DAVID BROOKS VERSUS THE PLEBES: WHAT IS IT ABOUT DAVID BROOKS THAT MAKES HIM SUCH AN UPPER-CLASS TWIT?

Well, other than his would-be ability to read a man’s presidential aspirations and character through his trouser creases, of course.

REUTERS: Beijing’s covert radio network airs China-friendly news across Washington, and the world.

They’ve got a lot of nerve trying to muscle into Thomas Friedman’s gig.

ASHE SCHOW: VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS LACK OF UNDERSTANDING OF ‘YES MEANS YES’ LAWS.

Just as 1984 slowly morphed into a how-to guide to weaponize bureaucracy, somehow the left forgot that Catch-22 is a warning, not a how-to guide for writing Kafka-esque legislation.

JAMES LILEKS ON THE LATEST STAR TREK RE-RE-RE-RE-BOOT: Where No Non-specific-gender Person Has Gone Before: “The big question is whether the sixth series can provide anything new. It’s going to be about a Federation vessel that explores space and runs into bipeds with similar technology but ridges on their cheeks or noses. What’s left to tell? What’s left to show?”

CLOWARD AND PIVEN, CALL YOUR OFFICE: How Long Can Europe’s Welfare States Welcome Refugees and Migrants?

THE INSTA-WIFE: Alpha or Jerk? You Decide.

THE DREARY NOSTALGIA OF 2016: Hillary’s “presidential candidacy has not merely been an invitation to perform a critical review of the president’s first term; it has also become a soul-sucking time vortex drawing American punditry back into the 1990s. For a subset of left-leaning political journalists and progeny of ‘Generation X,’ nothing could be more welcome. This decade was, however, characterized by more than an information technology bubble and the fruits of America’s uncontested global hegemony. It was a period of spectacular cynicism,” Noah Rothman writes at Commentary:

There is a superficial but popular contention among political observers that Hillary Clinton is greatly aided by the fact that her husband presided over a period in American history characterized by unparalleled peace and prosperity. That belief only holds up so long as you do not take too much stock in the fact that Clinton has been compelled by her restive left-flank to renounce virtually all of her husband’s most popular achievements.

* * * * * *

Amid Donald Trump’s campaign of bomb throwing, he perhaps inadvertently stumbled upon a rare attack on Democrats, and Team Clinton in particular. By obtusely suggesting the September 11 attacks might have been preventable, he reignited a long-settled debate over the nature of pre-attack intelligence.

And of course by virtue of his last name, Jeb is also carrying the torch for the late 1980s and 2001-2008. If the leading candidates on both sides of the aisle are all trapped in the past, that lends further credence to Jonah Goldberg’s observation regarding the importance of making 2016 a contrast between an exhausted DC lifer and a younger outsider in his latest G-File:

While not my first choice by any measure, I think [Jeb] could be a fine president, and it would be a no-brainer to vote for him over Hillary Clinton. That said, I’ve always thought he’d be a deeply, deeply, flawed nominee. As I’ve written before, in a contest of familiar brands, the more popular one does better — and the Clinton brand is more popular than the Bush brand. In a change election, when the other side has an old and tired brand, the last thing in the world you should do is respond with an older and even more tired brand.

Especially when the stakes involve the chance to finally move beyond 1933.

And to bring this post full circle, all of this dreary nostalgia explains the “Fear And Loathing In Hillary World,” the stench of which emanates particularly strong from her operatives with bylines.

STIFFARMED BY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, WHICH DOESN’T WANT ANYONE TALKING ABOUT POLITICAL CORRUPTION, Larry Lessig quits the Democratic race. He hasn’t ruled out an independent race, though. Well, if you want to punish them for keeping you out, that’s the way to go. Maybe a Lessig/Webb independent ticket?

I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: New ‘Star Trek’ TV Series a Go at CBS All Access.

(Sorry to cross the sci-fi streams in the headline.)

Update: “The headline is ‘New Star Trek Series!’ The buried lede is ‘free broadcast networks are going bye bye in the near future.'”

WHEN GIMMICKS WEAR THIN: A Growing Disenchantment With October ‘Pinkification.’ “What do we have to show for the billions spent on pink ribbon products?”

Oh, somebody has something, I’m pretty sure. . . .

DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Scarborough: No Republican Has Hosted Network Sunday Show or Newscast in 50 Years.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Want To Reduce Inequality? Abolish The Ivy League! (Bumped, because it seems to be getting under the skin of the right people.)

HOPE AND CHANGE. In the last few years the long term decline in death rates has flattened out.

GREG GUTFELD: LEFT BUT REALLY RIGHT: “All success in life is based on conservative principles. Ponder that the next time you hear a great piece of music, hit the gym or eat a tasty meal.  If you do, you might realize you’re not as liberal as you think:”

As Charles Murray brilliantly put it in 2012’s Coming Apart, leftists succeed by personally leading conservative lives, as Gutfeld explores above, but because of their obsession with “nonjudgmentalism,” cannot preach what they practice.

(And yes, I know, there are few people more strongly judgmental and less tolerant than a leftist SJW.)

THIS IS AN ABOMINATION: Opening of all-decaf coffee shop in Manhattan met with horror, outrage.

STEPHEN MILLER: South Park Shows How to Defeat the Social-Justice Warriors. “The cries for liberation from this browbeating have finally been answered, by what might appear, on the surface, to be unlikely heroes: the boys from the quaint Colorado town of South Park. In their 19th season, show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have taken aim squarely at the thought-crime police. But they aren’t relaying a message about how suffocating a society built on the foundations of political correctness can be by preaching about it; they are putting the citizens of South Park through it, and in doing so, they’re showing us all just how ludicrous we’ve become.”

For certain values of “we.”

Plus: “South Park is giving the masses one long lesson in the hyper-politicization of the culture we now live in: For each measure the eager townspeople take in attempting to become more accepting of “social justice,” things become increasingly worse for them. The people who claim that society is full of shaming and bullying are the ones who are actually the bullies ganging up on those with whom they disagree.” True.

INSERT DONALD TRUMP JOKE HERE: You Can Now 3D Print A Toupee.

I NEVER SAW THIS ONE COMING! Nick Gillespie: Why I’m Voting For Pot Legalization In Ohio.

FAKE-MALWARE WARNINGS: Some people have been getting a popup telling them to call an 800- number for malware. This is apparently some sort of scam javascript thing, not actual malware. If you just close down your browser it will go away. The ad people don’t think it’s coming through ads, but we’re shutting them down anyway just to be sure. If you keep seeing this even after the ads are gone, please shoot me an email — at the pundit -at- instapundit dot com email — and let me know.

Sorry about this.

GOOD NEWS IS UNPLANNED: A review of Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge.

A LOOK AT the University of Tennessee Legal Clinic, the oldest continuously operating legal clinic in America.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 907.

YEHUDAH MIRSKY: The Religious Fate Of Secular Liberation.

Once upon a time, a not-so-very-old story went, there was religion. A powerful phenomenon in its time, it had since become tamed in the cool light of reason and evolved, according to the generous of spirit and historically minded, into an intermittently helpful and mostly harmless handmaiden to the great projects of secularism and modernity as they barreled their way along the train tracks of history. There were, to be sure, some who tried to hop off the train, or even to attempt to turn it around. These were called “fundamentalists”, rear-guard atavists who were to be pitied and, when really necessary, put in their place.

This culturally single-lane story of inevitable modernist secularism is in retrospect so unconnected from reality that one can hardly believe how commonplace it was—and occasionally still is—in Western elite circles, where the claims of religious actors were instinctively translated into something “real”—which is to say, into the bloodless and pliant language of economics, political science, or social psychology.

But it just doesn’t work. Observe our world today. In looking at the vast mess sprawling from western China through Central and South Asia, from Turkey to Sudan, and from Iran to Algiers, the salience of Islam is inescapable. Islam and Christianity alike thrive in sub-Saharan Africa. Christianity holds sway in the Americas, regularly in Evangelical and Pentecostal dispensation, and, in the Orthodox, is nearly as omnipresent in Russia these days, as well as in much of Eastern Europe. In Israel, traditional Judaism in its various forms is as powerful as ever. If one allows for non-Abrahamic and non-deistic forms of religion, most of Asia counts as well. Note that religion of one kind or another is alive and kicking not just in traditional societies, but also in societies that look modern—indeed in societies whose political and legal institutions are paragons of what Weber called formal rationality. Religious commitment and passion, whatever one thinks of them, are powerful political forces that must be reckoned with.

As I’ve mentioned before, my colleague Rosalind Hackett thinks that militant Christianity is likely to be the big religious force of the 21st Century. Increasingly, I think she’s likely to be right.