Nick Gillespie’s recent discussion with Matt Ridley, about science and Science, is excellent.
Progressive Democrats (with their obsession with a “green” economy), like MAGA Republicans (with their obsession with tariffs), apparently believe that Americans are too wealthy. A slice from a new Wall Street Journal essay:
The House on Thursday passed the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (Speed) Act, 221-196. Every Republican except Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania voted for the bill. But the Hakeem Jeffries’ Democrats voted 195-11 against the bill that is co-sponsored by Democrat Jared Golden of Maine. The 11 Democrats other than Mr. Golden who voted aye include four from Texas and represent swing districts where Republicans have at least a chance at winning.
The Speed Act attempts to simplify the morass of federal permitting by limiting environmental reviews to the impact from a proposed project but not from speculative downstream effects. The Act also imposes sensible limits on the lawsuits that are routinely deployed to delay projects for years. Under the bill, lawsuits must be filed within 150 days and can only be filed “by a party that has suffered or imminently will suffer direct harm from the final agency action.”
The Democrats who voted no bowed to the green lobby that refuses to accept any changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the 1970 law that has become the main impediment to building roads, bridges, tunnels, pipelines, transmission lines, you name it. Some 26 environmental interest groups opposed the bill, while nearly all business groups supported it.
Megan McArdle writes about the “diversity”-inspired institutionalized bias against young straight, white males. Two slices:
Everyone in media, academia and entertainment knew it was happening. A number of them had qualms. Almost none spoke up. And now that someone has said something, many are pretending they didn’t see it happen with their own eyes. This is incredible, in every sense of the word.
I am talking about how for years, at many institutions, there was a hiring preference for anyone but White, straight men. As Jacob Savage argues convincingly in a recent essay for Compact magazine, this most affected one group: younger White men who hadn’t had time to gain the skills and experience that might have compensated for their melanin deficiency.
…..
Young White males were about a quarter of college graduates in 2022, so we’d have expected them to average about a quarter of new hires for various elite professions. They didn’t drop to 12 percent of junior television writers because of demographics, or because studios stopped discriminating against other groups. They dropped because employers started discriminating against them to make their institutions “look like America.”
If you want to understand the backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion, you need to understand how bad that math was for a certain class of educated millennial men. You also need to recognize that a lot of this math was bad, period.
National Review‘s Editors rightly applaud Ben Shapiro. A slice:
First, at the Heritage Foundation, he [Shapiro] argued that a political movement, like a nation, needs borders. He illustrated the point with reference to the Heritage Foundation mission statement, which supports free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.
He then compared those principles with the beliefs of Tucker Carlson, with whom Heritage President Kevin Roberts has been in ideological sympathy, up to and including initially defending Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes (before backpedaling). Shapiro persuasively argued that by Heritage’s own standards Carlson — who expresses routine contempt for markets, who launders Russian propaganda, who sees the advantages of sharia law, and who gives sympathetic interviews to white nationalists, Churchill-hating World War II revisionists, and proud misogynists accused of rape — is no longer a conservative.
We assume that Roberts won’t be inviting Shapiro back any time soon, but his talk was received warmly by the audience at the Heritage Foundation.
A couple of days later, Shapiro spoke at TPUSA’s AmFest conference. He addressed the rank pandering to audience, widespread conspiracy-theorizing, and cowardly unwillingness to call out lunacy on the right that has infected the right-wing influencer space. Here, Shapiro focused on the absolutely cracked theories promoted by Candace Owens about the Charlie Kirk assassination; these rancid, obsessive musings, which would set off alarms bells for any psychiatrist if spouted by a patient, have significantly shaped the debate on the right about Kirk’s assassination.
True to form, Owens responded to Shapiro’s speech with an anti-Jewish rant.
