 Dear Weekend Jolter, If truth is the first casualty in actual war, it's at least dodging cannon fire in the culture wars. And not always successfully. The phrase "post-truth" became something of a cliché during the Trump administration — and, admittedly, it's hard to argue with its use when the former (and future?) president continues to make statements that are, let's say, Pyongyang-y. But if you read this website for more than its Dune content, you already know well that Trump and his adherents aren't the only ones building their own reality. Ideologically motivated actors on the left are busy creating a cultural metaverse (all are *not* welcome), one with its own axioms and evidence. Ari Blaff, on our NRWire team, reported in depth this past week about emerging educational practices in Ontario that essentially merge math with progressive politics. They will be familiar to anyone who has followed similar developments stateside. In the province, one "mathematics coordinators" group compiled a presentation that finds "covert" white supremacy in every classroom nook, including in the phrase, "Of course math is neutral because 2+2=4." This is more a statement about a statement (i.e., that asserting the objective truth of 2+2 is itself a microaggression) than it is a rejection of the equation. But the very premise of the movement to portray math as part of the global injustice machine — to then justify the subject's politicization — is warped, and potentially dangerous. Kenin Spivak got at the problem a while back in a piece for NR: Each year, 7,000 to 9,000 Americans die from math errors in medication dosage. Math errors kill and cause substantial property damage and losses each year. It is an undeniable truth that there are correct and incorrect answers in basic math. There is no white math, or black math. There is only math.
Yet right answers appear to play only a supporting role in this brand of instruction. In Ari's report, he cites one social-justice-oriented math textbook that elevates a progressive cause in "every single case study": income inequality, the wage gap, immigration, etc. The problem with injecting political discussions into math texts, of course, is that math is no longer the point. Elsewhere, NPR made a claim for the ages last weekend with a tweet asserting, alongside a story on trans athletes, that there is "limited scientific evidence of physical advantage" for trans-identifying males over females in sports. Vahaken Mouradian brought the receipts in citing that readily available and very-not-limited evidence. To NPR's credit, it issued a correction. An addendum on Twitter also noted that multiple studies show these athletes "retain higher muscle mass, strength, and running speed than women," linking to the research showing this to be the case, even after medical interventions to suppress those advantages. This kind of walk-back is rare. But there are a few positive signs that the cultural metaverse is being challenged, including from the left. The New York Times has — notoriously, in some quarters — started to report more objectively on the trans issue, including a lengthy report on the medical profession's debate surrounding gender therapy. Some were bothered by this. LGBT organizations and Times contributors published letters blasting the paper, with the former declaring the science on the issue "SETTLED." (This is of a piece with a top health official in the Biden administration declaring, despite ample evidence to the contrary, "there is no argument among medical professionals . . . about the value and importance of gender-affirming care.") But Times MGMT have held firm, so far, with the Daily Beast reporting that staffers who signed the letter were chastised. Cause for hope? We'll see. MBD has a notably less sanguine take on the state of things, which looks to the Middle Ages as a reference point. Read if you dare. * * * Before the meat and the potatoes, I'll slip in here an opportunity to catch up on National Review Institute's just-concluded Ideas Summit. The two-day gathering in Washington featured former vice president Mike Pence, Senator Tom Cotton, and a host of other prominent figures in policy, law, and media — and, of course, moderators and speakers from NR World. Thank you to all who attended and/or watched online. You can still find the footage here, and read about the highlights from our news team. * * * Oh, there was an indictment in the news this week, also. More as it develops, as they say. NAME. RANK. LINK. EDITORIALS On the indictment: The Reckless Trump Indictment On the shooting: The Nashville Tragedy Breaking down that Republican parental-rights bill: Democrats vs. Parents ARTICLES Andrew McCarthy: Bragg Crosses the Rubicon, Indicting Trump on Stormy Daniels Nonsense Dan McLaughlin: If You Don’t Publish This Manifesto, Publish None of Them Charles C. W. Cooke: Therefore What? Noah Rothman: Humanizing Mass Killers to Vindicate Progressivism Ari Blaff: Legacy Media Struggle to Characterize Trans Shooter’s Sex Ari Blaff: 2 + 2 = White Supremacy: How Woke Ideologues Corrupted Canada’s Math Curriculum Erielle Davidson: Is Democracy Really Dying in Israel? John Fund: The TSA Declares Peanut Butter a Liquid Will Swaim: California Government Is the Real 'Junk Fee' Offender Caroline Downey: Female University of Wyoming Students Sue Sorority for Admitting Male Student Jim Geraghty: Are American Values Tanking? Jim Geraghty: Why the Legal Case against Fox News Might Fail Kyle Duncan: What We Must Expect of Our Law Schools Brittany Bernstein: Nikki Haley Finds Early Campaign Lane: Defending Women against Gender Ideology CAPITAL MATTERS Tom Cotton & Michelle Steel warn of how China's shipping tech might be put to use: The CCP Has an Inside Informant on Our Military and Supply Chains LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW. Brian Allen gives a local Connecticut museum, with a first-rate collection, its due: New Britain, Conn., Packs a Punch in Industry, Politics, and Art Armond White finds a filmmaker "drunk on Old Time radicalism" in his latest doc: Ken Loach's Socialist Nostalgia FROM THE NEW, APRIL 17, 2023, ISSUE OF NR Jeffrey Blehar: A Tremendous Circus Christine Rosen: The Folly of Nature's Biden Endorsement Bjørn Lomborg: Life after Climate Change Madeleine Kearns: Prince of Hypocrisy NRO, ABRIDGED Noah Rothman identifies a disturbing trace of sympathy being applied in the wrong direction in analysis of recent acts of mass violence, including that in Nashville: Recent episodes of mass violence perpetrated by shooters who do not fit the part has compelled cultural observers and the press to innovate new ways of talking about mass violence. These new methods rob the victims of these attacks of their sacrifice and transfer their victimization onto their killers. Commentary around Monday's horrific mass shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tenn., followed a familiar trajectory right until the perpetrator was revealed to be a biological woman who identified as a man. This priors-scrambling detail sent media outlets off on the frenzied pursuit of something that would justify the preconception that those who assume a trans identity are never victimizers, only victims. First, there was the mad dash to indict Nashville police for failing to use the pronouns preferred by the person who shot and killed three teachers and three nine-year-old students. That was followed by an attempt from media outlets and politicians to allege — the lack of substantive evidence to back them up notwithstanding — that the shooter had been incited in some way by local legislation restricting "adult cabaret performances" in the presence of children and the provision of hormone-blocking therapies to minors. The application of a moment's reasoning to the suggestion that any of this explains, much less justifies, the murder of children must have proven unsatisfying, because the press soon moved on to crafting a narrative of victimization for the deceased killer. . . . The tragedy of mass murder is, in fact, "not one tragedy but two," according to a statement release by the Trans Resistance Network. The killer "felt he had no other effective way to be seen other than to lash out by taking the life of others." NBC News reporters Matt Lavietes and Jo Yurcaba alleged that the killer's victims tangentially include Tennessee's trans community, who could now expect to face increased discrimination. . . . The pattern we've been forced to witness this week has been in development for some time, because the perpetrators of mass violence increasingly fail to meet the expectations set for them in the mainstream press.
Jeffrey Blehar's debut piece for the magazine is bleak (his words). It's about 2024, like you had to guess. Skipping ahead to the part about DeSantis: After narrowly edging out a win in the otherwise dismal Republican year of 2018, Florida governor Ron DeSantis carved out a nationwide profile by bucking the Trump and Biden administrations' shared "scientific consensus" on Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions. He then bolstered his credibility with a series of cannily fought culture-war brawls, whether against critical-race theorists or the Walt Disney Company. On the same November 2022 night that the Republican Party fell short of expectations nationwide, DeSantis destroyed his opponent — former Republican governor Charlie Crist, eager for one final loss — by nearly 20 percentage points while leading the statewide GOP ticket to sweeping gains down-ballot. It is fair to say that, among conservatives, DeSantis is the Great Non-Trump Hope. Although he has not formally announced his campaign, everyone knows DeSantis is running for president. Donald Trump certainly knows it: After years of praise for the governor, he has begun upending buckets of invective on him on Truth Social. (For some sense of how it's going: He hinted that DeSantis might be a gay sexual predator.) It is the unresponsiveness of the DeSantis campaign in the face of this that rankles those who desperately seek an alternative to Trump. Whatever internal strategy considerations there may be, it looks as if he is ceding the field — and any hope of defining the narratives of the race — to Trump by remaining silent. DeSantis has a particularly difficult needle to thread; he must appeal to the political and cultural priors of Trump primary voters without alienating them by attacking Trump in a way seen as "unfair." The problem is that, of course, there is no "fair" way to attack Donald Trump, certainly in his own mind (he will tell you as much) and also in the minds of many of his supporters. "Let my record speak for itself" is a dignified, noble strategy; it is also doomed to failure. Trump and his online armies and paid influencers, meanwhile, are launching every conceivable attack on DeSantis, from the scurrilous to the even more scurrilous — throwing it all at the wall and seeing what sticks. Trump has even been praising Charlie Crist, to give you some sense of how wide he's willing to cast the net while fishing for attack lines. DeSantis's refusal to pivot to a more aggressive strategy on the fly reminds one of the French behind their Maginot Line, failing to come to terms with the blitzkrieg. This might not have been the start to the war that DeSantis would have preferred, but the war has begun regardless, and the longer he refuses to acknowledge it and commence taking chunks out of Trump's hide — if for no other reason than to break out of the self-defeating "deference" paradigm that Trump imposes on his rivals and allies alike — the more likely DeSantis is to lose.
Following up on the incident at Stanford in which students (and an associate dean) derailed Judge Kyle Duncan's talk, we've published his remarks from a subsequent talk at Notre Dame, which he was allowed to actually deliver this time. The Stanford incident featured prominently: So, what about free speech? We have a vital tradition of free speech in this country, both in our law and our culture. That of course extends to student protests. Think of the students who refused to pledge allegiance in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnett or the Vietnam protesters in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District. The students at Stanford enjoy the same right to protest me. They can protest me every day of the week and twice on Sunday. It's a great country where you can harshly criticize federal judges and nothing bad will happen to you. You might even get praised or promoted. The students at Stanford and other elite law schools swim in an ocean of free speech. Has any group of people ever been so free to speak in the history of our nation or any nation? Has any group ever been so privileged? In the aftermath of the event, a large number of students even protested the dean herself in her own class for the offense of apologizing to the likes of me. But make no mistake. What went on in that classroom on March 9 had nothing to do with our proud American tradition of free speech. It was a parody of it. I'm relieved that Dean Martínez's letter forcefully recognizes this. As she writes: "Freedom of speech does not protect a right to shout down others so they cannot be heard." It is not free speech to silence others because you hate them. It is not free speech to jeer and heckle a speaker who's been invited to your school so that he can't deliver a talk. It is not free speech to form a mob and hurl vile taunts and threats that aren't worthy of being written on the wall of a public toilet. It's not free speech to pretend to be "harmed" by words or ideas you disagree with, and then to use that feigned "harm" as a license to deny a speaker the most rudimentary forms of civility. Some of the students were apparently convinced that what they were doing was "counter-speech." Wrong. Counter-speech means offering a reasoned response to an argument. It doesn't mean screaming, "Shut up, you scum, we hate you" at a distance of twelve feet. Other students claimed this was nothing more than the "marketplace of ideas" in action. Again, wrong. The marketplace of ideas describes a free and fair competition among opposing arguments with the most compelling one, we hope, emerging on top. What transpired at Stanford was no marketplace. It was more like a flash mob on a shoplifting spree. One final note on free speech: Do not think for a moment that the mob showed up to "respond" to my talk or engage in some high-minded back-and-forth about what I was invited to Stanford to talk about. That would have been fine. But the mob had no interest in my talk at all. They were there to heckle and jeer and shame.
Once more, Ari Blaff's latest report in his series exploring progressive capture of Ontario's public-school system is . . . really something: According to a webinar created by [Ontario Mathematics Coordinators Association] president Jason To, proponents of math's political neutrality who use the phrasing "2 + 2 = 4" are engaged in an act of "Covert White Supremacy." To's presentation, released in September of last year, features a pyramid of "White Supremacy in Math Education." The apex of the pyramid features examples of "overt white supremacy" — classroom offenses any reasonable person would consider racist — while the base includes more nebulous examples of what To calls "covert white supremacy." The covert forms of white supremacy allegedly plaguing mathematical education include "Eurocentric math curriculum," "Standardized testing," and exhortations such as "Just stick to math," "I don't see colour in my math class," and "Of course math is neutral because 2+2=4." Former OMCA president Heather Theijsmeijer, who originally publicized the webinar, lives on picturesque Manitoulin Island, in Georgian Bay, and serves as the program coordinator for middle- and high-school math students in the Rainbow District School Board, the largest district in northern Ontario. Her social-media history conveys a deep support for OMCA's view of mathematics as a potentially malign force. In one tweet, Theijsmeijer pointed her followers to commentary by Laurie Rubel, an associate professor of mathematics education, explaining that proponents of "2 + 2 = 4" are grounded "in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values." . . . As math has become hyper-politicized, test scores have continued to plummet. Not even half of sixth-grade students meet provincial math standards at present; 52 percent of ninth-graders met the bar during the 2021–2022 school year, down from 75 percent just three years prior, according to provincial standardized testing administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO). Woke Math advocates have doubled down in the face of falling performance, seeking to incorporate so-called Indigenous Knowledge Systems and anti-racism.
Shout-Outs Heather Mac Donald, at Quillette: Dismantle DEI Ideology Emily Davies, at the Washington Post: Staffer for Rand Paul stabbed in D.C. in apparently random attack Jacob Siegel, at Tablet (and more from MBD): A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century CODA Before Daft Punk, there was Ravel. (Okay, that's a ridiculous sentence, but I'm contractually allowed one per month that's not subject to editing, and this is the one.) Meaning: The allure of crushing repetition in music was first demonstrated convincingly by that cuddly Frenchman. You can argue that without Boléro, "Get Lucky" still gets written, but you'd be wrong. So enduring is Boléro that it's been covered and tapped for inspiration by countless modern musicians. Just for fun, I'll throw a few examples out here. There's Jeff Beck's (and Jimmy Page's) version, aptly titled "Beck's Bolero." King Crimson also did one, of course. Here is yet another. And . . . this isn't a cover of Boléro, but it sure seems inspired by it: the Buddy Rich Big Band's "Chavala." Each has its merits. Hope you enjoy. Feel free to shoot me any others: jberger@nationalreview.com. And thanks for reading. | 
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