How Many Have Died?

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Like everything else in the (dis)United States, the Covid-19 death toll has been politicized. Many conservatives claim the death totals have been exaggerated by liberals intent on weakening Trump, which recent events prove, he’s fully capable of doing himself.

One of the more conservative newspapers in the country has completed a comprehensive study of the worldwide death toll. Their conclusion:

“To better understand the pandemic’s global toll, the Journal compiled the most recent available data on deaths from all causes from countries with available records. These countries together account for roughly one-quarter of the world’s population but about three-quarters of all reported deaths from Covid-19 through late last year.

The tally found more than 821,000 additional deaths that aren’t accounted for in governments’ official Covid-19 death counts.”

Not the recorded death count of 2 million, 2.8 million. Because it’s the Wall Street Journal, I’m sure the death count deniers’ false claims will cease and we’ll see a corresponding rise in empathy for the deceased and their families.

John Eastman “Retires” From Chapman University

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Eastman is a Southern California law professor who has been telling Trump exactly what he’s wanted to hear, that the election was stolen and Pence could help undue it. This fiction lead to him rising through Trump’s “elite legal strike force” so fast that he ended up speaking from the stage pre-insurrection with Rudy on January 6th. Meanwhile, 3,000 miles away, his Chapman University colleagues and students were organizing. They pressed the University President to fire him, but the President forcefully explained why he couldn’t and wouldn’t.

Until yesterday, when he flipped and announced Eastman had agreed to retire. So what happened to cause the sudden and drastic reversal? Conservatives will no doubt say “cancel culture” struck again, but my guess is the University’s legal team and Eastman’s lawyers agreed to craft the “retirement” exit to avoid a lose-lose situation with respect to exorbitant legal fees both sides would incur if they dug in.

So is the case of John Eastman’s retirement, as conservatives will claim, another example of the hypocrisy of progressives who advocate for diversity writ large while simultaneously reducing ideological diversity by pushing Eastman out the door? No, because this isn’t a difference of opinion about the role and size of government, gun control, or social justice, it’s about what a law school does when one of its professors refuses to accept a bipartisan legal consensus—that it was a free and fair election—in the most visible way imaginable. How much harm is done to the law school’s and University’s reputation?

Ultimately, the university had to have worried that many of the mostly liberal recent college graduates applying to law schools were less likely to apply to Chapman because of Eastman’s affiliation with it. They had to have known his flight from reality was going to lead to fewer applications, meaning a weaker and smaller entering class, meaning a loss of revenue during higher education’s great retrenchment.

Undoubtedly, the University paid Eastman a tidy sum to “retire”. A sum they deemed less than the long-term loss of revenue from keeping Eastman on the payroll.

We know it wasn’t really a retirement because Eastman said he will direct the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at Claremont Institute.

Watch the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence retract their offer sooner than later. Hope his fifteen minutes of fame was worth it.

Making History

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Many people understate Trump’s accomplishments. He is the first president to lose the popular vote twice and to be impeached twice.

And one more thing, he received 74,222,593 votes. A lot, but not the 75 million nearly everyone is stating. In the interest of accuracy, can we stop rounding up? And for the record, Biden/Harris earned 81,281,502. Electoral college. . . 306 to 232.

Am I undercutting my own argument?

Monday Required Reading

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  1. Three cheers for my ‘oh so woke’ sport.
  2.  Props to this brave, young French woman for agitating for a more frank approach to sexism and gender violence.
  3.  File this under “increasingly relevant”. A new study has found being angry increases your vulnerability to misinformation.
  4. Leah Sotille’s podcast Bundyville is state-of-the-art audio journalism. Along with Kathleen Belew, she’s my go to source on all things domestic terrorism. File her most recent writing, “All Bets Are Off”, under “increasingly relevant”.

What Happened on January 6th, 2021?

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Young children will wonder. Maureen Dowd’s answer:

“He draped his autocratic behavior in the American flag. Surrounded by Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, F.D.R., M.L.K. and monuments to our war dead, this coward whipped up a horde of conspiracists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and gullible acolytes to try to steal an election for him. He said he would march to the Capitol with them, but he didn’t, of course. He watched his insurrection on TV, like the bum that he is.”

Pence’s Luck Runs Out

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White House reporters say Trump is livid with Pence. The President’s public comments lend credence to that. And now we’re learning many Republicans in the White House and Congress are repulsed by the President’s treatment of the most loyal of Veeps.

But no one whose been paying even a little attention should be surprised. The surprise is that the political partnership lasted as long as it did. In Trumplandia, four years is forty.

What I find most fascinating about the President is the stories we never hear. Specifically, about close friends, whether childhood, college, or more recent. Sure, people partner with him in business and politics, and they appear chummy until they don’t. No one ever talks about him as a close, personal friend. When he said his older, overweight friend died from the ‘rona, I was left wondering how “his friend” would have described their relationship.

Friendship requires one to put other’s interests before their own on occasion. To listen, to help them move, to make them food, to celebrate their successes, to support them through difficult chapters of life. Most importantly, it requires reciprocity. Friendships mature as people learn to put other’s interests before their own.

More simply, narcissism is friendship kryptonite.