LET’S HOPE. Will the Supreme Court End Rent Control?

THEY HATE YOU, THEY REALLY HATE YOU: America’s Wokest Company. Penzeys Spices wants Republicans to know that they’re the “#1 threat to this country.” The upscale spice chain tops Dave Seminara’s list of woke companies (which unfortunately includes just about every big one).

THEY JUST CAN’T QUIT: More Mask Hysteria. From White House to elementary schools, from the CDC to its useful idiots in the media, the insanity continues.

SKEWERING THE ELITE: How Did Tom Wolfe Get Away With It? In his day, the liberal establishment was  more dominant and even smugger than it it today, but somehow Tom Wolfe took on its high priests and triumphed, celebrating red-state culture and hilariously exposing the pretensions of the blue-state intelligentsia. I discuss the reasons for his success in a review of “Radical Wolfe,” a superb new documentary chronicling his career. The film opens in theaters this weekend in New York City, next weekend in Los Angeles and Toronto, and then in other cities. Definitely worth watching.

NO, BARBIE, THERE IS NO PATRIARCHY: The myth of male privilege. Toby Young, the Daily Sceptic’s editor-in-chief, proposes another law:

A few weeks ago I had a crack at coming up with my own sociological ‘law’ and my first effort went as follows: “The more progressive a country is when it comes to sex and gender, the more authoritarian it is when it comes to speech and language.” I was thinking of Ireland which, having legalised abortion in 2018, is about to impose the most draconian speech restrictions in Europe. I now propose a second law: “^Any group described as privileged is in fact marginalised; and any group described as marginalised is in fact privileged.’

A case in point is white men – and in particular cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class white men – who are now at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy of oppression in most professions. But to add to their misery, these poor, benighted souls have to pretend they’re at the top of that self-same pyramid if they’re to retain their jobs, apologising for their ‘privilege’ in front of their more powerful black, female, non-binary, gay and disabled colleagues.

Read the whole thing. And for a look at the overwhelming evidence that both sexes are biased against men, check out my article in City Journal, “The Misogyny Myth.” 

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: Academia’s Missing Men: Men are disappearing from science and academia. The public perception is, however, exactly the opposite.

THE BIG LIE THAT WON’T DIE: The Misogyny Myth. Contrary to what you see in the press (or “Barbie”), misogyny is not rampant in modern societies. There is no evil patriarchy oppressing women. Quite the reverse: Both men and women are guilty of misandry, a bias against men. My City Journal article reviews the overwhelming evidence (ignored or suppressed by misandrist journalists and scholars) of bias against men, from the “women are wonderful” effect reported by psychologists to the discrimination against men in the legal system,  government, schools, corporations, and academia.

This misandrist bias is probably innate, and it’s being exploited by a diversity industry that falsely blames sexism for any gender gap not favoring women. Yes, women are “underrepresented” in some fields, especially at the top, but it’s not because of discrimination. It’s because of factors like the “gender productivity gap” and the “competition gap” (which explains why scientists in the 99th percentile of productivity are disproportionately male, and why 95 of the top 100 Scrabble players are men). The misogyny myth serves the interests of the diversity industry, but it’s enormously damaging to the rest of  society — women as well as men — because it poisons relations between the sexes and undermines the system that has provided unprecedented opportunities and prosperity to everyone: meritocracy.

BIPARTISAN FOLLIES: The Costs of Protectionism. The Biden administration lambasted Trump’s latest tariff proposals, but it’s been doubling down on his protectionism. At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux notes the damage from current tariffs, including an extra $726 annually for food and clothing in the average U.S. household.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: No to the Politics of Whiteness. The case against right-wing racialism.

AGELESS WISDOM: Adam Smith at 300. Some of the smartest scholars and liveliest writers on Adam Smith will be convening to celebrate the 300th anniversary of his birth. The conference, at the Union League Club in New York City on September 13th, is open to the public, with tickets at $75 apiece. Dan Klein, Anne Bradley, Dominic Pino, and David Bahnsen will be discussing The Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and more from the father of modern economics. For a sample of Klein’s thoughts, here’s a podcast of him being interviewed by James Howard Kunstler on the viciousness of left-wing politics — what Klein calls “lefpotism.” 

WHY THE MEDIA DOESN’T TALK ABOUT SWEDEN ANYMORE: Sweden’s ‘Laissez Faire’ Pandemic Policies Paid Off. Sweden, which the media denounced in 2020 as a “pariah” and a “cautionary tale” because it stayed open and and told its citizens not to wear masks, has come through the pandemic with the lowest rate of excess mortality in Europe, as Johan Norberg shows in a Cato Institute report. All the more reason its public-health leaders deserve a Nobel Prize.

BAD MEDICINE: Testimony, or Evidence? Glossing over the damning facts and the lack of evidence for gender-transition treatments.

MASKAHOLISM IS AN INCURABLE DISEASE: No Masks, Please, We’re Rational. Mask mandates are starting to return despite 97 percent of Americans having acquired Covid antibodies and all the evidence that the mandates failed to make a difference in Covid infections or mortality (including a recent study in The Lancet  reporting that the only significant effect of the state mask mandates in the U.S. was a decrease in fourth-graders’ test scores). Yet the media are urging the return of masks, and the CDC, unlike every country in Europe, continues to advise masking toddlers. The maskaholics’ faith remains as strong as that of the Cambodian villagers who protected themselves from the coronavirus by erecting magic scarecrows in front of their huts.

HOW TO MAKE A DISASTER EVEN WORSE: Lockdowns: the Self-Inflicted Disaster.  My new piece at City Journal looks at the latest lockdown research as well as previous research into the consequences of politicians using a natural disaster as a pretext for authoritarianism:

Long before Covid struck, economists detected a deadly pattern in the impact of natural disasters: if the executive branch of government used the emergency to claim sweeping new powers over the citizenry, more people died than would have if government powers had remained constrained. It’s now clear that the Covid pandemic is the deadliest confirmation yet of that pattern.

One reason Sweden escaped lockdowns is that its constitution guaranteed freedom of movement to citizens. We need to enact those sort of protections in the U.S, particularly since the CDC and WHO are making plans to seize even more power — and do more damage — in the next pandemic.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Lancet Study on Covid Vaccine Autopsies Finds 74% Were Caused by Vaccine – Study is Removed Within 24 Hours. 

NEWSOM’S DEADLY FOLLY: A Covid Postmortem for California. Though well positioned to weather the pandemic, California instead pursued disastrous restrictions and cracked down on dissent. It had one of the slowest economic recoveries of any state, and ranked dead last in providing in-classroom teaching to students. Now Governor Gavin Newsom, having squandered $40 billion to mitigate his calamitous lockdowns,  is falsely claiming that the state suffered lower mortality than Florida. The reality: If California’s excess-mortality rate equaled Florida’s, 10,000 fewer Californians would have died.

CAFE HAYEK: A Telling Tale of Toil. What the pundits and tweeters don’t know about those manufacturing jobs they’re trying to save (just not for their own children).

TEVI TROY: The Last Great President. A new book gives Ronald Reagan’s successful foreign policy the detailed history it deserves.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: America’s Shadow Self. Ruinous policies have transformed California from a symbol of progress to a cautionary tale for the nation.

THE FREE PRESS: The Real Science on Masks: They Make No Difference. 

NEVER LET THE FACTS GET IN THE WAY OF RACE-BAITING: What Buttigieg Ignored about the Construction Industry. Whites are actually underrepresented in the construction industry. Far from helping minorities, the Biden administration has enacted policies depriving minorities of opportunities in the industry.

ALLISON SCHRAGER: How to Hedge Life. Often criticized, risk-management tools remain the best defense from panic, superstition, and bad public policy.  They could have helped us avoid the disastrous response to Covid — if only our leaders knew how how to use these tools as well as bail bondsmen do.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA: When I Covered Climate Change for Reuters I Thought CO2 Was Certainly to Blame for Rising Temperatures. I Was Wrong. Once upon a time, science correspondents at Reuters considered the evidence before parroting activists’ claims. Today the news agency works with the activists — and even funds them.

REALCLEAR INVESTIGATIONS: The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex. 

Two decades ago, MIT professor Thomas Kochan estimated that diversity was already an $8 billion-a-year industry. Yet along with the addition of equity, inclusion, and like terms, the industry has surely grown an order of magnitude larger. Six years ago, McKinsey and Company estimated that American companies were spending $8 billion a year on diversity training alone. DEI hiring and training have only accelerated in the years since. 

“In the scope and rapidity of institutional embrace,” writes Marti Gurri, a former CIA analyst who studies media and politics,“nothing like it has transpired since the conversion of Constantine.” 

At Ohio State University, for example, the average DEI staff salary is $78,000, according to public information gathered by economist Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute – about $103,000 with fringe benefits. Not to be outdone by its Big Ten conference rival, the University of Michigan pays its diversity officers $94,000 on average – about $124,000 with benefits. Until he retired from the position last summer, Michigan’s chief diversity officer, Robert Sellers, was paid over $431,000 a year. His wife, Tabbye Chavous, now has the job, at the vice provost rank and a salary of $380,000. 

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This is what happens when your institutions are controlled by a ruling-class monoculture.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: What Killed Tyre Nichols. His fatal torture was a tragic culmination—not of racism, but of the racism-in-policing narrative.

BUT THE CDC WANTS TO MASK TODDLERS ANYWAY: The Strongest Evidence Yet That Covid Masks Are Worthless. The gold standard in medical research, the Cochrane review of clinic trials, finds no evidence that surgical or even N95 masks made any difference in stopping the spread of Covid. Naturally, the CDC’s director vows to ignore the world’s most respected authority on health interventions. The CDC, the only national health agency to recommend masking two-year-olds, peddled junk science throughout the pandemic to justify its cruel policies, so why stop now? When you follow “the science,” who needs real science?