June 2020 Archives


Many states have majorities of conservative citizens and legislatures who are getting tired of funding public universities who often seem to despise conservative people and values. In an ideal world universities would be responsible enough to avoid ideological possession, but we don't live in an ideal world and legislatures are moving to oversee their state university systems more closely.

[Patrick Garry, University of South Dakota law professor] concludes that "political indoctrination is not a legitimate academic function and hence is undeserving of special constitutional protection. ... [Campuses] have, in a way, become like the southern states under the Voting Rights Act. Those states were put under judicial supervision to make sure that voting rights were respected in those states," Garry concludes. "Perhaps, as the South Dakota Legislature has recognized, universities may now have to be put under a kind of formalized public review process regarding their actions concerning free speech and academic freedom." ...

Sue Peterson, one of the state representatives who sponsored the bill, told RealClearInvestigations the Board of Regents' lack of progress over such a long period of time left the legislature no choice but to act. "They did make some policy changes between 2018 and 2019 that were positive," she said. "We still felt certain changes needed to be in statute because policies can change." South Dakota Rep. Tina Mulally was even blunter. "I don't believe the Board of Regents has been responsive to the taxpayers for decades," she told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "I tried to have conversations with them when I became a representative, and I got the impression that they didn't want to talk to me."

The motivations for reining in campus radicalism aren't just ideological. Legislators say radicalism is making their schools less attractive to prospective students. The University of Missouri, in one of the states currently considering intellectual diversity legislation, was rocked by violent protests in 2015 that caused such a steep enrollment drop that the university closed four dormitories, saw its credit rating downgraded, and created a budget shortfall of $32 million.

Political oversight of public universities is an unfortunate necessity, but I encourage legislatures to use a light touch.


I like Charles Lipson's idea: "Defund the thought police".

Dissent from their approved views is not just considered an error, much less an innocent one. It is considered immoral, illegitimate, and unworthy of a public hearing. Although both left and right have moved steadily toward this abyss, the worst excesses today come from the left, just as they came from the right in the 1950s. Opponents are seen in religious terms, as dangerous apostates who deserve to be burned at the stake, at least symbolically. You never expect the Spanish Inquisition. Yet here it is. That is the powerful iconography behind torching police cars and neighborhood stores.

Anyone who doesn't support free speech is probably just afraid they'll lose the debate.


In March Anthony Fauci and other health experts told the public not to wear masks to protect ourselves from COVID-19:

"You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider," Surgeon General Jerome Adams said during an appearance on "Fox & Friends" earlier this month.

"If it's not fitted right you're going to fumble with it," warned Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar late last month, when asked about N95 respirator masks.

"Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and a public face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, on CBS' "60 Minutes" earlier this month. He, like the others, suggested that masks could put users at risk by causing them to touch their face more often.

Apparently they were intentionally lying to us. Now we're told:

"Masks are not 100 percent protective. However, they certainly are better than not wearing a mask. Both to prevent you, if you happen to be a person who maybe feels well, but has an asymptomatic infection that you don't even know about, to prevent you from infecting someone else," Fauci said.

"But also, it can protect you a certain degree, not a hundred percent, in protecting you from getting infected from someone who, either is breathing, or coughing, or sneezing, or singing or whatever it is in which the droplets or the aerosols go out. So masks work," Fauci added.

Why did they lie?

[Fauci] also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn't feel the strain of a shortage of PPE.

That's still a lie. Masks weren't "not recommended" -- experts recommended against wearing masks.

Remember this whenever you consider giving the government more power over anything.


I'm surprised but pleased to see that Facebook is resisting pressure from Joe Biden to "fact-check" political statements.

We live in a democracy, where the elected officials decide the rules around campaigns. Two weeks ago the President of the United States issued an executive order directing Federal agencies to prevent social media sites from engaging in activities like fact-checking political statements. This week, the Democratic candidate for President started a petition calling on us to do the exact opposite. Just as they have done with broadcast networks -- where the US government prohibits rejecting politicians' campaign ads -- the people's elected representatives should set the rules, and we will follow them. There is an election coming in November and we will protect political speech, even when we strongly disagree with it.


Joel Kotkin is one of my favorite writers on city and class issues, and his "The Rebellion of America's New Underclass" is worth reading in full. I want to highlight one element that I think is critical for understanding the psychology and politics of the Millennial generation. Kotkin certainly makes this point in his essay, but I want to connect the dots in a different order than he does.

Near the end of his essay he calls out Millennials for not respecting America's founding principles:

Not surprisingly, then, Millennials tend to support massive government programs as a way to address social and economic problems by wide margins. A poll conducted by the Communism Memorial Foundation in 2016 found that 44% of American Millennials favored socialism while 14% chose fascism or Communism.

Perhaps because they no longer respect the basic founding principles, Millennials are also far more likely than their elders to accept limits on freedom of speech. Some 40% of Millennials, notes the Pew Research Center, favor suppressing speech deemed offensive to minorities--well above the 27% among Gen Xers, 24% among baby boomers, and only 12% among the oldest cohorts, many of whom remember the fascist and Communist regimes of the past.

Many people recognize this sentiment in the Millennial generation and attribute it to ungratefulness and poor character, but earlier in the essay Kotkin points to a remarkable fact:

America's economic regression is best understood in generational terms. About 90% of those born in 1940 grew up to earn higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project. The same is true for only 50% of those born in the 1980s.

A Deloitte study projects that Millennials in the United States will hold barely 16% of the nation's wealth in 2030, when they will be the largest adult generation by far. Gen Xers, the preceding generation, will hold 31%, while Boomers, entering their eighties and nineties, will still control 45% of the nation's wealth.

The reason Millennials are angry is because America's promise of upward mobility has been broken. I was sure that George W. Bush would be America's last Baby Boomer president, but even now in 2016 no one but Boomers got close to the nomination for either party. The Boomers' grip on power is strangling their children and grandchildren.

Millennials are foolish to clamor for socialism, but can you blame them? They're badly educated and inarticulate -- again, thanks to political correctness foisted onto them by Boomers -- but their grievances are real.


On Monday the media almost universally reported that police in Washington DC used tear gas on peaceful protesters to clear a path for Trump to visit St. John's Episcopal Church. But now it's clear that no tear gas was deployed and the protesters weren't peaceful.

Facts were no barrier to their narrative. They spun a tale of violent, jack-booted cops running rampant through the streets over innocent docile protesters, using tear gas to clear the area. It turns out none of that was true.

Every single major media outlet falsely reported that Park Police were unprovoked when they used "tear gas" to clear the area. If any of that were true, it might mark the first time in history that cops without gas masks launched tear gas in an area that the president of the United States easily walked through minutes later.

After thousands of false tweets, print stories, and broadcast stories to the contrary, local journalist Neal Augenstein of WTOP reported that a Park Police source said "tear gas was never used -- instead smoke canisters were deployed, which don't have an uncomfortable irritant in them." Further, the source said the crowd was dispersed because of projectiles being thrown by the "peaceful protesters" at the Park Police and because "peaceful protesters" had climbed on top of a structure in Lafayette Park that had been burned the prior night.


I'm not really sure what I have to add to the current news-cycle.

  • The killing of George Floyd by the police was horrible and should be prosecuted.
  • Peaceful protesting is good and useful to bring attention to legitimate grievances and to promote positive change.
  • Rioting, looting, and burning is disgraceful and should be prosecuted.
  • Civil disorder is the kind of thing that makes people long for an authoritarian to restore order. If you want more and worse Trump, this is how you get it.

It seems like political agitators of various stripes -- but primarily left-wing self-described anti-fascists Antifa -- are using the terrible killing of George Floyd to foment violence to undermine Trump and provoke him to an authoritarian overreaction. I don't think this move will play out well for the Left because it undermines the class realignment that has been happening since the 2016 campaign and Trump's election. The nature of that realignment has been that suburban white women have begun to align with the globalist class, and working-class white men have begun to align with the small-c conservative cohort. The rioting and violence threaten to undermine the leftward movement of white suburban women, which could leave the Left without a dance partner.

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This page is an archive of entries from June 2020 listed from newest to oldest.

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