THE VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION: Yes, this $375 ‘antifa’ jacket from Barneys is actually real.

THE DAM HAS BURST: LAPD confirms they are investigating Hollywood pedophile ring after Corey Feldman files formal report.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Laser Weapon to Go in Fighter Jet in 2021.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Gillespie Ran a JEB! Campaign in a Trump World.

EX-WEINSTEIN EMPLOYEE WONDERS IF WARREN BEATTY IS NEXT. Maybe not next, but I imagine like many powerful Hollywood men, he’s probably sweating a bit right now.

His fellow leftists spent the Obama era weaponizing the culture. Just look at the language invented or popularized over the last eight years: “Toxic whiteness.” “White privilege.” “Male privilege.”  “War on Women.” “Income inequality.” “Rape culture.” Didn’t they think their culture war on the rest of us would turn on them eventually?

As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2005, while gathering the material that would become Liberal Fascism:

Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them. McCarthyism was a direct consequence of both the Red Scare and the Brown Scare. And when the tactics they mastered were turned on them, they acted as if they came from nowhere.

They’re not going to like living under the new rules they created, to coin a phrase.

SKYNET SMILES: Russia Presses Ahead With Combat Robots.

FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists rejuvenate old human cells, make them look and act younger. Interesting that they’re using resveratrol analogs.

WHAT AMERICA NEEDS: More Lawyers.

Actually, I’ve said something sort of similar.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Tim Kaine Is Wrong about America and Slavery.

Kaine lays the blame at the feet of the Constitution: “a nation that put a Constitution in place that enshrined the institution of slavery and said that a slave is equal to three-fifths of a person.” But the compromises struck at Philadelphia in 1787 (or before that, during the Revolution) did not create slavery; slavery had existed in the Thirteen Colonies for a century, and the problem faced by the Founding Fathers was what to do with a society where it already existed.

By and large, the generation of the Founding Fathers saw slavery as an evil; they were acutely aware of the charge of hypocrisy laid against the broad principles of universal human rights they declared. At the same time, in an age when indentured servitude was still common, the moral argument that slavery was a fundamentally distinct evil was not as far advanced as it would later become.
…
Kaine, echoing today’s left-wing writers, would damn the Founding Fathers for their optimistic faith in the American promise. But the revolutionaries of France tried to tackle all of society’s ills simultaneously, and ended up on a Reign of Terror. We should not be so quick, from the distance of history, to condemn the Founders for making a world that was better than the one they knew just because the job was unfinished.

Indeed.

Good stuff — read the whole thing.

HMM: People With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Are Exhausted at a Cellular Level, Study Shows.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Trump’s Spectacular Speech From Seoul.

This goes right back to what Roger L. Simon was wondering about earlier today.

THAT’S WHAT PURGES ARE FOR: How Erdogan’s Purge Is Making Turkish Journalists Think Twice.

A Turkish journalist who spoke on condition of anonymity said that Kavala’s arrest is intended to “sustain the fear.”

“The arrests fall into several categories,” he explains: “Those who were arrested right after the coup attempt, on the basis of information that directly tied them to the coup; those who were arrested in the second wave so as to eliminate Gulen’s influence in the government, the courts, the police and the army; and those who are being arrested now, in order to snuff out any desire to criticize the regime.”

He points to the coverage of the recent arrests by journalists who are considered supporters of the opposition, noting the tepid language that is being used.

“Everything is written carefully and cautiously, for fear that tomorrow the writer will be arrested or summoned for questioning. Suddenly, you see cultural events being given more prominence than political events. Opinion pieces have become highly generalized and refrain from naming specific people as being responsible for anything, and the images are also no longer news-related,” the journalist observed.

Democracy dies in bland conformity.

SO IT’S COME TO THIS: Emotional white girl blames RACISM for not being able to order French fries at Taco Bell… despite them not being on the menu.

AIR FORCE ACADEMY “HATE CRIME” TURNS OUT TO BE FAKE. At this point, I assume these are fake until proven otherwise.

JAMES BOVARD: Trump election anniversary and progressives’ delusional race to save democracy: Some liberals think increasing government power will repair our broken civic life. But it would destroy the tattered remnants of federal legitimacy.

WOW: Utah Husband Who Walked Miles with a ‘Need Kidney 4 Wife’ Sign Finds a Donor.

On Sunday, Winters told KSTU that he got the call they were both waiting for after two years – there was a kidney available.

“I was just so overwhelmed,” he said of the call he received from the hospital. “I didn’t know what to think.”

Finding a donor is no small feat — there are 3,000 new patients added to the kidney donor waiting list each month, and 13 people die every day while waiting for their chance, according to the National Kidney Foundation. It’s hard to know how long someone will remain on the waiting list, but waits of three years or more are not uncommon.

If you haven’t, and you’re eligible, please consider signing your donor card. If you have, someday somebody might just be thanking you.

TO BOLDLY DRAIN THE ULTIMATE SWAMP. Roger Simon: Will Trump’s Greatest Triumphs be in Foreign Policy?

SO THAT HAPPENED: Rubbernecking at the GOP’s car-wreck of a Virginia election.

SOCIALISM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR NOTHING LEFT TO GAIN: Venezuelan crisis spawns boom in gambling.

“Most people I see playing the lottery are unemployed, trying to make a bit extra this way because the payouts are good,” said Veruska Torres, 26, a nurse who recently lost her job in a pharmacy and now plays Animalitos every day.

Torres often plays more than a dozen times daily at the kiosk in Catia, spending between 5,000-10,000 bolivars, but sometimes making up to 50,000 or 60,000 bolivars in winnings – more than a quarter of the monthly minimum wage.

When that happens, she splits the money between buying food and diapers for her baby boy, and re-investing in the lottery.

The Animalitos game, whose results appear on YouTube at scheduled times, is hugely popular because it goes through various rounds, holding people’s interest, and provides more chances to win than most traditional betting options.

The cheapest ticket costs just 100 bolivars – a quarter of a U.S. cent at the black market currency rate, and more than 10 times less than that at the official exchange level.

If Venezuela defaults, as is widely expected, Animalitos winnings will be worth less than the ticket by the time Torres gets her payout.

MEGAN MCARDLE ON HIGHER EDUCATION’S PERILOUS STATE:

It’s a nervous time to be a university. Forget the political activism that has been convulsing campuses over the past year; the Republican tax plan is now taking aim at the money that funds those campuses, particularly elite research universities. It proposes a tax on university endowments, an end to the tax deduction for student loans, and treating employer tuition reimbursement as income. This last would not only threaten a revenue stream for colleges and universities, but also make it much more expensive to run Ph.D. programs, where students normally get a tuition waiver as part of their package.

Universities are understandably concerned. And they’re not the only ones. Levying heavier taxes on education sounds perilously close to spitting on an American flag while denouncing motherhood, baseball and apple pie. So this might be a good time to ask whether we really ought to be subsidizing higher education — particularly elite higher education — as much as we are.

In theory, our nation’s elite educational system is supposed to be an engine of opportunity. And that was a very fine theory — in 1960, when America’s elite colleges transformed themselves into meritocratic institutions. . . .

At least when college was often as much finishing school as academic program, people understood that economic and social value could be found elsewhere. The current system is not only self-sustaining, but also self-legitimating. The elites who come through it, after all, are smart, hardworking and conscientious, as they have to be to get through an increasingly competitive admissions process. After all that hard work, those born on third base feel as if they earned their home run … and they can’t see any reason to change the scoring system.

As a proud alum, I’m glad that the University of Pennsylvania has a $12 billion endowment to sustain it into the future. But it’s hard to see why the school needs a tax subsidy from the government to educate students with a median family income of nearly $200,000 a year. I suspect those parents will ensure that their children get educated even if the government offers no subsidy at all — and that the students could probably manage to learn even without the shiny new buildings and extensive renovations that have appeared since I left the campus 23 years ago.

I say, abolish the Ivy League. Because inequality!

SHANNA, THEY BOUGHT THEIR TICKETS; THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE GETTING INTO. I SAY, LET ‘EM LEAVE!

DONNA BRAZILE: Jake Tapper betrayed me after debate questions controversy.

Brazile, a former CNN contributor, recalled in her new book when emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta showed that she relayed information about possible topics that would be brought up during the Democratic primary debate hosted by her network.

“The next day, even Jake Tapper took a swing at me, calling me unethical and ‘journalistically horrifying’ during a radio interview with WMAL even though I worked for CNN as a commentator not a journalist,” Brazile wrote in her book Hacks: The Insider Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House. “When I called him on this, he did not apologize. His attack on me was really about him. He wrote in an email, ‘I don’t know what happened here except it undermines the integrity of my work and CNN … you have to know how betrayed we all feel.'”

Brazile continued, “The feeling is mutual, my friend.”

Nobody looks too good here, not even Jake Tapper who used to enjoy a more favorable reputation with many on the Right.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, BLOOD LIBELS EDITION: Prof regrets tweeting that GOP, NRA ‘want mass shootings.’