not worse in America than in Europe (and middle-class Americans are much richer than middle-class Europeans). And no, the tax burden on the rich hasn’t been shrinking– their share of the tax burden has actually been increasing. Phil Gramm explains why in his lecture accepting the Manhattan Institute’s 2024 Hayek Book Prize for The Myth of American Inequality, co-authored with John Early and the late Robert Ekelund.

DEI: Didn’t Earn It. The new meaning of DEI goes viral, infuriating progressives and offering hope, as Orwell wrote in “The Politics of the English Language,” that doublespeak can be defeated “if one jeers loudly enough.”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: NIH scientists made $710 Million in royalties from drug makers — a fact they tried to hide. New revelations from OpenTheBooks.com.

THE BARD OF AMERICAN SELF-RULE: Painting the Revolution. John Turnbull, whose iconic paintings of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers hang in the Rotunda of the U.S.Capitol Rotunda and in a gallery at Yale, is the subject of Glorious Lessons, a new biography by Richard Brookhiser. From Paul Beston’s review:

In the mid-1970s, Richard Brookhiser, then a Yale undergraduate, came upon the Trumbull paintings. The story they told seized his imagination, seeming to instruct him: “This is important; pay attention. These men and women are dead, but they live here. You do not know them (you do not know them yet) but they had you in mind.” This directive could describe Brookhiser’s own mission. He has devoted much of his book-writing career to compact, eloquent lives of the American Founders, preferring, like Trumbull, the compressed frame to the vast canvas. His lean biographies, defined by insight, aim to draw readers’ eyes to the most important parts of the picture and answer a perennial question: Why should we care? . . .

These are obstacles enough to appreciating Trumbull’s art. The most formidable, though, is not aesthetic but political: the defilement of American memory beneath the march of a rejectionist history of the nation and its principles. “How many Americans today sympathize with the story Trumbull tells?” Brookhiser asks. He thinks the artist lucky not to have been a sculptor, given the fates of stone monuments in America’s demonic summer of 2020 (though vandals have not spared paintings elsewhere). The question echoes concerns voiced in his 2019 book, Give Me Liberty, where he called this “the most confused historical moment I have lived in,” lamenting how “America’s national essence is being ignored, trampled, or distorted.” It’s a glimpse of the quiet passion animating his work, which has yielded a canon of moral biographies that help Americans understand the Founders by trying first to see them—not so remote from us as they appear, and struggling, as we do, to make choices in a world full of bad ones.

Trumbull is a timely addition to Brookhiser’s gallery of portraits. Who more fitting to profile, in this age of screens, than the man whose images have “flashed like an ad on the nation’s retina”? Brookhiser calls him “the bard, in pictures not words, of American self-rule,” adding: “Those who enjoy self-rule as a matter of course forget how novel and fragile the concept was and is.” This is important. Pay attention.

Read the whole thing.

THE SECOND CITY IS NUMBER ONE IN DEBT — AND IN FLEEING TAXPAYERS: How Debt Ate Chicago. The city already spends more than 40 percent of its budget on debt and pensions, and future looks much worse as the debts grow and the population shrinks. But are Chicago voters worried? Not the ones who chose a former member of the Chicago Teachers’ Union to be their mayor.

A GREEN FANTASY MEETS REALITY: The “Energy Transition” Won’t Happen. Foundational innovation in cloud technology and artificial intelligence will require more energy than ever before—shattering any illusion that we will restrict supplies.

WHY ET WON’T WIPE US OUT: Humanity Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Say Hello to Aliens. I enjoyed the “3 Body Problem” Netflix series and the sci-fi trilogy on which it’s based, but I disagree with the premise: that sending a message to an extraterrestrial civilization would doom Earth. The doomsayers, who want to ban the transmission of any more interstellar messages from radio telescopes, say that the reason we haven’t detected signals from aliens is that the only civilizations that survive are the ones smart enough to keep quiet. This is known as the “dark forest” hypothesis — the universe as a dark forest in which solitary hunters remain quiet and hidden, because they fear being killed by another hunter with much more advanced technology.

But as I argue in the Wall Street Journal, this scenario is flawed because it’s based on the axiom that expanding civilizations will inevitably deplete their natural resources and need to conquer other worlds.

The fear of conquest by aliens rests on the dubious premise that they would greedily crave the natives’ land and resources. But that’s not how civilization is proceeding on Earth as our technology advances. In the past, armies fought wars over access to scarce resources (salt, grain, oil), and 20th-century intellectuals predicted that overpopulation would lead to an “age of scarcity” with catastrophic global shortages of food and energy.

But thanks to technological progress, humans today are better nourished and wealthier than ever. Over the past century, the cost of food, energy and other commodities has plummeted more than twentyfold by comparison with workers’ wages. Natural resources now matter less to individuals or societies seeking wealth than an intangible resource: knowledge. The modern economy is increasingly dominated by industries that traffic not in physical commodities but in information: finance, software, communications, entertainment, artificial intelligence, education and research.

Because of this economic shift, today we wouldn’t react as 16th-century Europeans did to the discovery of a “new world” with less advanced technology. We’d exploit it differently. Sure, there would be oil and mining companies ready to extract resources, but they’d run into fierce opposition from scientists, politicians and activists determined to preserve and study its ecosystem and native cultures.

Why wouldn’t ET react similarly to the discovery of Earthlings? An advanced civilization wouldn’t be desperate for food and natural resources (which would be available on plenty of uninhabited planets and asteroids).

Earth’s farmland and minerals would be far less valuable to the aliens than the knowledge to be gained from studying the strange new life-forms on Earth. Even if they regarded us as appallingly primitive creatures, even if they felt no moral obligation to spare an inferior species, they’d be as eager to observe us as we are to watch animals in a zoo.

In fact, aliens may already be observing us without making themselves known, a possibility known as the “zoo hypothesis.” I prefer this to the dark forest hypothesis as an explanation for the Fermi paradox. In this scenario, the reason we haven’t heard from aliens is that they want to observe the behavior and evolution of Earth’s creatures unaffected by outside influences.

So let’s keep sending messages to the stars. Now that we can finally say something to aliens, maybe they’ll be curious to converse with the creatures in this zoo.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Columbia. For decades, the university cultivated the conditions that led to its campus Intifada.

STEVEN MALANGA: The New Road Rage. Bad government policies are contributing to soaring auto insurance costs, which now worry Americans more than the costs of health care or mortgages.

ON SECOND THOUGHT, DON’T: Gimme (Government) Shelter. States and cities spend billions on housing projects that are costly, cumbersome to build, and won’t solve the affordability crisis. Steven Malanga digs into the scandalous programs, which have provided housing to people who don’t need it (one recipient was earning $1 million annually) at prices that are gouging taxpayers, like “affordable” units that cost as much $1 million apiece to build.

NOW IN PAPERBACK: Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. What’s wrong with the World Economic Forum’s plans for humanity? What can be done to resist the Davos elite’s determination to run our lives? Michael Walsh has assembled essays from, among others, Angelo Codevilla, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Douglass Murray, Harry Stein, and me.

WINNING TACTICS: How to Defeat Left-Wing Racialism. Battle plans from six domestic-policy experts: Wade Miller, Dan Morenoff, Ilya Shapiro, David E. Bernstein, James Sherk, Judge Glock, and Christopher F. Rufo.

SANE VOICES ON CAMPUS: Put down the Megaphones. Richard Shweder, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, explains how private schools can support free speech while banning its more disruptive forms. He also quotes some excellent advice given by the president of Columbia University to the incoming freshman class in 1946:

“You who have reached the age of advanced study will, of course, have opinions, maybe even prejudices; but acceptance in an academic community carries with it the obligation to submit those opinions and those prejudices to examination under the bright light of human thought and experience. If, perchance, your views have been crystallized into slogans held aloft on banners, or are subject to control by allegiance to minor or major pressure groups, check your banners and your membership cards at the college gate.”

Of course, this advice to check the banners at the college gate would horrify the students who camped at Columbia this year. Slogans are all they’ve got.

FOLLOW THE MONEY: Brown, Harvard, and Indiana University of Pa. Received Gifts from the “State of Palestine.”  The grants were spotted by the watchdogs at OpenThe Books, which has also just launched a free tool for members of the public to do their own searches of how money is being spent by governments at the local, state and federal levels. It’s called Benjamin the Chatbot (in honor of Benjamin Franklin.)

WARNING: THE PUBLIC-HEALTH ESTABLISHMENT IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH: Medscape Censors Science to Placate Activists. Medscape, which bills itself as “the leading online global destination for physicians and healthcare professionals worldwide,” posted medical-education programs on tobacco-harm reduction that included accurate information about nicotine vaping, the most promising tool yet developed for helping smokers quit. But then, despite an enthusiastic reception from the professionals who watched the programs, Medscape bowed to a campaign by anti-vaping zealots and removed the programs.

The result will be less-informed doctors and, presumably, more people smoking and dying. But to anti-vaping activists desperate to keep their jobs and funding, that smells like victory.

WARNING: THE PUBLIC-HEALTH ESTABLISHMENT IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH: Medscape Gets Smoked. A once-reputable platform providing information to physicians caves to woke activists by censoring accurate information about nicotine vaping — the most promising tool yet developed for getting smokers to quit.

NO, CRIME ISN’T DOWN: Enduring Lawlessness in Our Cities. Crime continues to plague the American urban core at much higher levels than before the pandemic. Jeffrey H. Anderson, a former director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, rebuts the claims of Biden and the legacy media that the crime wave is over.

WELL WORTH THE TRIP: ‘Deep Sky’ Takes Us On a Cinematic Voyage Beyond the Stars. This IMAX documentary has just opened in 300 theaters across North America, and it gets a rave review in  Forbes:

Imagine venturing to the beginning of time and space, exploring cosmic landscapes so vast and beautiful that they’ve remained unseen by human eyes until now. This is the promise of “Deep Sky,” an extraordinary IMAX presentation that brings the universe’s awe-inspiring mysteries closer than ever before. . . .

At the heart of “Deep Sky” is the story of human ambition and scientific achievement. The film chronicles the high-stakes global mission that brought the James Webb Space Telescope to life. From conception to the nail-biting launch that placed JWST into orbit a million miles from Earth, “Deep Sky” captures the collective effort of thousands of individuals across decades, aiming to answer some of humanity’s oldest questions: Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? Are we alone in the vastness of space?

I’ve seen “Deep Sky” and agree wholeheartedly: It’s a great film, and a joy to watch in IMAX. See it at a theater near you.

CENSOR WIKIPEDIA, GET HIRED BY NPR: Larry Sanger Speaks Out. The Wikipedia co-founder discusses NPR’s Katherine Maher and the corruption of the Internet.

THE SWAMP WASN’T DRAINED:: How the Deep State Played Trump During the Pandemic. My podcast (transcript provided) with Rob Montz,  whose documentary reveals how one scientifically ignorant bureaucrat, Deborah Birx, imposed lockdowns and mask mandates during the pandemic.  He calls it a “silent coup” against Trump — carried out with Mike Pence’s acquiescence. And check out Montz’s documentary, “It Wasn’t Fauci.”

BOEING’S WOES: “It’s an Empty Executive Suite.” A Boeing insider explains the profound alienation between the people who build airplanes and the ones who occupy the executive suite — including the DEI bureaucracy that has poisoned the company’s culture.

BUT IT’S GREAT FOR VIRTUE SIGNALING: Actually, Diversity Isn’t Profitable. In a series of much-hyped studies, the McKinsey consulting firm claimed that companies with more “diverse” leadership were more profitable. But a new study finds no connection at all between diversity and profitability.

JUST WHAT WE NEED, A NEW AND UNACCOUNTABLE GLOBAL PANDEMIC CZAR: The WHO’s Power Grab. The response to Covid was the worst fiasco in the history of the public-health profession, but the Biden administration and other countries are planning to reward the World Health Organization by giving it unprecedented powers to impose its disastrous policies on the U.S. and the rest of the world in the next pandemic.

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION CONTINUES: The Biden Administration Benches Female Athletes. Don’t believe the spin that its proposed Title IX regulations won’t harm athletics for women and girls.