The Foundry.

Father’s Day is a good time to reflect on the importance of dads. It is also an opportunity to bring attention to how fatherhood, marriage, and family became divisive, partisan political issues to the progressive Left.

As a candidate and president, Barack Obama talked often about the importance of fatherhood, marriage, and family. A speech he gave in Chicago a decade ago about violent crime included one observation few elected Democrats today would repeat publicly:

There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence, than strong, stable families—which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood.

As was often the case, the loudest criticism Obama received for elevating fathers came from his progressive supporters. The rest of the party took notice. Democrats removed all references to fatherhood from their 2016 and 2020 party platforms.

How Kamala Harris has emerged as an early winner of the GOP primary (Politico)

Judge Blocks Seattle Police From Graffiti-Related Arrests

Texas governor signs bill placing limits on transgender athletes in college sports (CNN)

The FBI Is Hunting a New Domestic Terror Threat: Abortion Rights Activists (The Intercept)

Texas Law Ends Diversity Offices at State Colleges

Wyoming Sorority Sisters Sue Fraternity For Inducting Biological Male As First ‘Trans’ Member

Twitter is ‘the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people,’ GLAAD says (NBC News)

CBS Interviews AMA Head Who Frets Bans on Trans Surgeries & Abortions

Texas Gov. Buses First Group of Migrants to LA (NewsMax) Sanctuary city? Or sanctimonious hypocrite city? We’ll find out.

Tijuana Mayor Flees To Army Base As Crime Chaos At Border City Worsens

NBC Worries Teachers Quitting Due to LGBTQ Agenda Backlash

Anger Grows Across Europe Over EU’s Mandatory Migrant Quotas

CNN Owner Sponsoring Drag Queen Story Hour for Kids

Dems eye redistricting redos to regain House majority (Politico) More ballot harvesting?

Watch: RFK Jr. Says He Must “Be Careful” The CIA Doesn’t Assassinate Him

America’s biggest liberal cities are dying (Washington Examiner)

California GOP Legislator Tells Parents to ‘Flee’ the State

Iowa Court Fails to Uphold Abortion Restriction  Never trust anyone with purple hair.

MLB Apparently Not Diverse Enough For Progressives

Jordan Subpoenas Radical ESG Group as ‘Collusion’ Probe Intensifies

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear Lied About ‘Record’ Job Gains, Stats Show  Lying is what Democrats do best.

Georgetown Faculty Object to Renaming Foreign Affairs School After Madeleine Albright

Hotels Are Dumping Property in San Francisco as Tourists Shun Crime-Ridden City

‘They Were Experimenting On Her’: Teen Detransitioner Sues Doctors Over Child Gender Transition

Lifehacker.

If you’re dropping checks in the mail to your landlord or utility provider, it’s time to look for a different way to pay your bills. Check fraud and mail theft nearly doubled between 2021 and 2022, affecting hundreds of thousands of Americans, according to reports from both the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.
Criminals are taking sophisticated steps to wash checks—stealing them from the mail and changing the payee’s name and payment amount—and conning banks into cashing them. This often involves creating fake identities using stolen personal information and then opening fraudulent bank accounts and writing new checks. Some are selling copies of washed checks online or using stolen mailbox keys to pick checks directly out of collection points.
While banks do refund check fraud victims for money lost, the AP reports that this process is slower than usual due to the significant increase in fraud cases.
Fewer Americans are writing and sending checks, but it’s still somewhat common. Here’s how to minimize the chance of becoming a victim.

Most banks will send a check for you if you use their online facilities.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott buses 42 migrants to Los Angeles

Austin relocates people from homeless encampments to shelters after resident exposes environmental damage (Fox)

VA hospitals are outperforming private hospitals, latest Medicare survey shows (NPR) Anybody who has had to use a VA hospital knows this to be a lie.

Chris Rufo’s War Against Woke Institutions

FLASHBACK: The Media HATED Talking About Hillary’s Emails

With Order Making Maryland a Gender Transition Sanctuary, Governor Aids Sex Traffickers

Conservatives to Rally Outside Pride Mass at Biden Church

ABC ADMITS Downtown San Francisco Too Unsafe Even for a War Reporter

Target Received Bomb Threats From the ‘LGBTQ+ Community.’ The Media Told a Different Story.

Middle School Students Stage Rebellion Against LGBTQ Indoctrination

Election Integrity: Most Voters Expect Cheating Will Affect 2024 Outcome (Rasmussen)

PBS: ‘Hillary Clinton’s Case Is Completely Different,’ Says Undeclared Dem Operative

Oliver Darcy Wails Over White House Anger at Fox Chyron, NYT’s Disobedience

Genital Mutilation for the Masses

Crenshaw Squashes Dem Who Can’t ‘Name One’ Study About the Benefits of Trans Procedures for Kids

Far-Left Jurisdiction Appalled When Middle Schoolers Revolt Against Pride Day

Brazen Hillary Clinton Seen Wearing ‘But Her Murder Victims’ Hat (Babylon Bee)

Read it.

A California state senator told a gathered crowd of parents at the California Senate Judicial Committee to flee the state on June 13 during a hearing on a bill which would put parents who don’t affirm their child’s “gender transition” in danger of child abuse charges.

Sen. Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, is the lone Republican on California’s Senate Judiciary Committee, and he has served in the California Legislature for 11 years. He was also the lone voice warning against language in AB 957, which a Democratic senator had amended on June 5 to rewrite the California Family Code to list “gender affirmation” alongside a child’s need for “health, safety, and welfare.”

US halts online asylum appointments at Texas crossing after extortion warnings (Associated Press)

Democrats, shocked by Supreme Court’s minority voter ruling, see opportunity as House fight looms (ABC News)

Wisconsin County Mulls Sanctuary Status for Trans Kids (NewsMax) To virtue-signal or not to virtue-signal? That is the question.

Man With ‘the Facts’: CNN Has McCabe Defend Clinton’s E-Mail Server

Maryland Dem grovels after saying Muslim kids against LGBTQ+ lessons aligned with ‘White supremacists’

UK, Sweden, and Switzerland Retract Support for Gender Fluidity

Westfield giving up S.F. mall in wake of Nordstrom closure, plunging sales and foot traffic (S.F. Chronicle)

Women’s Group To Spend “Tens Of Millions” To Boost Kamala’s Image

Who is not implicated in the Trump indictment? Hillary Clinton. (Washington Post) Ruth Marcus piles sandbags around the biggest crook in modern American politics.

Outrage at jail sentence for woman who took abortion pills later than UK limit (The Guardian) You break the law, you go to jail. Them’s the rules.

Pittsburgh ‘Pride Mass’ Canceled Following Backlash

“Rantings Of A Demagogue” – Parents Angered By Princeton President’s Graduation Address

The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens (WIRED)

Female-Only Spa With Compulsory Nudity Must Admit ‘Transgender Women’ With Penises: Judge

Prominent Jewish Conservatives Start ‘Jews Against Soros’ Group

Tide Turning Against Biological Men Competing in Women’s Sports, New Poll Finds—Even Among Democrats

Target Stores in Five States Receive Bomb Threats After Removing Some Pride Month Items  But, remember, only Republicans engage in political violence.

Is The EU Trying To Cover Up The Biggest Corruption Scandal In Its History?  Of course.

Fact Check: Nearly 100 Percent of Political Contributions From Fact Checkers Go to Democrats

New York to Set Minimum Wage for App-Based Workers  Thus making sure that none of them have jobs.

Nets Spend 291 Minutes On Trump Indictment, 0 Seconds On Biden Burisma Bribery

Target stores see more bomb threats over Pride merchandise (Washington Post)

Target Stores Close Over Pro-LGBT Bomb Threats

Leftist Billionaire Pierre Omidyar Financed Gov’t-Tied Election Censorship Effort

House Dems Push for Assault Weapons Ban  But that trick never works….

WATCH: 9-Year-Olds Lead Pride Month Celebration at Virginia Elementary School

How online communities feed the transgender spread

Home Depot CEO Warns ‘Organized’ Theft Tsunami Is “A Big Problem”

The Collapse Just Won’t Stop: 10 Weeks Later, Tranheuser Busch Sales Still Cratering, Down 27%

Major League Baseball Strikes All Pride Jerseys

The Democratic Party Is Run by Graduate Students

What to do when the US becomes uninsurable (Financial Times) Move to Texas.

Bud Light Appears In Promotional Material For “All Ages Drag Show Party” In Flagstaff

Baby Boomers Are Moving To Vegas And Tampa, Millennials Prefer Austin: America’s Great Migration In Real-Time

The Diversity Myth

This blue-state election compact could create a constitutional crisis (Washington Post)

Trans Cyclist Finishes NC Women’s Race 5 Minutes Ahead of Runner-Up

The little-noticed court decision that changed homelessness in America (Vox)

NYC’s Huge Wage Hike for App Delivery Workers Could Cost Customers $5 Per Meal

Planned Parenthood Annual Report: 374,000 Abortions, More ‘Transgender’ Services—While Taxpayers Chip in $670M

‘Let Me Finish’: Lindsey Graham Calls Out George Stephanopoulos for Bias on Hillary’s Emails

World Health Organization Releases Guide About Abortion Care, Doesn’t Mention “Baby” Once

Moving To ‘Wall Street South’ From NYC Can Save You Up To $200k

WATCH: Exploding the Malthusian, Anti-Human One Health Myth

ZMan turns over a rock.

One line of attack against various forms of socialism has been that these organizational models run contrary to human nature. Humans naturally want to keep the produce of their labor, so any system that requires them to give over their labor to the whole is going to require a great deal of force to implement. Similarly, humans are not equal in ability, so there will always be unequal outcomes. A system that supposes no one is in charge and everyone is equal is unnatural.

Libertarianism has a similar problem. Like communism, it assumes things about humans that are not true. This is why there are no libertarian societies. As Hans Hermann-Hoppe observed, there is no way to go from the present to a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. More important, there is no way to maintain a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. Like communism, libertarians imagine a world that is odds with the human condition.

In both cases, what we see is a clash between the model-dependent reality of the ideology and reality itself. It is not hard to imagine a society that operates by the sorts of rules the ideologue prefers. The trouble comes when you try to implement the scheme on flesh and blood human beings. As with every model, there are going to be things the model must ignore in order to make sense. In real life, the things that exist outside the model tend to land in a death camp.

Anger and anxiety as DeSantis’s asylum-seeker flights return to US skies (The Guardian)

Newsom claims DeSantis’ migrant flights have a ‘different spirit,’ worse than Biden’s in ‘Hannity’ exclusive (Fox)

Migrant flight gripes continue from Gavin Newsom (Florida Politics)

I’m a liberal — it’s hard to find masculine men to date who aren’t conservative (N.Y. Post) Better get used to it, sweetheart.

Oversight GOP: Dem Members Lying About FBI Doc

CEO Talk Of “Shrink” Hits Record On Earnings Calls Amid Nationwide Shoplifting Crisis

New ‘0% Handgun’ Shows Biden’s ATF Losing Control Over Regulating 2nd Amendment

ESG Dystopia: Why Corporations Are Doubling Down On Woke Even As They Lose Billions

The Publisher Censoring Roald Dahl is Suing Florida Schools for ‘Banning Books’

Spyware Could End Malta’s Golden Passports

Europe’s Digital Services Act Puts Free Speech At The Mercy Of Eurocrats

England’s Health Service Says It Won’t Give Puberty Blockers to Children at Gender Clinics

Fire Under I-95 Causes Section to Collapse, Closing Interstate in Both Directions  Philadelphia. Just sayin’….

Ramaswamy Schools CNN’s Bash: Media’s Doing Biden’s Bidding

West Coast Port Paralysis Returns, But This Time It’s Not Covid’s Fault  Look for … the Union label….

GOP “Wrecking Ball” Erodes Support For Woke ESG Shareholder Proposals

Target Shares Hit With Another Downgrade

California Advances Bill To Help Shoplifters Steal

Panicked LGBTQ Group Declares ‘National Emergency’ As Fed-Up Americans Pose Threat To Its Institutional Power

Baltimore’s Top Cop Abruptly Steps Down, Leaves Crime-Fighting Plan In Limbo 

In 2023, Forcing Women to See Penises Isn’t Sexual Harassment. It’s the Law.

How ‘Child-Friendly’ Drag Events Can Expose Children To Sex Offenders

PBS, NPR, and VOA Provide a Puffy Play Mat for Democrats

Colorado Bans Court-Ordered “Brainwashing” Camps For Abused Minors

California Bill Would Redefine ‘Infertility’ To Give Men Access to Pregnancy Treatments

AP Stands for ‘Associated Pride’ with One-Sided Pride Month Propaganda

Gender’s Truth-Distortion Field

20 Years Ago: Media Saluted Hillary’s ‘Candid’ Scandal Fairy Tale

ProPublica Under Fire for Millions in Secret Donations

NC GOP Votes to Censure Tillis for Support of LGBTQ+, Immigration

The Unabomber’s Transgenderism

Spoiler alert: NYC mayor could complicate Dem plans to retake the House (Politico)

Minnesota Democrats Approve Free College For Illegal Immigrants as They Hike Taxes on Residents

Girl Scouts Unveil ‘LGBTQ+ Pride’ Patches

Portland Rolls Back Sidewalk Camping Ban It Didn’t Enforce Anyway

WATCH: PBS Reporter Echoes Activist Talking Points Defending Irreversible Trans Procedures for Kids

DEFUND PBS: Reporter Lobs ‘Question’ to Biden About ‘Anti-LGBTQ’ ‘Intimidation’

West Coast Dockworkers Making $200K Demand Higher Pay

Rep. Jordan Says FTC’s Actions Against Twitter Political

Former AG Barr: Dem Rep. Raskin Spread Disinformation

Scarborough Dismisses Comer’s Biden Investigation Before It’s Really Started

California Bill Would Punish Parents Who Don’t ‘Affirm’ Their Child’s Gender Identity

Tucker Talks Taboos After MSM Ignores Instagram Kiddie-Porn Bombshell

Jaw Dropping Stats – Reports Of Bud Light Memorial Day Sales Dropping -60% As Brand Boycott Continues

CNN’s Mostly False Take on Biden’s Stance on Abortion

This Is Not the Time for a Third Presidential Candidate (N.Y. Times) David Brooks, ‘conservataive’ poodle at the NYT, earns his keep.

30 San Francisco Hotels Face Incoming Debt Maturity Wall As Default Dominos Begin

Judge Rules Spa Must Accept Trans Women With Penises  Washington State. Time to leave.

‘Other Unruly Acts’ in Killadelphia

US Air Force Tweets Photo of Soldier Saluting LGBTQ Flag

Dark Money Watchdog ProPublica Rakes in Millions From Undisclosed Donors

60 Companies That Are Celebrating LGBTQ Pride Month More Quietly

The Antiplanner.

The owner of San Francisco’s first and fourth largest hotels announced Monday that it is going to walk away from the mortgage it owes for those buildings. The owners of the Hilton Union Square Hotel noted that San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges,” including the fact that fewer groups want to hold conventions in a city now more famous for its homeless population than its cable cars and restaurants.

Last month, Nordstrom said that it was closing both its stores in downtown San Francisco. “The dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years,” said a Nordstrom official, “impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.”

The month before that, Whole Foods closed its downtown San Francisco store. The company cited safety concerns for its employees, but drug-related retail theft also played a role in the decision.

The stigma around weight and the complexity of obesity treatment  Who’s turn is it to be the victim?

Mayor Breed’s comments on S.F. nightlife draw criticism from venue owners: ‘We desperately need tangible solutions’ (S.F. Chronicle)

‘Do Something’: Mother of Teen Pushed Onto Subway Tracks Demands Eric Adams Crack Down on Crime

New York City Sues Counties That Refused To Accept Migrant Buses

Soros-Funded DA Gives Teen Linked to 3 Murders Just 7 Years in Prison

Chicago Mayor Johnson’s Latest ‘Yes, He Really Said That’ Comments On Crime

NYC Sues 30 Counties With Migrant Relocation Bans

CBS Attempts to Normalize Sex Change Surgeries for Minors

“Literally Impossible”: Trucking Companies Brace For California’s Electric Mandate  That has never stopped Democrats before.

Scarborough Gaslights American Public, Denies Biden Inflation Failure

Rule By Decree: The Emergency State’s Plot To Override The Constitution

BBC Is Biased “On Occasion”, Admits UK Culture Secretary

Mellman: Extremism is more bipartisan than Democrats want to believe (The Hill)

New York Dems Want to Free ‘Son of Sam,’ All Serial Killers

Member States Resist ‘Voluntary’ Obligation of EU Migration Pact

Gavin Newsom wants 28th Amendment for guns in U.S. Constitution (Politico) Good luck with that.

There’s No ‘XY’ in Female Sports

PolitiFact Defends Target for Backing Group Pushing Secret Child Gender Transitions

Nike To Host Drag Shows, LGBT Movie Night For Pride Month  Fortunately, New Balance shoes are better.

US CDC sets first federal target for ventilation of indoor air to lower risk

France legalizes remote camera and microphone activation in smartphones

Colorado Bans Local Governments From Jailing Immigrants for ICE  The problem is elected officials (DEMOCRATS) who refuse to enforce the law.

Every major U.S. news organization is now officially helmed by a woman (Fortune) No wonder they’re all dying.

WATCH: RFK Jr Gives Video Tour of ‘Unsustainable’ Southern Border

9to5Mac.

Earlier this year, Reuters published an excellent report exposing the false recycling practices of Dow Inc. and the Singapore government using Apple’s AirTag item tracker. In a similar vein, journalist Pamela Cerdeira has now shared a new video in which she used AirTags to track donations made in Mexico that were supposed to be sent to Turkey in response to the devastating earthquakes that hit the country earlier this year.

The donations were collected by the Mexico government, but it turns out those donations never made it to Turkey. In fact, they never made it out of Mexico City.

Yeah, we really need more Mexicans in the United States.

Read it.

Canada reached a new high in the number of assisted suicides last year, registering a 34% increase in people opting to end their lives under the world’s most liberal euthanasia laws in just one year, the Daily Mail reported on Wednesday, June 7th. Anti-euthanasia activists blame the “heavy promotion” of assisted suicide for this steep incline.

BBC.

For 17-year-old Rutvij Holay, getting into an Ivy League university mattered.
These institutions represent the elite of the elite in higher education in the US.

His parents came to the country from India and “started from scratch”, he said, so that he could achieve the American Dream.

…

With a resume boasting high test results, work volunteering for political organisations, prestigious leadership awards and the ability to speak five languages, he entered the admissions process with confidence.

He says he applied to 35 different schools, though Harvard was not one of them.
But, he says with a sigh: “I was rejected from all the Ivy League universities.”

Although he cannot provide any concrete evidence, Rutvij believes that admissions officers discriminated against him because he is Asian American.

“The worry that myself and many other Asian Americans have is that when admission officer sees Patel, when he sees a Lee, when he sees a Kim, when he sees any Asian last name, basically the image that comes up is kid just sitting in his school on classes studying away math, and not doing anything that has an impact on society,” he said.

ZMan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

One of the lingering questions about the Covid panic is why did the West suddenly go insane over a regularly occurring phenomena? Pandemics hit the West every generation or so with varying lethality. Most are like Covid in that they are bad for the old and the sick, but mostly a bad flu for everyone else. Once it was clear that Covid was not the Spanish flu, much less the Black Death, the response should have been like those of the past, but instead we got a panic.

Adams floats idea of New Yorkers housing migrants in ‘private residences’  (N.Y. Post) How about ‘private residences in Mexico’?

NYC migrant crisis: Houses of worship to host hundreds of migrants (Fox 5 New York)

Got a spare room for asylum seekers? New York City could pay you, too (CBS New York)

Seeing the light: Partnership with houses of worship to house migrants is welcome (N.Y. Daily News)

‘Americonned’ tackles the country’s income inequality crisis (MSNBC) I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was an ‘income inequality crisis’. (‘Crisis’ means a problem that absolutely must be solved. How does other people having more or less income than you do constitute a ‘crisis’?)

California is killing another industry that families need (Fox) Insurance, in case you haven’t been paying attention.

California insurance commissioner won’t take action against State Farm (KCRA)

California insurance market rattled by withdrawal of major companies (Associated Press)

True the Vote Leadership Accused of Using Donations for Personal Gain (ProPublica) Oh, like Black Lives Matter?

Fake News Group Behind Deceptive TV Ad Funded By Dem Megadonor Reid Hoffman (Washington Examiner)

Park Hotels Makes “Difficult” Decision To Stop Paying San Fran CMBS Loan, Citing “Concerns Over Street Conditions”

Second Plane Carrying Migrants Arrives in Sacramento (N.Y. Times)

‘Gender-Affirming’ Surgery Leaves People Lonelier and Depressed: Study  My, what a surprise.

Multiple NFL Teams Use Twitter Accounts To Push LGBT Agenda

Following in Dr. Mengele’s Footsteps

Narcan and crackpipe vending machines: White flag of surrender to addiction (N.Y. Post)

Republicans’ abortion bans are nothing like those in Europe (Vox) And of course we all want to do it the way Europe does it. (Another clue as to why Vox went bankrupt.)

EU Officials Want All AI-Generated Content To Be Labeled To “Combat Fake News”  I.e. news that might disagree with the Narrative.

London Mayor Wants More Migrants  I.e. more Labour voters.

Nearly a Third of Gen Z Favors the Government Installing Surveillance Cameras in Homes (Cat0) Indoctrination works when you control the schools.

Bank of America: Americans Fleeing Blue States for Red

NYC Democrats Unveil Crack Pipe Vending Machine

A ‘One-Eyed King’: New Book Exposes George Soros’ Extremist Agenda to Unravel America

“Infuriating”: College Tuition Made Free For Illegal Immigrants In Minnesota

PBS Decries Pastors Banning Drag Queens From Their Christmas Parade

Morning Joe Segment On Anniversary of RFK Assassination Never Mentions the Assassin

The American Mind.

The words on a poster taped to a teacher’s classroom door at a New Jersey public school expose the precarious corner American parents have been painted into. “If your parents aren’t accepting of your identity, I’m your mom now.” The poster featured a drawing of a mama bear tending to her bear cubs, who are each painted the color of a different LGBTQ flag.

Parents, I have bad news. You’ve got competition. Someone posted a job listing looking for a new authority figure in your house, and they hired everyone who applied. Lots of other adults, most of them unpleasant strangers, would like to raise your children for you—or at least get your children to hate you.

This may already be happening—and you’ll be the last to know! All your hard work to keep creeps, perverts, and kiddie-sniffers away from your kids may get reversed in an instant when you’re not looking.

Zman destroys all of your illusions.

In 2016 the Dirt People stole fire from the gods in that they defied their masters and supported Trump in the primary then the general election. Instead of sending a jar containing plagues, they sent another ballot box. In 2020 that box was opened and out came the secret police to carry Joe Biden to the White House. Despite it all, some still cling that that ballot box, hope trapped inside, thinking that maybe this time when they open the box, their hopes will be realized.

Read it.

“I will not stand by and let criminals undermine our economy and the livelihood of New Yorkers. We are going to act,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams vowed.

After announcing a 44% increase in retail theft in one year, Adams promised a bold new effort called “Second Chance” and “Re-Engaging Store Theft Offenders and Retail Establishments (RESTORE)” that will allow shoplifters “to avoid prosecution or incarceration by meaningfully engaging with services to help address underlying factors that lead to shoplifting.”

What “underlying factors” led gangs to steal hundreds of thousands worth of jewels or handbags, pack them up and walk away, or roll a trash can full of them down the street?

The root cause of the crime wave is a lack of consequences.

“Last year alone, 327 repeat offenders were responsible for 30 percent of the more than 22,000 retail thefts across our city.,” Adams noted.

Read it.

Italy’s center-right government is again grabbing international headlines by virtue of enforcing its immigration laws.

On Friday, June 2nd, the Italian coast guard announced that it had detained two German charity-run vessels rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean.

The vessels’ crews, the coast guard explained, had failed to abide by a new law, passed by Italy’s parliament last February, which stipulates that after each rescue, rescue ships have to request access to the nearest port and sail to it, rather than remain at sea looking for other migrant boats in distress.

The scam is this way: ‘Migrants’ get their boat out beyond the territorial limit, an NGO ‘rescue’ boat ‘rescues’ them and then takes them to Europe, where they promptly vanish into the migrant underworld.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

For reasons I can’t explain, the Left, including the Democratic Party, has made sex change operations on minors its signature issue. It has become a litmus test: in order to be considered progressive, one must now advocate the mutilation of children’s genitals. If there is a Democratic Party politician who dissents from this orthodoxy, I am not aware of it.

Sex change operations on minors are massively unpopular. Opponents of the practice outnumber supporters by three to one. And from the progressives’ standpoint, those numbers are more likely to get worse than better. This weekend, the superb documentary “What Is a Woman?” got over 150 million views on Twitter. Of course, two seconds counts as a Twitter “view.” But still, millions of people must have actually watched the film. One who did was Elon Musk. Today on Instagram:

If it doesn’t flame out at the polls, “trans” madness will die in a hail of lawsuits. That is what is happening in the U.K., where genital mutilation is increasingly out of favor. The facility where such surgeries were carried out on minors, Tavistock, has now been closed, but youngsters age 18 and above are still being carved up. From today’s London Times, notable because the Times is a liberal paper: “NHS trans surgery damaged my body for ever — it’s not safe.”

Read it.

The three teens accused of killing and eating a beloved swan in an upstate New York village are refugees, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Manlius Police reported Faye the Swan and her four cygnets missing from the town pond last Monday, which prompted horror from the Manlius, New York, residents. Locals flooded Manlius police with tips the next day, which ended in the arrest of 18-year-old Eman Hussan of Syracuse, New York, and two minors, aged 16 and 17.

The posse are refugees from Myanmar and attend high school in the neighboring city, Manlius Police Sgt. Ken Hatter told the Free Beacon. Police say the three were able to steal Faye because she was nesting and did not fight back. The suspects devoured Faye with their family in Syracuse.

Read it.

How many scientific papers have you read in full over the past year? Presumably, none or very few, unless you belong to a small number of specific professionals, like researchers or science communicators. Even if you do read papers as part of your job, you probably haven’t read many of them beyond the title and abstract, especially if they lie outside your field of expertise.

There are several reasons for this, including the difficulty of accessing papers that lie behind the paywalls of large publishing companies and the extreme specialization of most academic articles, which limits their appeal. Also, scientific topics are often complex, and it’s generally not worth spending time and energy to understand a technical argument unless it’s particularly germane to your work.

But compounding these issues is a simple truth that has made science less impactful than it could otherwise be: Scientific papers are poorly written. And they’ve been getting worse.

University of Houston’s DEI bureaucracy has this unbelievably radical take on ‘diversity’ (Fox)

Failing Forward: Recalled San Francisco DA Lands At Berkeley Law, While Lori Lightfoot Brings ‘Big D*ck’ To Harvard

‘Gender-Affirming’ Surgery Leaves People Lonelier and Depressed, Study by Transgender Surgery Department Chairman Finds

Police Shot on Duty Up 30 Percent Since ’21

‘No Facts’: CNN Falsely Claims Trans Agenda Not Targeting Kids

IRS Pressed to Revoke CUNY’s Tax-Exempt Status Following Anti-Semitic Hate Speech

As Fentanyl Deaths Spike, LA Hands Out Crack Pipes

California State Assembly Votes To Ban Driverless Trucks  Driverless trucks don’t belong to unions and can’t be depended on to vote Democrat. Away with them!

Former Gun Company Executive Explains Roots of America’s Gun Violence Epidemic (ProPublica) According to the Narrative, that is. The Reality-Based Community knows that most gun violence is caused by young black male criminals, but you’re not allowed to say that in public.

Authoritarianism Keeps Surging In Western “Free Democracies”

Hawaii Allows More Concealed Carry, but Bans Guns Most Places

Vt. School District Settles Suit in Trans Case for $125K

34 Years After Tiananmen: Dumbest Media Quotes About Chinese Communism

Texas Largest State to Ban Trans Care for Minors

Steps to World Rule: First, Destroy Humanity  (OffGuardian)

Conservatives’ Boycotts Wipe Off Billions From Target And Bud Light Valuations, More Brand Battles Upcoming

New Mexico State Rep ‘Outraged’ at New Minors Gender Surgery Laws

FHA Floats New Program To Use Taxpayer Cash To Pay Mortgages Of Delinquent Homeowners

Niskanen Center.

The number of practicing physicians per person in the United States is lower than in just about any other developed country. Yet from 1980 to the early 2000s, the prevailing wisdom was that the number of physicians within the United States ought to be reduced. During this period, a series of ill-judged reports by the federal government warned of an impending physician surplus. These reports ushered in a period in which both private and public actors took actions to constrain the supply of U.S. physicians, the most significant of which was the medical school moratorium. The resulting dearth of physicians had the effect of making U.S. health care more intensive and less accessible than it otherwise would have been.

Listening to ‘experts’ always puts you in a worse place than you otherwise would be.

Read it.

One of the most common strategies used by the political left to attack 2nd Amendment supporters is to ramp up the anti-gun hype every time a crime involving a gun is committed. They don’t care much about the tragedy itself, they only care about how they can use it for political gain. However, it’s very important to understand that this is not only about removing gun rights for leftists – It’s also about creating a false association in the public consciousness that guns = crime.

That is to say, they want to condition people to believe that once guns are gone, crime and murder will be gone also. But, firearms have been an integral part of American society for hundreds of years, and gun ownership has been present through times of relative peace as well as times of increased violence.

In the case of countries like the UK with incredibly strict gun laws, muggings, rape and homicides have been rising with knife attacks in particular increasing by 80%. While it is technically more difficult to murder a person with a knife, it’s also a lot easier for larger, stronger assailants and gangs to succeed in harming people when those people have no equalizer. Disarmament makes life EASIER for criminals, not harder.

VMI’s chief diversity officer resigns amid alumni war over DEI (Washington Post) A Colonel wearing diamond-stud earrings? I think not.

CBS Discovers ‘Brand Politics,’ Frets ‘Woke’ Businesses Being ‘Caught‘ in ‘Culture Wars’

Why the Media Are Rushing To Defend AOC’s Honor (Washington Free Beacon)

Pentagon Chiefs Cancel “Family Friendly” Drag Show At Air Force Base After Rep. Gaetz Pressure

“Migrants Will Soon Be The Powerful” – German Broadsheet Causes Uproar With Immigration Article

J1 – The Anniversary of the BLM Insurrection at the White House

The European Union Will Shut Your Mouth For You

Inside The Meltdown At CNN (The Atlantic)

LGBTQ Pride event at North Hollywood elementary school draws protest, heightened security (ABC)

Insurers are fleeing states due to climate realities, not ‘anti-woke’ bullies (The Hill) As Thucydides said, you have to be careful to distinguish the reason from the excuse.

Extremists Are Running America Because No One Runs Against Them (The New Republic) He’s talking about Republicans, of course, not Democrats.

Cambridge University Press.

Abstract

Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.

I am not making this up.

The Other McCain.

Where this anti-white “diversity” mania began, of course, is in higher education, where discrimination against white males has been more or less overt for the past 25 years. The admissions data that came out of the lawsuit Harvard showed that, year after year, 14% of the freshman class was black — demonstrating that a de facto numerical quota was in effect, otherwise some variation in the percentage would have been expected. Asian students sued because, it was equally obvious, no matter how clearly their superior academic aptitude was demonstrated by GPA and SAT scores, the number of Asian students admitted to Harvard was artificially “capped” at around 20% of the freshman class total. Expert testimony showed that an Asian student whose GPA/SAT gave him a 25% chance of being admitted to Harvard would have had a 95% chance, if he had been black. In other words, being black was worth at least four times as much as academic aptitude. And this type of blatant bias is now being replicated in corporate America (see “Google Lawsuit Exposes Stalinist Climate Protecting Anti-White, Anti-Male Bias,” Jan. 10, 2018).

San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic?

How Flipping Colorado Blue Has Become Democrats’ Blueprint For The Rest Of America

Major Grocery Chain Struggles To Survive Amid Wave Of Thefts

Pentagon leaders cancel drag show at a Nevada Air Force base (NBC News)

California Senate Approves $300 Weekly Checks for Unemployed Illegals  Time to leave.

Boston Spends the Most on Students of Any Large District in the Nation. Its Test Scores Are at Their Lowest in More Than a Decade.

North Carolina Democrats Push for State To Mourn ‘Catastrophe’ of Israel’s Creation

Berkeley Hires Axed San Francisco Prosecutor Chesa Boudin to Train California Law Students

Pence Wants to Know Why LA Dodgers Are ‘Welcoming Anti-Catholic Bigots’ to Their Stadium ‘With Open Arms’

Walmart Hasn’t Made Changes to LGBTQ-Themed Merch

Alabama Expands Restrictions on Trans Athletes

Randi Weingarten Has Zero Credibility

Female Athlete Retires After Competing Against Biological Men, Says Girls “No Longer Have A Fair Chance”

Research Finds Women Are Advantaged in Being Hired in Academic Science

Corporations Paint Rainbows On Door Posts So Woke Gangs Will Pass Them By (Babylon Bee)

Bud Light Giving LGBTQ Organization $200,000 Donation

ESPN to Display Pride Flag for Month of June at Main Campus

CNN Interviews Comey On Every Alleged Violation Of The Rule Of Law… Except His Own

Lawmakers Condemn NYC Mayor For Housing Illegal Immigrants In Public Schools

USA TODAY Celebrates June with Front-Page Trans Teens ‘Pride-a-Ganda’ Piece

World’s Lamest Country Slaps Health Warnings on Individual Cigarettes

WATCH: Transgender Soccer Player Injures Female Opponent

ABC Refuses to Tie Organized Retail Theft to Weak-on-Crime DAs

Even Millennials Are Turning Republican, Data Show

San Francisco Mayor Makes U-Turn To Fund Police After Company Exodus Pressures City Finances

Read it.

Bloomberg said a 535-mile rail line used to haul iron ore and manganese from Kumba Iron Ore Ltd.’s giant Sishen mine in the Northern Cape province to west coast ports was paralyzed on Tuesday after criminal organized gangs stole power cables used to power electric locomotives.

Boy, ending apartheid and putting indigenous Africans in charge really made the country explode with prosperity, didn’t it?

9to5Mac.

Back in January, a top US Air Force general predicted that a Taiwan invasion would occur in 2025, while the US is distracted by the likely fallout from the 2024 presidential election. That scenario is gaining in credibility among companies in Apple’s supply chain – but they say there is no possible way to put in place the necessary contingency plans.

Production of iPhones would likely be rendered impossible given the company’s complete dependence on both Taiwan and China.

First Things.

The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

…

Jonathan Haidt explains that privileging female strategies does not eliminate conflict. Rather it yields “a different kind of conflict. There is a greater emphasis on what someone said which hurt someone else, even if unintentionally. There is a greater tendency to respond to an offense by mobilizing social resources to ostracize the alleged offender.”

Freeberg nails it.

In a way, we’re outgrowing the ancient conflict between conservatism and liberalism. Throughout May, it’s bee more like: One school of thought says once you’ve given people the vote, and given them entitlements, you’ll never succeed in taking those things away again so you’d better just figure out how the republic can endure with criminals and other destructive individuals voting, spending out of control, interest on the debt out of control…find a way to make it work.

The other school of thought says it can’t work like that, so if you really want the republic to remain you’d better take the vote away from the criminals and the grifters, and withdraw the previous entitlements…find a way to make that work.

The first of those two is more popular. But there’s no way it can win. Math backs the other, and math won’t negotiate.

This doesn’t foretell happy times ahead.

The American Mind.

Middlebury College, the highly-ranked Vermont school which made national news when students blocked social scientist Charles Murray from speaking because of his heterodox views on racial issues, and physically assaulted the professor who had invited him, is now being sued by representatives of the estate of John Mead, a deceased former governor of the Green Mountain State. The estate claims that that the college breached its contract with Mead’s estate in 2021 when it removed his family name from the campus chapel, which was a precondition of the money originally being donated to build the chapel.

Mead (1841-1920) was a physician and businessman who served as governor from 1910 to 1912, having interrupted his studies at Middlebury in 1862-63 to serve in the Union Army. He made substantial donations to Middlebury, including the financing of its eponymous chapel, constructed in 1916. The reason given for removing his name from the chapel is the discovery that he had advocated the sterilization of “degenerates and defectives” over a century ago.

Responding to the suit, Middlebury’s lawyers not only deny that the gift of the chapel was predicated on preserving the original name, but also assert that the College has a duty to “grow” with the times, including in its choice of honorees. Elsewhere, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, in 2022 descendants of benefactors of at least two other schools made complaints similar to those of the Mead heirs—one against the state of California for changing the name of the Hastings College of Law (because Hastings had been “involved in the slayings of hundreds of Native Americans” in the nineteenth century, presumably in territorial battles) and another against the University of Richmond for renaming the T.C. Williams Law School (because Williams had owned slaves).

Lizzo is teaching us about body neutrality. Here is what it means and how to get there (CNN)

Kohl’s Baby Pride Merch Sparks Shopper Outrage

South Dakota Governor Tells Higher Education Board To Remove Mandates On Preferred Pronouns

Fox News Highlights Problems Caused by Illegal Immigrants in New York Hotels

Healthy Newborn Placed in Tennessee’s First ‘Baby Box’

Protest Anthem ‘Boycott Target’ Tops ITunes Hip Hop Chart

Philadelphia Crime Wave Of Burglary, Larceny And Auto Theft Spills Into Nearby Suburbs

There Are 99 Pages Of Details In The Debt-Ceiling Deal, And A Big Trap On Republicans

“Trans Rights” Means Trans Entitlements And The End Of Civil Society

Total Farce: Real Spending Under Debt Ceiling Deal Actually Goes Up Next Year

The Left’s Redefinition of Words Leads to Totalitarianism, Homeschooling Leader Warns

Target’s Deceptive Transgender Agenda

The rise and fall of an anti-capitalist café

Here come the new gender stereotypes, same as the old gender stereotypes

The Hammett and Chandler of Gay Detective Fiction

‘Numbers Nobody Has Ever Seen’: How the GOP Lost Wisconsin (Politico)

Germany: Left-Liberal Coalition Quietly Flies in 4,000 Migrants Per Month

Russia May Ban Surgery to Change Gender Under Draft BilAbout 1 Million Viewers Stopped Watching Fox News After Tucker Carlson’s Exit: Report

WATCH: Commencement Speaker at NY-Funded School Goes on Anti-Semitic Rant Against Israel

Outraged critics rip CUNY law grad’s ‘hate-filled’ commencement speech, demand billions in tax dollars be stripped (N.Y. Post)

LGBTQ+ activists call for new strategies to promote equality after Target backlash (Associated Press) New strategies = Being even more obnoxious?

LGBTQ Activists Warn Corporate America — ‘You Need to Be Our Ally’ (Breitbart) Or suffer the consequences.

Trump Releases Plan to Halt Chain Migration

Texas Lawmakers Pass Bill Allowing Removal Of ‘Rogue’ Prosecutors Who Fail To Enforce Laws

Chicago Sent ‘Peacekeepers’ To Stop Memorial Day Weekend Violence. It Didn’t Go Well.

Elderly Pro-Life Men ‘Viciously’ Assaulted Outside Planned Parenthood Clinic

‘Heartbreaking’: Furries and Drag Queens Upset After GOP Laws Force Them To Exclude Minors

Leftists Make Accusations Of ‘Economic Terrorism’ As Conservative Boycotts Succeed

Dramatic Video Shows Rogue Pack Of Teens Beating Up Marines In California

“We Have A Captive Audience”: Boston University To Require Students Take Social Justice Writing Courses

Target’s Marketing VP Also Works For Organization Pushing Transgender Agenda In Schools

Kohl’s Indoctrinates Babies Into LGBTQ Culture With ‘Happy Pride’ Onesies

AOC’s ‘assessing with [her] team how to handle’ AOC parody account that’s a little too good at its job

Old Navy Closes Flagship Store in San Francisco Amid Wave of Retail Theft

Groom And Doom: Target Shares Mark Longest Losing Streak In Almost 5 Years

Johns Hopkins Implements Pronoun Guide

Ohio Bill Would Roll Back DEI in State’s Public Colleges and Universities

The Critic.

Welcome to the age of the TikTok thug and the home invasion influencer,

The Antiplanner.

This is Daquan Rogers. He is a 27-year-old Minneapolis light-rail rider who has a history of transit crimes including being arrested last month for brawling aboard a light-rail train. Following the arrest he was released pending his court case.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein confused by VP Kamala Harris’ participation in tie-breaking vote: report (Fox)

Children’s Hospital ‘Health Hero’ Award Given To Trans Democrat Pushing Child Sex Changes

Comedian Arrested In Beijing As Informants Become Norm Again In China, Eroding Mutual Trust

French Bill To End Woke Rewrites

Memorial Day: Ten WORST Anti-Military Smears from Lib Journalists

United Methodist Church Seeing Disaffiliations Over LGBTQ Issues

Old Navy To Shutter Downtown San Francisco Store Amid Retail Exodus

Antisemitic Speaker Addresses CUNY Law Graduates

Judge postpones showdown over 14th Amendment debt powers (Politico)

Liberal US Cities Top Global List For Highest Homelessness Problem

‘CUNY has become the home of hate’: Lawmakers including Ted Cruz slam NYC college for allowing ‘hateful graduation speech’ by law grad who called for attacks on ‘fascist’ NYPD and military – all while getting her education on the taxpayer’s dime (UK Daily Mail)

Biden world confident in a Trump rematch but preps for a surprise (Politico)

The Other McCain.

Remember when President Obama got elected and America’s public schools suddenly became excellent? No, you don’t remember that, because it never happened. The guy Obama appointed as Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is a Harvard-educated liberal who had previously been appointed by the Daley machine as Chief Executive Officer of Chicago Public Schools, where he worked no miracles, and neither did he do anything during his eight-year tenure as Secretary of Education that anyone remembers as praiseworthy.

Former employee reveals shocking conditions in NYC migrant hotel: ‘Free for all’ (Fox)

Migrant children in NYC left alone to drink, do drugs, ex-Midtown hotel worker says (N.Y. Post) Getting them used to life as Democrats?

Colonie supervisor says NYC violated county emergency order on migrants (Times-Union)

Outrageous! Taxpayers will pay Randi Weingarten a pension because of government’s special deals with unions (Fox)

Winnie the Pooh ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ Book Draws Parents’ Ire (N.Y. Times) Blue cities training up a new generation of victims.

Citywide Youth Curfew Begins In Baltimore As Mayor Strives To Restore Law And Order

Christian Students Sue Professor, Claim She Forced Them To Pay $99 To Fund Left-Wing Activism

Private spies hired by FBI and corporations infiltrate Discord, Reddit, WhatsApp

CNN Claims Work Requirements Are Offensive to Poor People

Kerik to Newsmax: Blame NYC Teen Crime Spike on City, State

Bud Light Offers $2.99 18-Pack After Sales Tumble Accelerates

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

A global consensus has emerged that governmental responses to covid-19, which mainly involved shutdowns, limitations on mobility and other aspects of freedom, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, did an enormous amount of harm. The issue is sometimes posed in terms of whether governments’ responses did more damage than the epidemic did. But that isn’t actually the right question. The epidemic happened. The question is whether the epidemic + government restrictions on freedom was better or worse than the epidemic alone would have been. And the answer is, worse. The net effect of government responses was catastrophically bad.

Workplace expert explains how CEOs are being dragged into culture wars (CNN) “Dragged into”? They’re jumping in with both feet.

“It’s Time To Pay”: Democrat Voters Demand Fulfillment Of Past Promises From Reparations To Sanctuary Cities

NYC Democratic Councilman Under Fire for Anti-Italian Bigotry  Notwithstanding that he is a Person of Color.

NYC Outlaws Discrimination on the Basis of Weight, Height  Short people and fat people appear to be a vital Democrat constituency.

Study: At all levels of public office, threats now come with the job (Washington Post) Perhaps because government employees have never been more willing to act tyrannically.

‘Everything Was Just a No’: Progressives Frustrated After Colorado Legislative Session (Bolts)

Justin Trudeau Championing “2SLGBTQI+” Rights

EU Council President Atones for Overspending by Spending More

Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

State Farm halts new property insurance policies in California

Attacks on trans athletes have little basis in science (S.F. Chronicle) Narraitve sophistry.

LA Nonprofit Giving Meth Pipes To Homeless Sparks Debate Over “Harm Reduction” Approach

Fluoride Lawsuit Against EPA: Alleged Corruption, Shocking Under Oath Federal Statements

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

You would think a team named “Dodgers” would know how to dodge a culture war battle they can’t win (see: Target, Bud Light), but no, the Los Angeles Dodgers managed to get picked off in the most embarrassing fashion in a pickle-style rundown entirely of their own ineptitude. Surely the conservative (and Catholic) O’Malley family that used to own the Dodgers—before the onerous estate tax forced the family to sell the team back in the 1990s after Peter O’Malley died—are rolling in their graves.

But there’s a larger lesson here. Back in 1984 I attended the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco as a credentialed reporter (you can read the long feature Ken Masugi and I filed, “Revenge of the Nerds,” here). The day before the convention opened, there was a large gay pride parade on Market Street, which I watched from the sidewalk for the show. It was what you would have expected—a flamboyant and festive display of gay fetishes and skimpy costumes made mostly of leather, along with lots of banners expressing grievances against the Reagan Administration for not instantly curing AIDS with more money.

I somehow got to chatting on the sidewalk with a Republican campaign operative who was observing the convention, and he remarked, “In 1972 we paid people to do this to McGovern, and now the Democrats are doing it for us for free.” Sure enough, Democrats running the convention were careful to keep this sideshow out of sight as much as possible. They knew political poison when they saw it, though Jeanne Kirkpatrick nonetheless later stuck them with the label “San Francisco Democrats.” Though she had foreign policy chiefly in mind, there was a distinct undercurrent of their victim mentality that defines the party’s dominant ideology today.

Washington Free Beacon.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) is under federal investigation for allegedly accepting a luxury car and apartment from a halal meat company.

Federal agents are investigating whether Menendez and his wife Nadine Arslanian received the gifts from IS EG Halal, a New Jersey company that won an exclusive contract with the Egyptian government to certify halal meat exports to the country, a decision that attracted scrutiny because the business is run by a Christian and lacks experience in halal certification. Now law enforcement is working to determine whether Menendez, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that dishes out billions of dollars to Egypt, took action in the Senate to benefit the company in exchange for gifts.

This is not the first time that Senator Menendez has been investigated for corruption.

Menendez was previously tried in 2017 in a public-corruption case, which ended in a mistrial. He was tried for allegedly taking $1 million in gifts—including private flights and trips—from a Florida doctor who wanted help with visas.

Read it.

In 2017, Dr. Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago complained that the residual effects of Christianity were holding Western civilization back. How? It was Christian ethics, he said, that were preventing legal infanticide from making a comeback.

“The reason we don’t allow euthanasia of newborns is because humans are seen as special, and I think that comes from religion, in particular, the view that humans, unlike animals, are endowed with a soul,” he wrote. “It’s the same mindset that, in many places, won’t allow abortion of fetuses that have severe deformities. When religion vanishes, as it will, so will much of the opposition to both adult and newborn euthanasia.”

Many philosophers share Coyne’s views. Princeton bio-ethicist Peter Singer argues that only religious superstition is keeping us from killing infants, a practice he believes to be perfectly ethical. As he wrote in Practical Ethics: “Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.” For Singer, the baby-killing of our bloody pagan past is a source of nostalgia rather than horror.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

How bad is America’s education system? Worse than you can possibly imagine.

Tom Veal.

In the post mortems on Ron DeSantis’s less that wholly satisfactory campaign debut, I’ve seen plenty of derision – Donald Trump is firmly aligned with the Left here – and some pro-DeSantis apologetics, mostly along the lines of, “Everybody will forget this in a week or two.” What I haven’t seen is so much as a breath of suspicion that the Twitter Spaces meltdown might not have been simply the result of the deployment of not-adequately-tested technology. Yet the grounds for suspicion sit in plain sight.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, many, many employees did not welcome their new overlord, to put it mildly. They were overwhelmingly Musk-hostile for a variety of reasons, some stemming from his imperious management style, others from dislike of his perceived political opinions, which jibe poorly with the tech world’s longstanding woke orthodoxy and increasingly woke orthopraxis. Many malcontents were fired in the wake of the takeover, but Musk couldn’t, even if he seriously tried, get rid of them all and conjure a loyal work force into being.