Monday roundup

Jeffrey Epstein's Rolodex is going to prove quite explosive. DNC official Christine Pelosi tells Dems to brace themselves. 

Two great pieces on the snot-nosedness and poor math skills of the US Women's Soccer Team: one at the Daily Wire by Matt Walsh and one at The Resurgent by Erick Erickson. From Erickson's piece:

Want some grade school quality sporting with a side of virtue signaling? Watch women’s soccer. Good for Team USA. They won the Women’s World Cup. They did so complaining the whole way there and after. The women’s team made Colin Kaepernick seem mute. And the sports community commentary around it just insisted you had to care. I don’t. But I do have one good thing to say about the whole miserable thing. You just have to read to the end. First…

The Christian player on the team got shoved aside because she didn’t want to wear the LGBTABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ whatever. Then we had to hear all the anti-Trump, anti-conservative nonsense only to cap off the win with the winners complaining about their money and equality.

I assure you they aren’t paid as much because women’s soccer doesn’t generate the revenue, eyeballs, etc that men’s soccer does. It’s like the WNBA, but worse.

Graham Allison, writing at The National Interest, says that, yes, we're finding out that China is not a strategic partner, but rather an aggressive rival. Allison's analysis draws heavily on Henry Kissinger's concept of the Thucydides Trap. He says that hopefully, the rivalry will play out much like the US - USSR rivalry did during the Cold War, with each side's second-strike capability holding the unthinkable at bay.

Also writing at The National Interest is the American Enterprise Institute's Frederic Hess, following up on reaction to a piece he co-authored a while back:

Last winter, in National Affairs, Brendan Bell and I published “An Ivory Tower of Our Own.” The premise was straightforward: Higher education has become inhospitable to conservatives and conservative thought—and this really matters. The goal we set was also simple: a self-sustaining university where, to paraphrase the mission of Brandeis University, the intellectual Right—in all its rich diversity—can be “a host at last.” While the institution should be oriented by an intellectual mission rather than an ideological agenda, its board, leadership, bylaws, culture, and norms should unapologetically champion rigorous, important work that challenges prevailing campus orthodoxies.
The university would embrace unfettered academic freedom in accord with the highest principles of free inquiry, with no quarter given to demands for speech codes, “safe spaces,” or the political enthusiasms of the moment. It would offer a preeminent alternative to the anti-conservatives adversely affecting the college experience of students—and the nation at large. As we put it, these members of America’s academic cartel “help determine what knowledge is pursued, legitimize bodies of thought, provide a platform for cultural criticism, shape literary canons, develop policy agendas, and hold a privileged place in the public square.”

So what has response been like?

Now, in the six months since Bell and I published “Ivory Tower,” many have wondered about the response the piece garnered. Indeed, inquiring about the response is almost invariably the first question asked by each of the dozens of academics and scholars who have written to say, “Is this going to happen? Please tell me this is going to happen. And sign me up!”

On that count, at least four things are noteworthy.

First, there has been much less interest from the coterie of consultants and consiglieri who surround deep-pocketed conservative donors than I might have hoped. It’s not that I expected rich guys to read a 7,000-word essay, or that anyone was going to pony up $3 billion-plus on the word of a Beltway egghead. I had hoped, however, that “Ivory Tower” would pique the curiosity of some hangers-on, advisers, and estate planners who are advising deep-pocketed conservatives. After all, these same donors are busy writing huge checks, and leaving even bigger bequests, to colleges and universities that have no time for the views and values they hold dear. I fear that the quiet response on this front reflects the sense of resignation that characterizes conservative philanthropy in higher education today. Wealthy conservative donors have become enablers, happy when an elite university agrees to accept millions for a new medical complex or program in American studies. Nothing of import will change, I suspect, until that mindset does.

Second, some conservative thinkers have responded by conceding that the notion is an interesting one, only to insist that we ought not be too hasty to dismiss the academy or question its appetite for self-correction. They’ve suggested that it would be mistake to retreat from the academy, and that conservatives should continue to show up, be winsome, and trust that the better angels of the academy will get their act together any day now. I wholly agree that it would be nice if we could all find a way to peacefully coexist in the modern academy. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the problems noted above make clear why such a strategy is, like they say about second marriages, a triumph of hope over experience.

Third, to no one’s great surprise, the campus mandarins have mostly ignored the critique and proposal that Bell and I sketched. When they have occasionally bothered to acknowledge the piece, they have mostly sniffed at it as a typical example of right-wing paranoia and the refusal of conservatives to appreciate the fair-mindedness of the modern academy. I’m never quite sure what to say in response. I do find myself thinking if the handful of university denizens who bother to engage with long-form essays by conservatives are this dismissive, that there’s little hope that far-seeing chancellors are about to boldly challenge the monoculture, or would find much support if they did.

Finally, the heartening and striking response is that which has emerged from the ranks of established professors, young scholars, and academic exiles who have reached out to offer some version of “I’ve yearned for a place like this.” Indeed, plenty of those writers have opened with the disclaimer, “I’m no conservative, but…,” before lamenting that they’d love to find an institution where they needn’t tiptoe so carefully around prevailing norms when it comes to vital questions of political, cultural, and social thought. It speaks to the hunger for robust intellectual debate and suggests that such a venture could be as important for its ability to help liberate free-thinking centrists from smothering orthodoxy as for the scaffolding it would offer to right-leaning intellectuals.

I’m often struck that the conservative response to higher education has wobbled between fretful hand-wringing and resigned acceptance. There’s lots of justifiable snark and head-shaking regarding campus foolishness, but far less discussion of what it would take to truly change things. Indeed, conservative wonks and officials are more likely to advocate giving colleges new funds for workforce training than they are to challenge the cartel.

The first rule of holes is: When you’re in one, stop digging. Well, when it comes to higher education, it’s time to set the shovel down. And get to work assembling a ladder.

Hopefully, Vincent Lambert, the 42-year-old man who was rendered quadriplegic in 2008 and is now subject to an order from France's highest appeals court that his food and water be stopped can somehow, by God's grace, be spared that fate, much as a mentally ill woman in Britain was spared from a court order to abort her baby. Otherwise we slide further down to the condition in which the state's power vis-a-vis that of the individual is so overwhelming that life is utterly dispensable.

Per an Economist / YouGov poll, 53 percent of post-Americans want the citizenship question on the census.