I don't think it's widely appreciated that the current administration seems to be destroying the careers of scientific researchers solely for the crime of having followed the rules made by previous administrations. pic.twitter.com/l2DA7qHVnE

— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) March 19, 2025

This is very dishonest. They didn’t just follow the rules. They hounded people based on sex and race excitedly, enthusiastically, and with glee. This was not a top-down revolution. This was – and still is – a phenomenon in which the most educated, credentialed, intelligent and privileged people participate completely sincerely. The percentage of scholars who do not passionately believe in DEI is maybe 2%, and I’m being very optimistic.

DEI was created in academia and then exported as a neoliberal cudgel everywhere else. Since Trump’s inauguration, the administration of my university has not used racist language. Even though we aren’t dependent on federal funding, the administration stepped away from this. I did, however, hear a colleague mockingly go on about “mediocre white men getting jobs because they are mediocre and white” to a white male academic who looked very uncomfortable but terrified to say anything. We lived for years amidst this kind of bullying where it was OK to insult people most outrageously based on their innate characteristics. Nobody took responsibility for this. Nobody indicated in any way that they understood why this was wrong and why this shouldn’t happen again.

In the meantime, the Dems are busy #MeTooting a 23-year-old influencer called Harry Sisson for exchanging Snapchat messages with several different women. Because consensual Snapchatting between adults is now not OK.

The chief complaint from these women though isn’t that Sisson harassed them—most don’t seem to have even met Sisson in person—but that he led them to believe that he “didn’t have a roster,” and was only “talking” to them.

This, to Zoomers, is a sex scandal.

I feel compassion for the women who are so lost and confused they mistake a Snapchat exchange with a random dude for declaration of love and serious intentions. They need older women in their lives to explain that it’s OK to want marriage and how to get it.

Harry Sisson, on the other hand, needs a sexopathologist to help him find out why, at an age where he should have no inkling of libido problems, he spends enormous amounts of time on Snapchat instead of having an actual private life. The young women are all really pretty, and it’s sad they are so lacking in romantic options they have to chase a guy with early-onset ED.

This is a case of psychological issues meeting sexual dysfunction. Sisson’s problem is probably organic but the women can still be helped if somebody on their lives cares to step in.

Why on earth is he doing this? https://t.co/dFjaw99OT4

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) March 21, 2025

Good question. The goal of handing the next election in Canada to the libs has been achieved. Is the plan now to make sure that the libs win for the next three generations?

Does anybody have a positive explanation because I’d kill for one at this point.

I kept wondering for years why American literature is so dead. Today I learned the answer:

I honestly had no idea about this.

Here’s the link to the article. It has a funny passage on Stephen Markley who showed great promise in his novel Ohio only to produce the following monstrosity later on:

And Stephen Markley’s 2023 climate change epic The Deluge, replete with a Jamaican/Native American heroine and a queer neurodivergent Arab-American mathematician, shows that appropriation is acceptable so long as the politics are sufficiently on the nose (“The trauma of that time, especially the storming of the Capitol, lit a new fire under me…”).

At least, there’s Emma Cline. That’s good literature. Slim pickings in such a large country but better than nothing.

One more quote on the same subject:

In 2022 famous novelist—and no liberal—Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a post on X: “(a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’)”

How to Recapture the Lost ‘Literary Men’

Yes, by all means, let’s do this. This will finally provide the needed evidence that male and female bodies are fundamentally different, and we will be able to move on from this anti-scientific lunacy.

I completed sincerely support this plan because nothing else is working.

I spent the afternoon with organized labor, making plans to save physics. And the rest of the programs under threat. It’s entertaining to think that, after everything, I’m back with my COVID-mask-wearing, BLM-stickering, Ramadan-observing, very lefty comrades.

The left is at its best when it fights “the Man”, so maybe that’s what it should do.

I’m still not voting Dem under any scenario ever, so there’s that.

Here’s an example of poor informational hygiene:

NEW: On a $247,000 federal salary, property records show Judge Boasberg lives in a $2.4 million house in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in D.C.

— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) March 20, 2025

The idea that it’s weird or unusual to have a house valued at that price with a quarter mil salary and a working, highly paid wife is nuts. The utterly invented outrage over this judge’s house was amplified by Elon Musk and eagerly consumed by overheated bimbos of both sexes. There’s absolutely no difference between this and “there are thousands of unarmed black men murdered by police each year.”

The worst part is that we are all hostages of these stupid, excitable, eager idjits.

The amount of propaganda from all traditional news outlets has reached COVID-era levels. I highly recommend practicing informational hygiene and being very alert that this is happening. Let’s hope that this is temporary but it’s truly a tsunami of the most egregious lies on every possible topic.

If USAID really spread the “soft power” of the US around the world, I would be completely in favor of it. If it promoted the greatness and the power of the American nation-state, I’d say let’s totally spend more money on it.

But in the past 30 years, USAID has been doing the exact opposite. It spread ideas that undermined not only ours but any nation-state. It promoted the idea that cultures and people are interchangeable widgets with interchangeable parts.

The idea of soft power is amazing. It’s a great achievement of the nation-state model. Today, it’s as infected with neoliberalism as we all are, unfortunately. But if it could take a cure, that would be great.

For the concluding chapter of Neoliberal Love, I’m rereading Guillermo Arriaga’s wonderful novel Salvar el fuego. If you love the Spanish language, I implore you to read the novel, or better yet, listen to it on Audible. It’s narrated in the purest Mexican accent that is a delight to hear. I’m experiencing paroxysms of joy listening to this book.

I don’t think Salvar el fuego has been translated into English because Mexican slang is the best part of the novel. I’m listening to it in my office to the great delight of the Mexican GA sitting next door. I can’t write about a novel without at least three readings. Or maybe that’s the excuse I use to justify coming back to beloved texts.