March 16, 2025

PRESIDENTIAL NONACQUIESCENCE IS ITSELF A CHECK ON JUDICIAL OVERREACH, ALBEIT ONE THAT SHOULD BE USED RARELY:

When Ex Parte Quirin was before the Court, President Franklin Roosevelt warned them that he would not turn over the captured German saboteurs to some U.S. Marshal with a habeas order. The Court then declined to issue one.

I do think that if John Roberts is as concerned aboutu the institutional future of the federal judiciary as he says he is, something needs to be done to rein in these rogue district judges.

Posted at 6:44 pm by Glenn Reynolds 14

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Racist–But Underfunded? Universities have gone from arguing that science is biased to claiming that even the overhead on their massive federal research budgets must not be cut by the Trump administration. Academic bureaucrats often collect surcharges of more than 50 percent on the federal grants that go to researchers. How could science ever progress without taxpayers subsidizing the six-figure salaries of deans of inclusion and community engagement?

Posted at 4:24 pm by John Tierney 91

THE PASSIVE VOICE IS SURE DOING A LOT OF WORK HERE: ‘We Were Badly Misled’ Says the New York Times As They Admit COVID Lab-Leak Theory Was True.

Maybe the Times means Xi Jinping’s administration? Because it certainly wasn’t Trump’s:

Pressure from who in the administration? President Trump was pretty adamant about calling it the ‘China virus.’

And why didn’t The New York Times bother sending a reporter or two to do some digging on this?

We all know why. Because if they thought it could hurt Trump to investigate, they would have.

Tom Cotton was routinely called a racist for referring to the lab leak origin – in February of 2020. To which a variety of Democrat house organs, including the Times, responded:

“Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” lamented the Times, before accusing Cotton of contributing to an “infodemic.”

“Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” explained the Post, which later issued issued a correction that still characterized the theory as “fringe.”

The Daily Beast declared that he was promoting a “Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory Dismissed by Actual Scientists.”

Tom Nichols, a cable news “conservative” who has since been rewarded with a staff writer position at The Atlantic, approached Cotton’s comments even more scornfully. When Cotton pointed out to detractors that he had not said that the virus had originally been developed as a bioweapon by the Chinese government, and that there were several hypotheses worth exploring, Nichols responded by calling it an example of “why arguing with a conspiracy theorist rarely goes well.”

“It gives the person advancing the theory to keep repeating it ‘just as a hypothesis,’ as Cotton does here. Every time you ask him, he’ll repeat it, say it’s unlikely, and then say he’s just asking questions,” continued Nichols. One might wonder if such questions are worth being asked — especially by the press. But Nichols left that to Cotton, instead opting to mock the senator for doing so.

Anne Applebaum, also a staff writer for The Atlantic as well as a member of the advisory panel for the Global Disinformation Index, compared Cotton’s comments to those of “Soviet propagandists who tried to convince the world that the CIA invented AIDS.”

As late as May of 2021, Apoorva Mandavilli, the Times’ replacement for veteran chief science reporter Don McNeil, who was forced off the paper during 2020’s culture war, was tweeting:

With today’s Times’ headline, we’ve entered into “Oceania has never been at war with Eastasia” territory:

UPDATE:

Posted at 4:15 pm by Ed Driscoll 380

THEY’LL SAY ANYTHING IF IT FEELS GOOD AT THE MOMENT:

Posted at 12:20 pm by Glenn Reynolds 166

RICH LOWRY: Does Anyone Know What a Nazi Is? Not if Elon Musk is considered one.

It’s not just that many of these people need to read a book — they need to get acquainted with the country where they live.

Needless to say, Nazism is not, and never was, normal. It was born of the wrenching destruction of World War I and represented a fundamental break with the norms of Western civilization. It was irrational, bloodthirsty, and obsessed with racial purity and warfare.

If Hitler merely sought to reduce the workforce of the Ministry of the Interior by 15 percent, he wouldn’t have been the most notorious figure in modern history.

Elon Musk wants to balance the budget; Hitler wanted to murder mentally ill people.

Elon Musk seeks to root out fraud from the federal government; Hitler sought to eliminate the supposed malign, pervasive influence of the Jews.

Elon Musk believes that we need to enforce the border and welcome talented foreigners into the United States in abundance; Hitler believed he had to conquer Europe and “cleanse” the East of Untermenschen.

Elon Musk makes trolling posts on X; Hitler made a “prophecy” that if war came, it would bring “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

And so on.

It’s tiresome, of course, to point this out, and the sheer overuse of the Nazi charge means that it has lost much, if not all, of its sting. Still, as long as the other side remains so attached to this smear, we shouldn’t lose our outrage at the poisonous idiocy of it.

Related:

Republicans and conservatives would be thrilled about any cutting of government spending or the size of government. What is Walz implying about the reaction from the other side of the aisle? Or, along with his other constant references to Musk’s South African background, did he not think this analogy through?

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 157

NEWS YOU CAN USE:

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll 102

DOJ DROPS PROBE OF SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION: Did you hear the Department of Justice (DOJ) has dropped its Biden administration-initiated investigation of allegations by Russell Moore and other prominent “Woke evangelicals” of widespread abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)?

Probably not, but the fact is, as reported by guest author Jon Whitehead on the Rod Martin Report, no charges were filed after a lengthy investigation that cost the SBC as much as $20 million just in legal fees. The investigation was yet another illustration of the Left’s costly, time-consuming and often-libelous Lawfare.

“Russell Moore, in his infamous ‘leaked’ letters, peddled a narrative of systemic corruption and cover-up within the SBC Executive Committee (EC). This was demagoguery of the worst sort. It was a tale steeped in half-truths and self-righteousness, meant to whip messengers into a frenzy,” Whitehead explains.

If you aren’t familiar with Moore, he’s a former congressional aide to Democrat-turned Republican Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi. After leaving the Hill, he occupied prominent preaching and teaching positions across the SBC, then became the long-time leader of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC).

Moore was a vocal Trump critic in 2016 and thereafter, but what really caused his downfall was his steadily escalating Woke-driven criticism of Southern Baptists and other evangelicals, beginning during the Obama administration.

Most recently, Moore became Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today, a move that highlighted that once-respected magazine’s sad abandonment of its conservative evangelical roots in a direction that will almost certainly end up in the same Progressive neighborhood as Sojourners magazine.

Whitehead is also clear that exposing Moore’s attack on the SBC as groundless does not mean SBC congregations need not be always alert to and just in responding to abuse allegations:

“Don’t be fooled. This doesn’t mean sin is absent from every corner of the SBC. Local churches must remain vigilant; God hates sexual abuse. We should support SBC churches who report sexual abuse to authorities and care for victims of such crimes. I have laid out the path for real reform on the issue here: ‘The Path Forward on Abuse Reform in the SBC: Baptist Accountability.’”

Posted at 10:12 am by Mark Tapscott 29