Pun Salad

Pun Salad's Eye Candy du Jour is from the gutter-mouthed "Rep. Ellen Read":

Let us cook for each other. Share resources. Make our gifts, or gift used items. Show these fuckers the People, the community that they've spent decades trying to isolate us from, will ALWAYS have the actual power.

Shut. Them. Down. #blackoutthesystem

— Rep. Ellen Read 🍉 (@Ellen4NH) November 11, 2025

Yes, that's "Rep" as in "member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives." Her Twitter bio is slightly less irate:

Yesterday, I linked to Mitch Daniels' WaPo op-ed discussing how "public norms have been warped." Ellen eloquently demonstrates her eager participation in that warp drive.

She is (by the way) writing in support of the "Blackout The System" event, scheduled for eight days starting next Tuesday. They're pretty down on capitalism:

So we'll see how that exercise in voluntary deprivation works out. My guess is "negligibly", but I could be wrong. (I was going to say "Scrooge-like behavior", but then I remembered Steve Landsberg's classic essay "What I Like About Scrooge.")

Also of note:

• Tucker Carlson is a vile loon. But James Meigs' headline is slightly more diplomatic: Tucker Carlson Goes Full Truther.

  Effective conspiracy theorists need to be quick on their feet. To tell a persuasive story, they must focus our attention on the tiny number of facts that seem to support their theory, while ignoring the vast amount of evidence that contradicts it. An agile theorist therefore jumps from point to point like a hiker crossing a stream by leaping from rock to rock. The trick is to get listeners to forget about the river of facts that refute the conspiracy claims. Still, even the seemingly solid points supporting most conspiracy theories generally collapse under honest scrutiny. When that happens, the theorists rarely concede that their elaborate assumptions have been debunked. They simply jump to new, even shakier pieces of “evidence.”

  Tucker Carlson uses this device, and many more, in his slickly deceptive new video series, The 9/11 Files. Carlson is late to the 9/11 conspiracy party. In fact, in the past he employed his considerable rhetorical skills arguing against the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, once calling its adherents “parasites.” But the former Fox News anchor has made quite an ideological journey in recent years. Today, he embraces the Truther worldview that was originally a hallmark of the anti-American Left. In recent years, such dark conspiratorial fantasies—including anti-Semitic tropes—have found new life on the very-online far Right.

  I'm somewhat surprised even a moonbat like Carlson would try to resurrect Trutherism from the grave. But his desperate antisemitism explains a lot.

  This caused me to look back at my own debunking of a Truther-sympathetic article that appeared in my lousy local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat, back in 2007. I think it still holds up, and reminds me that conspiracy-craziness is always with us.

• On the LFOD watch. Michael C. Dorf has an interesting essay on Freedom of Thought, Compelled Speech, and Expressive Businesses. I had always considered the SCOTUS decision in Wooley v. Maynard to be holy writ, but Michael says not so fast:

  For one thing, we might want to reconsider Wooley v. Maynard, which upheld the right of New Hampshire motorists who disagreed with the state's motto ("Live free or die") to tape over it on their license plates. It's very unlikely that anyone would have attributed that sentiment--which, at the time at least, appeared on all New Hampshire license plates--to the drivers or owners of New Hampshire cars. Thus, misattribution was a low risk in Wooley.

  But so was the risk of internal indoctrination. Just as external observers will not likely attribute the state motto to any particular New Hampshire motorist, so drivers of cars with New Hampshire plates are unlikely to experience getting behind the wheel as an affirmation of the state motto.

  Consider that as I wrote that last sentence, I realized that I wasn't sure what message New York State has placed on my own license plate. I guessed that it was either "Empire State" or "Excelsior" but had to go look to verify that it's the latter. I then looked that up and discovered that Excelsior has been the state motto since 1778 and means "ever upward," which seems like the wrong message to put on a car, which should head upward only when the road goes uphill. Otherwise, cars should head forward, backward, to the right, or to the left. Nonetheless, I won't tape over "Excelsior."

  In the end, however, I don't have a strong view about whether Wooley was correct as an original matter, but if it's wrongly decided, it doesn't seem so wrong as to warrant overruling. In their chapter in my book, Professors Shiffrin and Blasi acknowledge that Wooley is a harder case than Barnette. They also suggest (in footnote 135 at page 445) that the case might divide people based on how important driving is to them, noting that one of them lives in Los Angeles and the other (at the time) in Manhattan.

  This has implications for the legal status of "compelled expression" of "expressive businesses", like that Colorado guy who refused to make a gay wedding cake.

  I'd advocate for going back to a simpler rule for that: capitalism works best when transactions are mutually voluntary. Specifically, one may refuse to do business with anyone for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all.

• You won't miss it when it's gone. Liz Wolfe notes the possible beginning of the end: Department of Education begins major program transfers.

  The Department of Education "has signed interagency agreements to outsource six offices to other agencies, including those that administer $28 billion in grants to K-12 schools and $3.1 billion for programs that help students finish college," reports The Washington Post. It's a step toward dismantling the department, which was created in 1979, by combining offices from a few different federal agencies. (The dismantling is, in a sense, a callback to the creation.)

  […]

  It's not like shuffling departments around necessarily makes them better or more efficient. But there is at least some clarity from the upper echelons on the relative uselessness of a lot of DOE functions. "The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states," wrote the secretary herself.

  "Our nation just experienced the longest government shutdown in its history," she continued. "The 43-day shutdown, which came smack in the middle of the fall semester, showed every family how unnecessary the federal education bureaucracy is to their children's education. Students kept going to class. Teachers continued to get paid. There were no disruptions in sports seasons or bus routes."

  Make sure they turn off the lights and unplug the coffeepots on the way out.

• Veronique de Rugy reminds us. Industrial Policy Isn't Being Done Poorly. It's Just Bad Economics.

  American industry has been getting a lot of hands-on direction from Democrats and Republicans for quite some time now. Every few years, someone looks at the underwhelming results of this economic maneuvering and insists that real "industrial policy" has never been tried. The truth is that the Left's call for a "mission-oriented" state and the right's yearning for a nationalist industrial revival may sound different, but they share the same conceit: that their own intentions can finally succeed where decades of intervention have failed.

  The latest person to revive this evergreen fantasy is Mariana Mazzucato, the Italian-born economist who has made a career out of championing an assertive, big-spending state as the engine of innovation. In a new interview with Politico, she laments that President Donald Trump's industrial policy — which includes tariffs and government equity stakes in private companies — is "an idiosyncratic hodgepodge," not the "holistic" strategy she favors. Mazzucato wants the U.S. to have a "smart, capable" state to guide investment with purpose.

  Back in the days of former President Joe Biden's industrial policy, when subsidies, tax credits and loans were flowing, an emerging Republican faction had a similar refrain, claiming that to revive American manufacturing, restore communities and put men back to work, industrial policy simply had to be done right. We now know that this meant increasingly erratic tariffs, price controls and government taking shares in companies.

  I looked at Deirdre McClosky's and Alberto Mingardi's debunking of Mazzucato here

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