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Despite a Supreme Court decision banning their behavior, unions in 11 states continue to engage in one of the most predatory practices they have ever conceived. In a process known as dues skimming, some states allow union bosses to automatically confiscate funds from Medicaid checks intended for patients whose primary caregiver is a direct family member, often without the patient or caregiver even being aware that they are losing money.

While in theory, these dues are designed to represent caregivers who are employees of the state, they are certainly not being spent in collective bargaining agreements for people who care for their elderly parents or in legal fees defending caregivers in lawsuits brought by their dependent children. Instead, this process merely takes funds from needy patients on Medicaid and redirects it to union bosses, who, in turn, spend tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions every election cycle in order to maintain their power.

Union bosses are invariably, as you might expect, Democrats.

The Other McCain turns over a rock and watch the creepy crawlies thus exposed.

Jack Posobiec is a conservative activist with more than 250,000 followers on Twitter. A woman claimed to have discovered that Posobiec had a profile on the feminist dating app Bumble, and BuzzFeed claimed that Bumble verified this was actually Posobiec’s account. Posobiec is married and his wife is pregnant, and he has threatened legal action against those he says have defamed and harassed him by “criminal fraud.”

One of the pernicious effects of ‘social media’ is that, on the Internet, not only does nobody know you’re a dog, but also nobody knows that you’re not a dog, or at least not the particular ‘dog’ they have in mind. I suppose that every celebrity (plus and minus) has had to cope with people pretending to be them on Facebook and Twitter, for good or ill. (I’m immune from this because those who know me know that I loathe Facebook and Twitter, and those who don’t know me are of no importance.)

This is also a familiar tactic. In 2010, Democrat operative Neal Rauhauser was caught red-handed organizing a Twitter harassment campaign against Tea Party activists. Rauhauser then persuaded Adrian Chen of Gawker to publish an article explaining this away as an innocent “prank.” Left-wing journalists are willing enablers of this kind of harassment, even while they claim that conservatives are perpetrators of harassment. This was the liberal media’s narrative of #GamerGate, after all — supposedly, Anita Sarkeesian and others were victims of right-wing “harassment,” which became a pretext for Twitter’s shutting down the accounts of various conservatives (myself included), but no one at Twitter ever took action against Neal Rauhauser or any of the left-wing trolls who participated in his anti-Tea Party harassment campaign.

Proglodytes accept as proof things that not even High School students ever would. This fits under the Dan Rather ‘fake but accurate’ rubric.

What has happened, during the past year or so, is that Democrats and their media allies have played their customary connect-the-dots guilt-by-association game. It works like this: Person A (e.g., Richard Spencer) becomes notorious, and then everyone on the Right is expected to denounce Person A. Prior to becoming a notorious symbol of “hate,” however, Person A had some association with Person B, Person C and Person D. These three persons who were in some way associated with Person A are now deemed “radioactive,” and everyone associated with them falls under the penumbra of suspicion, even if there is no actual evidence that they share the “hate” that made Person A notorious.

This is a combination of the proglodyte neo-Puritan Hunt for Heretics and Sinners with the proglodyte cultural Marxist inheritance of the Stalinist Hunt for Revisionists and Counter-Revolutionaries. Virtue Signalling is an outgrowth of the requirement to line up to denounce Emmanuel Goldstein lest you be suspected of suspicious lack of Zeal for the Narrative.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, discusses Blue Privilege.

Earlier I wrote about how police unions around the country give to every officer dozens of “get out of jail” cards to give to friends, family, politicians, lawyers, judges and other connected people. The cards let police on the street know that the subject is to be given “professional courtesy” and they can be used to get out of speeding tickets and other infractions. Today, drawing on the Police Union Contracting Project, I discuss how union contracts and Law Officer “Bill of Rights” give police legal privileges that regular people don’t get.

The proliferation of public employee unions is one of the pillars of our modern dystopian society. You’d think that, as public sector union pension largesse bankrupt local government after local government, they’d wake up and say, ‘Hm, that was a bad idea’, but no. It is a truth universally acknowledge but uniformly ignored that an organized special interest group can almost always triumph politically against the general mass of the public.

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I suggest ‘Jihadists cut here’.

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Don’t be that guy.

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Davos is a work of art. And like all the best art, it both delights and instructs. It reminds us that the smartest people in the world are actually the dumbest.

Imagine being one of those exalted personages, graduates of our finest universities, global citizens equally at home in Manhattan, San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, and Bombay, for whom “Creating a shared future in a fractured world” is a highly erudite proposition, a paradox of chin-scratching complexity. Imagine going every year for decades without realizing that this year’s “theme” and “The Power of collaborative innovation” (2008) and “Global cooperation and megacompetition” (1990) and “Competitive cooperation in a decade of turbulence” (1988) are virtually identical. Imagine thinking that “Responsive and responsible leadership” (2017) is not a meaningless phrase. Imagine having any idea what “Resilient dynamism” (2013) even means. Imagine thinking that “globality,” as in “Responsible globality: managing the impact of globalization” (1999), is a word.

I would say ‘foolish’ rather than ‘dumb’, but a case could be made for it.

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How about that fantastic government-provided health care, eh?

Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

Hang on, it’s coming….

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

I wonder if that’s where he got the blue hair.

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I’m surprised they didn’t give him a medal.

Every now and then, the system works.

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The European Commission has announced that its efforts to censor the Internet and purge it of “illegal hate speech” have shown “improvement” as more social media platforms hop onboard.

In a press release this weekend, the organization, which dictates policies for countries within the European Union, announced increased adoption in these efforts. A new evaluation shows that IT companies removed on average 70 percent of illegal hate speech reported to them.

Since May 2016, several tech giants, including Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and YouTube committed to censoring “illegal hate speech” through a Code of Conduct established by the European Commission.

According to the European Commission, the Code of Conduct was established to complement “legislation fighting racism and xenophobia which requires authors of illegal hate speech offenses – whether online or offline – to be effectively prosecuted.”

On average, one in five reported incidents are reported to the police.

European governments are fine with censoring speech they don’t like. Proglodytes are fine with it, too, which explains the presence of Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and YouTube.

Winston Smith, call your office.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded today to the firing of employee James Damore over his controversial memo on workplace diversity, stating that while he does not regret the decision, he regrets that people misunderstood it as a politically motivated event. Speaking in a live conversation with journalist and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher, MSNBC host Ari Melber, and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in San Francisco, Pichai said that the decision to fire Damore was about ensuring women at Google felt like the company was committed to creating a welcoming environment.

The worst part of the situation is that he doesn’t even realize that his was essentially a political decision. ‘Creating a welcoming environment’ doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of one guy, James Damore. Ensuring unity of Politically Correct thought, however does; that’s the whole rationale behind the proglodyte Hunt for Heretics and Sinners.

“I regret that people misunderstand that we may have made this for a political belief one way or another,” Pichai said. “It’s important for the women at Google, and all the people at Google, that we want to make an inclusive environment.”

Any environment that excludes certain people for their political beliefs is NOT an ‘inclusive environment’, and this statement is the biggest giveaway that there is room at Google only for the Narrative.

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If it doesn’t indoctrinate with the Narrative, then it isn’t education.

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A man threw his body onto a self-driving car — a GM Cruise AV — causing a car vs. pedestrian collision at the 16th and Valencia intersection earlier this month, the DMV reported Wednesday.

Operating in “autonomous mode,” the Cruise AV was stopped at a green light, facing northbound on Valencia, waiting to make a right turn onto 16th Street as pedestrians crossed.

Suddenly, a man ran across Valencia Street against the “do not walk” sign, shouting, and struck the left side of the car’s rear bumper and hatch with his entire body. This is all according to a report the self-driving car manufacturer must file with the DMV in the event of a collision.

The man sustained no injuries, but the car did. It suffered “some damage to its right rear light,” according to the report.

With all the other problems faced by self-driving cars, deliberate sabotage by underclass Luddites was probably not among them.

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The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. Not a problem – just print more.

Feel the Bern.

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Yeah, that’s the American Dream, apparently.

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Thank God the BBC isn’t racist like Donald Trump.

How’s that White Privilege working out for you, guys?

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in Somalia, where she suffered female genital mutilation. So now she speaks out against radical Islam. For that, SPLC put her on its list of dangerous “extremists.”

Maajid Nawaz was once an Islamic extremist. Then he started criticizing the radicals. SPLC labels him an “anti-Muslim extremist,” too.

While launching hateful smears like these, SPLC invites you to donate to them to “join the fight against hatred and bigotry.”

Dude, it’s all about the Nartative.

One man went to the Family Research Council headquarters to kill people, shooting a security guard in the arm before he was stopped.

The shooter told investigators that he attacked the FRC because he found them on SPLC’s hate list.

Perfectly reasonable. It’s all about the Hunt for Heretics and Sinners.

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Ponder what ‘reform’ of the LDS church could be so important as to merit mention in the headline.

Maybe it’s that whole Christianity thing — they’ve been waiting for the Mormons to give up on that for the longest time.

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Today the bicycle is a mixed bag, usually with more negatives than positives. In many cities, bike lanes now consume more road space than they free up, they add to pollution as well as reducing it, they hurt neighbourhoods and business districts alike, and they have become a drain on the public purse. The bicycle today — or rather the infrastructure that now supports it — exemplifies “inappropriate technology,” a good idea gone wrong through unsustainable, willy-nilly top-down planning.

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Uh, guys, if it’s a ‘crime’, then it was created by government. ‘Automakers’ can’t make something a crime.

If lawmakers were corrupt, that’s their fault, too. Don’t badmouth business because government screwed up.

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Daniel Horowitz reports on a new study by criminologist John Lott. It finds that illegal aliens commit crimes at a disproportionate rate relative to their share of the population.

Lott’s study is based on data from the state of Arizona. His team examined data on all prisoners who entered the Arizona state prison from January 1985 through June 2017.

News you’ll never see in the DemLegHump Media.

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Well, now. Perhaps we ought to restrict immigration from San Francisco.

Wonder how they’re going to pin that on Trump.

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Feel the Bern.

Victor Davis Hanson commits the ThoughtCrime of Noticing.

Democrats once used to talk about ending outright illegal immigration. They worried that it put downward pressure on wages. They thought it eroded union efforts and sapped political support among Democrats’ blue-collar base, while overtaxing finite social services to the detriment of the American underclass.

In the current age of identity politics, a new generation of progressive Democrats has recalibrated mass illegal immigration as a godsend. Over the last 20 years, it has vastly expanded the Latino vote as well as empowered ethnic tribunes. Immigration has galvanized minority registration in general and encouraged bloc voting. One tangible result is that the American Southwest is slowly turning blue, or at least purple.

They saw Tony Blair do it in Britain with great success, and they said ‘Hey, we gotta get some of that.’

Illegal immigration flourished because Democrats wanted future constituents, and Republicans sought inexpensive labor. But an irate public has had it with open borders — and both parties are scrambling to hide their past and present agendas for now by focusing on the idealized Dreamers.

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This is like putting Iran on the Human Rights Council. Read the front page ofany South African newspaper for a week, and ‘shithole’ will seem like a compliment. Migration from South Africa to Detroit would be a step up, especially for black people.

For an eyewitness, see Telling the Hard Truth – by Dave Freer

My friend Sarah Hoyt pointed me to a self-righteous fury spewing from the South African ANC (the political party which has governed South Africa since the end of apartheid) about the idea of South Africa being a shit-hole and bad America was. I was born there, and eventually migrated to Australia, of which I am now a proud citizen, and which I love, and try my best to pay back for its enormous generosity in taking us in.  Now, South Africa is a beautiful country, with some fine people… but the ANC have presided over it now having one of the highest murder and rape stats of any country in the world not at war.  Corruption is endemic, and racial hatred – both white on black and black on white – if anything is worse than at the end of apartheid. Public Health is in a sad state, and education isn’t much to write home to mother about, principally because ‘writing’ might be challenge, and mother (adult education is a neglected disgrace) still can’t read. There are squatter camps, squalor, mud huts without toilets in the bush. Electrical grids are failing, potable water is a major problem. There are good patches of course. There are things which have improved. But it’s only not a shit-hole when compared to places like Zimbabwe. Any criticism from it is like a serial child rapist and murderer complaining about you saying ‘shut up’ to your kid.

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The proglodyte politicization of every aspect of life proceeds apace.

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Another opportunity for blacks to do a bit of comfort looting with politics as cover.

This happens all the time in the U.S., and are called Race Riots because only one race is rioting. You will not see the KKK or the Aryan Nation conduct this sort of smash-and-grab fest, because they’re actually interested in politics as opposed to politics-as-an-excuse-for-theft. The Usual Suspects will wring their hands about these poor oppressed people attempting to gain empowerment in the only way available to them, while we cynics note that political empowerment appears to grow from the screen of a 65″ TV.

Jonah Goldberg cuts to the heart of the matter.

The most recent Golden Globes ceremony has already been excoriated for being a veritable geyser of hypocritical effluvia, as the same crowd that not long ago bowed and scraped to serial harasser and accused rapist Harvey Weinstein, admitted child rapist Roman Polanski and that modern Caligula, Bill Clinton, congratulated itself for its own moral superiority.

The interesting question is: Why have movie stars and other celebrities become an aristocracy of secular demigods? It seems to me an objective fact that virtually any other group of professionals plucked at random from the Statistical Abstract of the United States — nuclear engineers, plumbers, grocers, etc. — are more likely to model decent moral behavior in their everyday lives. Indeed, it is a bizarre inconsistency in the cartoonishly liberal ideology of Hollywood that the only super-rich people in America reflexively assumed to be morally superior are people who pretend to be other people for a living.

The Other McCain lets loose.

What was being discussed, of course, was a matter of government policy. The president’s characterization of which countries are favored by current policy was crude, but essentially accurate.

And that’s the key. Democrats want more immigration from countries where they are used to corrupt, oppressive government, because that’s the sort of government Democrats want to install in America, and these sorts of immigrants are seen as the kind that won’t push back against it, as (for example) Tea Party Republicans would.

We need to save American citizenship from becoming the Participation Trophy for the Third World. It’s that simple.

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University of Rochester’s president announced his resignation Thursday under pressure from activists who faulted him for not firing a professor accused of sexual misconduct, even though three separate investigations found no cause to do so.

A former Obama administration official enlisted to probe the charges for a third time concluded that “the complaints’ narrative—framed through the language of sexual predation and retaliatory animus towards women—is largely without factual basis” and that there was “no evidence… of a hostile work or academic environment for any female graduate students.”

Instead, the final report from former Securities and Exchange Commision chair Mary Jo White’s law firm says a federal complaint against professor Florian Jaeger contained misrepresentations, and faulted his accusers for behavior including “engaging in ‘vigilantism’” and “breaching confidentiality.”

Incredible.

Read it. And watch the video.

A new undercover video from Project Veritas shows Twitter employees discussing new ways for the social media site to censor political speech that they dislike.

The video shows eight current or former Twitter employees explaining how they will employ “shadow banning” and algorithms to prevent political opponents from spreading their ideas on the platform.

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Great, let the stoners and the eco-Nazis fight it out for a change.

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A hitchhiking robot that relied on the kindness of strangers to travel the world has been found with its head and arms ripped off, just two weeks into its first American tour.

The child-sized robot, known as hitchBOT, was found damaged beyond repair on the streets of Philadelphia early on Saturday. It had earlier hitched across the entire of Canada for 26 days and completed a hitchhiking adventure through Germany.

Note that they don’t dare reveal in what part of Philadelphia this happened. From this I suspect that it was in an area frequented by People of Color ™.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Your tax dollars at work.

UPDATE: Jack In The Box CEO: We May Replace Workers With Robots Because Of $15 Minimum Wage Campaign

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There already is a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, but the current crop of illegal immigrants want to jump the line and be rewarded for it.

Yes, the current immigration process is in the hands of TSA rejects. Yes, it is one of the least efficient and frustrating activities by a bureaucracy famous for its inefficiency. So the answer is to FIX IT. If Senator Graham had put as much effort into fixing the current system as he has into wringing his hand over those poor lawbreakers who snuck in the back door and now feel that their entitled to free room & board, it would be well on its way.

Democrats see amnesty for illegal immigrants as a cheap & easy way to create a large permanent dependent underclass whose votes they can buy in return for Free Stuff at the expense of the American taxpayer. They’ve had a lot of success with black people and figure that brown people are their next target. I see no reason why any Republican legislator ought to be willing to play their reindeer games.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

The one example I always remember was about a girl who had graduated from Harvard and was unable to find a job she deserved. Instead she was reduced to waiting tables (gasp!) and doing temp work in offices. The story went through her struggles to get interviews and her process of considering alternative career options. Finally she landed a job as a social worker for the city. The piece wrapped up with a quick summary of her story and it was revealed that she had majored in folklore at Harvard.

Whenever the topic of college majors comes up, I always think of that story. I’ve made a hobby of rooting around in the course catalogs of liberal arts colleges, looking for bizarre classes and majors. Nothing so far has topped the Harvard Folklore and Mythology degree. Our colleges are full of lunatics doing useless work, of course, but there is some effort to dress it up as legitimate academic work. There’s no way to dress up a major in folklore. Exactly no one has ever said in an emergency, “We need a folklorist!”

If I were running a business I would not hire an Ivy League graduate without a lot of investigation into his or her background. It’s just not worth it these days.

Steve Sailer sounds the alarm.

Read it.

James Damore, a former Google engineer who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board, arguing that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering, has filed a class action lawsuit against the company in Santa Clara Superior Court in Northern California.

His claims: that Google unfairly discriminates against white men whose political views are unpopular with its executives.

Damore is joined in the suit by another former Google engineer named David Gudeman, who spent three years with Google, working on a query engine. According to Gudeman’s LinkedIn profile, he left the company in December 2016 and has been self-employed since.

The lawsuit, filed by Dhillon Law Group, says it aims to represent all employees of Google who’ve been discriminated against due to their “perceived conservative political views by Google,” due to “their male gender by Google” and “due to their Caucasian race by Google.”

Pushback at last.

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The road to this agricultural town winds through the slums and cartel-controlled territory of Michoacán, ground zero for Mexico’s drug war, before arriving at a sight so strange it can seem like a mirage.

Fifteen-foot stone turrets are staffed by men whose green uniforms belong to no official force. Beyond them, a statue of an avocado bears the inscription “avocado capital of the world.” And beyond the statue is Tancítaro, an island of safety and stability amid the most violent period in Mexico’s history.

Local orchard owners, who export over $1 million in avocados per day, mostly to the United States, underwrite what has effectively become an independent city-state. Self-policing and self-governing, it is a sanctuary from drug cartels as well as from the Mexican state.

How American.

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Too bad the KGB isn’t around to give her a grant.

Nothing is so important as the proglodyte search for Heretics and Sinners….

I’d love to grow my own food, but I can’t find bacon seeds anywhere (not even at Whole Foods).

Pepsi bushes appear to be non-existent in my neck of the woods, as well.

Bummer.

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• Google changed Silicon Valley with its free company bikes that help employees get across its giant corporate campus.
• But locals in Mountain View, California — where Google is based — reportedly view the bikes as their own and end up displacing 100 to 250 bikes on a weekly basis.
• Now Google is trying to cut its losses. It’s hired a team of 30 contractors to retrieve bikes from around the city, and it is testing other solutions like GPS trackers and bike locks, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And reality intrudes into the hipster universe. Women and minorities hardest hit, no doubt.

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How about that great government-provided health care? It sucks, but you’ll never see a bill! Except your tax bill.

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How about that great government-provided health care? It sucks, but you’ll never see a bill! Except your tax bill, of course.

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How about that great government-provided healthcare? It sucks, but you’ll never see a bill! Except your tax bill, of course.

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Officially, the unemployment rate stands at 4.1 percent, as of December 2017. Unofficially — but in reality — the unemployment rate stands 6.5 percentage points higher at 10.6 percent, where it stood 9 months earlier. While the official unemployment rate has dropped by 5.9 percentage points from its peak in 2009, the real unemployment rate has dropped by only 2.9 percentage points since then.

…

In short, if you are 16 years of age and older, not confined to an institution or on active duty in the armed forces, but have not recently made specific efforts to find employment, you are not (officially) a member of the labor force. And if you are not (officially) a member of the labor force because you have given up looking for work, you are not (officially) unemployed — according to the BLS. Of course, you are really unemployed, but your unemployment is well disguised by the BLS’s contorted definition of unemployment.

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Black Lives Matter … except in Chicago, apparently.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

It is becoming a cliché that America is undergoing its own version of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

…

The Cultural Revolution was largely perpetrated by young people told to feel oppressed by their country’s past. Social justice could be achieved only by the destruction of the weight of Chinese culture. Their slogan was “Smash the Four Olds”: old customs, culture, habits, and ideas.

But that’s not the only analogy between late-1960s China and 2018 America. One of the mainsprings of the Cultural Revolution was a vindictive aged actress out for revenge on the producers and actresses who had cost her roles back in her prime. Mrs. Mao, Jiang Qing, had been a movie starlet in 1930s Shanghai, when she built up a lifetime of grudges that she acted upon when her husband let her take control of Chinese popular culture in the 1960s.

Her squads beat up aging film figures and reedited old movies to conform to new political prejudices. She would have considered the recent American custom of terrified novelists hiring “sensitivity readers” to censor their manuscripts for them a step in the right direction.