Wednesday roundup

Just no. Who in the hell within the Hoosier BMV signed off on this?

Hoosiers will soon have a third option for gender on their driver’s license or state ID card.

The Times of Northwest Indiana reports that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles will be offering a ‘non-specified’ gender option to residents. The ID will be marked as an ‘X’ for those who identify as neither male or female.

Those looking to apply for the designation must provide a birth certificate or a signed physician’s statement confirming a permanent gender change.

At least five other states offer a non-binary option on driver’s licenses.

Richard Fernandez' piece at PJ Media on how grim things have gotten in Venezuela, and how post-American millennials still get excited over socialism even with such an apocalyptic picture of its end product in their faces, is jarring reading.

Great Ben Shapiro tweet:

An electronics company manufactured the microphone into which AOC is speaking. Why shouldn't they be held responsible for the stupid crap she says into the microphone?

Sarah Lawrence College is yet another example of a school administration taking exactly the wrong approach in dealing with a campus group of snot-nosed brats. If these punks with crania full of dog vomit weren't demanding anything beyond detergent pods, it might be possible to write them off as too ridiculous to have any impact. But, as you'll see, they are savages. And the school president is a shameful coward:

And here are the first three demands in their, ahem, laundry list:

 

1. Sarah Lawrence must commit to actualizing the value that housing is a human right.
   The College must provide winter housing to students at no charge. This housing must include a communal kitchen with dry goods from the food pantry available for all students.In the extreme case that housing cannot be provided to students during break due to housing probation, the school must provide a list of local low-cost, free, and/or accessible housing options for students.
2. The College will designate housing with a minimum capacity for thirty students of color that is not contingent on the students expending any work or labor for the college. This housing option will be permanent and increase in space and size based on interest.
3. All campus laundry rooms are to supply laundry detergent and softener on a consistent basis for all students, faculty and staff.

So housing is a human right and thus, students should be provided free housing (demand #1) without working for it (demand #2). Students should also be given free detergent and fabric softener (demand #3) so maybe this is also a human right? Or maybe it’s an emanation from the penumbra of the right not to smell like marijuana and patchouli oil? They’ll work all of that out later. But for now, it’s simple: Tide pods for the people!

It’s worth mentioning that Sarah Lawrence College is one of the most expensive schools in the country with an annual tuition of $52,600 as of last year (ranking it 20th nationwide).

All of this would be amusing if it weren’t for some more disturbing demands that pop up later in the list. The protesters make it clear they want professors who are in strict ideological agreement with the principles of intersectionality:

• We demand that the College offer classes that embody intersectionality, as defined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and address the racial diversity of the LGBTQ+ community instead of centering whiteness.
• The aforementioned classes must be taught by professors who are a part of the culture they are teaching about.

Then the group singles out a conservative professor who wrote something they didn’t like. The group demands that he be put up for tenure review before a group made of of their members (despite that fact that he already has tenure) and demands he issue a public apology [Emphasis in the original]:

On October 16, 2018, politics professor Samuel Abrams published an op-ed entitled “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators” in The New York Times. The article revealed the anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-woman bigotry of Abrams…We demand that Samuel Abrams’ position at the College be put up to tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of color. In addition, the College must issue a statement condemning the harm that Abrams has caused to the college community, specifically queer, Black, and female students, whilst apologizing for its refusal to protect marginalized students wounded by his op-ed and the ignorant dialogue that followed. Abrams must issue a public apology to the broader SLC community and cease to target Black people, queer people, and women.

As Reason’s Robby Soave has pointed out, professor Abrams office door was vandalized after his article appeared in the NY Times:

Abrams’ office door was vandalized on October 16, hours after the op-ed’s publication. The perpetrators posted a sign on the door that read, “Our right to exist is not ‘ideological,’ asshole,” and was signed “transsexual fag.” Another flyer demanded that he apologize to residence life staff and the director of campus diversity, students of color, queer students, trans students, and other marginalized persons. Multiple messages instructed Abrams to “quit,” and one told him to “go teach somewhere else, maybe Charlottesville.”…

Several of Abrams’ colleagues met with [president Cristle Collins] Judd to discuss the vandalism and express their view that such acts could not be tolerated. Judd agreed, but did not pledge to take any further actions. These professors thought she seemed scared that the students might hold more protests, creating a public relations disaster, according to Abrams.

Professor Abrams spoke with President Judd to discuss the situation during which she told him he had created a “hostile work environment.” When they met in person, Judd suggested Abrams was back in the job market, despite the fact that he is a tenured professor. This is all starting to seem very reminiscent of what happened at Evergreen State College. President Judd may want to look into Evergreen’s subsequent enrollment numbers before she commits fully to backing the protesters.

Still, muckety-muck playpens for the unhinged colleges and universities are seen by some as essential to a worthwhile life. Jim Geraghty at NRO on the scandal involving two TV celebrities and a number of other wealthy west-coasters using outrageously unethical means to get their kids into prestigious schools.

Were those parents crazy? Or were they just astute about the risk-reward analysis and long-term benefits of getting into one of the top 25 schools, instead of one of the top 50 or top 100?

We’ve heard all the stories about the “Harvard mafia.” A few years ago, Ross Douthat wrote “elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.”

A line that appears a little further up his piece is as apt here as there:

If you wanted to pour gasoline onto the fires of populism, this is how you do it!

His essential point:

Sure, all of those wealthy parents indicted yesterday stand accused of breaking the law. But they were also pretty obviously responding to incentives. If a society turns getting into one of the top 25 schools in the country into the Willie Wonka ticket, the Holy Grail, the alchemical formula — the one thing that parents believe will ensure their children will have a happy, financially comfortable, and successful life — then people will go to absurd and illegal lengths to get it.

Why didn't the FBI go after Madame Bleachbit in 2016?

 

Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page admitted under questioning from Texas Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe last summer that "the FBI was ordered by the Obama DOJ not to consider charging Hillary Clinton for gross negligence in the handling of classified information," the congressman alleged in a social media post late Tuesday, citing a newly unearthed transcript of Page's closed-door testimony.

Page and since-fired FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, who were romantically involved, exchanged numerous anti-Trump text messages in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, and Republicans have long accused the bureau of political bias. But Page's testimony was perhaps the most salient evidence yet that the Justice Department improperly interfered with the FBI's supposedly independent conclusions on Clinton's criminal culpability, Ratcliffe alleged.

"So let me if I can, I know I’m testing your memory," Ratcliffe began as he questioned Page under oath, according to a transcript excerpt he posted on Twitter. "But when you say advice you got from the Department, you’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you: You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to —"

Page interrupted: "That is correct," as Ratcliffe finished his sentence, " -- bring a case based on that."

The document dump was part of a major release by House Judiciary Committee Republicans, who on Tuesday released hundreds of pages of transcripts from last year's closed-door interview with Page, revealing new details about the bureau's controversial internal discussions regarding an “insurance policy” against then-candidate Donald Trump. Fox News has previously reviewed portions of Page's testimony.

Timothy P. Carney (whose new book Alienated America is on my want-to-read-soon list) at the Washington Examiner on the upside of Tucker Carlson's remarks when Carlson was a guest on Bubba the Love Sponge years ago:

. . . the upside is that now we’re allowed to discuss the real harms of flippant attitudes towards sex and the sexualization of women.

If you tried to bring up those issues eight years ago, you would have been chased off the stage as a backwards prude dedicated to sexual repression. Consider that very recently — before we had a president who bragged about sexual assault — we had a president whose top asset on the campaign trail was rapper Jay-Z. Somehow, this seemed okay at the time. 

“You know I thug em, f--k em, love em, leave em,” Obama’s favorite fundraiser explained in "Big Pimpin,'" “Cause I don't f--kin need em."

"Put your two lips on my wood and kiss it, could ya,” Obama’s good friend Jay-Z explained on another occasion. 

The Obama White House also elevated vulgar sex columnist Dan Savage to be a crusader against bullying. Savage’s entire shtick was sexual depravity. 

Even today, our press corps accepts as one of its colleagues a White House correspondent from Playboy, literally a smut publication.

Pornographic depravity, reducing sexuality to materialistic hedonism — in a word, debauchery — has been aggressively tolerated by the media elites. Chastise that debauchery and risk getting branded a prude. Hell, social scientists have even promulgated bogus studies arguing that sexual conservatism kills kids.

But now that someone has dragged up Tucker’s old bawdy remarks, we’re allowed, finally, to speak the truth: Modern American culture needs to treat sex more seriously. Our public discourse is far too lewd, and its lewdness is detrimental.

The irony is that much of Tucker’s current critique of today’s elites lead us towards this truth. The Left’s elites are constantly bashing the morality of the 1950s traditional family and small town, and constantly attacking the institutions (most importantly church institutions) that preserve, defend, and build the family and community. Then those same elites go home to Chevy Chase and Park Slope for supper with their intact families and bustling Little Leagues. They retire in the evening to the life they spent their workday undermining for others.

These are the elites Carlson is dedicated to challenging. But it’s not their conservative lifestyles that need challenging. It’s their unconservative assault on the norms and institutions that have historically helped the regular guy make good life decisions.

So here’s a salutary, contrarian, and provocative move for Carlson: Apologize, but not on the Left’s terms. Instead, apologize for appearing to endorse sexual licentiousness that violates moral law. Maybe begin by saying that sex is properly reserved for marriage, and so the jokes he made about a teenager sleeping with his teacher were immoral. Also, grant that the talk he indulged of teenage lesbians was indecent in seeming to endorse a hedonistic concept of sexuality.

Great Ben Shapiro column at the Daily Wire entitled "Government Isn't the Social Fabric." This is something that occasionally comes up in LITD comment threads. It's sometimes asserted that "government" is an interchangeable term with "society" or "the people." It is not. They are distinct critters and that distinction is crucial to always maintain.