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.

NY TIMES CHATBOT TEACHES YOU HOW TO OVERCOME VACCINE SKEPTICS. It appears to be an earnest attempt to teach people how to teach others to come to believe the “right” things, though I can’t escape the feeling that helping people overcome skepticism of government policy is just a super awkward fit for a newspaper.

RUTGERS LAW STUDENT GOVERNMENT: PROMOTE CRITICAL RACE THEORY OR ELSE. Apparently enjoying no access to First Amendment scholars, it’s engaging in viewpoint discrimination by denying funding to law student organizations unless they plan events “through the lens of Critical Race Theory, diversity and inclusion, or cultural competency.” I was in the Duke Law Drama Society. We put on Blithe Spirit. How you do that through the lens of critical race theory, I have no idea.

HOW COLLEGES SUPPRESS CURIOSITY: Effects like this are probably worse, long-term, than the political indoctrination. The political dimension is so obvious and in-your-face (especially now) that you can at least be aware of it — and people can always change their views. I’m not so sure you can restore curiosity once it’s been beaten out of a young person.

THESE ARE THE FOLKS WHO DECIDE IF YOU’RE NUTS: My friend, Duke emeritus professor John E. R. Staddon, has been banned from an American Psychological Association email listserv for violating its circa-2019 “Code of Conduct,” which I am 100% sure was totally adopted based on SCIENCE and not as a transparent attempt to enforce ideological conformity. In true SCIENCE fashion, these SCIENCE-oriented people failed to point to what exactly got him banned, because specific evidence is totally unnecessary for SCIENCE, leaving him to guess it was the following shocking and intemperate remark: “Hmm… Binary view of sex false? What is the evidence? Is there a Z chromosome?” (Staddon, an Englishman, is one of the politest people I know.)

But then, I am just some lawyer and not an important SCIENCE man like Jonathon Crystal, Mark Krause, and Tony Puente, the “Presidential Trio” who announced Staddon’s ban. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go not wear a mask because it will make things worse wear a mask even if I can’t breathe or else I will die wear at least two masks unless I am outside, because you gotta defer to the SCIENCE.

BIDEN TO NOMINATE CATHERINE LHAMON TO LEAD EDUCATION DEPT’S OFFICE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS. She was the head of OCR under Obama, and was the primary person responsible for all of the Obama Administration’s Title IX policy. I wrote a short book about how well this policy worked, called Twisting Title IX.

EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT THE END TIMES, BUT NOBODY DOES ANYTHING ABOUT IT. The Center for Applied Eschatology aims to change that. From its FAQ:

Q: Why do you want to end the world?
A: CAE is devoted to practical, pragmatic solutions. We’re interested in the how, not the why.

We can’t keep waiting around in our gas lines (or, for folks unfortunate enough to be anywhere near the Capitol on January 6, jail) for the SMOD to make good on its string of broken promises.

DISPATCHES FROM THE CARTER BIDEN ADMINISTRATION: As I sat in a gas line discovering my parents’ 70s experience here in North Carolina today, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if the NSA and our other “intelligence” agencies had spent more of their time helping companies defend vital infrastructure like pipelines and less building giant facilities so they can illegally spy on Americans? It’s not like they didn’t know this was a problem.

Update: Sorry for basically replicating Ed’s post from 12 minutes ago; I was late because of the dang line for gas! Shoulda bought that Tesla, my power is nuclear…

CENTRAL MICHIGAN U. FORCES PROF OUT FOR QUOTING THE N-WORD. Prof. Timothy Boudreau, having settled his lawsuit, speaks out for the first time about his concerns. His “crime?” Pronouncing the forbidden words while quoting and discussing important First Amendment cases like Matal v. Tam and Dambrot v. CMU (the latter, an early campus speech code case, even involved his own institution).

This is how you make a generation dumber and more easily led.