MATT DRUDGE FINDS THE ANGLE, as only Matt Drudge can.

ANDREW McCARTHY: Freddy Gray and Jihad: Narrative v. Fact.

UNEXPECTEDLY: How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism.

ANSWER: A TOUCH OF EVIL. WELL, MAYBE MORE THAN A TOUCH. Roger Simon asks, “What does TSA, the VA, Venezuela and Bernie have in common?”

Apologies to Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Orson Welles for their dreadfully unpalatable substitutes in the Photoshop.

SPACE: Space Station Inflatable Habitat Will Get Blown Up On Thursday: Inflated, that is.

MY FAVORITE MODEL IS THE HOVERCRAFT-LIKE HOOVER CONSTELLATION: The Messy History of the Vacuum Cleaner.

JESSE WALKER: The View From Frank Bruni’s Bubble: Epistemic Closure, or Epistemic Chaos?

CLINTON FOUNDATION GOT $100 MILLION FROM “BLOOD MINERALS” FIRM: Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unaccountably delayed implementation in 2009 of a congressionally mandated certification process designed to bar human rights abuses by mining companies in Africa.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock found a hundred million reasons for Clinton’s dallying. Two years before, the Clinton Foundation got a $100 million pledge from the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group.

Lundin is one of the giants of the global mining industry, with huge operations in the Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. Those operations were repeatedly condemned by human rights groups claiming native populations were being forced to flee their homelands and even being killed because they stood in the way of Lundin projects.

“’Blood minerals’ are related to ‘blood diamonds,’ which are allegedly mined in war zones or sold as commodities to help finance political insurgencies or despotic warlords,” according to Pollock. Lundin has a long history of “cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships” in war-torn Africa.

The least surprising aspect of this story? Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and Lundin refused to comment.

FASTER, PLEASE: One person’s cancer can be fought using someone else’s immune cells, study finds.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Perils of Executive Power. Our President should always be a straight, white, Republican male, since only then does our chattering class fully perceive the dangers of an unchecked executive.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1110.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON THE TRUMP PHENOMENON AND OUR DYSFUNCTIONAL POLITICAL CLASS:

What makes Trump so appealing to so many voters is that the establishment does seem unusually clueless these days. The great American post-Cold War project of seeking peace and security through the construction of a New World Order based on liberal internationalism and American power doesn’t seem to be working very well, and it’s not hard to conclude that neither the neoconservatives nor the Obama-ites really know what they are doing. When it comes to the economy, it’s been clear since the financial crisis of 2008 that something is badly awry and that the economists, so dogmatic and opinionated and so bitterly divided into quarreling schools, aren’t sure how the system works anymore, and have no real ideas about how to make the world system work to the benefit of ordinary voters in the United States. With the PC crowd and the Obama administration hammering away at transgender bathroom rights as if this was the great moral cause of our time, and with campus Pure Thought advocates collapsing into self parody even as an epidemic of drug abuse and family breakdown relentlessly corrodes the foundations of American social cohesion, it’s hard to believe that the establishment has a solid grip on the moral principles and priorities a society like ours needs.

Trump appeals to all those who think that the American Establishment, the Great and the Good of both parties, has worked its way into a dead end of ideas that don’t work and values that can’t save us. He is the candidate of Control-Alt-Delete. His election would sweep away the smug generational certainties that Clinton embodies, the Boomer Progressive Synthesis that hasn’t solved the problems of the world or of the United States, but which nevertheless persists in regarding itself as the highest and only form of truth. . . .

Myself, I don’t think the system is quite as corrupt as some Trump supporters believe or, perhaps more accurately, I lack their confidence that burning down the old house is the best way to build something new. But it would be equally wrong and perhaps more dangerous to take the view that there is nothing more fueling his rise than ignorance, racism and hate. The failure of the center-Left to transform its institutional and intellectual dominance into policy achievements that actually stabilize middle class life, and the failure of the center-Right to articulate a workable alternative have left a giant intellectual and political vacuum in the heart of American life. The Trump movement is not an answer to our problems, but the social instinct of revolt and rejection that powers it is a sign of social health. The tailors are frauds and the emperor is not in fact wearing any clothes: it is a good sign and not a bad sign that so many Americans are willing to say so out loud.

Those of us who care about policy, propriety and the other bourgeois values without which no democratic society can long thrive need to spend less time wringing our hands about the shortcomings of candidate Trump and the movement that has brought him this far, and more time both analyzing the establishment failures that have brought the country to this pass, and developing a new vision for the American future.

The Control-Alt-Delete candidate. Heh. And our political class is Windows ME.

EPISTEMIC CLOSURE: Feminist Author Lindy West Pre-Emptively Blocks Conservatives on Twitter. To be honest, I’m only aware of her existence via Milo Yiannopoulos’ fat jokes.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: When leaders cheat, followers … follow: The trust that underlies a law-abiding society is rotting away thanks to double-dealing in Washington.

THEY DON’T CALL HER #CROOKEDHILLARY FOR NOTHING: EXCLUSIVE: Clinton Foundation Got $100M From ‘Blood Minerals’ Firm.

WELL, BILL CLINTON, LIKE BILL COSBY, HASN’T AGED WELL: Trump Escalates Attack On Bill Clinton. And Bill is the Achilles’ heel of Hillary’s “Vote for me, I have a vagina” campaign.

And it’s working: Report: Hillary Dropped Gender Talk After Negative Internal Polling.

UPDATE: Now she’s ruining Ghostbusters: “Sony Pictures is unhappy that Hillary is horning in on their long-scheduled publicity for a movie that it really needs men not to hate.” “I don’t think too many men watch Ellen DeGeneres, so what’s the real problem for Sony? The NYT is trying to weave this into the usual gender politics, but I think the real problem for Sony is that it wants to sell the movie to women — that’s the point of going on Ellen DeGeneres — and putting Hillary on the same show saps the fun out of something that absolutely needs to be very, very fun.”

Well, as Bill can no doubt attest, sapping the fun out of things is what Hillary excels at.

BECAUSE THEY NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR ANYTHING, AND THEY DON’T CARE HOW MANY PEOPLE SUFFER AS LONG AS THEY GET TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES: Why Won’t The Left Apologize For Backing Venezuela?

I AGREE: Ashe Schow: Hate Crime Hoaxers Should Be Prosecuted.

The excuse that one merely wanted to “start a dialogue” is unacceptable. The damage that hoaxers are doing to real victims is incalculable. It’s impossible now to view an accusation of a hate crime and think it won’t be proven a hoax because there aren’t modern examples of real hate crimes that get the attention of the hoaxes.

Whether it’s a race hoax, a gay hate-crime hoax or a rape hoax, allowing people to get away with lies sends the message that it’s okay. It’s not.

But lefty activists believe there are no consequences — because, often, there aren’t.

WELL, HE’S GOT A LOT TO HIDE, AND IF HE LIES TO CONGRESS, PRESIDENT TRUMP MIGHT PROSECUTE HIM: Roll Call: IRS Commissioner Declines to Testify at Impeachment Hearing: House Judiciary Committee will examine alleged “misconduct” over IRS political targeting scandal.

ROCKING IT OLD-SCHOOL: Trump Eschews Using Voter Analytics In His Campaign, Will Rely On Personality, Rallies To Win Presidency. The “analytics” guys — like Nate Silver — have been notably poor performers in predicting Trump’s rise, so maybe that makes sense.

AS YOU CAN SEE, the new Disqus-based commenting system is now in place. You’ll need to create a Disqus account if you don’t have one. Sorry about that, but it should address most of the complaints about the old system. Old comments are preserved, and are being migrated over.

BUILDING A BRIDGE TO THE EISENHOWER ERA: Why are presidential candidates going to Pittsburgh and talking about coal and steel — and not Uber and Google?

DEMOCRATS WORRY: What If Bernie Is Right About Hillary? “The most ominous sign for the Democrats is that at the moment when they should be beginning, in earnest, to run a general election campaign, there is already a lively debate, not exactly about who to nominate, but over who to blame if Ms. Clinton loses in November.”