Lockdowns endangered democracy, the economy and children’s learning. The confused public-health establishment nonetheless embraced them. Mr. Trump initially went along but reversed course after Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser, arranged for Dr. Bhattacharya and other lockdown critics to educate Mr. Trump about the damage.
Mr. Trump proved more open-minded than the mainstream experts, who continue to insist that lockdowns and school closings saved lives despite the evidence to the contrary. Such small-minded zealots again showed their authoritarian side by pressuring social-media companies to suppress lockdown contrarians.
Twitter blacklisted Dr. Bhattacharya in 2021 after he tweeted an article he had written on age-based risks, noting that “mass testing is lockdown by stealth.” He was right. Many school districts later dropped their mandatory Covid testing policies because so many kids with mild or no symptoms were forced to stay home.
Dr. Bhattacharya didn’t deliberately court controversy. People who know him describe him as apolitical and unassuming. Over two decades in academia, he published dozens of wonky papers, such as “Provider visit frequency and vascular access interventions in hemodialysis” and “Heterogeneity in healthy aging.”
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The pandemic is over, but liberal group-think in science continues on issues like climate and race thanks to the NIH’s support. Consider the NIH-funded “UnBIASED” study led by professors at the University of Washington and University of California, San Diego, which seeks to use machine learning to detect “hidden bias” in interactions between doctors and patients. Its stated goal is to develop tools to alert doctors of their unconscious racism, sexism and homophobia “to shift the balance of power toward more equitable health outcomes.”
Your tax dollars at work. Dr. Bhattacharya’s top charge at the NIH will be returning the agency to its original mission of funding innovation rather than political science masquerading as real science.
Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady ponders Justin Trudeau’s Canada. A slice:
Things have only deteriorated further since Israel came under attack. As National Post journalist Michael Higgins noted last weekend, no one begrudges Mr. Trudeau his leisure time at a pop concert and he can’t control the schedule of marauders. But what happened in Montreal was only the latest outbreak of anti-Israeli extremism. As Mr. Higgins wrote, “These pro-Palestinian/Hamas-supporting demonstrations have been happening since the savagery of October 7 and the Liberal government and Trudeau have been missing in action.”
The hoodlums’ trashing of Montreal caught the government off-guard. But somehow Mr. Levant was immediately intercepted, labeled a troublemaker and carted away. Something isn’t right in Canada’s “democracy.”
Who’d a-thunk it?: “Joe Biden pardons his son Hunter.”
Yet workers at large would pay the price for more years of Ms. [Lauren] McFerran’s rulings. The NLRB under her leadership has torn up several precedents to silence opposition to union organizing. In last year’s Lion Elastomers decision, the board overturned a 2020 precedent to exempt union organizers from many employer rules against harassment, including racist taunts and sexual slurs. Under this notion of union impunity, the NLRB previously tried to force Amazon to rehire an organizer who called a colleague a “gutter b—” over a bullhorn.
Other recent rulings have made it illegal for employers to address their workers frankly. In Siren Retail Corp., decided last month, the board ruled that a manager committed a labor violation when she told employees that unionizing would harm their “direct relationship with leadership.” When workers choose a union to represent them, they close off part of their dialogue with managers, and the board had upheld managers’ right to say so in Tri-Cast Inc. (1985). The McFerran NLRB tossed that precedent on a 3-1 vote and ordered the company to halt its “threatening” speech.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown explains “why Kamala Harris lost.” A slice:
If Harris has any personal political priorities or animating ideology at her core, they’ve been buried so deep as to basically be undetectable—entirely subsumed by skilled pandering to the progressive zeitgeist. That’s why Harris has a reputation as a flip-flopper. That’s why she spent so much of her short 2024 campaign walking back positions she took during the rather different days of 2019 and 2020. And it’s why she tried hard not to stake out strong positions on most issues this time around.
Yes, Harris had reproductive rights on her side. But while that’s been a huge issue this election, it’s only one issue—and not even one where Trump, who says he doesn’t want a nationwide abortion ban, totally disagrees.
Though Harris’ campaign largely avoided detailed policy proposals, we did get some glimpses of what a President Harris hoped to have in store for us. It included an incoherent “Medicare at Home” benefit, national rent-control policies, tax hikes on businesses, giving $25,000 to first-time homebuyers, giving “1 million loans that are fully forgivable” to “Black entrepreneurs and others” who want to start businesses, and some form of federal price controls for groceries—or, at least, a federal clampdown on price gouging, whatever that would have turned out to mean. And a continuation of Biden-era foreign policy, hostility toward mergers, intrusion into health care (including forcing insurance companies to cover over-the-counter contraception, and perhaps all sorts of over-the-counter products, with no cost sharing), and a weird fixation on so-called junk fees.
Stone Washington reviews Neil Gorsuch’s and Janie Nitze’s book, Over Ruled. Two slices:
Gorsuch and Nitze chronicle the monetary and human costs of excessive regulations, particularly from the federal bureaucracy. Their book collects stories of everyday Americans on the receiving end of regulatory overreach.
Over Ruled begins with an exploration of the ever-more imperial character of America’s legal system. Federal regulations grow more voluminous, complex, and obscure with each passing year. Even seasoned attorneys and judges can struggle to understand these mandates. The number of federal crimes has more than doubled since 1982, and the number of regulations carrying civil monetary penalties has reached a staggering 300,000.
As a result, the federal government can increasingly punish people for non-criminal offenses. Consider the case of fisherman John Yates, who possessed fish in his catch branded as “undersized” by a federal agent and threw them overboard before the matter could be investigated. Yates was robbed of his livelihood, separated from his family for 30 days, and sentenced to three years of supervised release. Despite ultimately winning his case at the U.S. Supreme Court, he suffered devastating financial and reputational damage.
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In Over Ruled, Gorsuch and Nitze underscore the importance of “men and women being willing to stand up, even at a high personal cost, to defend the rights to democratic self-rule, equal treatment, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that belong to us all.” Their book offers inspirational stories of courageous individuals who embody these ideals and defied administrative tyranny.
Here’s David Henderson’s weekly reading for December 1, 2024.
