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?

LET THEM EAT WINDMILLS: California’s Green Debacle. The Golden State’s energy policies impose ruinous costs on residents but make no measurable impact on global climate.

ANN COULTER: Why Plastic Is Good and Recycling Is Bad. We discuss the perverse campaign to ban plastic — a revival of medieval sumptuary laws imposed on commoners by the nobility — on her podcast.

TO BE FAIR, THAT WAS ALWAYS THE GOAL OF SOME PROGRESSIVES: How We Broke Science. Less emphasis on basic research, over-emphasis on citation counts, and costly regulations — like the ones responsible for Eroom’s Law (that’s “Moore’s” spelled backwards) of drug research, which keeps getting more expensive and less productive.

OF COURSE NOT, ESPECIALLY ONCE THEY DISCOVER THE PRICE TAG: Should Virginians Pay for University “Diversity” Leftism? The Virginia Association of Scholars has added up the costs of the DEI racket at the state’s public universities. The money spent on these bureaucrats, whose six-figure salaries often dwarf professors’ pay, could have paid for 150 full-time professors.

JOHN STOSSEL: The Recycling Religion.  A smart column accompanied by an excellent video showing how costly and pointless recycling is, including some nice footage showing how all those plastic bags lovingly tossed into the recycling bin end up clogging and shutting down the machinery at recycling plants. Of course, a lot of the stuff from the recycling bin just goes straight to landfills.

AND CODDLING CRIMINALS: Embracing Failure. Despite recent crime spikes, decarceration advocates are unrepentant

PLAYING NOW INSIDE YOUR GUT: The Invisible Extinction. A fascinating new documentary on the race to save vanishing microbes. Available on streaming services, it offers a great overview of the research into the link between the changing microbes in our bodies and the rising rates of food allergies, obesity, diabetes, autism, asthma, Alzheimer’s and other diseases. Some of the experimental treatments (there are hundreds of clinical trials underway) are already showing promise.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Strategic Charitable Giving. A guide to supporting the classical music organizations that hold true to their missions amid the relentless DEI tide.

TRAINING TOMORROW’S NEWSROOM CENSORS: Like Professional, Like Student. The University of Missouri’s journalism school imposes an anti-speech diversity policy. In abandoning the First Amendment (once considered essential to the profession by journalists on the left as well as the right), Missouri is following the lead of Columbia University’s journalism school, which has been rationalizing censorship in the once-respected Columbia Journalism Review. 

THE ALGORITHM OF LOVE: The Woman Who Made Online Dating into a “Science.” The Atlantic’s profile of the anthropologist Helen Fisher, the world’s most-quoted authority on love. (Full disclosure: I am married to her.)

STEVEN MALANGA: The Biden Bucks Blowout. Local governments are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in federal handouts for dubious needs — like a new golf course for Palm Beach Gardens in Florida.

AN UNLIKELY BEST-SELLER AGES WELL: Times Change, Principles Endure. Bill Bennett’s Book of Virtues at 30.