Your son is about to start his second year at college. You get a notice from the school saying that he must, every morning, jump up and down 12 times, three times facing north, three facing south, three east, and three west, in that order. If he does not agree to do that, he will not be allowed to return to the college.

What do you do? Kick yourself for not having sent him to Hillsdale, perhaps. But it’s too late now, especially if you’ve already paid the tuition for next fall — and most especially if you borrowed to pay the tuition.

What’s the point of the college-mandated jumping up and down? Can colleges make unreasonable demands on students as conditions for matriculating? It probably says somewhere in some manual the schools have put out that students must … follow orders. But surely there’s an implication that the orders must be sensible. And necessary.

And if they aren’t sensible and necessary, don’t students riot? Isn’t that what students do? (We know they can’t read, or just don’t, many of them.)

Harvard used to require students to pass a swimming test in order to graduate. But as more and more students who were unlikely to fall off the Saltonstall’s dock on the North Shore got admitted, Harvard’s requirement became dated and was eliminated. And however unreasonable the requirement may have seemed, it was on the books for decades — which is to say, before most students in the modern era (whenever that began) matriculated, so the students of that era and their families were at least on notice before their trustees had to clip the coupons to pay the tuition.

Today, or this fall more precisely, the requirement imposed by many colleges is not to be able to swim but to have been vaccinated against the Chinese Virus. Why?

And why are so many other organizations requiring vaccinations and other unnecessary actions as conditions for doing business with them? Particularly reprehensible are the private clubs that have imposed conditions on their members. They have done so, one supposes, because the state or municipality has ordered them to do so. But where is the Spirit of ’76? Lost, one fears, in the spirit of ’19 — the lies of the anti-American 1619 Project.

All the world can be divided into two categories: those who should get vaccinated and those who need not. Those who should are older people — 65 and up. Their mortality rate from the Chinese Virus is high, we are told. We’re not sure what the actual mortality rate is, because politicians (including the CDC) have lied and lied, and listed people who have only died with the Chinese Virus as having died from it. Still, old people, even those who are not obese, would be rolling loaded dice not to get vaccinated.

But that is not true for younger people. They are not at serious risk of dying from the Virus. Oh, one or two, here and there, may die from it — as one or two students may fall out a fraternity window now and then. But those are the exceptions. A vibrant society doesn’t make draconian rules for all (“block up all college windows”) in order to protect a few.

Young women, on the other hand, may be at risk, not of dying from the Virus, but of having the vaccine interfere with their getting pregnant or carrying a baby to term. We just don’t know, and we certainly don’t trust the government to tell us the truth.

Here’s the only sensible rule: once everyone who wants to be vaccinated has been (which will certainly be the case by September, if it is not already), there’s no further need for any rules at all. Period. No masks. No “social distancing.” Nothing. Any rules that are imposed are fascist if imposed by government and scandalous if imposed by private bodies — and perhaps also in violation of common carrier rules if imposed by airlines and other organizations that have obligations to serve all customers.

But who will lead the charge against the fascism of overreaching governments? High on the list should be private clubs, especially tony social clubs that cater to the rich. Cadwalader Wickersham Cromwell may like to eat lunch at his club, but he doesn’t have to. Clubs may be able to support their staffs if government shuts them down, but the local hair salon or fitness center almost certainly cannot. Those businesses are mostly run by struggling middle-class entrepreneurs, regular Americans, including a lot of people who weren’t admitted to Harvard.

Clubs also tend to be able to afford to pay lawyers to fight government, and they have a civic duty to do so. And they also have the ability to arrange, and pay, to have all their staff members who so desire to get vaccinated.

Someday our children and grandchildren will, we should hope, look back at us, and wonder, incredulously, how we could have been bamboozled into doing the stupid things we are being required to do today in response to the Chinese Virus.

But the people who stand up and object will be added — by our children and grandchildren, and theirs — to the pantheon of Americans, headed by the Founding Fathers, who took the risks that kept the nation free.

Published:

May 21, 2021
The American Spectator

“A great man giveth not a mean speech; yea, and a mean man giveth not a speech worth hearing.”

One point about Biden’s Wednesday night speech is not debatable: no one could have been disappointed. Biden’s speech was pure Biden: unimaginative, mean, probably plagiarized in parts and designed to sow discord even as he mouthed words about bring Americans together.

In another words, about what you would expect — probably just what you did expect.

He spoke of lifting his “hand off our family Bible” — you know, the one that endorses abortion, which Biden wants to fund in a thousand and one ways. Some Catholic bishops may have been watching: It has now been reported that some of them are considering stopping Biden from receiving communion.

He spoke of “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” Not much nuance there, given that the crisis was created entirely by government, which locked down the country, snuffing out economic activity. So: Biden is pro draconian lookdown rules, and then complains about precisely the results of those lookdown rules. Please.

Then he called the Jan. 6 business “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” Whether it was an “attack” is debatable — how do you attack a concept? But surely “our democracy” includes the concept of law and order — and certainly the summer’s Black Lives Matter riots were magnitudes worse that what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6. More than a dozen people were killed during the summer’s riots, and the property damage is estimated to be more than $1.4 billion. The only killing on Jan. 6 was by a yet-unidentified policeman of an unarmed woman as she was climbing through a window, not exactly a threatening position. Biden was just stoking racial unrest.

Here’s the old plagiarizer at work: “When I was sworn in, less than 1% of seniors were fully vaccinated against COVID-19. One hundred days later, nearly 70% of seniors are fully protected.” What he’s implying is that the previous president (whose name is never to be spoken) did a lousy job of getting people vaccinated. Except that the vaccine was only just coming online when Biden took office; and coming online only because of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Without Trump and without Warp Speed there wouldn’t be a vaccine. How difficult would it have been for Biden to tip his hat to that success story?

Too difficult, apparently.

And on he went, about a nurse who said, “Every shot feels like a dose of hope.” and about a Florida educator who “when she got vaccinated, she sat in her car and cried.”

“But tonight, I can say because of you — the American people — our progress these past one hundred days against one of the worst pandemics in history is one of the greatest logistical achievements our country has ever seen.” But it really wasn’t because of the American people as a whole, but only the drug companies — and the man who drove the Warp Speed effort.

And catch this line: “. . . more new jobs in the first one hundred days than any president on record.” Well, yes: government shuts down the economy, then opens it up and then takes credit for creating the jobs. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

For those who don’t like Biden, it was fun watching him stumble over his campaign slogan. The text read: “We have to do more than just build back. We have to build back better.” What he said was, “We have to do more than just build back better (stumble, stumble), we have to build . . . back . . . better.” No, no: we have to do better than that.

“Throughout our history, public investments and infrastructure have transformed America. The transcontinental railroad and interstate highways united two oceans and brought us into a totally new age of progress.”

Biden has forgotten — if he ever knew — the Crédit Mobilier scandal.

In the late 1800s, the federal government gave huge federal subsidies to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads which created the chance for corruption and which resulted in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, the first two transcontinental railroads, received federal subsidies of land and cash. Later, the Northern Pacific Railroad was given federal subsidies of land. But the Great Northern Railroad, under James J. Hill, received no federal subsidies, and it was so successful that it was the only transcontinental not to lose money during the Panic of 1893. Both the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific Railroads went broke during the 1890s. They were early Solyndras — the Silicon Valley solar power company to which the Obama-Biden administration gave a half a billion dollars, which then promptly collapsed.

Then: “The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America. And, it recognizes something I’ve always said: ‘Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle class built this country.’”

Could we have a citation to where you’ve said it before, please? The middle class undoubtedly did its part building this country, but where’d the money come from? Wall Street? Oops.

And the idea of pumping more money into woke educational establishments borders on dementia. We know, and have for years, that most people learn almost nothing in college. Promising more funds for education is just a bribe to people too stupid to realize they’ll be wasting precious years of their lives warehousing themselves off the grid.

And then this not-so-veiled attack on the 75 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump: “And, we won’t ignore what our own intelligence agencies have determined [would those be the same agencies that determined that Trump was a Russian stooge?] — the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism,” a sentence followed immediately by, “And my fellow Americans, we must come together to heal the soul of this nation.” You just can’t make this stuff up.

There’s a lot of ruin in a country. And a lot of it was on display in the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday night.

Published:

May 1, 2021
The Daily Caller