Let’s pick up where we left off last week.

At some things, one just has to laugh.

One just has to laugh at what four law schools did that at least in effect substantially diminished attendance for presentations to Federalist Society chapters:

— At one law school: A fire drill and the next semester’s class registration.

— At another: Simultaneously scheduling an event at the law school’s other campus to honor Justice Clarence Thomas’s chief 1991 accuser.

— At another: Simultaneously scheduling a mid-semester first-year-law-student orientation.

— At another: Simultaneously scheduling another event, which forced the chapter to reschedule its event to another week, when distance-learning students would not be on campus and attendance would fall.

Somehow the fire drill is the funniest of all. At least the other diversions had some modicum of subtlety, which, come to think of it, isn’t a compliment. Here, subtlety might include not discretion but surreptitiousness.

There’s nothing subtle, however, about a fire drill. The more one pictures that, the funnier it gets.

Anyone who doubts these diversions should please consider that taken together, they’re so bad that they must be true. Who would be foolish enough to make these up and expect anyone to believe them?

That’s one thing making all of them, taken together, all the funnier.

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Other intolerance, however, isn’t funny. This includes intolerance directly or indirectly begetting (1) threats of or (2) actual physical violence.

Such intolerance may ultimately reflect something along the spectrum from disrespect for others to disregard of the rule of law.

Which is one reason it’s often smart to pull back on the rhetorical reins long before loose language rises to the level of implicit threats, much less explicit threats.

For example, please consider this loose language published in a newspaper but not this one. The source, who had made no secret of opposing a particular public figure, made accusations about the public figure that the source didn’t back up; indulged non-sequiturs to compare the public figure to a socialist, atheist, totalitarian dictator; advocated taking “every opportunity” to remove the public figure from public office; and then lamented that words suddenly lack meaning.

Well, if words mean what they mean, please imagine what “every opportunity” includes. Yes, it includes what you just thought of.

Now imagine the uproar from some quarters if someone had said that about a liberal. Yet when someone said that about a non-liberal, the reaction from the same quarters was silence.

The double standard is shocking yet not surprising.

Such words from whatever amalgamation of sources can in effect be a rallying cry for those who — for whatever reason — will take “every opportunity” to do who knows what.

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If you need evidence that lawlessness begets lawlessness, please consider that the Sept. 10 assassination of Charles James Kirk followed two failed attempts on the life of Donald John Trump Sr.

If you need further evidence that lawlessness begets lawlessness, please consider that the Sept. 24 shootings at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, facility in Dallas are not an isolated incident of hostility toward, or violence against, ICE.

It’s legitimate to ask to what extent lawlessness toward ICE and ICE officers has roots in the Biden-administration lawlessness letting illegal aliens — and unvetted illegal aliens at that — into the United States by the millions. Yes, by the millions. Some of them, please recall, haven’t exactly proven to be Rhodes scholars.

Cleaning up what the Biden administration did is, to put it mildly, a long-term project.

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In the wake of the Kirk assassination, it’s become almost a rite of passage for some to say political violence is never justified.

Such a statement is, of course, almost always true.

Yet anyone maintaining its universal truth is saying, for example, that Operation Valkyrie, a July 1944 assassination-and-coup attempt to save a country and end a war, was unjustified.

The primary misfortune in that heroic effort lay not in its undertaking but in someone’s unknowingly moving the briefcase bomb away from its intended target, thereby allowing the target to survive when the briefcase bomb detonated with the target in the room.

If you, faithful reader of this column, haven’t seen the movie Valkyrie, you might want to put it on your to-do list.

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After seeing the movie, Randy Elf called the mother in his German exchange family to ask what she and her family knew of Operation Valkyrie. She said they knew what the target wanted them to know, and they wondered whether it could be that someone could kill him.

COPYRIGHT (c) 2025 BY RANDY ELF