But here's a twofer:
Liz Truss killed The Queen. JD Vance killed the Pope. Can we just stop these people hanging out with the elderly?
— Hannah Brown (@_HannahJBrown) April 21, 2025
Excellent side eye from Pope Francis here btw. pic.twitter.com/87hgqEw0WP
And a couple notables even made the semi-news: Jack Schlossberg and Ann Coulter Mock Vance for ‘Killing Pope’.
John F. Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg found an unlikely ally to troll JD Vance over the death of Pope Francis—the ultra-conservative Ann Coulter.
Pope Francis died aged 88 on Monday morning—after he spent a few minutes of his Easter Sunday with Vance at the Vatican.
“Okay JD killed the pope,” Schlossberg posted on Instagram. The 32-year-old is the newest and most online face of the country’s most prominent Catholic family. In contrast the vice president is a self-described “baby Catholic” who become a member of the church when he converted in 2019.
"Gee," I wondered, "Does Jack Schlossberg have a real job?"
His Wikipedia page says the 32-year-old is a "writer". His most recent perch is at Vogue, where he was hired as a "political correspondent". Which, at Vogue, translates to "shill for Democrats". His most recent written article there seems to be from October 2024: The Keys to the Harris Campaign’s Viral Success. Never is heard a discouraging word!
Also of note:
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They made the mistake of providing useful free stuff to everyone. So obviously, they must be punished: The Department of Justice is trying to make Google unprofitable.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is currently considering what remedies to impose in an antitrust case against Google's monopolization of the search engine market, which the company lost to the DOJ in August 2024. In this case, the DOJ proposed that Google divest from Android and Chrome, make its advertisement data available to competitors at zero cost, and allow publishers to deny Google access to their domains to train its generative AI models.
The proposed remedies in both cases threaten the company's main source of revenue: Google Services, including Google Ads and products like Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube, which Google's present business model offers to users for free. Declaring this model and its associated practices illegal could have unintended consequences for consumers.
I'm not sure those consequences will be actually unintended.
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A model for the University Near Here. Bryan Caplan provides a transcript of his talk to the "Board of Visitors" of his employer, George Mason University, which explans Why GMU Should End DEI for Real.
It’s been a long time since I’ve received so much as an email from GMU’s DEI office. In fact, the last email I received about GMU DEI was a message from President Gregory Washington announcing that “Our DEI office is now the Office of Access, Compliance, and Community.” Given the current political climate, why would any reasonable person consider the full abolition of this renamed DEI office, including the firing of all DEI staff, to be an important and valuable goal?
My answer: The current political climate will not last. Political climates never do. And once the political climate for DEI is once again favorable, the office will resume its ultimate mission: transforming GMU from a university where people can freely discuss the most controversial issues into a seminary where people are taught one controversial philosophy as established fact — and dissenters are intimidated into silence. You can call this philosophy “social justice” or “wokeness” as you prefer. Even if you think it is true, it should not be Officially True.
Bryan's talk is short and to the point. DEI, even under a more innocuous label, is left-wing McCarthyism.
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Meanwhile, on the other end of the horseshoe… C, Bradley Thompson provides a small seminar on Right-Wing Gramscianism vs. Classical Liberalism. He concentrates on Chris Rufo; although now on "our side", Rufo brings a strategy from one of his old Commie inspirations:
In the end, though, Mr. Rufo is more than just an “activist” and a journalist. He’s also a strategic thinker about cultural and political change. Moreover, if I’m not mistaken, Mr. Rufo was once a man of Left, which means he knows the leading Marxist, post-Marxist, and neo-Marxist thinkers from his days fighting the Right. Specifically, Mr. Rufo has read and takes seriously the work of the early twentieth-century Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).
Gramsci broke with the dialectical materialism of Marx’s scientific socialism and the latter’s claim that History was inevitably leading mankind toward a proletarian revolution that would usher in first socialism and then communism. By the 1920s, Gramsci realized that the so-called working class was the most conservative force in Western societies and could not be relied on to consecrate the revolution. Gramsci therefore replaced economics with culture as the necessary force to liberate the working class from their “false consciousness” and reactionary devotion to traditional religious, moral, political, and cultural folkways. The proletariat could not be, in other words, liberated from their economic exploitation until they had been freed from the “cultural hegemony” of the ruling class.
In his Prison Notebooks (written between 1929 and 1935), Gramsci was the first Marxist to urge socialists and communists to begin what would later be called the “long march through the institutions,” by which was meant any given society’s cultural or opinion-forming institutions. In the same way that Marx turned Hegel on his head, so Gramsci flipped Marxism right side up so that the ideological superstructure was the first cause and the driving force in society.
Rufo has stated that he thinks the time has come to refuse "to indulge the fantasies of the ‘classical liberals’". Damn, that's me. Well, see you later, on the barricades.
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I continue to be fascinated by this very question. And it's asked by a very respectable group, the WSJ editorial board: Should Harvard Be Tax Exempt? (gifted link). Unfortunately for folks who prefer to be tossed red meat…
Some conservatives are cheering on Mr. Trump, but they might not like it when President Ocasio-Cortez is in charge. They were rightly indignant when the IRS under President Obama was found to have targeted the tax exemptions of right-leaning 501(c)(4) nonprofits, including pro-Israel groups. The Court’s reasoning in Bob Jones University would allow the President to revoke a charity’s or university’s tax exemption for political reasons. A Democratic President could declare a think tank that opposes its climate or transgender bathroom rules to be acting contrary to “established public policy.”
There are better ways to reduce taxpayer money for schools and give them an incentive to reform. Mr. Trump could work with Congress to codify his order to limit the share of federal research grants that universities can spend on overhead to 15% since this money is fungible and thus supports politicized liberal arts departments.
Sigh. Yeah, do that. President AOC is a scary thought, though, isn't it?
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