Pun Salad

But of course, we have words to accompany Mr. Ramirez's Eye Candy du Jour. Starting with Tyler Cowen, who thinks ‘Liberation Day’ Was Even Worse Than Expected. Tyler quotes Scott Lincicome's tweet about the so-called "reciprocal" tariffs, which will:

As I type this (pre-market opening), stock market futures are looking pretty grim. Essentially they're saying, "Gee, this is worse than even I expected."

The President's Executive Order on this is full of fallacies. And (thanks, control-F) it contains the words "manufacturing" 30 times, "manufacturers" thrice, and "manufacture" (also) thrice.

Which brings us to Jeff Maurer's query: Why Do We Fetishize Manufacturing Jobs?.

Apologies in … what's the opposite of advance? Anyway, sorry for the porno lingo there.

Jeff provides a telling graph from YiLi Chien and Paul Morris of the St. Louis Fed:

As they say: that's one way to look at it. Here's another, also from the St. Louis Fed:

Same data, but this is one of those things in Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie With Statistics: you can make things look more, or less, dire by choosing the range of your graph axes appropriately.

Also of note:

• Irony, thy name is Nina. Robby Soave looks at a recent appearance in a congressional subcommittee hearing: Nina Jankowicz's Defense of Government Censors Is Based on Misinformation.

  Nina Jankowicz is the former director of the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, an entity that purported to advise the Biden administration on how best to counter online misinformation but was shuttered after drawing the ire of conservatives and libertarians. Like so many other purported disinfo experts, Jankowicz's record of identifying actual lies is decidedly mixed: She had dutifully joined the intelligence community and much of the mainstream media, for instance, in wrongly asserting that the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story was disinformation peddled by Russia. She personally expressed the view that the straightforward explanation—Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair shop—was a "fairy tale." Oops.

  But like so many other former government intelligence officials who were fundamentally wrong about pivotal issues pertaining to their area of expertise, Jankowicz is fated to fail upward. She is now the president of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting transparency, though the group does not disclose its sources of funding.

  Robby writes at Reason, and (as he notes) the magazine was slammed back in the day by the "Global Disinformation Index" as one of the 10 "riskiest online news outlets". Because it dared take seriously the lab leak explanation for Covid.

• Yes, "we" did. Well, not me. Kevin D. Williamson takes issue with people objecting to Trumpian policies by saying, “This isn’t what Americans voted for.” Oh, yeah? KDW objects: Americans Did Vote for This. It's pretty brutal:

  Trump was not elected to help people—economic growth during the first Trump administration was exactly the same as it was in the Obama years (please apply the usual caveats about presidents and economic performance) and less than during the Biden, George W. Bush, or Clinton administrations. American farmers were even reduced to taking supplementary federal handouts because Trump’s idiotic trade wars wrecked their export markets. That isn’t what help looks like.

  Trump was elected to hurt people.

  The creed of cruelty is nearly universal among Trump loyalists. Of course, they don’t put it that way, but ask them and they will tell you the truth in spite of themselves: Trump was elected by people who resent this or that group for its status, its wealth, its influence, its political power, its class condescension, etc., and electing Trump—again—was a way to get back at “them,” “the media,” “elites,” etc. Nobody voted for Trump for policy reasons, because he has no policies, only tantrums. Nobody voted for Trump for philosophical reasons, because he has no philosophy beyond, “I am your retribution.” The excitable ladies and gentlemen over at The Daily Wire sell “Leftist Tears” mugs, and there’s a reason for that. The tears—of our fellow Americans, wrongheaded though they may be in their politics—are what this is all about. Forget policy—those tears are the deliverable, the only one that really matters.

  Which brings to mind Bryan Caplan's observation from 2021: Politics is Cruelty. Illustrated with:

  

  You don't want to see that face in a mirror, do you?

• Going faster than a rollercoaster. Perhaps to the tune of that old Buddy Holly song, "Everyday", Noah Rothman sings: The Case for Defunding NPR Keeps Getting Stronger.

  National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher has regrets. She should be grateful to the House Republicans who compelled her to express them during a subcommittee hearing last week on the thoughtless left-wing biases that flourished under her leadership.

  During that hearing, Maher confessed that her outlet was “mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.” That makes it sound as if NPR merely failed to give the story its due. Rather, NPR refused to cover the story at all so as to not “waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” as former NPR managing editor Terence Samuel put it. In addition, Maher admitted that her news-gathering institution lacked the requisite curiosity to explore the prospect that Covid originated in a Chinese lab — that is, until enough Democrats in good standing were willing to admit as much.

  It was a damning performance, and Maher’s Democratic allies failed to muster a coherent response to it. In lieu of cogency, Democrats retreated to old talking points about how Republicans are blinded by their irrational hate for America’s partially taxpayer-funded public news outlets, NPR and PBS, because they just cannot tolerate the existence of family-friendly educational products.

  Noah has links to National Review's coverage of NPR over the years. It's unpaywalled, and includes a pitch for contributions to NR. Which, unlike taxpayer support for NPR/PBS/CPB, is voluntary.