[guest post by Dana]

Nicholas Kristof has an eye-opening piece at the New York Times titled A Confession of Liberal Intolerance. In his op-ed, he both admits to and laments an undeniable sort of discrimination at our institutions of higher learning. You’re sort of late to the party, Nicholas, but welcome anyway:

We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, gays, Latinos, and Muslims at the table – er, so long as they’re not conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

Thus Kristof begins his confession. Given the recent outing of Facebook for its calculated political bias, Kristof informs us that that’s exactly where he’s been mulling this over. On Facebook. How ironic.

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

“Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” said Carmi.

“The truth has a liberal slant,” wrote Michelle.

“Why stop there?” asked Steven. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”

To his credit, Kristof zeroes in on the root of the problem: liberal arrogance. (I think liberal ignorance would have worked equally as well.)

He also offers findings from four different studies that demonstrate that Republican professors in the humanities and social sciences are indeed “endangered species,” and the stark contrast a black sociologist provides reveals the narrow-minded bigotry of supposed “progressives” (a term used to describe a group of people who are anything but…):

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close,”

If it’s tough being a conservative in academia, it’s even tougher if one is also an evangelical:

According to Yancey’s study, 59 percent of anthropologists and 53 percent of English professors would be less likely to hire someone they found out was an evangelical.

“Of course there are biases against evangelicals on campuses,” notes Jonathan L. Walton, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard. Walton, a black evangelical, adds that the condescension toward evangelicals echoes the patronizing attitude toward racial minorities: “The same arguments I hear people make about evangelicals sound so familiar to the ways people often describe folk of color, i.e. politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor.”

Kristof, who earns his bread and butter in the belly of the self-admitted liberally-biased beast, nonetheless reminds readers of all political persuasions why this particular kind of discrimination is so dangerous:

To me, the conversation illuminated primarily liberal arrogance — the implication that conservatives don’t have anything significant to add to the discussion. **My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.

The stakes involve not just fairness to conservatives or evangelical Christians, not just whether progressives will be true to their own values, not just the benefits that come from diversity (and diversity of thought is arguably among the most important kinds), but also the quality of education itself. When perspectives are unrepresented in discussions, when some kinds of thinkers aren’t at the table, classrooms become echo chambers rather than sounding boards — and we all lose.

**Clearly, narrow-minded bigots are limited in their capacity to feel anything but disdain for those who dare to think differently. The very definition of progressive.

–Dana

[guest post by JVW]

With both guest bloggers on super-secret missions on behalf of brand awareness for Patterico’s Pontifications, this Weekend Open Thread might end up being somewhat slapdash and haphazard. I’m starting this on Tuesday night in the hopes of getting a little bit up every day, but the final product will be what it’s gonna be. With that, it’s rosin on the bow and here we go:

Item 1 – Nicholas Kristof, Affirmative Action Kid
The Chronicle of Higher Education asks why our old friend Nicholas Kristof is claiming to have been the beneficiary of affirmative action, believing that growing up in rural Oregon made him exotic and thus and interesting candidate in the eyes of Harvard’s Admissions Office, when in fact his background was fairly straightforward by Harvard’s standards:

In a recent column, The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof explained that he had been a beneficiary of affirmative action: “Elite colleges were looking for farm kids from low-income areas to provide diversity. So a school that I had never visited, Harvard, took an enormous risk and accepted me, and I became a token country bumpkin to round out a class of polished overachievers. In time, Harvard gave me a wonderful education, transformed my life and set me on a path to becoming a columnist — which is why you’re stuck reading this.”

Readers were quick to point out that both of Kristof’s parents were professors. His father, Ladis Kristof, was born in a part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire now in Ukraine; he was imprisoned by the Nazis and eventually made it to the United States, where he graduated from Reed College, in Oregon, in 1955. According to Reed’s alumni magazine, Ladis became “a political scientist of international renown; a Fulbright Scholar to Romania, and a visiting professor at universities in India, Moldova, Poland, and Romania.” Nicholas’s mother, Jane McWilliams, was also a professor; she retired emerita at Portland State.

So Kristof was a double-professor brat with exactly the kind of advantages that might make one unusually competitive when applying for college — no first-generation college student here. Far from taking “an enormous risk,” Harvard was making a very safe bet. Why does Kristof work so hard to imply otherwise?

Mr. Kristof no doubt wrote a stirring essay about getting up at dawn to feed the chickens, milk the cows, bale the hay, hitch up the family’s one ox to the rusty old plow and make a pass at the north field, and then walk the four miles to his one-room schoolhouse where the room was illuminated with kerosene and heated with a coal stove. But maybe he really is onto something. We’ve pointed out before that affirmative action as practiced by Harvard was far more beneficial to middle-class and upper-class minorities than it was to kids from the mean streets, so it’s only fair that Mr. Kristof sees himself as an extension of that phony-baloney program.

Item 10 – Not Looking So Great for the USWNT
The United States Women’s National Team has thus far been incredibly underwhelming at the FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament being jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand. After a rather pedestrian 3-0 victory over Vietnam, a team the U.S. women were expected to trounce by somewhere around twice that margin, the team played absolutely uninspired tie games with Holland, ranked ninth in the world, and then Portugal, ranked twenty-first. Their record of one victory versus two draws places the U.S., who entered the tournament as the world’s number one ranked team, into the elimination round as the second finisher in their group, placing them in a win-or-go-home game on Sunday morning against Sweden, ranked as the world’s number three team. Should they survive that match, their next opponent would be either Japan, ranked eleventh, or Norway, ranked twelfth, and it would only get harder from there.

Item 11 – Third Time Is the Charm
This ultra-tolerant attitude towards criminality is really paying off in the Bay Area:

CNN senior national correspondent Kyung Lah said her rental car was broken into while she was on assignment in Oakland, Calif., on Wednesday, marking the third time in the last year her car has been broken into while she was on assignment in the Bay Area.

Lah said in a series of posts on X that she was in Oakland shooting a story about crime when her “completely empty” car was broken into.

“We were across the street— this happened in seconds,” she said, adding in a second post that “Even tho the car is empty, the thieves break in and lower the seat so they can steal anything in the trunk.”

[. . .]

Back in March, Lah shared that she and CNN producer Jason Kravarik had their bags stolen out of their rental car while on assignment at San Francisco’s city hall for a story about the city’s rampant crime.

While the pair were conducting an interview at city hall, thieves broke into their car and snatched their bags “in under 4 seconds,” despite the crew having hired private security to keep watch.

[. . .]

This time around, an employee for the rental-car company told Lah that of the 250 cars returned to the lot yesterday, 27 had been broken into — more than 10 percent of returned cars.

How long until the first politician complains about the rising cost of rental car rentals and car insurance in the Bay Area, and blames greedy corporations for gouging the hard-working citizen?

Item 100 – Suing College Accreditation Cartels
Florida pushes the anti-woke agenda further by suing the Southern Associations of Colleges and Schools. George Leef has the details:

College accreditation used to be the most soporific of topics. Almost nobody was interested in it because accreditation meant so little. Accrediting agencies had their standards that kept degree mills from fooling people into thinking they were real colleges. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t a matter of national concern.

In recent years, however, accreditation has become highly controversial. The reason is that the accrediting agencies have ceased to be neutral parties who apply reasonable standards to ensure that students are not squandering their federal student-aid funds on dodgy schools that are just interested in cashing in on easy money. Instead, the accreditors have become activists who want to direct how colleges and universities will be run. They have badly overstepped their boundaries, and that has now triggered a lawsuit against the Department of Education.

You can see where the rest of the story is going, but click through to the article for full details.

Item 101 – The Summer of Strikes Roils the Golden State
In addition to the Writers Guild of America strike, joined in solidarity by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and the hotel workers strikes ongoing throughout Southern California, comes word that some pretty high-paid state workers might also take to the picket lines:

The union representing doctors and psychiatrists working in California correctional facilities said that 91% of voting members authorized a strike Monday. Non-competitive salaries, strenuous working conditions and an overreliance on higher-paid contracted doctors, make it difficult to hire staff physicians, said Dr. Stuart Bussey, president of the umbrella Union of American Physicians and Dentists.

[. . .]

The biggest sticking point is salaries. Though doctors and psychiatrists pull down between $285,000 and $343,000 annually, according to California Correctional Health Care Services, temporary contracted workers make twice as much, said Dr. Nader Wassef, psychiatrist and chief of staff at Napa State Hospital.

“I am not going to claim poverty. What I’m trying to say is if we plan on getting trained, qualified psychiatrists to treat these patients, we are not going to get any because we are not competitive,” Wassef said.

The vacancy rate among on-site psychiatrists exceeded 50% in June, according to court documents filed by the state in an ongoing lawsuit over prison conditions and prisoner safety. Among all psychiatrists, including telehealth providers, the vacancy rate was 35%.

More than 20% of primary care doctor positions are vacant, California Correctional Health Care Services told CalMatters in an unsigned statement Tuesday. The agency did not respond to questions about contractor pay.

Lucky we have a state dominated by the union-friendly political party, right? But of course that same party receives massive donations from both sides in the Hollywood and the hotel strikes, and they have the challenge of finding the budget money to help pay for all of those prison sawbones and shrinks. Good luck to them.

Item 110 – More on Strike-mania in Southern California
Taylor Swift brings her “Eras” tour to Los Angeles tonight [this is being drafted on Thursday] for the first of six sold-out concerts at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Some 400,000+ tickets have been sold for the shows. Estimates are that Ms. Swift herself realizes a net profit of about $5 million for every show she plays (there are other claims it is closer to three times that amount), and some studies suggest that her 46 shows in 17 U.S. cities this summer will bring $4.6 billion dollars in economic activity over a five month period.

So naturally the aforementioned striking hotel workers want Ms. Swift to cancel her Los Angeles shows in solidarity with their cause. The workers are demanding an immediate raise of $5 per hour, followed by guaranteed raises of $3 per hour each year over the next two years. They also want healthcare, pensions, and no immigration checks via the eVerify system. The union, Unite Here Local 11, even got some of the more dopey and economically-illiterate California politicians such as hypocritical Lt. Governor Eleni Kounalakis; Patterico’s and my County Supervisor, Janice Hahn; and a whole host of other pandering Democrats to sign on to a letter asking Ms. Swift to postpone her Los Angeles concerts until the strike is settled, as if tens of thousands of young Swifties and their angry parents would then force those mean old hotels to immediately pay up. The delusion of labor-owned Democrats knows no bounds, even if Ms. Swift has recently outed herself as a typical entertainment leftie with all of the right political beliefs. Here’s wishing her a successful run at SoFi this extended weekend anyway.

Item 111 – Dianne Feinstein: Too Far Gone to Manage Her Own Affairs But Still Able to Serve in the Senate
The ending to Dianne Feinstein’s grossly overrated career keeps getting more and more sad. Last week we had the spectacle of her yet again acting bewildered in a Defense Committee hearing and having to be stage-managed by her colleagues. Now news comes that her daughter is exercising power of attorney to take care of the Senators personal legal affairs:

The daughter of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has been given power of attorney over the sitting senator and is handling the 90-year-old’s legal affairs.

Katherine Feinstein, 66, has filed two lawsuits on her mother’s behalf in an effort to gain access to the estate of the senator’s late husband. The senator’s decision to delegate management of her affairs comes as Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill argue whether Feinstein is no longer fit for office.

Katherine’s first lawsuit on her mother’s behalf relates to a California beach house owned by the senator’s late husband, Richard Blum. The lawsuit argues that Feinstein is seeking to sell the house in order to raise funds for her ongoing medical treatments.

The second lawsuit challenges the appointment of two other trustees in Blum’s estate: Michael Klein, a longtime lawyer for Blum, and Marc Scholvinck, a business partner of Blum’s, according to The New York Times.

It’s a sad reflection on the broken one-party political system in California which kept electing her long after it was apparent that she was not up to the job, and it’s a sad reflection on her party which keeps her in place in order to hold down an important spot on the Judiciary Committee, where her usefulness is in rubber-stamping President Biden’s nominees. A sad way for her to cement her (at best) mediocre legacy.

Item 1000 – Is this DeSantis-Newsom Thing on, or What?
Unannounced Presidential candidate Gavin Newsom has been out on the hustings challenging announced Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis to a debate over which state model — Newsom’s California vs. DeSantis’s Florida — is more stable and sane. After (rightly) ignoring his West Coast antagonist, the governor of America’s Penis now seems to be poised for a fight. Noah Rothman, for one, believes this might be a fine and necessary thing:

The California model and the Florida model are wildly distinct theories of how to balance economic optimization against the need to maximize human happiness. They are in competition already, and it would be valuable to hash out those distinctions in plain terms on a debate stage. If these two governors can respectfully advocate their respective philosophical approaches to governance, it would greatly clarify the stakes of the coming presidential contest. Indeed, such an engagement would likely prove vastly more informational than one defined by two aged, cantankerous bloviators whose highest aspirations for the country are to ensure that it doesn’t put them or their loved ones in jail.

He also recognizes that this could just turn into a pointless shitshow:

Of course, a DeSantis–Newsom debate could also devolve into bickering, point-scoring, and competing one-liners. If this debate becomes a contest of personalities, DeSantis’s deficiencies in that area could prove fatal. But if Hannity could keep the participants in this deliberation focused on arguing their competing theories of societal organization, it wouldn’t just be a far healthier political exercise than any to which Americans have been privy for many years; it would also showcase the superiority of the conservative model of state governance. And it might go a long way toward convincing the voting public that Florida’s state-level experiments deserve to go national.

In any case, I would sooner tune into this debate than any involving you-know-who. If the majority of Americans look at the California model versus the Florida model and determine that they like better the way the Golden State is managing things, then at least we can drop the pretense that the United States is still (barely) a center-right nation.

Enjoy the weekend. The summer is winding down and the kids will be back to school soon.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

We’ve been kind of hard on New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof over the years, calling him out for his namby-pambysm and his gullibility in service of the progressive narrative, among other sins. At times, however, we have shown him at least some modicum of love when he’s been willing to deviate away from his newspaper’s incessant editorial direction and to challenge the wisdom of some deeply-held leftist beliefs. All in all, I think that Nick Kristof is less of an outright blowhard than his colleague Thomas Friedman, less of a spittle-flecked partisan than his colleague Paul Krugman, less of a smug and sanctimonious scold than his colleague Charles Blow, yet, alas, a little bit (though thankfully just a little) of all three.

But one thing that I did want to salute Mr. Kristof for is his recent decision to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s exhortation not to be the critic but instead be the man in the arena, by announcing his candidacy for governor of his native state of Oregon. At long last, one of the elite opinion makers from big media would descend from his lofty perch at the Indispensable Newspaper in the Greatest City on Planet Earth and deign to lead the citizenry in a far-flung state, albeit one that is achingly progressive. To set aside the snark for a moment, Mr. Kristof, who grew up on his family’s farm, has pledged that a main focus of his would be to bridge the ideological chasm between rural, conservative Eastern Oregon and the western part of the Beaver State which is dominated by the Portland-Salem-Corvallis-Eugene stretch of Interstate 5. Given that the Kristof family farm is located in suburban Portland, it’s not a stretch to imagine the candidate envisions cajoling the rubes in Pendleton and Baker City to adopt big government and woke agenda items, in return for the city sophisticates not making fun of them and maybe agreeing not to kill the timber and mining industries through environmental legislation right away.

Unfortunately for the campaign, Mr. Kristof and his political team appear to have made a big miscalculation:

Shemia Fagan, Oregon’s secretary of state, notified longtime New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof Thursday morning that he was ineligible to become Oregon’s next governor.

Fagan’s office issued a press release after informing Kristof of her decision to reject his filing, citing the fact that “Article V, § 2 of the  Oregon Constitution  requires a candidate for governor to have been a  ‘resident within this state’ for three years before the election. ”

“The rules are the rules and they apply equally to all candidates for office in Oregon,” said Fagan.

Whoopsie. You would think that a guy who was chock-full of policy advice for Presidents, Premiers, Prime Ministers, Popes, Puppets, Paupers, Pirate, Poets, Pawns and Kings (sorry — really got carried away there for a moment) might have ensured that he was indeed eligible to run in the election before resigning from his enviable gig, but I guess the smartest people in the room are forever assuming that they can outmaneuver the local yokels in something as basic as state constitutional law. Mr. Kristof argues that because he has owned property in Oregon for several years and because he visits his place now and again, why, that ought to satisfy any of your provincial old residency requirements. His campaign may yet win out in court, and even if they lose it’s pretty likely that Times Square will accept him back in their good graces, so let’s not worry for a moment that Mr. Kristof will end up in the bread lines any time soon. But if the Kristof Team can’t handle the most basic of rudimentary campaign tasks, what would make anybody think he has what it takes to be chief executive of the state?

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

Credit where it’s due: I came across this thanks to a tweet from the often insufferable Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. This remarkable piece ran in The Harvard Crimson last month and was written by a sophomore majoring in applied mathematics (note: not some grievance-mongering studies discipline).

In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again.

My father ran from a government that beat, tortured, and brainwashed its citizens. His childhood friend disappeared after scrawling an insult about the dictator on the school bathroom wall. His neighbors starved to death from food rations designed to combat “obesity.” As the population dwindled, women were sent to the hospital every month to make sure they were getting pregnant.

My father’s escape journey eventually led him to the United States. He moved to the Midwest and married a Romanian woman who had left for America the minute the regime collapsed. Today, my parents are doctors in quiet, suburban Kansas. Both of their daughters go to Harvard. They are the lucky ones.

Those of us of a certain age are likely to forget that today’s college student, likely born sometime between 1995 and 2000, has no direct experience with large-scale communism of the sort practiced in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries in the latter half of the past century. Their view of communism is skewed by countries like China and Vietnam who have blended some capitalist practices with authoritarian central government to create a system where the government picks and chooses who gets rich and how much they can keep (ironically enough, this is the same system that seems to hold a great deal of appeal to the Barack Obamas and Hillary Clintons of the world). Or else they view communism through the prism of Cuba, a small and poor island nation with catchy rhumba and mambo music and cool classic cars prowling the streets. But the author, Laura Nicolae, is here to set her schoolmates straight:

Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.

[. . .]

Walk around campus, and you’re likely to spot Ché Guevara on a few shirts and button pins. A sophomore jokes that he’s declared a secondary in “communist ideology and implementation.” The new Leftist Club on campus seeks “a modern perspective” on Marx and Lenin to “alleviate the stigma around the concept of Leftism.” An author laments in these pages that it’s too difficult to meet communists here. For many students, casually endorsing communism is a cool, edgy way to gripe about the world.

After spending four years on a campus saturated with Marxist memes and jokes about communist revolutions, my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives.

I was in college in the very waning days of Soviet communism (the Berlin Wall came down the summer after my freshman year). Back then the campus radicals were circumspect enough not to climb aboard the broken-down Marxist-Leninist bandwagon (well, except for Van Jones who is a whole separate category of nutjob), and most of them gravitated more towards anarchism, which after all, they liked to say, was what Trotsky understood was the real future all along. But today’s college kids, not even old enough to recall very clearly the first stirrings of Islamofascism, now find old Uncle Joe Stalin to be a benign figure, just as clueless fellow travelers did a century earlier. The estimable Ms. Nicolae is having none of it:

Many in my generation have blurred the reality of communism with the illusion of utopia. I never had that luxury. Growing up, my understanding of communism was personalized; I could see its lasting impact in the faces of my family members telling stories of their past. My perspective toward the ideology is radically different because I know the people who survived it; my relatives continue to wonder about their friends who did not.

The stories of survivors paint a more vivid picture of communism than the textbooks my classmates have read. While we may never fully understand all of the atrocities that occurred under communist regimes, we can desperately try to ensure the world never repeats their mistakes. To that end, we must tell the accounts of survivors and fight the trivialization of communism’s bloody past.

There’s more, so do read the whole thing, but it does my grumpy and worried heart a world of good to know that Harvard has at least some sensible students like Laura Nicolae to counter the baneful effects of the Bernie Sanders-worshipping modern campus Marxist.

– JVW

Your must-read for the day, if you have not read it already, is a piece by Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs titled The Necessity of Credibility. It thoroughly exposes many examples of “fake news” by Big Media — including their claims that conservatives are routinely engaged in spreading “fake news.”

The piece opens with a discussion of a topic that irritated me quite a bit recently: the pack of bleating media sheep who claimed that Trump was blatantly lying when he said that millions of people voted illegally. (The claim has not been proved, but is far from outlandish.) As Robinson explains, the Washington Post “fact-checkers” pounced, with Glenn Kessler calling Trump’s claim “bogus” and decrying Trump’s “wild allegations.”

But when people wondered where Trump got the idea that a significant percentage of people had voted illegally, the Trump transition team cited . . . a piece from the Washington Post. Whoops!

Then it got even more farcical. Now the “fact-checkers” gave four Pinocchios to the Trump camps’s claim that the piece had been in the Washington Post. How could that be, when it actually had been in the Washington Post? Because, the fact-checkers claimed, it had been in a blog hosted by the Washington Post. Never mind that the URL begins: “www.washingtonpost.com.” Never mind that, as Robinson points out, the blog’s name appears “in tiny letters beneath the ordinary full-sized Washington Post logo.”

Who are you going to believe, the fact-checkers or your lying eyes?

The Washington Post itself was the source for the Trump claim that the Washington Post claimed was bogus and alarming. Fake! And then the Washington Post tried to deny they were the source, when they had been!

Fake fake fakety fake!

The voter fraud story is indicative of a much wider problem with U.S. political media: its attempts to point out Trump’s falsehoods are consistently undermined by the media’s own lack of credibility on matters of fact. Especially with the rise of “fact-checking” websites, whose analysis is frequently shoddy and dubious, the political media contribute to the exact kind of “post-truth” atmosphere that journalists criticize Trump for furthering.

An interesting and illuminating example of this can be found in the controversy over so-called “fake news.” A few weeks after the election, a series of critics lamented the role of “fake” stories during the election cycle. A study by BuzzFeed reported that “the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets.” A number of commentators saw this as a bad sign for the future democratic governance. Andrew Smith of The Guardian suggested that the proliferation of false stories on social media was eroding the very foundations of reality. In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof solemnly concluded that “fake news is gaining ground, empowering nuts and undermining our democracy.”

But, as Robinson notes, many of the examples of “fake news” offered up by Big Media are themselves fake.

Particularly pernicious is the rise of “fact-checking” websites, which are ostensibly dedicated to promoting objective truth over eye-of-the-beholder lies, but which often simply serve as mouthpieces for centrist orthodoxies, thereby further delegitimizing the entire notion of “fact” itself. As Current Affairs has previously argued at length, websites like PolitiFact frequently disguise opinion and/or bullshit as neutral, data-based inquiry.

This happens in a couple of ways. First, such websites frequently produce meaningless statistics, such as trying to measure the percentage of a candidate’s statements that are false. PolitiFact constantly spreads its statistics about how X percent of Trump or Clinton’s statements are rated false, declining to mention the fact that this statistic is empty of any content, since the statements that are evaluated haven’t been randomly selected. The centrist biases of fact-checkers also affect their decisionmaking. Fact-checkers have, for example, insisted that it was wrong to say Hillary Clinton wanted to get rid of the 2nd Amendment. But this isn’t a “factual” dispute at all. It depends on one’s interpretation of the 2nd Amendment’s essential meaning, something that varies based on one’s personal political values.

Robinson gives several specific examples of instances in which fact-checkers called something “false” that was literally true because of a political argument about the interpretation of the true fact. This is something I have railed about many times before. As one example among many, take Carly Fiorina’s claim that she went from secretary to CEO: admitted by the fact-checkers to be true, but deemed false by the fact-checkers because of its implications. There are an appalling number of similar “fact-checks” by these propagandists masquerading as neutral arbiters of truth.

The piece is long and chock-full of interesting anecdotes, facts, and quotes. It’s worth your time and gets the coveted read the whole thing recommendation. I’ll end the post with this quote:

Those who say Donald Trump dwells in a “post-truth” realm are not wrong. He lies a hell of a lot, and misrepresents a hell of a lot more. But in order for the “post-truth” charge to be taken seriously, one must be careful and reliable in calling out “lies.”

Amen.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

[Posted by Karl]

A slice of the establishment media is increasingly taken with comparing Occupy Wall Street — the two-week old protest against “banksters” and corporate tycoons — with the revolutionary protests of the “Arab Spring.”  James Joyner correctly observes what an insult that is to the protesters who (however problematic some of them may be) risked death to overturn repressive dictatorships.  Indeed, the comparison is doubly insulting to the intelligence of the reader, given that those making it generally support Team Obama, which is run and funded by said banksters and would be the dictatorship in this scenario.  The people floating the metaphor do not expect or hope for a revolution.  And the metaphor crumbles even further on close examination.

Nicholas Kristof explains the metaphor:

I tweeted that the protest reminded me a bit of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and that raised eyebrows. True, no bullets are whizzing around, and the movement won’t unseat any dictators. But there is the same cohort of alienated young people, and the same savvy use of Twitter and other social media to recruit more participants. Most of all, there’s a similar tide of youthful frustration with a political and economic system that protesters regard as broken, corrupt, unresponsive and unaccountable.

However, there is no tide — at least not one unique to American youths.  To be sure, the youth vote continues to lean left in general, but Democrats have lost about half their edge with young voters to the GOP since 2008.  Indeed, the GOP now has an advantage with white youths, suggesting that the youth vote is following the same trends we see in the electorate as a whole.  Moreover, the most recent dKos/SEIU poll — which ought to harbor no bias against the left — asked, “Which of the following statements best describes your opinion on the United States’ current economic situation: corporate greed helped lead to the current crisis and these practices need to be reined in to fix our economy, OR now is not the time to constrict corporations while we are trying to get our economy back on track?”  The overall split was 57/37; the split for 18-29 year olds was 52/42.

In short, Occupy Wall Street does not appear to reflect any particular revolutionary sentiment among the American youth vote.  As for the segment of the youth vote attracted to the protests, what are they going to do?  Vote for Obama, as Kristof and his fellow travelers in the media almost certainly will?  The hipster demographic is already disillusioned with The One.  Write in someone like Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders?  Stay home with their bongs?  The left-leaning media is having its fantasy moment here, but the primary beneficiary of Occupy Wall Street is probably the GOP.

–Karl

[Guest post by DRJ]

At PowerLine, Scott Johnson posts on the aftermath of the New York Times’ Bush-era exposes of the NSA and SWIFT programs that were based on anonymous leaks. One of the Times’ reporters, James Risen, published a book on these and other topics. Chapter 9 dealt with CIA efforts to disrupt the Iranian nuclear research and Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., has subpoenaed Risen regarding those revelations. Risen is resisting the subpoena, citing the confidentiality he owes as a reporter to his source or sources.

Johnson links a Washington Post guest post by Gabriel Schoenfeld regarding Risen’s obligation as a citizen to reveal his sources:

“James Risen has an obligation as a citizen to tell a grand jury who provided him with classified information that may have severely damaged our ability to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. This obligation has not deterred voices in and around the press from justifying both the leaking and the publishing of the leaked materials. Risen himself calls his anonymous sources “heroes.” Others, striking a tone of outrage, profess to see no public purpose served by government secrecy in this critical realm: “The message [the Obama administration is sending] to everyone is, ‘You leak to the media, we will get you,’ ” is what Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, complained to The Washington Post. “We had thought that the Obama administration would be different,” writes Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “a little less likely to want to menace and jail journalists… I find this utterly disappointing.”

But what is utterly disappointing — yet not in the least surprising if one is familiar with the exalted status members of the press like to confer on themselves–is not the subpoena issued to Risen. Rather, it is the assumption held by Nicholas Kristof and many others in the news business that journalists are exempt from the fundamental obligations of citizenship. If James Risen keeps his silence and is held in contempt of court and then sent to jail, that will certainly provoke howls of outrage in the press. It will also be a just outcome, for no one is above the law.”

These incidents are not novel or unusual. For instance, recently Beldar commented hypothetically regarding what might happen in the Faisal Shahzad case if a law enforcement officer leaked information to reporters about Shahzad’s location:

“Being a journalist doesn’t immunize anyone from the consequences of criminal laws. The “shield” is an extremely narrow qualified privilege, and the nature of the privilege is the ability to protect the identity of a confidential source by being exempted from testifying about that particular subject. As a qualified privilege, it can be overcome — ask Judith Miller, or rather, the D.C. Circuit judges who affirmed her contempt sentence to jail — upon a proper showing by the government (basically that the info is really important and there’s no other way to get it). So nothing in the reporter’s shield law says if the reporter breaks a criminal statute, he gets a free pass because he’s a reporter.

Leaking this kind of national security information is certainly a dischargeable offense for any law enforcement officer, and I would be very surprised if it weren’t also a violation of the federal criminal laws. If Obama were serious about national security, he would set about exhausting all other potential sources in order to identify and prosecute the leakers. If no other sources could accomplish that, then it would be time to put the journalist who was tipped to the real hideout location on the witness stand to identify his source, the presumed leaker.”

The Pentagon Papers introduced America to the notion that reporters can expose national secrets. Watergate reinforced that as something exciting, romantic, and a career-builder. But there are and should be consequences to exposing national secrets. In their zeal to break the big story, that’s something reporters have apparently forgotten.

— DRJ

[Posted by Karl]

This is generally not the opening usually seen for a Nicholas D. Kristof column:

Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering.

One academic study asked 2,000 Americans to fill out questionnaires about moral questions. In some cases, they were asked to fill them out as they thought a “typical liberal” or a “typical conservative” would respond.

Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.

That may not be surprising to conservatives, but — if the study is correct — it is likely shocking to so-called liberals.  One of the authors of the study, University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt, has written a book, The Righteous Mind, from which Kristof summarizes an explanation for the disconnect:

Americans speak about values in six languages, from care to sanctity. Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims.

“Moral psychology can help to explain why the Democratic Party has had so much difficulty connecting with voters,” writes Haidt, a former liberal who says he became a centrist while writing the book.

I am generally skeptical of pseudo-science trotted out in the service of politics.  Liberals who are usually quick to discount scientific (especially biological) explanations for phenomena inconvenient to their ideology are much more flexible in trotting out “studies” to paint the right as racist neanderthals.  Kristof veers near this territory in his column, but it’s not clear that Haidt buys all the implications ideologues draw from such studies.  Indeed, the NYT book review from William Saletan suggests Haidt does not think much of much psycho-punditry himself:

The usual argument of these psycho-­pundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.”

I plan on reading the book and expect I may disagree with chunks of it.  For example, Saletan says the book is short on solutions for ideological segregation, but one suggestion is to attack gerrymandering.  That may sound good to a psychologist, but political scientists have not found gerrymandering to be an important cause of political polarization.  If people like me do not read the book, who will?  Liberals are probably more likely to ignore it.  They will be reading less objective, less scientific twaddle on the subject from Chris Mooney, which even Kevin Drum doesn’t buy (As someone on Twitter whose name I didn’t get permission to use noted, Mooney might consider that he is the exact sort that has caused more educated conservatives to become skeptical of scientists).

–Karl