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John Sailer reports on how the Mellon Foundation is doing exactly what Joseph Schumpeter predicted: Using the fruits of capitalism to attack capitalism (in this case, by funding anti-intellectual ‘intellectuals’ at universities). Two slices:

The University of Virginia launched a hiring spree in 2020 as it pledged to become “a racial-equity-focused university.” A special initiative promised to recruit 30 postdoctoral fellows and “open the gateway” for them to fill tenure-track jobs. One current fellow’s specialties include “transfeminisms” and “genderqueer life writing.” Another researches how Filipino nurses resist “racial capitalism.”

The program owes its existence to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funded it to the tune of $5 million. With a $7.7 billion endowment, the Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Its annual giving has long dwarfed that of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In recent years, it has been refashioned as a tool for advancing an identitarian vision of social justice. For academia, the consequences are far-reaching.

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Students who specialize in intersectional neologisms will be well prepared for Mellon-funded faculty jobs. In 2023, Ohio State put out a job ad for an “Assistant Professor of Black Sexualities,” noting a recent $2 million Mellon Foundation gift that funded 10 new faculty positions. Zalika Ibaorimi, the professor hired for the job, lists “Black Porn” and “Black Sexual Logics” among her areas of expertise.

Mellon has bankrolled many professors notorious for their activism. At the Socialism 2025 conference, Assistant Prof. Eman Abdelhadi referred to her employer, the University of Chicago, as “evil” and a “colonial landlord,” but conceded that working there was useful for political organizing. Ms. Abdelhadi came up through the University of Chicago’s Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, a longstanding Mellon-funded hiring program. A few months after the conference, she was arrested at an anti-ICE protest and charged with two counts of aggravated battery to a police officer. She has pleaded not guilty.

Mellon’s funding has amplified a bleak trajectory for the academy. Today, a young person drawn to traditional fields like military history or classics should think twice before entering academia. A young scholar who “advances an anti-capitalist, prison abolitionist agenda,” as one Ohio State professor puts it, can find abundant support, especially from the Mellon Foundation. Higher education reform will only succeed when this unfortunate trend is reversed.

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller talks with AIER’s president Sam Gregg about “why the battle for free markets has shifted from a technical argument to a deeply moral one.”

Dominic Pino tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Contrary to the popular narrative about the “globalist” Americans and Europeans, it has consistently been the U.S. and the EU that have opposed trade liberalization in agriculture, while Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South American countries have supported it.

J.D. Tuccille describes the Trump administration’s “conflicted relationship with the Second Amendment.” A slice:

The Trump administration has a problem when it comes to the Second Amendment. A large part of its base consists of people who firmly believe in the right to keep and bear arms. But that right, as protected by the Second Amendment, empowers the individual and stands as a challenge to the authority of the state.

This creates an awkward situation for a president and his coterie who don’t like being challenged or even criticized. That’s why we see administration officials arguing in favor of self-defense rights one moment while challenging the right to keep and bear arms at another.

Here’s David Henderson’s new biography, for the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, of the great trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati. Two slices:

Economist Jagdish Bhagwati has made fundamental contributions to the studies of international trade, tariffs and quotas, and of industrial development. One of his most important contributions on tariffs was to show that when markets suffer from distortions or government policies cause distortions in a domestic economy, tariffs are never the best solution; for any given distortion there is always a domestic policy that is more efficient than tariffs in correcting the distortion. Another important contribution was to show that tariffs and quotas on imports are equivalent only under restrictive assumptions. Bhagwati has written numerous thoughtful defenses of free trade and critiques of protectionist policies. He wrote the entry titled “Protectionism” for this Encyclopedia.

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Bhagwati often identified arguments for restricting trade that could be misused by advocates of protectionism. For instance, in discussing economist Laura Tyson’s claim that the U.S. government should protect industries that produced positive externalities, Bhagwati wrote, “But the problem with this is that it is very hard for policymakers, and very easy for lobbyists, to decide which industries have the externalities.” Bhagwati quoted Robert Solow’s statement that although he knew there many industries where there were four dollars’ worth of social output to one dollar’s worth of private output, he didn’t know which ones they were.

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JOSHUA TREVIÑ0: England As It Really Is. “On the one hand, this is ordinary. England is under no obligation to meet an American standard. On the other hand it is deeply out of the ordinary, because the England we find is increasingly alien even to the English. . . . This does not strike the American as a cause for celebration, but perhaps we love England more than its academics do.”

THIS IS HOW THE NFL SCANS ALL OF ITS OLD FILM:

The Instagram account, @mrcelluloid, is run by independent filmmaker Alex Grant who brings fans behind the scenes as he manages NFL’s massive film vault. There is a staggering amount of film in there: over 100 million feet — it would take 13 years to watch it all.

Using “state-of-the-art” scanners, Grant digitizes 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm film. “Methods of transferring film have varied over time, with older machines using a same similar principle of taking individual photos of every single frame,” he writes in one post.

Grant, who scans about 50,000 feet of film per day, says the vast majority of the NFL Films archives is on 16mm, but there’s plenty of 35mm, too. 8mm is relatively rare. The earliest films are from the 1920s and film was still being used as late as 2014.

“To keep up with the volume of film, we have four machines running almost all day,” says Grant, while adding each scanner costs $300,000. “It has a big camera lens inside, which takes a high-quality photo of every single frame. It even has a built-in fan to blow off any excess dirt/dust.”

I grew up in South Jersey, about 20 minutes from the NFL Film’s office in Mt. Laurel, and once interviewed the legendary Steve Sabol for Videomaker magazine, so I’m thrilled that the league is digitizing its archives. But how much will be available for public viewership? To watch old NFL Films product is to watch a worldview and a respect for its core audience that no longer exists among its management, and hasn’t for a decade:

In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.

In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.

The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority. A half century later, Roger Goodell would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

In August 2016, America was experiencing a polarizing presidential election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem, to protest injustice. It was a politically divisive act directed at fans who regard the national anthem as something sacred. The league did not lift a finger to stop him.

Most employers don’t let their workers make controversial political statements to their customers. It is why you do not know your UPS driver’s views on the expansion of NATO. The Constitution does not prohibit private businesses from regulating speech during work.

A savvier commissioner would have reminded Kaepernick that he is being paid millions to wear the logo of the NFL, and the league does not permit players to use its brand to flaunt their personal politics. Instead, Roger Goodell permitted the pregame ceremonies to become the focus of intense political scrutiny, as the media lined up to catalog whether players stood, sat or knelt during the national anthem.

As Iowahawk famously tweeted back then: