Pun Salad

Fun fact: Amazon has a dizzying array of mugs that refer to pronoun usage, including today's Eye Candy. Without downloading them all, a sampling of other messages you can buy:

• "What a Beautiful Day to Respect Other People's Pronouns"
• "She/Her/Hers/Respect my pronouns"
• "They/Them"
• "He/Him/He/Him/He/Him/He/Him/He/Him"
• "I Identify as a Conspiracy Theorist/My Pronouns are Told/You/So"
• "I Identify as a Threat/My Pronouns are Try/Me"
• "I Identify as Bacon/My Pronouns are Fat/Salty"
• "My Pronouns are He/Hee"

… and many more. Why do I get a vision of an early morning department meeting where all the participants bring in their dueling pronoun mugs, conducting silent passive-aggressive arguments up and down the conference table?

Well, that's probably not what Jeff Maurer has in mind when he makes his plea: I’m Begging the Media to Start Unpacking the Word “We”.

Me too, and for a long time. My main irk-cause is the "warm collectivism" blanket that people want to sneak into the conversation: "Our homes"; "Our bodies"; "Our data"; and (especially) "Our children".

Which brings to mind this old Jonah Goldberg excerpt:

Also of note:

• And about time, too. Veronique de Rugy Minnesota Welfare Scandal Is the Fraud Warning Americans Finally Noticed.

  Growing national outrage over Minnesota's welfare fraud is justified, but not because of where it took place or because it implicates members of any immigrant community. It's much more than a "Minnesota" story.

  The outrage is justified because Americans are finally getting a concrete look at what happens when pushing public money out the door matters more than verifying the eligibility of the recipients, confirming services were delivered or, ultimately, being a good steward of taxpayers' money.

  Since 2022, investigators have uncovered a staggering amount of fraud, including $250 million siphoned from pandemic-era child nutrition programs to a network of individuals and shell companies, and have secured dozens of indictments with more prosecutions underway. But it goes beyond that.

  Way beyond. Vero's near-bottom line rings true: "If we want less fraud, we need less government."

• These people are unwell. And the major problem is at the top. Noah Rothman notes something that may have been missed in all the Venezuela/ICE/Minnesota/Epstein hoopla: Trump Administration Goes Full Tinfoil Hat in Revisionist History of January 6. (archive.today link)

  He's talking about the White House's "j6" page. And:

  The document goes off the rails at the outset — in the introduction, to be exact. In it, Trump’s aides hail the president’s “blanket pardons” of the January 6 convicts. Trump “ordered immediate release of those still imprisoned, ending years of harsh solitary confinement,” the White House’s account reads, “denied due process, and family separation for exercising their First Amendment rights.”

  In fact, the majority of the January 6 convicts were found guilty of misdemeanors and sentenced only to probation. The only people that Trump could spring from prison were those who had been convicted of more serious, even violent, offenses. And there were a lot of them. As I wrote at the time:

  Devlyn Thompson attacked a police officer with a metal baton. Robert Palmer bludgeoned another officer with a fire extinguisher, among other items of debris he could find strewn about the ransacked Capitol steps. Julian Khater shot pepper spray into the faces of three Capitol Hill police officers. David Dempsey used all these weapons and more in his frenzied attack on law enforcement. They are free today, along with those who were convicted of seditious conspiracy for the preparation and planning that culminated in that premeditated act of mass violence.

  In addition, federal courts have rejected the claim that some of the criminal charges brought against the rioters represented a violation of their First Amendment rights. As U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote in the case of the Proud Boys defendants, “There were many avenues for defendants to express their opinions about the 2020 presidential election.” Whatever the “expressive aspect” of protests might have been, “it lost whatever First Amendment protection it may have had” at the outset of the violence.

  Adjectives like "shameful" and "delusional" are simply way too mild.

• They banned Mickey Mouse's dog? Oh, never mind. The College Fix headline is referring to a different beast: ‘Ban on Plato’: Professor says Texas A&M censored materials in contemporary morals class.

  A philosophy professor says Texas A&M University recently demanded that he remove sections about “race” and “gender ideology” – including readings by Plato – from his spring “Contemporary Moral Issues” class to comply with a new course review directive.

  “Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented,” Professor Martin Peterson wrote in a letter to his department chair, which he shared with The College Fix Wednesday.

  I strongly suspect we got a good example of malicious compliance here. Bolstered by paragraphs further down in the story:

  At the center of the matter is a new syllabi and course review directive that the university’s Board of Regents adopted in December. It requires deans and department leaders to flag “material advocating race or gender ideology or sexual orientation” for “adjustments,” starting with classes in the spring semester.

  The move followed the regents’ November approval of a civil rights policy that states, “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.”

  The actions relate to larger efforts by Texas conservatives to crack down on diversity, equity, and inclusion and other political and ideological advocacy in the classroom.

  It's tough to "crack down" on DEI/woke indoctrination without also hitting Plato, I guess.

• I can't go with the "crime" part. So I disagree with James Piereson's headline at the New Criterion: Socialism is a hate crime.

  It is remarkable that, despite its long record of failure, socialism is now more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party, at least judging by the cult status of figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now an avowed socialist has been elected mayor of New York, the commercial capital of the United States and home to that great capitalist institution, the stock market. Even more recently, socialists here and around the world have spoken out in unison against the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator of Venezuela.

  It is ironic that these socialists, along with their supporters and fellow travelers, like to censor conservatives for, allegedly, promoting “hate” and “division.” On that basis, they have banned conservative speakers from appearing on college campuses, and just a few years ago urged Twitter and Facebook to close the accounts of conservatives who spoke out against socialism.

  This raises the question: given the historical record, why don’t we label socialism as a hate crime?

  Well, James, it's because "isms" are not crimes. At least not in America.

  Even though I mostly agree with everything else you're saying.

Recently on the book blog:

This book by Peter Swanson was on Tom Nolan's WSJ list of the Best Mysteries of 2025 (WSJ gifted link). Tom's not always a reliable guide for me, but he got it right this time.

It does require a pretty capacious definition of "mystery", though. Not much whodunit content here. Sentence one is: "The first attempt at killing her husband was the night of the dinner party." That's Wendy, her perhaps-doomed husband is Thom.

I've read a few of Peter Swanson's novels, and (looking back at my book reports) the word that sticks out is "gimmick". Usually that's not a compliment, but Swanson makes his gimmicks work. Here, it's that Wendy's and Thom's story is told in reverse-chronological order, starting in 2023, going all the way back to 1982. Hints and references are made along the way about sordid past events, which will be described in subsequent chapters. That's kind of the opposite of foreshadowing; is "backshadowing" a word? "Aftshadowing"?

Reader, if you don't want the book spoiled, do not even glance sideways at the last page. You may not find that ending satisfying, but I did.