IT’S DEAD JIM, AND NOT A MINUTE TOO SOON:  USAID formally shut down and incorporated into State Department.

NOT REALLY A NEW INSIGHT, BUT INDISPUTABLY TRUE:

A great explanation for white wokeness I heard: upper-middle-class whites desperately want to express sneering, classist contempt, and lower-class whites are the only socially acceptable target.

— Hunter Ash (@ArtemisConsort) July 4, 2025

NPR’s radical “domestic extremism correspondent” Odette Yousef took an insane angle on the Trump Administration’s efforts to punish Harvard University for failing to protect Jewish students from anti-semitism on campus – twisting it into Trump trying to halt the arc of racial justice. The online transcript of Tuesday’s NPR’s flagship news program All Things Considered featured this headline: “Federal pressure on Harvard over antisemitism echoes conservative attacks on higher ed.” That gets Ivy League universities off the hook for letting pro-Hamas radicals run rampant since Hamas’s massacre at an Israeli music festival.  Host Ari Shapiro explained that the Trump administration has informed Harvard University it had violated the Civil Rights Act, claiming the university has been "deliberately indifferent" to harassment directed at Jews on campus. Shapiro invited on NPR's domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef, not to talk about the actually extremist pro-Hamas encampments that sprouted up on progressive elite campuses, but the Trump administration for doing something about it. Yousef pretended there was significant anti-Muslim bias at Harvard. ODETTE YOUSEF: Well, many of the examples it cites of campus hostility towards Jewish and Israeli students, Ari, actually come from Harvard's own investigation. Harvard convened task forces to look at antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias at the school. Those reports came out in April. And so the administration is using information that the university found to punish the university. It also only focuses on antisemitism, so it doesn't show concern about findings of hostility toward Muslim, Palestinian or Arab students on campus. She slotted Trump’s move against Harvard as just another ignorant conservative move against elite education. YOUSEF: ….And so this is where the question comes in, Ari, of what's really the goal here, and it's useful to put it in a larger historical context of attacks on higher education. Yousef found a Trinity College professor who supports DEI on campus and sees conservatives as a long-standing racist threat to education. YOUSEF: I spoke with Isaac Kamola about this. He teaches political science at Trinity College in Hartford. He says it goes back to the mid-20th century. Access to higher ed really expanded. Colleges were accepting more women, people of color, first generation and low-income students, people studying under the GI Bill. And in turn, that led to new areas of study, like Black studies and gender studies. ISAAC KAMOLA: Starting in the 1980s, you get a massive backlash against those kinds of shifts by those who want to reproduce hierarchy, that want to reproduce this vision of America as a white nation - as a white Christian nation - that want to push back against the directions of racial justice that the society was going in in general and higher education played a large role in. YOUSEF: So universities, Ari, kind of became the vanguard in the pursuit of inclusive democracy. And Kamola says, you know, conservative attacks on universities are really like a counter-revolution fighting against that. We’re quite a long way from the question of Harvard violating the civil rights of Jewish students. YOUSEF: Well, Kamola says antisemitism is a real and serious issue, but he sees the administration using it for other goals, namely rolling back civil rights -- or DEI, as we hear more often now -- and rolling back inclusive democracy…. Next, a clip from Jonathan Jacoby of the Nexus Project tortured language to suggest that tolerating anti-semitism was actually part of fighting anti-semitism. JONATHAN JACOBY: Living as a free people in an open society is essentially unprecedented in Jewish history. And it's kept us safe, and our relationships with other Americans have kept us safe. And so standing against the weaponization of antisemitism to undermine democracy is part of standing against antisemitism. Yousef encapsulated Jacoby’s argument in her own words, that “singling out Jewish people as uniquely deserving of safety could feed conspiracy narratives, and it could lead to Jews being scapegoated for damage ultimately done to America's higher education system.” That’s the same twisted argument leftist Yale University professor Jason Stanley used on tax-funded PBS in March, before high-tailing it to Canada to flee Trump’s fascism.

Glastonbury Festival made headlines across the world this year, but not because of the music. The focus before the festival had been on the Irish rap trio Kneecap—who had waved the flag of Hezbollah and said that, “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.” But it was London-based punk-rap duo Bob Vylan that went viral for leading a series of Palestine-related political chants, including one in which they call for “death, death to the IDF.”

It wasn’t the first time that Vylan had chanted such things. Although the group later tried to frame their chant as a call to dismantle the Israeli military, footage from 28 May has since surfaced of the group’s frontman Pascal Robinson-Foster calling for “death to every single IDF soldier.” Indeed, during their Glastonbury set itself, Robinson-Foster shone a light on his intentions, saying: “We are the violent punks, because sometimes you gotta get your message across with violence, because that is the only language that some people speak, unfortunately.”

This is a sentiment that I’ve encountered many times, as a Palestinian who has talked to people from both sides of the conflict. A lot of Palestinians believe that violence is the only language that Israelis understand, and a lot of Israelis believe that violence is the only language that Palestinians understand, and the consequence of this is more spirals of violence. It’s not a new sentiment in the Levant—but to see it take root in Britain is concerning, not least because it risks importing the cycles of hatred and violence from the Middle East.

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Listening through Bob Vylan’s discography reveals a group whose work is interwoven with a fascination with left-wing political violence. Their latest record Humble as the Sun features tracks with titles like “Makes Me Violent” and “Get Yourself a Gun,” in which they advise listeners to arm themselves in response to rent hikes.

Of course, Bob Vylan is hardly the first punk band to court controversy or use political outrage to grab attention. The genre started out that way in the 1970s, with monotonous works expressing a rage born from working-class frustration, together with a performative rebellion against the political establishment and ossified social norms.

Hardcore punk took the genre in a more muscular, confrontational direction in the ’80s—as bands like Black Flag, Crass, and Discharge ventured into darker, more explicitly anarchist territory. These groups screamed against authority, police brutality, war, and corporate control. But even at their most furious, the aggression was sonic and aesthetic—meant to blow out the speakers, not to cheer on literal armed conflict.

Vylan’s work is influenced by the funk-metal of Rage Against The Machine, but it represents a dimmer and less imaginative evolution of that formula, lacking Tom Morello’s virtuosic guitar solos and punchy riff work, and amping up the trollish provocations, a product for a new era in which content can easily go viral on social media for its extremity, offensiveness, radical politics and violent rhetoric. 

All of this signals a seismic shift: once, progressive activists in the West more often rallied around slogans of peace, coexistence, and human rights; now, a significant faction glorifies so-called “armed resistance” and indulges in chants calling for the death of those seen as political enemies. Yes, a fringe assortment of Maoists, Stalinists, and others—including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—have long described Hamas and Hezbollah as their friends. But for most of my life, they remained very far from the mainstream. Bob Vylan’s chants and gestures were cheered on by the crowd at a world-renowned music festival.

Many pro-Palestinian protestors are deeply concerned about the well-being of civilians caught up in the war—and that’s perfectly reasonable. But we’ve gone far beyond that. Anti-war protests of the 2000s called for an end to the war against Iraq, not for death to British and American soldiers. Indeed in 2023 and 2024, most pro-Palestine protests called for a ceasefire—not for “death to the IDF.” But now pro-war chants have begun to echo from festival stages. This descent from yesteryear’s songs celebrating hope, togetherness, and peace to today’s “get yourself a gun” agitprop is deeply unsettling.

1. “Cool people are perceived to be more extraverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open, and autonomous, whereas good people are more conforming, traditional, secure, warm, agreeable, universalistic, conscientious, and calm.”

2. Henry George and American libertarianism.

3. More Scott Sumner movie reviews.

4. Restaurants rated by the hotness of their clientele (NYT).  You know what to do!

5. A new bank called Erebor? (FT)  Here are further bits of detail.

6. “Proxy quitters” in Japan — the service is still growing.

7. Reddit debate on early massive galaxy formation.

8. ChatGPT-assisted retrieval practice had positive effects in an educational setting.

The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

So far I am not finding them very impressive.

To be clear, there are many things — big things — I do not like about the bill.  I would sooner cut Medicare than Medicaid (that said, I do not find the idea of cutting health care spending outrageous per se).  The corporate rate ends up being too low, given the budget situation.  No taxes on tips and overtime is crazy and cannot last, given the potential to game the system, plus those are not efficient tax changes.

I strongly suspect that if I knew more of the bill’s details (e.g., what exactly is the treatment of nuclear power in the current version?), I would have more complaints yet.  I do not wish to boost taxes on solar power.  Veronique de Rugy criticizes the underlying CEA projections.

That all said, doing the budget is not easy, especially these days.  Maybe I have read fifteen or so critiques of BBB, and have not yet seen one that outlines which spending cuts we should do.  Yet comparative analysis is the essence of economics, or indeed of policy work more generally.  In that sense they have not yet produced critiques at all, just complaints.  Alternatively, the critics could outline all the tax hikes that would put the budget on a sustainable path, but I do not see them doing that either.  Again, no comparative analysis.

If you don’t want to cut health care spending, what do you want to cut?  I am willing to cut health care spending, preferring to start with richer and older people to the extent that is possible.

You can always spend more on health care and save more lives and prevent some suffering.  But what is the limiting principle here?  Simply getting angry about the fact that lower health care spending will have some bad outcomes is more a sign of a weak argument than a strong argument.  Again, a strong argument needs comparative analysis and some recognition of what is the limiting principle on health care spending.  I am not seeing that.  I am seeing anger over lower health care spending, but no endorsements of higher health care spending.  I guess we are supposed to be doing it just right, at least in terms of the level?

It is commonly noted that the depreciation provisions and corporate cuts will increase the deficit, but how many of the critics are noting they are also likely to increase gdp (but by enough to prove sustainable?)?  I write this as someone who thinks the proposed Trump corporate tax rate is too low, but I am willing to recognize the trade-offs here.

Another major point concerns AI advances.  A lot of the bill’s critics, which includes both Elon and many of the Democratic critics, think AI is going to be pretty powerful fairly soon.  That in turn will increase output, and most likely government revenue.  Somehow they completely forget about this point when complaining about the pending increase in debt and deficits.  That is just wrong.

It is fine to make a sober assessment of the risk trade-offs here, and I would say that AI does make me somewhat less nervous about future debt and deficits, though I do not think we should assume it will just bail us out automatically.  We might also overregulate AI.  But at the margin, the prospect of AI should make us more optimistic about what debt levels can be sustained.  No one is mentioning that.

It also would not hurt if critics could discuss why real and nominal interest rates still seem to be at pretty normal historical levels, albeit well above those of the ZIRP period.

Overall I am disappointed by the quality of these criticisms, even while I agree with many of their specific points.

The post Big Beautiful Bill critiques appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.