Grab Bag

FARMERS FRIGHT

Let’s pretend you are in a graduate-level seminar on Public Ethics and wanted to discuss the ethics that govern the so-called “Kavanaugh stop,” under which it’s lawful for law-enforcement to detain someone based on their perceived ethnicity. It’s named for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the opinion in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, the relevant case.

Could you do it without discussing ethnicity?

In College Station, Texas, you can’t discuss it at all.

Inside Higher Education reports that The Board of Regents of Texas A&M (TAMU) is yet again dealing with the predictable headaches stemming from the incoherent war on woke.

This time, the clamps are coming down on a graduate course on Ethics in Public Policy at The Bush School of Government and Public Service.

Dean John Sherman, pursuant to TAMU’s anti-woke regulations, asked Professor Leonard Bright to explain precisely when and how gender and sexual orientation would come into his class. It’s not for anybody on the outside of those discussions to adjudicate between an academic dean and a professor on such matters, but you’d be within your rights to wonder, “How could we possibly know that?” Issues of gender and race are going to come up at least weekly in such a class. Sherman could not possibly expect Bright to say, “Of course I will make clear there are only two genders every time it comes up.”

I have no idea what the actual proposed content of the class was, but using my imagination, how do you discuss the ethics of public hiring and firing of, say, lieutenants in the U.S. Army, without opening the question of cause, and whether homosexuality, transgenderism, or misogyny is a cause? How do you discuss the handling of racism in public life without admitting that there is such a thing and interrogating its nature?

For background: last year, the Board of Regents adopted System Policy 8.01, which requires the university president to approve any courses that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity.” (Unsurprisingly, the Board of Regents have in common that none of them has ever been a full-time college professor.)

It should be obvious that (1) the Board of Regents is getting its information from hysterical right-wing media about how academics talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation, assuming that offensive talk will always wear an easily-identifiable black hat; and (2) because they’re wrong about that, the policy was always going to cause a lot of confusion.

Ordinarily, we might see Policy 8.01 as the sort of policy misfire that universities always go through in trying to clarify what works and what doesn’t. But A&M is… special that way, with a track record of reactionary histrionics. Their war on woke is turning out to be really expensive.

The previous year, the University wound up settling for a million dollars with Kathleen McElroy, who had been hired with great fanfare as the tenured head of the Journalism school. Her hiring conditions were gradually changed after conservative groups pressured the Administration because of her support for racial equity and representation in journalism.

Similarly, Professor Joy Alonzo was suspended and then reinstated when, during a lecture on the opioid crisis, she criticized Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. The daughter of the State Land Commissioner happened to be in that class and ratted Alonzo out to her mom, who contacted the state’s Attorney General, who called the University Chancellor. The University had to admit in its internal review that mistakes were made.

You bet they were. The first one was creating an environment filled with speech-codes, anti-woke hysteria, academic vigilanteism, and censorship.

It’s no wonder TAMU has been through five presidents in the last decade, all trying vainly to educate Texans while serving the Board of Regents’ delusions about what “Texas values” means.

A final note on that: I used to ask my sophomore English Literature students how they would know if they should ask for their money back for a course. Of course they weren’t going to get their money back, but I wanted them to think about the product they were paying for.

And what I wanted to lead them around to, through Socratic questioning, is that you measure a college education by how you change. Education isn’t merely acquiring a data-set, though it draws on a continually expanding data-bank.

It’s becoming a person that aligns with what you know about how the world really is. It’s employing knowledge towards becoming a better self, and that necessarily means the self must change.

And if I’m right about that, TAMU’s Board of Regents have tasked the Administration with ensuring that A&M’s students do not receive an education.

THE STRANGE IMPULSES OF M. JOHNSON

Partisanship is to be expected. Naked partisanship in a leader of either chamber in Congress is unfortunate. It signals that the goal is to remain in power even at the expense of good governement.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson spent months keeping the House out of session so members wouldn’t be forced to vote to release the Epstein files. When the Senate and House both voted overwhelmingly for a bill mandating the release of the files (a bill the President signed into a law which he then promptly broke), Mike Johnson was deeply annoyed that the bill he voted for had passed.

That made it very difficult to know precisely what Mike Johnson thought is “good for the country,” as the old joke used to put it.

Which makes it choice irony that he is now holding Bill Clinton in contempt for ignoring a subpoena to come and tell Congress what his role in the Epstein saga was.

It amounts to:

• Mike Johnson: We should not release the Epstein files.

• Also Mike Johnson: I will not hold a vote on releasing the Epstein files. That would be awful.

• Also Mike Johnson: I am holding a vote on releasing the Epstein files. I will vote to release the Epstein files.

• Also Mike Johnson: The Senate voted for the bill I voted for to release the Epstein files. How could they.

• Also Mike Johnson: Donald Trump has nothing to answer for in the Epstein files.

• Also Mike Johnson: Bill Clinton has everything to answer for in the Epstein files.

Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree that Bill Clinton is contemptuous. He’s under subpoena and he should testify.

He was a good president, the last one to balance a budget and the first one to institute meaningful welfare reform and prison reform in over fifty years. He brokered the Good Friday accords and managed not to cock up the powder-keg of Serbia and Bosnia worse than necessary. It’s always been ironic that conservatives hated him so much: he basically gave them half of their Reagan-and-Bush-Era wishlist.

But he was, and maybe still is, a bad man. (I speak analytically but without judgment, as a pretty awful individual myself.)

He perjured himself publicly, catastrophically, which should have resulted in a conviction in his impeachment even though that was carried out by some pretty hypocritical and awful Republican scoundrels. His flagrant abuse of women was only forgiven by Democrat feminists because he gave them a glimmer of hope that their reproductive rights mattered.

But Bill Clinton is old news. If he’s got things to answer for, he should do it, and if by some miracle he answers truthfully under oath this time, we’ll know a little more than we did before.

What’s on display here though is not Bill Clinton but Mike Johnson, whose reluctance to hear anything about Epstein is only surpassed by his unslakable thirst to hear Bill Clinton on Epstein.

“Twat-waffle” is such an ugly word, but there are just people in public life for whom no other word will do.

EXPLAIN IT TO HIM LIKE HE’S FIVE

“I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public…We’ve had the most successful first year of any president in history.” Thus spake Donald Trump to the House Republicans, on a retreat. And if I add that it was a retreat from reality, please forgive me.

Since 2016 it’s been apparent to anybody with a finger on the pulse of the human soul that Trump’s glaring weakness is his need for adoration. He doesn’t need to be strong, politically or physically; he recently complained that “exercise is boring.” But he has this bottomless hunger for adulation, to be seen as strong, as a good leader. Thus FIFA, that sewer of corruption, invented a peace prize and gave it to him like an indulgent but creepy uncle pacifying a toddler.

The public catastrophe that comes from putting such a person in power is that he really cannot talk about reality. He bathes in the media, social media, and company that protects his fragile sense of self.

The public, meanwhile, is much more interested in whether he’s doing a good job for them, and couldn’t care less about his feelings.

Whoever told him that he was the most successful president in history was ignoring all that stuff that is catastrophic:

• tariffs and losing trade wars;

• the evaporation of our alliances;

• a new and unsustainable approach to foreign policy rooted in whim and avarice rather than global stability;

• a critically-K-shaped economy;

• the moral debacle that is border enforcement;

• the purely symbolic but woeful destruction of the East Wing in favor of a ballroom and a triumph-arch nobody wants, funded by corporations and billionaires into whose debt the presidency now passes.

• Unleashing untrained shock-troops into American cities over the objections of local elected leadership that has resulted, predictably, in the murder of two innocent Americans.

• Apart from that, it’s been an awesome presidency, I guess.