Dear Weekend Jolter,
Jay Nordlinger has aptly noted with regard to media-consumption habits, “We live on different planets.” Sad, and true. So for any kind of consensus to build, a cause requires a presence in the publications and feeds of Planet Blue, Planet Red, and their various subdivisions.
It’s no coincidence that Democrat-led states began rolling back mask mandates once allied outlets and pundits (even SNL) questioned their efficacy. Candace Owens could, if she wanted, reverse vaccine hesitancy with a tweet. The Hunter Biden laptop story might get a second life now that the Washington Post and the New York Times have acknowledged its legitimacy. And a carefully worded entrance by the latter into the free-speech fight is significant for these reasons: Despite the Twitter meltdown over the recent Times editorial declaring, “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” it could open up a broader and dare we say more constructive debate on cancel culture and the suppression of speech on (and off) campus.
Here’s hoping.
As it happens, National Review has been reporting on this issue for years, and especially so lately, inviting those with first-hand experience to weigh in. Indeed, the free-speech problem is real.
Writing this week for NR on a pattern of illiberalism at the University of Virginia, student Ian Schwartz discussed how the campus newspaper is fighting a planned — and supposedly “dangerous” and life-threatening — appearance by Mike Pence.
Kristen Waggoner, with Alliance Defending Freedom, recalled her experience being shouted down at Yale Law School during a — checks notes — free-speech event. In her words:
Rather than listen and engage in civil dialogue, the vitriolic mob shouted down their professor who was moderating, and then me. After they were asked to leave, they chanted, pounded on classroom walls, and reportedly disrupted nearby classes, exams, and meetings. Even members of the Federalist Society, the student group that organized the event, were harassed and physically threatened by their fellow law students. . . .
The situation was so volatile that we required an armed police escort to leave campus in a patrol car.
The point in bringing attention to such incidents is not to demand that protesters hush. But physical intimidation goes beyond legitimate protest and is hardly conducive to genuine debate on campuses designed for such things. Speech is not violence. Silence is not violence. Violence is violence. Ask Chris Rock.
Alexandra DeSanctis offers some thoughts here on the importance of open debate, especially on campus. Jay applies the term “fear society” to current conditions. And Dan McLaughlin writes about the specific challenge for the legal profession, given how often these incidents happen at law schools:
Systems of law are designed to resolve disputes by speech and evidence precisely so that disputes will not instead be resolved by resort to violence. Mobs are the antithesis of that: They bring the force of the crowd to bear to drown out reason. Left to run wild, they will destroy not just speech but law itself.
Nate Hochman has reported on how constitutional law scholar Ilya Shapiro continues to be hounded over a poorly worded tweet for which he has apologized. At the University of California, Hastings College of Law, he endured 45 minutes of screaming, pounding, and profanity-hurling by students who tried to block him from the lectern. Caroline Downey reported on an even more chaotic scene at the University of North Texas (UNT), where Jeffrey Younger, a Texas House candidate who lost a child-custody battle after contesting his young son’s transgender diagnosis, saw his lecture hijacked by activists:
As the situation at UNT deteriorated, police evacuated Younger, as well as the student event organizer Kelly Neidert, from the building. They exited outside to confront a swarm of about 500 black-clad activists screeching expletives like “F*** you, Kelly!” One individual punched Younger in the gut, he said and Neidert confirmed. When police escorted Younger to a car and drove him away, the activists chased the car down the street, trying to open the door and “pull me out of the car,” he said. . . .
Police officers hurried Neidert to a nearby building, where they hid in a locked janitor’s closet as protesters ran through the hallways, “shrieking like animals,” she noted.
Think that’s an overstatement? Watch the video. (The picture you see above, by the way, is from a 2017 Ben Shapiro appearance at Berkeley, where protests were largely peaceful — thanks to a $600,000 security effort, undertaken to avert the violence that plagued prior events.)
In this debate, the disconnect between word and deed is substantial. Waggoner noted that most universities voice support for free speech, without putting “support into practice.” Which brings us back to that Times editorial, and a line that contains a great deal of truth: “You can’t consider yourself a supporter of free speech and be policing and punishing speech more than protecting it.”
What to do? Stanley Kurtz argues that the Yale shout-down provides an opening to set an example. The Law School’s own rules allow any student or faculty member to file a complaint and trigger an investigation. “A few courageous Yale Law students now have an opportunity to change the national conversation on free speech,” he writes.
Here’s hoping.
* * *
One last thing (there’s always one last thing). We’re about to close out our latest webathon, focused on supporting the great work of NR’s Maddy Kearns on the transgender debate. You heard about it from me earlier, but here’s that donation link one last time, in case you’re feeling philanthropic this weekend. Choice picks from the week’s coverage follow presently.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Unpacking the problems with the “billionaire” tax: Biden’s Latest Tax Folly
The new defense budget is neither serious nor responsible: Biden’s Weak Defense Budget
“Gaffe” does not quite capture what happened last weekend in Warsaw: Biden’s ‘Regime Change’ Blunder
ARTICLES
Mike Pence: A Freedom Agenda Is the Conservative Path to Victory
Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Empty Chair
Isaac Schorr: Disney Was Silent on Parental-Rights Bill until Public Pressure Campaign Began, Florida House Speaker Says
Peter J. Travers: The Wild Beasts Are Real
Rich Lowry: It’s the Inflation, Stupid
Brittany Bernstein: MIT Admissions Reinstates Testing Requirement to Increase Low-Income Enrollment
Andrew McCarthy: The Smearing of Clarence Thomas
Dan McLaughlin: The Candidates Who Can’t Afford to Lose in 2022
Kevin Williamson: We Have Enough Taxes
Philip Klein: Biden’s Dishonest Budget
John McCormack: The Abortion Vote That Could Haunt Democrats in November
Charles C. W. Cooke: The Scottish Government Just Prosecuted a Man for Sending a Rude Tweet
CAPITAL MATTERS
Joel Kotkin warns about the “coming revenge of the disappointed”: The Most Dangerous Class
Shanghai is locking down for Covid. The city also is home to a major ocean port and a major airport for cargo planes. Dominic Pino dutifully discusses what it means for supply chains: What Shanghai Lockdowns Could Mean for Supply Chains
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
It fell to Armond White and Kyle Smith to make sense of this crazy, mixed-up world after Sunday’s Oscars.
- From Armond: The Slap and the Apology: Will Smith’s Most Important Performance
- From Kyle: Chris Rock vs. Will Smith: Who Won the Oscars?
- Okay, one more: Top Ten Reasons Why Will Smith Should Not Have Slapped Chris Rock
Brian Allen stands athwart the Oscars insanity and turns to New York’s Whitney Museum, kicking off a series on its Covid-delayed Biennial: A First Look at the Whitney Biennial
FROM THE NEW, APRIL 18, 2022, ISSUE OF NR
Andrew McCarthy: Does Hunter Biden Face Indictment?
Ruy Teixeira: Eyes Wide Shut
Jay Nordlinger: Ukraine and the End of Illusions
Alexandra DeSanctis: A Bite of Italy
Jessica Hornik: Still Life
SIDE TWO
Ruy Teixeira’s cover story in the latest issue is a flashing red warning sign to Democrats, from one:
As a lifelong man of the Left who very much wants the Democratic Party to succeed, I regret to report this: The Democrats and the Democratic brand are in deep trouble. That should have been obvious when Democrats underperformed in the 2020 election, turning what they and most observers expected to be a blue wave into more of a ripple. They lost House seats and performed poorly in state legislative elections. And their support among non-white voters, especially Hispanics, declined substantially.
Still, they did win the presidency, which led many to miss the clear market signals this underperformance was sending. That tendency was strengthened by the Democrats’ improbable victories in the two Senate runoffs in Georgia, which gave them full control of the federal government, albeit by the very narrowest of margins.
At the same time, Trump’s refusal to concede the election — his bizarre behavior in that regard probably contributed to the GOP defeats in the Georgia runoffs — and his encouragement of rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 led many Democrats to assume that the Republican brand would be so damaged by association that the Democratic brand would shine by comparison. And yet, two years later, the Democrats are in brutal shape.
Biden’s approval rating is in the low 40s, only a little above where Trump’s was at the same point in his presidential term, which of course was the precursor to the GOP’s drubbing in the 2018 election. Biden has been doing especially poorly among working-class and Hispanic voters. His approval ratings on specific issues tend to be lower, in the high 30s on the economy and in the low 30s on hot-button issues such as immigration and crime. Off-year and special elections since 2020 have indicated a strongly pro-Republican electoral environment, and Democrats currently trail Republicans in the generic congressional ballot for 2022. It now seems likely that Democrats will, at minimum, lose control of the House this November and quite possibly suffer a wave election up and down the ballot.
Most Democrats would prefer to believe that the current dismal situation merely reflects some bad luck. The Delta and Omicron variants of the coronavirus did undercut Biden’s plans for returning the country to normal, interacting with supply-chain difficulties to produce an inflation spike that angered consumers, but that is not the whole picture. Democrats have failed to develop a party brand capable of unifying a dominant majority of Americans behind their political project. Indeed, the current Democratic brand suffers from several deficiencies that make it somewhere between uncompelling and toxic to many American voters who might otherwise be the party’s allies.
For another flashing red warning sign, see Joel Kotkin’s analysis for NR’s Capital Matters on the glut of grads with no place to go:
Twenty-first-century America may be dominated by oligarchic elites, but arguably the biggest threat to our economic and political system might be located further down the food chain. This most dangerous class comes from the growing number of underemployed, overeducated people. They’re what has been described in Britain as the lumpenintelligentsia: alienated, angry, and potentially agents of our social and political deconstruction.
This is far more than an angry mob shouting in keystrokes, but the proto-proletariat of a feudalizing post-industrial society. Overall, notes one recent study, over the past 20 years we have created twice as many bachelor’s degrees as jobs to employ them. Instead of finding riches in the “new economy,” many end up in lower-paying, noncredentialed jobs. They then compete with working-class kids, often products of similarly dysfunctional high schools; an estimated one-third of American working-age males are now outside the labor force, suffering high rates of incarceration, as well as drug, alcohol, and other health issues.
Although they are not subject to the same pressures of the working class, the fate of those attending college and even graduating is far from bright. This is the most-anxious generation in recent history, and for good reason. Today more than 40 percent are working in jobs that don’t require their degree, according to a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Another study notes that most may never ascend to the kinds of jobs that graduates have historically enjoyed. . . .
This is a generation in which entrance to the middle class is increasingly blocked. Over 90 percent of people born in the 1940s and 80 percent in the 1950s did overwhelmingly better than their parents. Among those born in the 1980s, almost half do worse. The decline, note Richard Reeves and Katherine Guyot in a study for the Brookings Institution, is most evident among the upper-middle class, the very group that has long prioritized education.
NR’s editorial shoots down Biden’s latest tax proposal — and specifically the irrational plan to tax unrealized gains:
Biden has had some very, very stupid ideas in his 50 years in public life. We won’t say that his latest “billionaire” tax proposal is the dumbest of them, but it’s on the top-ten list.
Biden’s proposed “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” — which, of course, is not actually limited to billionaires — is an economically illiterate and very likely unconstitutional proposal that purports to make the very wealthy pay their “fair share,” in the conventional language of Democratic demagoguery. It would do so in part by taxing some high-income people on money they haven’t made yet, combining the worst features of the IRS with the worst features of Minority Report. . . .
You may have heard the rumor that sometimes stock prices go down as well as up. If you buy a share at $1 and it goes up to $2, then you’ve made $1 — if you sell the share and collect the gain. But that $1 share bought on Monday that goes to $2 on Tuesday may very well be $1.40 on Wednesday and $0.65 on Friday. The Biden proposal would tax “unrealized gains” assessed at an arbitrary point — irrespective of whether the investment actually makes that much money, or any money at all, or loses money. So-called mark-to-market rules are a useful tool in some contexts, such as assessing the financial health of a bank for deposit-insurance purposes, but mark-to-market is a capricious and destructive way to calculate an individual’s income tax. It is capricious and destructive when it is the county tax-assessor giving your house a notional market value for tax purposes — imagine the federal government trying to do that for something as fluid and complex as whatever it is that Andreessen Horowitz is up to this week.
The proposal is economically absurd, and probably illegal. The 16th Amendment empowers Congress to “lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived,” but unrealized investment gains are not income — they are, at best, potential income. Investments are also potential losses. That’s how investment works.
Brittany Bernstein flags a significant development in the standardized-testing debate, over at MIT:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will reinstate its standardized testing requirement for admission after finding that not having access to SAT or ACT scores “tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education,” the university announced Monday.
“After careful consideration, we have decided to reinstate our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles,” dean of admissions and student financial services Stu Schmill said in a statement. “Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.”
Schmill said the school believes a testing requirement is “more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy,” breaking with many other elite universities who have dropped testing requirements amid criticism that wealthier students who can afford expensive preparation classes have an advantage in standardized testing.
In a hurricane of hot takes, Armond White’s exposition on the Smith–Rock Oscars fracas is a must-read:
No one should feel superior to what has been called Smith’s “lack of self-control” when he walked on stage and slapped comic Chris Rock, or to Smith’s teary-eyed conflation of shame and ego when he later accepted an Oscar as Best Actor. Both moments ripped the lid off the Oscar charade in which mainstream media pretend to uphold values they have abandoned long ago.
Smith’s outbursts also revealed the unhealthy standards that have overtaken our culture, confounding ideas about race, gender, and art. . . .
Former Oscar host Chris Rock appeared secure in his status as Hollywood jester, but his attempt at celeb bonhomie hit the roadblock of unpredictable hip-hop egotism. And so the personal drive and private motivation behind the world’s favorite swaggering verbal invention — knowable only through aggressive performance and creativity — resulted in what’s commonly known as a “bitch-slap.”
It happened on stage, but it resembled a behind-the-scenes, at-the-club rap battle. If America failed to heed Eminem’s 8 Mile and Joseph Kahn’s remarkable Bodied, about hip-hop ethos, all America knows that ethos now. Smith showed his superiority to Eminem after the slap, when he returned to his seat and shouted twice to Rock the lesson that the slap was intended to teach: “Keep my wife’s name out your f***ing mouth!” This was hip-hop — with a “Yes!” linking the two declarations. Smith, glib talent and untrained street actor, has never been more convincing than when announcing the shocking terms of the arrival of New Black Hollywood. Throughout Hollywood’s fabled lore (such as the infamous Jennings Lang–Walter Wanger castration dispute), only studio bosses talked like that. Rappers call such language “boss.” The drag world calls it “realness.” We are hypocrites to pretend otherwise. . . .
Ambivalence is the best way to feel about this. Instead of the Academy’s punishing Will Smith (who simply wasn’t mature enough to just walk out on the circus as Eddie Murphy did in 2007), some screenwriter should be inspired to help him in his search for art and for moral equilibrium. Will Smith has embarrassingly exposed himself. But he exposes the Oscars’ race-baiting hypocrisy, too.
Speaking of free speech, remember that it is a quite literally foreign concept in many parts of the world. Charles C. W. Cooke highlights this astonishing case from Scotland. It’s easier to just read the whole thing, so this one is link only, folks.
Shout-Outs
Joel Kotkin, at UnHerd: The exodus continues from America’s biggest cities
Salena Zito, at the Washington Examiner: Don’t underestimate John Fetterman
Bradford Betz, at Fox Business: Chris Rock comedy tour ticket prices spike after Will Smith Oscar slap
Alex Gutentag, at Tablet: The New Authoritarians
CODA
Did you hear this newsletter postscript won an Oscar? What a country. In the spirit of that particularly pugilistic presentation of prizes, a Pat Benatar ending is difficult to sidestep.
Yet that is a shade too predictable. “The Boxer,” then? Still . . . not quite on the nose, or the cheek. Ah, A Fistful of Dollars (theme). Yes, that’ll do quite nicely.
Have a great weekend, and thanks for reading.