Not long ago, I wrote that the ethical problem with Harlan Crow’s patronage of Clarence Thomas is that Thomas has put his living standard at risk should he ever do anything to significantly displease Crow:

This seems to me a fairly obvious problem! Indeed, it’s the basic concept at the heart of financial ethics for public employees. People in the position to make important decisions for the government should not be financially dependent on other people.

National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, to whom I was responding, has published a retort so ludicrous I had to read it several times to be sure I was not misunderstanding it. McLaughlin’s entire argument is based on the premise that my argument is that Thomas acted unethically not by accepting lavish gifts but by having friends. Here is the relevant passage of his case:

No, of course, the ethical problem isn’t that Thomas is afraid of alienating his social circle. It’s that alienating his social circle would mean risking free tuition for the boy he is raising as a son, free housing for his mother, and the extremely lavish vacations he could never otherwise afford. Everybody has friends. Generally, those friendships do not involve massive financial leverage.

McLaughlin apparently can’t defend Thomas’s habit of accepting massive undisclosed gifts from his friend, so he pretends the only objection is that Thomas has a friend.

He then proceeds to argue that Supreme Court justices don’t really care about money:

Talk about proving too much! This argument would seem to negate any financial limits for Supreme Court justices — they could just take direct payments from litigants, and we could be secure in the knowledge that their rulings would be unaffected and driven by the purity of ideas.

And if McLaughlin is suggesting Thomas isn’t motivated by money, maybe Thomas should stop accepting large financial gifts. After all, he’s not getting any benefit from them, right?

Glenn Greenwald recently tweeted a long, smug thread about polling showing the American public agrees with him about various topics related to Joe Biden. “A newly released Harris-Harvard poll conclusively demonstrates how radically out of touch is liberal corporate media with the views of Americans,” he gloated, concluding, “What’s so striking here isn’t that the corporate media relentlessly advocates views and ideologies that majorities of Americans — often large majorities — reject. It’s that the views held by majorities are all but banned on NBC, CNN, NYT and WPost.”

This struck me as odd. Greenwald is positively obsessed with the media. (Specifically, the mainstream media — he tends to act like conservative media doesn’t exist.) So if the media’s views are so ineffective, why does he care so much?

One answer is that when Greenwald is forced to admit the American public holds an opinion he disagrees with, he likes to blame it on media propaganda.

In January, Greenwald complained that his beliefs about January 6 are shared by very few people:

Naturally, he attributes that to “the nation’s largest media corporations, who demonstrated yet again that there is literally no limit to their willingness to lie, fabricate and invent stories when doing so advances their deeply ideological and partisan interests.”

Do Americans blame Russia for invading Ukraine and consider it a threat? Obviously, Greenwald explained the following month, it’s because the media is brainwashing them:

I think I’ve cracked the Greenwald algorithm! If public opinion disagrees with him, the public has been bamboozled by the media. If public opinion agrees with Greenwald, it proves the (non-Fox) media is irrelevant. What a perfectly designed worldview it is — every conceivable permutation of public opinion simply serves to confirm it.

When numerous universities announced they would stop using standardized tests in college applications on the grounds that these tests allegedly benefit the rich, skeptics immediately retorted that rich people would simply find ways to game the remaining criteria.

Lo and behold. ProPublica reports on a burgeoning new scam for college applicants: “A new industry is extracting fees from well-heeled families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential.” The students can engage in — or at least publish — research papers as high-school students and use these papers to flesh out their college applications. College admissions departments are hardly up to the task of evaluating the veracity, let alone the academic rigor, of these papers.

I’ve written recently about the fixation of progressive critics on discrediting standardized-test scores. These tests do indeed reflect embedded inequalities in educational outcomes between rich and poor, but the alternative metrics for allocating spaces in selective universities are even more discriminatory. Standardized tests do at least allow bright children in low-performing schools to show their academic potential. The metrics that are replacing these tests — teenagers starting their own NGOs, mastering obscure sports like water polo or fencing, and now producing “research” — are all far more exclusionary.

In the middle of the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s encomium to Ron DeSantis, which ticks off his “impressive” legislative record, is a line crediting him with “insisting on free speech in higher education.”

Free speech? DeSantis?

The Florida governor’s allies blocked professors in the state from testifying as expert witnesses, fearing they might undermine his positions. Then he passed a law explicitly prohibiting college professors from espousing concepts the state deems excessively woke. A judge struck it down as a clear violation of the First Amendment, especially citing its claim “that anything professors utter in a state university classroom during ‘in-class instruction’ is government speech, and thus, the government can both determine the content of that speech and prohibit the expression of certain viewpoints.”

After that rebuke, DeSantis passed a law consolidating control of hiring and firing of faculty in the hands of political appointees, a straightforward attack on academic freedom. Ironically, the effect of eliminating tenure protection will make professors not only more afraid to offend DeSantis but also more afraid to offend left-wing activists on their own campuses.

The whole ideology behind DeSantis’s higher-education program presumes that conservatives can no longer confine their position to defending free speech. The universities have been so captured by left-wing thought, the argument goes, that demanding neutrality is too weak. Their only recourse is to actively impose counter-indoctrination through state power.

Not all conservatives are onboard with this belief. The problem, as the Journal editorial illustrates, is that the conservatives who aren’t enthusiastic about importing Viktor Orbán’s methods into the United States are refusing to hold DeSantis accountable for his overt illiberalism. Instead, they’re pretending it isn’t happening. It’s the same dynamic they employed to ignore Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses.

I enjoyed James Cromwell’s interview with Vulture. The actor, who plays Ewan Roy on Succession, turns out to have pretty much the same political beliefs as his character. This thumbnail sketch of his history of activism doubles as a chronicle of the decline of the American left:

I suppose the positive way to frame this trajectory from defying Jim Crow to demanding less-expensive vegan milk at Starbucks would be that the big problems have been solved.

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