Monday roundup

 Basecamp's CEO made a refreshing move corporate-policy-wise:

The web software firm Basecamp is asking employees not to discuss politics or partake in activism on company time. Founder and CEO Jason Fried also announced that the privately owned firm would be dropping committees, obsequious peer-performance reviews, and “wellness” and other “paternalistic benefits” that try to nudge employees toward a particular lifestyle.

Alas, apparently a sizable swath of the company's staff wanted the woke stuff:

Tech journalist Casey Newton said about one-third of the company’s roughly 60 employees took buyouts shortly after, with one fuming: “Basically the company has said, ‘well, your opinions don’t really matter — unless it’s directly related to business…’ A lot of people are gonna have a tough time living with that.”

Matt Welch at Reason on the interface between pandemic policies and the current fashionability of the concept of equity. 

A darkness is descending over Finland. Asserting sound Christian doctrine can get you charged with incitement, as Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, Bishop Elect of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Dicoese of Finland found out when he said marriage was between a man and a woman, or have you facing six years in prison as member of Parliament, medical doctor and mother of five Paivi Rasanen is for similarly speaking out about the Christian position on human sexuality.

It's called human nature. It's called the natural reaction to the entity in society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force coming for what belongs to you:

Wealthy Americans will avoid paying 90% of the estimated $1 trillion increase in investment taxes that President Joe Biden is proposing this week, according to new study from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School.

The Wharton researchers concluded that tax avoidance, much of it legal, would cut nearly $900 billion of what the proposed increase on capital gains taxes could raise for the government.

"We don't think that the proposal has a lot of teeth," said John Ricco, director of policy analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a non-partisan fiscal policy research group at the business school. "There are a lot of games you can play to avoid paying this tax."

 The University of Pennsylvania plays identity-politics favoritism with its initiative to address how the COVID pandemic has affected its faculty's output in pursuit of tenure:

The  University . . . has issued guidance promising an extra pre-tenure year to pretty much all assistant and associate professors while observing that the pandemic’s “specific” effects “will be different for different faculty members.” UPenn could’ve stopped there, and just said that the pandemic disrupted a lot of teaching, convening, and research, and that’s why it’s giving faculty some leeway.

Instead, the university went on to endorse a series of rather specific race- and gender-based assertions about how the pandemic affected college faculty, backed only by the sloppy, misleading application of junk science. It’s a study in how a sensible impulse can go awry in the hands of today’s woke campus bureaucrats.

UPenn officials asserted that “the negative implications [of the pandemic] for traditional measures of faculty productivity may be greater, on average, for women faculty and faculty of color, given gender differences in caregiving responsibilities, disproportionate negative health- and economic-related effects of the pandemic on Black and Brown people and communities, and greater expectations for women faculty and faculty of color to engage in mentoring and institutional service. Early data show that journal submissions during the early months of the pandemic were lower for women than for men.”

We couldn’t help but be curious about the research cited to justify these sweeping assertions.

Turns out, the pickings are pretty slim. The guidance is supported by only six references. Two of the citations explain how to write a pandemic impact statement and outline general pandemic effects on faculty well-being. That leaves four to address the pandemic’s disparate impact on women faculty of color and women faculty more broadly.

The citation used to justify the assertion that the pandemic had a disproportionate negative impact on the research and publication of women and on black and Latino faculty turns out not to be a study at all — but a June 2020 opinion column, published by the National Academy of Sciences and penned by Jessica Malisch, a biology professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, which advises universities on how to promote gender equity.

Malisch’s piece is, itself, a revealing exercise. Malisch offers a handful of references to support her call for changing campus hiring and tenure. But only two of these are studies which purport to study the pandemic’s impact on faculty research (the others are op-eds or actions guides). And neither of the two studies actually support Malisch’s point. To back her claim that COVID-19 has driven “a wedge between women and men in academia in terms of research opportunities,” Malisch cites an Inside Higher Ed story discussing a study which used data from the first few weeks of the pandemic—and which found that women faculty, overall, submitted more work than they typically did in that time period! The other study, focused solely on women economists, found that women were submitting working-papers at their normal rate. In other words, neither study actually made Malisch’s point.

UPenn’s other citation regarding the pandemic’s effect on women faculty of color was an Inside Higher Education guide titled, “Keeping COVID-19 from sidelining equity.” The guide simply posited that higher education “will most likely become less diverse and inclusive, given the pressure the pandemic is placing on women and faculty of color.” In other words, it was a think piece predicting inequitable impacts which was then used as evidence of inequitable impacts. This would be considered shady practice by used car dealers — research institutions should be held to a higher standard.

The guidance also claimed that evidence showed “journal submissions during the early months of the pandemic were lower for women than for men,” though the data in question relied entirely upon a study of submissions to Elsevier academic journals in the first eight or ten weeks of the pandemic. The researchers found that women submitted about as many submissions as normal, while men submitted more than they normally would (hardly evidence of the pandemic’s devastating impact on scholarly productivity). However, given that the study only examined submissions between February and May 2020 relative to that same period in 2018 and 2019, and given that the pandemic didn’t actually cause disruptions until mid-March 2020, it’s hard to gauge how representative this limited snapshot might be.

Some Midwestern farmers are not going to take the Biden administration's racially discriminatory loan forgiveness program lying down:

A group of Midwestern farmers sued the federal government Thursday alleging they can't participate in a COVID-19 loan forgiveness program because they're White.

The group of plaintiffs includes farmers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and Ohio. According to the lawsuit, the Biden administration's COVID-19 stimulus plan provides $4 billion to forgive loans for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers who are Black, American Indian, Hispanic, Alaskan native, Asian American or Pacific Islander.

White farmers aren't eligible, amounting to a violation of the plaintiffs' constitutional rights, the lawsuit contends.

Jack Butler at National Review examines how consultant behemoth McKinsey is the prefect representation of the technocratic overlord class:

. . . one pithy expression of woke capitalism was a letter, signed by hundreds of corporations and executives and published in the New York Times in mid April, reflexively and baselessly condemning election-integrity legislation such as that passed by the Georgia legislature.

Among the signatories was McKinsey & Company, the consulting behemoth. Its employees are hired the world over, ostensibly to improve other organizations’ internal operations. But the true nature of the company, as well as its recent history, gives its presence on that list an irony dark enough to be worth singling out even among the many corporate hypocrites and virtue-signalers who signed that letter.

McKinsey is one of the premier firms in the consulting world, with annual revenue of $10 billion and 2,600 partners. Its business model is more or less that of a typical consulting firm: Its employees parachute in to an enterprise that has decided itself needful of improvement, study that enterprise’s operations and imbibe its goals, then advise it on how best to go about achieving those goals. With such a remit comes quite an ego; ergo, McKinsey employees, whether consciously or not, partake of the essence of a kind of technocratic capitalism that can be difficult to distinguish from its public-sector counterpart. “Its partners like to think of themselves as the smartest guys in the room,” as The Economist put it. The best and the brightest, you might say. And with that tendency comes an inclination to view one’s fellow humans in the abstract, as cogs in various machines — projection, perhaps, on the part of many consultants who are themselves cogs in a machine.

Some consultants, I assume, are good people. Or at least one would hope so, given that the people in leadership roles in society seem increasingly cast from this mold. McKinsey alumni in government include Pete Buttigieg, Susan Rice, and even Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse, a welcome traitor to his elite class. Maybe there is at times a need for their services. At other times, though, they can seem simultaneously arrogant and useless, showing up at a place they know nothing about, repeating back what they are told on-site, and then providing a pedigreed, credentialed gloss on marginal efficiency improvements or on the hiring (or firing) decisions a given organization’s executives hoped to make before they showed up. Think less Manhattan Project whiz kids and more the Bobs from Office Space.

John McWhorter, at his Substack newsletter It Bears Mentioning, has another must-read entitled "Do Black People Enjoy Being Told They Are Weak and Dumb? The Elect Hope So." A taste:

 Tom Taylor . . . [is] the head of the upper school at Riverdale Country Day school, and has penned an article where he serenely lays out his educational philosophy. You know the drill from the title alone: “Independent School Rhetoric and its Role in the Neoliberal Construction of Whiteness.” Some choice passages from Mr. Taylor’s opus:

In light of the deeply embedded and largely unexamined neoliberal ideologies in the foundation of NAIS [National Association of Independent Schools] (and thus in independent schools as a broadly constructed segment of the education landscape), it would appear that such schools are fundamentally problematic spaces.

Get ready, though: to people like this, problematic means blasphemous, and blasphemy requires desperate, and even hostile changes of procedure.

Neoliberalism and its attendant beliefs about the market, individual control, and meritocracy are existential elements of independent schools and, thus, any attempt at constructing an inclusive space or decolonizing community will face immediate challenges.

That is, the problems people like Taylor have with what they call neoliberalism justify deriding the idea of anyone having control over their fate (who isn’t white), and the things we consider it a positive trait to excel in – i.e. “meritocracy.”

Thus, private schools who find parents unwilling to accept moves toward culturally responsive schooling are free to draw a line in the sand, so to speak, and assert firmly and positively a philosophy of education that is explicitly anti-racist, decolonizing, and culturally affirming. 

That is, parents’ objections are not to be heeded because today’s “antiracism” is a higher morality these “Nice White People” are too benighted to understand (although quite a few of them are South Asian and African, but never mind).

In light of the problematic elements of neoliberal ideology evident in the structures of independent schools, it is not merely a freedom they have to construct their environment in this way, but in fact an obligation.

Again, the school is channeling Jesus and will not be questioned. Thou shalt not question Tom Taylor.

Given the buzzwords, the period of composition, and current practice at such schools nationwide, we are reasonable to assume that the program Taylor is espousing will include excusing black students from real standards, teaching students to distrust one another across racial boundaries, narrowing scholastic coverage to “center” issues of oppression and inequity, “decentering,” well, just plain school as “too white,” assigning KenDiAngelonian texts as scripture, and creating an atmosphere where students and teachers are afraid to take issue with any of this because they don’t want to be rhetorically roasted alive and socially excommunicated.

And Taylor’s position is “If parents don’t like what we’re doing they can go fuck themselves. We’re right and they’re wrong.”

Half of self-characterized Christians in the US say casual sex is acceptable.  

How the Republican Party treats Liz Cheney in the coming days will tell us whether it has a chance to once again be the natural home of conservatism or whether it is doomed as a moribund Trumpist freak show. 

 

 

 

 

 

The spending-and-redistribution aspect of Biden's address to Congress

 This morning, I devoted a post to one narrow aspect of Biden's speech last night, namely his doubling-down on the claim that the country he presides over is systemically racist. In the first paragraph, I said I'd visit the subject that was the centerpiece of his remarks, unveiling the American Families Plan, so here you go.

For starters, let's look at what redistribution is: Taking Citizen A's money, using the coercive power of government, to address the specific situation of Citizen B. That's what every last feature of this plan is. 

Consider the education initiatives in it:

The proposal would provide $200 billion for a universal pre-kindergarten program for children ages 3 and 4 along with $109 billion to provide two free years of community college. Both would be done via partnerships with states, which would have to pick up some of the bill (50 percent for the pre-K plan, 25 percent for the community college plan). The White House projects that the expanded pre-K program would save families an average of $13,000 per year.

Two "free" years of community college. Um, no. I would pay for it and I have no intention of enrolling in a community college. 

And spare me the rhetoric about America needing a work force prepared to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. I have no use for macro-level reasons to redistribute Americans' money. Decisions to go to community college - or a four-year liberal-arts college, or a prestigious university, or a trade school - are made by individual human beings who are making choices about how to plan their lives. If a leg up is needed regarding tuition, that's something to be handled on the local level, or through scholarships, or funds set up by particular institutions to helps their students, or - just a thought - by working one's way through the institution. Money doled out by the most centralized level of government creates the widest possible chasm between the student and the source of his or her ability to attend class and buy textbooks.

And this is supposed to be a "families" plan. So what's with the universal pre-K? Seems like a step in the wrong direction, taking children out of their homes at an ever-earlier age so that the state can get its hands on their noggins and ensure that it, not the children' parents, are the main influence on the kids' development and worldview formation.

The child-care provision is likewise a move away from any strengthening of families. I guess it's too much to ask of a Democrat president and a Democrat House to look at a major shift in policy orientation that provides the conditions for a parent to be home during a child's formative years, and any suggestion of such a shift is sure to bring retorts along the lines of "Get real, would you? Both parents have had to work in this country for decades now." The question to pose at that juncture is, "Would a drastically lower tax rate help with that?"

Oh, and we're going to take money from citizens for whom child care is not a concern to pay child care workers higher wages - and provide free lunches!

Paid family leave is a piece of this plan. Again, I would like to suggest that workers taking time off from jobs is a matter to be decided between employers and employees in a given organization. As the nature of the workforce has changed, a lot of businesses have instituted more flexible policies in this regard. Granted, there are some who haven't, but to make that the government's business is to distort the workings of the free market. If it's good business to be more flexible about time off for sick family members, the birth of a child, and such, those being flexible will thrive and enjoy the gravitation of talent to them. 

The plan also calls for increased subsidies of premiums for insurance policies obtained via the "Affordable" Care Act. Again, this creates a yet-wider distance between a patient and the provider of a given health care service by making not one, but two third entities - the insurance company and the taxpayers ponying up for these subsidies - party to that relationship.

Biden envisions "the rich" and those who realize capital gains on investments paying for this. A few things about that: It stokes class envy, there are not enough rich people to cover the cost, and it dampens investment, which in turn dampens innovation and advancement. 

And bear in mind it's the third "plan" he's introduced so far this year, with each of them costing several trillions of dollars. 

And the other two are suppose to be about COVID relief and infrastructure, respectively, but in each case it's a fig leaf for random acts of government intrusion.

The American Rescue Plan is overwhelmingly about things other than helping people affected by the virus:

 . . . even the liberal-leaning fact-checking website PolitiFact is pointing out that almost all of the bill’s spending is unrelated to the health effects of COVID-19. 

“Total spending directly on COVID-19’s health impacts ranges from $100 billion to $160 billion,” fact-checker Jon Greenberg writes. “At the high end, direct COVID-19 spending represents about 8.5% of the bill’s $1.9 trillion cost.”

Of the bill’s nearly $2 trillion in spending, PolitiFact reports that just $14 to $20 billion goes to vaccine distribution and vaccine-related efforts. This is a tiny fraction, a mere 1-2 percent. Overall, the spending that actually goes to health-related matters pales in comparison to the hundreds of billions doled out for partisan priorities. 

For example, at least $350 billion goes to bailing out state and local governments—despite most not actually experiencing predicted COVID-19 tax revenue shortfalls. That means Biden’s bill spends more than twice as much lining the pockets of bankrupt blue states than it does actually addressing public health. 

Legislators also included a completely unrelated $86 billion bailout for union pension plans. And the bill pours $128 billion into public education. Despite what advocates claim, it’s not actually money to “reopen schools.” A whopping 95 percent of the money will be spent after 2021.

These are just a few of the big-ticket spending items that are unrelated to COVID-19. But slipped into the bill’s 600+ pages are literally countless smaller allocations of millions in taxpayer money. Many of these carve-outsare for waste like billions for racial justice programs for farmers or politician’s pet projects like $1.5 million for a bridge in New York that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wants built.  

Similarly, the administration has a quite, shall we say, expansive definition of infrastructure:

According to a White House Fact Sheet about the plan, $621 billion will be spent on items that are somewhat related to infrastructure, but only $115 billion out of the $2.3 trillion is specifically for roads and bridges. So what is the other $2 trillion-plus being spent on?

The AJP includes $213 billion to retrofit more than two million homes and commercial buildings; $174 billion in the electric vehicle market, including building 500,000 new charging stations; $100 billion to address “racial equity” in the job market; $100 billion to build high-speed broadband internet; $48 billion for an American workforce development program; $45 billion in the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Drinking Water State Revolving Fund”; $40 billion in a “new Dislocated Workers Program”; $25 billion for a “dedicated fund to support ambitious projects that have tangible benefits to the regional or national economy”; $10 billion for a civil climate corps; and $5 billion to support “evidence-based community violence prevention programs.”

Recall what LITD noted this morning, namely, that the combined cost of these three plans is nearly twice the gross domestic product of Germany. 

The task before us - that is, before anyone who cares about human freedom and agency, about families, and about the hair-raisingly astronomical debt this country is saddled with - is to persuade our fellow citizens to think past the supposed appeal of these plans. A tall order, to be sure, but to be silent is to let the ruin gain momentum. 

 

 

Apparently Joe Biden hasn't heard what Keith Ellison had to say about whether Derek Chauvin was motivated by racism

 I will chime in later today on the big-spending, redistributive aspect of Biden's speech last night. For eff's sake, the sum total of the three American-This-and-That Acts is a bank-breaker of epic proportions:

The combined cost of all three bills — the already passed American Rescue Plan and the two infrastructure proposals, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — is $6 trillion, or nearly twice the gross domestic product of Germany.

But what I want to address presently is his doubling down on his dog-vomit claim that America is beset by systemic racism. Last night, he specifically tied it to the Derek Chauvin-George Floyd situation:

He described last year’s killing of George Floyd by a police officer at a now infamous Minneapolis location as evidence of “systemic racism that plagues American life.” 

Look, it's obvious from the nine-minute-plus video, as well as the verdict of the jury, that Chauvin murdered Floyd. But there's not a damn bit of evidence that he was motivated by racism in doing so.

Don't take it from me. It's the assessment of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, whose progressive bona fides are impeccable, and who has a lengthy track record of being preoccupied with race:

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview aired Sunday that there was no evidence that Derek Chauvin's murder of George Floyd last May was a hate crime.

Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter charges on Tuesday for Floyd's death, during which the former police officer kneeled on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes. Chauvin faces up to 40 years in prison and is currently being held in solitary confinement.

When interviewer Scott Pelley asked Ellison whether the murder was a hate crime, the prosecutor replied: "I wouldn't call it that because hate crimes are crimes where there's an explicit motive and of bias. We don't have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd's race as he did what he did."

When Pelley pointed out prosecutors could have charged Chauvin with a hate crime under state law, Ellison said they only charge crimes for which they have "evidence that we could put in front of a jury to prove."

"If we'd had a witness that told us that Derek Chauvin made a racial reference, we might have charged him with a hate crime. But I would have needed a witness to say that on the stand. We didn't have it. So we didn't do it," he said.

Biden has a different way of being inflammatory than Trump did, but he is equally so.

I'm getting real tired of having presidents of the United States who are a danger to the United States. 

 

 

 

Marco Rubio has gone off the rails

 He has an op-ed at the New York Post today that is a complete mess.

It has its valid points.  Corporate woke-ism is a real thing. The nation's largest companies are indeed ate up with preoccupation with "equity," inclusiveness and the global climate. 

Where his piece unravels is when he conflates concern about that with the kind of nostalgic yearning for the thriving factory towns of a bygone era that was a key component of Trumpism, trotting out the protectionist lines about "moving good jobs out of our nation," "prioritizing offshoring" and "with the profits came a corporate duty to care for the strength of the nation and its citizens." Where in the federal code is that found? Those were the whines of the populists well before the woke-ism element became such a problem.

I understand that US companies being so entwined with China is problematic and even has national security implications, but that's a specific situation that ought to be targeted for examination. The idea that it's, generally speaking, somehow "greedy" for corporations to offshore is something that has a more-than-faint leftist odor about it. Government - as in elected lawmakers such as Rubio - ought to be steering policy toward a free-market footing. Whether Republicans have ever been anywhere close to purists about that is debatable, but given that their party is ostensibly the repository for conservative principles on the national landscape, they should be. 

Rubio frames the low-corporate-taxes stance Republicans have taken as part of a transaction:

Cutting corporate taxes, and especially investment taxes, makes sense if US companies are going to invest in American industry. But if they’re instead prioritizing offshoring operations or simply returning windfalls to shareholders, then policymakers are going to start being more careful in how we structure tax cuts. 

Sorry, Senator, the reason for keeping corporate taxes low is the same as it is for any kind of taxes: the money belongs to the person or organization earning it, not the government. 

He winds up his argument with this humdinger. There's no way around it; it sounds downright Mussolini-esque:

America’s laws should keep our nation’s corporations firmly ordered to our national common good. 

Corporations, like mom-and-pop shops or any other form of organization that exists to show its owners a return on their investment, are not obligated to hew to anybody's concept of the "national common good." Who the hell gets to define that?

 Yes, corporations ought to get out of the business of weighing in on transgender bathrooms, election laws and police shootings, but they ought to continue to set up their facilities and supply chains in the most cost-efficient manner possible, free of pressure from government  to do otherwise. 

Senator Rubio, when did you get this idea that tax law is a legitimate instrument of leverage?

Republicans double down on their identity as the stupid party

 Per a new poll from CBS News & YouGov, 70 percent of Republicans still believe Biden is not the legitimate winner of the November election, and nearly half of Republicans think the Derek Chauvin verdict was wrong. 

I realize there is a precious handful of principled, sane grownup Republicans in elected office and vying against long odds to hold elected office, but the task before them is daunting. This is a party in utter ruin from the grassroots up.

Saturday roundup

 Christopher J. Ferguson, writing at Arc Digital, says that a new paper published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences explores the possibility that a self-perception of being a victim may be a personality trait. 

Josh Hammer has a piece at Newsweek entitled "The Toxicity of the Permanent Outrage Mentality." One reason it tends to be permanent is that it's a lucrative career path:

The unfortunate reality is that, in our modern political and media ecosystem, a permanently aggrieved, outraged, victimized mentality pays well. For the charlatans and hucksters of "anti-racism" and "critical race theory," therefore, conceding that a development such as Chauvin's conviction might indicate that America's criminal justice system is not "systemically racist" is unconscionable. Indeed, an entire industry has been established to perpetuate this rotten myth. "A post-racial America would be an unmitigated disaster" for this industry, David Azerrad recently wrote for Newsweek. "Instead of charging $6,000 an hour lecturing corporate America on its white privilege, Robin DiAngelo would be selling plastic jewelry on the Home Shopping Network."

At It Bears Mentioning, John McWhorter's Substack newsletter, he says it's time to face facts about police shootings and race:

Whenever the national media reports on a black person killed by cops, we must ask ourselves “Would a white cop not have done that if the person were white?”

Because: we are taught that white (and even non-white) cops ice black people (usually men) out of racism. It’s possibly subconscious, but in the heat of the moment, they revert animalistically to their white supremacist assumption of black animality and pull that trigger.

This is why so many can only bristle at the idea that George Floyd did not die because he was black.

It’s why now, when the cop who killed Daunte Wright not only says she mistook her gun for a taser, and is even recorded as having done so, legions of people still insist on parsing it as evidence of “racism.” The idea is, I suppose, that she wouldn’t have made that mistake, would have been more prudent, if Daunte Wright was instead a white guy named Donald White.

* * *

Here is why we need that mental exercise. Tony Timpa was quite white and was killed quite in the way that Floyd was, including it being recorded.

AND white people have been killed when cops mistook their guns for tasers. I wonder why no one ever heard about this one beyond one day in Philadelphia? (Wait – there will be objection that the shot didn’t actually kill this guy. But that’s random – it could have, easily.) There are many others -- there has been media coverage this week of cases where cops made the mistake that Officer Potter did towards Daunte Wright (where the person shot died). You can be quite sure that if their authors had found that the mistake only happened when the victims were black, we’d know by now.

This is a dog that didn’t bark and for a reason – that this week’s headlines have notbeen about how cops only mistake their guns for tasers when they are dealing with a black man is because … wait for it … they don’t! I suggest you take a little time and do a quick search on the cases listed by media articles like this. When the victim is black, it’s noted – big surprise – and quite often, the victim simply is not. By that I mean that often the victim was white. The journalists seeking to show that cops only mistake guns for tasers when they are confronted with a black person couldn’t find it and thus just write that officers have sometimes been “confused” while studiously leaving race out of it. Their head editors have made sure they did. 

In this vein, what you didn’t hear this week is that cops killed a teen pointing a toy gun at them. Many will recall that cops killed (black) Tamir Rice for holding a toy gun, with this considered a prime demonstration that cops kill out of racist animus – why just a teen waggling a toy around? I mentioned this new case in my Twitter feed this week and have been bemused to see almost Talmudic exegesis arguing that the killing of Rice was “worse” because the white kid was actually aiming the gun at the cops and then picked up a knife. 

But the answers to that are these.

1) The cops first shot the white kid when he aimed the gun but before he held up the knife, and if we rolled the tape again they could have killed him right when he held up the gun – the bullet they fired then only happened by chance not to kill him. (Say it’s wrong of me to reason that closely and I ask why you think so. Roll your eyes, click your tongue, and then explain. But you can’t.)

2) Evidence is likely forever unclear as to whether Rice seemed to be “reaching for” that gun when the cops came to him. Of course Rice did not deserve to die regardless, whatever he may have been doing in his pocket at that moment with his toy. But the iconic idea of Rice just looking off into the distance waving a toy at the sky is not the indisputable truth. 

3) Most important – if this white kid were black, then even if the cops had shot him for aiming the toy right at them and then killed him when he raised the knife, we can be quite sure that the idea would be that the cops should have understood he was mentally disturbed – i.e. trying “suicide by cop” – and that they only killed him in seeing him as a “black body” rather than as a person.

Really – imagine him not named Ham but Harrison, and black. People would be in the streets, some of them looting, in protests against the black boy who aimed a toy gun at white officers and got killed for it – even if he then held up a knife. It’d be all about how officers need better training and such. 

Here, some will just hate, growl, twist, seek to deny. I’m too “assimilated” to really understand, etc. But more than a few know that’s all, frankly, manure. They will be open to the following:

Cops unjustifiably kill white people all the time and in greater numbers than they kill black people.

* * *

But let’s go back to what the enlightened take is. To wit: I am pointing out mere outliers. Surely the endless succession of black people killed by cops that we can mentally review is the main issue. Okay, now and then a white kid gets killed too. But isn’t pointing them out just what a “conservative” denialist about racism does in order to curry the favor of racist white people and make money speaking before them?

I love this notion, in that I turn down so very many offers to speak on race, including on Zoom, simply because I have other stuff to do, but I digress.

The problem is the sheer volume of the white cases. We just don’t hear about them. As I write, what about Hannah Williams? Or this hideous case? No, I’m not laboriously smoking these cases out when they are just weird exceptions to a general rule. They are the norm. It’s just that they don’t make national news. It really is that simple, and that sad, and that destructive to our national conversation about race.

Funny thing – nothing makes this clearer than the Washington Post database of cop murders. Just pour a cup of coffee and look at what it shows, month after month, year after year. As South Park’s Cartman would put it, “Just, like, just, just look at it. Just look at it.”

Yet, the enlightened take on the issue serenely sails along as if that database proves that cops ice black men regularly while white men only end up in their line of fire now and then by accident. The database reveals a serious problem with cops and murder, period, quite race-neutrally.

* * *

To wit, cops, when things get tense, are quite okay with depriving white people of life. It can be hard to imagine this, because of how cop killings of black people has become essentially the keystone of the idea that blackness means oppression. 

But true enlightenment, my friends, means opening yourself up to counterintuitive realities.

Rafael Mangual, writing at City Journal, asks "Who killed Adam Toledo?" 

The immediate cause of Toledo’s death was the bullet fired by Officer Stillman. But it’s worth examining how a 13-year-old boy ended up in a full sprint through a dark alley at 2:30 AM with a gun in his hand and a police officer on his tail.

Start a few minutes before the shooting. Though it hasn’t gotten much attention, a video compilation that the Chicago Police Department released includes footage that seems to show Toledo walking with a young man before one (or both) fired the eight or nine shots at a passing vehicle near the alley where the police encountered Toledo. Exactly who pulled the trigger remains unclear (the footage is grainy), though CNN reported last Friday, citing prosecutors, that both Toledo’s hand, and the gloves of the man he was with, tested positive for gunshot residue. According to police, that man is a 21-year-old named Ruben Roman, who was arrested at the scene for allegedly obstructing Officer Stillman as he gave chase.

All indications are that Roman was exactly the kind of negative influence to Toledo that loving parents stuck in high-crime neighborhoods stay up nights worrying about. Chicago’s publicly available arrest database shows that Roman has been collared at least six times by the Chicago Police Department (CPD) since 2017. He has at least one felony conviction, for a gun offense, for which he was apparently sentenced to probation. According to a Chicago police officer (who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity), Roman is listed as a member of the Latin Kings street gang in the CPD’s database.

Local thugs often lure impressionable children into the gangster lifestyle they glorify by promising protection and brotherhood, and Roman seems an illustrative example. But he didn’t protect or care about his young charge the morning of March 29. In fact, as shown on the body-worn camera footage of the officers arriving after Toledo was shot, Roman didn’t shed a tear after Toledo was shot but pretended not to know the 13-year-old at all. Roman’s decision not to provide police with information about Toledo’s identity meant that the boy would be listed as a “John Doe” in the CPD’s paperwork, and his family couldn’t be notified. Toledo’s body remained unidentified in the morgue for two days before the police were able to contact his mother.

This is a common story, sadly. People like Roman corrupt kids like Toledo, and put them on paths that lead to untimely deaths, incarcerations, and perpetrations of evil. Street gangs recruit child soldiers into their turf wars, which turn playgrounds into battlefields and leave parents holding the bodies of the children caught in the crossfire; and they should be shamed for it.

Quin Hilyer, writing at the Washington Examiner, says, "No, Mr. President, the 'Soul of America' Isn't Racist." 

A very prominent reason why the Department of Education should never have been created and why it should be dismantled yet this afternoon: when poisonously leftist administrations, such as the present one, get hold of it, they turn it in a perniciously corrosive direction. Alex Nester at the Washington Free Beacon has the details:

The Biden administration this week proposed a rule that would encourage public schools to adopt radical, racially driven curricula in American history and civics classes.

The Department of Education on Monday proposed a rule that would prioritize federal funding for education groups that help schools develop and implement antiracist teaching standards. If the rule takes effect, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education would increase grants to woke groups across the country.

School districts in recent months have increased their efforts to weave critical race theory—the idea that America's political and economic systems are inherently racist—into K-12 curriculum standards. The Education Department's proposal signals the Biden administration's support for this trend.

The rule would allocate federal funding for education contractors who work to "improve" K-12 curriculum by promoting "racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically responsive teaching and learning practices." The rule would also require the Education Department to encourage social studies curricula that teach students about "systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history."

The Education Department claims that the coronavirus pandemic and "ongoing national reckoning with systemic racism" make changes to the education system necessary. The proposal cites the New York Times‘s 1619 Project and antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi's criticisms of American education.

"Schools across the country are working to incorporate antiracist practices into teaching and learning," the proposal reads. "It is critical that the teaching of American history and civics creates learning experiences that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, histories, contributions, and experiences of all students."

The proposal will undergo a month-long notice-and-comment period, during which interested parties can submit questions on the rule to the department. The department must respond to each individual comment prior to releasing a final draft of the rule, which can take months or even years depending on the number of comments received.

Christopher Rufo, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow who has documented the antiracist push in schools and federal institutions, told the Washington Free Beacon that this decision shows the Biden administration's true colors.

"President Biden is structuring the Department of Education's programs to incentivize critical race theory in America's public schools," Rufo said. "Biden campaigned as a moderate, but this decision would bring a radical and unpopular ideology into the classroom. The federal government should reject the principles of race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation, not encourage them in the public education system."

The Biden administration's move follows national trends to weave anti-American ideology into public schools. The Illinois State Board of Education in February approved a set of learning standards that asks teachers to "mitigate" behaviors that stem from "Eurocentrism" and "unearned privilege."

California has considered adopting standards that teach kids to "resist" Christianity and other elements of the "Eurocentric neocolonial condition." And the North Carolina State Board of Education in February adopted a new set of K-12 history curriculum that teaches high schoolers to "compare how some groups in American society have benefited from economic policies while other groups have been systematically denied the same benefits."

Think STEM is safe from this garbage? Here's what the Virginia DOE is up to:

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.

Loudoun County school board member Ian Serotkin posted about the change via Facebook on Tuesday. According to Serotkin, he learned of the change the night prior during a briefing from staff on the Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI).

"[A]s currently planned, this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration prior to 11th grade," he said. "That is not an exaggeration, nor does there appear to be any discretion in how local districts implement this. All 6th graders will take Foundational Concepts 6. All 7th graders will take Foundational Concepts 7. All 10th graders will take Essential Concepts 10. Only in 11th and 12th grade is there any opportunity for choice in higher math courses."

Writing at The Gospel Coalition, Kevin DeYoung reviews Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Renewal by Duke Kwon and Greg Thompson. DeYoung is far more cordial than I'd have been, lauding the book as "both accessible and academic":

Kwon and Thompson have a knack for breaking down complex ideas into helpful categories. For example, they argue that racism can be understood in four ways: as personal, with the need for repentance; as relational, with the need for reconciliation; as institutional, with the need for reform; or cultural, with the need for repair (32-44). There are more lists and rubrics like this throughout the book, many of them insightful and useful.

Kwon and Thompson are also to be commended for avoiding the history-as-screed template. The tone is strong at times, but never incensed. 

But he soon enough comes to the work's problematic essence:

The work of reparations outlined in the book is so expansive and so nonspecific as to be impossible to ever fulfill. Reparations, we are told is “ultimately redeeming for everyone, both those who give and those who receive.” It is an opportunity for all of us to finally be healed (181). But how does that work? When will the debt be relinquished? How will we know that the reparations are complete and the healing can begin? According to Kwon and Thompson, “the call of reparations is not merely for a check to be written or for a debt to be repaid but for a world to be repaired” (178). By this logic, reparations will be our work until the end of the age.

Either Kwon and Thompson equivocate on what they mean by reparations, or, if their definition on page 185 (quoted above) is true, Whites (and Asians?) can never in this life truly be forgiven of the debts they owe. How does that bring healing to everyone? How does this square with the gospel? How does this make sense of Christ’s celebratory meal with Zacchaeus? When do we get to hear Jesus say to the repentant sinner, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham”? If reparations are to be “fixed in the church’s imagination and fundamental to its vocation as the language of repentance and reconciliation,” it would be good to hear more about how we can all find forgiveness for our sins and freedom from condemnation in Christ.

He uses the book's discussion of a repurposed church building in Memphis to really drive home his point:

The eschatological vision in Reparations is about Memphis’s Clayborn Temple. At first a White church, then a Black church after White flight, the church was at the center of Memphis’s civil rights struggle and was for years home to a Black congregation. Now, as Kwon and Thompson tell us, the famous Clayborn Temple is quiet, empty, braced with scaffolding, and boarded up.

But leaders like Anasa Troutman, “a brilliant and charismatic African American woman in her mid-forties” (184), see what the Temple will one day become. And what is that vision? Perhaps a worshiping, evangelizing church committed to racial healing and racial justice? Maybe a revitalized Black church committed to the gospel and its neighbors? Or maybe a multiethnic church learning to love like Christ and share his love with others? This is the vision of Clayborn Temple that closes the last chapter of the book:

Here is where the artist’s studio will be. This will be the performing arts center. This will be the space for education and community meetings. Walking outside, she continues: Out here will be the business incubator, financial services offices, and community kitchen. That land over there will be part of a community-owned cooperative. . . . [Troutman] sees a world healed from the ravages of White supremacy. A world in which we are emancipated from its lies to live in the freedom of the truth. A world in which we are delivered from White supremacy’s control so that we can live together in the fullness of our shared power. A world whose wonders are shared by all and stewarded for the good of everyone. A world in which people don’t spend their lives laboring for justice but have the opportunity to move beyond justice and into joy. What she sees, in short, is reparations. Reparations. Reparations is the cry of the ages. This is the opportunity of the moment. And this is the call of the church. (206–207)

A stirring conclusion to be sure. Sermonic, eschatological, and essentially religious. But it is not a beatific vision that depends on Christian categories or the Christian story. To be sure, it can draw from the Christian tradition in so far as the Christian tradition has a lot to say about restitution and restoration. And yet, the moral arc and the teleological aim do not require a Christian accounting of the world. Suppose American history is as bad as Kwon and Thompson aver. Suppose our corporate guilt is everything they say it is. Suppose everything they want to see under the banner of reparations would be good for our country and good for our communities. The religious vision is still one that I find more in line with a community organizer’s dream for America than a distinctively Christian one. It is a vision where sin is White supremacy and salvation comes from a lifetime of moral exertion. It is a vision where the church’s mission is to change the world and heaven is a world of art studios and co-ops. It is a vision where urban renewal feels central and the grace of the risen Christ feels peripheral. It is a vision filled with many noble aspirations, but one ultimately that depicts a future where the White guilt never dies and the reparations never end. 

Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal looks at Steven Koonin, a scientist who definitely has his head on straight regarding the global climate.

Of course she is: Kimberly Guilfoyle is going to serve as the national chair for the Senate race of Eric Greitens, who had to resign as Missouri governor in 2018 due to sexual misconduct and donor charity list misuse scandals. 

One final note about today's roundup: You will note that all but one of the linked articles and columns have to do with the destructiveness of leftism. The lone exception is a pretty egregious example of the rot that is almost certainly killing the Republican Party, and I fully understand that that rot extends to the GOP still not having come to grips with its cowardice in the face of what happened January 6,  but I cannot sign onto the argument that that cowardice and what, in general, has happened to the party and far too much of the Right over the past five years, dwarfs what the Left is up to. We have to walk and chew gum at the same time. The sum total of what I've presented here today in most of these items is a grim picture of post-America's prospects. The nation is under assault from two directions.