April 3, 2026

GET WOKE GO BROKE:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

COVID SIX YEARS AGO TODAY: “They got covid 100% wrong,” Don Surber wrote on Boxing Day of 2022:

On April 3, 2020, the Daily Breeze reported, “Malibu surfer in handcuffs after enjoying empty, epic waves.”

Los Angeles County sheriff deputies arrested a man who was by himself in the ocean, in the name of stopping the spread of covid. The deputies were unmasked. It was a crazy time in which authorities erred on the side of authoritarianism to stop the spread of a virus.

The experts sided with closing down the world.

[On April 2nd, 2020], The LA Times reported, “Kim Prather, a leading atmospheric chemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wants to yell out her window at every surfer, runner, and biker she spots along the San Diego coast.”

She told the paper, “I wouldn’t go in the water if you paid me $1 million right now.”

Why?

Covid is a virus. Viruses spread from person to person — or according to those covering up for Red China, from bat to person. And yet the government ordered everyone inside.

That was dumb. But it is worse. We now know by staying indoors and vegetating, people made themselves weaker.

NPR reported two days before Christmas, “A regular exercise routine may significantly lower the chances of being hospitalized or even dying from COVID-19, recently published research shows.

But so much for aquatic exercising in the once-Golden State. As Jack Dunphy noted at the PJ Mothership on April 6th of 2020: Crackdowns on Lone Surfers and Paddleboarders Threaten to Erode Respect for Law Enforcement Even Further.

Despite, as Surber noted, their getting covid 100% wrong, corporatists on both sides of the equation weren’t afraid to use their power to bend reality: The Twitter Files show the unholy alliance of state and corporate power.

Even if social media content is not protected by the First Amendment, and even if Twitter, as a private company, can create its own “terms of service” and just decide to banish whomever they want, a key question posed by the Twitter Files is: what if the government is telling this private company to do so?

Isn’t that just an end run around the First Amendment’s protections of our right to free speech? I’m no lawyer but it sure seems so.

And, even worse, what if the cozy relationship between government and social media evolves to the point that platforms censor users without needing to be specifically asked to do so by the government? Like a Mafia don ordering a hit with a sideways glance, no words are ever spoken, but the order is made clear.

Just like that, an unholy alliance has been created, with government and private companies working in lockstep to censor our guaranteed right to free speech.

There’s a name for when private companies and the government work hand in hand: fascism. Benito Mussolini said that “fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

As indicated in the Twitter Files, access to Twitter’s bureaucratic censors, de-boosters and outright platform banners was equal opportunity — Republicans could make a call just as easily as Democrats. But what is also made clear is that the Democratic Party loyalties of Twitter employees are close to 100 percent.

So who was being censored? Anyone who challenged Democrats. Which goes a long way towards explaining why those 11,000 people who questioned Covid lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates and vaccine effectiveness were given the boot.

“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State,” to coin a phrase.

Related: Several more bonkers moments from 2020 rounded up here, under an otherwise innocuous headline: Greater Exercise Activity is Tied to Less Severe Covid-19 Outcomes, a Study Shows.

Evergreen:

Posted at 1:43 am by Ed Driscoll

April 2, 2026

THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED:

Posted at 10:55 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S AN EASY QUESTION:

Posted at 10:13 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Well, here we are.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

UNBURDENED BY WHAT HAS BEEN: White House Humorously Skewers Remarks Kamala Harris Decided to Put Out Before Trump’s Iran Speech.

She spoke in the video about the action against Iran, but she didn’t talk about how the Biden-Harris administration has helped to prop up the terrorist regime by relaxing enforcement on sanctions, and even released billions of dollars to Iran in frozen assets at the same time as a prisoner exchange.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly just flattened her, using Harris’ own comments about coconut trees to do her in.

“Kamala Harris oversaw the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and ushered in an invasion of migrant criminals into our homeland. She should listen to the overwhelming majority of Americans who want her to crawl under a coconut tree and go away.”

Thirteen service members were killed directly because of the Biden-Harris failures.

This is what it looked like under Biden-Harris. We do well never to forget how out of control it was, from the border to the rampant high prices/inflation.

To be fair, I can understand why a cabinet member from Obama’s third term would be angry about how Trump is cleaning up Barry’s messes. It’s a far cry from giving the mullahs $400 million in cash, and the Taliban seven (cue the Dr. Evil voice) billion dollars worth of American weapons, vehicles, and aircraft:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

MY MONEY IS ON THE FORMER:

But in regards to Graham’s questions, while it’s obvious that as a fellow lefty Brinkley is a fan, his biography raised a number of questions about just how biased was Mr. “And that’s the way it is,” particularly in an era when his competition consisted of three other prime time anchors (two on commercial networks, eventually, one on PBS) with exactly the same Democrat Party talking points.

Still though, it could be fun for audiences to discover that Democrat Party operatives with a lavalier were smearing Republican presidential candidates as crypto-Nazis decades before Trump.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Unintential Plagiarist” Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse: ” I think the reason AI propagandists are so flustered by the fact that no real writer wants to use their idiotic tools is that they themselves don’t enjoy writing.”

As Phillip Magness asked at Reason in June 2022: Is Twitter-Famous Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse a Plagiarist?

His 2000 thesis on civil-rights-era Atlanta lifts passages from other people’s work.

Known for posting Twitter threads that call out both real and imagined errors of accuracy in conservative commentaries about America’s past, Kruse earned the moniker of “History’s Attack Dog” from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Kruse parlayed his half-million Twitter followers into a recurring opinion column on American political history at MSNBC, and he will soon be taking his Twitter threads to print in a co-edited book, which purports to catalog “distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media.”

But a discovery from Kruse’s past may now put Princeton’s Twitter warrior under a microscope of his own, raising the question of whether he holds himself to the same standards that he imposes on his internet adversaries. A key passage from Kruse’s doctoral dissertation on the history of race relations in Atlanta displays uncanny similarities to a 1996 book on the same subject by Ronald H. Bayor, a now-retired historian from Georgia Tech.

A few months later, “Princeton [dismissed] Kevin Kruse plagiarism allegations as ‘careless cutting and pasting.’”

Scraping data and repurposing it — it’s not just for LLMs anymore!

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HMM:

Posted at 7:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WHAT MATTERS MOST: There are six things that matter most when pondering how to heal all that afflicts America, and long-time evangelical conservative insider operative Tim Goeglein documents each of them in his new book bearing that title. Actually, he wrote my book. Find out here what I mean.

Posted at 7:52 pm by Mark Tapscott

SQUEEZE HARDER: Dubai crackdown hits Iran’s economic lifeline, squeezes IRGC networks.

The arrest of dozens of IRGC-linked money changers in the United Arab Emirates is one of the most serious blows yet to Tehran’s sanctions-evasion network, laying bare how heavily the Islamic Republic has depended on Dubai as an economic lifeline.

Sources familiar with the matter told Iran International that UAE authorities detained dozens of money changers tied to financial entities linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, shut down associated companies and closed their offices.

The crackdown follows days of mounting regional tensions and comes after other measures targeting Iranian nationals, including visa revocations and tighter travel restrictions through Dubai.

For years, Dubai has served as Iran’s main offshore financial artery, where oil proceeds, petrochemical revenues and rial conversions were turned into dollars, dirhams and euros beyond the reach of the country’s battered domestic banking system.

“This is going to be a real problem for Tehran because Dubai was an economic lung for the Iranian regime,” Jason Brodsky of United Against Nuclear Iran told Iran International.

“That is economic pressure and diplomatic isolation in a way that the UAE is able to employ against the Iranian regime, and it will have a very considerable impact.”

This is no time to go wobbly.

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Nike Shares Now Slide to 11-Year Low.

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File.

Nike’s stock has slumped to its lowest level in more than a decade after the sportswear giant warned sales will keep falling through 2026.

Shares hit an 11-year low on April 1, capping a brutal stretch that has seen the company lose around 75 percent of its value since shares peaked in 2021.

It is now worth under $68 billion – a third of the value of TJ Maxx.

The latest sell-off was triggered by a bleak outlook, with Nike forecasting sales will slump 4 percent this quarter – a staggering $500 million fall in the value of shoes, tracksuits, and t-shirts.

The brand is being hit by a triple whammy: backlash to its more ‘woke’ image shift, a failed retreat from major retail partners in favor of direct-to-consumer selling, and a deepening slump in China.

* * * * * * * *

Nike’s recent ad campaigns have apparently featured not only Colin Kaepernick, who whines about being “oppressed” while enjoying fame and fortune, but also the woke Megan Rapinoe and a “non-binary esports player” – whatever that is – named Dominique McLean. That’s not very likely to draw a wide audience of loyal American buyers.

Why can’t these companies just advertise the virtues of their products? Why not just make the case to the buying public that Nike athletic shoes and so forth are better quality, longer-lasting, more comfortable, and explain why? Traditionally, advertising has promoted the virtues of a product. The company is looking to entice buyers to a free trade in which their buyers perceive a gain in value; that the shoes, or sportswear, or whatever, will return value to them greater than the cost of the product.

Promoting anti-American woke nutbars does nothing to that end. Nike seems to be learning that; they are learning, as other companies have before them, what it means to “get woke, go broke.”

How woke did Nike get before the plummet began? This woke:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll