Is the Era of Climate Change Hysteria Over?

As a political issue, climate change is losing its mojo. Activists care less and less about saving the planet, and have aimed their ideological weapons at more serious issues, like unjust social inequality.

Climate change was the perfect issue for a citizen of the world like Barack Obama. His Enlightenment Era cosmopolitanism walked away from shopworn issues like national pride and patriotism, the better to focus his attention on the threat to the planet, the threat to all of humanity, the threat to all the people living everywhere. 

When we are talking about the earth’s climate we are, in principle, all in it together. Better yet, since America is one of the largest users of fossil fuels, being for the climate allowed Obama to be against America, and to blame America for polluting the atmosphere. He happily since an accord that allowed America to pay for cleaning up the mess it created. Worse yet, the Paris Climate Accord, a massive wealth redistribution scheme, was based on a narrative and on aspirations, not on real steps to reduce carbon dioxide omissions.

Of course, the world’s leading producers of greenhouse gasses are no longer the Anglo-American countries. If you believe that China is going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because of a piece of paper signed in Paris, you are not living in the real world. Or better, you have sucked up too much gas.

No one disputes the fact that the climate changes. The climate has always changed. It’s what it does. How much human beings, and especially human beings of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion are responsible for the change…is open to some question. If a leading climate scientist like Richard Lindzen is not persuaded, we should retain our skepticism about claims of “settled science.” We ought to know that science runs on skepticism and that it is never settled. As for the planet’s future, we are dealing with prophecy, not with science. There is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow.

Now, Steven Hayward writes in the Wall Street Journal (via Maggie’s Farm) that climate change hysteria is fading from public consciousness. The armies of the progressive and radical left are moving on from climate change, the better to find a more salient and more alarming threat to everything they believe to be holy.

Hayward opens his thoughtful op-ed as follows:

Climate change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.

He notes that the Paris Accord, which some people consider to be one of Obama’s greatest achievements— one that he failed to submit to the Senate for ratification, thus making it vulnerable to his successor’s pen— was nothing like what it appeared to be. It was aspirational. It did not commit anyone to anything:

A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ” Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades.

How about that? Did you know that we cannot address climate change without addressing issues of misogyny and social justice?

It’s like throwing mud at the wall, to see whether it sticks. Hayward continues:

The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out.

To track the rise and fall of climate change hysteria, Hayward refers to a 1972 article by one Anthony Downs. In it Downs mapped out what he called the “issue-attention” cycle, in five stages. All of them will be blindingly obvious to those who have followed the unfolding process.

Hayward begins with the first stage. There, the experts run out to announce that they have discovered a great problem, one which they are well qualified to analyze and to solve. Could it be that said experts are merely talking their book and making themselves more important, the vanguard of an elite leading the world’s fight against… the Industrial Revolution and free enterprise capitalism:

The first stage involves groups of experts and activists calling attention to a public problem, which leads quickly to the second stage, wherein the alarmed media and political class discover the issue. The second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call it the “dopamine” stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global peril and salvation. 

The end is nigh, the sky is falling… no, not figuratively, but literally. It’s not just Chicken Little who is announcing the impending doom. It’s responsible scientists.

But then, lo and behold, the accountants enter the picture and tally up the price. Guess what, the price of enacting all of the pie-in-the-sky plans of the hopers and dreamers is prohibitive. It would cause us to spend everything we have saving the planet and still, the outcome would be uncertain. Because outcomes are always uncertain:

Then comes the third stage: the hinge. As Mr. Downs explains, there soon comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” That’s where we’ve been since the United Nations’ traveling climate circus committed itself to the fanatical mission of massive near-term reductions in fossil fuel consumption, codified in unrealistic proposals like the Kyoto Protocol. This third stage, Mr. Downs continues, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.”

So, human ardor being what it is, it starts cooling down. It has become so unrealistic that true believers stop proposing it. Besides, when you shut down all of that energy production, someone else somewhere else is very likely to pick up the slack… and eat your lunch:

“In the final stage,” Mr. Downs concludes, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.” Mr. Downs predicted correctly that environmental issues would suffer this decline, because solving such issues involves painful trade-offs that committed climate activists would rather not make.

And besides, how much do the climate changers really want to change the climate. If they were serious, Hayward opines, they would have been out in force promoting nuclear energy. But, nuclear energy is insufficiently pristine. So they spend their money mobilizing the public, brainwashing the public and trying to shut down the fossil fuel industry.

A case in point is climate campaigners’ push for clean energy, whereas they write off nuclear power because it doesn’t fit their green utopian vision. A new study of climate-related philanthropy by Matthew Nisbet found that of the $556.7 million green-leaning foundations spent from 2011-15, “not a single grant supported work on promoting or reducing the cost of nuclear energy.” The major emphasis of green giving was “devoted to mobilizing public opinion and to opposing the fossil fuel industry.”

Hayward concludes:

Treating climate change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics, die by politics.

Apparently, it was more scientism than science. But, who knew? In truth, most of us knew.

She Will Not Be Missed

Barely a week ago, I posted about a family that was torn apart when the wife-mother abandoned her husband and daughter in order to find true love. In that story, ripped from Carolyn Hax’s Washington Post column, the derelict woman’s relatives were trying to re-establish contact with the woman’s abandoned child—now grown up. I agreed with Hax, to the effect that it was too little, too late.

Anyway, the gods seemed to want to confirm the correctness of our views. They sent us the following obituary, written by the children of a woman who also abandoned home and hearth to find true love.

Here’s the story, reported by the Daily Mail:

Kathleen Dehmlow passed away on Thursday in Springfield, Minnesota.

According to her obituary in the Redwood Falls Gazette, she was not a very good person.

It states that after she married Dennis Dehmlow in 1957, the couple had two children, Gina and Jay.

Five years afterward, 'she became pregnant by her husband's brother Lyle Dehmlow and moved to California.

'She passed away on May 31, 2018 in Springfield and will now face judgment.

'She will not be missed by Gina and Jay, and they understand that this world is a better place without her.'

When the Dog Ate the Butterfly

Trust me, this is going to cheer you up. It might even make your day. A nature loving family raised a caterpillar until it became a full fledged butterfly. They decided to hold a ceremony celebrating the dong's release into natural freedom. But, something went wrong... and their dog ate the butterfly.

Keeping Secrets

In a culture that values openness and honesty what are we to make of secrets? How important is it to keep secrets? Compared, for example, with the habit of sharing everything about your life with your 2, 439 closest friends on Facebook. Do you have a right to divulge a secret told to you in confidence? Do  you have a right to break faith with someone who has shared an intimate detail of his life? When you agree to keep a secret, can you ever break the promise?

If you discover that your neighbor's wife is cheating on your neighbor, should you tell him? Surely, it depends on whether said wife has confided in you or whether you have witnessed her casual encounter? If you discover that your friend's teenage child is engaged in dangerous activities, hanging out with gang members, trafficking drugs... should you tell your friend? Should you tell even if you learned about it from the boy himself and he asked you not to tell? In that case you will probably think that it is right to tell. He is a juvenile and he is engaged in potentially life altering dangerous activities.

In all cases, deciding whether to keep a secret is complex, not simple.

In an age of oversharing, what should we make of the fact, well know to everyone, that the worst thing a criminal can do is: to snitch, to betray a secret, to fail to keep a confidence. You might be thinking that we should not base our moral principles on the behavior of criminal gang members, but, under the circumstances such groups have an acute understanding of what allows a group to cohere. You might say that it’s life or death. You might say that it's the difference between freedom and jail. Surely, criminal conspirators value discretion because the alternatives are so dire.

On the other hand, the secrets do constitute a conspiracy. What if the district attorney offers you a new life in a new state with a new name... if only you tell what you know? In that case, the moral requirement to keep secrets seems to yield, not so much to the imperative of keeping you out of prison, but to the imperative of being a good citizen.

Beyond the realm of personal familial secrets, we also have trade secrets, company secrets and national security secrets. They are often closely held. If you betray them you will soon find yourself either without a job or in jail.

Or else, consider this. When two or more people share a life, when they are married or living together, they know things about each other that are intimate and personal. You cannot share a life if you do not. They may be highly embarrassing personal habits or they may be innocuous habits that are only indulged at home. In all cases, if you want to continue to live together, if you want to live in conjugal harmony, you do best not to betray such secrets. If you do so and if it gets back to your cohabitant, you will have broken the bonds of trust. Without such bonds your living arrangement is likely to become fraught with drama.

At a time when we have all been told, over and over again, that good relationships are based on shared feelings, especially on empathy, it is useful to redirect our thinking to a simpler and clearer point: good intimate relationships involve sharing secrets, and keeping them in trust. Secrets are not feelings. They are pieces of information. If your husband fails to put his dirty socks in the hamper, it is a fact, not a feeling. If you share it you are betraying his trust. Even on so trivial a matter. Especially on a trivial matter. If you cannot keep an innocuous secret, why should anyone expect you to  keep an important secret?

There is nothing simple or easy about this issue. I imagine that the therapy culture invites us to overshare because it is easier to blurt it all out than to reflect on what we should or should not share with whom when and where. It takes moral judgment to know when it might be permissible to divulge a secret. Often, there are no really good answers. You find yourself deciding between two difficult options, bad and more bad.

Elizabeth Bernstein raises the issue in her Wall Street Journal Bonds column. She recounts the following event: her sister Rebecca was going to have a breast cancer biopsy and wanted her to come to be with her. Rebecca insisted that Elizabeth not share the information with other family members. She did not want to subject them to potentially unnecessary worry.

So, Bernstein was faced with a moral dilemma? Should she or should she not tell? She chose to keep the confidence and not to tell. Fair enough. Most of us would have done the same thing. We believe that it was the right thing to do. She respected her sister’s wishes and kept her word. And yet, Rebecca herself broke down and told other family members, adding that only Elizabeth knew.

Here is what happens:

Two days later, while I was sitting in Rebecca’s living room, I got a call from my mother. My sister, overwhelmed with worry, had told her about the biopsy she’d asked me to keep secret, and my mom was angry with me for preventing the rest of the family from supporting Rebecca. Then my other sister, the gynecologist, called, hurt that I didn’t seem to value her expertise. Too late, I realized that in keeping Rebecca’s secret, I might have betrayed others. It took me almost a week to get back into everyone’s good graces. By then, we’d learned that the biopsy, thankfully, was negative.

For keeping a secret Bernstein was accused of depriving the rest of the family of the opportunity to support her sister. By keeping faith with one sister she offended several other family members, some of whom were physicians.

She made a moral judgment. She could not split the difference and tell part of the secret. She had to choose and she chose to keep her word to her sister. Thus, she offended some family members while maintaining her relationship with her sister. 

Interestingly, the offended family members have forgotten the incident, doubtless having come to understand the importance of bonds of trust. Her sister, however, maintains that Elizabeth did the right thing… because if she hadn’t she would no longer have been able to confide in her.

Now, my family has forgotten this incident. But Rebecca hasn’t. When I brought it up recently she was adamant that I had done the right thing.

“If you’d told people what I asked you not to, I wouldn’t have been able to trust you again,” she says.

High School Teacher Punishes Trump-loving Student

Until this very morning I had not heard of the website Resistance Hole. It seems to be a spinoff of The Onion, thus counts among as satiric. Today’s story presents satire with a sting. Good satire always aims at something resembling the truth… and allows certain people to laugh at themselves.

Today’s story. A high school teacher has done what every freedom and justice and equality loving teacher would and should do. She punished a freshman student for wearing a Make America Great Again cap. How did she do it? She stopped having sex with him. Lysistrata Redux. I am sure the story warms your heart. Another tale of a strong empowered woman standing up for her convictions.

Without further ado:

Fair warning to all you Drumpf lovers out there: You might want to keep scrolling past this story, because a Resistance smackdown this epic may be too much for you to handle: A student in this Toledo, OH high school wore a MAGA hat to class, and his incredible teacher’s amazing response was to completely stop having sex with him every day after school.

Absolutely perfect. Now THIS is how you secure a W for the right side of history!

As soon as ninth-grader Eric Rollins walked into her morning social studies class sporting his MAGA hat, his teacher, 34-year-old Amanda Higgins, stepped up by immediately pulling him out into the hallway and telling him point-blank that she would no longer be meeting him in secret to have sex in the football field snack stand during study halls. Yep, this teacher is the kind of heroic lover of freedom who simply refuses to have an affair with any student of hers who supports Trump’s despicable administration.

How’s that burn feel, Drumpf lovers??

Amanda Higgins is a culture warrior. She is taking a stand against bigotry—especially against ageist bigotry. And she is teaching young Eric an invaluable lesson:

So. Epic. It’s not always easy to take a stand in a world where bigotry of all kinds has become the norm since Treasonous Trump took the reins, so it’s absolutely thrilling when someone like Amanda Higgins claps back by telling her Trump-supporting student that she’ll no longer be having sex with him in her car after he’s done with wrestling practice. That 15-year-old MAGA shithead just found out the hard way that actions have consequences.

Ms. Higgins, we salute you! The Resistance believes that you deserve to be having sex with a student who believes in freedom and equality for all—not a hateful and bigoted Trump supporter like Eric. Let this be a warning shot to all you Dump lovers out there: If you support this corrupt administration, your days are as numbered as the president’s, because there are plenty more badass takedowns like this on the horizon!

The Age of the Strongman Follows the Time of the Weakman

As Western Europe buckles under an influx of millions of Muslim immigrants, European liberals declare war on… the radical right. People who did not give a second or third thought to flooding the continent with unassimilable Muslims are horrified to see a backlash against their policies and their philosophy.

Does this mean that liberal democracy has failed? Does this mean that the bright eyed optimists, from Francis Fukuyama to Steven Pinker, have misread the historical moment? Have these reconstituted Hegelians preferred the joys of a grand narrative to the facts on the ground?

If we are seeing the ascendance of strong men around the world, from Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping to Donald Trump to Recep Tayyip Erdogan might it not be that their ascendance signals a rejection of the Western liberal effort to feminize their countries. Aren’t these strong men merely balancing the influence of weak men? Count Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau among the weak. And of course the most significant weak men have been women: Angela Merkel, Theresa May and the ruling females in Sweden. Nations controlled by women or by men who are in touch with their feminine sides are notably more crime ridden, more terrorism ridden than are those that are run by strong men.

In an excellent essay John Gray points out that liberals have simply misread history:

Why is it that liberals keep misreading the present? They deplore the AfD – just as they do the rise of similar parties in Poland and Hungary, Austria and Italy, for example. But they do not ask themselves what it means for their view of history or the political projects they hold dear. Just as they have done throughout the post-Cold War era, they treat such developments as passing difficulties on the way to a world without precedent. In this imagined future nationalism and religion will no longer be deciding forces in politics and rivalry for territory and resources will have been left behind. Basic freedoms will be protected in a universal framework of human rights.

In brief, liberal thinkers do not care to examine the implications of what is happening in the world. Most especially, Gray will argue effectively, they are incapable of accepting responsibility for the failures of systems they have been running.

If things are not looking very good for liberal democracy, liberal democrats explain that history moves in cycles and that, in the end, all will work out for the best. The fact that nations around the world are increasingly rejecting the Western liberal model ought to set off alarm bells. It ought to suggest that we cannot rely on historical inevitability. We cannot expect that other nations will adopt a political system that opens its doors to hordes of unassimilable refugees. Or a system that tears itself apart over diversity quotas, regardless of the effect it has on performance or achievement. And let’s not mention the spectacle of using the court system to divide the nation over transgender high school locker rooms.

Elite liberal intellectuals have learned very little. They seem to understand that installing democracy in nations that have no experience with it does not work. The Bush freedom agenda has failed:

Some among them have learned that forcibly installing liberal regimes in countries where they have never existed before does not work, others cling to the belief that regime change could have been successful if it had been better planned and implemented more determinedly. They also differ in the degree of their enthusiasm for the free market. But all of them view the mix of capitalism and democracy that seemed to be triumphant at the end of the Cold War as the only regime that can secure popular legitimacy at this juncture in history, and therefore as a model for the entire world. Rather than being the victor in a historic contest with another Enlightenment ideology – communism – a late 20th century brand of liberalism embodies the only possible future of humankind.

And yet, Gray continues, an increasingly important segment of the left has become radicalized. Some have called it the alt-left. Gray calls it alt-liberalism. It no longer really believes in liberal democracy:

On the other hand there is what might be called alt-liberalism – a mutant version of liberal ideology that repudiates the Western civilisation that gave birth to a liberal way of life. Embedded chiefly in universities, where they shape teaching in the humanities and social sciences, alt-liberals may appear an insignificant force in politics. But while they cannot command a popular majority in any democratic country they shape the agenda on sections of the left, and weaken parties of the centre to which many voters were attached in the past.

Off on their own extended guilt trip, alt-liberals want to undermine Western values in order to bring about a new socialist paradise. They have blinded themselves to history and believe that the fall of Communism and other socialist enterprises is only the prelude to a new socialist order. Having dumbed down the educational system to the point where students are incapable of competing in the world they find it easy to persuade these same students that the world owes them a living.

Liberal values, Gray argues, are threatened both by the rise of strongmen around the world and by an internal disease that is eating at them from the inside. He calls it a moral failure to accept responsibility for its own complicity in producing the conditions it deplores. Dare we mention Barack Obama, who never accepted responsibility for his own failures... who was a master of the art of blame shifting.

The world is rapidly changing. The world that liberals accuse the right of destroying has long since been destroying itself. Liberals accuse Donald Trump and other strongmen of upending the world as they knew and love it. They do not understand that they are living in a mirage.

Gray explains:

The recent age of progress, whose passing liberals mourn, included unending war in Afghanistan, a European migrant crisis rendered intractable by anarchy in countries where Western intervention destroyed the state, a global financial crash and decades of stagnant or falling living standards for swathes of the population in many Western countries. Unfolding disasters such as the American opioid epidemic and attendant fall in life expectancy have their roots in the corporate predation and ravaging of communities that occurred under the regime over which liberals of one kind or another presided. But they can comprehend the disorder of the present only on the basis that they had no part in creating it. They continue to believe their hegemony was a reflection of their superior rationality. The current hiatus can only be a passing spasm of unreason and the prelude to a state of normalcy returning in which they are once again in charge.

He is arguing that liberals have refused to take any responsibility for having produced the horrors that the public is reacting against. We tend to see the migrant crisis as indicative of the problem created by Western liberalism. And we ought to mention not only Angela Merkel, the architect of the current German calamity, but our own Barack Obama, a man who now believes that he had not timed his presidency correctly.

Gray sees us moving toward a new authoritarian era. Among the consequences, are a revival of the political pathologies of the past, among them, anti-Semitism. Marine Le Pen for one, manifested it, but Gray points out the extent to which the British Labour Party is infested with it:

Anti-Semitism has re-established itself on the left partly by way of an ideology of anti-colonialism. Believing Western colonial power to be the worst evil in history – a progressive orthodoxy that has been inculcated in Western education systems for decades – sections of the left relativise the Holocaust, treating it as only one among many crimes against humanity. At the same time, they see Israel as the worst embodiment of colonialism – hence the demand that, alone among the world’s states, it must demonstrate its “right to exist”.

Let’s not forget the number of Muslims who live in nations like Germany, France and Great Britain. Some are recent arrivals. Others have been there for decades. Most of them harbor some degree of anti-Semitism and, under the aegis of leftist ideology, have defined themselves as warriors against Judeo-Christian civilization. Or else as a new proletariat rebelling against the patriarchy. One does not want to be blindingly obvious, but many Muslims vote in elections. Liberals seem most willing to pander to them by sounding notes of anti-Semitism.

Until recently, the world order depended, Gray explains, on the hegemonic power of the United States. He argues that Donald Trump is retreating from American leadership in the world, yet he suggests that Trump is reacting against Barack Obama’s Weakman policies. Obama sided with Western European alt-liberals and diminished American power and influence in the world. He is most responsible for opening the door to other potential alpha male.

When Communism fell the two leading Communist nations tried two different ways to modernize. Gorbachev’s was the more liberal, more Western approach. Deng Xiaoping borrowed more from Singapore and created a free enterprise system without liberal democracy.

Which worked better? Clearly, Vladimir Putin saw that the authoritarianism of Deng was creating more wealth and prosperity than the Jeffersonian idealism of Gorbachev. Ergo….

Gray adds that even if Islam undergoes its Reformation, the results are not going to look like a liberal democracy. Egypt voted the decidedly un-liberal Muslim Brotherhood into power. A military coup returned the nation to a semblance of normalcy and to economic progress... under a strongman. Saudi Arabia is liberalizing and modernizing, but Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seems to be following the Chinese, not the Western model.

Liberal democracy has been losing out because it seems not to be competitive. It is not competitive because it has been weakening and feminizing itself. Efforts to establish it around the world have largely failed. This might mean that the strength of America and the Western world lay not in our ideals, but in the practical spirit that worked hard to compete … and to win.

Gray sees things differently. I give him the last word:

Liberals need to shake off their sickly nostalgia for an irrecoverable past, whose flaws and contradictions created the world in which we find ourselves. Instead the intellectual remnants of the post-Cold-War era fall back on a narcissistic fantasy in which all will be well once the vanishing regime they embody is back in place. When liberals see the current condition of politics as an interregnum, they demonstrate their failure to recognise the new authoritarian hegemony that they helped to establish. 

When We Reward Failure

How much damage is diversity mongering doing? Betheny Mandel explains that lowered standards demoralize those who have worked hard to meet the normal standards. She adds that choosing people to fill diversity quotas lowers the competence level of an enterprise.

The other night Tucker Carlson pointed out that we are now going to choose air traffic controllers based on diversity. We will not privilege candidates who have experience flying planes or who have excelled at science. Anything to increase the diversity of the controllers. When you are in a plane flying into an airport you naturally care more about diversity than about your safety.

And let’s not forget the systematic dumbing down of our education system. If colleges and universities fill their classes with subpar students in order to achieve diversity, professors will be forced to dumb down the lessons, lest these subpar students all flunk out. And this without considering the cost of all those diversity administrators. The University of Michigan has a hundred full time diversity administrators—who do you think is paying for that?

Thus academic excellence and professional competence are being sacrificed on the altar of diversity. This is not going to end well.

Anyway, Mandel begins her column with a story you have heard before. A child in a New Jersey high school failed to make the cheerleading team. She was so distraught that her mother filed a complaint with the proper authorities. The school—run by weak-kneed cowards—decided to place the child on the squad. It also decided to place any child who wanted to be a cheerleader on the squad. Good-bye, competition. Other cheerleaders complained bitterly about this injustice. And, we suspect, the girl whose mother caused this ruckus was naturally ostracized in school. Great job, Mom.

Mandel tells the story:

The proverb is simple: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But a teenage girl and her mom in New Jersey figured out how to circumvent that difficult “trying” part — by whining until success was easily achieved.

At Hanover Park High School last month, a mother complained when her daughter got cut after cheerleading tryouts. Instead of telling her tough luck, the athletic director placated the mom and changed the team’s policy, allowing any wannabe cheerleader to join the squad.

Naturally this upset the kids who made the team fair and square, and they brought their grievances to the school board.

“I did not put in 18 months of work to lead up to this moment just to be told it didn’t matter anymore,” sophomore Jada Alcontara told News12 New Jersey.

Student Stephan Krueger added: “I tried my hardest. Now everything is going away because of one child who did not make the team. Now all my hard work has been thrown out the window.”

Despite its reputation, cheerleading isn’t just about shaking pompoms and yelling catchy chants. Squad members practice gymnastic maneuvers that require strength, flexibility and flair. Now there will be cheerleaders on the team who won’t possess enough of these skills, while those who do have seen their talents devalued.

Many people think this way. They do not say it because they are not allowed to say it. If you place more underachieving students in college ahead of overachieving students in order to produce diversity, the students who have been rejected will probably feel some bitterness and resentment at the injustice.

Besides, we already know that those who seem to have been admitted to college through a diversity quota are not made to feel that they belong. We see this on college campuses, but we are not allowed to talk about it. Surely the same rule applies.

What happens, Mandel continues, when fire departments hire women who cannot meet the physical standards?

Three years ago New York City’s Fire Department found out after allowing female applicant Choeurlyne Doirin-Holder to fail her way into a $81,000-a-year desk job. Firefighters fumed at the preferential treatment in an online forum. “If you can’t meet the standards, you are a danger to yourself, the public and most importantly everyone operating on the fire ground who is doing their job,” one wrote, according to The Post.

That prediction proved accurate. After just 10 days on the job, Doirin-Holder was injured while inspecting equipment in a station house, stepping off a ladder incorrectly and fracturing her foot.

It isn’t an outlier. The Marines have lowered fitness standards because women could not meet the old standards. And it is not just about physical fitness. Schools across the nation have been lowering standards in order to pass more students. Mandel explains:

When schools were unable to pass the basic proficiency tests of the No Child Left Behind law in 2002, educators simply made the tests easier over the years, allowing more kids to pass while keeping the schools’ federal funding intact. And, as of last year, teachers in New York no longer have to take a literacy test that many found too difficult. Meanwhile, in England, schools are now removing analogue clocks in exam rooms and replacing them with digital versions because students unable to read clock faces felt stressed about it.

Think of it. Today’s British schoolchildren are incapable of reading an analogue clock and were so stressed about it that the schools decided to replace them with digital clocks. Might they not have taught the children to read clock faces? Apparently, it was too stressful a chore.

And, of course, this was all initiated by the pedagogues who decided that schools should provide therapy, not education. It was produced by teachers who fed their pupils a steady diet of unearned praise, thus systematically lying to them and causing them to mistrust adult authority.

Mandel quotes Jessica Lahey, a bestselling author:

Kids are smarter than we give them credit for, and they know when we lower our expectations for them. When we give praise, awards or a slot on the team unearned . . . they no longer trust adults to be honest and unbiased arbiters of quality. Lying to kids about the quality of their work or downgrading our expectations so as not to make kids feel bad will only result in their no longer trusting our judgment

To which Mandel sagely remarks, the children who did not earn their way or who were judged by different standards know that they are being patronized, and are less capable than the rest. Their experience is one of daily humiliation, not only because everyone knows that they do not belong, but because everyone is obligated pretend that they do. Better to pretend than to be accused of being a bigot.