HEY, THEY DON’T CALL IT THE SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE FOR NOTHING, YOU KNOW: You Won’t Believe How Close Louisiana Was to Being the Hippopotamus Ranching State.

IF YOU CAN’T CRITICIZE LIBERTARIANS WITHOUT LYING ABOUT THEM, MAYBE YOU CAN’T CRITICIZE THEM AT ALL: Some dubious claims in Nancy MacLean’s ‘Democracy in Chains,’ continued.

WE’RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND WE’RE HERE TO HELP: “The opioid epidemic can also be linked to the overuse of Medicaid.”

Quick, somebody put together a conspiracy theory about how the government did this to depopulate Kentucky and West Virginia. Kind of like the lefty claims that the CIA was behind the crack epidemic in LA.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Everything You Possibly Need to Know About Screws.

You know what I hate? When you have a damaged screw and you need to extract it. If only there were some sort of tool that made it easy.

RIGHT ON!: Court rules U.S. can seize Manhattan skyscraper from a sanctions-violating Iranian “charity.”

A New York jury has ruled that the U.S. government can seize a Manhattan skyscraper worth as much as $1 billion from an Iranian-American charitable foundation accused of violating sanctions against Iran.

The U.S. federal court on June 29 ruled that Alavi Foundation, the majority owner of the 36-story office building at 650 Fifth Ave., knew and helped hide the fact that the building’s 40 percent partner, Assa Corp., was a front for the Iranian government.

Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Joon H. Kim said the tower “secretly served as a front for the Iranian government and as a gateway for millions of dollars to be funneled to Iran in clear violation of U.S. sanctions laws.”

Remember, Obama basically agreed to let the ayatollahs have a nuclear bomb. Don’t let CNN and other fake news mongers tell you otherwise.

SEMI-RELATED: Iranian terror connections in South America. OK, maybe not so semi.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON THE REACTION TO TRUMP’S LATEST TWEET:

Over at The Washington Post, Callum Borchers is calling it a “blatantly sexist attack.” Ridiculous. Men get facelifts too. In fact, it’s Borchers who’s supplying the sexism:

When Trump hits Brzezinski and Scarborough on Twitter, he hits Brzezinski harder, more personally and in a way that seems designed to portray her as insecure (“facelift”) and unintelligent (“low IQ”) — as a side piece who would not be on TV if not for her romantic relationship with Scarborough, to whom she was recently engaged.

Trump didn’t say “sidepiece” or characterize plastic surgery as a marker of insecurity. That’s Borchers projecting. What I read in that tweet is that he found it ludicrous that the person trying to insinuate herself into his company was bleeding from the face. That doesn’t sound at all like insecurity. Quite the opposite.

I suspect that Trump knows a lot about cosmetic surgery. And the pic accompanying the NYT story doesn’t exactly undermine the whole “facelift” angle.

But for those who find Trump unacceptably crude, a reminder: How David Brooks Created Donald Trump.

Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and working class.

The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. Unlike Brooks, I actually ventured out to “intermingle” with Tea Partiers at various events that I covered for PJTV.com, contributing commentary to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner. As I reported from one event in Nashville, “Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry — and they are — but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun. Laughter rang out frequently, and when new-media mogul Andrew Breitbart held forth on a TV interview, a crowd gathered and broke into spontaneous applause. A year ago (2009), many told me, they were depressed about the future of America. Watching television pundits talk about President Obama’s transformative plans for big government, they felt alone, isolated and helpless. That changed when protests, organized by bloggers, met Mr. Obama a year ago in Denver, Colo., Mesa, Ariz., and Seattle, Wash. Then came CNBC talker Rick Santelli’s famous on-air rant on Feb. 19, 2009, which gave the tea-party movement its name. Tea partiers are still angry at federal deficits, at Washington’s habit of rewarding failure with handouts and punishing success with taxes and regulation, and the general incompetence that has marked the first year of the Obama presidency. But they’re no longer depressed.”

One of the most famous things about the Tea Partiers was that — as befits a relentlessly bourgeois protest movement — they left things cleaner than they found them. Rich Lowry reported from Washington, DC: “Just as stunning as the tableaux of the massive throngs lining the reflecting pool were the images of the spotless grounds afterward. If someone had told attendees they were expected to mow the grass before they left, surely some of them would have hitched flatbed trailers to their vehicles for the trip to Washington and gladly brought mowers along with them. This was the revolt of the bourgeois, of the responsible, of the orderly, of people profoundly at peace with the traditional mores of American society. The spark that lit the tea-party movement was the rant by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who inveighed in early 2009 against an Obama-administration program to subsidize ‘the losers’ mortgages.’ He was speaking for people who hadn’t borrowed beyond their means or tried to get rich quick by flipping houses, for the people who, in their thrift and enterprise, ‘carry the water instead of drink the water.’ The tea party’s detractors want to paint it as radical, when at bottom it represents the self-reliant, industrious heart of American life.”

In San Francisco, too, tea party protesters met pro-Obama activists and picked up their trash. “John,” author of The City Square blog wrote: “As Obama supporters moved along in the line to get into the fundraiser, they left behind an impressive amount of trash … Tea Partiers shouted ‘pick up your garbage’ and ‘this is San Francisco, what about recycling?’ There was no response. They chanted ‘Obama leaves a mess.’ Still no response. Eventually, a tea partier (wearing the black cowboy hat) crosses over and starts to pick up the trash on his own. Other tea partiers join him. Another manages to find a trash bag. Soon the trash is being collected.”

Yet the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by pundits like Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it was largely betrayed by the Republicans in Congress, who broke their promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.

So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counterprotesters instead of picking up their trash.

When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly. Brooks closes his Trump column with Psalm 73, but a more appropriate verse is Hosea 8:7 “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Trump’s ascendance is a symptom of a colossal failure among America’s political leaders, of which Brooks’ mean-spirited insularity is only a tiny part. God help us all.

Nice work, political class. Now if you manage to do to Trump what you did to the Tea Party, you need to wonder: What comes after Trump?

CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRESS IN EUROPE: Czech Republic Parliament Passes Constitutional Right to Bear Arms.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Loryn Barclay Accused of Sex With Student.

Barclay’s case is the latest in a string of teacher sexual assault scandals to hit the news. . . .

Many other female teachers have been accused recently of having sexual relationships with students.

Nataly Lopez, a 27-year-old former substitute teacher at a middle school in New Jersey, was accused of having sexual contact with a student.

Lindsey Jarvis, a 27-year-old middle school teacher’s aide, was accused of the rape and sodomy of a student who was under the age of 16. Jarvis was arrested in Fayette County, Kentucky, on June 16.

Then there’s Laura Ramos. She is a 31-year-old Connecticut high school teacher who is accused of having sex with a special education student.

Related: The Rise Of Female Child Molesters. I don’t think there are necessarily any more. I think that they’re discovered more often due to cellphones and social media, and I think people used to turn a blind eye when it was female-on-male abuse.

THEY’RE ALWAYS ANGRY AT PEOPLE WHO POINT THAT STUFF OUT: Progressive Journalists Are Outraged At The NRA For Pointing Out Leftist Violence. “Two days before an assassination attempt on Republicans, the NRA posted a video on Facebook warning of leftist violence. Progressive journalists are now pretending political violence is the NRA’s fault. . . . You might not remember it because the news media pivoted away from the story as quickly as possible, but just two weeks ago an anti-Trump Bernie Bro tried to assassinate a bunch of elected Republican officials while they practiced for the annual bipartisan Congressional baseball game. Just days after the New York Times revealed that Republicans regularly practiced at a public park in Alexandria with minimal protective detail, the shooter showed up at the park and started surveilling it. According to the FBI, he even took pictures of the location. Before opening fire on the lawmakers, the shooter also confirmed that the assembled officials were Republicans.”

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CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Another stun gun ban repealed, this one in Tacoma.

APPOINTMENTS: Trump Nominates Indiana Health Commissioner as Surgeon General. “Dr. Adams, who trained as an anesthesiologist, has also been outspoken about the risks of prescription opioid painkillers and the need to address the opioid epidemic. Charles N. Rothberg, president of the Medical Society of the State of New York, said Dr. Adams reminded him of C. Everett Koop, who was surgeon general through much of the 1980s.”

CNN WILL PROBABLY BLAME THE GOP HEALTHCARE BILL: New Mexico Confirms 3 Cases of Plague.

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THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN: Gallup: 61% Support Big Tax Cuts.

JONAH GOLDBERG ON NANCY MACLEAN’S JAMES BUCHANAN & LIBERTARIANISM BOOK — SHORTCUTS TO EXPOSE EVIL:

Indeed, this is all downstream of the century-old effort to turn Herbert Spencer into some kind of monster because he opposed governmental social engineering. The idea seems to be that because the statists are good, anyone who opposes them must be evil.

The contemporary liberal obsession with claiming that their ideological opponents must be somehow in league with, or modern-day reincarnations of, Klansmen and slavers is just another manifestation of this old, self-indulgent smear. It’s a bit like MacLean set out to reach that destination. When she realized she couldn’t get there by conventional navigation, she put a magnet marked “Calhoun!” or “Slavery!” next to her compass, and that did the trick.

Conservatives are bit more accustomed to this sort of thing. Ramesh and I beat back a similar attempt to claim that modern conservatism is a Calhoun cult a few years ago.

But I think the assumption behind both efforts is very much the same: Anyone who disagrees with us must not simply be wrong, they must be evil. And taking short cuts to expose evil is no vice.

Read the whole thing, which has echoes of the early days of InstaPundit, when Glenn was frequently debunking Michael Bellesiles’ bogus Arming America book.

DON’T LOOK NOW, BUT WHILE TRUMP WAS BUSY TWEETING MEAN THINGS ABOUT THE MSM, House passes Kate’s Law, as part of illegal immigrant crackdown.

On to the Senate.