Pun Salad

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?
Excellent side eye from Pope Francis here btw. pic.twitter.com/87hgqEw0WP

— Hannah Brown (@_HannahJBrown) April 21, 2025

And a couple notables even made the semi-news: Jack Schlossberg and Ann Coulter Mock Vance for ‘Killing Pope’.

"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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

Recently on the book blog:

Last month, I looked at Matt Zwolinski's essay, titled Libertarianism's Democracy Problem. In it he referred to this book by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (H3 from here on). And also Against Democracy by Jason Brennan, which I read and liked quite a bit.

But I was intrigued enough to request H3's book, which arrived from Brandeis U, thanks to the Interlibrary Loan Service of the University Near Here. (The inner cover says the book was purchased for the Brandeis library by the "Brandeis National Women's Committee", which strikes me as an odd choice for a Women's Committee, but never mind.)

Anyway: I didn't care for the book much. It's not really about democracy, but a manifesto detailing and advocating H3's political philosophy. Which his subtitle calls "natural order", but most of us fellow travellers of the libertarian camp know as anarchocapitalism: all property is private, its justice system (police, justice, punishment) provided by firms competing for voluntary customers in the marketplace.

H3's inspiration is in the Austrian school of economics, particularly Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. Those two are quoted and praised extensively, with the fervor of a old-style bible-thumper quoting the Good Book. The (equally Austrian) Friedrich Hayek is relatively ignored, relegated to some footnotes. (H3's excuse: Hayek studied under early Mises, before the Misesian system was entirely worked out, and hence is a heretic. Rothbard got Mises later, and therefore is his true intellectual heir.)

H3's political/economic views are heterodox. For example, he likes old-style monarchy better than democracy, because the monarch "owns" the state, and is constrained in his behavior as is any business owner: his ability to please the customers. Democratic governments, on the other hand, are all on a slippery slope eventually, inevitably, leading to socialist totalitarianism; it's just that some countries got there quicker than others.

As for America: the Declaration was great, the resulting Revolution was inspiring, the post-Revolutionary government was admirable, and the Constitution was a big fat mistake, giving too much power to the Federal Government. Arguable!

Even more arguable is H3's sympathy for the secessionist "Southern Confederacy" decades later; after all, weren't they just insisting on doing the same thing America did when it seceded from Britain? (H3 admits, finally, that "the issue of slavery" might have "complicated and obscured the situation in 1861." Gee, ya think?

Along the way H3 disdains liberal pieties, for example multiculturalism. He claims "no multicultural society—and especially no democratic one—has ever worked peacefully for very long." Uh, Hans, simply as an editing pedantry: if no such society exists, then the aside about democratic ones is superfluous at best.

H3 can also be hair-on-fire apocalyptic: "The U.S. government does not protect us. To the contrary, there exists no greater danger to our life, property, and prosperity than the U.S. government, and the U.S. president in particular is the world's single most threatening and armed danger, capable of ruining everyone who opposes him and destroying the entire globe."

The book is ©2001, by the way. U.S. Presidents have just been "biden" their time in destroying the globe.

Bottom line: even as a mostly-libertarian, I can't recommend H3. He's right about some things, utterly wrong about way too many others. If you want a libertarian critique of democracy, Jason Brennan's a better choice.

I've been blogging about REAL ID for a REAL long time (heh). An example from eighteen years ago: REAL ID == Imaginary Security.

And also linking to folks like Bruce Schneier. and Jim Harper. I bought Jim's book Identity Crisis long ago (and so can you, Amazon link at your right); my report is here.

But I have a confession to make: My driver license came up for renewal this year, and the Official Word is that you're gonna need a REAL ID card to get on a plane, starting next month.

So I meekly gathered my documentation together (an ancient Social Security card, birth certificate, plus my car registration), shelled out some extra money, and voila, a few days later, I got a REAL ID-compliant license.

Jim Harper's telling me, however, that I probably didn't need to do that: Which is in Collapse? Administrative Law or REAL ID?.

I'm in total agreement! So why did I get REAL? As with so many things involving government: at my age, I just want to minimize hassle. I plan on flying to Iowa later this year, and just want to avoid even a chance of a TSA agent's raised eyebrow.

It will be interesting to see whether there will be news reports of masses of irate travelers on May 7. Will President Trump "illegally" come to their rescue? Pass the popcorn.

Also of note:

• Geez, it's almost as if Trump's not a First Amendment fan. Jacob Sullum notes Constitutional illiteracy at the highest levels of Your Federal Government: Treating Journalism As Consumer Fraud, Trump Claims Coverage of a Presidential Poll Was Not 'News Reporting'.

  Shortly before last year's presidential election, the Des Moines Register reported the results of a poll that gave Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, a three-point lead in Iowa. That surprising result, generated by a survey that pollster Ann Selzer conducted for the Register, proved to be off by more than a little: Donald Trump ultimately won Iowa by 13 percentage points.

  Trump is still mad about that survey, and he is trying to punish the Register and Selzer for it by persuading a federal judge in Iowa that it amounted to consumer fraud under state law. The obvious problem for Trump is that his fraud claim hinges on showing that he suffered damages because he reasonably relied on misrepresentations by the defendants in connection with the sale of "consumer merchandise." Since Trump did not buy anything from the Register or Selzer, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) argued in a motion to dismiss his lawsuit, he is trying to invent a tort that consists of reporting "fraudulent news," which would be plainly inconsistent with the First Amendment.

  I'd consider this grounds for impeachment, in violation of his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

  But nobody asked me.

• Did I call it, or what? Jeff Maurer provides a guest writer for his substack, Vice President J.D. Vance. Who writes Omen, Schmomen: Sometimes Popes Die Five Minutes After You Meet Them.

  Libtards and naysayers are gunning for the Trump administration. Every small setback is treated like a crisis, every hiccup reported like it’s the end of the world. And that’s why, when I learned that Pope Francis had passed away almost immediately after meeting with me on Easter Sunday, and that basically his last act on Earth was to rebuke the path that President Trump and I have chosen, I thought: “People are going to make something of this.” That’s just the world we live in; when the Pope grasps your hand, issues a stark warning, and then dies, almost as if he had been kept alive purely to deliver a dire message directly from God, the bedwetters and snowflakes will try to find some symbolism in that sequence of events.

  And sure enough, they have! Cut-ups on social media are trying to make a connection between me shaking the Pope’s hand and his so-proximate-as-to-be-functionally-concurrent death. But I know the truth: These things simply happen. Pope Francis was 88. And sometimes, you meet the Pope during a time of turmoil, he pulls you close and issues an admonition, and then passes away with your hand practically still clasped within his so that you may feel the icy grip of death enter his body in a chilling representation of what might happen to the Body of Mankind should you not heed his warning. Ho hum.

  You don't want to miss a guest appearance by "the beheaded ghost of John the Baptist". Click through.

• On the LFOD watch. Valley News reporter Narain Batra covers A day in the life of a Vermont state senator. Specifically, Senator Joe Major, from Windsor County. Joe's not a fan of the Granite State:

  Finally, I asked him why Vermont is not “A Live Free or Die” state like neighboring New Hampshire, where there is no state income tax or sales tax?

  Vermont’s philosophy contrasts sharply with New Hampshire’s libertarian approach, he said.

  “A couple of things. One, this state, Vermont, is a bit of a safety net state. And what I mean by that is we want to take care of everyone and create somewhat of a safety net,” thus resulting in higher taxes to fund social programs. Vermont’s tax policies, including taxing seniors and military benefits, discourage retirees and businesses, making affordability a challenge. Balancing compassion with economic sustainability remains Vermont’s ongoing struggle, he said, “And I personally like Vermont a little better.”

  For reference, the Tax Foundation ranked New Hampshire #6 among the states for "tax competitiveness". Vermont was … not close behind, coming in at #43.

  But I also got a chuckle out of this:

  Major serves on two Senate committees: Agriculture and Institutions, each of which offer a window into the state.

  “Agriculture is interwoven into the fabric of Vermont,” he said. As vice chair of the Agriculture Committee, he focuses on sustaining Vermont’s struggling farming sector, which faces challenges like federal subsidy reductions and weather impacts. Vermont has lost over $55 million in farming revenue in four years, including a 40% decline in dairy farms between 2012 and 2022.

  Which reminded me of the article I cited yesterday, claiming that attempts to bring back manufacturing jobs was a "fool's errand". Senator Major seems to be on an even more foolish errand, frantically trying to prop up a sector that's obviously been fading for a long time. Because it's "interwoven."

But that's exactly what greeted my bleary eyes this morn. Specifically: Stocks, Dollar Nosedive As Trump Flogs Fed.

Ah, well.

Bryan Caplan posts a long and relevant excerpt from his book The Myth of the Rational Voter, dealing with The Political Economy of Faith. (I've left his references intact.)

I read The Myth of the Rational Voter back in 2007; might be time for a reread.

Also of note:

• 

  "Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?" Norbert Michel and Jerome Famularo argue that Trying to “Bring Back” Manufacturing Jobs Is a Fool’s Errand. There are graphs at the link, from Norbert's new book, Amazon link at your right.

  The Trump administration’s trade policy has taken a serious beating during the past few weeks, with good reason. Okay, for many good reasons, some of which we’ll expand on in this post.

  But what’s encouraging is that more and more polls suggest Americans understand these trade policies are harmful. And one explanation could be that most Americans recognize that service jobs are good.

  In other words, even though the Trump administration seems bent on “bringing back” manufacturing jobs to the United States, most Americans recognize that service sector jobs have already made America great.

  I realize that Norbert's "encouraging" news pales somewhat in the face of Bryan Caplan's discouraging words about voters.

• Perhaps remedial classes at the local community college would help? Tal Fortgang's LTE in yesterday's WSJ manages to capture my own thoughts precisely: Neither Harvard Nor Trump Gets a Good Grade (gifted link).

  Your editorial “Donald Trump Tries to Run Harvard” (April 16) offers an excellent analysis of the administration’s overreach in bringing Harvard to heel. Federal funding comes with civil-rights strings attached, not viewpoint-diversity strings. Yet no one in Cambridge, Mass., or Washington is handling this affair especially well. Both parties are lumping discrete issues together.

  The government has the better of at least one argument: It can and should use funding as leverage to force Harvard to confront its national-origin-discrimination problem. Harvard admits that it has had severe issues with anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli harassment, and though it settled with one group of Jewish plaintiffs, it remains locked in litigation with others. It is likewise under Education Department investigation for failing to handle discrimination adequately. The school can’t simply claim it is trying its best and expect the feds to go away. It certainly can’t do so without attempting to identify and expel students who harassed Jews and Israelis, or those who led groups that did the same. It is absurd to suggest that federal civil-rights enforcement is a violation of academic freedom. That’s an argument against civil-rights law, not heroic defiance of an overweening government.

  But the Trump administration does itself a disservice when it lumps in related but not fully congruent gripes about how Harvard conducts its academic affairs. The lack of viewpoint diversity may contribute to discrimination—e.g., biasing students against Zionism—but combined with tangential demands about DEI and administrative bloat, it looks as if it’s bullying for the sake of a larger anti-Harvard campaign. If the administration is going to freeze funding due to discrimination, it needs to ensure that it connects its means and ends logically and then follows the proper procedures so it doesn’t lose its progress in court.

  Well said, Tal. Although "connecting means and ends logically" doesn't seem to be Team Orange's strong point.

• In other good news… John Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty think Trump Could Have a Strong Case to Revoke Harvard’s Tax-Exempt Status (gifted link). We've previously alluded to the precedent to which John and Robert refer:

  Thanks to a 1983 Supreme Court opinion widely hailed by progressives at the time, the Trump administration may have stronger grounds than at first appears to reconsider Harvard’s tax status. Harvard is a tax-exempt organization as an educational institution under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Section 501(c)(3) exempts organizations “operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes.” Tax-exempt status carries great advantages, because it frees Harvard from federal income tax and its donors can make tax-deductible contributions. Loss of the exemption would cost Harvard an estimated $500 million annually.

  But the IRS can remove 501(c)(3) designation if the organization engages in conduct that violates “established public policy.” The Supreme Court recognized this public policy doctrine in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983). Bob Jones was a private Christian university that prohibited interracial dating and marriage based on its understanding of biblical teachings. The IRS concluded that Bob Jones’s rule violated fundamental national policy. Agreeing with the IRS, the Supreme Court found that the institution’s purpose “must not be so at odds with the common community conscience as to undermine any public benefit that might otherwise be conferred.” It concluded, “it would be wholly incompatible with the concepts underlying tax exemption to grant the benefit of tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory educational entities.”

  John and Robert also note the points on which "e the Trump administration has gone too far in its efforts to reshape Harvard." Which is a shame.

• I'm skeptical of Trump's negotiation talents. But let's see what Stanley Kurtz recommends anyway: Donald Trump vs. Harvard: A Negotiated Education Reform. He recommends this One Weird Trick:

  The solution is suggested by model legislation called General Education Act (GEA), a limited version of which just became law in Utah, and which is likely to be considered by other states in 2026. (I am a co-author of the model GEA.)

  The GEA works by establishing an independent School of General Education, where the governing dean and the newly recruited faculty are committed to a traditional “great books” approach. No doubt such a faculty would proportionately include more conservatives than are typical in academia, yet by no means will the scholars be of a single political stripe. There are still plenty of old-fashioned liberals who believe in a great books approach.

  The distinctive feature of this plan is that the new School of General Education is put in charge of teaching a set of great books and Western Civ–focused courses required of every student at the university in question. This magnifies the reach of a relatively limited number of new academic appointments, because every student has to take at least a few classic-style courses taught by teachers committed to traditionalist methods. Also, the independence of the School of General Education means that its hiring and governance cannot be hampered by hostile faculty or departments.

  Sounds crazy, but it just might work.

JD Vance to Pope Francis a day before the Pope's death:

“It is good to see you in better health.” pic.twitter.com/7va6fMTtVs

— Clash Report (@clashreport) April 21, 2025

And on my dead-trees copy of the WSJ this Easter Monday:

Requiescat in pace, Jorge.

Also of note:

• It's Point/Counterpoint Monday here at Pun Salad. Taking the pro-Harvard point is Angel Eduardo, writing at UnHerd: Harvard's resistance to Trump is a model for US universities.

  They say that where Harvard goes, others follow. For the first time in a while, supporters of free expression on American campuses should hope that’s true.

  Late last week, the Ivy League university received a letter from the federal government demanding changes to its governance, leadership structure, hiring practices, and admissions processes, as well as a “discontinuation of DEI” and reform of “programs with egregious records of antisemitism or other bias”. If it failed to carry out these changes, Harvard would risk losing its government investment. In other words, “Nice school you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

  Thankfully, Harvard pushed back. Yesterday the university’s president Alan Garber published a response, firmly committing to the preservation of academic freedom and institutional independence on campus. The government’s mandates, Garber wrote, “[threaten] our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

  Fine. I'm a fan of free expression on American campuses too.

  I will only point out that it's been 14 years since a similar ("Dear Colleague") letter went out to all universities demanding significant changes handling alleged sex-related misbehavior, significantly eroding due-process protections for the accused. There was pushback on that, but not much significant resistance came from university administration or faculty.

  In fact, one University Near Here scheduled a big ceremony celebrating that announcement.

  So go figure.

• Jonathan Turley's counterpoint does not lead off with "Angel, you ignorant slut." His headline at the Hill: Crimson chide: Harvard makes the case against itself

  Harvard faculty members are finally upset about free speech and viewpoint intolerance. Hundreds of professors signed a letter of outrage over what they called an attack on the “rights of free expression, association, and inquiry” in higher education.

  The cause for this outcry is the threat to end the university’s tax exempt status, freezing federal grants, and other punitive measures. Some of those measures raise serious concerns over academic freedom and free speech.

  The problem is that Harvard faculty members have spent decades denying those rights to teachers and students alike.

  There is an almost comical lack of self-awareness among Harvard faculty members who express concern about protecting viewpoint diversity and academic integrity. The letter gives off that same queasy feeling as when CBS morning host Gayle King insisted she is an astronaut, just like Alan Shepard, due to her 10-minute jaunt in space on the Blue Origin. One is just left speechless, looking awkwardly at one’s shoes.

  Many of these signatories have been entirely silent for years as departments purged their ranks of conservatives to create one of the most perfectly sealed-off echo chambers in all of higher education. Harvard ranks dead last for free speech, awarded a 0 out of 100 score last year by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. There has been no outcry about this from most of these professors.

  I have to give gold stars to both Angel and Jonathan. "Both make good points."

• Tired of all the "winning". Karl Rove takes the pulse of the electorate and diagnoses: America Gets Trump Fatigue (gifted link). .

  We aren’t 100 days into Donald Trump’s second term and many Americans are already exhausted. They’ve had way too much thrown at them.

  Voters made crystal clear what they sought during the 2024 election. They wanted prices to come down and the economy revved up. The Southern border had to be closed, our military strengthened and a strong leader installed in the Oval Office.

  Some of that we’re getting, especially regarding the border. Other things—the rebuilding of the military—appear to be in the works.

  But on the key issue of the economy, Americans aren’t happy. Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to break inflation has been replaced by a fixation on raising tariffs, which nearly three-quarters of Americans expect to hike prices. We’re also confused: Is the goal getting trading partners to lower their tariffs on U.S. goods and services? Or replacing our income tax with high tariffs on foreign goods?

  Rove represents Conventional Republican Wisdom, which is out of favor these days. Sad!

• Written before he killed the Pope. Andrew C. McCarthy reminds us that the Veep should, and almost certainly does, know better, but JD Vance Pretends Due Process Is Beside the Point (gifted link).

  JD Vance is a smart fellow. That’s why he’s often infuriating — too smart not to know that the nonsense he spouts is nonsense. Well-framed nonsense, to be sure. Demagoguery, to be effective, has to be well framed: A grandiloquent rationalization for shredding the Constitution has to be pitched as a defense of constitutional principle if, as the speaker intends, the former is to be taken by the listener as the latter. All the while, though, the speaker knows exactly what he’s doing.

  Vice President Vance issued one of his claptrap-laden diatribes on social media Wednesday, slamming “the media and the far left” who are “weeping over the lack of due process” in the Trump administration’s illegal deportations of people it alleges — probably correctly in most instances — are members of criminal gangs. Vance spotlights Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the illegal alien and Salvadoran national whom — the Trump Justice Department itself has confessed to the Supreme Court — the administration unlawfully deported to El Salvador.

  It is natural for Vance to dwell on Abrego Garcia. It’s topical, after all, with the administration cruising toward being held in contempt by a federal judge (I should say, yet another federal judge) because it is stonewalling about its flouting of an order, endorsed by the Supreme Court, that it facilitate his return to the United States. It’s an order with which the administration could easily comply but it has decided to ignore. The best explanation is the simplest: Trump intends to illustrate that he has amassed uncheckable power. That is, having extirpated what made the Republican Party conservative and constitutionalist, and with Congress thus no obstacle (at least for the next 21 months), the president wants it known that such constitutional constraints on executive power as courts and due process are no longer operative.

  If you want to hit Andy with arguments involving hypocrisy and whataboutism, feel free. You won't be wrong. But that doesn't make him wrong.

At Reason, Jack Nicastro, not a Trump fan, looks at three issues which "are just some of the positions that the commander in chief's supporters must walk on eggshells while discussing to avoid looking overly scrambled." And the article is amusingly headlined: The yolk’s on you!

On tariffs:

This is Pun Salad, and readers have to expect vile punning now and then. And (by the way) there's a secular eggy theme at Reason on this Holy Weekend, and links to the relevant articles are provided here.

Also of note:

• Just keep the cash coming, Uncle Stupid. Paul Mueller looks at the current imbroglio between the Trump Administration and Higher Ed, and waxes indignant: Hands Off the University, Indeed.

  Administrators are right to chant, “hand off my university!” We should want the federal government’s hands off universities. We can start by removing its tentacles from student loan financing. No more FAFSAs. No more Pell grants. This, by the way, would save taxpayers nearly $30 billion annually.

  Then, we can remove government research grants, whether for the arts and humanities or for science and medicine. The $40 billion to $50 billion of federal tax dollars spent annually at research universities could be used to pay down national debt (or at least to reduce the deficit).

  In 2018, colleges and universities received roughly $150 billion in federal money through a variety of programs. That’s a lot of government “hands” on the higher education system. If universities want those hands off, they should refuse the money.

  This laissez-faire attitude works both ways, y'know.

• But as entertaining as educrat-baiting can be… The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) says this as if it were a bad thing: Revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status will threaten all nonprofits. They (correctly) note that such threats should not be used to suppress dissenting political viewpoints in curricula, admissions, or hiring. So let's skip down to:

  Many who support Trump set aside the president’s ideological justifications for removing Harvard’s tax-exempt status. They instead argue the targeting is justified because of the college’s alleged acts of discrimination, both with regard to allegations of anti-Semitism on its campus and the Supreme Court’s 2023 finding in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that its admissions program was racially discriminatory. They point to the Court’s 1983 decision in Bob Jones University v. United States, in which it upheld the IRS’s decision to strip that university’s tax exemption because of its rules banning interracial dating and marriage.

  However, the Court emphasized in that case that revoking tax-exempt status is a “sensitive” decision that should be made only when there is “no doubt” that an organization violates fundamental and longstanding federal policy, emphasizing policy agreement among all branches of government. Federal attention to Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status spanned four different presidential administrations and left the public no reason to think the grounds for revocation were pretextual. Today, by contrast, the president is explicitly targeting a university specifically for its expression and ideological reasons.

  FIRE's arguments are not totally convincing to me, as they seem to reduce to "this is different" hand-waving. Still, see what you think.

• See if you can guess what they are. Kat Rosenfield relays: Mel Robbins Has Two Words for America’s Control Freaks.

  If you, like me, have absolutely no idea who Mel is, Kat will fill you in. Instead we will skip down to the spoiler:

  

  … [W]while [Mel's] strategy for content creation is enviable, her real gift is being deeply attuned to what troubles the psyches of her mostly female, digital native audience—and her new book is a direct challenge to our era of collective control freakiness, in the form of a two-word mantra that provides part of the title:

  Let Them.

  The book is “a step-by-step guide on how to stop letting other people's opinions, drama, and judgment impact your life.” Like Robbins’s other published works, this one began with a viral moment on social media: “I just heard about this thing called the “Let Them Theory” and holy crap… I absolutely LOVE this!!!!” she posted on Instagram in 2023. “Stop wasting energy on trying to get other people to meet YOUR expectations. Just LET THEM show you who they truly are.” That reel garnered almost 1.5 million likes, while a similar post on Robbins’s TikTok collected more than 20 million.

  Amazon link at your right, and if you click over, you'll note how woefully out of the zeitgeist I am: "#1 New York Times Bestseller; #1 Sunday Times Bestseller; #1 Amazon Bestseller; #1 Audible Bestseller". Sheesh. As confessed above, I really had no idea.

• Least surprising news of 2024? Gotta be close, anyway. Tevi Troy looks at some now-it-can-be-told revelations from last year: Even Hollywood Couldn’t Save Biden (Gifted Link).

  Joe Biden received advice from Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg before his June debate against Donald Trump, according to a new book by Chris Whipple. Given that it was probably the worst presidential debate performance in history, it’s no wonder they haven’t bragged about it.

  “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History” recounts how the Hollywood moguls advised Mr. Biden over Zoom on how to answer questions. Mr. Katzenberg then spent a week at Camp David to work with Mr. Biden on his body language in front of a camera.

  There’s a long history of Hollywood types advising Democrats on debates. Every Democratic president since 1960 who has participated in a general-election debate has received debate advice from Tinseltown. It started with the director Arthur Penn, who advised John F. Kennedy before Kennedy’s 1960 debate against Richard Nixon. JFK was smooth and effective on television while Nixon, who sounded fine on radio, looked pasty and sweaty to those watching at home.

  Hollywood big brains couldn't save Snow White. Nobody should have expected them to save Joe.

• Another argument for a Dispatch subscription, if you need one. It's Kevin D. Williamson musing on The Wrong Kind of Abundance. Winning me over is his leadoff quote from Friedrich Hayek's Nobel Prize lecture in 1974:

  “I am … inclined to suggest that you require from your laureates an oath of humility, a sort of Hippocratic oath, never to exceed in public pronouncements the limits of their competence.”

  And KDW continues:

  Forgive me for how precious-sounding this is, but: If you really want to understand COVID politics in the United States, you have to unwind American political history all the way back to 1776—and a bit before, getting to know that character who shouldn’t exist but somehow does: the conservative revolutionary.

  COVID unleashed a lot of different kinds of crazy in the United States, and, on the right, it broke the dam for a special kind of crazy, the kind that leads to the embrace of crackpots such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Of course, the political group that we now call, broadly speaking, the American right has always been convulsed by irreconcilable contradictions because the American project itself is founded in a paradox: There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a conservative revolution, but that is approximately what the Founding Fathers carried out. And from the New Deal through to the present, the right has been torn between its conservative tendencies and its revolutionary tendencies. Dwight Eisenhower called himself a “progressive conservative”; William F. Buckley Jr. called himself a ”radical conservative” and insisted that whatever it was his new movement was going to stand for, it was against Eisenhower.

  Among the founders, there were plenty of wild-eyed utopians and radicals, but the revolution ended up being led by relatively conservative figures such as George Washington and John Adams (who had originally opposed separating from England) and others of similar temperament, who made the case that they were not so much overturning a legitimate political order as restoring and securing their ancient rights as Englishmen. The American project is a marriage between the forces of conservatism (property and religion) and the forces of radicalism (majoritarianism, disestablishmentarianism, etc.), and, to the extent that the American right acts as a conservator of the American tradition, it feels those contradictions deeply.

  As we just passed the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, it might be time to reflect on what we owe to those guys.

Recently on the book blog:

I find that I'm reading a disproportionate amount of non-fiction books by woman authors with the initials A. S.: Amity Shlaes, Allison Schrager, and now here's Abigail Shrier. Funny coincidence, or a bug in the simulation?

Also: Shrier's first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was the target of a cancellation campaign back in 2020. One of the lead cancellation advocates was an ACLU lawyer! (Is that ironic?)

And I note that, while I found this book at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, they do not carry Irreversible Damage. Which means it probably will not show up in their prominent "Banned Books Week" display this year, or any other year. (I'm pretty sure that's ironic.)

Anyway, this book: Shrier's subject is the psychological damage to children caused by mental health professionals, semi-professionals, and (yes) even some parents. This isn't a new phenomenon; one of my wise-cracking middle school teachers back in the 1960s occasionally smirkingly remarked that he "didn't want to give us a complex" after expressing even an innocuous opinion.

But Shrier argues that it's gotten worse, and she backs up her argument with plenty of evidence of "iatrogenic" harm to the kiddos. The incentives involved in the mental health industry are all wrong, she (convincingly) says; quirks are magnified into neuroses, everyday disappointments blow up into major trauma, "surveys" are performed that normalize destructive behavior, and more.

My take: A good book for parents to read. And maybe teachers too. But Shrier was pushing on an open door in my case; some of the negative Amazon reviews accuse her of cherry-picking data, misinterpreting/misrepresenting the sources she cites, and so on. Since my kids are in their 30s, and I haven't been in a classroom for a couple decades, I'm not motivated enough to judge.

… although, technically, this might not be one:

I think I'm on more solid ground with Daniel Lyons' essay at AEI: Bastiat and What is Not Seen in Tech Policy.

But it's not just trade policy of course; the seen/unseen feature extends to tech policy too, for example:

In tech policy, “what is not seen” often involves stifled innovation—products or services that never emerge due to regulation. Net neutrality offers a clear example. Advocates celebrated its visible effects: bans on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization preserved existing network management practices, allowing competition among internet-based edge providers. But these rules prevented broadband companies from experimenting with alternative business models. For example, in 2014, Sprint sought to offer a wireless plan with unlimited talk, text, and one social media app of your choice at a lower price than its unlimited broadband plan. But it scrapped the idea when critics complained it violated net neutrality by favoring one service over others. Such plans thrived abroad but remained unseen in US markets, to the detriment of budget-conscious American consumers. In 2024, similar concerns arose that net neutrality could hinder network slicing, a 5G innovation enabling customized network performance but which potentially violated prioritization rules.

And more examples exist at the link. Finally, Tyler Cowen provides a chuckle with his headline: Bastiat's revenge. He points to a San Francisco Chronicle article titled (as I type): San Francisco auto glass shops suffering as car break-ins drop. (Semi-paywalled, archived here.)

I'm sure Hank Wee has already received multiple pointers to Bastiat's essay. No need for us to pile on.

Also of note:

• Fallacies can be addictive. And none more so than Fentanyl Fallacies, amirite? Kevin D. Williamson writes:

  Fentanyl is a wonder drug.

  Not only is it useful for managing severe pain (e.g., for cancer patients and burn victims) but it also provides policy cover for … whatever.

  Donald Trump’s senior economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, knows that Trump’s tariff policy is dumb and destructive, and it is very difficult to make an economic case for it, so he insists that the tariffs are really part of a fentanyl interdiction policy. Trump would like to blame illegal immigrants for everything from heartbreak to psoriasis, and he reliably invokes fentanyl trafficking in his litany of immigration denunciations.

  The problem is that—as so often is the case with Trump and his sycophants—the facts do not quite line up with the story he would like to tell.

  Relevant facts, summed up in KDW's subhed: "Illegal immigrants aren’t the ones bringing it in, and overdose deaths are decreasing."

  But a final fact remains: "there were about 87,000 overdose deaths in the United States in the 12 months ending in September 2024". Attributable in large part to the "war on drugs".

• Like a library book left at the beach last summer… The NR editors say Defunding PBS and NPR Is Long Overdue.

  President Trump is expected to push for ending $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization that funnels taxpayer money to PBS and NPR.

  Under the move, he would send a memo to Congress asking them to either rescind the funding, or restore it. The rescission process is not subject to the Senate filibuster, so only a majority of both houses need to concur with the president’s request. House and Senate Republicans should seize the opportunity to cut off the broadcasters.

  In principle, there is no reason why the federal government should be in the business of funding news and entertainment programming. It does not serve an essential purpose and could easily be financed privately. But if the government is going to be in the broadcasting business, it should at least not be one-sidedly political.

  Put on your Nikes and Just Do It, Congress.

• So you're saying there's a chance! George Will looks at the odds in favor: The Supreme Court gets a chance to rebuke schools’ bullying wokeism.

  In this centennial year of two memorable events in the fraught history of public K-12 education, Montgomery County, a progressive Washington suburb, has kindled another controversy about government power and parental rights. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument concerning whether children can be exempted from instruction that their parents consider contrary to their religious beliefs. The parents say this compulsory instruction violates their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

  In November 2022, the county’s board of education mandated for elementary school pupils “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks featuring gender transitions, same-sex playground romance, and questioning “cisnormativity” and “power hierarchies.” The picture book “Pride Puppy!” asks students to search a Pride Parade for “underwear,” “leather” and a “lip ring.” Another picture book invites kindergarten through fifth-grade readers to ponder what it means to be “nonbinary” and asks “what pronouns fit you?”

  So those kids in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and Olney may not know how to read, or add, but they'll fer darn tootin' be able to spot lip rings.

  Note this is not a "censorship" case; parents are simply asking to have their kids unexposed to Pride Puppy! and the like.

• Turned out "Liberation Day" was followed pretty quickly by… … people being liberated from wage slavery! As Eric Boehm reports: Trump's tariffs are starting to kill American jobs.

  The Trump administration believes that high tariffs will boost the prospects of American manufacturing, but one iconic truck company is now preparing to lay off hundreds of workers—because of the tariffs.

  For more than a century, the Mack Trucks plant on the outskirts of Allentown, Pennsylvania, has been churning out heavy equipment to haul stuff from place to place. It is one of the largest employers in the region, providing hundreds of the good-paying, blue-collar jobs that President Donald Trump and his allies want to promote in America.

  Some of those jobs are about to disappear. Mack Trucks will lay off between 250 and 350 workers over the next few weeks, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reports. A company spokesperson told the Capital-Star that the layoffs are due to "market uncertainty about freight rates and demand" and "the impact of tariffs."

  As Peter, Paul and Mary used to sing: Take me for a ride in your Mack Truck… Mac. :

Recently on the book blog:

This is Don Winslow's (allegedly) penultimate book, and the middle volume of his "Danny Ryan" trilogy. It is a generic page-turning crime thriller, but with pretensions. I read elsewhere that Winslow got some plot inspiration from the Aeneid, which explains some of the unlikely events here.

At the end of the previous book, City on Fire, Danny was one of the few survivors of a Providence, Rhode Island gang war. Disgusted, dispirited, mourning his late wife, he, his infant son, senile dad, and his ragtag crew need to get out of town and go into hiding, avoiding both the law and surviving still-hostile mobsters.

So: off to sunny Southern California. And (speaking of unlikeliness) Danny and his crew get involved with a big-budget movie based on that Providence gang war. And Danny gets, um, involved with the glamorous leading lady, looking to reboot her career after tabloid-fodder history of booze, drugs, and scandal. Spoiler: It turns out poorly.

There's lots of sex, violence, and bad language. And soap operatics. Consumer note: If you tackle the trilogy, you might not want to spend as many months as I did between reading volumes. I found ("at my age") that it was unclear why characters were (variously) killing, betraying, and bonking each other. Oh well, just turn the pages, Paul.

On this Good (but not Great) Friday, I'm interested in the Trump-Harvard War. Like most things, Trump's doing a mixture of good, iffy, and awful things. One potentially good thing is a righteous weapon, as described by John Hinderaker: Harvard, Meet Bob Jones. Led off by:

People should familiarize themselves with Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983). https://t.co/Oqt1IFraoq

— Randy Barnett (@RandyEBarnett) April 15, 2025

And John continues:

I am not a lawyer, but if this isn't a slam-dunk for revoking Harvard's 501(c)(3) status, someone will need to explain why it isn't using very small words.

The NR editors don't have a lot of sympathy for Team Crimson: Harvard Discovers What Federal Money Costs. And note that there is adequate precedent for going beyond the 501(c)(3) thing:

I didn't like the Obama/Biden pressure on universities, and I wouldn't like Trump's use of the same tactic. Still, the right time to complain about it was back then.

On that note, as Robby Soave points out: Obama is a huge hypocrite for praising Harvard's anti-Trump stance. Specifically:

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and… https://t.co/gAu9UUqgjF

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 15, 2025

So I said "good, iffy, and awful" above, so let's go to the "awful". At Cato, Walter Olson points out the unconstitutional overreach: Feds Can't Regulate "Ideological Diversity" at Schools Like Harvard.

So, yeah, Trump shouldn't do that. But (good news) the 501(c)(3) thing all by itself would make universities freak out. Bigly. Stick to that, Team Orange.

Also of note:

• I can't say enough good things about Dominic Pino. He uses his substitute perch doing Geraghty's Morning Jolt newsletter to tell us What’s Really Going On with U.S. Manufacturing. It's long and full of eye-openers. RTWT, but here's a sobering stat:

  A U.S. manufacturing worker in 2010 was twice as productive as a U.S. manufacturing worker in 1990. A U.S. manufacturing worker in 2025 is slightly less productive than a U.S. manufacturing worker in 2010.

  This is an example of why targeting job growth is not a very good economic policy. There are all sorts of ways to create jobs that don’t make people better off. There’s the famous example of Milton Friedman surveying a construction site in China and being told by the authorities that the workers were using shovels instead of machinery so that more people could have jobs. Friedman suggested that if they really wanted to create jobs, they should give them spoons instead of shovels.

  A bookstore in Chelsea, Mich., recently moved to a new location about a block away, and to transport its 9,100 books, a few hundred people stood in a line on the sidewalk and passed each book to one another. This was just a fun publicity stunt, of course, but if creating jobs was your sole economic goal, it would be a good policy to ban trucks and force all goods to be transported this way.

  The problem with U.S. manufacturing, to the extent that there is one, is that it isn’t destroying enough jobs. When all those jobs were being destroyed in the ’90s and ’00s, the workers who were left were becoming much more productive. Output has been rising despite workers becoming slightly less productive over the past 15 years, only because employment has been increasing.

  On a historical note: Hitler decreed that the massive 1936 Olympic Stadium be made by hand as much as possible, even when machines could have done the job quicker. For precisely those "job creation" reasons.

• I'm not a RINO! You're the RINO! I would imagine that's being said a lot behind D.C. closed doors. Kimberly A. Strassel notes Whispers of a ‘Millionaire Tax’ . (gifted link)

  A popular knock on this second Donald Trump term is that the president stocked his administration with nothing but saluting loyalists. Tell that to the staffers scheming to undercut his signature tax reform—by “managing” him into surrendering to the left’s favorite talking point.

  A (delighted) mainstream media several weeks ago started writing stories about a new Republican interest in raising taxes on “the rich”—namely hiking the top individual tax rate from 37% to 40%, higher than even under Barack Obama. These reports all come from anonymous White House officials, and always take care to insinuate Mr. Trump is “open” to this idea—despite his never saying so.

  This is an awful idea. Nikki Haley wouldn't be "open" to it, I betcha.

• Among the many Washington fixtures we don't need… Daniel J. Mitchell says We Don’t Need Two Class-Warfare Political Parties. Looking at the advocacy of Steve Bannon and Henry Olson:

  They make a political argument that the GOP will benefit politically if it embraces class warfare.

  I’m very skeptical. If voters want that approach, they’ll go for Bernie Sanders and AOC. And I’ll observe that the Republican presidents who supported higher tax rates, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, are not exactly role models of political acumen and success.

  Pro-tax increase Republicans also argue that higher burdens on the rich can help finance some of Trump’s goofy tax proposals, such as no tax on tips or overtime. That’s true, at least on paper, but that doesn’t change the fact that more tax loopholes and higher tax rates is exactly the wrong direction for tax policy.

  Dan notes (however) that it's "risky" to rely on Trump's devotion to principle on this, like many other things.

Recently on the book blog: