May
18
2026

"Divisiveness"

It may not be the last refuge of scoundrels, but it's certainly a rhetorical hiding place along the way. Today's example provided by Greg Lukianoff:

Twitter's embed snips Greg's revelation about The Coddling of the American Mind: "… we never liked the title." (My 2019 report on the book is here.)

More, more, more:

  • And certainly not one of those mysteries with talking cats. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. checks the polls, and concludes: For the Public, Covid Is No Longer a Mystery.

    In a sense the debate is over. Since 2023, an American majority has believed Covid came from a Chinese lab.

    In 2004, 27 years after the fact, a Chinese virologist confided to an American counterpart that 1977’s flu pandemic began with the accidental release in China of a stored pathogen. Imagination isn’t strained to picture a similar confirmation eventually about Wuhan. The alternative, that the virus passed naturally from an animal population to the human population, will have its fans but is unlikely ever to be proved in such a way that would derail the lab-leak origin story the U.S. now believes.

    This means coming to terms with another fact—the U.S. governing establishment’s urgent smoke screen around Covid’s possible origins to allay pressure from voters, the media and political entrepreneurs to confront China over its role in sparking the pandemic.

    This week’s Senate testimony by career CIA official James Erdman III, largely ignored in the media, describes the background. Recall the press’s eagerness at the time to help stigmatize the lab-leak possibility. Ditto the CIA, on the alleged advice and active guidance of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dealings with Beijing must not be complicated by unproductive Covid recriminations. Such was the broad consensus. This self-interest, I suspect, would have prevailed even in the absence of an additional wrinkle—the U.S. government’s and Dr. Fauci’s role in sponsoring research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    To be fair, the relevant Wikipedia entry still presents Covid's zoonotic origins as a slam-dunk fact. (But note the Wikidisclaimer at the top, beginning "This article needs more reliable medical references for verification…".

  • "We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here!" The Josiah Bartlett Center notes that some local educrats aren't even trying to pretend that it's about the children: Manchester school board elevates educator staffing above all other priorities.

    With Manchester’s school district looking to trim its proposed 2027 budget to stay within the city’s tax cap, the Board of School Committee took the extraordinary step of forbidding the district from achieving a balanced budget by laying off educators.

    The move effectively elevates raw educator staffing numbers over all other district priorities, even though district enrollment has fallen by thousands in the last two decades.

    The most recent indicators of how well Manchester School District is doing its job:

    In 2025, Manchester students tested below state English language arts averages in every participating grade. This actually marked improvement for some grades, with grade 3 rising six percentage points from their 19 percent proficiency score among students that took the assessment in 2021.

    Within mathematics results, Manchester student results were even lower, coming in with scores less than half of state averages in every grade assessed, with grades 3 and 4 reporting the only results above 20 percent (26 and 28 percent, respectively).

    Good luck, Manchester kids. You'll need it.

  • Next thing you know, they'll be coming out against guillotines. Alex Tabarrok is shocked, stunned, and surprised to see: Hayek in Jacobin.

    Here’s something I never expected to write: Jacobin, the magazine of the DSA-aligned left, has a good article on central planning. In an interview, Vivek Chibber lays out essentially the Mises–Hayek–Kornai critique of central planning. Information problems, incentive problems and the consequent failures are laid bare. Moreover, Chibber refuses to lay the blame at the feet of Stalin, poverty, or the Russians. Nor does he wave hopefully at supercomputers and AI, as is fashionable today on the planning-curious left:

    The dilemma is this. There is a problem of information. Supercomputers will in fact help process information better. But if the information coming in is junk, and if that junk is built into the system because of the incentives that operators have in workplaces to lie, you will not have a planning system that can be put on its feet through the advent of computers or artificial intelligence or anything like that. I don’t see any reason to think that that strategic misalignment of incentives is simply there because of Russian backwardness or poverty.

    I suppose it's only a matter of time before the magazine will be j'accused of being JINO: Jacobin in name only. (Somewhat surprisingly, that's a thing.)

  • You don't despise them enough. I don't often link to RedState, and I'm not much of a Kash Patel fan, but Brad Slager does a pretty good job of dissecting a recent MSM smear effort: Now the Press Claims Kash Patel Desecrated a Historic War Site, and Disprove Themselves In the Process.

    There is a desperate pattern emerging in the press regarding FBI Director Kash Patel. There is a growing tendency to see/hear a claim of outlandish behavior involving Patel and then rush to publication without maybe committing a modicum of research or striving to apply calm, rational thought to the matter. But then again, if they commit to researching the story, they run the risk of discovering information that would completely derail their hit piece. Best to just allude to these items in a minimalist fashion and bury them under waves of outrage.

    At issue was Patel's "VIP Snorkel" tour of the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor, where 900 sailors are entombed. The original AP story tries hard to cast this as unseemly at best, but such tours have apparently been conducted for years without anyone making a fuss.

  • Send me my cash, Kash! I will share this mail with you, inexplicably routed to my spam folder. It is 

    From: MR KASH PAETL <mdenis@hauswagen.com.arl>

    I have no explanation as to why Kash can't spell his own name, or why he's sending from someone else's account at a VW dealer in Argentina. I don't care, though, because we are talking big bucks. Original formatting preserved as much as possible: 

    COMPENSATION FUNDS

Compliment of the Season

HOW are you doing today this is FBI AUTHORITY DIRECTOR Mr, KASH PATEL,  
 From  FBI headquarter
Washington DC , during our investigation work we find out that you

have funds that stop on the way, and return back to the bank of AMERICA 
, and you have lost a lot too.

scammers, all I need from you now is to sincerely tell me what happen

and the year it happen,

you have the sum of $10.5 million here right now, I will conclude

everything if I received a tangible reason from you thank you

contact information , please remember to reconfirm your information ,

we might surprise you

Contact the FBI director Email address
mrkashpatelfbiauthority@gmail.com

i will be waiting
for your responds so that all this can be finalized

information to send

NAME: ==================

COUNTRY===

state====

email address====

ADDRESS: ===============

MOBILE NO of your text or call
message.:=============

NAME OF YOUR NEAREST AIRPORT:====
ID CARD/DRIVER LICENSE:======

BEST REGARD
MR. KASH PATEL FBI AUTHORITY DIRECTOR!!

    10.5 million. But those two exclamation points at the end kinda make me suspicious; is this actually Trump, posing as Kash?


Last Modified 2026-05-19 7:11 AM EDT