Pun Salad

For decades, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has fought for free speech. Finally, the organisation has realised that “free speech” is a racist dog whistle. I have been saying this for a long time now: the only way to prevent the rise of fascism is to empower the state to arrest people for what they say and think.

Recently the ACLU issued a stunning series of myth-busting facts about trans people in sports. Like all important activism, this was achieved via Twitter.

Regarding contemporary American foolishness, there really is no such thing as rock bottom. Nine weeks after the assault on the Capitol, today’s president still will not say, “Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Schumer, tear down this fence!”

In normal life, when there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. In government, failure, far from being penalized, is often rewarded. Those whose bad judgments botched the Capitol’s security on Jan. 6 now are granted seemingly unlimited deference regarding their judgments about needed security measures. Hence their infuriating project currently scarring the epicenter of American democracy: more than three miles of seven-foot-tall fencing that is topped by razor wire and patrolled by soldiers. This seals off from a phantom menace the Capitol, the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, symbols of liberty under law, and the reign of intelligence.

You see Third-Wave antiracism telling you are morally bound to conceive of ordinary statements like “I don’t see color” as racist that once were thought of as progressive. That if you are white you are to despise yourself as tainted permanently by “white privilege” in everything you do. That you must accept even claims of racism from black people that make no real sense, or if you are black, must pretend that such claims are sacrosanct because the essence of your life is oppression. Whatever color you are, in the name of acknowledging “power” you are to divide people into racial classes, in exactly the way that First- and Second-Wave antiracism taught you not to, including watching your kids and grandkids taught the same, despite that progress on racism has been so resplendent over the past 50 years that an old-school segregationist brought alive to walk through modern America even in the deepest South would find it hard not to turn to the side of the road and retch at what he saw.

It’s always worth reminding people that if President Joe Biden were compelled to live by the standards he intends to institute for college students accused of sexual misconduct, he would be presumed guilty of rape, denied any legitimate opportunity to refute Tara Reade’s charges, and tossed from office in disgrace.

The New York Times reports today that Biden’s Kafkaesque “White House Gender Policy Council” is “beginning his promised effort to dismantle Trump-era rules on sexual misconduct that afforded greater protections to students accused of assault.” The subhead informs us that, “The Biden administration will examine regulations by Betsy DeVos that gave the force of law to rules that granted more due-process rights to students accused of sexual assault.”

The science program at Fieldston would make any parent swoon. The electives for 11th- and 12th-graders, according to the school’s website, include immunology, astronomy, neuroscience, and pharmacology.

But physics looks different these days. “We don’t call them Newton’s laws anymore,” an upperclassman at the school informs me. “We call them the three fundamental laws of physics. They say we need to ‘decenter whiteness,’ and we need to acknowledge that there’s more than just Newton in physics.”

Santa here. Ho, ho, ho. As we approach St. Patrick’s Day we need to discuss.

I delivered billions of presents around the world and especially love the Mount Washington Valley.

But we have a rule at the North Pole: No Christmas decorations past Valentine’s Day. Maine has a law, but you all are “Live Free or Die.”

Get out there and get with spring, neighbors. Wreathes and lights in March are tacky. No one wants coal in their stockings, so please take them down.