SUSTAINABILITY:

“How did your country go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

-Ernest Hemingway, possibly.

YES: Open the door to new worlds: Poor kids have a right to Shakespeare, Bach, Plato.

There is nothing compassionate about teaching an easier, more familiar, “culturally relevant” curriculum to disadvantaged children, writes Mark McCourt on EMaths, a British blog. It’s condescension.

Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics, he writes. “That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.”

School “is meant to offer new worlds,” writes McCourt. “It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their post code, places they have every right to belong.”

If certain educators wanted* kids — and Western Civilization — left behind, what would they do any differently?

*They want it.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems Are Getting Way Out Over Their Skis About 2026 Midterms. “For most of my adult life, the Democrats have been a formidable political machine, developing years-long strategies, while the GOP reacted to everything in the moment. That party no longer exists. The Democrats in Washington are a collection of grown children who are trying to live out some naively ignorant Che t-shirt fantasies. Even with all of the help that they get from their propagandists, I can’t rule out their ability to completely blow whatever opportunities that might be given them for next year.”

CHANGE?

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Supreme Court Denies Cert in Snope, Ocean State Second Amendment Cases.

The Supreme Court has denied cert in two key Second Amendment cases. Snope v. Brown (Maryland’s “assault weapons” ban) and Ocean State Tactical v. Rhode Island (“high capacity” magazine ban). The Supreme Court has forsaken us, at least for now.

As Josh Blackman wrote at Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy . . .

“Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch would have granted. Justice Barrett, as usual said nothing. Justice Kavanaugh wrote a very unusual statement respecting the denial of the petition. The first two paragraphs explain why the Maryland decision was ‘questionable.’ If you read these parts, you would expect a grant. Indeed, Kavanaugh as circuit judge had found that the District of Columbia’s ban on AR-15s was unconstitutional.

Kavanaugh says the Court wants more time for percolation, apparently.

As someone living in a state dominated by Democrats determined to legislate away my Second Amendment rights, I’d appreciate a little less “percolation” and a little more SCOTUS action.

IT’S BECAUSE CHINA ALREADY HAS A COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT:

PHILIP HAMBURGER: Don’t Just Fix Higher Education, Reconstitute It: The real threat to the existing system comes from the internet and AI, not Donald Trump.

Academic institutions think they have a problem and that its name is Donald Trump. But he’s only the beginning of their problems. The difficulties are systemic, not only legal or political, and that means it’s time to reconsider what higher education should look like.

The current institutional players are in no condition to rethink higher education. Having cultivated and tolerated violations of civil-rights laws, universities and colleges can’t afford candid introspection, lest it be understood as an admission of wrongdoing. They are controlled, moreover, by administrators who generally don’t have the stomach to recognize the damage they’ve done to higher education, let alone what should be done with their jobs.

The federal government is no better at re-evaluating higher education. It’s focusing on the tools available to it: enforcing antidiscrimination laws and defunding science (even though scientists aren’t typically the culprits).

The academic failures of universities and colleges are obvious enough. Departments generally appoint their own faculty members—so that once a department is ideologically captured, it tends to tilt further in the same direction, inevitably producing instruction and research that, considered as a whole, is slanted. Institutions then inculcate conformity, punish dissenters, and apply harsh disciplinary proceedings. Put another way, the recent antisemitism didn’t develop in a vacuum. It was nurtured amid ideological capture and selective enforcement of the rules. These are substantial impediments to the pursuit of truth.

Part of the problem comes from government. It’s often said that we’re seeing the results of the left’s march through the institutions. But government policies, often based on twisted interpretations of civil-rights laws, accelerated ideological and administrative dominance.

Plus: “When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1536, the monks thought the danger came from Henry, but the underlying problem was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Similarly, although today the immediate threat comes from the Trump administration, academic institutions are fragile because knowledge is now available through the internet and artificial intelligence. For balanced inquiry, even academics increasingly look outside their universities.”

If only there had been some sort of warning.

YES:

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: The New York Times published Tom Cotton’s editorial on June 3rd, 2020, and the repercussions continue to this day. From Noah Rothman, then-with Commentary, the next day: The New York Times and the Vanguard of the Incognizant.

“One thing above all else will restore order to our streets,” wrote Sen. Tom Cotton, “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain, and ultimately deter lawbreakers.” The senator has advocated extraordinary measures involving the domestic deployment of uniformed soldiers for several days—as we’ve witnessed mass protests in American cities during the day and wanton violence, rioting, and looting by night. This exhortation is not new for him, but the venue in which it was placed—the New York Times opinion page—inspired a frenzied revolt from within the journalistic institution that published him. More remarkable, the aggrieved staffers and writers at the Times generally declined to issue a counterargument. They simply declared Cotton’s arguments anathema and sought to wield whatever power they could muster to see them banished.

One by one, New York Times staffers added their voices to a coordinated campaign of shame directed squarely at the paper’s management. “Running this puts Black [New York Times] staff in danger,” wrote technology reporter Taylor Lorenz, writers Caity Weaver and Jacey Fortin, climate reporter Hiroko Tabuchi, book critic Parul Sehgal, graphics assistant Simone Landon, reporter Katherine Rosman, styles desk editor Lindsey Underwood, culture writer Jenna Wortham, contributor Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and columnists Kara Swisher and Charlie Warzel. The News Guild of New York soon chimed in with a statement: “[Cotton’s] message undermines the journalistic work of our members, puts our black staff members in danger, promotes hate, and is likely to encourage further violence,” the Guild affirmed in what was billed as a “response to a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent.”

As I wrote back then (and the rest of this post continues in the original post’s tense), as a result of their staff’s meltdown over the Cotton op-ed, the New York Times, already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series, promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more. Or as Tina Lowe writes at the Washington Examiner, “New York Times employees can bully their bosses into submission — just don’t criticize a celebrity:”

A newspaper, beyond its moral purpose to tell the truth, is functionally a business. To turn a profit, it must balance journalistic integrity with revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Thus, it came as absolutely no surprise when the New York Times fired Alison Roman, the up-and-coming chef who irked professional celebrity Chrissy Teigen with a rude remark in an interview that was falsely smeared as racist and subsequently piled onto by Teigen.

* * * * * * * *

As you may recall from a long day ago, after the opinion page published a fairly straightforward op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton, arguing to utilize the military in quelling protests — a position shared by the majority of Americans and 46% of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, mind you — several staff members instigated a civil war, all sharing the same copypasta bullying their bosses: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.”

* * * * * * *

Publishing the opinions of the Taliban wasn’t a bridge too far for the staff, and employees claiming that destroying property isn’t violence on national television isn’t a bridge too far for the management. But a sitting United States senator’s opinion that’s shared by the majority of the electorate is, and as a result, journalism will suffer in the future.

The bitter babies at the New York Times wanted less speech, and they got it. They’ll now publish fewer op-eds overall. There is a wholly illiberal war on the free press, and its primary aggressors aren’t in the White House or corrupt police stations. It’s being waged from within the inside.

Bari Weiss, one of the saner voices at the Times, responded to her colleagues’ collective primal scream in a Twitter thread earlier today:

Naturally, as this Mediaite headline notes: NY Times ‘Civil War’: Opinion Writer Bari Weiss Gets Buried By Colleagues for Tweeting Her Takes on Newsroom Friction After Cotton Op-Ed.

In 2015, Ashe Schow, then with the Washington Examiner wrote, “With all the attention being paid to college-aged social justice warriors and microagressions, one has to ask: What happens when all these delicate snowflakes enter the workforce?”

The Gray Lady is finding out, good and hard.

Meanwhile, Daily Beast editor-at-large Goldie Taylor threatens violence against Weiss, in a since-deleted tweet:

As William F. Buckley famously said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

MATT TAIBBI: Jake Tapper’s Biden Book is Hilarious and Insane.

Holy catfish! I thought from online buzz that Original Sin was a mea culpa. It would own press failures to cover Joe Biden’s infirmity in a super-belated version of Canadian comic Bruce McCullough’s “I’m sorry I caused all that cancer” routine. But Original Sin isn’t that. It’s much crazier! Instead of a dreary and predictable book-length excuse for thousands of media professionals simultaneously whiffing on the most obvious story in history, it’s an ambitious book-length effort to absolve all concerned, pin an industry’s coverage mistake on its President Droolcup subject (a gambit many times ballsier than blaming one reporter, à la Judith Miller), all while additionally swirling a new storm system of bullshit storylines to delay more serious questions about things like who was just president for four years.

It’s the opposite of a mea culpa and the literary degree of difficulty is awesome, equivalent to a blind unicyclist trying to juggle six chainsaws. Do Jake and Alex pull it off? They don’t! But they sure leave a hell of a lot of blood on stage.

Exit quote: “Tapper right now is getting toasted by everyone from Jon Stewart to Hunter Biden for saying things like, ‘I do not accept that I was part of a cover-up,’ but I almost feel like that’s too serious a criticism for a book like this. People should more find it funny, for its sheer irrelevance and circle-jerkness.”

Taibbi is talking about Tapper, but that’s an apt description of the entire Democrat-Media Complex.

THIS IS THE WAY:

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE WAS LAST SEEN SPORTING MS-13 TATS: Here’s a Shocking Look at Who’s Been Hiding Out in Massachusetts. “United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced on Monday that throughout the Month of May, they arrested nearly 1,500 people who are in the country illegally. Many of them were affiliated with transnational organized crime and various gangs, like MS-13, Tren de Aragua, Trinitarios, and 18th Street. Around 800 had criminal records in the U.S., and just under 300 of them had deportation orders from a judge but failed to actually leave the country.”

FROM PATRICK CHILES:  The Long Way Home (Interstellar Medic Book 2.

#CommissionEarned

Interstellar medic Melanie Mooney races against time to save her patients while unraveling cosmic mysteries and navigating the dangers of space, all while longing for the Earth she left behind.

Find a Way Home

Everything is relative. Einstein said so.

After years of traversing the galaxy as an emergency medic, Melanie Mooney is learning this in a personal way. With each run to a far-flung star system, she is taken ever farther from her former life, and not only in distance. The penalty for zipping around the galaxy at light speed means time is moving slower for her than it is back home, and the difference is adding up. If Melanie ever hopes to return, she must do so before the Earth she knew becomes as unrecognizable to her as the alien worlds of the Galactic Union.

Intergalactic travel is expensive, far beyond anything Melanie can afford with her Medical Corps pay. There may yet be a way to not only get a free ride home, but in a manner that would avoid the pernicious effects of relativity. It’s risky, and will force Melanie to place her trust in some unsavory characters, including the last person in the galaxy she wants to be caught dead with.

The trick will be not getting caught dead or hopelessly lost in dimensions of the universe where no human or alien belongs. That’s a lot for a woman who just wants to go home.

At the publisher’s request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

APPARENTLY THE CLIMATE CHANGE SCHTICK IS PETERING OUT AND SHE NEEDS TO BROADEN HER DESTRUCTIVE IDIOCY MENU:  Greta Thunberg Is Headed to Gaza.