NICHOLAS WADE: Proximal Orchestrations. Newly released emails cast more doubt than ever on the official story of Covid-19 as a naturally occurring virus.

LEOR SAPIR: The School-to-Clinic Pipeline. New Title IX rules from the Biden administration, besides bringing kangaroo courts back to campus, will worsen gender-related distress in children.

NICHOLAS WADE: GOP-Controlled House Should Investigate Covid Origins. The next Congress should investigate not only how the virus emerged but also the institutional failures that obscured the search for truth. The committee should demand answers from the CDC and NIH, the intelligence agencies, the National Academy of Sciences, and the editors of Science, Nature, and the Lancet. 

WITH AWFUL RESULTS: American Politics Is Being Shaped by the AWFLs (Affluent White Liberal Feminists).

LESSONS FOR 2024: Toward a Conservative Popularism. If they want to win majorities, Republicans should emphasize issues on which the public supports their positions.

NOAH CARL: Name-Calling, “Fact-Checking” and Censorship in the Covid Era. A new paper analyzes the tactics used to enforce Covid orthodoxy.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Other Imaginary Red Wave. Despite ceaseless warnings on the left, Election Day came and went without right-wing violence.

We have been through this hysteria before. Predictions of right-wing violence are now a standard feature of Democratic rhetoric. In the lead-up to January 6, 2022 (the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Capitol riot), the media, politicians, and the Biden national-security apparatus warned that “domestic violent extremists” were likely to strike again. Washington, D.C., was reportedly on edge in anticipation of the MAGA rebels. As it turned out, January 6, 2022, was notable only for the maudlin theatrics of newly patriotic Democrats, who softly sang “God Bless America” in a candlelight vigil on the Capitol steps, as calm engulfed them.

During the previous year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security had issued regular warnings about election-denying terrorism. The summer of 2021, August 2021, September 2021—all provoked a satisfying increase in alerts and in precautionary barricades and bollards. And still, the right-wing terrorists did not strike.

Read the whole thing.

STEVEN MALANGA: Trumped at the Polls. Despite Joe Biden’s deep unpopularity, GOP gubernatorial candidates backed by the former president struggled in yesterday’s election because voters disliked Trump even more than Biden.

THE 2024 BETTING MARKET: DeSantis Dethrones Trump. For the past year, betting markets made Donald Trump the favorite to win the presidency in 2024. But since the election results came in, the new favorite is Ron DeSantis, with Trump falling to second place and Biden remaining in third.

THE ESSENTIAL WOKE PHILOSOPHY: I Feel, Therefore I Am. The novelist and religious historian Mark Goldblatt has written a short and savagely funny philosophical analysis of wokery. He imagines, for instance, today’s academics canceling Galileo because “astronomical observations privilege a specific Enlightenment view of the earth as an inanimate object hurtling through space rather than as a living, nurturing mother figure” and therefore “reinscribe the cultural hegemony of Europeans over communities of color.” A summary:

Advocates for Critical Race Theory, the Me Too movement, and transgender-recognition, often grouped under the umbrella term “Woke,” share more than a perpetual sense of grievance, an attraction to street theater, and an intense dislike of straight white guys who drink cheap beer and wear their baseball caps backward. They share a devotion to subjectivism. Their gathering principle is the idea that subjective belief, if it is heartfelt, trumps whatever objective, verifiable evidence may be brought against it. For these social justice warriors, if you sincerely and passionately believe an injustice is being done, then the effort to determine whether that belief corresponds with reality is a further injustice.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS THOU CANST USE: Whatever Happened to “You”?  English sorely lacks a distinction that’s common in other languages. We once used “thou” for the singular, but by the 17th century “you” became common for both the singular and plural (unless thou wert a Quaker). People have kept coming up with new ways to make this useful distinction, like “y’all” and “youse” and Pittsburghers’ “yinz” (derived from “you ones”). But none of them has become standard, the linguist John McWhorter explains, because “their class associations are especially strong, and are felt by pretty much all of the population rather than by just a few pedants.”

English without “thou” has a ding in it. You can likely recall times when you have had to say something amid a group, like “You need to make sure — I mean you all, not just you, Jocelyn — that we make contact with them before Monday.” No one had to pause for little fixes like that when speaking Old or Middle English. It’s a design flaw in the modern language.

And yet notice that no one seems terribly concerned. In contrast to endless attempts to create a brand-new gender-neutral pronoun, such as “ze” or my favorite one, dating all the way back to 1879, “hesh,” there seems to be no push to create a plural “you” pronoun that doesn’t have the class associations of “y’all” and the like. We just accept that in this regard English is pitilessly, eternally and peculiarly unclear.

There is, actually, a lesson in that. If it’s OK that standard English can’t readily distinguish between the singular and plural “you,” then what determines which aspects of our language we single out for criticism and attempt to fix? If we don’t need “thou,” then why all of the agita about using “literally” in a figurative way, when in that case, unlike with “you,” context almost always makes clear what the meaning is without any need for repair? Why sweat about the insouciant redundancy of “irregardless”? Why insist on retaining something as confounding and ongoingly misused as that “lay” is both how you make something “lie” and also the past tense of “lie”? This is the result of an unintended train crash between two words that sounded much less alike 1,000 years ago — but last time I checked we were supposed to keep the distinction going irre— sorry, regardless.

To wit, in the grand scheme of things, what happened in English is an object lesson in how imperfect all languages are, and that this imperfection is both inevitable and harmless. We like our English “you” just the way it is and dismiss all attempts to change it, even though it only got that way because of a creeping notion that everybody should be, as it were, holier than thou. Few things better demonstrate how we can learn to stop worrying and love our language.

Personally, I’m still rooting for a separate plural. Yinz have any opinions?

WHAT THE PUNDITS AND BETTORS MAY BE MISSING: Could New York Elect a Republican Governor? According to most pollsters and the betting markets, Lee Zeldin is still a long shot to beat Kathy Hochul.  But Nicole Gelinas at City Journal says that early voting numbers are encouraging for Zeldin because turnout has been so low in New York City.

THE DAILY SKEPTIC: U.S. Covid Response Taken Over by National Security Council in March 2020 to Impose Pre-Prepared Lockdown Plan.  A lockdown was not part of the CDC’s pre-2020 plans for dealing with a pandemic.

ON SECOND THOUGHT, JUST TOSS THAT PLASTIC BOTTLE IN THE TRASH: Even Greenpeace Admits That Recycling Plastic Makes No Sense. Greenpeace has finally acknowledged what was obvious a quarter century ago, when I set a record for hate mail at the New York Times Magazine with a cover story, “Recycling Is Garbage.”  Environmental groups published lengthy denunciations and went on convincing municipal officials to keep adding more and more plastics to their recycling programs.  They kept up this fantasy for decades, but now a report from Greenpeace’s finally admits that recycling plastic is a hopeless cause — utterly impractical, a waste of money, and bad for the environment. Unfortunately — but inevitably — Greenpeace is now pushing an even worse alternative.

AS SHE SHOULD BE: Kathy Hochul on the Ropes in New York. 

THE FED’S BOGUS STUDY: Fake Science Fuels Climate Extremism.  The Federal Reserve’s doomsday forecast of economic damage from climate change is statistical nonsense, but the media promote it instead of the forecasts from competent economists.

DON’T GET COCKY: Betting Markets Have Flipped to GOP Control of the Senate. After two months of bettors favoring the Democrats to retain control of the Senate, the markets flipped this week, and bettors now give Republicans a better than 60 percent chance of taking the Senate. Five Thirty Eight’s model still favors the Democrats (it gives them a 58 percent chance to retain Senate control), but Nate Silver says he personally considers it a toss-up.

SEND OUT THE CLOWNS: The CDC’s Inadequate “Reform Plan.” Instead of acknowledging the agency’s disastrous mistakes during the pandemic,  the CDC’s director is proposing to repeat them in the next pandemic — and as an added bonus, she wants to create an “equity office.” Tevi Troy translates the bureaucratese of her “reform” and shows what actually ought to be done.