CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR: The ‘Success’ of Obama’s Trolling May Have Trump as Its Legacy.

QUESTION ASKED: Donald Trump finally ramped up his campaign spending. So where did the money go?

The campaign’s largest investment continues to be in digital consulting and online ads. Giles-Parscale, a San Antonio-based firm whose president, Brad Parscale, serves as the Trump campaign’s digital director, was once again the biggest vendor for the month, collecting $11.1 million, much of which was directed to digital ads. The company, which got its foothold designing websites for the Trump Organization in 2011, had previously been paid $12.5 million this cycle.

Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm backed by GOP megadonor Robert Mercer, got $250,000 in August, up from $100,000 in July. Trump’s media consultant, Rick Reed, was paid $4.5 million to place TV ads. And Private Jet Services, a New Hampshire-based air charter, received $2.3 million. That’s a shift from past months, when Trump mainly used own his private jet company Tag Air to fly. In August, Tag Air was paid just about $320,000.

Through July, the campaign had directed nearly $7.7 million in reimbursements to Trump properties and Trump family members, a practice that drew criticism. But such spending drastically dropped in August. In all just $548,519 went to reimburse Trump and his companies, the majority to Tag Air, the new filing shows.

Trump started spending more like a traditional presidential candidate in the last month — $30 million — and on more conventional campaign expenses, and his national and swing-state poll numbers have shown a commensurate rise.

OCCUPIED MOSUL: Smuggled diary reveals life of fear under IS.

This morning my friend went out shopping and saw Isis executing three people because they’d been talking about Isis losses. It’s really shocking to hear news like that. They’re robbing people of their lives for trivial reasons. They are twisting the word of God for their own interests.

In the past I used to go out with my friends to the caves, to play football, or study together. But now most of the places we used to go are shut down. When I go out I try to be careful and not to go too far from home or to public places because it’s unsafe there.

Today my mother made some delicious cookies for us. You can sometimes buy the ingredients on the market, but they’re expensive. People here survive on local products which they grow themselves. It’s quite easy to get vegetables but it’s very difficult to get flour, sugar and rice because it’s expensive. People don’t have money. There’s no work, no salaries.

Free nations are endlessly inventive and surprising, but totalitarian regimes are all alike in their repression and deprivation.

NARRATIVE UBER ALLES: CNN writer contradicts himself on Trump profiling comments.

Adding the word “racial” to a chyron about GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s comment on profiling wasn’t the only blatant mistake the CNN made.

In an article about Trump’s comments, the network’s Theodore Schleifer contradicted himself in his first and third paragraphs.

“Donald Trump on Monday reiterated his support for the controversial practice of racial profiling by police amid increasing threats to the homeland,” Schleifer wrote in the first paragraph.

But in his second paragraph, Schleifer states that “Trump did not say on what attributes he would encourage police to profile possible suspects” and that “it’s illegal for police to subject U.S. persons to disparate treatment based on their race or other protected status.”

How can Trump “support … racial profiling” yet not have outlined the attributes police should use to profile?

Yeah, they hope you won’t notice that.

The extent to which “journalists” have pulled out all the stops to misrepresent Trump and his positions — and in some cases are even bragging about it and encouraging others to do the same — kind of illustrates why Trump’s here to begin with.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER WEEK: This Week in Clinton Corruption for September 21, 2016.

You might think a series like this would eventually run short of material, but no.

OPENED UP TWITTER TO SEE THIS:

Can’t imagine why they’d do that, except that it seems to be happening to a lot of people for no obvious reason. It’s as if, despite assurances to the contrary, Twitter is out to silence voices it disagrees with or something.

UPDATE: Ah, it was about this tweet.

Sorry, blocking the interstate is dangerous, and trapping people in their cars and surrounding them is a threat. Driving on is self-preservation, especially when we’ve had mobs destroying property and injuring and killing people. But if Twitter doesn’t like me, I’m happy to stop providing them with free content.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Was just on Hugh Hewitt talking about this. Since Twitter won’t let me respond to — or even see — my critics, let me expand here.

I’ve always been a supporter of free speech and peaceful protest. I fully support people protesting police actions, and I’ve been writing in support of greater accountability for police for years.

But riots aren’t peaceful protest. And blocking interstates and trapping people in their cars is not peaceful protest — it’s threatening and dangerous, especially against the background of people rioting, cops being injured, civilian-on-civilian shootings, and so on. I wouldn’t actually aim for people blocking the road, but I wouldn’t stop because I’d fear for my safety, as I think any reasonable person would.

“Run them down” perhaps didn’t capture this fully, but it’s Twitter, where character limits stand in the way of nuance.

Meanwhile, regarding Twitter: I don’t even know that this is why I was suspended, as I’ve heard nothing from Twitter at all. They tell users and investors that they don’t censor, but they seem awfully quick to suspend people on one side of the debate and, as people over at Twitchy note, awfully tolerant of outright threats on the other.

Twitter can do without me, as I can certainly do without Twitter.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Erik Wemple of the Washington Post emails that “Keep driving” would have been a better formulation of what I was trying to say. It would have been, and in only two words instead of three. But I’ve had over 580,000 tweets, and they can’t all be perfect.

MORE: Here’s the Hugh Hewitt transcript.

STILL MORE: They reinstated me on the condition that I delete the offending tweet. I did so, but it’s preserved here lest I be accused of airbrushing.

Related: From Nick Gillespie at Reason: In Defense Of InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds. “Whatever you think of the tastefulness of his suggestion regarding the protesters in Charlotte, the idea that he is seriously inciting any sort of actual or real threat is risible.”

THE HILL: Trump ‘troubled’ by Tulsa shooting.

Donald Trump says he is “very troubled” by the killing of an unarmed black man by police in Oklahoma, adding that it looked like the man killed did everything he should have done when he was confronted by police.

Trump offered the comments on Wednesday during a visit to a historically black church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, before an African-American congregation.

“I watched the shooting, in part, in Tulsa, and that man was hands up,” Trump said. “That man went to the car, hands up, put his hands on the car.

“To me, it looked like he did everything you’re supposed to do. The young officer — I don’t know what she was thinking. But I’m very, very troubled by that.”

It’s possible to believe both that we have a problem with excessive police violence, and that Black Lives Matter is a bunch of race-baiting frauds. Since, you know, both statements are true.

D’OH! Hillary Clinton’s IT Guy Made This Common Mistake.

His mistake was choosing that username “stonetear.” Unfortunately for Combetta, he had used that name elsewhere on the Internet, which provided amateur detectives with a trail of online breadcrumbs that appear to identify him.

As the Washington Post and others have pointed out, those clues include: archived records linking the name Combetta to a “stonetear” Gmail address; an Etsy account and a video game site where “stonetear” identifies as Paul Combetta; other “stonetear” Reddit points that correspond with Combetta’s personal biography (such as ties to Rhode Island).

To make a long story short, Combetta screwed up by recycling an online handle he had used before. It’s something all of us do. It’s human nature to use the same name, rather than invent a new handle for each Internet site we visit.

But it’s also a great way to get caught if you’re doing something illicit.

I had been assured that Hillary Clinton’s personal and unsecured email server, used for public business while stashed in a bathroom of her private residence, then later wiped clean with BitBleach, was strictly on the up-and-up.

MICHAEL BARONE: What happens to the Democratic Party if Hillary loses?

The shock for Democrats will likely to be more severe than for Republicans if Trump loses. “Imagine the best candidate in your party losing to the weakest candidate in the other party,” speculates Dan McLaughlin at nationalreview.com, “after years of telling yourself that your party had unlocked the demographic code to a permanent majority.”

One option for Democrats would be to moderate their policies, as the New Democrats urged in the 1980s and Bill Clinton did in the 1990s. After all, that proved pretty successful. But the current Democratic electorate has little stomach for going back to that strategy.

Two decades ago, lots of self-described moderates and even conservatives voted in Democratic primaries. Not so these days. The slump in Democratic primary and caucus turnout, from 38 million in 2008 to 31 million in 2016, was due to a sharp decline in turnout by self-described moderates.

Well, if Hillary — old, sick, tired, boring, and generally unappealing — is “the best candidate in your party,” then there’s your problem. . .

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Some Thoughts on Professor Garrett Epps’ “Trumpism Is the Symptom of a Gravely Ill Constitution.” “The funny thing is … I don’t disagree with Professor Epps’ core thesis, which I restate here in my own words, as: something is wrong in the United States, and some of what is wrong relates to our Constitution. That said: some of Professor Epps’ specific claims strike me as, at the very least, odd. How much worse than odd, if at all, I leave to you, the reasonable reader.”

I’ll just add that it’s not only the United States that’s having these problems. It has a lot to do with the extreme dysfunction of our post-Cold War leadership.

Related: A Republic, If You Can Keep It. Our political class bypasses democracy whenever it can. Why would you expect voters to remain enthusiastic about it? Once you’ve established a banana republic, we’re down to arguing about what kind of bananas.

WE KNOW WHO WE ARE: Who are America’s ‘super’ gun-owners?

America may hold a reputation as a country of gun owners, but a new survey shows that roughly half of the nation’s weapons are owned by just three percent of the population.

Three percent of Americans own eight or more firearms, a cumulative 133 million of the country’s 265 million weapons, according to an unpublished survey from Harvard University and Northeastern University, whose results were reported by the Guardian and The Trace on Monday. These “super owners” have a multitude of reasons for accumulating their stash, from the guns’ investment value, to their historical significance, to concerns about personal protection, the primary factor motivating about two-thirds of all gun owners, according to the study.

While many gun owners are staunch in their defense of what they consider their Second Amendment right to protect themselves, some experts say that the fear that motivates many to accumulate weapons can be dangerous in its own right.

This unsigned Christian Science Monitor editorial is a nasty example of the left’s efforts to stigmatize a minority of Americans for being enthusiastic about exercising a constitutionally protected individual right.

UH OH: Clinton’s Wisconsin lead collapses, Trump within striking distance.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: New study adds to evidence that student reviews of professors have limited validity.

VIDEO: ‘A Sh*t Ton of Famous People’ Telling You to Vote for Hillary.

Do as you’re told, citizen.

ALL THEY DO IS HELP THEMSELVES: The Clintons Can’t Help Themselves.

SO WE GOT LUCKY, ARE WE GOING TO COUNT ON IT? America’s Lucky Brush with Terror.

NARRATIVE, SHATTERING: But what about Brentley Vinson, the black police officer who fatally shot Scott?

FROM JEFF DAIELL: To Hell and Back.

WE’VE KNOWN THIS FOR AT LEAST TWO DECADES. SHOULD IT STILL BE A SURPRISE TO THE MSM? The grim reality of human organ harvesting in China.

SERIOUSLY DISTURBED MISANDRIST RAISES TWO GOOD MEN: Stop Guilt-Tripping Boys About Their ‘Toxic Masculinity’.

FROM JAMES YOUNG: Collisions of the Damned: The Defense of the Dutch East Indies (The Usurper’s War Book 2).

HE WAS KILLED BY A COMPUTER VIRUS: Human Skeleton Found on Famed Antikythera Shipwreck.

Two-thousand-year-old bones could yield first DNA from an ancient shipwreck victim.

YOUR CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS ARE OUT TO GET YOU: This is why your body always hurts in the morning.

IT’S OKAY.  I DIDN’T WANT TO BE ONE BEFORE READING THIS, EITHER: You won’t want to be a porn star after reading this.

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