Just Keep It Off My Timeline!

It's the great Freddie DeBoer, "This really gives the game away, if you think for five minutes"...

There are plenty of models for where this site is likely headed. I'm on those sites all day. I cover extremism and lies for a living. You're not gonna like it.

Nowadays “left” opposition to free speech in principle is more or less explicit, though not coherent. As I’ve documented before, a core dynamic in left-of-center American politics is the transition from “lol that’s not happening” to “lol of course that’s happening and it’s good.” Extreme social justice ideals from cultural studies departments were never going to spread outside of campus, you dumb idiot, and then they did, and suddenly they always knew that would happen and were in favor of it. Free speech is in the awkward zone in between, where lots of liberals will dutifully argue that they’re the ones fighting for free speech while many of their fellow travelers are insisting that free speech is an inherently reactionary concept. The cool thing now is to put free speech in sneer quotes, which ensures that other left-of-center people know you’re one of the good ones. It does not, I’m afraid, represent clarity about what they actually believe the correct perspective on speech should be.

Anyway, it’s important to remember that the original justification for left censorship was that they were only interested in getting rid of the really noxious stuff - literal fascism, literal white supremacy. You don’t want literal fascism on the internet, do you?? You know how that movie goes: what they consider literal fascism just grew over time, so that things that were perfectly common conservative positions 10 years ago now fall under that umbrella, and whatever simplicity and limitation that rule contained is gone. It’s led us to a place where discussing factually correct reporting on Hunter Biden was banned on social networks, as was criticizing Anthony Fauci, whose leadership is certainly questionable and who by admission has worked on horrific experiments on lab animals. Meanwhile, as Collins’s tweet here points out explicitly, the most noxious stuff still flourishes online.

So here’s the question, Ben: if you acknowledge that far-right sentiment flourishes on the internet in many places, what does keeping it off of Twitter accomplish? If the ideas and arguments and symbolism of fascism and white supremacy can be traded on the internet elsewhere, what are you preventing from getting more and more censorious on major social networks? Do you think people are going to go to Twitter to treat it like Stormfront, find themselves censored, and just give up? People like Collins believe that far-right sentiment is very prevalent and dangerous, that’s his job description. So in what world does a Twitter ban function as any sort of check on that? What’s the idea here?

Last year I wrote a piece making the simple point that heavyhanded attempts to censor extremism are bound to fail because the flow of information cannot be stopped in the digital era - that we can’t ban ideas, as a matter of fact, so there’s no matter of principle to discuss. Should we stop the free flow of ideas is a meaningless question because we can’t. France and Germany’s decades-old laws against far-right arguments and organizations have failed entirely to prevent extremism in those countries. Drug cartels communicate around the world effortlessly. When ISIS was being pursued by the entirety of the Western military and intelligence establishment, they still actively recruited. In English! They got white middle-class teenagers to fly to goddamn Syria to sign up! And you’re telling me that tweaking Twitter’s terms of service is going to eliminate the ideology that wasn’t ended by a war that killed 4% of the world’s population? What the fuck are we talking about here?

No, liberals and leftists are afraid of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter not because they think it will contribute to right-wing extremism, which exists and always has and always will but which is also far more marginal than they like to pretend. They’re afraid because Twitter is where they perform the personalities they lack in real life, where they act like the confident and clever people they patently aren’t, and where they pretend to do politics by telling the same terrible jokes, over and over, while the political “movement” they represent remains totally powerless and reviled. Twitter, in other words, is where they wage busy little PMC lives. And they’d prefer that space be pleasant for them. They have eliminated the existence of any contrary opinion in their personal lives and private lives, and now they want to do the same in Twitter, which as sad as it is to say is the center of their emotional lives. Which is why it’ll never stop at “the really bad stuff.” The things that liberals believe should be eliminated from social media have grown and grown as time has gone on, and will continue to grow. Eventually people will say that those who disagree with them about the correct size of the Earned Income Tax Deduction are literal fascists...

Still more.

 

More Hilarious Wailing at Elon Musk

Heh.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Wait, you mean Twitter could ban one party’s political speech?":

My, what a progressive panic Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter has inspired. MSNBC host Ari Melber warns that Mr. Musk could hack the political debate by having the website “secretly ban one party’s candidate” or “turn down the reach of their stuff, and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.”

Uh, hello? Twitter has banned President Trump. A month before the 2020 election, it moved to “turn down the reach” of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Those actions weren’t secret, but Mr. Melber’s alarm echoes what conservatives have been saying for years about big tech’s censorship. As long as the usual Silicon Valley overlords controlled all of social media, progressives didn’t mind. But Elon Musk buys Twitter, and suddenly freer speech is a national crisis...

The shoe's on the other foot, and it's hurting.

WATCH: "MSNBC's Ari Melber is worried that Elon Musk would use Twitter for partisan political purposes!"

Dems are scared, alright. 

Twitter's Top Lawyer -- Who Has Pushed for Ever More Censorship With the Indignant Fury of a Holy Inquisitor -- Cries In Meeting With Employees

At AoSHQ, "UPDATE: MUSK CALLS HER CENSORSHIP OF THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY 'INCREDIBLY INAPPROPRIATE'."

Heh. 

More at London's Daily Mail, "Elon Musk slams Twitter's top lawyer who sobbed after he bought social media network and blasts her for 'incredibly inappropriate' censorship of Hunter Biden laptop story [PHOTOS]."

Ace suggests she's out. *Shrugs.*

Elon Musk Buys Twitter, Sparking Concern from Democrats

"Sparking concern," lol. 

That's putting it mildly, indeed. These people have lost their minds.

At Fox News, "Democrats worry Trump will return to Twitter":

Congressional Democrats sounded the alarm this week after Tesla CEO Elon Musk struck a deal to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion and take the social media company private.

Among the lawmakers' chief concerns was that Musk could allow former President Donald Trump, who was permanently banned from Twitter in January 2021 after spreading misinformation about the 2020 election, back onto the platform.

While Musk has not said whether he plans to lift Trump's Twitter ban, the tech executive is a frequent citric of the platform, which he has previously accused of stifling free speech. In the past, Musk, who describes himself as a "free speech absolutist," has proposed relaxing Twitter content restrictions, fueling speculation that Trump could return to his onetime favorite social media website.

During a recent interview at a TED conference, Musk argued that social media networks should not remove comments that are offensive if they are still legal.

"If it's a gray area, let the tweet exist," Musk said...

Still more.

At at the Hill, "Musk buying Twitter alarms Democrats."

Musk Takes Twitter: Tyrants Won't Take Rejection Lightly

From Dana Loesch, on Substack, "It's Official: Elon Musk Takes Twitter":

"Tots and pears" to the apoplectic left.

More insanity.

 

Amazon Employees Melt Down Over Matt Walsh's Best-Selling Children's Book, 'Johnny the Walrus'

Frankly, I've never heard of the book until now, so this leaked video of Amazon employees completely melting down --- lying about the book and defaming Matt Walsh --- will definitely boost sales. 

At Twitchy, "Just INSANE: Amazon leaders hold ‘session’ for employees dealing with ‘trauma’ over Matt Walsh’s best seller, ‘Johnny the Walrus’ (watch)."

Insanity's a word I hear a lot these days with reference to the LGBTQIA8 left. 

This is the greatest moment of my career

— Acclaimed Children's Author Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) April 26, 2022

Why I Love Watching the Meltdown Over Musk and Twitter

From Mike Solana, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Elon Conquers The Twitterverse"

Our chattering class claims Musk is a supervillain. The truth is simpler: He wants free speech. They don't.

Three weeks ago, a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Elon Musk, billionaire Shitposting God of Silicon Valley, had acquired over 9% of Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder and setting in motion a chain of events that led, ultimately, to yesterday’s outright purchase of the now $44 billion company. In a press release, Elon shared his goals for the platform, which echoed the goals he’s shared all month:

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

“Freedom,” “open source technology,” and “man, I really hate these spam bots.” The media’s reaction to these ambitions was instant and apoplectic. They were akin, we were told, to literal Nazism.

Welcome to the Clown World. Boy, do we have ground to cover.

The social internet is always a Dalí painting—surreal and horrifying and beautiful. A million crazy people screaming over nonsense, with funny jokes or anecdotes mixed in, fortune cookie observations, legitimate political happenings, and “words are violence” hall monitors from The Washington Post waging daily information war on trolls and Russian bots and okay actually just a lot of regular people with whom they disagree, or simply don’t like.

But even by the gutter standards we’ve come to accept from media, this has been a month for the books.

Out of the gate, it was incoherent fury, with no consensus motive. We were told that Elon, who explicitly opposes censorship, intended to deplatform, and ultimately destroy, all of his critics, who are themselves explicitly in favor of censorship. We were told that Elon was building a propaganda engine. We were told that Twitter, which was until last week apparently a peaceful, utopian haven for principled discourse, would now revert to some earlier, imagined world of carnage (very bad tweets). The case was made, with zero evidence, that Elon is a racist. It was all just table stakes, really.

After a week or so, in brutal, Darwinian competition for attention, arguments against Musk blossomed into something more colorful. From Axios, a company committed in writing to never sharing an opinion, it was “reported” that Elon, once likened to Iron Man, was now behaving “like a supervillain.” His ownership of Twitter would lead to World War III, the case was made elsewhere. In one of my favorite moments of derangement, NPR helpfully reminded us that Elon is an imperialist. The basis for such an incredible charge? In the tradition of America’s Apollo Moon landing, one of the most celebrated accomplishments in human history, Elon wants to settle Mars, an uninhabited desert planet 155 million miles from Earth. This is just like colonial-era Britain’s brutal conquest of half the world, when you think about it.

The takes were all extraordinarily stupid, and yes, I loved every single one of them...

Keep reading.

 

9-Year-Old Ohio Boy Denied Kidney Transplant Because Father Is Unvaccinated

At Instapundit, "EXTORTION:

“They tried explaining to the clinic that Dane Donaldson had recovered from COVID-19 and therefore has natural immunity—even presenting results from a T Detect test, which measures the T cell immune response to SARS-CoV-2—but their rationale fell on deaf ears.”

 

Federal Reserve Expected to Raise Rates at Half Percentage Increments to Help Cool Inflation

The Fed folks are freaking out. 

Inflation is battering consumers, home owners, businesses, travelers, and agriculture, industrial, and manufacturing concerns, to name a few. Fuel prices remain at record levels, generalized inflation is spilling over to the rest of the economy, and continuing supply chain pressures (especially from China amid a new coronavirus crackdown) are crimping the availability of a variety of foods, consumer products, and basic industrial inputs, etc. As noted preciously, it's getting so bad consumers are even cutting back on basic necessities.  

People are hot and mad too. Inflation is the number one concern of regular Americans. And depending on how fast the Fed pulls the switch, there's some alarm that a recession could be coming down the pike.

Things aren't likely to cool off before the November midterms either. President Biden's so rattled and confused he's been cursing at members of the White House reporting pool.  

At the Wall Street Journal, "Fed Signals Faster Pace of Rate Increases, Bond Runoff Likely":

Minutes show central bank officials in March spelled out plan for shrinking $9 trillion asset portfolio next month to help cool inflation.

Federal Reserve officials signaled they could raise rates by a half-percentage point at their meeting early next month and begin reducing their $9 trillion asset portfolio as part of their most aggressive effort in more than two decades to curb price pressures.

Minutes from the Fed’s March 15-16 meeting, released Wednesday, showed that many officials last month were prepared to raise rates by a half-point but opted for a smaller, quarter-point increase because of concern over the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Stocks fell and bond yields rose in the midst of expectations of a more aggressive Fed policy tightening process than previously anticipated. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which rises when bond prices fall, climbed to 2.606%, a three-year high, from 2.554% on Tuesday and 2.409% on Monday. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.2%, while the S&P 500 fell 1% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.4%.

Officials last month approved their first interest rate increase in more than three years, raising their benchmark rate to a range between 0.25% and 0.5%. They also penciled in a series of additional rate increases this year to take rates closer to 2%, with inflation having surged to a four-decade high.

The minutes revealed for the first time how officials expect to shrink their asset holdings much faster than they did last decade, which would serve as another key tool for tightening monetary policy. Officials neared agreement on a plan that, after a roughly three-month ramp-up, would allow up to $95 billion in securities to mature every month without being replaced.

The Fed’s plans have sent tremors through the mortgage market, where the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose last week to 4.9%, the highest rate since late 2018, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

In the three weeks since they last met, many Fed officials have indicated that they could support raising rates by a half-percentage point instead of the traditional quarter-point at their next meeting. The Fed hasn’t raised rates at consecutive policy meetings since 2006 and hasn’t raised rates by a half-point since 2000.

Investors in interest-rate futures markets now anticipate half-point increases at the Fed’s next meeting, May 3-4, and at the following gathering, in June.

On Tuesday, Fed governor Lael Brainard, who is awaiting Senate confirmation to serve as the Fed’s vice chairwoman and has previously been an influential voice warning against prematurely pulling back stimulus, underscored in a speech the importance of reducing high inflation.

Ellen Meade, a former Fed economist who is now a policy consultant, said that based on those remarks there is no reason not to expect a half-point increase. “It would have been an opportunity to push back at this point in time,” Ms. Meade said. “She really laid out the progressive case for why inflation fighting needs to be front and center.”

Consumer prices rose 6.4% in February from a year earlier, according to the Fed’s preferred gauge, the Commerce Department’s personal-consumption expenditures price index. Core prices, which exclude food and energy, climbed 5.4%. Those readings were the highest in around four decades.

Fed officials a year ago described higher inflation as transitory. They backed away from that characterization last fall, as the labor market healed rapidly and price pressures broadened to a range of goods and, more important, labor-intensive services.

Still, as recently as January, the Fed had expected inflation to diminish this spring as supply-chain bottlenecks improved. The war in Ukraine and potential lockdowns in China to deal with more-contagious variants of the coronavirus have ended any expectation of near-term relief from improving supply chains.

“That story has already fallen apart,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said March 21. “To the extent it continues to fall apart, my colleagues and I may well reach the conclusion we’ll need to move more quickly. And if so, we’ll do so.”

The central bank is still counting on inflation slowing later this year as supply-chain problems ease and as more workers return to labor markets. But unlike last year, Mr. Powell said the central bank could no longer set policy by forecasting that such relief would materialize.

“As we set policy, we will be looking to actual progress on these issues and not assuming significant near-term supply-side relief,” he said...

 

With Inflation Not Letting Up, Shoppers Cut Back on Staples

I don't recognize my country. We're well into the third decade into the 21st century and Americans are cutting back on bare necessities, WTAF?!!

November is coming. I can't wait.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Consumers are buying detergent, diapers in smaller quantities and switching to store brands; 'It doesn’t smell as nice'":

Household staples are no longer immune to inflation.

American consumers are starting to cut costs on mainstays from toothpaste to baby formula as inflation hits a swath of the economy that had thus far proven resistant to substantial price increases.

Procter & Gamble Co., Clorox Co., Kraft Heinz Co. and other consumer-products giants have made a bet that consumers will pay up for household products even as inflation takes hold. Over the past year, the companies have seen profits and market share grow as they have raised prices on products from detergent and diapers to snacks and soda.

Now consumers, hit by soaring costs for everything from gasoline to child care, are drawing a line, analysts and retailers say. Shoppers are buying staples in smaller quantities, switching to cheaper, store-name brands and more rigorously hunting for deals. The shift is especially pronounced among lower-income consumers who splurged on household products amid the heights of the pandemic, they say.

Private-label brands, after two years in which they lost market share to brand names, have begun to lure back buyers. In the three-week period ended March 13, edible private-label brands increased share slightly and nonedible store brands held steady, according to data from research firm IRI.

Crystal Philips of Adams, Mass., said she has been feeling the pinch of higher prices for months, but started more seriously cutting costs in recent weeks after she spent $92 to fill the gas tank on the family’s vehicle.

Ms. Philips, with four children ages 6 to 18, replaced ornamental plants with vegetable seeds in her backyard garden, started shopping at discount grocer Aldi, and last week ditched her $7-a-bottle Tide detergent for a similarly sized bottle of Purex she found for $2.50 at a Dollar General.

“It doesn’t smell as nice,” she said of the detergent. “But I’m more concerned with feeding my family.” The most recently available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the annual inflation rate had risen to 7.9%, a four-decade high, with oil and commodity market disruptions from the Ukraine crisis expected to add more cost pressures.

The consumer-staples industry “has crossed a threshold,” said Krishnakumar Davey, president of strategic analytics for IRI. “Consumers have been pinched for some time, they are observing that they are paying more and more, and they are beginning to drop some items from their basket because they can’t afford it.”

Grocery-industry executives say consumers are becoming more sensitive to price. They are switching to store brands for some products and increasingly trading down to cheaper items such as ground beef instead of steak.

“I was hoping that by now, things might have eased up a little bit, but it hasn’t slowed down,” said Steve Schwartz, who oversees buying and pricing at Morton Williams Supermarkets. He said he was notified of price hikes from bread and beer companies and expects further increases in the coming months.

Part of that shift is because private-label options are more available now than during the height of the pandemic, when high demand and supply-chain problems led manufacturers to shift products away from store brands in favor of pricier name brands, IRI’s Mr. Davey said. But consumer demand for cheaper items is also a factor, he and other analysts say.

Another telling sign: sales volumes have begun to fall in a number of categories, meaning people are buying mainstays in smaller quantities. Before and during the height of the pandemic, sales volumes of staples increased even as prices rose. On Feb. 22, volume sales of cereal were down 7.2% on a two-year compound basis; cleaning product volume sales fell 5.1% in that same period, according to a Bernstein analysis of Nielsen figures. Prices for those products rose 9.5% and 7.2%, respectively, for those categories.

RBC analyst Nik Modi said cost-cutting on staples is most pronounced among lower-income Americans. In part that is because income groups that typically buy lower-priced household goods switched to pricier brands amid the pandemic, as homebound consumers spent less on travel, dining out and other perks. Now budget-conscious consumers are returning to discount brands, he said.

P&G, for instance, has reported gains in both pricing and volume sales since the start of 2019, meaning consumers bought greater quantities of items at higher prices. The Cincinnati-based maker of Tide detergent and Pampers cut discounts and shifted to higher-end products in an effort to boost revenue. Consumers were willing to pay more, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic, when high demand led to product shortages of mainstays from paper towels to soap.

P&G executives say they are prepared for a downturn in consumer spending, but have told Wall Street they believe consumers will continue to covet items like Tide laundry-detergent pods, Gillette razors and Pampers diapers, which often are the priciest option on store shelves.

“Consumers continue to prefer P&G brands and superior performance they provide even as inflation is impacting household budgets,” P&G finance chief Andre Schulten said in a January call with analysts. The company declined to comment on consumer spending...

Unpack Your Privilege!

I have all kinds of privilege and I think about it often. My mom was white though, but not my dad. So how am I defined by leftists? It's not by my goodness and decency, my fairness and kindness, my honesty and integrity, my work ethic, nor my commitment to faith and family. Nope.

You're defined by your ideological fanaticism, about swallowing the woke critical theory ideology and making your entire existence about that. Nothing else matters. It's diabolical.

On Twitter:

The Takeover of America's Legal System

A truly must-read article, from Aaron Sibarium, on Bari Weiss's Substack, "The kids didn't grow out of it." 

Ms. Bari has the introduction:

If you are a Common Sense reader, you are by now highly aware of the phenomenon of institutional capture. From the start, we have covered the ongoing saga of how America’s most important institutions have been transformed by an illiberal ideology—and have come to betray their own missions.

Medicine. Hollywood. Education. The reason we exist is because of the takeover of newspapers like The New York Times.

Ok, so we’ve lost a lot. A whole lot. But at least we haven’t lost the law. That’s how we comforted ourselves. The law would be the bulwark against this nonsense. The rest we could work on building anew.

But what if the country’s legal system was changing just like everything else?

Today, Aaron Sibarium, a reporter who has consistently been ahead of the pack on this beat, offers a groundbreaking piece on how the legal system in America, as one prominent liberal scholar put it, is at risk of becoming “a totalitarian nightmare.”

This is a long feature on a subject we think deserves your time. Save it, share it, or print it to read in a quiet moment...

And read Mr. Sibarium in full. Really. Don't miss it

 

Biden Gets Boost in Public Approval After State of the Union Address

From Marist, "NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll: Bounce for Biden Following State of the Union, March 2022":

Biden Enjoys Boost in His Job Approval Ratings Following the State of the Union... A Majority Approve of Biden’s Handling of Conflict in Ukraine... Overwhelming Support Exists for Economic Sanctions.

Following a State of the Union address which underscored President Joe Biden’s commitment to promoting democracy across the world, the president enjoys a bounce in his handling of the crisis in Ukraine. His standing among the American people has also improved on the issues of the economy and the coronavirus pandemic. While Biden’s bounce is predominantly among his Democratic base, he also enjoys moderate gains among independents. Of note, rare, bipartisan consensus exists on the issue of sanctions levied against Russia. Most Americans, regardless of party, support these sanctions, and nearly seven in ten favor them even if it means higher energy prices domestically.

RTWT.

Howard Zinn Poisoned a Generation

 From Mary Grabar, for Prager University:

Republicans Blame Pentagon Planner Colin Kahl for Bungled Afghanistan Strategy

At Free Beacon, "'Sen. Hagerty: 'We have someone not even qualified for a security clearance at the center of Biden's incompetently planned withdrawal'."

Read the whole thing.

Professor Kahl is on leave from Stanford. I know some of his research, some of which is quite good, actually.

But he's stupid. He's been attacking Republicans on Twitter for years, and his partisanship irks critics --- and they want him gone. 

Alex Marlow, Breaking the News

At Amazon, Alex Marlow, Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

The Miseducation of America's Elites

Dear readers, my apologies for the light blogging. I'm hitting "crunch time" this week in my "online remote" classes, and I just started a "late-start" class this week (which is a 12-week class, rather than the normal 16-week class, which is a "regular" course in a "normal" semester).

Also, family duties take up a lot of time, especially with my 19-year-old son, who is "on the spectrum," that is, he has "autism spectrum disorder," and while he's "high-functioning," he takes a lot of time to manage, and even as this post goes live, I've still got to help him "settle down" and get to sleep, or he'll be one cranky mofo in the morning, who is hella hard to wake up, lol.

Anyway, just read this fabulous piece by the wonderful Bari Weiss, at City Journal, "Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret."

If you're like me, you'll actually get a good giggle out of it, although it's "comic relief," for the actual fear that many folks have, parents and students, of speaking out against "woke" culture, is in fact depressing. That said, Ms. Weiss is now a leader in the counterrevolution that's been taking place, pushing back, and hard, against leftist ideological totalitarians.

So, again, sorry for missing yesterday's blogging, and again, thank you for reading the blog, and also thanks very much if you've purchased books and things through my Amazon links.

Check back tomorrow, and I promise to try to get a bit more "hot" content posted.

Will Leftists Be Able to Stop Reopening?

At Issues & Insight, "Americans Are Re-Opening. Will Dems Be Able to Stop Them?":

America Is Reopening Itself: Will Politicians Be Able To Stop It? https://t.co/swEeXiOGhi

— Issues & Insights (@InsightsIssues) May 19, 2020

Weary of more than two months of lockdowns, lost jobs, vanished income, and emotional distress, Americans are practicing a bit of Irish Democracy, shopping, dining out, gathering, and trying to carry on as before the pandemic arrived without approval from authorities. It was bound to happen.

As has been widely noted, we were initially told that we needed to shut down and shelter in place so that we would “flatten the curve” of infection growth to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed by people sick with COVID-19. That benchmark was met a little more than a month into the lockdowns. Time magazine reported in late April that “The U.S. Has Flattened the Curve.” This New York Times chart clearly shows that the flattening began early last month.

Yet many Americans are still under shelter-in-place orders, some of which have been extended. We hate to use a cliche, but politicians have been moving the goalposts. Flattening the curve isn’t good enough. They want to keep people home until there’s a vaccine; or science, which has sadly become a loose term that means whatever the user wants it to, has established an effective treatment; or maybe until there are zero coronavirus cases.

This has rankled more than a few. The masses are fed up with huddling in their homes and are yearning to breathe free.

The center of the “resistance” might be, oddly enough, in California, which has three “Free Counties.” Sutter and Yuba, just north of Sacramento, and Modoc, in the state’s far northeast corner, have reopened without Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval. More counties quickly followed, rushing, reports the Sacramento Bee, “to persuade state health officials they are ready to reopen key segments of their local economies on a fast-track basis.”

In Southern California, Orange County engaged Newsom in a bitter battle over reopening beaches there. Newsom closed the shoreline when he saw photos that he didn’t like of people on the sand in Newport Beach. County Supervisor Michelle Steel called it an “act of retribution against Orange County.” But beachgoers eventually won by kicking up such a fuss that Newsom and state authorities were pressured into making a decision they otherwise would not have made.

Meanwhile, Michiganders are chafing under the boot of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has issued arguably the harshest lockdown orders in the country, and has even extended to May 28 her initial closure order for some businesses. The capital in Lansing has been the site of demonstrations by some deeply restless, and in many cases angry, protesters.

“We haven’t had any bloodshed yet,” one member of a Facebook group called Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine recently wrote.

We hope there is none. But tempers are short. One man has already been charged with making death threats against Whitmer and the state attorney general. And we’ve seen members of the Michigan Militia swear they aren’t going to allow law enforcement to arrest an Owosso barber who reopened his business because he had no other income. How long can she hold back demands for freedom — in America?

Still more at that top link.

What the New Socialists Want More Than Anything is to Punish the Rich

Radical leftists are looking to fulfill Marx's vision in the 21st century: Expropriate the expropriators!

Here's Jerry Z. Muller, at Foreign Affairs, "The Neosocialist Delusion: Wealth Is Not the Problem":

The neosocialists are descended from Rousseau. They downplay poverty and fetishize equality, focus on wealth distribution rather than wealth creation, and seem to care as much about lowering those at the top as raising those at the bottom.

The movement’s signature policy proposal is a wealth tax, an annual levy on household assets. Touted by economists such as Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, all associated with the Paris School of Economics, the concept has been embraced by both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, U.S. senators from Vermont and Massachusetts, respectively, who are running for the Democratic presidential nomination. At first, Warren advocated a two percent tax on households worth more than $50 million and a three percent tax on billionaires. Later, pressed on how she would pay for her proposed universal health insurance, she doubled the billionaire tax to six percent. Sanders’s plan starts at taxing $16 million in assets at one percent and tops out at an eight percent tax for assets exceeding $10 billion.

The radicalism of this approach is often underestimated. Many people conflate wealth taxes with higher income taxes or see them as mere extensions of a similar concept. But wealth taxes are fundamentally different instruments with much broader ramifications for economic dynamism and individual liberty.

The main effect of a wealth tax would be to discourage wealthy individuals from holding demonstrable assets. Any individual or household within shouting distance of the threshold would have to get its assets valued annually, imposing costs and creating a permanent jobs program for tax lawyers and accountants, whose chief responsibility would be to figure out ways around the law, including moving assets abroad.

A wealth tax would dramatically curtail private investment. The higher people rise on the economic ladder, the more of their resources go to investment instead of consumption. Those investments, in turn, often fuel innovative, risky ventures, which get funded in the hopes that they will eventually produce still greater gains. A wealth tax would upend the incentive structure for rich people, causing many to stop funding productive economic activity and focus instead on reducing their tax exposure and hiding their assets.

Warren contends that calculating one’s wealth tax would be as easy as calculating one’s property tax, but that is ridiculous. Take a firm that has a market value but no income—a frequent situation for startups but also common for established firms in various situations, such as a turnaround. Rich investors in such firms would have to sell their shares to pay the wealth tax or force the companies to disburse cash rather than invest in the future. Either way, the tax would discourage investment, reduce innovation, and encourage short-term thinking.

A wealth tax, finally, would force everyone whose assets were near its minimal threshold to give the government a full accounting of all those assets every year: homes, furniture, vehicles, heirlooms, bank accounts, investments and liabilities, and more. The result would be a huge expansion of the reach of government into citizens’ lives, a corresponding reduction in citizens’ privacy, and the accumulation and storage of vast amounts of highly sensitive data with few safeguards to prevent their misuse.

It is not only successful individuals who draw the neosocialists’ ire; it is also successful companies. If a firm grows big enough to become famous, it becomes a potential target of vilification; if it grows too big, it becomes a target for destruction. Sanders, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic representative from New York, accordingly, have all pledged to break up Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Here they can draw on a venerable antimonopoly tradition in American political culture from the trustbusters on, rooted in the assumption that the further away you move from Smith’s ideal of perfect competition among many small firms, the more the public is hurt. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, however, argued that Smith had greatly underestimated both the dynamism of capitalism and the role of entrepreneurs in driving it. Capitalism’s manifold benefits didn’t just happen; they were created, by a relatively small group of people responsible for introducing new products, services, and business methods. Entrepreneurs sought the big profits associated with temporary monopolies and so were driven to create whole new industries they could dominate.

Large companies, Schumpeter realized, acted as engines of innovation, plowing back some of their profits into research and development and encouraging others to do the same in the hopes of becoming an acquisition target. He would have been delighted with Silicon Valley, viewing technology giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft as poster children for the enormous benefits to consumers that entrepreneurs generate.

Companies such as Amazon and Walmart, meanwhile, maintain their position through furious competition in service and price, contributing to the virtual elimination of inflation in the American economy. And yet it is precisely these dynamic, successful, customer-oriented companies that the neosocialists want to tax heavily, burden with regulations, and cut up for parts.

Still more.

Image Credit: The People's Cube, "Chiquita Khrushchev: 'We will bury you!'."

Jonah Goldberg Attacks Michelle Malkin

Ace has the write-up, "Jonah Goldberg Calls Michelle Malkin 'Anti-Semitic' and 'Alt-Right'; Calls a Critic 'Troll Bitch'."