Pun Salad

From those scamps at Reason: Caveman NIMBY.

Also of note:

• It's never too late. Pretend Nellie's saying "Thank God It's the First [of August]": TGIF. And she's all over Doctor Tony, who's typing without a spellchecker:

  → HRH Fauci!: Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, kept a journal. A diary filled with love notes to himself. Which I’ve literally never heard of a man doing, but that’s beside the point. I guess he also did it on his work computer, because Senator Rand Paul obtained and released it. I’m not sure where to begin. First, let’s get a sense of the tone. He carefully documents all the glitzy celebrations of himself, lists all the “movie stars and athletes” he has a Zoom call with, and carefully logs all the celebratory news stories about himself. It’s like an Excel spreadsheet of compliments. For a sense, here’s Anthony Fauci on Anthony Fauci:

  Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world. (Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written abuyt [sic] me since I am so busy . . . seriously. POTUS seems to be enamored of me even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We are developing a very unique and interesting relationship. The entire secret service corps is coming over to me and chatting. They let me into the first gate without even checking ID. Everyone is worried about my health and welfare, probably because it is all over the place that I am almost 80 years old.

  He loved being a celebrity. The thing about it is, he really was being worshipped! There was a cult of Fauci. People were getting Fauci tattoos and dancing with images of Fauci. He really was on the cover of every magazine, which, if you think about it, was weird! If millions of Americans suddenly made me their cult leader, and I had previously just been an unknown short man in the back of an HIV press conference, I would go insane with power too. So would you. And when you see lockdowns in the context of a power-drunk elf getting turned on by the idea of canceling Easter—he’s typing so fast he can barely keep up—you can understand better what we all lived through. For him, the pleasure was canceling things, especially things he felt gave power to the right (sports, family gatherings, religious events). We can never forget the freaks who gain power in a centrally controlled system. Also: no diaries, ever, certainly none in Google Docs. I write my grocery lists on Signal, and you should too. Love letters via email have been forbidden until further notice. I will be dragged up in front of Congress one of these days, but so help me God, they aren’t going to know about one brunch I attended. Next up, the lab leak:

  … and then she gets to the lab leak thing. But Nellie's TGIF post is wide-ranging, as usual, so even if you're Faucied out, keep scrolling.

• I have to admit it's getting better. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has published its yearly survey: Spotlight on Speech Codes 2026. Here are the "major findings":

  1. The percentage of colleges and universities earning an overall “red light” rating in FIRE’s Spotlight database has hit an all-time low — this year to 13.2%. This is an approximately one-and-a-half percentage point drop from last year, and is more than 55 percentage points lower than the percentage of red light institutions in FIRE’s first, 2006 report in which 68.6% of all institutions earned a red light rating.
  2. 69.4% of institutions now earn an overall “yellow light” rating. Though less restrictive than red light policies, yellow light policies still restrict expression that is protected under First Amendment standards and invite administrative abuse.
  3. A total of 76 colleges and universities now earn an overall “green light” rating, up from 73 schools as of last year’s report. Policies earn a green light rating when they do not seriously threaten protected expression. For the second year in a row, more institutions earn a green light rating (76) than a red light rating (66). This gulf widens at public schools, where the number of public schools earning a green light rating (68) eclipses the number of private schools earning a red light rating (37) by over 30.
  4. One hundred and twenty university administrations or faculty bodies have now adopted policy statements in support of free speech modeled after the “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression” at the University of Chicago (the “Chicago Statement”), released in January 2015.
  5. Forty-seven institutions have adopted an official position of institutional neutrality substantially similar to the principles set forth in the University of Chicago’s “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action” (the “Kalven Report”).

  No changes reported for the University Near Here: it still maintains a "green light" for its speech code, it hasn't officially adopted a policy of neutrality. Informally, they seem to have dialed their past in-your-face woke ideology way down.

• Just your usual reminder that Trump is a crook. Kevin D. Williamson reminisces about The Gentlemen of Antwerp. (Dispatch gifted link)

  Donald Trump is cheap in every sense of the word: cheap in that he is an infamous deadbeat who cheated his creditors; cheap in the sense of tacky; cheap in that he is the sort of man whose virtue, such as it is, can be overcome at no great expense—a cheap date.

  Trump is a $40 fake Rolex made copious flesh.

  Trump is so cheaply bribed that the bribes almost do not look like bribes, and they aren’t bribes in the conventional sense, notwithstanding only the fact that no court of law has found them to be such. They are moral bribes—trinkets—rather than economic bribes.

  And you do not have to spend very much on that sort of thing. One need not be overboard. The pimped-out airplane from the Arab despot was a bit much, maybe. But the CEO of Rolex, Jean-Frédéric Dufour, bought the whole Swiss watch industry a better deal on tariffs with a desk clock that was not even solid gold but merely gold plated, along with a 1-kg bar of gold engraved with the word “PRESIDENT”—in case Trump, who seems to believe that there is something called the Islamic Republic of Japan and who conflates Vladimir Putin with Volodymyr Zelensky, finally forgets which office it is he holds.

  The gemstone cartel known as the Antwerp World Diamond Center got its diamonds an exemption from Trump’s tariffs after offering up the merest of baubles, a hideously tacky ring with diamonds arranged in two big capital Ts and the numbers 45 and 47, references to Trump’s two terms as president. Trump in the pocket of a bunch of European diamond merchants: The antisemitic stereotypes thereby invoked must have been almost too much to bear for the Jew-hating cretins in Trump’s coalition, who surely would be muttering about some yarmulke-wearing malefactor

  spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp

  Blistered in Palm Beach

  Patched and peeled in Washington

  if any of them had ever read a book that did not have pictures in it.

  A long excerpt, but I did want to get to his Antwerpian reference.

  And, oh yeah, T.S. Eliot was kind of an anti-semite.