The Morning Brief

"What's the frequency, Kenneth?", and other Tuesday tidbits

• Everyone recall how the media likes to go with the "Republicans pounce" headline whenever Democrats commit a blunder? I forget now who it was who pointed out the bias in this framing—that the story was not the Democrat blundering, but the Republican reaction to it, with the less than subtle implication that there is something illegitimate to it, as though noting a Democrat blunder is an act of lese majeste—which is exactly what it is for the left.

Now we're getting the other side of the street, with the media pouncing on the Jeffrey Goldberg report that he was included on a Trump Administration group chat conducted on Signal discussing operational plans for attacking the Houthis in Yemen. Oh are the media pouncing! They are pouncing harder than a six-year-old boy in a bounce house.

I have no idea why the Trump team chose to use Signal to conduct this discussion, but I'd like to think they did it on purpose precisely to cause the media to beclown itself, or perhaps for the purpose of detecting (or avoiding) a leak. I can well imagine that there's a legitimate fear of Biden holdovers or Deep Staters leaking or attempting to organize disruption of Trump security plans. We know careerists at the National Security Council (we're looking at you, Vindman!) did this in the first Trump Administration. This wouldn't be the first time an administration used off-the-books communications to get around vulnerabilities in the official channels. Including the egregious and cowardly Jeffrey Goldberg is a stroke of genius. I think they should loop in CNN's Kaitlyn Collins on the next round.

Or we could taunt the retired Dan Rather, just for grins and giggles: “What’s the frequency Kenneth?” (Old timers will get this reference. . .)

• Over at Civitas, I offer some reflections on "The Nadir of the Climate Change Movement." Excerpt:

It is possible that the Trump Administration is going to deal the death blows to the long-running climate change hysteria and government hostility to fossil fuels, not just in the United States but around the globe. . .

At this point, someone might well raise the question of whether Trump's moves will last or whether they will be promptly reversed by the next Democratic administration, for whom the "climate crisis" will remain a core priority (or whether some of Trump's proposed changes will encounter a legal roadblock). This is a plausible scenario until we consider the startling proposition that the Trump Administration's moves are, in fact, a lagging indicator of where the climate change story has been heading for some time now, unrecognized by the media and most politicians.

Chaser: Worth taking in Alex Trembath's parallel article, "The Age of the Climate Hawk Is Over."

• Readers in the vicinity of Oxford, MS, may want to take in the lecture I am delivering Thursday at Ole Miss:

I'll try to post a video, audio, or transcript of my remarks next week.

• Megan McArdle beat me to a point I've been meaning to make (and likely still will) as some length:

Abandoning DEI Won't Fix Academia's Left-Leaning Problem

After all the diversity offices are renamed and the diversity statements withdrawn, academia will remain near-monolithically left. This is a problem for conservatives on campus and an even bigger problem for society, because it takes a lot of scholarly expertise to maintain a modern industrial economy. Scholarship that excludes half the available ideas isn’t up to the job — if only because such lopsided expertise can’t command the public trust. . .

That problem can’t be cured, however, by forcing academia to abandon the most overt and annoying manifestations of its political skew. Nor can the right simply demand that academia hire more conservatives, because in most disciplines there aren’t enough conservative PhDs to staff ideologically balanced campuses, or even provide otherwise left-leaning campuses a vibrant conservative counterweight.

Getting to that point means rebuilding a pipeline of right-leaning academics that will have to start with graduate students and spit out full professors 20 years later. That will mean convincing potential graduate students that they won’t have to run through an ideological gantlet to get a job.

I have a LOT of thoughts on this subject, and will attempt to do a whole series here in due course.

• Feel good headline of the day, from Inside Higher Ed:

Education Department Reeling After Layoffs

Inside Higher Ed spoke to more than a dozen former and current department staffers over the past week about the RIF and what followed. All of them describe a chaotic process that was “disorganized and unstrategic,” as one source put it, and say the cuts have led to technical mishaps, gaps in oversight and a large-scale loss of institutional knowledge. . .

“The mood is horrendous,” the staffer said. “Nobody knows what to do.”

I don’t think many people in Washington realize how the phrase “bringing an agency to a standstill” is celebrated beyond the Beltway.

• Meanwhile, today's feel-good meme: