Pun Salad

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.