SARAH HOYT: So, about the last week…

Your occasional reminder that these are Heinlein’s Crazy Years — we just live in them.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1563: Judge Orders IRS To Disclose Names Of Employees Who Targeted Conservative Groups And To Prove That It Has Stopped The Practice.

SCOTT POWELL: Repealing ObamaCare Is The Key To Restoring Economic Growth.

STEPHEN L. CARTER: Too Much Power Lies in Tech Companies’ Hands: A libertarian case for caution after the Daily Stormer is booted off the public internet.

The libertarian part of me ought to be fine with all of this. Apart from the most exceptional circumstances, such as invidious discrimination, a business should be free to contract with whom it pleases. And I will shed no tears for the Daily Stormer, which fully earned its expulsion from rational discourse. One might protest, correctly, that there is a lot of evil in the world, but history teaches that Nazis and white supremacists are a special case. When their views vanish, we will all be better off for it.

Yet I find myself troubled. For one thing, as tech columnist Will Oremus pointed out in Slate, the same companies currently being told that they should not serve all comers made essentially the opposite argument in their campaign during the previous administration to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act. Having now decided that they can indeed pick and choose customers, the tech companies will be ill-placed to reverse field should Congress once more try to crack down on them for hosting sites that make unlicensed use of intellectual property.

It’s worrisome, moreover, that so many activists are cheering the demise of the Daily Stormer not on the narrow ground that white supremacy is a special case but on the more general ground that groups promoting “hatred” should have no place on the web. Given the contemporary left’s broad and wondrously flexible definition of the word “hate,” the implications of that particular slogan (calling it an argument would be too charitable) are unsettling. The triumphal tumult on social media naturally leads one to wonder which groups that progressives deem wrong on the issues might be the subject of the next banning campaign.

This leads to my largest concern. Libertarians tend to worry about concentrations of power in the hands of the state. There is no consensus about the danger of concentrations of power in private hands. But when the private hands in question control access to the principal media of communication in the world, one has to hesitate when they decide that not everyone should be granted entree. For the power they are exercising is almost state-like.

Yes, and their political connections to the state, or at least the Deep State, are immense.

BREAKING THE INTERNET: Alt-Tech Bad Boy Cody Wilson Explains Hatreon, an Alternative to Online Censorship.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “It seems apparent that the NYT set out to find out if there’s any evidence that Trump is a racist. Read the article. They found strong evidence that he is absolutely not any sort of a racist. The headline ought to come out and celebrate his excellent record.” Naturally, it doesn’t.

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Squeezing the nukes out of North Korea. My latest Observer essay.

IRAQ SAYS THANKS IRAN NOW GO AWAY:

With ISIL no longer a major threat Iraq has surprised Iran (and many others outside the Arab world) by rebuilding relations with Sunni Arab neighbors and telling Iran to back off with any plans it had to dominate Iraqi politics. Senior Shia Arab religious and political leaders have been leaning this way for a long time and Iran thought the war against ISIL was an opportunity to weaken the traditional Shia Arab distrust of Iran. That did not work.
Since 2005, when accurate opinion polls and generally free elections were once again available it became obvious that both in Sunni Arab areas (where there used to be a lot of support for al Qaeda) and Shia areas (where there used to be a lot of support for the kind of religious dictatorship found in Shia Iran) that Iran was seen as the enemy.

A good read.

TIME TO RENAME YALE, instead of honoring racist, slave-trading Yale University founder.

Speaking as the very first “Yalie of the Week,” so named by the Yale Alumni Magazine back in 2008, I think it’s time. Now, about John Harvard. . . .

PREPARING FOR AMERICAN COLLEGE FOOTBALL IN AUSTRALIA: Rice and Stanford play Down Under on August 26.

CHARLES C.W. COOKE: That NYT Oped Is Right: Trump and Sessions need more censorship powers to preserve public safety! “The United States federal government is now run at every level by Republicans. So, indeed, are the lion’s share of the governors’ mansions, statehouses, and localities. If the ACLU really knuckles down, it can ensure that these figures — and not pernicious ‘neutral’ principle — determine the edges and contours of America’s civil society.”

A TRUMP VOTER SPEAKS: It’s Not Trump They Hate—It’s Us!

IF ALL YOU KNEW CAME FROM THIS LAME PIECE BY NOAH FELDMAN, you’d think that “Whose streets? Our streets!” was a Nazi slogan instead of a longstanding lefty chant, and you’d have no idea that there has been violent lefty street thuggery from Antifa since before the election.

ILYA SOMIN: A cosmopolitan case against world government.

RACISM IN WHITOPIA: In cities that vote blue, no immunity from racism. “Progressive to its core, Portland is also America’s whitest big city – in part the troubling legacy of Oregon’s founding goal in the 19th century of creating a white utopia through exclusionary laws. Here in a city of hops and hipsters, where Republicans have been all but banished, Ms. Smith’s properties have been vandalized with racist graffiti – a particularly sore point since they are one of the only black families left in what was once the core of black Portland, around the corner from where Duke Ellington used to hang out. . . . And as white Portlanders have grown richer, the median black income has fallen – to less than $30,000 per year. The city’s criminal justice system sends black kids to juvenile detention at four to five times the rate of white kids, for the same misdeeds.”

Plus: “It isn’t Richard Spencer calling the cops on me for farming while Black. It’s nervous White women in yoga pants with ‘I’m with Her’ and ‘Coexist’ stickers on their German SUVs.”

THIS IS A BIGGER ACCOMPLISHMENT THAN MOST PEOPLE WILL APPRECIATE: Trump ends Obama’s Operation Choke Point.

The Trump administration has ended Operation Choke Point, the anti-fraud initiative started under the Obama administration that many Republicans argued was used to target gun retailers and other businesses that Democrats found objectionable.

Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd told GOP representatives in a Wednesday letter that the long-running program had ended, bringing a conclusion to a chapter in the Obama years that long provoked and angered conservatives who saw Choke Point as an extra-legal crackdown on politically disfavored groups.

“All of the department’s bank investigations conducted as part of Operation Chokepoint are now over, the initiative is no longer in effect, and it will not be undertaken again,” Boyd wrote in the letter.

The letter was addressed to Jeb Hensarling and Bob Goodlatte, the chairmen of the Financial Services and Judiciary Committees, respectively. Their staffs confirmed they received the letter.

The Republicans had written last week to Attorney General Jeff Sessions for confirmation that the program was over so that businesses that might be targeted could breathe easy.

Now Hensarling, Goodlatte et al. should pass a statute that will prevent the next Democratic administration from doing the same thing.

FLASHBACK: WHEN OBAMA DECLARED THAT THERE WERE “MANY SIDES” TO BLAME FOR ISLAMIST TERRORISM — ESPECIALLY CHRISTIANITY — MEDIA NOT ONLY DEFENDED HIM, But Castigated Critics Who’d Dispute Obama’s “Many-Sides-ism.”

PROVOCATEUR JOURNALISM: CNN uncritically publishes a list of “hate groups” compiled by the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center.

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STEPHEN L. CARTER: Things would be better if the press focused on Trump’s policies instead of his tweets. “Journalists should by all means cover what the president and his appointees actually do, particularly at the level of regulation. But the nonstop coverage of his every silly or venal remark leaves little room for conversation about what his administration is doing — and yet it is those acts, not his words, that will have a lasting effect on the nation. So let’s stop wasting energy deconstructing his tweets and start the important democratic work of debating his policies.”

Well, I tried to tell them this back in January, but they don’t have sufficient self-control.

2001 FLASHBACK: “SmarterTimes is reporting two interesting facts: the New York Times is the only major American paper on the Web not blocked by the Chinese government. It’s also soft-pedaling treatment of China, and especially Jiang Zemin. Coincidence?”

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