SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: TRUMP’S 7% PANEL.

Read the whole thing.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF: The evil that men do.

Terrible news from Christchurch in New Zealand, with (at this moment) 49 Muslim worshipers at Friday prayers in two mosques gunned down in a well organised terrorist attack that was streamed live on social media. The shooter is a 28-year old fitness trainer from Grafton in Australia, a seemingly ordinary young man from small-town regional Australia who have become radicalised in the course of a seven-year trip around the world after his father’s death in 2010.

What makes a man apparently plan in cold blood for two years mass murder of his fellow human beings – in this case based on their religion and their status as immigrants in a Western country?

Clearly you are not a normal, well-balanced human being – there are no indications so far the shooter is mentally ill in any way – but it’s for psychologists to debate what parts of your humanity must be sufficiently broken, and why, to enable you to commit an atrocity like this.

But the mass shooting is also a political act, though politics, even extreme politics, turns only a small minority into killers and terrorists.

What are the politics here?

Read the whole thing.

THIS. A HUNDRED TIMES THIS: Sharyl Attkisson says “I dream of a world without smears.”

“Bork, Thomas, Hill, Clinton, Clinton, Beck, Imus, Palin, Biden, Obama, O’Reilly, Sanders, Trump, Hannity, Kavanaugh, Northam, Klobuchar, Carlson … Smears have become a distasteful staple in our media diet. The nonprofits, LLCs, super PACs, PR firms, crisis management companies and global law firms that organize and promote smears have formed a multibillion-dollar industry. They’re profiting beyond imagination. Are we?”

As the Professor says, “Read the whole thing.”™

TOM WOLFE MAY BE GONE, BUT WE’RE ALL STILL LIVING IN HIS VIRTUAL REALITY PROGRAM:

● Shot:

Maybe this is why Gregory and Marcia Abbott allegedly bought their daughter’s way into college.

Their “rapper” son, Malcolm, popped out of the family’s Fifth Avenue building to smoke a giant blunt — while defending his parents and bragging about his latest CD.

“They’re blowing this whole thing out of proportion,” said Malcolm Abbott outside the home that overlooks the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I believe everyone has a right to go to college, man.”

* * * * * * *

The toker, who sports a ponytail and raps under the name “Billa,” then shamelessly plugged his music. “Check out my CD, ‘Cheese and Crackers,’ ” he said of his 2018 five-track rec­ord that includes a song titled “If I Lost My Money.”

Later, Malcolm emerged with his brother, who groused to The Post on Tuesday his parents “got roped into [this by] some guy who f–king cheated them.”

—“Son defends parents caught in college admissions scandal while smoking blunt,” the New York Post, yesterday.

● Chaser:

In Silicon Valley, wearing a tie was a mark of shame that indicated you were everything a Master of the Universe was not. Gradually, it would dawn on you. The poor devil in the suit and tie held one of those lowly but necessary executive positions, in public or investor relations, in which one couldn’t avoid dealing with Pliocene old parties from . . . Back East.

Meanwhile, back East, the sons of the old rich were deeply involved in inverted fashions themselves. One of the more remarkable sights in New York City in the year 2000 was that of some teenage scion of an investment-banking family emerging from one of the forty-two Good Buildings, as they were known. These forty-two buildings on Manhattan’s East Side contained the biggest, grandest, stateliest apartments ever constructed in the United States, most of them on Park and Fifth Avenues. A doorman dressed like an Austrian Army colonel from the year 1870 holds open the door, and out comes a wan white boy wearing a baseball cap sideways; an outsized T-shirt, whose short sleeves fall below his elbows and whose tail hangs down over his hips; baggy cargo pants with flapped pockets running down the legs and a crotch hanging below his knees, and yards of material pooling about his ankles, all but obscuring the Lugz sneakers. This fashion was deliberately copied from the “homeys”—black youths on the streets of six New York slums, Harlem, the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Fort Greene, South Ozone Park, and East New York. After passing the doorman, who tipped his visored officer’s hat and said “Good day,” the boy walked twenty feet to a waiting sedan, where a driver with a visored officer’s hat held open a rear door.

What was one to conclude from such a scene? The costumes said it all. In the year 2000, the sons of the rich, the very ones in line to inherit the bounties of the all-powerful United States, were consumed by a fear of being envied. A German sociologist of the period, Helmut Schoeck, said that “fear of being envied” was the definition of guilt. But if so, guilt about what? So many riches, so much power, such a dazzling array of advantages? American superiority in all matters of science, economics, industry, politics, business, medicine, engineering, social life, social justice, and, of course, the military was total and indisputable. Even Europeans suffering the pangs of wounded chauvinism looked on with awe at the brilliant example the United States had set for the world as the third millennium began.

—Tom Wolfe, “Hooking Up: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American’s World,” the first chapter in his 2000 anthology, Hooking Up. 

(Post article spotted by Rod Dreher, who writes, “Do read the whole thing, if only to see the photo of Young Master Abbott and his blunt. Like I even have to ask.”)

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Tucker Carlson’s Jokes Didn’t Hurt Anybody, Then or Now.

Tucker isn’t apologizing. Even if I thought he should (which I don’t), it wouldn’t do any good. Media Matters and their ilk don’t want an apology. They want him to go away. They want him to quit destroying CNN and MSNBC in the ratings night after night. And then, when somebody takes his place, they’ll go after that person for any possible reason they can dig up. That’s what they do. They can’t compete, so they try to destroy.

If you’re genuinely offended by jokes Tucker Carlson made over a decade ago, on a radio show you never listened to, congratulations. I assume you’ve stopped watching his show, which you never watched in the first place.

Position yourself strategically over the fainting couch and read the whole thing.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: No, Zoo Animals Don’t Want Selfies with You.

First-world humans have separated ourselves from the natural world as much as possible, but the natural world doesn’t care. An apex predator doesn’t know what the internet is, and its hierarchy is much simpler than ours. You can get all the likes and RTs in the world, but it won’t help you when you’re resting in a big cat’s belly.

Explore “the Circle of Life” and read the whole thing.

(MOVED TO TOP to note that two days after this post first appeared, the Times’s story is still up, without even a correction posted. “Fake news,” anyone?)

NEW YORK TIMES EXPOSE ON AIPAC RELIES ON “AIPAC ACTIVIST” WHO HASN’T BEEN A MEMBER OF AIPAC FOR SEVERAL YEARS: You can’t make this stuff up.

Fiske’s role as the chairman of a pro-Israel political action committee — unaffiliated with AIPAC, which is not a PAC — was the centerpiece of The Times article…. AIPAC would not comment for the story, but I heard from insiders that Fiske has not been associated with the lobby for five years. In a telephone interview Fiske, a South Florida realtor, told me it was more like three or four years, but confirmed that he is no longer a member.

Read the whole thing.

THE ARISTOCRACY OF VICTIMHOOD:

The aristocracy of victimhood can be seen everywhere if you train your eyes to see it (don’t get me started on the new push for reparations). And the corrupting power of this cultural shift is profound. Because we’re not just heaping praise on victims, we’re investing extra legitimacy to their ideas and arguments. If we as a culture want to say that the Pale Penis People can’t wear sombreros or cook Korean food, I’ll pound away at my keyboard about how stupid that is. But ultimately, that idiocy falls under the loosey-goosey rubric of fashion and manners. If we’re going to start saying that victims’ ideas are “more right” simply because the people spewing them are victims, then we are committing a kind of civilizational suicide. I don’t care if you spent your youth at the bottom of a pit putting the lotion in the basket when commanded to, you’re still wrong if you tell me two plus two equals seven.

If anti-Semitism is wrong, it shouldn’t matter how bad Ilhan Omar’s childhood was. If racism is wrong, it doesn’t become less wrong if a survivor of Auschwitz says something racist.

Read the whole thing.

DEATH FLAT PANELS: Doctor tells patient he doesn’t have long to live through hospital robot’s video screen.

When Ernest Quintana went into Kaiser Permanente Medical Center’s emergency department in Fremont [California] on Sunday, his wife of 58 years, his son, daughter and  granddaughter all worried about the 79-year-old man.

They say it was hard enough to learn that his lungs were failing, but they couldn’t believe it when a hospital robot entered his room and they got the news through a doctor on the robot’s video screen.

Quintana’s granddaughter was in the ICU by his side, and she said at first the nurse came in.

“The nurse came around and said the doctor was going to make rounds and I thought ‘OK, no big deal, I’m here,’ ” said Annalisia Wilharm.

A short time later, a robot arrived in the room. A doctor appeared on a video screen. Wilharm took cell phone video so she could show her mother and grandmother the test results.

“When I took the video, I didn’t realize all of this was going to unfold,” she said.

Read the whole thing.

PEGGY NOONAN: Get Ready for the Struggle Session.

The Chinese Catholic Margaret Chu, a medical-lab assistant, was dragged into the office of her labor camp in 1968 and made to answer invented charges. “Their real motive was once and again to force me to admit all my alleged crimes,” she wrote decades later. “ ‘I did not commit any crimes,’ I asserted.” She was accused again, roughed up. She denied her guilt again. “Immediately two people jumped on me and cut off half my hair.”

She was tortured, left in handcuffs for 100 days, and imprisoned for years. While being tortured she sometimes prayed for death so her suffering would stop.

The Cultural Revolution lasted roughly a dozen years and died with Mao in September 1976. In time a party congress denounced it as what it was: ruinous.

So I ask you to entertain an idea that has been on my mind. I don’t want to be overdramatic, but the spirit of the struggle session has returned and is here, in part because of the internet, in part because of the extremity of our politics, in part because more people are lonely. “Contention is better than loneliness,” as my people, the Irish, say, and they would know.

The air is full of accusation and humiliation. We have seen this spirit most famously on the campuses, where students protest harshly, sometimes violently, views they wish to suppress. Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs. In an interesting departure from democratic tradition, they don’t try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence.

Read the whole thing, though Noonan is a bit late to the notion that the left’s overculture has an increasingly Maoist taint.

MARK STEYN: Two-Mile Tailbacks at Jew-Hate Junction.

As Laura Rosen Cohen likes to say, everyone meets at Jew-Hate Junction: excitable young Mohammedans, secular polytechnic Euro-lefties, anti-globalist conspiracy theorists… It’s getting pretty crowded over there.

* * * * * * * *

I’m very bored by the smooth taqqiya Muslims who profess to dig the interfaith outreach. On balance, I prefer the likes of Ms [Ilhan] Omar, who just can’t help herself. She’ll back down a little when Nancy Pelosi orders her to, but forty-eight hours later comes roaring Tweeting back …and dares the Democrats to call her on it.

The House Leadership just backed down. Like Corbyn in London, it can no longer even insist on its anti-Semitic bona fides without weaseling and equivocating. That’s very telling — and, unlike puppet grotesques in a medieval Lenten parade, it’s not the last throes of the past but a glimpse of the future.

Read the whole thing.

DISPATCHES FROM THE COLD CIVIL WAR: What Would a Hybrid Civil War Look Like?

If a civil war were actually underway it would take the form of hybrid warfare and look much like what can already be observed today. It would explain why, in an era obsessed with safe spaces and tolerance, there is little of either left; why no one is safe from offense, nothing is private; why everything is increasingly criminalized. That context would explain why each new restriction, whether on the use of cash, private transportation, or gun ownership can be perceived as a veiled threat. “Speaking to conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, diGenova summed up his best advice to friends: ‘I vote, and I buy guns. And that’s what you should do.'”

It might shed light on why so many people already feel like psychological refugees with the strange sense they have been evicted from their homes and wondering: what happened to my country? To the church on the corner? To family gatherings? Trust networks? Why have they been turned into battlegrounds?

It’s Richard Fernandez, so read the whole thing.

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet.

In 2002, shortly after I turned 30, I decided I wanted to dedicate myself to addressing climate change. I was worried that global warming would end up destroying many of the natural environments that people had worked so hard to protect.

I thought the solutions were pretty straightforward: solar panels on every roof, electric cars in every driveway, etc. The main obstacles, I believed, were political. And so I helped organize a coalition of America’s largest labor unions and environmental groups. Our proposal was for a $300 billion dollar investment in renewables. We would not only prevent climate change but also create millions of new jobs in a fast-growing high-tech sector.

Our efforts paid off in 2007 when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama embraced our vision. Between 2009–15, the U.S. invested $150 billion dollars in renewables and other forms of clean tech. But right away we ran into trouble.

Read the whole thing.

BREITBART.COM ALUM TO RESUSCITATE HUMAN EVENTS:

 A timeline of Human Events history indicates that Reagan began subscribing to the publication in 1961, a time when the conservative media space was sparsely populated. As the decades wore on, Human Events had to learn to share. Since the arrival of the Internet alone, conservative sites such as the Daily Caller, FoxNews.com, the Blaze, NewsBusters, Independent Journal Review, Breitbart, PJ Media and RedState have jostled and elbowed their way toward a piecemeal fragmentation of the right-leaning U.S. audience.

Human Events couldn’t keep up. It dropped print in 2013, and, according to [Raheem] Kassam, it hasn’t turned out original content in four years, though it has been posting syndicated material from Townhall Media.

The new Human Events, pledges Kassam, will leave the poverty in the past.

Read the whole thing.

ALLAN BLOOM ON HISTORY: “You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad?… Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past.”

Read the whole thing.

Though at least while Bloom was still alive, students were still learning some form of history: Flash-forward to today: Why Are Students Ditching the History Major?

MICHAEL LEDEEN: What Does a Successful Revolution Smell Like?

I have long said that the most important human instrument for perceiving when a revolution is on the verge of success is the nose. It’s not the mind, as you can easily see by the “intelligence community’s” repeated failure to see one coming. For a revolution to succeed, the current leader must sense that his or her time has come, that the forces of history have turned against him, and that he or she had best arrange a safe haven, or make a deal with the revolutionaries, instead of dedicating all efforts to prolonging his or her rule, and the dominating system.

You can’t measure this sort of thing, you can only smell it.

Read the whole thing.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The Awful Truth of Michael Jackson’s Depravity.

Years after their time with Jackson, both Safechuck and Robson married and had children, and becoming fathers triggered more revulsion at what had happened to them. The final 45 minutes or so of the documentary delve into their depression and torment as well as that of their mothers, each of whom searches her soul at excruciating length. What can it be like to know that you abetted the long-term despoliation of your own son? Safechuck says Jackson abused him for four years; Robson says his nightmare lasted seven years. Both mothers own up to what they did, and neither will ever be able to live with herself again. Says Stephanie, “I danced when I heard that he died.” She thought, “Oh thank God, he can’t hurt any more children.”

Throughout the film, everyone involved marvels at his or her own acquiescence to the acts of a monster. No one heard any alarm bells going off. No one saw any red flags. Both boys and their mothers were fully in the singer’s thrall. Jackson’s fame was central to why he got away with so much. Leaving Neverland is a harsh reminder that supposed role models who ought to be held to the highest of standards can use that notoriety as a way of blinding people to the obvious, odious truth.

Read the whole thing.

Flashback: Hugh Hefner, Gangsta Rap & the Emerging Moral Majority: “Slowly, however, the elite of our culture seem to be drifting toward a new, far-more jaundiced and suspicious view of popular culture from the 1960s to the 1990s…Moral concerns pop up one decade in right-wing clothes, and, in the next, change into another outfit.”

MICHELLE MALKIN: I’ve Been Silicon Valley Sharia’d.

Read the whole thing.

THE MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN: The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time– Part XXI.

You’ll want to read the whole thing, but climate “scientists” in Australia are lowering past temperature recordings to make the current situation look far worse.

THE HATE-HOAX BONFIRE. In his latest G-File, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Smollett’s hoax isn’t that unusual. I’m already running long, so I’ll spare you the data, but hoaxes happen all the time — and so do actual hate crimes. They’ve happened under Trump, and they were happening for decades before Trump. That’s why it’s particularly galling to see Al Sharpton opine on the Smollett case given that his entire career stemmed from the Tawana Brawley hoax and his role in a real hate crime that killed seven people.

I’ve been following this stuff ever since I witnessed such hoaxes as a college student. I think the first book I ever reviewed professionally was about student activism. The author, Paul Rogat Loeb, had a whole chapter about racism on college campuses. He focused on a hate crime at Emory. It was only after dozens of pages about all the wonderful consciousness-raising — and shakedowns of administrators — that resulted from the response to the atrocity that he acknowledged that the victim orchestrated the whole thing. But that was irrelevant, according to Loeb, because “other racial harassment has unquestionably occurred again and again, at colleges nationwide.” And besides, so much consciousness was raised! I wrote at the time, “When students are taught that the coin of the realm is race and rage, invariably some will spend that currency on self-aggrandizement and controversy.”

Read the whole thing. Tom Wolfe may have passed on, but the coding he wrote to program the Matrix is still working brilliantly.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Jussie Smollett story reveals a peculiar aspect of 21st-century America: victimhood chic.

Did it not occur to Smollett that if this blew up in his face, he would be tarring by association actual and legitimate claims of racist and homophobic abuse? As someone seeking to be seen as a concerned activist in the vein of his mother and Angela Davis, could Smollett really not understand that a stunt all about making himself more famous was not exactly the wokest approach?

But that’s just it—Smollett, if the latest reporting is true, was an eager puppy, jumping with joyous inattention into American social politics as he has encountered it coming of age in the 21st century. He would have known that in this moment, very important people would find him more interesting for having been hurt on the basis of his identity than for his fine performance on an interesting hit television show. He would have known this so well that it didn’t even occur to him that his story would have to be more credible than the dopey one he threw together about being jumped in near-Arctic temperatures by the only two white bullies in America with a mysterious fondness for a black soap hip-hopera. (Yet again, I’m assuming the latest reporting is accurate.)

Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told could things get to the point that someone would pretend to be tortured in this way, acting oppression rather than suffering it, seeking to play a prophet out of a sense that playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys. That anyone could feel this way and act on it in the public sphere is, in a twisted way, a kind of privilege, and a sign that we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting.

Read the whole thing.

Related: CBS Chicago: Smollett Wrote The Hate-Crime Letter Too. “But wait — there’s more! Since the letter contained the crushed [aspirin] as a hoax chemical/biological attack in itself, that violates 18 US Code 1038 – False Information and Hoaxes. That could add another five years to a potential sentence, although it would likely run concurrently rather than consecutively. Smollett’s next gig could be Club Fed, and for more than a season.”

NO THANKS, LEFTY, WE’RE GOOD:

Jesse Singal points out that most black Virginians want Gov. Ralph “Blackface” Northam to stay in office (58 percent — more support than Northam has among whites). Most Latinos don’t want to be called “Latinx”. Only nine percent of Native Americans want the Washington Redskins to change their name. This signals that progressives have a class problem.

I know that’s a shocking conclusion, but crack open the smelling salts and read the whole thing.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Will History Survive?

The news that the University of Notre Dame, responding to complaints by some students, would ‘shroud’ its 12 134-year-old murals depicting Christopher Columbus was disappointing. It was not surprising, however, to anyone who has been paying attention to the widespread attack on America’s past wherever social justice warriors congregate.

Notre Dame may not be particularly friendly to its Catholic heritage, but its president, the Rev. John Jenkins, demonstrated that it remains true to its jesuitical (if not, quite, its Jesuit) inheritance. Queried about the censorship, he said, apparently without irony, that his decision to cover the murals was not intended to conceal anything, but rather to tell ‘the full story’ of Columbus’s activities.

Welcome to the new Orwellian world where censorship is free speech and we respect the past by attempting to elide it.

Read the whole thing.

“FAKE NEWS ABOUT FAKE NEWS:” Enlisting media myth to condemn Trump’s national emergency.

They’re pretty sure it’s apocryphal.

But they use it anyway.

Media myths can be appealing like that: Too good to resist. Too good for media outlets not to revive when they think the occasion is fitting.

So it was the other day when the Salt Lake Tribune editorially condemnedPresident Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to add miles of barriers along the country’s southern border.

In its editorial, the Tribune resurrected William Randolph Hearst’s debunked vowto “furnish the war” with Spain in the late 19th century.

“You want fake news?” the Tribune‘s editorial began. “Here’s some fake news about fake news.”

Read the whole thing.

MICHAEL WALSH: Leftism Is Like the Cult of Cthulhu.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think,” wrote the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft in the opening to The Call of Cthulhu, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” In the Lovecraftian mythos, this refers to the occult world of the Great Old Ones, eldritch gods from outer space, as old as time itself who lie beyond our ken, dead but still dreaming. If we could only grasp their existence and see how fragile our imaginary world really is, we would go mad. Thus, we go on believing in an illusion and subconsciously hope Cthulhu and Azathoth never show us their true faces.

The secret to being a successful leftist is very similar.

As they say when they’re handing out the textbooks at Miskatonic University, read the whole thing.

BRUCE BAWER ON GERMANY, Where “Anti-Americanism is As German as Apple Strudel.”

Their ancestors fought wars of conquest, and they understand that; but they’ll never be able to fully process the fact that Americans actually fought a war to free them from a psychopathic dictator whom they had followed, in mindless obedience, to the gates of Hell. Imagine knowing that and having to live with it! How could a proud and arrogant people in such a situation not find their thankfulness toward the nation that saved them being twisted into a ghoulish hatred?

Read the whole thing.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON ON SANDY’S WAR:

“Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” is, at 16 syllables, a mouthful. The day before yesterday, she was “Sandy,” a pleasant-seeming young woman who liked to dance, worked in a bar, worried about her family, and chafed that her advantages and elite education (Boston University shares Case Western’s academic ranking and is significantly more expensive than Princeton: Is there a more appropriate preparation for life in Washington?) left her struggling, obscure, and unsatisfied. And so she set after glory and personal significance in politics, to which she is relatively new — the hatreds and grievances she dotes on are obvious enough and familiar enough that one assumes she has been in possession of those for some time. They are not newly acquired.

If you spend enough time around politics and/or media, you have seen this figure before. Years ago, a young woman beginning what would turn out to be a successful turn on the Washington cursus honorum asked me, earnestly: “Is it wrong to want to be famous?” I asked her what she intended to do with the celebrity she sought — for what purpose did she want it? “Why?” The question obviously had never occurred to her. I might as well have asked her why she wanted two eyes rather than one. She has a lot of Twitter followers now.

* * * * * * * * *

About the details of the Green New Deal, such as they are, there is not really much to say. On Friday, I spoke with one of the world’s leading authorities on North American building practices and asked him about the plan to “retrofit” these structures in the service of a “net-zero energy” agenda. Neither “scathing” nor “derisive” quite captures his response. He has been involved in a number of net-zero retrofits and understands how complex and expensive they are — and how they can destroy a building when done poorly. Ask a farmer, an aerospace engineer, the manager of an electric utility, or a truck-driver about these highfalutin’ schemes and sentiments and you will get another superfluous proof of Robert Conquest’s maxim — “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best” — and Williamson’s First Law: “Everything is simple if you don’t know a f*****g thing about it.”

Read the whole thing.

TOCQUEVILLE TALKS: A FAREWELL TO JOHN DINGELL. “Eet says ’ere, that, in ’eez book, Monsieur Dingell advocated the abolition of the Senate. Is this a popular opinion in the United States today?”

“But Congressman Dingell took issue with more than just the pace of the Senate — he also saw great danger in how unrepresentative it has come to be of the American people.”

“’ow so?

“Oh, his district in Michigan alone boasts a greater population than say, the entire state of Vermont.”

“And so he says…”

“How can the Senate address the needs of his constituents when they enjoy a fraction of the voice per capita compared the people of Vermont?”

“Ah, but surely they understand that the Senate does not exist for this purpose? To address their needs, and wield their power, les Michiganders ’ave the state government of Michigan. Through this tool they can craft their little society, without a care for the whims of the ’ill people of Vermont. The Senate exists to treat the issues from the perspective of the states themselves, not the individuals who live in them. Recall, as I wrote, that the ‘Federal system was created in order to combine the various advantages of large with those of smallness.’”

Read le whole thing.

UDDER MADNESS: The Green New Deal’s War on Cows.

Where is Gary Larson when you need him?

I loved Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, Dilbert, and Bloom County, but I was in awe of The Far Side. Larson could do more in one panel — daily — than the best often did in three. And he was weird, and I like weird (you’d know that if you could see what I’m wearing right now).

Anyway, I could write about Larson all day long, so long as the armadillo I have under my breastplate doesn’t need to go to the bathroom. But I should get to the point.

Larson loved cows, and he made them into cultural things like no one before. “I’ve always thought the word ‘cow’ was funny,” Larson once said. “And cows are sort of tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor.”

And that’s why we need him now.

Contained within the FAQ for the Green New Deal is one of the greatest sentences ever written with the intention of being taken very, very seriously:

We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.

I love this sentence so much I want to stand outside its house holding up a boom box blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”

Heh. Read the whole thing.

DISPATCHES FROM THE NATIONAL FISKING LEAGUE: If you loved James Lileks’ classic “Notes from the Olive Garden” 2003 fisking of a leftwing “Grauniad” columnist trying to explain — and mock — the modern American south to his fellow British lefties, you’ll enjoy his latest “Wednesday Review of Modern Thought,” a takedown of an American leftist writing in London’s New Statesman on an even more impenetrable subject to Brits than the 21st century American south — American football. It features this passage:

The Super Bowl should be pure, or as pure as any comically overblown brand extension devise can ever be. This is not a time to squabble over our differences. It should be a time to get together, eat a whole bucket of chicken, and punch your best friend in the stomach – like God intended.

So you know we’re off to a highly authentic, nuanced start, the Internet equivalent of Alistair Cooke’s Letters from America BBC radio series. As Lileks replies:

Okay, let’s look at some more . . . Trump Trump Trump and so on. Kapernick, whose kneeling showed that “America has a persistent problem with racial inequality that we seem to have no interest in reckoning with.” Nope, no discussion on that issue. You’d think it would come up in elections and political discussions, but it’s just not a big thing. Odd.

Despite the cavalcade of horrific news stories about the rise of white supremacy in the US that bolstered Kaepernick’s thesis – from Charlottesville to the latest tragedy involving Empire star Jussie Smollett –

We’ll just leave that one there, and skip ahead a bit.

The build-up to this year’s Super Bowl has been mercifully free of political squabbling and self-righteous posturing. As much as I’d like this to be a sign that we too can move past the last three years of perpetual in-fighting, this detente is guaranteed to be short-lived. Surely, another front will open up in this rhetorical pillow fight. Maybe halftime show performers Maroon 5 will unfurl a Palestinian flag during their set. Could Patriots quarterback Tom Brady remove his jersey to reveal a “Build the Wall” t-shirt? What if the Los Angeles Rams win the game and refuse to visit the White House, then donate their championship bonus to Kamala Harris?

Dave Schilling is a writer and humorist

I’m hardly the “stick to sports” guy conservative Americans are so fond of lashing out at,

Wait a minute. Hold on. Conservatives lash out at the guys who want sports to stick to sports?

but I also would like to enjoy my Bud Light commercials in peace.

And what prevents you from doing so?

Certainly nothing this year, as Anheuser-Busch’s latest round of Super Bowl ads were consistently designed to please elite American leftists and cop Clio awards from the advertising industry (but I repeat myself). This year the ads featured ill-conceived freakouts over corn syrup, a Leonard Nimoy-esque search for both Bob Dylan and wind turbines, and, plugging Anheuser-Busch-imported Stella Artois, an ad that co-starred that legendary blue collar lager lass, Sarah Jessica Parker.

Exit quote:

The one thing right-wing bloviators are correct about is that sport is meant to be an escape. I’ve grown tired of mixing my personal ideological convictions with the simple, binary pleasures of watching two teams compete in an athletic contest.

As Lileks replies, “So don’t. Or do. No one cares. Who politicized it in the first place?”

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How many colleges and universities have closed since 2016?

If only there had been some kind of warning. I mean, any kind of warning at all. But read the whole thing.

S.G. CHEAH:

It was a sort of sick unintended symbolism that the Parkland school shooting happened on Valentine’s Day. That an act so evil could occur on a day that is dedicated to the celebration of love. Horrified, I asked “How could this possibly happened?” Especially after multiple reports and investigations uncovered that the Parkland tragedy was fully preventable.

Suddenly it hit me like a brick. Liberals claim to love the young. “Think of the children!” is one of their favorite rallying cries.

And yet, it was a liberal School Board that failed to protect the children at Parkland.

It was a liberal Sheriff Office that failed to protect the children at Parkland.

It was an liberal (Obama appointed) Judge who ruled that the authorities didn’t have the obligation to protect the children at Parkland.

The kids at Parkland were simply not safe under the protection of Broward’s liberal district.

Liberals always claim to love and care about the young more than the conservatives, and yet liberals are the ones that are the most predatory against the young.

Read the whole thing.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Elizabeth Warren Finally Packs Up Her Wigwam.

Now, speaking as a cuck RINO NeverTrumper, I know I’m not supposed to admit when Trump gets something right. But he sure did get this one right. He saw Warren’s biggest weakness and exploited it. He used what Saul Alinsky called “man’s most potent weapon”: ridicule. Warren could have ignored all his taunting and teasing and trolling. Instead, she ended up doing more damage to her own campaign than Trump or anybody else ever could.

Nevertheless, she persisted. Whoops!

Read the whole thing.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Who’s to Blame for the Alleged Jussie Smollett Attack? “I know it’s racist and homophobic of me, but I’m going to reserve judgment on this one.”

Read the whole thing.

DEATH SPIRAL FOR BUZZFEED, THE MILLENNIAL READER’S DIGEST:

The second part of the BuzzFeed makeover, coming soon, is to grow. BuzzFeed has hinted that it intends to hoover up many other similar sites, all those fourth-rate imitators of a third-rate product that also seek to provide micro-dopamine infusions to cupcake-scarfing arrested-development cubicle prisoners as they daydream of shopping at Forever 21 and wonder if Jafar is kind of hot. If 17 bajillion dollops of extreme-low-quality content delivering 150 gajillion eyeballs doesn’t work, double down! If gigantic scale doesn’t work, activate ludicrous scale!

By the time all of these mergers and acquisitions are complete, the next recession will be nigh, the first thing that always happens in recessions will happen first again (America’s great companies will slash ad budgets) and low- and medium-quality media companies reliant on advertising are going to segue from creating dystopian movie plots to experiencing them. Say, BuzzFeed, Which Pandering And Meretricious Yet Doomed Advertorial Dungbot Are You? Take The Quiz!

Heh. If you’re not too busy learning to code, read the whole thing.

IN DEFENSE OF ASSIMILATION: As Rich Lowry writes, Tom Brokaw “didn’t understand that assimilation is now a third rail of American politics.”

He caused a furor with comments on the venerable Sunday news program Meet the Press over the weekend, including, most controversially, his statement that he believes “that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation.”

The condemnations were swift and sweeping and a sign that being a beloved media figure who has never before said anything that could legitimately be considered bigoted is no defense when the furies descend.

It was Presidential Medal of Freedom to white hood in one sound bite. A group called Latino Victory hit Brokaw for allegedly giving “credence to white supremacist ideology.”

Typically, his apologies were deemed insufficient and part and parcel of the original offense.

Let’s stipulate that using a definite article to refer to any minority group will always strike people as tone-deaf, but what Brokaw was getting at — the importance of assimilation to cultural cohesion — should be uncontroversial.

It isn’t anymore. The head of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists rejected the very idea of assimilation, which he decried as “denying one culture for the other.” It is astonishing that in that formulation “the other” is American culture. We are perhaps the only nation in world history that has sought to “otherize” its own culture.

Read the whole thing. Naturally of course, in order to appease his fellow leftists, Brokaw didn’t dare stand his ground on Twitter, eventually either reverting to the mindset of a 15 year old, or more likely, having a young ghost-tweeter play the role of flak catcher:

Lowry doesn’t go on to note what Brokaw was given a near-complete pass for on Sunday: Tom Brokaw Claims GOPers Tell Him They’re Not Fans of ‘Brown Grandbabies.’

But if that actually happened, why doesn’t he name any names? Why would Brokaw cover for racists?

HE MEANS THE OTHER GUY, NOT MADURO’S THEFT OF AN ENTIRE COUNTRY: What has happened in Venezuela is a coup.

I tried to pick an excerpt, but this Oscar Guardiola-Rivera opinion piece is so juicy with Guardian-level lunacy that you might just want to read the whole thing.

WELL, OF COURSE:

In case you missed it, a would-be terrorist was arrested last week for allegedly plotting a massive, multi-faceted attack on the White House. The plotter, 21-year old Hasher Jallel Taheb, hails from Cumming, Ga. His motive appears to have been jihad.

Might this story have been a tad bigger if the alleged perpetrator hadn’t been a Muslim and “person of color?” Might it have been bigger yet if the sitting president had been a Democrat?

Of course it would have. It might even have gotten a fraction of the coverage that last October’s letter bomb scare received.

But wait, there’s more:

The reason I pose these questions is not to point out blatant media bias, which is so glaring at this point that no one who wasn’t trying could possibly miss it, but to ask how the current “climate of hate” in this country contributed to this Taheb’s blood lust, and what we as a society are doing about it.

Until fairly recently, I strenuously disagreed with this notion, and to some extent I still do. Climates, much like guns, do not kill people. People kill people. Blaming a climate lets the perpetrator off the hook because, when the killer’s agency is minimized, so too is his culpability. What else can a passive receptor of hate-filled messaging do except to kill the person whom he is told to despise?

The other reason I have resisted the idea of killer climates is that it seems to lead, like night into day, toward censorship. If climates kill, then our words, even our thoughts, must be policed. Preemptive measures must be taken. Children must be indoctrinated in government schools to prevent dangerous ideas from occurring in the first place. Adults must be shamed, doxxed, and fired from their jobs for fear of what other people completely unknown to the speaker might do upon hearing their words. I am on record saying that the blurring of distinctions between speech and violence is eroding our right to express ourselves, and I still believe that.

But in recent years, I have started to reevaluate my beliefs about killer climates. When a soak-the-rich socialist named James Hodgkinson attacked a group of Republican congressmen and staffers at a baseball practice in 2017, I couldn’t help but notice that he was feted by certain segments of the internet, most notably the Facebook groups we know he belonged to.

James Hodgkinson doesn’t strike me as a particularly bright individual, which tells me that he probably doesn’t do much of his own thinking. We know that he was a fan of Rachel Maddow, whose program appears on the network that pioneered the “24-hour hate” — a slightly elongated version of the “two minutes hate” that George Orwell spoke of — and it seems unlikely that his suggestible mind was not affected by it.

Read the whole thing. Exit question: Does the nonstop violent rhetoric against Trump and his supporters mean that leftists don’t actually believe that a “climate of hate” leads to violence — or that they do?

JOHN HAWKINS: Long Term, How Do We Live With the Sorts of People Smearing Covington Catholic Teen Nick Sandmann?

Politics ain’t pattycake and expecting someone to love and adore people on the other side of the aisle who disagree with him on fundamental issues is probably a bridge too far.

Still, every American has a right to expect equal treatment under the law and from government agencies. There’s also a fundamental American belief in fair play. That means whatever rules we come up with get applied to everyone equally. It means that right is right even if you don’t agree with the person who benefits from that. It means that it is immoral to lie about someone even if you disagree with him. It means that at the end of the day, we put the good of the country ahead of our own petty political disagreements.

Those are the sorts of foundational customs and mores that allow people with wildly divergent viewpoints to live together in a functional society. The very fact that the Left has rapidly moved away from those principles is why our society has become increasingly dysfunctional. This is a tendency liberals have not just here, but everywhere.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, YES:

The Covington fiasco has proved to be a clarifying moment. And here is what has been made clear: Much of the American media is no longer engaged in journalism. It is engaged in opposition research and in what is sometimes known among political operatives as “black p.r.”—the sinister twin of ordinary public relations. As Joy Behar, as profoundly dim and tedious a person as American public life has to offer, forthrightly confessed: The hysteria and outright dishonesty surrounding the Covington students had nothing to do with them. It has to do with narrowly partisan, selfish, deeply stupid, entirely unpatriotic, childish, foot-stamping, fingers-in-the-ears, weeping, cooties-loathing, teary-eyed, tremulous, quavering, pansified, gormless, deceitful, dishonorable, and cynical politics of the lowest kind — the politics of Us and Them.

Here are some of the idiots and idiotic institutions who engaged in that recently in the matter of Cesar Sayoc. Chris Truax in USA Today: “Trump bears moral responsibility for pipe bombs. Denying it just makes things worse.” Jonathan Chait, New York: “Bomber Cesar Sayoc is a By-product of Trump’s Party.” Even Rick Wilson debased himself, writing in The Daily Beast: “Of Course Donald Trump Inspired Cesar Sayoc’s Alleged Terrorism.” That’s a particularly asinine headline: For Trump’s culpability, it’s “of course,” while Sayoc’s crimes are “alleged.” That isn’t the kind of stupidity that happens by accident. These claims are pure intellectual dishonesty. They are smears, and there is no good-faith case to be made for them. All of these writers should be ashamed.

It is always easier to appreciate when the roles are reversed. Democrats know that there is a big difference between would-be mass assassin James T. Hodgkinson embracing Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders embracing would-be mass assassin James T. Hodgkinson. . . .

And the fact that a couple of children in MAGA hats engaged in boorish behavior — which isn’t even a fact, as it turns out, but a lie constructed and wholesaled with malice aforethought — wouldn’t have told us one damn thing about Donald J. Trump, his administration, or his political supporters at large. The fact that we had a momentary national moral crisis over the (as is turns out, fictitious) actions of a couple of nobody teenagers is all the evidence anybody needs of the fundamentally hysterical and unserious times in which we live. In a sane world, nobody cares about whether a 16-year-old boy somewhere . . . smirked.

Everybody who has pretended like that smirk tells us something serious about the state of the world is a liar and a fraud. I don’t mean the people who were legitimately taken in by the deceit — especially those who have had the honor and self-respect to admit their errors and correct them — but those who willfully persist in the lie. I’m talking about you, Ruth Graham of Slate, still trying to justify by whatever pathetic means are available what everybody with any sense knows to have been an exercise in pure horses***. I’m talking about you, editors of the New York Times. You sorry specimens are poor excuses for journalists, which, of course, we already knew. What’s more relevant here is that you are bad citizens. Trafficking in lies and distortions because you think the guy in the White House is kind of gross is unworthy of adults with responsible positions in a free society that depends on honest and functional institutions.

As some of you may recall, I wrote a little book called The Case against Trump. I didn’t think much of him in 2016. I don’t think much of him now. But we aren’t three tweets away from the Holocaust. Nobody seriously believes that we are, unless they are insane. Sane people who insist that the United States in 2019 is something like Germany in the 1930s are liars. They don’t really believe it. They have an investment in hysteria.

Those of you who play along with that — who enjoy being lied to and manipulated — are pathetic in the literal sense of that word. What the hell is wrong with you?

The best argument in favor of Trump’s presidency is what Trump’s presidency has taught us about the character of the people who oppose him, and who would be wielding power if he weren’t.

SOHRAB AMARI: Dear Covington boys: Everyone failed you.

I wish I could offer a word of reassurance amid your troubles. But all I can say is that everyone failed you. The elite media failed its duty to truth and fairness. Your school failed you. Your diocese failed you. Your Church failed you, with some of the nation’s most visible Catholics, lay and clerical, rushing to join the pile-on. America failed you.

Start with the media. If you have taken a high-school journalism class, you have heard that reporters are exacting with facts. That they are supposed to seek comment from people they criticise. “Even if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out,” runs an old journalistic maxim. These standards are especially pertinent when stories involve children.

Well, I’m sorry to say that many “real”, adult journalists don’t follow these professional rules anymore, including and especially at the prestigious outlets that went after you.

Read the whole thing. But not everyone failed them.

Related: Ross Douthat wrestles with his conscience.

I’M ALMOST READY TO THINK THAT TRUMP SET THIS WHOLE THING UP, BUT WE ALL KNOW HE DIDN’T HAVE TO: Nathan Phillips rally attempted to disrupt Mass at DC’s National Shrine.

Meanwhile, from a friend on Facebook: “Verdict on Covington: 500K more votes for Trump in 2020.” In a crucial part of the country.

BRUCE BAWER: The Disgraceful Covington Catholic Pile-On. “I spent much of my weekend following this story, because the savage assaults on the boys on Twitter and elsewhere struck me as supremely emblematic of the ugliness at the heart of our holier-than-thou, white-hating, male-hating, and Trump-hating establishment culture. Even if the boys had behaved in an unseemly manner, the spectacle of all these politicians, journalists, and celebrities piling on to them with such intense shows of moral indignation was far more unseemly. Especially reprehensible was the way in which so many of the boys’ critics reacted when the real truth came out. Many of them quietly removed their tweets. Others choked out extremely lame apologies.”

Read the whole thing.

THREAD: “If I walked up to a group of Antifa thugs, and started banging a drum inches from their faces, what would happen to me?”

Very likely something far worse than a confused smile. Read the whole thing.

NEO: Reporting on each other: the Covington boys, the Native American, and the smart phone vs. the telescreen.

Today’s smart phones (not envisioned by Orwell) can record, as well. But what they record, how it is edited and used and described and slanted, is the task of social media and the MSM. If the viewers of such videos don’t have a huge amount of skepticism, they are easily taken in by people using videos to mislead. Even people with a great deal of skepticism, such as Scott Adams, can apparently be taken in by the right video presented in a very clever way.

This is obviously a grave danger, because videos (like photos before them) can easily give the appearance of being the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and can whip the crowd up into enormous hatred. And yet the actual truth can be something very, very different.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Note this part: “One of the sadder things about this particular incident is that many on the right, as well as the boys’ Catholic school, jumped on the leftist bandwagon—at least to a certain extent. And some jumped on it to a greater extent and have yet (at least, as of this writing) to retract their words.”

BUZZFEED SHAT THE BED, BUT HERE’S A STORY: Transcripts of Former Top FBI Lawyer Detail Pervasive Abnormalities in Trump Probe.

Former top FBI attorney James Baker admitted to House lawmakers in October last year that the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russia was riddled with abnormalities.

Confronted with a damning summary of abnormalities, bias, and omissions, which transpired during the investigation, Baker told Congress that the investigation indeed was “highly unusual.” . . .

As general counsel, Baker advised senior FBI leaders on the legal aspects of key investigations and served as the liaison with the Department of Justice (DOJ). In testimony, he detailed a series of unusual steps he took in the Trump-Russia investigation, including serving as the conduit between Perkins Coie—the firm working for the Clinton 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—and the FBI.

Baker left his position as general counsel in early January 2018 and then resigned from the FBI in early May 2018.

Baker testified that it was Michael Sussman, a partner at Perkins Coie, who shared with him information that detailed alleged communications between servers in Trump Tower and servers located in Russia at Alfa Bank, which were eventually debunked. Sussmann was also the lawyer who spearheaded the handling of the alleged hack of the DNC servers. Baker admitted that it was highly unusual to interact with an outside counsel.

Read the whole thing, which has an actual named source and everything.

“BUZZFEED EDITOR-IN-CHIEF BEN SMITH IS HAVING A TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO-GOOD, VERY-BAD DAY,” Twitchy notes; but we’ll come back to them in just a second. First up, Colby Hall of Mediaite writes, “Buzzfeed News Bombshell Reporter: No We Have Not Seen the Evidence Supporting Our Report:”

Anthony Cormier is one of the two investigative reporter at BuzzfeedNews who co-authored the bombshell report published Thursday night — a report which claimed President Donald Trump directed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie during Congressional testimony over discussions between the Trump Organization and Russian authorities about a Trump Tower Moscow project.

Cormier appeared on CNN’s New Day and revealed that he had not seen the evidence underlying his report.

Who is the other “investigative reporter” on BuzzFeed’s article? “One Of The BuzzFeed Reporters Behind The Trump Report Has A History Of Making Things Up” Joe Cunningham of RedState notes:

One of the authors, Jason Leopold, has quite the history when it comes to bad reporting. Most folks know of his claim that multiple sources told him Karl Rove was going to be indicted in 2006 and how it turned out to be utterly false.

But, as Columbia Journalism Review noted back then, it wasn’t his first problem with facts.

When Leopold’s story was first called into question a few weeks ago, Salon’s Tim Grieve reminded readers of Leopold’s checkered history with the publication. Salon removed Leopold’s August 29, 2002 story about Enron from its site after it was discovered that he plagiarized parts from the Financial Times and was unable to provide a copy of an email that was critical to the piece. Leopold’s response? A hysterical rant (linked above) which claimed that Salon’s version of events was “nothing but lies,” and that “At this point, I wonder why Salon would go to great lengths to further twist the knife into my back. I suppose the New York Times will now release their version of the events. I can see the headline now ‘Jason Leopold Must Die.’”

That is pretty big. But, like always in cases like this, there is more.

Read the whole thing. “There are reasons to believe there’s something to the story too, though,” NeverTrumper Allahpundit speculates at Hot Air:

Leopold, Cormier, and BuzzFeed’s editors are obviously keenly aware of the magnitude of the charge here. They’re accusing a sitting president of a crime that makes his removal from office conceivable, even with a Republican majority in the Senate. They also must be aware that we’ll know whether they were right or wrong sooner rather than later. This charge won’t hang out there forever unresolved, like Michael Cohen’s alleged trip to Prague per the Steele dossier. Mueller’s working on his report, it may be ready as soon as next month, and this claim — if true — will be a key part of it. If the report emerges and there’s nothing in there about suborning perjury, BuzzFeed’s reputation will never recover. This isn’t a case like the dossier where they’re publishing someone else’s work product with no claims as to its veracity. They’re putting their own names to it. Every political scoop they publish for the next 20 years will be challenged by citing to the Leopold/Cormier fiasco. It’s basically professional suicide unless they really do have good reason to be confident in the reporting.

And so maybe they do. We’ll know soon!

But in the meantime, back to Twitchy: “Rake, meet face! BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith accidentally admits his site’s guilty of lazy ‘journalism’ [screenshots]:”

Click to enlarge.

In addition to his Freudian slip about BuzzFeed itself, that’s a pretty nasty (albeit likely unintentional) subtweet from Smith aimed at former BuzzFeed staffer Andrew Kaczynski, who has since taken his habit of “resurfacing” old news to Time-Warner-CNN-HBO.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Oops:

Ouch:

ANOTHER UPDATE: Shep Smith and Chris Wallace: Why haven’t any media outlets been able to corroborate BuzzFeed’s Trump story? Why, indeed?

MORE: #JOURNALISM.

STILL MORE: Yes.

Plus, from the comments: “This ‘story’ was the top of hourly radio news all damn day today. And now we hear it’s crap, straight from the godhead, Mueller. The anti-Trumpers apparently just ate a dick the size of Oumuamua. Again.”

In two successive days, Trump’s owned Pelosi and the press, without even breaking a sweat. Welcome to 2019!

MAKE THE RUBBLE BOUNCE:

I DUNNO, I’M STARTING TO THINK THAT YOU ARE:

COLLUSION: Top Mueller Officials Coordinated With Fusion GPS Spouse In 2016. “The Department of Justice’s Bruce Ohr claimed he repeatedly said information was not verified, risked bias, and had been obtained under political circumstances.”

A senior Department of Justice official says he repeatedly and specifically told top officials at the FBI and DOJ about dossier author Christopher Steele’s bias and his employer Fusion GPS’ conflicts of interest, information they kept hidden from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. These conversations involved high-level officials, including some who are now senior officials in the special counsel probe. And the conversations began taking place in the earliest days of August 2016, much earlier than previously revealed to congressional investigators seeking to learn the facts about the FBI’s decision to spy on the Trump campaign.

Testimony from Bruce Ohr, the demoted associate attorney general at Justice, informs a years-long partisan debate about the role he played in funneling information to the FBI from the terminated source.

Read the whole thing.

THE PROBLEMS WITH TINY HOUSES: They tend to depreciate in value. Tiny homes ≠ tiny consumption. Read the whole thing.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad.

Talking about the yellow-vest movement, French geographer Christophe Guilluy observes: “Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist, but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore.”

That’s right. It’s class war masquerading as something else, but people have seen through the mask.

Read the whole thing.