May
20
2026

A Lot of Wisdom Per Word

Right here:

Some commenters point out that the Industrial Revolution was no bed of roses. True enough. But it did lift a lot of people out of miserable poverty, disease, and general oppression.

And I think the Tweeter was making a point relevant to today's AI revolution. (Is that what they'll be calling it in the coming centuries? In whatever language they'll be speaking then?)

Without mentioning AI at all, Andy Kessler notes how it could all go wrong, by handing political power to Our Champagne Socialists.

Twenty years ago, comedian Ron White presciently observed, “You can’t fix stupid.” Socialism fails. Every time. If you’re offended, go read a history book. Or visit Havana. The leaders reap the spoils. Bernie Sanders has three homes and flies private. He told Bret Baier about his “Fighting the Oligarchy” tour: “Think I’m going to be sitting on a waiting line at United?” and added, “No apologies.” Joseph Stalin had 20 dachas while the proletariat went hungry.

Thanks to capitalism, we are living in unprecedented good times. Space launches. Weight-loss wonder pills. Happy-hour-friendly autonomous cars. AI bots that will meet our every imaginable need. A more peaceful Middle East on the horizon. A resurging middle class around the globe. But that’s nothing that a few commies—er, democratic socialists—couldn’t destroy in a generation.

Socialism adoration comes from brainwashing. A recent City Journal survey of 120 “prominent colleges and universities” showed that a grand total of zero schools required economics courses to graduate. Only 15% required some U.S. government or history classes, while half required diversity, equity and inclusion-like courses. Ugh. So bye to jobs, hello socialism.

I recently reread Orwell's Animal Farm (link to my report below). A modern retelling might feature analogs of Bernie, AOC, Katie Wilson, and the Zohran as oinkers.

Also of note:

  • Also reminding me of Animal Farm 
 Jonah Goldberg detects a flaw in the Constitution: The Founders Never Conceived of a President Like Trump. (Dispatch gifted link)

    Something I missed in the discussion yesterday:

    On Tuesday, the DOJ announced that Trump, his family and business will be functionally exempt from IRS audits or prosecutions from any past tax returns, literally placing him above the law.

    Jonah argues that's grounds for impeachment. He's right, and that only adds to the list.

  • More like "Betrayal". But Federal judge Roy K. Altman goes with a different, slightly milder characterization: A Miscarriage of Journalism at ‘The New York Times’.

    Nicholas Kristof’s recent essay about supposed Israeli sex crimes against Palestinian detainees is a travesty—not simply because it’s wrong as a matter of fact, or because it regurgitates long-debunked blood libels against the Jewish state at a time of rising antisemitism around the world.

    It’s a travesty because it embraces the erosion of democratic norms at an inflection point in our history. Since our founding, the American political experiment has entrusted everyday citizens with the revolutionary power to choose. We choose the men and women who represent us. We choose how to balance the intimate relationship between a free people and its government. We choose whether to send a member of our community to prison.

    But we entrust our fellow Americans with the power to make these choices because we believe that a virtuous people will be equipped to make the right choices—principally because we assume that our citizens will be prepared to discern truth from fiction. And we feel comfortable in that assumption because we’ve devised a system of laws—based on evidence, burdens of proof, and a time-tested set of rules—to help us assess the veracity of contested claims. In this way, the jury system isn’t simply a means of ensuring fair trials. Rather, it’s a way of training free citizens to make difficult decisions for themselves.

    Can the Times be shamed enough for this? Hard to imagine.

  • Setting the record straight. Co-author Greg Lukianoff does that, in spades: What Jonathan Haidt actually said at NYU — and what The Coddling of the American Mind actually argued.

    In case you hadn’t heard, my Coddling of the American Mind co-author Jon Haidt was invited to give a commencement speech at New York University last week, and it led to an uproar from students.

    This was, in one sense, ordinary university life: students objected to a speaker, people argued about it, some booed during the speech, and others defended him. It didn’t lead to a sustained disruption of Jon’s remarks, so great. I’ve defended the right to protest on campus more than practically anybody in the United States, and this was well within the bounds of what you’d expect to see.

    The more troubling part was why NYU’s student government leaders called on the university to disinvite Jon in the run-up to commencement. “Students are astonished by the university’s inability to leverage its vast network and unique connections to secure a speaker whose scholarship and global contributions more accurately reflect the values and diversity of its graduates,” their statement read.

    I bolded the most telling bit. And Greg points out, ungently: "A university is not a mirror. It is not supposed to show students an image of themselves with better lighting."

    But there are many more wise observations at the link.

  • And getting longer by the day. At the WSJ's Free Expression newsletter, Kyle Smith recounts Al Gore’s Long and Persistent Record of Miserable Failure. (WSJ gifted link)

    In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” Al Gore wrote, with what would become his customary hyperbole, “the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of the glass shattering in Berlin.” The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”

    It’s been a “few decades.” How is Mr. Gore’s prophecy working out? Did he even get the direction right?

    Florida’s population in 1992 was around 13 million. Mr. Gore’s notional Flexodus would have reduced that figure below six million. Today, the state’s population has nearly doubled instead of more than halved. More than 23 million souls now call Florida home.

    Well, we'll try to fit in one last ride on Space Mountain before it vanishes 'neath the waves.

Recently on the book blog:

Animal Farm

(paid link)

Somehow, a very old hardcover edition of Animal Farm wound up on my bookshelf. Published by Harcourt Brace, compyright 1946. Five years before I was born. No idea how I wound up with it.

Gee, I wonder if it's worth anything to collectors? Checking Google's AI


Well, it's not going to send anyone to college, but my heirs probably won't want to throw it in the dumpster either.

Anyway, I first read Animal Farm as a kid, probably 60 or so years ago. (Not this edition. The edition I read back then was illustrated.) I was inspired to reread it, ironically, by Nicholas Clairmont's pan of the recent movie adaptation, which was characterized "the exact opposite of what the author intended." Orwellian!

But back to the book: it is an unsubtle allegory of the early history of the Soviet Union, starting with the oppressed beasts of Mr. Jones' "Manor Farm", inspired by the harangues of the old boar, Major, chasing off Jones and taking over themselves. Major's ideology drives them to rename their conquest "Animal Farm", they establish commandments, sing inspirational songs, and bleat the famous slogan: "Four legs good, two legs bad."

The parallels are many, and readers will pick up more of them the more they know about early 20th-century Russian history. (Or they can just peruse the Wikipedia page.)

Although Orwell's original subtitle of this work was "A Fairy Story", it's also horror-filled. Probably not the best bedtime reading to your toddlers, because things get explicitly violent. It is pretty much a fictionalization of Chapter 10 of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, "Why the Worst Get on Top".