USA TODAY EDITORIALIZES: Campus Mobs Muzzle Free Speech: Administrators and student groups play a role in the growing intolerance.

As much as university administrators lament student-led intolerance and narrow ideas about free speech, they played a role in their creation. For decades, colleges and universities, public and private, have been fighting in court to maintain ridiculous restrictions on expression. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education catalogs them exhaustively. Last month, Fairmont State University in West Virginia finally accepted that students have a right to gather signatures on a petition without a school permit. In March at Regis University in Colorado, the school shut down a student sale that charged different prices for baked goods based on the buyers’ race, gender, religion or sexuality to protest affirmative action. That’s the same month the University of South Alabama tried to force a student to take down a Trump/Pence sign from his dorm room.

And just like university bureaucrats who try to shut down speech they don’t like, student governments get in the act, too. Last month, Wichita State student government backed down from its decision to deny recognition to a student group, not because the group engaged in “hate speech,” but because the student group argued that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. . . .

Campus administrators and student groups, who defend the growing intolerance for unpopular ideas on campus, see themselves as protecting what New York University Vice Provost Ulrich Baer calls “the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse” in a unique moment when Donald Trump, nationalism and the “alt-right” are on the rise. But those who’d restrict freedom of speech and association always have an important excuse for their actions. The grave threat of global communism abroad was no excuse for McCarthyism in Hollywood. European carnage in World War I was no excuse to shutter the German-language press at home.

True. And there’s no such thing as “unprotected hate speech.” That’s just a fiction — more accurately, a lie — made up to justify censorship.

MILLIONS OF SCHOOLCHILDREN REJOICE: Trump unwinding Michelle Obama’s school lunch program rules.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue took steps Monday to roll back healthy school lunch standards promoted by former first lady Michelle Obama in one of his first regulatory acts.

In an interim final rule, aimed at giving schools more flexibility, Perdue and his department are postponing further sodium reductions for at least three years and allowing schools to serve non-whole grain rich products occasionally as well as 1 percent flavored milk.

The rule allows states to exempt schools in the 2017-2018 school year from having to replace all their grains with whole-grain rich products if they are having a hard time meeting the standard.

USDA said it will take “all necessary regulatory actions to implement a long-term solution.”

“This announcement is the result of years of feedback from students, schools, and food service experts about the challenges they are facing in meeting the final regulations for school meals,” Perdue said in a statement.

“If kids aren’t eating the food, and it’s ending up in the trash, they aren’t getting any nutrition – thus undermining the intent of the program.”

Well, to be fair, the intent of the program was mostly virtue-signalling.

HMM: Democrats confident they can block Trump’s agenda after spending-bill win.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) secured nearly $5 billion in new domestic spending by exploiting disagreements between Trump and GOP lawmakers over spending priorities.

Democrats’ lopsided victory on the five-month deal, which is likely to be approved this week, means it will be very difficult — if not impossible — for the GOP to exert its will in future budget negotiations, including when it comes to Trump’s 2018 budget blueprint.

That’s because Republicans are hopelessly divided over how much to spend on government programs, with a small but vocal minority unwilling to support such measures at all. That has forced Republicans to work with Democrats to avoid politically damaging government shutdowns.

And that means Democrats are in the driver’s seat when it comes to budget battles, even with Trump in the White House.

When Republicans force a government shutdown, they take the blame. When Democrats force a government shutdown, Republicans still take the blame.

MARC THIESSEN: The past 100 days have been a disaster — for Democrats.

But most damaging has been the Democrats’ seemingly nonstop efforts to further alienate the millions of Americans who twice voted for Barack Obama but switched to Trump last year. The president’s critics have pointed to a Post-ABC News poll, which showed that Trump had not expanded his base of support since he took office. Well, Trump did not need to expand his base. He won the election (and the poll suggested that if the election were held again today, he would not only defeat Hillary Clinton again but also win the popular vote this time).

The ones who need to expand their base are Democrats — the party that lost — and they utterly failed to so. According to the Post-ABC News poll, only 2 percent of Americans who voted for Trump regret their votes, while fully 96 percent say it was the right thing to do. In other words, after 100 days, Democrats made no inroads with these Obama-Trump voters. Quite the opposite, today just 28 percent of Americans say that the Democratic Party is in touch with the concerns of most Americans today — 10 points behind Trump.

Perhaps one reason is that Democrats have made clear their deep-seated contempt for the values of working-class, socially conservative Democrats who left their party in droves last year.

Even uber-lefty Greg Sargent gets it:

Top Democratic pollsters have conducted private focus groups and polling in an effort to answer that question, and they shared the results with me.

One finding from the polling stands out: A shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy — twice the percentage that said the same about Trump. . . .

50 percent of Obama-Trump voters said their incomes are falling behind the cost of living, and another 31 percent said their incomes are merely keeping pace with the cost of living.

A sizable chunk of Obama-Trump voters — 30 percent — said their vote for Trump was more a vote against Clinton than a vote for Trump. Remember, these voters backed Obama four years earlier.

42 percent of Obama-Trump voters said congressional Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy, vs. only 21 percent of them who said the same about Trump.

Well, when you’re the party of urban gentry and $400,000 Wall Street speaking fees, people will tend to think that. And I don’t think Tom Perez, who looks like a 1970s central-casting Marxist agitator, will change things either.

GOOD MORNING: Liz Sheld’s Morning Brief will make it even better.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE! Well-off liberals choose mostly white schools.

TOMORROW IS LAUNCH DAY FOR MY BOOK.  WAIT, WAIT, PROPERLY DONE — CLEARS THROAT — FROM SARAH A. HOYT, THE LATEST IN HER DARKSHIP SAGA, AND, ACCORDING TO HER, HER BEST BOOK TO DATE: Darkship Revenge.  Coff.  It is a book about… motherhood.  Okay, okay, there are explosions, fights and adventure.  It is still a book about parents and children.  Possibly the most ‘splody book about parents and children you will ever read.

Tomorrow there will be a free short story in the world on my blog. I’ll post a link here!

MEN NOW CONSIDERED GUILTY EVEN AFTER PROVEN INNOCENT: This law would require stylists to look for signs of domestic abuse.

DOUBLE THEIR MINIMUM WAGE: When money is imaginary, I don’t think this will solve their problem. Maduro tries to mollify angry Venezuelans with a minimum wage increase.  …. Speaking of victims of communism.

AS IF AIR TRAVEL WEREN’T SUFFICIENTLY OFF-PUTTING: Sex in airports is more common than on planes: survey.

WHEN PROTECTING BECOMES TREATING LIKE CHILDREN: UK Student Group: Ban Cheering, Clapping So Deaf Are Not Excluded.

CAVEAT EMPTOR: Why You Should Never Take It At Face Value.

ALSO FROM THE LIBERTY ZONE: Also with a language warning, but if you read it and tell me the language isn’t warranted, we can’t be friends anymore. Why Return the Child?

SAME THEME FROM THE LIBERTY ZONE, WHICH MEANS IT’S MORE COLORFUL.  YEAH COLORFUL:  (Okay, for the naive among you, that IS a language warning.) The Independent Goes Full Retard.

LYING ABOUT TRUMP IS BECOMING AN HABIT: Trump Trance Strikes Again: Trump Says ‘Senate Rules,’ Left Hears ‘Constitution’.

HOLD THE CRIMINALS ACCOUNTABLE: Remember the VICTIMS of Communism on May Day!

ANTHONY FISHER: Liberals’ Free Speech Amnesia. “Erstwhile anti-war presidential candidates and distinguished professors should know better than to put their faith in authority when it comes to the competition of ideas.” Well, they’re putting their faith in leftist authority.

TO BOLDLY GO WHERE FRANK J. FLEMING HAS GONE BEFORE: “At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States found themselves locked in a chilling race to nuke the moon, declassified military documents reveal.”

To be fair, one could modestly describe such efforts as “A Realistic Plan for World Peace.”

NEW VIDEO FROM DENNIS PRAGER: Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?

This video currently has over 10,000 likes after over 208,000 views today. But that there are over 1,100 thumbs down votes is more than a bit distressing.

CHARLIE MARTIN: Remember the VICTIMS of Communism on May Day!

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Trump Will Test Democrats’ Tax Patriotism: President’s plan would make high-tax blue states pay their fair share.

Democrats have been saying for years that we need tax increases, and that paying taxes is one of the greatest forms of patriotism. Now it looks like President Trump is going to put their beliefs to the test.

Trump’s new tax plan would hit blue states hardest, by eliminating the federal deductibility of state income and property taxes. . . . That’s going to make it harder for blue states to maintain the high tax rates they’ve traditionally levied.States should be able to set their own levels of taxing and spending, but I see no reason why a Walmart cashier in Tennessee (which has no state income tax and low property taxes) should be subsidizing a hedge fund mogul in New York or a studio executive in Hollywood. It’s fine if blue states want to have higher state and local tax rates, as they do, but they shouldn’t be encouraged to do so by federal tax giveaways. And it’s the urban, coastal areas that have done best over the past 25 years, so it seems time for them to pay their fair share now.

Fair share! Fair share! The wealthy states can afford to “chip in a little more.”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Compromise Spending Bill Includes 2,500 More Visas for Afghans in Program.

BYRON YORK: Piety and Trump-bashing: The sheer awfulness of the White House Correspondents’ dinner.

THE ANATOMY OF LIBERAL MELANCHOLY: “The Trump-Putin obsession is the death rattle of an entire epoch, and the fever dream of a social class whose self-understanding utterly depended upon that era’s basic historical assumptions.” Even some lefties get it.