Pun Salad

In the upside-down world of modern press coverage, politicians win praise for opportunity-crushing lockdowns while a new White House effort to encourage job seekers is attracting scorn across the media landscape.

As for the lockdowners, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.) has recently pivoted from praising protesters who were gathering in public and shouting near each other to blaming young people who gather for a “selfish mindset” that he ties to a recent increase in Covid cases.

Of course young people have been sacrificing plenty lately due to the shutdowns which amount to a massive transfer of generational wealth. The cost is not just measured in the reduced employment and educational opportunities being imposed upon them—which will dent future earnings. There is also the massive debt they will be forced to carry as they attempt to build careers.

A Journal editorial notes that “federal spending for the first nine months of fiscal 2020 hit a record $5.005 trillion. Congratulations to everyone, and especially young Americans. You’ll be paying for it the rest of your lives. The Congressional Budget Office fiscal report for June says outlays rose 49% in the first nine months, or $1.649 trillion more than a year earlier.”

Vermont Law School plans to paint over a mural in its student center that highlights Vermont’s role in the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement after members of the law school community objected to its depictions of African Americans and said it made some people uncomfortable.

VLS President and Dean Thomas McHenry said in a schoolwide email this week that students and alumni had raised concerns about the mural in the Chase Community Center, which was painted by Vermont-based artist Sam Kerson in 1993 with the school’s blessing, even winning recognition from The Christian Science Monitor at the time.

In keeping with league policy on political statements, the official online store of the NBA does not permit fans to order a custom jersey with the phrase "Free Hong Kong" printed on the back.

"Free Hong Kong" is one of the many phrases banned under the NBA's new jersey policy, which allows players to display certain political messages such as "Black Lives Matter," but prohibits messages critical of the Chinese regime.

Typing "Free Hong Kong" into the text box on the NBA store's custom jersey page returns the following message: "We are unable to customize this item with the text you have entered. Please try a different entry."

The contentious fight over freedom of expression has come to the University of New Hampshire, where a progressive professor has signed onto a letter supporting the suppression of free speech and defending what’s commonly known as “cancel culture.”

Roger Stone committed a raft of felonies in order to protect the political interests of Donald Trump, who has now commuted Stone’s sentence as a reward for Stone’s political loyalty. Stone’s misdeeds include collaborating with the Russian intelligence cutout known as “Guccifer 2.0,” though I am inclined to credit the defense he has offered there — that he is too stupid to understand that he was being manipulated by the GRU. The specific crimes of which he was convicted go straight to the question of trust: witness-tampering and perjury. As National Review’s editorial put it: “He was justly convicted of these charges and deserved to go to jail; in our system of justice, self-parody is no defense.”

Trump’s self-serving commutation of Stone’s prison sentence is another chip off the U.S. government’s foundation of trust and legitimacy. No one can claim to be surprised by this behavior — this is exactly what any reasonable person would expect from Donald Trump and from his associates. It is what Bill Bennett would have expected if he had understood his own books or had not forgotten what they say. The heavy price we will pay for Trump’s presidency is not that we will feel bad as a people about his lack of virtue and have a good cry over it but that his lies and abuse will leave the government itself, along with the political system and our civic culture, degraded. It is not a baby step but a mighty stride down the road to the Venezuelafication of American politics, and if you don’t think we have our own Hugo Chávez out there ready to step forward and fill the trust gap with ideology and an enemies’ list, then you are not paying very close attention.