Megan McArdle

My name is in the Epstein emails because someone emailed him a newsletter that mentions one of my Bloomberg columns, which sort of demonstrates how meaningless "being in the Epstein files". I've never met Jeffrey Epstein, and had no idea who he was until he was arrested the second time.

I appreciate that. As I say, I clearly failed to make my point clearly and that's my fault.

Drunk driving was quite illegal in the 1960s, but it was treated by society as a pecadillo rather than an extremely grave offense. MADD changed the norms. That was good too. But it is helpful in looking back at that period to understand that the norms changed.

An understanding that the reason Epstein got away with it for so long is that the norms against sexual predation on minors were clearly much weaker than they are today. Not non-existent, but weaker. A positive analysis, not a normative argument.

That was not what I intended. Obviously, I should have been clearer, and that's on me. But I feel like we have interacted enough that you should assume my point was not "Judge people who exposed themselves to 14 year old girls by the standards of their own time".

I'm not sure why this is stoking so much controversy; I thought we all agreed that the norms about male sexual predation had shifted dramatically during MeToo. That was the point of the exercise. I obviously failed to make my point, but did you really think I was defending pedophilia?

This musician had a kid in a fancy private school. I was unaware of his transgression until it came up in the context of the Epstein files, though I assume my parents must have known about it. Somehow society decided to let it pass. That was bad. But it happened.

Yes, and he went on to have a very successful career until it caught up with him in his eighties. I'm not saying this was good. It was not good! It is good that the norms changed.

No! I am not!

It wasn't supposed to be an exoneration. Elites were permitting their peers to do horrible things. My point is that this is a much broader indictment than the decision of one prosecutor.

Opinion | What Jason Rezaian learned after 544 days in an Iranian prison - The Washington Post This month marks the 10-year anniversary of Jason Rezaian’s release from imprisonment in Iran. In 2014, Rezaian — then The Washington Post’s Tehran bureau chief — was arrested with his wife at their h...

Jason @rezaian.bsky.social spoke to @mcmegan.bsky.social about what he learned after 544 days in an Iranian prison:

Quite apart from the immorality of what's going on in Minnesota, this is not even politically effective. Trump's got a remarkable talent for throwing away GOP political advantage with both hands.

Opinion | What it will take to fix American policing - The Washington Post When Renée Good was fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis, it reignited a familiar debate. Was this another case of police brutality, or an act of self-defe...

What will it take to fix U.S. policing?

@mcmegan.bsky.social speaks with former New York City police commissioner William Bratton and former NYPD chief Kenneth E. Corey:

Thank you!

Opinion | How the internet changed politics — and our lives — forever - The Washington Post Matthew Yglesias has been a disrupter his entire career. He started as an early adapter to the web, running a blog before blogs were a thing. He went on to co-found the media company Vox and has writt...

. @mattyglesias.bsky.social joins @mcmegan.bsky.social on "Reasonably Optimistic" to discuss how the internet has changed both media and politics:

“You always want to err on the side of individual autonomy.”

@colorado.gov Jared Polis speaks to @mcmegan.bsky.social about gender-affirming care and the need for science-based advice for different therapies. wapo.st/4am6l3N

"My colleagues, the students, we all stepped up to it, because we realized that was under our control."

UVU President Astrid Tuminez talks with @mcmegan.bsky.social about how she found the strength to lead her university in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing. wapo.st/4s7BQ7X

Thank you! Glad you liked it!

YouTube video by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) November 2020 ACIP Meeting - Phased Allocation of COVID-19 Vaccines

Curious then how things like this happened: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF_3...

www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Without any significant pushback from within academia.

(And many of the group dynamics that led to the systematic marginalization of Blacks in American life long after the end of official segregation are the same dynamics that exclude conservatives now. Humans gonna human.)

(Pausing to note that I am not comparing conservative underrepresentation to the oppression faced by Blacks or some other marginalized group MORALLY, which would be absurd. But conservatives on campus are, well, an underrepresented minority compared to their numbers in the general population.)

And that's my basic response to most of the arguments that academics make about this stuff: change the group to any underrepresented minority you find sympathetic, and see if the argument still seems reasonable. I'm betting it does not.

Academics understand this problem very well because it's one of the big arguments for aggressive affirmative action: if you really want representation, rather than a handful of unusually tough outliers, you need a critical mass.

I think there is a real pipeline problem, which also exists in journalism. But that is not exogenous to the fact that academia skews so far to the left. People don't like working in environments where they are a loathed minority.

And academic politics became much more noticeable thanks to the internet, and I don't think that's an available option any more.

Both because the skew was less pronounced, and because the value of a college diploma kept rising, putting academics in a strong market position where they could afford to indulge in a taste for politics. But the value of a college diploma stalled in the early 2000s ...

Note, I'm not saying "should not expect" in some moral sense. I'm just making a practical argument: people will not pay you to call them lackeys and stooges. This was something that academia could get away with for a while ...

Now, you can say that that's the "lackeys and stooges" exception, but this rather proves my point: if you have defined your discipline to automatically exclude half the country, you should not expect those voters to support you financially.

I mean, multiple studies, some of them dating back before Trump, find more than a third of academics admitting they'd discriminate against conservatives, with the most recent, which surveyed academics in multiple countries and disciplines, finding that 40% said they'd never hire a Trump supporter.

Hello BlueSky! Here is something new many of you will hate. I’m doing a new podcast with Josh Barro and Megan McCardle about how centrism is good. www.centralairpodcast.com/p/welcome-to...