Read it.

The people pushing the “energy transition” in New York and elsewhere claim a foundation in science, but proceed with religious fervor. A key element of the playbook is never to engage with people asking legitimate questions, who are generally dismissed out of hand as “deniers.” But every so often one of the team will break the code of silence, thus giving us some insight into the thought process behind the campaign to transform our energy supply.

In New York, the most important academic guru behind the Climate Act and energy transition is a Cornell professor named Robert Howarth. Howarth is a professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology. Based on that background, he would seem to have nothing to offer on the subject of the engineering of an electrical grid. But Howarth has a burning desire to save the planet, and he has read some work by trendy Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, and has become convinced that putting together a zero-carbon electricity grid is no problem. Despite his total lack of relevant expertise in grid engineering, he has somehow gotten the ear of the New York State legislature and bureaucracies on that subject.

Read it.

Over the weekend, The Daily Telegraph published an article which revealed that almost “£1.5 million in taxpayer funding has been awarded to a research project that aims to ‘decolonise’ folk singing.” Such research is surprisingly typical within universities at least in one respect, namely that the funding is awarded on the grounds that the conclusion of the research is determined long before any research begins. Hence, in no way can this be understood as scholarship, but rather it possesses both the form and the content of propaganda, and for a particular kind of regime.

I guess Hearts of Oak and The Roast Beef of Old England are not long for this world.

Read it.

The transgender movement’s cultural Blitzkrieg swept the elite institutions of the West in less than a decade, but their hold on the public imagination has always been far more tenuous. It is one thing to get academics and activists to believe that the phrase “her penis” makes perfect sense; it is quite another to condition ordinary people into believing that. Consequently, the transgender movement has attempted to enforce their agenda by government totalitarianism on one side, and street-level violence on the other.

This is not hyperbole. Vassilis Tsiartas, widely considered to be one of the greatest Greek soccer stars of all time, was convicted in 2022 of “transphobic” social media posts and given a 10-month suspended prison sentence and 5,000 euro fine for “violence or hatred for reasons of gender identity.” Norwegian filmmaker and actress Tonje Gjevjon was criminally investigated for stating that men cannot be lesbians; her compatriot, the feminist Christina Ellingsen, was investigated for saying that men cannot become women.

Read it.

San Francisco United School District’s LGBTQ Student Services department offers guidance on “Changing Your Name and/or Gender” in the district’s systems. The document offers a note “for students to think about,” recommending they wait to change their in the school records if they are not ready for their parents to find out their gender identity.

“Remember that your caregivers have the right to check out some of your school files, Google Classroom, or may end up on a Zoom call or meeting with you and staff at your school, and may see/hear that you are using a different name or pronoun,” the note reads. “If you are concerned about your caregiver’s response, you may not be ready to complete any of the above processes.”

It’s unclear why the district refers to parents as “caregivers.”

If they gave a care they wouldn’t put their kids in government schools.

Time to leave.

Read it.

In New York City, there is an exhibit honoring the victims of Gaza’s October 7 massacres. A week ago, many Jews attended an event there. Leaving the event on the subway, they were harassed by a “masked mob of pro-Hamas demonstrators,” including one masked man who accosted a group of Jews on the subway and demanded that “Zionists” raise their hands, warning, “This is your chance to get out.” That anti-Jewish “activist” has now been identified as Christopher Husary. And nothing about his history will surprise you.

Read it.

For almost a decade Disney has been on a Diveristy, Equity and Inclusion induced spiral into clown world (along with a number of major entertainment and media companies). The shift by corporations towards promoting ideological propaganda instead of chasing profits started out subtle and has quickly escalated into a crescendo of absurdity.

Disney has become the public focus of the wokification of media for a number of reasons including the conglomerate’s massive size and global reach, but more than anything else, it used to be family favored company. When an organization makes the virtues of family and childhood innocence its brand, any slide into degeneracy or indoctrination is going to be amplified and scrutinized.

Read it.

A new series of papers presented as an objective guide to populist parties adds fuel to the panic over the rise of the ‘far right’ in Europe. Still reeling from June’s election results, the academics behind a Europe-wide political blacklist have updated their terms of engagement by claiming to offer clear and workable language for understanding recent trends—while completely wedded to a Brussels-based and centrist view of politics.

Read it.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit heard oral arguments June 11 in St. Joseph Parish v. Nessel. The case involves St. Joseph Catholic School in Saint Johns, Michigan, which is asking the court to protect its ability to hire staff who share the same faith.

In July 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court reinterpreted a state civil rights statute’s definition of sex to include sexual orientation, without any exemption for religious organizations. In March 2023, the Michigan Legislature wrote the change into state law, expressly prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

The school’s right to hire staff who hold Catholic religious views on marriage and gender is at risk. St. Joseph’s asks all staff to be practicing Catholics who uphold the faith.

St. Joseph’s also risks being sued for discrimination because of its beliefs about gender and marriage, because the law makes it illegal to decline to use staff members’ or students’ preferred personal pronouns or to have separate girls’ and boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

Time to leave.

New York Times.

A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked Iowa from enforcing its own immigration law, which makes it a state crime to enter Iowa after being deported or denied entry into the United States.

The ruling comes amid a national push by statehouse conservatives to assert authority over illegal immigration, which the Justice Department argues is solely the federal government’s responsibility.

“As a matter of politics, the new legislation might be defensible,” Judge Stephen Locher wrote. “As a matter of constitutional law, it is not.”

The doctrine involved is ‘pre-emption‘. This is why, when activists try to get control over people’s lives, they prefer to do it at the Federal level.

Read it.

“America is the land of opportunity.” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” “America is a melting pot.” Those are examples of harmful “microaggressions,” according to Columbia professor Derald Wing Sue, lauded by Oregon’s state government as a “microaggressions expert.”

Now, under a soon-to-be-finalized ethics rule from the Oregon Medical Board, doctors who commit “microaggressions” risk losing their medical licenses.

Under Oregon law, doctors who fail to report “unprofessional conduct” from themselves or a colleague within 10 business days can face severe penalties, including loss of license. The state’s medical board is in the process of shoehorning “microaggressions”—innocently intentioned behaviors interpreted by women or minorities to be subliminal communications of bias—into its definition of “unprofessional conduct,” according to the proposed rule, which the board unveiled in April.

Read it.

The Biden Administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) just issued a proposal to ban medical debt from factoring into your credit score. But for free-money socialists and their Keynesian bedfellows, this doesn’t go nearly far enough: short of canceling medical debt entirely, nothing else is acceptable.

Read it.

The European Union is ready to punish France if Marine Le Pen’s nationalist-sovereigntist National Rally (Rassemblement National) wins the upcoming French parliamentary elections, writes establishment media outlet Politico. According to the article, the European Commission may not let a right-wing government “off the hook” with regards to France’s overspending, unlike their leniency with the current and previous cabinets. This is clearly a sign that the EU institutions use their ‘power of the purse’ to penalise only those member states they politically disagree with.

New York Post.

A patriotic middle schooler who was “humiliated” by his principal when he was barred from giving his school election speech has been kicked out of the school, the student’s mother claims.

Hattie Ruggles shared the news Tuesday that her son Jimmy Heyward and his two sisters would not be returning to Saint Bonaventure Catholic School in Huntington Beach, Calif., over a violation of the school’s code of conduct.

“Finally heard from St. Bonaventure. This morning we received an email terminating Jimmy, Alice, and Livia from the school and will not allow them to return next year,” Ruggles shared on Facebook along with a photo of the termination letter, referencing her three children.

Catholic schools aren’t what they used to be.

New York Post.

Summertime in presidential campaign season tends to resemble midyear network TV schedules of yesteryear: unpopular, full of re-runs and marred by the occasional high-concept experiment gone horribly wrong.

Such is the Democrats’ latest attempt to jump-start their stubbornly nonplussed electorate with a jolt of old-timey hate.

Presented with endless potential lines of attack against the GOP’s court-convicted-nominee and his bottomless well of sycophants, lefties are instead sounding the ooga-booga alarm against a menace that does not meaningfully exist: Christian nationalism.

“Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration,” warned a Politico headline, over an article about . . . a single such ally, who heads up a three-year-old think tank no one’s ever heard of, and speaks with the former president “at least once a month” (according to an anonymous source, natch).

The Foundry.

Democratic lawmakers are escalating their attacks on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the wake of secret recordings that were obtained last week of the justice agreeing that America should return “to a place of godliness.”

Sounds good to me.

Read it.

A coalition of immigrant advocacy groups sued the Biden administration on Wednesday over President Joe Biden’s recent directive that effectively halts asylum claims at the southern border, saying it differs little from a similar move during the Trump administration that was blocked by the courts.

Read it.

Rap artist Jay-Z drew outrage from left-wing critics over the weekend when his talent agency unveiled an initiative to promote a school-choice program that would give Philadelphia’s low-income students access to the city’s prestigious private schools.

Roc Nation, the talent agency Jay-Z founded, will host events to educate residents about proposed legislation in the Pennsylvania Senate that would distribute from public funds up to $300 million in scholarships to low-income students. The legislation is similar to school-choice voucher programs across the country that give students the opportunity to pursue education at private schools rather than low-performing public schools.

“We want to empower the youth and families with the knowledge to pursue their scholastic dreams, make their voices heard, and become the leaders of tomorrow,” Roc Nation’s managing director of philanthropy Dania Diaz said of the initiative. Left-wing opponents of school-choice policies, however, described Jay-Z’s education initiative as a betrayal and a sinister collaboration with right-wing forces.

“This is no different than the right-wing efforts in Arizona, Florida and elsewhere just because they put a Black face on it,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’s controversial 1619 Project series.

“All within the stete, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

“The Virginia NAACP is bringing this lawsuit on behalf of its members and families, including students in the Shenandoah County school system,” the NAACP’s press release announcing the lawsuit reads. “The families whose children attend Shenandoah County Public Schools seek the removal of Confederate names and mascots and to prevent any future naming involving Confederate leaders. The Virginia NAACP will not allow localities to advance white supremacy. The Virginia NAACP will continue to fight against policies and legislation that serve to send the Commonwealth of Virginia backward.”

The lawsuit comes after the school board voted to reverse a 2020 decision to change the schools’ names because they were linked to Confederate leaders. On May 10, the Shenandoah board voted 5-1 to reinstate the original names, with Mountain View High School going back to the name Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary School returning to the name Ashby-Lee Elementary School.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The conservationist group known as NYC Audubon changed its name to NYC Bird Alliance to distance itself from the pro-slavery views of ornithologist and illustrator John James Audubon, the organization announced.

Rod Dreher.

On Monday, Americans and Britons woke up to media reports about the surge of the “far right” in Europe. The news, according to Anglophone media, was especially bad in France, where the “far right” walloped President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition so thoroughly that Macron felt compelled to call snap elections.

English speakers could be forgiven for panicking over fear that a Franco-fascist skunk called Pepe Le Pétain had come to stink up the Republic, and herald the odiferous return of Vichy. After all, what else could “far right” mean?

After this weekend’s vote, it should be clear that “far right” is a term that says more about the biases of the person using it than it does about the person or party to whom it is applied.

Read it.

If you don’t get on board with woke, you oppose “democracy.” You’re a bigot, a racist, or a Christian nationalist.

Where does this insane idea come from? It comes from the spin masters at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The SPLC has long demonized mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits by putting them on a map with Ku Klux Klan chapters. It updates this “hate map” annually with a “Year in Hate and Extremism” report for the previous year. On Tuesday, it published the report for 2023.

Read it.

For years, free speech advocates (including myself) have criticized the new rationalization for censorship in the cause of combating disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. As discussed in my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, there is a burgeoning cottage industry in academia in helping corporations and government agencies to target certain political, social, and scientific viewpoints. One of those centers is located at the Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Now, however, the faculty are accusing each other of misinformation over the departure of “misinformation and disinformation” expert Joan Donovan.

Read it.

The world’s largest math education organization is injecting identity politics where it doesn’t belong—and undermining math education in the process.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics told teachers to “regularly and intentionally integrate more equity, justice, and culturally centered mathematics education” in every math lesson in a May 20 position statement,

The council argues that math education must respond to the “culture” of students, represented in “multidimensional identities,” including “race, ethnicity, religion, generation, gender, sexual orientation, education, class, occupation and socio-economic status, and disability.”

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has put a group founded by a lesbian on its “hate map” because the group opposes the transgendering, mutilation and sexualizing of children.

UnHerd.

On 25 November 1970, the great Japanese novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima arrived for an appointment with the commandant of the Tokyo barracks of the Japan Self-Defence Forces, Eastern Command. With the help of four others who joined him on his visit, Mishima tied the commandant to a chair and then strode out onto his balcony to pour vitriol on post-war Japan. A crowd of bewildered recruits below heard Mishima effectively call for a coup d’état, accusing his countrymen of chasing economic prosperity while “forgetting the principles of the nation, losing their native spirit, pursuing the trivial without correcting the essential [and] leading themselves into spiritual emptiness”.

The reaction among most Japanese to Mishima’s speech and subsequent ritual suicide — he plunged a samurai sword into his belly back in the commandant’s office, before one of his comrades beheaded him — was one of mystification and sadness. Others, both in Japan and around the world, found that Mishima’s message resonated.

Among them was the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, by this point in his early-70s. Disappointed by the demise, 25 years earlier, of what he regarded as the “miracle” of Japan’s fascist theocracy, Evola saw in Mishima’s final act a courageous call for his country to awaken from the prosperous slumber into which it had been cast by the United States, first as post-war occupier and then as partner in an uneven alliance.

To some people, there is no ‘right’ but the ‘far-right’. Many of these people work in ‘journalism’.

Read it.

The Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual list of “hate groups” and “antigovernment extremist groups” Tuesday, and many conservatives say they are disappointed to be left out.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has squandered its credibility on hate. It gained its reputation by suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, but it took the program it used to monitor the Klan and weaponized it to smear conservative and Christian groups as “hate groups,” placing them on a map with Klan chapters.

The SPLC is currently facing a defamation lawsuit that has made it to the discovery process. A former employee called this a “highly profitable scam,” and some conservatives consider landing on the SPLC’s “hate map” to be a badge of honor.

Read it.

The names and photos of the students in a New Jersey high school Jewish club were cut from the 2024 edition of the East Brunswick High School yearbook in what the town’s mayor has called a “blatant antisemitic act.”

Read it.

It’s not enough to be gay, you have to be the correct (not right, God forbid) kind of gay.

Read it.

Fewer fuel particles injected into the atmosphere reduce cloud droplet density and this leads to clouds that reflect less solar radiation back into space.

Read it.

Google continues to bury former President Donald Trump’s campaign website after a Manhattan, New York jury came down with a guilty verdict in the dubious case filed by George Soros-backed prosecutor Alvin Bragg.

MRC Free Speech America analyzed Google search results for the eight presidential candidates still in the race Friday. Despite his donation website crashing due to the overwhelming number of visitors following the verdict Thursday, former President Trump was the only candidate whose campaign website did not appear on the first page of search results a day later. All seven other candidates’ websites, including those of President Joe Biden and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr, appeared in the first 10 results when researchers searched for each candidate’s name and the phrase “presidential race 2024.”

“There you go again,” said MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris. “Google is up to its old censorship antics in an all-important election season. Just like it did in 2022, burying Republican campaign websites in key Senate races, burying its biggest critics and burying the GOP candidate in the Georgia runoff races, Google is burying the leading GOP challenger in the 2024 presidential race from the first page of results.”

Harvard Crimson.

The worm turns.

Power Line.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had fresh entries in our “Civil War on the Left” series, partly because they became redundant and therefore boring, but also because the left has become so un-civil. Still, as I have been remarking (most recently over at The Pipeline), it must be infuriating to be a climate change protestor setting out in the morning to block a road or deface a statue, only to find the pro-Hamas protestors got up earlier and beat you to it. The solution to this was simply to merge the issues, and voila: Climate Justice for Gaza!

But now it is Pride Month again (you’ll just have to contain your excitement), and yesterday a pro-Hamas mob blocked Pride parades in both New York and Philadelphia, and also over in England, as it will be difficult to harmonize the pro-Hamas and the pro-Pride movements, because gravity from building rooftops.

Slate.

Every now and them, Voice of the Crust SLATE puts out something interesting.

Perhaps you hold the currently popular notion that medieval witch hunts targeted wise old women who made herbal remedies for their ungrateful peasant neighbors? Incorrect, according to Stanmore and most historians of the period. In the first place, witch hunts were rare during the Middle Ages. They proliferated in the early modern period, and while Stanmore does not explore theories about what caused this in Cunning Folk, historians increasingly view Europe’s witch hunts as a symptom of social upheaval and competing faiths following the Reformation. Witch hunts occurred within all Christian denominations and served as a kind of advertisement for a particular church’s ability to secure both salvation and protection from evil for its members. They were dramatic demonstrations of purity in a highly competitive ideological marketplace.[emphasis added]

Which tells you everything you need to know about the Trump trials.

Politico.

Donald Trump’s conviction has raised many political and legal questions, but at least one issue is not in doubt: whether he will appeal.

He might even win.

Watch it.

This disturbing legal trend with firearm training is on the rise in the courtroom. Could your firearm training affect you in a disturbing way? What does this mean for firearm training, police officers, military members, license and permit holders, gun owners, and gun enthusiasts? Armed Attorneys Emily Taylor and Richard Hayes discuss the legal trend they’re seeing more frequently with firearm training.

Freeberg nails it.

“Symbol(s) of hate.” I’m not quoting any one particular thing. It’s the concept. Progressives see a S.O.H. and they want it covered, removed, preferably destroyed. You put up text or an image on Facebook expressing a “hateful” idea, their cops will see to it the display is as temporary as possible. Get rid of those symbols.

Read it.

The Republican attorneys general of Mississippi and Tennessee announced Friday that they are part of a multistate lawsuit challenging a new Biden administration rule that redefines Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition against discrimination based on “sex” to include “gender identity.”

“Gender identity” is, of course, mentioned nowhere in the applicable statute. This regulation goes beyond the powers granted in HHS. But they plan to do it anyway because it fits the Democrat fascist political agenda.

The rule change by the Department of Health and Human Services “is the latest effort by the Biden Administration to enshrine sweeping gender-identity mandates without congressional consent,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday at U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Mississippi.

The rule would require medical providers to perform surgeries and administer hormone drugs to children and adults for the purpose of gender transition, without regard for a doctor’s medical judgment as to whether that treatment was appropriate, according to a news release from the office of Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch.

Associated Press.

The jury in Donald Trump’s hush money trial ended its first day of deliberations without a verdict Wednesday but asked to rehear testimony from key witnesses about the alleged hush money scheme at the heart of the history-making case.

The 12-person jury was sent home around 4 p.m. after about 4 1/2 hours of deliberations. The process is to resume Thursday, when jurors are expected to rehear the requested testimony and at least part of the judge’s legal instructions meant to guide them on the law.

The notes sent to the judge with the requests were the first burst of communication with the court after the panel of seven men and five women was sent to a private room just before 11:30 a.m. to begin weighing a verdict.

Apparently it’s not as much of a slam-cunk as the Narrative media have been reporting.

Read it.

In a shot across the bow against Scientific American’s continued descent into unscientific twaddle, a BMJ investigation documented over a dozen social media posts by editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth promoting transgender care for children, despite scientific evidence showing such treatment has had “devastating consequences” for minors.

Read it.

House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., has filed a misconduct complaint against Judge Juan Merchan, whom she says was not “randomly” selected to preside over former President Donald Trump’s legal expense trial in New York City.

Steve Sailer.

In 2017 the pseudonymous blogger Spotted Toad appears to have coined the term “The Great Awokening” to denote the decade of identity politics mania that began about 2013.

His joke was of course a pun upon the various Great Awakening religious revivals that periodically swept Protestant America in the 1730s and the early 1800s (especially in upstate New York’s “burned-over district”), and the liberal Social Gospel movement of the late 19th century that inspired humanitarian reformers such as Jane Addams.

But Protestant history, which was long recognized as absolutely central to American history, is increasingly seen as boring, and thus all this is fading from consciousness.

Read it.

UCLA Professor Hannah Appel has accused the school of human rights violations amounting to “torture” in the treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters. The reason is the denial of water and food from being brought into a building being unlawfully occupied by protesters, even though the students were free to leave at any time.

Read it.

For the political left, free speech is relative. If a certain brand of public grievance conflicts with their agenda then it’s no longer considered “free.” All they have to do is label protests they don’t like as insurrections and expressions of defiance as hate speech.

Nothing showcases this hypocrisy more than the legal privileges given to LGBT movements and symbols. Woke activists can destroy American monuments, deface or tear down historical statues and burn the American flag without fear of reprisal, but if you dare leave a mark on a pride flag in the middle of the road you will face the full force of the law.

Such is the case in St. Petersburg, Florida where two separate vehicles have burned rubber across a pride mural painted in the middle of a Central Avenue intersection. Democrat officials are outraged by the persistent damage to the giant pride flag and they claim the cost to fix the mural will be over $1000, which local police say is a felony. A “manhunt” is now underway for the perpetrators.

Power Line.

Bragg laid out his 34-count indictment of President Trump with links to underlying documents in this press release dated April 4, 2023. The indictment relies on section 175.10 of New York’s criminal law (“Falsifying business records in the first degree”): “A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”

In a most recent update on the trial, Andrew McCarthy concisely explained the lawlessness inherent in Bragg’s prosecution (with links to previous columns that support each point). Under New York’s state constitution, the felony statute invoked gives insufficient notice of what it is criminalizing. The indictment fails to explain what laws Trump is alleged to have broken. Bragg purports to enforce federal law over which he has no enforcement jurisdiction. To top it off, Bragg’s version of federal campaign-finance law — over which he has no authority — diverges from the interpretations followed by the two federal agencies with exclusive jurisdiction over that law (the Justice Department and the FEC).

Read it.

On the eve of closing arguments in the business records case in New York City, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote Monday that former President Donald Trump should be found “not guilty.”

Read it.

Former director of the defunct Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), Nina Jankowicz, said President Joe Biden’s disinformation policing government does not even have a consistent definition of disinformation.

Rep. Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee released the transcript of Jankowicz’s sworn testimony to the committee which it gathered in April 2023. In her testimony, Jankowicz pointed out discrepancies in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) definition of disinformation. DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency “has one definition, and one of the things that occurred to me while I was at DHS is that different entities were dealing with different definitions,” she said. But according to Jordan, CISA’s definition is merely “anything that they deem false.”

The leftist disinformation activist said that creating protocols for identifying misinformation, disinformation and misinformation “wasn’t really at the top of the list” of things to do. “And so, to get to identification, you first have to kind of have an agreement about what you’re talking about,” said Jankowicz. “You can’t say that something is a bear if you don’t know what a bear looks like. So that’s where we were.”

Read it.

Intersectionality has been a buzzword used by the hard Left to slyly erase inconvenient differences in their chaotic movement. It was the ameliorator of unresolvable dilemmas. Now it has become an unspoken doctrine of the self-appointed right-leaning Twitterati and the supercilious, tolerant (read ‘Lib-Dem in disguise’) Tory elite. If you are one of these—lower your eyebrows, stop liking that annoyingly funny meme posted by Elon Musk, cease fawning over Liz Truss’s latest piece of soon-to-be-reduced-in-Waterstones literature—and read on. Simply put, self-proclaimed conservatives will now accept bedfellows of the strangest kinds, based on their mutual attachment to basic beliefs.

Here I am not referring to the diplomacy of accepting new converts to the political conversation. I am talking about the blind desperation for alliance in a world of untrue truths and transient ideologies—a world where companionship follows the hoof-marks of a rare and ill-defined beast that frequently rears its delinquent head in political circles: the often misappropriated ‘Overton Window.’

Read it.

Publication of research results, theoretical propositions and scholarly essays is not a free-for-all. As shown by the dogmatism around climate change and Covid-19, sceptics struggle to get papers in print. The gatekeeper is the peer-review system, which people take for granted as a screening process to ensure rigour in scientific literature.

But it has not always been that way. Until at least the 1950s, the decision to publish was made by the editors of academic journals, who were typically eminent professors in their field. Peer review, by contrast, entails the editor sending an anonymised manuscript to independent reviewers, and although the editor makes a final decision, the reviews indicate whether the submission should be accepted, revised or rejected. This may seem fair and objective, but in reality peer review has become a means of knowledge control – and as we argue here, perhaps that was always the purpose.

‘Peer-reviewed’ is typically better than ‘non-peer-reviewed’, but not my much. The number of such papers that eventually wind up retracted doesn’t fill one with any confidence. The same problem shows up in The News all the time–nothing is more common than the click-bait headline ‘X LINKED TO Y’, the obvious insinuation that there is some causal link which they have to hint at because (wait for it) CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION. (Unfortunately, when causation is unknown, sometimes correlation is all you have to work with.)

Read it.

EBU, the European Broadcasting Union, is under fire for excluding the nationalist Identity and Democracy (ID) group’s representative, Anders Vistisen (Danish People’s Party) from the largest official TV debate ahead of June’s EU elections, Politico wrote.

The organizer claims that they cannot allow ID (predicted to be the next Parliament’s third largest group) to participate in the debate between lead candidates, because the party hasn’t officially nominated one Spitzenkandidat—despite the fact that almost no other party seems to take the purely ceremonial system seriously.

The final debate will take place on May 23rd, just two weeks before voting opens for some 400 million people across the EU to elect the next 720 members of the European Parliament.