ROGER SIMON: Why The Left Is Having A Nervous Breakdown.

But I have news for them. It’s not at all about Trump. It’s about them.

Trump is what the shrinks call the ‘presenting complaint.” The real problem, as is often the case in psychotherapy, is something entirely different. And it is this: the left is dead. It’s not only dead, it’s decomposed with no there there or anywhere.

Only dopes or con artists believe in socialism anymore (hello, Venezuela!) and identity politics has been exposed as the racist shell game it is with blacks and Latinos actually doing better than they have in decades under the current pro-capitalist administration.

So the left has nothing to say, only most of them don’t quite realize it yet. But this blockage, this reluctance and even inability to deal with what is actually happening shuts down the brain and emerges as anger, the hamster wheel of constant rage against Trump.

And that, of course, feeds on itself, as we have seen for the past year and a half, making matters worse, not just for the obvious reason – the aforementioned alienation of the public – but for what it does to their own minds.

Anger makes you stupid. When is the last time you heard a creative idea coming out of the left? (Herbert Marcuse? Okay, scratch that.) When is the last time they even debated the issues in a serious way rather than simply hurling invective or worse?

Infuriating them even more is that Trump is not even a conventional Republican or a conventional anything for that matter, making a mockery of people (like leftists) with rigid, reified (and highly conventional) ideologies that, in most cases, haven’t altered one jot in decades.

Read the whole thing. And chuckle.

DIY MUSIC UPDATE: Superior Drummer 3 Might Be the Most Human Sounding Drum Machine Ever Created — Biggest drawback? It won’t party like Keith Moon.

My review is over at the PJ Lifestyle section.

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JOURNALISM AS HONEY TRAP: ‘Pick-and-choose ethics’: NY Times says reporter Ali Watkins had ‘multiple’ relationships with sources she covered.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: This floating robotic factory will build satellites and spaceships in orbit.

OPEN THREAD: Just do it.

DON SURBER: Living Like President Trump.

BACON BACON BACON: Starting a Keto Diet for Fun and Profit. And Bacon.

Eat all you want as long as it’s meat: I lost 20 pounds and nearly completely resolved my type 2 diabetes.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Don’t forget to maintain the canned bacon stockpile.

IT’S LIKE THE POLITICIZED PRESS HAS LOST ITS MOJO: The battering Trump is taking in the press is not hurting him.

SOME WAR IS LOCAL: Puntland forces raid Somaliland police stations.

DEEP BACKGROUND FROM 2002: Hey, it’s way ahead of the news.

“MAX BOOT’S WEAK DEFENSE OF HARVARD’S AFFIRMATIVE ACTION”:  Ramesh Ponnuru destroys Boot’s four arguments one by one.

(And here’s one more argument against race-preferential admissions.)

NBC NEWS: The Movement To Arm Teachers. “Since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February, a divisive idea has gained momentum as a way to stem school shootings: arm teachers. At some schools in Ohio, armed teachers have been in classrooms for as many as five years, since the aftermath of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.”

Weird how lefty ideas are never “divisive,” even when most people disagree with them.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Good News: It’s a ‘Coffee and Booze Are Good for You’ Week.

IS IT THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW OR MARX: Dear Catholic Church, Your Founding Document Is Not Mao’s Little Red Book

DON SURBER: Why The Resistance Is Futile.

The Times approach to Trump supporters was laughably offensive. It reported, “In interviews across the country over the last few days, dozens of Trump voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, described something like a bonding experience with the president that happens each time Republicans have to answer a now-familiar question: ‘How can you possibly still support this man?'”

Buried in Paragraph 26 was the answer, from John Westling, 70, of Princeton, Minnesota, who said, “Let’s see. Economy booming, check. Unemployment down, check. Border security being addressed, check. Possible end to the Korean War that started when I was 3 years old, 68 years ago, check.”

Actions are more important than Words.

The press is made up of wordsmiths. This is why most of them do not get it.

And Democrats are word people. This is why most of them don’t get it.

Read the whole thing. Plus: “The Resistance simply is against everything President Trump does. He figured out more than a year ago how to work this to his advantage. The Resistance now opposes tax cuts, a booming economy, and peace in Korea. The Resistance also now supports MS-13, open borders, and Kim Jong Un.”

LIBERAL JEWS ARE DESTROYING THEIR OWN RELIGION.

To be fair, they have a higher calling they remain faithful to.

CHANGE: North Korea Is Erasing most Anti-US Propaganda.

Nix the nuclear warheads, cue the doves.

The North Korean government is erasing much of its anti-U.S. propaganda following dictator Kim Jong-un’s forays onto the world stage.

Gone are the posters depicting the U.S. as a “rotten, diseased, pirate nation” and promising “merciless revenge” on American forces for an imagined attack on the totalitarian country.

In their place are cheery messages touting praising the prospects for Korean reunification and the declaration Kim signed in April with South Korean President Moon Jae-in promising “lasting peace,” according to reports. . . .

“All the anti-American posters I usually see around Kim Il-sung Square and at shops, they’ve all just gone,” Rowan Beard, a tour manager at Young Pioneer Tours, told Reuters. “In five years working in North Korea, I’ve never seen them completely disappear before.”

Infamous posters and postcards showing North Korean missiles on their way to Washington are a thing of the past. Also removed are the anti-American trinkets that used to be sold to tourists as souvenirs. In their place are items showing themes of Korean reunification.

Well, that’s nice.

HOT OFF THE PRESS!! The final version of my school discipline article (with Alison Somin)—The Department of Education’s Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline: Wrong For Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law—is now available. Alas, the Trump Administration has not yet rescinded that policy.

(Bumped, by Glenn).

2018 HEADLINES: Writer resigns from New Yorker magazine after Twitter flap over Marine vet’s tattoo.

Talia Lavin, whose tweet about a veteran’s tattoo implied he was a Nazi, has apologized to him and resigned from her position as a fact-checker at the New Yorker magazine.

But in another tweet, Thursday evening, Lavin also lashed out at the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, saying it unfairly targeted her in its own tweet about combat-wounded veteran Justin Gaertner.

“This has been a wild and difficult week,” Lavin said in the tweet. “I owe ICE agent Justin Gaertner a sincere apology for spreading an rumor about his tattoo. However, I do not think it is acceptable for a federal agency to target a private citizen for a good faith, hastily rectified error.”

“Good faith.”

Related: “Talia Lavin Fails as Fact-Checker, Succeeds as Smear Merchant,” Michelle Malkin writes:

Lavin has not commented on the matter and instead turned her Twitter account private. But we can infer her attitude about her present troubles from a defiant piece she published just last week in The Forward magazine, where she writes a regular column. Titled “No, We Don’t Have to Be Friends with Trump Supporters,” the piece, laden with Nazi allusions, decries asylum reform, strengthened borders, and ICE agents enforcing the law.

Rejecting calls for decency in public debate over these contentious matters, she spat:

Tough nuts, sugar. When they go low, stomp them on the head.

Responding to Sarah Huckabee Sanders being kicked out of a DC-area restaurant, Lavin tweeted today, “they can eat in peace in their own damn houses,” adding, “Oh no, the fascists concertedly stripping away our rights might have to brown bag lunch. We should be more submissive. Direct anti fascist action is so gauche.”

As Joe Gabriel Simonson of the Daily Caller tweets, “the left’s constant use of Nazi analogies is being revealed as a mechanism for how they cope with what they feel is the inherent meaninglessness to their lives. It gives them purpose to fight Nazis. They need to invent them.”

And it has consequences: At the Hill, Allan Richarz spots “The strategic blunder of ‘Trump-as-Hitler.’”

Is this perhaps the last, desperate gasp of the president’s critics? Do they double down and ride the Trump-as-Hitler narrative — and themselves — into the ground until November’s midterms and beyond? Undoubtedly, the president is ready to chum the waters with another carefully manufactured outrage to distract the pundit class.

Despite what should have been a slam-dunk for critics of the president, the overwrought rhetoric of Democrats may have handed the modern-day Teflon Don another victory, and harmed their longer-term prospects in the process.

Prior to 2016, prominent leftists were only occasionally caught on microphones openly referring to Republican presidents and presidential candidates as Nazis. Today, social media gives the left a nonstop world in which they openly imagine the current GOP president is Hitler* and they’re the French underground. Where does that level of madness go from here?

Let’s ask Maxine Waters:

Waters calls for attacks on Trump administration: “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.

* And yet curiously, they never seem to notice the lack of consequences from attacking this week’s Hitler.

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“IF PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO BREAK THE JOURNALISTS-ARE-ELITIST STEREOTYPE THIS ISN’T HOW TO DO IT.” Woke? NY Times Selling ‘Truth’ T-Shirts for $300 Apiece.

They’re perfect for wearing on your $7,895 New York Times-sponsored trip to Iran.

YOU WILL NEVER FIND A MORE WRETCHED HIVE OF SCUM AND VILLAINY: Washington, D.C.: the Psychopath Capital of America. A new study ranks each state, plus D.C., by their psychopathic tendencies. The race for first? It isn’t even close.

Unexpectedly.

WOW, GLENN BECK TAKES OFF MIC, STORMS OFF CNN SET WHEN STELTER ASKED ABOUT LAYOFFS AT THE BLAZE.

BUT SERIOUSLY, WHERE ARE THE ALIENS?

IT’S COME TO THIS: George Will Endorses Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House but Does Anyone Care?