URLs du Jour

2020-10-10

  • So the NYPost has more details about our new favorite First Amendment poster boy at the University Near Here: White male New Hampshire professor allegedly posed as woman of color.

    A white male professor from the University of New Hampshire has been booted from the classroom for posing as a “woman of color” — the latest in a growing trend of race fakers.

    Craig Chapman allegedly secretly tweeted under the name The Science Femme and handle @piney_the to rail against the left, transgender and even people of color to his more than 13,000 followers.

    Can't have that, I suppose. Inside Higher Ed has an article here: University of New Hampshire suspends professor amid investigation into online persona.

    A white, male assistant professor of chemistry at the University of New Hampshire is on administrative leave after apparently posing as a female, immigrant scientist of color on Twitter to criticize feminists, trans people, Black Lives Matter supporters and others.

    The account in question, @piney_the, or “The Science Femme, Woman in STEM,” has been deleted. Older tweets are available, archived, here.

    In more recent tweets, the professor seemed to have accused another junior academic of reveling in the death of Mike Adams, a conservative professor of criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who died by suicide in July, following his separation from UNC over several controversies about his own online statements.

    The "archive" link above goes to web.archive.org, which seems to be from much earlier this year. The tweets are indubitably in-your-face to the woke ideologues.

    I'm not sure what kind of a case UNH thinks it has against Chapman. It appears he fibbed on Twitter about his race, gender, and (perhaps) social origin. That might not be the best behavior, he might have thought it was a good idea at the time, I'd like to hear his reasons. And where is official UNH policy that says that's a firing offense, or even a disciplinary offense?

    I think Chapman had every reason to hide that he was a facule at UNH. He's quite opposed to Official University Dogma on "diversity and inclusion", and that sort of thing can be career suicide.


  • On a (perhaps) related matter, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education provides an objective measure of just how far an allegedly-prestigious institution of higher education will go to abridge First Amendment rights: Censorship Costs: University of California system lost $800,000 defending censorship of ‘The Koala’.

    In 2015, administrators at the University of California, San Diego, pressed their lawyers to find a “creative legal solution” to get around the pesky First Amendment rights of an abrasive, off-color student newspaper, The Koala, which had published an article satirizing “safe spaces.” Administrators found a “creative” solution that was too cute by half: because they couldn’t single out the $452.80 intended for The Koala, they eliminated funding for all student newspapers. They soon found themselves on the wrong side of the “v.” in a federal lawsuit — a costly one. 

    The University of California fought the lawsuit, and a federal district court initially sided with the university before being overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in July of 2019. (FIRE and the Cato Institute filed an amici curiae brief urging this result.)

    You'd think, being college folk and all, they'd have gotten better advice from Constitutional scholars, instead of the lawyers on whom they dropped $662K. (They also had to pony up attorney's fees for The Koala, plus damages.)


  • At the WSJ, Holman W. Jenkins Jr. answers that thorny question you didn't know how to ask: Why Politicians Despise Us.

    “Can you imagine if you knew on January 28th, as opposed to March 13th, what they knew, what you might’ve done to prepare? They covered it up. . . . The president said it was a hoax. They minimized the seriousness of it. . . . So I want to ask the American people, how calm were you when you were panicked about where you were going to get your next roll of toilet paper? How calm were you when your kids were sent home from school . . .?”—Kamala Harris in Wednesday’s vice presidential debate

    Every official on earth knows the rebuttal to Sen. Harris’s canard. She knows it too. Before she agreed to utter this demagoguery, I like to imagine she had to be convinced, with focus-group research, that a part of the public would actually lap it up.

    As it happens, by Jan. 28 the public was already on the receiving end of a torrent of warnings about a looming pandemic. I wrote such a column here myself, coincidentally, on Jan. 28. But Mr. Trump didn’t sound the alarm Ms. Harris now demands for the same reason every leader, from Andrew Cuomo to Angela Merkel, didn’t. There would have been no toilet paper in the stores if Mr. Trump had warned us to stock up on toilet paper. There would have been no masks, for health-care workers or for the public. The economy wouldn’t have fallen off a cliff in March but in January, making the virus’s coming even harder on Americans.

    And every serious public servant (and their groaning shelf of pandemic plans) knows it.

    You have four major-party candidates who are comfortable with flat-out lying on national TV, as long as they think they can get away with it.


  • And a heartwarming local story from the Josiah Bartlett Center: Massachusetts banned the sale of flavored tobacco in June. What happened next was... totally predictable.

    Massachusetts’ June 1 ban on the sale of flavored cigarettes is driving higher sales, and higher tax revenue, in New Hampshire, state and retailer data show.

    In Massachusetts, cigarette tax stamp sales fell vs. the same month in 2019 by 17.2% in June, 23.7% in July and 29.9% in August, the New England Convenience Store and Energy Marketers Association (NECSEMA) announced this week.

    In New Hampshire, cigarette tax stamp sales rose vs. the same month in 2019 by 55.8% in June, 27.3% in July and 17.2% in August, the association reported.

    That’s a tax revenue gain of $16.48 million for New Hampshire and a loss of $31.88 million for Massachusetts.

    If Massachusetts ever wised up, we in New Hampshire might find ourselves in serious trouble. By which I mean: we might actually have to pay for the state government goodies we demand ourselves.

    Unfortunately, we're likely to regress to the mean, taxwise and spendingwise, over the next few years. (Sorry, feeling pessimistic today.)