Pun Salad

It doesn't get much more hatey than the last sentence of this screed:

That's quoted in yesterday's NH Journal article from Michael Graham: Timberlane Teacher Who Celebrated Kirk's Murder Has Resigned.

This is somewhat personal for me.

"Mr. Tinney" taught both my son and daughter when he was at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Dover (NH). That being the school from which he was (as he puts it) "fired after 23 years for being gay."

My kids liked him. And so we liked him. We even took care of his sweet little pug dog, Chiclet, for a few days while he was out of town. (My daughter volunteered us.) Tinney was vague about where he was going, but he left a contact address up in Maine, and a little bit of idle Googling revealed he was attending a "bear" gathering. That is, I learned, a term for hairy gay guys.

I was kind of shocked at the time. But even back then, I was mostly a "so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses" kind of guy. Shared my discovery with my wife, didn't mention it to the kids.

That was about 20 years ago. Was he fired from St. Thomas "for being gay", or (as this guy says) "for pushing a LGBTQ agenda"? Kind of a dicey thing to do while teaching at a Catholic school. The Boston Globe had a story about it back in 2023, predictably slanted.

I'm also a "free speech" kind of guy. And I recognize that (legally) there's no "hate speech" exception to that.

But I can imagine that there were a whole bunch of Timberlane parents telling Timberlane administrators they didn't want that hate-filled guy teaching their kids. If I were in their position, I could very well imagine being one of them.

So there's only one thing I'm relatively sure about, based on my 2019 recollection of Charlie Kirk at a TPUSA event: If Charlie Kirk's spirit could speak to Ed Tinney in response to his "I'm glad he's dead" comment, it would be: "I'm glad you're alive."

Also of note:

• "Got Wrong" seems overly charitable. Did I just mention I was a free speech fan? Apparently a more steadfast one than Christopher Eisgruber! Bill Hewitt pre-reviews a book: What Princeton’s President Got Wrong About Free Speech and Defamation. A lot, as it turns out.

  September 30 marks the publication of a new book by Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. For those who plan to read the book that ostensibly defends the culture of free speech on campuses, it is worth reviewing the author’s abysmal record on protecting free expression. The cruel irony for Princeton is that Eisgruber himself created and enforced a wicked doctrine. A threat to all on campus, this “Eisgruber Doctrine” allows his administrators to defame those they disfavor, yet evade university discipline. Rather tellingly, Eisgruber and the Board of Trustees have turned deaf ears to calls to disclose a secret report underlying the Eisgruber Doctrine.

  Princeton’s Board of Trustees should fire President Eisgruber. Indeed, they should have done so months ago. Here’s why. In 2022, Eisgruber wrongly dismissed a formal complaint by eight Princeton faculty members regarding the university’s mistreatment of an outspoken classics professor, Joshua Katz. Eisgruber’s administrators had defamed Katz in the notorious (and now memory-holed) 2021 presentation for students, “To Be Known and Heard: Systemic Racism and Princeton University.” Princeton later stripped Katz of tenure and fired him, a decision drawing widespread condemnation because it appeared to be motivated by animus against Katz for his protected speech.

  Eisgruber used a still-secret “additional review” to justify blocking the faculty complaint, asserting that the report established that Princeton’s free-expression policies protected the authors of the presentation. Eisgruber never offered much explanation. Nor could he, as the free-expression rule he cited explicitly excludes defamation from protected speech.

  It's an impressively bad record, and Eisgruber seems to be relying on everyone's short memories. We wrote on l'affaire Katz here, here, and here.

• We're (still) Number … Five?! The US is only behind Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, and Switzerland in the most recent rankings: Economic Freedom of the World: 2025 Annual Report. And for a reminder of why that matters:

  The standard of living in the most economically free nations is far higher than in the least free. In comparing the economically freest 25 percent of countries with the least free, we find:

  • Average incomes are 6.2 times greater;
  • The bottom 10% of incomes are 7.8 times greater;
  • People tend to work seven fewer hours each week;
  • People live about 17 years longer;
  • Far fewer children die in infancy;
  • People are more satisfied with their lives;
  • Governments are less corrupt; and
  • Environments are cleaner.

  Here's the bad news: the data is of 2023, so doesn't include Trumpian tariffs. And:

  [Robert Lawson and Matthew Mitchell] y estimate that Trump’s tariffs drop the US from 56th to 76th place in the world in terms of freedom to trade and nearly knock the US out of the top 10 in terms of total economic freedom.

  So if we are still in business in a couple years, we can see how that prediction bears out.

• I'm not optimistic, but this is nice to know. At Cato, Jeremy Horpedahl says Economic Stagnation May Be Over (If We Can Avoid a Recession Soon). There are lots of charts, but this is pretty nice without graphical accompaniment: Using a generous definition of "middle-class" families,

  Where the breaks between groups should be isn’t an exact science, but I use about $50,000 above and below the median family income as reasonable cutoffs for the middle-income group. As we can see, the middle-income group was over half of the total in 1967, but this group’s size gradually shrank by about 10 percentage points over the next almost six decades. But notice that the lower-income groups shrank too. That’s because this chart shows one astonishing fact: the number of rich American families has skyrocketed, with over one-third now having at least $150,000 in income.

  These trends are not sensitive to choosing different income cutoffs: if we use $200,000 as our definition of rich, the number has grown from 2 percent of families in 1967 to 21 percent in 2024. It also is not a trick of using families instead of households, as Mark Perry’s similar chart using households (and different income cutoffs than my chart) shows the same general trends.

  I still reserve my right to be a Gloomy Gus, given Uncle Stupid's fiscal profligacy.

• You don't have to pick a side, when both sides are awful. That's an attitude I'm assuming more and more these days, and J.D. Tuccille reinforces it today, with: In Trump’s tussle with James Comey, you should hope everybody loses.

  Two things can be simultaneously true. One is that President Donald Trump and his aides are petty, vindictive people who, like other members of the political class, misuse power to punish opponents. The other is that some of their targets currently or recently within government are abusive, untrustworthy, and should be held to account. That brings us to former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) James Comey and the law enforcement agency he once led. Comey's indictment is undoubtedly an act of political payback. But Comey and his agency really are dangerous and worthy of scrutiny and deprivation of power to prevent future harm.

  Comey faces charges under 18 U.S.C. § 1505, obstruction of a federal proceeding, and 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2), involving false statements to a branch of the federal government. He could be penalized with a fine and up to five years in prison.

  As Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) points out, the issue is whether Comey or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied when McCabe claimed his boss authorized him to leak details of investigations to the press and Comey, under oath, denied doing anything of the sort.

  I know it's fun to be a cheerleader for "our side", but doesn't it get a little tired after a while?