1. Wokeness asks too much. "The backlash against critical race theory may seem sudden, but it built up over decades."
2. The scam that is Seeming Enlightened. “‘Doing the work’ means hiring diversity specialists to call their children white supremacists in a prep school class they can put on their transcript to help their chances of getting into Harvard. It has absolutely nothing to do with asking those who could actually make a difference with regard to true inequality to sacrifice anything of themselves.”
3. Another deanlet misses the point? "For staff who find themselves exhausted by constant face-to-face contact, navigating the pre-pandemic academic bias toward in-person work was incredibly challenging." Work is what we do between meetings, not that the administrative drones in charge of Inside Higher Ed care.
4. Finding those missing trade-tested betterments. "[I]f the first question out of the audience is 'What are we going to do when we bring down the price of health care?' we're onto something."
5. That aggregation problem in democracy, again. "When people see the government as less legitimate, they are less likely to go along." Legitimacy is less of a problem among your neighbors. "To increase faith in our democracy we must make local decision-making more accessible and meaningful to everyday people. This means lowering decision-making authority to the neighborhood level."
6. It hasn't gone well. "America's cities are feeling the effects of a yearslong experiment in what would happen if nearly everyone celebrated a movement based on the idea that police are racist goons, excused rioting and explained away spiraling crime, and made it clear to cops that if they make a mistake, they will, at the very least, become instantly infamous."
7. Abusive coaches and support staff will come back to bite you. "But, see, this stuff doesn’t go away. Not with a kick, not with a shrug, not with a cover-up."
8. The limitations on democracy, plus Frank Knight's tragic vision. "Man is naturally a partisan and a gangster." What's that bit about "at once worms and gods?"
9. Root causes. "Fatherlessness is one of the most debilitating domestic issues confronting our country."
10. Bet on emergence. "Rewarding excellence with income produces benefits for society at large, while government-imposed income leveling is a recipe for mediocrity and possibly repression."
11. How badly is that hopey-changey stuff working out? "While there are many big issues that the Democrats have been very wrong about for many years, they’ve been really, really wrong about almost everything since the beginning of the Obama era."
12. So smart they got tangled in their epistemic closure! "The Democratic intelligentsia must appear to accept Black radicalism even while their base rejects it and they know that there are electoral advantages to distancing themselves from it."
13. Close the windows, and pretend the train is moving. "The solution to every academic failure is to lower the standards."
14. Political economy is too serious a subject to be left to the English department. "The humanities have suffered both from suicide and murder." You were warned!
15. The state is that grand fiction that roads are free. "Drivers used to pay for roads. Washington is killing that idea." Strictly speaking, they never paid their way, but once upon a time Our Political Masters paid lip service to the idea.
16. Ranked choice voting looks better in theory than it does in practice? "Nothing enhances confidence in government like an admission that it can’t count." Jeff Jacoby quips, "In essence, ranked-choice voting gives repeated mulligans to voters who back a loser, while penalizing voters who support just the candidate they prefer and refuse to rank candidates they know they don’t want." In support of his point, we could note that Lori Lightfoot became Chicago's joke of a mayor by receiving "second choice" mentions from several of the more establishmentarian (meaning being bought off by one of the more traditional grifters) candidates, for all the good that has done. I've found some serious analysis of implementing ranked choice to return to another day.
17. Don't rile up the Normals. "Deliberately alienating Middle America could not arrive at a worse time."
18. A different sort of welfare queen rises in Minnesota. "Forty years after Ronald Reagan, the old lefty saw 'the real welfare queens are the CEOs' is finally true."
19. "Irredeemable" is the gravamen of the argument. "Indeed, the whole point of the structural racism argument is to undermine a notion of a basically benign system that happened to have slavery as an original sin from which we only slowly recovered." Reality is socially conservative, and you deconstruct it at your peril.
20. It's the feminists' fault. "Whereas 50 years ago it took only one income earner for a family to enjoy a reasonable middle-class living, now it takes two." Somebody should write a book about that.
21. We could cast our net more widely. "We’ve got to move on past talking about the bad behavior of below-average men."
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