WORST. RACIST. EVER. Hispanics Score Under Trump. “Among Latinos, the jobless rate has only registered below 5 percent for seven months total – in the history of this country. Six of those months have occurred with Donald Trump in the White House, including the April report released last week.”

It’s been a long time since Democrats professed to believe that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and Trump’s embrace of it could prove to be the ultimate wedge issue.

BLUE WAVE: Is the Midwest the Next South for the Democratic Party?

The president’s courting of voters in the Heartland is a shrewd political calculation by Team Trump. More than half of the 206 so-called “pivot” counties—areas that twice voted for Obama then switched to Trump in 2016—are located in the Midwest, as are four “pivot” states: Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Hillary Clinton won Minnesota by fewer than 50,000 votes; Barack Obama won it by 225,000 votes in 2012.

Over the past decade, Midwestern states have been bleeding blue votes and politicians. With the exception of Minnesota, every single Midwestern state has a Republican governor (even my home state, the basket case Illinois) and Republicans control state houses throughout the Midwest except for Illinois. This once-reliably Democratic region is turning red faster than Elon Musk’s investors and Trump is only part of the reason why.

Democrats have been counting on the Great Lakes to deliver a Big Blue Wave this November to help win back control of Congress, but the current outlook portends a possible riptide that threatens to carry Democrats even further out to political sea. With no compelling message aside from impeachment, no policy agenda for the economy or national security, and no tactical strategy to lure swing voters back, Democrats might reverse the historical trend of the out-of-power party gaining more power in the midterm election. Republicans have a legitimate chance to expand their majority in the U.S. Senate and curtail losses in the House to less than a dozen seats.

Is the Midwest the next South for the Democratic Party?

Julie Kelly has the distressing numbers — distressing for midwestern Democrats.

Related: Democrats’ 2018 advantage is nearly gone.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON IS UNACCEPTABLE BUT STALIN IS FINE: The Liberal Media’s Answer to Ideological Diversity Concerns: Ban Conservatives, Hire Socialists.

WELL, YES, FOR QUITE A FEW REASONS: Univision Is A Fucking Mess.

THIS IS A LAZY AND STUPID TAKE: The Iran Nuclear Deal’s Unraveling Raises Fears of Cyberattacks.

When the US last tightened its sanctions against Iran in 2012, then-president Barack Obama boasted that they were “virtually grinding the Iranian economy to a halt.” Iran fired back with one of the broadest series of cyberattacks ever to target the US, bombarding practically every major American bank with months of intermittent distributed denial of service attacks that pummeled their websites with junk traffic, knocking them offline. Three years later, the Obama administration lifted many of those sanctions in exchange for Iran’s promise to halt its nuclear development; Tehran has since mostly restrained its state-sponsored online attacks against Western targets.

Now, with little more than a word from President Trump, that détente appears to have ended. And with it, the lull in Iranian cyberattacks on the West may be coming to an end, too.

I guess the lesson here is that Obama should never have loosened the screws, and allowed the Iranian economy to come to a complete halt — and with it, the Mullah’s regime.

But we knew that already.

NICOLE RUSSELL: 5 Things CNN Gets Wrong About the Patriarchy. “Sorry, CNN, the patriarchy doesn’t cause every bad thing in the universe.”

WHAT’S REALLY IMPORTANT IN NEWS COVERAGE? Giant boobs, of course. My weekly column at Daily Caller is up!

HOSTILE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT ON ACCOUNT OF RACE: Teaching ‘White People’ Are Toxic on America’s Elite Campuses.

If you’re white, you’re a blight. This past winter Yale University became the latest of dozens of colleges across the country to roll out a course aiming to teach undergraduates how to understand and counteract “whiteness”—a sinister force that, according to its official description, is “a culturally constructed and economically incorporated entity, which touches upon and assigns value to nearly every aspect of American life and culture.”

The professor in charge, Claudia Rankine, is a poet and MacArthur “genius” grant winner who was recently hired away from the University of Southern California to hold an endowed chair in poetry in the Yale English department.

The website The College Fix obtained a copy of Rankine’s syllabus for the course titled, “Constructions of Whiteness,” which makes the possession of pale skin sound menacing indeed, examining such topics as “white prosperity,” “white masculinity,” “white spaces,” and “white imagination.” The course’s goal, according to the syllabus, is to “create a lab for the construction of counternarratives around whiteness.”

Rankine’s obsession with skin color extends to her other professional endeavors. Her play The White Card, which opened in Boston in March, struck dutifully liberal Boston Globe theater critic Don Aucoin as marred by “stilted dialogue” but otherwise praiseworthy as an “inquiry into structural racism and an interrogation of whiteness.”

Rankin’s Yale course, currently winding up for the semester, slaps a patina of Ivy League polish onto the “toxic whiteness” fad currently raging in academia and other intellectual circles that if focused on any other ethnicity would be denounced as out-and-out racism.

It still is out-and-out racism, it’s just not denounced because it pushes a favored message. I’d like to see the Department of Education weigh in on this, as I believe this sort of overt institutionally sanctioned racism may create a hostile environment on account of race.

Related: How white women use strategic tears to avoid accountability.

BUT I WAS ASSURED THAT IF WE PASSED GUN CONTROL LAWS FELONS WOULD OBEY THEM!  Wisconsin Felon Admits To Enlisting Girlfriend To Make Straw Buys.

YOU MEAN THE NYT THOUGHT IT STILL HAD SOME REPUTATION AFTER COVERING UP THE HOLODOMOR?  THE CORPSE MIGHT BE TWITCHING, BUT IT’S JUST GAS:  New York Times embarrasses itself in hit piece on Pompeo.

I’D LIKE TO KEEP “YES” AS MY ANSWER, PLEASE:  Chelsea Manning: Political Farce or Nightmare?

THE LEFT THINKS MERITOCRACY IS RACIST.  WHICH MEANS WHEN THEY SCREAM “RACIST” THEY’RE LOOKING IN A MIRROR:  Inclusivity Over Talent or Ability.

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO!   European Space Agency may be heading to Venus in 2032.

DO YOU HAVE A FIRE ALARM?  Asking this question before you book an Airbnb could save your life.

CLIP AND SAVE! PLAY AIR BEHAVIOR BINGO!  These are the most obnoxious things you can do on a plane.

I THINK I’VE DETECTED A FLAW IN THEIR ASSUMPTIONS: “It’s about … perceiving a newborn baby as a capable, unique individual”  …. um… mostly mine seemed to be capable of peeing on whoever removed their diaper, but okay.  Maybe that word doesn’t mean what they think it means.  Trendy parenting method bans high chairs, baby talk.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Sarah Hoyt: The President is Not Your Daddy.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Six Most Underrated Restaurants.

FASTER, PLEASE: A stealthy Harvard startup wants to reverse aging in dogs, and humans could be next. Why start with dogs? “Dogs are a market in and of themselves. It’s not just a big organism close to humans. It’s something people will pay for, and the FDA process is much faster. We’ll do dog trials, and that’ll be a product, and that’ll pay for scaling up in human trials.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Ivy League senior presents her thesis in bra, underwear to fight ‘oppressive beliefs.’

OPEN THREAD: Rococo Basilisk.

TROLL LEVEL: THE BIGGEST CELEBRITY IN THE WORLD. Obama Whines About Trump’s America — ‘I Worry When Our Values Are Not Being Upheld:’

“I worry when our values are not being upheld,” he said. Obama added, “Our democracy, just like any organization, can’t work if, for example, we don’t insist on facts. Like, facts are really useful. We can’t make good decisions if we don’t at least agree on the facts.”

I agree. Which is why I’m eagerly awaiting Barry’s explanation of how this “fact” ended up not being reality:

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: America The Weird.

In general, outside the West, few of the seven billion people alive today enjoy human rights and the protection of property. The rule of law and freedom of expression are taken for granted in Europe and the United States, and residents there enjoy both economic prosperity and physical security. These exceptions to the global norms of repression, autocracy, tribalism, sectarian violence, and fundamentalism are found only either in the West proper, or in a few Westernized nations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

It may now be politically incorrect to suggest that, compared to countries like Afghanistan and Rwanda, different premises animate the social and political order of Europe, the United States, the English-speaking nations of the former British Commonwealth, and the West’s close allies such as Israel, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. But it is nonetheless true. The yearly migrations to these countries of millions of non-Westerners demonstrate that reality. Immigration is now nearly always a one-way pathway to the West or Westernized countries from the non-West. People vote with their feet in a more honest and concrete fashion than at the ballot box.

Indeed they do.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Students ‘deeply hurt’ by criticism of liberal intolerance.

TROLL LEVEL: TRUMP PRESS SECRETARY. Sarah Sanders Mocks Foreign Policy ‘Lack Of Success’ Of Obama Administration.