IF THIS IS TRUE, “DEMOCRACY” DESERVES IT: Actual Atlantic headline. I read it so you don’t have to. Basically, Lindell thinks the Chicoms stole the election by hacking it in Biden’s favor and is spending millions trying to prove it using experts, holding a conference, etc., after which the Supreme Court will vote to put Trump back in office. Article author Anne Applebaum doesn’t think he will be able to prove it, but assuming he did somehow, he would apparently be destroying democracy by… putting the actual winner of the election back in office.

Exit question: We have been hearing a whole lot since January 6 about how our “democracy” is threatened, but is there any substantial number of evil terrorist seditious insurrectionist Q-anon folks out there who don’t think Trump was, in fact, the actual winner of the election?

IS SUBSTACK THE “LAST, BEST HOPE FOR FREE SPEECH?” I think it’s proved that people will actually pay for journalism when it’s interesting and useful (as opposed to solely click-driven) but Substack is still a single point of failure – and the pressure to censor that will be brought on its management once enough powerful people get angry is immense. It would be wise for them, or someone who’d want to compete with them, to come up with a monetized, distributed model to flee to when the time comes.

TURNING CARBON CREDITS AND GREEN GIVEAWAYS INTO BITCOIN: Is it crazy, or are you crazy not to do it? (You also get all-you-can-eat beef.) A rare plan to help normies benefit from these absurd subsidies.

HUBBLE BACK UP AND RUNNING AFTER SWITCHING TO BACKUP #2 OF 3. Backup #1 didn’t work. The James Webb Space Telescope is on the way, but it’s mostly infrared, not visual light, and was originally scheduled for launch in 2007.

“STUDENTS WORE ‘WHITE LIVES MATTER’ SHIRTS. THEIR SCHOOL WON’T TALK ABOUT IT.” Vice News tries whipping up a cancel culture mob against some random teens in rural Pennsylvania. “[T]he school allegedly hasn’t addressed the students’ behavior in any meaningful way.” It sent them home, which is already unlawful under Tinker unless the shirts caused a disturbance, and they have graduated. Who knows what actually happened here (not Vice, that’s for sure), but we can’t have a society where simply wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt is legally fine but a White Lives Matter t-shirt is not.

THE ‘ELITES’ ARE DETERMINED TO CRASH THIS COUNTRY WITH NO SURVIVORS. From Politico:

Democrats for years have pushed the agency responsible for Fannie and Freddie to expand homeownership and narrow the racial wealth gap….

[President and CEO of the National Housing Conference David] Dworkin, and other housing advocates want FHFA to allow Fannie and Freddie to take on more financial risk — meaning more government intervention backed by taxpayers — in the name of expanding access to mortgages.

Among their ideas: Giving Fannie and Freddie free rein to purchase mortgages with lower credit scores, allowing private lenders to make more of those loans…

Dworkin said the companies today have “almost no measurable risk in their book of business,” which includes borrowers who hold “extraordinarily high” credit scores and very few first-time homebuyers with low down payments.

So, 2008 all over again, but this time after we already printed $4 trillion in a single year. Folly of this magnitude simply cannot be chalked up to stupidity. Better grab your original Hunter Bidens if you want to ride out the storm, as they are one asset we know will be made to hold their value.

VIRGINIA GOP DEMANDS UVA INVESTIGATE LARRY SABATO OVER POLITICAL TWEETS. Would everyone please stop doing this? It’s unconstitutional, plus, does anyone think this is convincing people? I get it, it’s an arms race and both sides do it, but someone has to be the first to walk away.

LINCOLN PROJECT’S STEVE SCHMIDT: JAN. 6 CAPITOL RIOT LEGACY WILL KILL MORE AMERICANS THAN 9/11. Setting aside my instinctual revulsion at this comparison, I don’t think you can separate the two events. You don’t get a “1/6” (sigh) without the massive unleashing and growth of the security state that is the legacy of 9/11. I don’t think you even get a Trump presidency.

WHITE HOUSE DEFENDS DOOR-TO-DOOR VACCINATION PUSH AMID BACKLASH. Unexpectedly.

Update: Yikes, sorry about just posting a bare link, don’t know what happened!

“GAY GROUP: ‘WE’LL CONVERT YOUR CHILDREN.'” As sung by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. The song is satirical, or at least full of double entendres, so I hesitated to post this since I don’t want to be unfair. But this year it’s been really hard not to see the overwhelming, crushing cultural messages from the woke movement (most definitely including government and corporations) as a ridiculous end-zone dance meant not to convince but to demoralize. (And aiming it so blatantly at peoples’ kids?) Politics always involves some of this, but while I don’t think it will ultimately succeed, I have real concerns that the sheer scale of this propaganda effort is incompatible with liberal democracy.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): These are The Crazy Years, and somewhere the Rev. Nehemiah Scudder reads this story and smiles.

YOU COULD JUST AS EASILY CALL IT INFINITE TAXPAYER-FUNDED DO-OVERS. Qualified immunity was invented by courts in 1982 and justified by police having to make snap judgments, but has been extended even to college administrators and other bureaucrats. Maybe it’s justifiable for police, but then how the heck did the police handle crime before 1982? It’s way past time for the doctrine to be dialed back or eliminated.

JUDGE ENJOINS FLORIDA SOCIAL MEDIA LAW FROM GOING INTO EFFECT. This was the law that would have fined companies like Twitter or Facebook $250,000 per day for deplatforming candidates for statewide office ($25,000 per day for any other office). I don’t doubt that there are extremely thorny First Amendment concerns here. But this should be the handwriting on the wall, in the most Biblical sense of the term.

Consider this: If Donald Trump is still banned from these platforms in 2024, runs for office, and loses, his supporters will say that it was not a free and fair election, and you know what? They will be right. I cannot stress enough how potentially apocalyptic this possibility is, and I don’t think anyone in DC or Silicon Valley has the first clue how close they are to driving us all right over a cliff.

HOW ‘EXPERTS’ ABUSED SCIENCE TO SADDLE AMERICA WITH ‘MICROAGGRESSIONS’: Don’t have the time or inclination to read a whole law review article? George Leef at the Martin Center breaks it down for you. Here’s a teaser for you: “When Sue’s [the “father” of microaggressions] research was finally critically analyzed for its weak-to-nonexistent evidence, he responded that what constitutes evidence ‘is bathed in the values of the dominant society.'” Yikes.

HUBBLE TELESCOPE STILL DOWN DUE TO 1980’S COMPUTER FAILURE. It’s been going for 31 years, which is awesome, but maybe it’s time to slap one of the two spare “Stubby Hubble” spy satellites NASA has (!) on a Falcon Heavy or something and go for it. They’re not doing anyone any good on the ground and I bet Elon would do a deal…

FIRE EXPOSES U. OF OKLAHOMA WORKSHOP TRAINING TEACHERS TO CENSOR AND INDOCTRINATE. OU has been a bad actor on these issues for a long time. From the video:

“If they’re writing and their goal is like ‘Oh, I should be able to use whatever pronouns I deem acceptable for this person despite how they identify,’ then they are invalidating that person’s humanity and their existence. And that’s not acceptable. So I flat out tell them that. This is what this is doing. You need to pick something else. You’re not doing that.”

This, in a class about argumentation. College does not have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way.

WHEN TEACHING THE LAW IS AGAINST THE RULES. America loses another good professor thanks to the kind of stupid “crazy years” incident that gets recounted in books with titles starting with the words “The Decline and Fall.”

MINDS WIDE SHUT: Northwestern University president Morton Schapiro joins literature professor Gary Saul Morson to pen a book about “the growing problem of fundamentalist thinking,” as reviewer George Leef puts it. But have Schapiro and Morson made some fundamentalist thinking mistakes of their own? (My strong impression is that even very smart people are shockingly bad at distinguishing reason from their own articles of – usually secular – faith.)

NEW JERSEY LANDLORDS SOON TO BE BANNED FROM AUTOMATICALLY REJECTING THOSE WITH CRIMINAL RECORDS. Don’t worry, though, the bill says you can always explain to violent criminals why you rejected them, which we can be confident will go super well in all cases. I have some small experience being a landlord. Does “the other tenants, many of whom were single women, would be both scared and angry if I did rent to such people” count as a reason?

GEORGETOWN SILENTLY REFUSES TO PUNISH PROF FOR READING THE N-WORD ALOUD FROM A SUPREME COURT CASE. My sad conclusion is that they’re probably more embarrassed about doing the right thing than the wrong one.

ON LAWS TARGETING CRITICAL RACE THEORY: “HOW HAS THIS ACADEMIC CONCEPT BECOME SO POLITICIZED?” That it has can’t possibly surprise anyone, though that doesn’t disqualify it as an academic concept.

Seeing how state bills target it differently is a reminder, though, that CRT is now a grab bag term, like cancel culture or political correctness, that means different things to different people. That doesn’t make it (or criticism of it) meaningless, it just means that you have to pay attention to the details.

WEALTH TAX TALK RETURNS WITH EXPOSURE OF BILLIONAIRE TAX RATES. Warren Buffett allegedly pays around a 0.1% income tax rate, but the odds that someone with billions of dollars isn’t going to find a way to avoid a wealth tax are even lower than that. Plus, do we actually care about taxes as a revenue stream any more? At this point we’re just funding everything through printing money, and the tax is inflation. No surprise there; the only way we can possibly pay the national debt is through inflating it away eventually.

Update: To be clear, Buffett’s “0.1%” tax rate was calculated by ProPublica by taking into account unrealized gains in his wealth, not just “income” like the average person gets, though ProPublica points out that they can just borrow against their wealth and avoid ever realizing the gains for tax purposes. Ultimately, it’s hard to imagine any “fix” that won’t end up missing the super rich and hitting the average person somehow instead.

“WHY I STOPPED HIRING IVY LEAGUE GRADUATES.” I think this situation is ripe for a preference cascade. The brokenness of campus culture hurts all of us, and admins are asleep at the wheel on it.

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION, NO DUE PROCESS. MUST BE 2021. President Bashar W. Hanna of the public Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania has disbanded its entire Greek system – 17 fraternities and sororities – alleging repeated incidents of misconduct. But some organizations had no such allegations, and are punished anyway. Why? Shut up, that’s why.

INSTA-CO-BLOGGER GAIL HERIOT’S NEW BOOK SOUNDS LIKE IT’S GOING TO ANNOY ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE. Our government and institutions think that treating people differently based solely on their skin color is way, way more popular than it actually is.

NY POST: COLUMBIA PREP STUDENTS AND PARENTS REEL AFTER CLASS ON ‘PORN LITERACY.’ Even in today’s world, you have to read it to believe it. Sprung on parents and students without warning. Here’s a student quote:

“We were all so shocked and mortified,” the girl told The Post. “We were all like, ‘Why are they doing this? Why do they think it’s OK?’

“We were supposed to answer questions about the porn stuff in the Zoom chat but we were all side-chatting in group chats and tons of kids thought it was so dumb that they sent the link to their friends all over the city and they were all logging on with the password.”

I’m not going to post the details, because it’s pretty graphic. Also, it sounds like it was a miserable failure. Parents should not be required to put up with this. But the head of the school sounds pretty chillaxed about the whole deal:

“It was unfortunate that we did not better inform ourselves of the speaker’s specific content in advance,” [school head William M.] Donohue continued. “In this case, the speaker did not align with our unique CGPS mission and for this, I apologize… Going forward we will certainly learn from this experience.”

And you thought, in our overheated social media environment, that understatement was dead.