Mar
12
2025

Specifically, a Soft Landing at the University Near Here

… and, as the tweet notes, Jake also nabbed a couple other sinecures at Harvard-associated organizations.

Given that UNH is looking to cut $20 million from its budget, I can't help but wonder how laid-off UNH workers might feel about this. (I don't know how much a Carsey "senior fellow" makes, but I'm pretty sure it's more than zero.)

We won't adjudicate Dunleavy's claim about Jake's impact on US foreign policy during the Biden Administration, but I'd say the results speak for themselves. Whatever Jake does up here in New England, he'll have to do it without a security clearance.

Jake's new employer, the Carsey School of Public Policy is careful to keep its public face non-partisan, but it was founded/funded by Marcy Carsey, estimated to be a half-billionaire thanks to her TV career. She's a huge donor to Democrats.

The school's "founding director" (and, like Jake, a current "senior fellow") Michael Ettlinger got some unwanted publicity back in 2016, when his mash note to the Hillary Clinton campaign got Wikileaked. In his mail, he spitballed about how he might "be helpful from my perch in New Hampshire", including "what I can do formally from heading the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire."

I looked at that embarrassment in more detail here; I also couldn't help but comment on the tongue-bath Ettlinger received from the UNH Today newsletter here.

I should also mention the site of Jake's other UNH appointment, the Franklin Pierce School of Law. It is pretty upfront about its possibly illegal color-conscious admission policies, proudly proclaiming that it's "the most racially and ethnically diverse college in the USNH system". The Dean's Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a real blast from the past:

At UNH Law, we condemn the enduring and systemic racism that pervades our communities. And we commit to positive change toward racial justice and equality.

… and the Dean carries on that way for a while. Also see UNH Law Student Bar Association's Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for more of the same. We are talking peak Woke.

So, anyway: Jake should fit right in.

Also of note:

  • Marcy Carsey gets a pass, being only a half-billionaire. At the Free Press, Gabe Kaminsky takes a look Inside the Trump Resistance, Funded by the Ultra-Wealthy.

    Days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a group of former Joe Biden and Kamala Harris staffers came together to launch an effort to arouse the public against the GOP’s looming push to cut taxes on the wealthy. Dubbed “Families Over Billionaires,” the project quickly assembled an eight-figure war chest.

    “The campaign will elevate the voices of the majority of Americans who oppose more tax breaks for the rich,” the group says in its mission statement. Mia Ehrenberg, the spokeswoman for Families Over Billionaires—and an ex-Harris campaign aide—told The Free Press that the organization is teaming with “grassroots organizers” to get its message out.

    In fact, like a surprising number of Trump 2.0 resistance pop-up groups, Families Over Billionaires owes its existence not to small-dollar donations from ordinary Americans, or to grassroots organizers, but to a single entity: the consulting firm Arabella Advisors, which oversees a massive “dark money” network bankrolled by the super-rich and aligned with the Democratic Party.

    The network relies on support from billionaires like Bill Gates, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Democratic megadonor George Soros. In other words, it’s not Families Over Billionaires so much as it’s billionaires over other billionaires.

    That link above goes to their "Who We Are" page. Which does not include "Who Is Giving Us So Much Money" information.

  • Some more good news. James Freeman believes he detected The Antidote to Political Panic.

    A few of us media folk were lockdown skeptics right from the start of the Covid panic five years ago. A few of us pointed out during the lockdowns that government disease doctor Anthony Fauci, beloved by the press corps, wasn’t even pretending to understand the consequences of his destructive societal prescriptions.

    But Dr. Fauci and then-director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins really were pretending when they treated dissenting scientists as peddlers of fringe theories. This week, seeing one of those brave and accurate dissenters moving closer to a Senate confirmation vote to run the NIH, it’s a little easier to hope that the lockdown disaster will never be repeated.

    Fauci famously got one of those coveted awards from President Biden: a preemptive pardon. Collins was snubbed for this honor, and a few days ago he made an abrupt departure from NIH. I don't know if he will seek political asylum in Wuhan.

  • Mything the truth by a mile. Holly Jean Soto looks at The Never-Ending Myth of the “Rich Getting Richer”.

    The classic tale of “the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer” never seems to get old. The newly released Takers Not Makers report from Oxfam fuels the idea that billionaire wealth is skyrocketing while the poor are getting poorer. They claim that poverty levels have barely changed since 1990, and that 60 percent of billionaire wealth is “taken,” not earned, arguing that the richest must bear the cost of “economic justice” through various means including heavy taxation. The argument is nothing new — it is based on the zero-sum fallacy, which assumes that one person’s wealth must come at the expense of another’s, ignoring the reality that economic growth expands wealth for everyone. 

    Despite the popular belief that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, this claim is not only economically misguided but factually incorrect. Using data from The Mercatus Center’s working paper Income Inequality in the United States, we can demonstrate how flaws in inequality data often exaggerate the problem, explore why the claim that the poor are getting poorer is inaccurate, highlight why shaping policies around resentment and envy of the rich does more harm than good, and why the real solution lies in addressing the root causes of inequality through private-sector opportunities rather than government intervention.

    It's useful to have the facts on your side, of course. But you probably won't be surprised at how little facts mean to the Oxfams of the world.

  • Democracy dies in darkness. And Jerry Coyne notes a couple of institutions that would prefer certain lights stay turned off: NYT and Bloomberg refuse [to] mention high-quality study showing that DEI training has counterproductive results. Quoting from a Substack post from Colin Wright which asks Why Was This Groundbreaking Study on DEI Silenced?

    In a stunning series of events, two leading media organizations—The New York Times and Bloomberg—abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pedagogy. The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric. With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs—heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate—might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.

    This should come as no surprise to anyone who's actually experienced those "certain DEI practices" in their workplace and come away insufficiently indoctrinated.


Last Modified 2025-03-13 6:21 AM EDT