Yikes.

Jeff Guinn’s comment on the previous post included a link to a Reason report on Fed governor Lisa Cook’s record before Biden appointed her and Congress confirmed her. since the law permitting Trump to fire her specifies “for cause,” and it usually isn’t just firing for cause when the cause is something everyone knew about (or should have) when the employee was put in the job, her extreme woke craziness can’t be used by the President to dump her, but it can be used to conclude that the woman is untrustworthy, is likely to be motivated by a political agenda rather than the public interest, is almost certainly firmly in the Destroy Trump By Any Means Necessary” camp, and is not above manipulating the interest rates to foil the Trump Administration.

From Reason’s Robby Soave:

I was doing research on Cook to prepare to discuss her firing on Rising and Free Media, and I came across some scrutiny of a paper she had written about the impacts of racism on black entrepreneurs between 1870 and 1940. According to the abstract, Cook found that political violence against black Americans during that time period caused them to receive 1,100 fewer patents.

That conclusion seems straightforward enough: It’s reasonable to assume that the rise of segregation was a serious impediment to black achievement. A subsequent study, however, suggested that Cook got her figures wrong. This prompted the conservative activist Christopher Rufo to audit her writings and conclude that, as with former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, Cook was somewhat incautious when it came to quoting, paraphrasing, and copying other scholars’ work. (Cook taught at both Harvard and Michigan State University.) In other words, there may be a pattern of carelessness here.

But in researching the academic misconduct scrutiny, I came across something else: Cook was involved in the effort to oust Harald Uhlig, then editor of the Journal of Political Economy, for crimes against wokeness.

The Uhlig affair was a classic example of cancel culture run amok: In the summer of 2020, Uhlig wrote a few tweets in which he politely but firmly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement for embracing the slogan “Defund the police.” His most provocative sentence was “George Floyd and his family really didn’t deserve to be taken advantage of by flat-earthers and creationists,” with reference to said supporters of defunding the police. That barely qualifies as a spicy statement. White supremacy, it isn’t.

Nevertheless, in response to those tweets—as well as unproven and somewhat ridiculous accusations that he had said something negative about Martin Luther King Jr. while teaching a class at the University of Chicago in 2014—a progressive mob called for Uhlig to lose his job.

Among the economists demanding Uhlig’s head were Paul Krugman, Justin Wolfers, Janet Yellen, and Lisa Cook. Wolfers was particularly emphatic: He wrote on Twitter (now X) that by continuing to employ Uhlig, the University of Chicago was effectively telling minority scholars that the quality of their work would be judged by someone who “consistently tried to minimize the legitimacy of Black Lives Matter in favor of racists.”

Cook also penned a thread on Twitter, in which she called for the prompt removal of Uhlig. The thread is really something, and it betrays her commitment to basically every speech-related woke shibboleth.

Cook writes that “free speech has its limits” and should not be used to “spread hatred and violate the dignity of other people.” She suggests that any and all criticism of MLK Jr. causes psychic harm to marginalized communities—”this is real pain you are inflicting”—and likened it to actual racist violence against civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 1960s.

Again, we are talking about a series of tweets in which Uhlig said that defunding the police was a bad idea, as well as an insinuation that he once said something mildly critical about MLK Jr., perhaps in jest. And the cancel culture campaign was successful, albeit temporarily: Uhlig was placed on leave pending an investigation, though eventually reinstated after cooler heads prevailed.

As I said, “Yikes.” The woman is nuts…and also a a censorious, totalitarian-tilting menace—in other words, a modern Democrat.

Soave writes, “I guess that having a sane view on these kinds of things is not a prerequisite for working at the Fed…” To the contrary, being sane, objective and trustworthy must be a prerequisite. It’s disgusting that someone like this was appointed by Biden and confirmed. It is also disgusting that the news media didn’t bother to reveal to the public exactly what the Biden Administration viewed as competent for such a powerful and important role in national financial policy.