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" Conservative scholarship of the serious kind is rapidly descending into merely an exercise in well-financed nostalgia. Respectable conservative intellects sound increasingly wistful \u2014 which, I admit, is a welcome change from what they sounded like for four decades, which was a NORAD alarm sounded by castrated goats. (OK, Malkin&amp;#039;s still around. Point taken.) Amity Shlaes, a scholar who was smart enough to wait until most of the people who&amp;#039;d actually lived through the Great Depression had died off before she started slinging the bullshit about it, and whose latest opus is a biography of that walking hunk o&amp;#039; throbbing man-history, Calvin Coolidge, decided to launder a bogus study through her column to determing that students at Bowdoin College are studying about more black people than they used to do, and that they no longer wander the woods of Maine declaiming Ovid and hoping not to be eaten by bears. The redoubtable Hoosier, Mr. J.D. Riley, puts paid to the whole thing, but it did remind me that George Effing Will, who, alas, never was eaten by bears, decided to launder a bogus kerfuffle through his column about something that may not have happened at all in Wisconsin.  The Wisconsin thing is something that was completely ginned up by enthusiastic local wingnuts and enthusiastic local talk-radio guys. Go ahead. Google &amp;quot;Wisconsin DPI white privilege.&amp;quot; You won&amp;#039;t find one entry from a mainstream publication in the state, except for the occasional op-ed by the folks doing the ginning. It&amp;#039;s all conservative websites and one big circle-jerk. Something may or may not have happened outside a conference and, yes, the educators in Wisconsin think it might be nice if white students recognized that, by and large, it has been better to be white in this country than to be any other color. So, naturally: GET WHITEY!!!!!! AIEEEE!!!!!! If Will thinks he can stand at the end of the puke funnel and not get his wingtips spackled, well, that&amp;#039;s up to him. After all the sturm und drang about &amp;quot;political correctness&amp;quot; \u2014 a term invented by the antiwar Left, by the way, and one almost solely responsible for prying Dinesh D&amp;#039;Souza out of obscurity \u2014 is the default conservative argument on these things really going to be that things ain&amp;#039;t way they used to be? Is that the best that&amp;#039;s left? And isn&amp;#039;t the obvious rejoinder that, if things were the way they once were, Amity Shlaes would be told to take home economics from a head of an History department who looked remarkably like George Effing Will? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18069/conservative-thinking-nostalgia-040513/>