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October 30 - November 14, 2018
Trump’s election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at the Weekly Standard after more than twenty years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump.
By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he’d learned nothing at all.
According to a Pew survey, 40 percent of millennials think the government should have the power to ban statements offensive to minority groups.
A 2017 Cato Institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified Democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants.
The Constitution says nothing about hate speech.
In 2017, Howard Dean, who was not only governor of Vermont but at one point even a presidential front-runner, announced on Twitter, “Hate Speech is not protected by the First Amendment.”
When you sincerely believe you possess the truth, all disagreement looks like apostasy. For the greater good, it must be silenced. It’s distressing
In California, the state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, filed a complaint against the Center for Medical Progress, a group of anti-abortion activists, accusing them of illegally recording their conversations with clinic operators without consent. For this, Becerra charged the organization with fifteen felonies, a response so disproportionate that even the Los Angeles Times couldn’t find precedent for it. Tellingly, Becerra did not charge NBC for secretly recording Donald Trump on what became the now-famous Access Hollywood tape.
personalities. Twitter awarded a verification, the blue check that signifies an account is legitimate, to the Muslim Brotherhood before it gave one to the conservative site Breitbart.
Google’s vice president of diversity, released a statement charging Damore with having “incorrect assumptions about gender.”
Every nation tries to influence how its citizens behave, but a free society never presumes to control what people believe.
The bureau bugged Martin Luther King’s hotel rooms, discovered he was an enthusiastic adulterer, and then tried to blackmail him with the information.
White men now kill themselves at about ten times the rate of black and Hispanic women. Yet white men are consistently framed as the oppressors, particularly blue-collar white men.
Nobody acknowledged the irony of banning people on the basis of skin color from a building named after Martin Luther King.
Our elites may despise white people, but they want to make certain their kids go to school with them.
Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York is a tireless advocate for diversity, but not in his own neighborhood. Although he lives in Brooklyn, where one in three residents is African American, his own zip code is one of the whitest
in New York. It’s less than 5 percent black.
Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, doesn’t really live on an Indian reservation. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard, as well as an enormous number of white peo...
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Representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. Waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. She lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in Hancock Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. How did Waters afford a house that expensive after ...
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But what’s more interesting are the demographics of the neighborhood where Waters lives. The district she represents in Congress has the second-highest percentage of African American residents in the state. The neighborhood...
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Washington, D.C., is one of America’s wealthiest cities, and one of its most progressive. Fully 91 percent of
the city voted for Hillary Clinton, the highest percentage of any city in America.
If you were looking for someone to tell you how to live, you’d screen candidates based on the success of their own lives. You’d be looking for people who were happily married over a long period, with well-adjusted children who respected them. You’d want to know if they had stable, honest friendships. Sanity would be a key requirement, so you’d check that, too. A cheerfully self-deprecating sense of humor might be one sign
of emotional health. Calm self-confidence might be another. If you found a person like that, you’d have a role model.
women have become dramatically less happy over the past forty years.
In the early years of the study, women reported greater happiness than men. They’ve become progressively less content ever since. Men are now considerably more satisfied with their lives than women are.
Marriages in which the female partner earns more than her husband are more likely to report instability and ultimately end in divorce. By contrast, a study of twelve years of data from the
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the first suffragettes, called abortion the “murder of children.” Susan B. Anthony referred to it as “infanticide.”
Employees of Facebook came up with more than seventy gender choices for their site.
one in five American children live with only their mothers.
Over the next nine years, the CCC transformed the landscape of rural America. Its workers planted more than three billion trees. They fought forest and prairie fires, built 125,000 miles of roads and 13,000 miles of walking trails, strung 89,000 miles of phone lines. They built fish hatcheries and wildlife refuges, constructed cabins and stonework in hundreds of state parks.
average, they gained twelve pounds over the first year. The CCC turned out to be the most popular government program of the Great Depression, with solid majorities of both Democrats and Republicans supporting it. It would be denounced as irredeemably sexist today.
it’s notable that most women, the very population on whose behalf these policies are supposedly created, strongly prefer to marry men who make more than they do.
Increasingly, having a father at home is a sign of affluence. But it is also a cause of affluence, especially for boys. Boys who grow up with a father at home earn much more as adults.
Numerous longitudinal studies, done over generations, show the devastating effects of fatherlessness. The results hold true across geography and ethnic groups: white, black; urban, rural. Boys raised without their fathers are at serious risk. The nationwide breakup of families is a disaster, and not just a moral disaster, but a practical one. It is one of the largest public health problems the country faces.
It’s been more than twenty years since a Democrat running for president won the majority of married women in America. Unmarried women, by contrast, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.
At the very moment he was lamenting the lack of educational opportunities for women, more girls than boys were graduating from high school. Far more were graduating from college. Women now earn 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 52 percent of doctorates.
But it was still cleaner than San Francisco. A survey by the local NBC station in the spring of 2018 found garbage strewn over all 153 blocks of downtown San Francisco. On more than forty blocks, there were discarded hypodermic needles. Close to one hundred blocks had piles of human feces. “The contamination,” said an infectious disease specialist from UC Berkeley, is “much greater than communities in Brazil or Kenya or India.”
Modern environmentalists step over piles of garbage and human excrement on their way to save the planet.
Wind turbines destroy hundreds of bald eagles every year. That’s in addition to more than a quarter million other birds of various species, including hawks, owls, and songbirds crushed by turbine blades. Some experts believe the actual number of dead birds is much higher, possibly in the millions.
Bats regularly mistake wind turbines for trees. Somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 of them are caught in wind rotors each year,
patterns of certain fish. These are real costs, measurable in the carcasses of dead animals, many of them endangered. To environmental groups, they mean nothing compared to the entirely theoretical benefit of wind power.
Throughout the West, illegal immigrants have left a wake of environmental destruction.
illegal immigrants caused 40 percent of the forest fires on the Arizona–Mexico border between 2006 and 2010.
Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona, home to the last two hundred endangered Sonoran pronghorn left in the United States, had been marred by more than eight thousand miles of vehicle tracks left by drug and human smugglers. The report noted that constant illegal traffic was having a damaging effect on the plants, animals, and soil quality of the refuge.
irrelevant. Judith Curry, a longtime climatologist at Georgia Tech, resigned from her tenured position because of what she described as “craziness in the field of climate science.” Over the course of her career, Curry has published two books and 186 articles on climate. But by 2016, the field was so politically fraught that academic journals refused to publish research that deviated from conventional opinion.
that “research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment.”
When science no longer requires evidence and no longer tolerates scrutiny, it’s no longer science. It’s dogma.
In one interview, Nye suggested jailing doubters who disagree with his views on climate change.
Then I remember: our environmental leaders don’t care about litter anymore, or even about the state of the natural world, the birds or the riverbanks. They’ve got bigger concerns now—global concerns, moral concerns—that ordinary fishermen stepping over dirty diapers and Tecate bottles couldn’t possibly understand or appreciate. But they feel good about themselves, and that’s what matters.
