THE LEFT CONTINUES TO EAT ITS OWN: Police were called in to restore order at a legislative town hall in Arlington, Va. on Saturday. Immigration activists calling themselves “La ColectiVa” object to Virginia Delegate Alfonso Lopez (D-Arlington), because he once did a small amount of consulting work for a private company that operates detention facilities for ICE. They want him to apologize, promise never to do it again and return the money.

The officeholders at the meeting appear to have all been Democrats.

“It’s one of the most stressful meetings I’ve been in my 21 years of office,” said state Sen. Barbara Favola (D-Arlington). …

“I’ve been [in office] for 27 years and no one has fought harder for immigrants or immigrant rights than Delegate Lopez,” [state Senator Janet Howell (D-Fairfax)] said.

It’s funny how politicians expect to be loved.

In connection with my work on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, I investigated conditions at two immigration detention centers located in Texas a few years ago. I found the center run by a private company to be quite nice.   The government-run center run by the federal government was decent and conscientiously run too. I wrote about them.

TOP. MEN. Mueller Indicted A Russian Company That Didn’t Even Exist, Court Transcripts Say.

OPEN THREAD: Saturday night’s alright for threadin’, get a little action in.

I SHOULDN’T POST THIS. IT WILL ONLY FEED EVERYONE’S HYPOCHONDRIA: But after three years of having a runny nose, a woman has learned that it was not allergies. It was brain fluid.

SHOULD McCAIN RESIGN IMMEDIATELY? OR IS ONE SENATE ELECTION ON THE NOVEMBER BALLOT ENOUGH FOR ARIZONA? If he resigns before May 30, such an election would be necessary. Steve Hayward has some thoughts.

THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Typhoid Scare At Day Care After Child Diagnosed.

YOUR LAST WARNING:  DON’T FORGET IT’S MOTHER’S DAY TOMORROW: And in case you are wondering who the original “mother” in Mother’s Day was, it was Ann Maria Jarvis (1832-1905) (mother of Mother’s Day founder Anna Marie Jarvis). The elder Jarvis was in fact a remarkable woman. She bore at least 11 children, only four of whom survived to adulthood (although, alas, that didn’t make her remarkable for the time). For Jarvis, her losses were a call to improve health conditions in Taylor County in what is now West Virginia. She organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” to raise money for medicine, care for sick mothers, inspect milk, and train women about how to deal with disease. This was before we all got used to the government doing this for us.

During the Civil War, she wanted these clubs to provide aid to fallen soldiers, no matter which side of war they had been fighting for. She is said to have provided the only prayer for the body of the first Union soldier to be killed by Confederate soldiers, Thornsbury Bailey Brown.

Weirdly, her daughter Anna regretted having been the founder of Mother’s Day. She resented any commerciality being associated with it. Printed Mother’s Day cards made her angry. She even tried to get official recognition of the day rescinded.  She failed.

IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR MY MOST RECENT SUPPLEMENTS POST, HERE IT IS. And here’s an earlier one.

THIS IS LIKE WHEN CIGARETTE COMPANIES PUSHED FILTERED CIGARETTES AS HEALTHY: Here’s Why Google’s New ‘Smartphone Addiction’ Features Aren’t Based on Science.

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GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERSECTIONALITY: Cannabis Industry Could Be ‘A Form Of Reparations,’ Says Cynthia Nixon.

CHAIRMAN ON STARBUCKS INCIDENT: ‘WE DID EVERYTHING WE COULD TO DEMONSTRATE CONTRITION.’

Wanna bet? Having smelled weakness, I’m sure the SJW left are just getting started finding new ways for the company’s employees and spokesmen to grovel.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Woman Kicked off Harry Potter Ride for Being Too Fat Claims Discrimination.

I BLAME SOCIAL MEDIA. SHUT THEM DOWN, FOR THE CHILDREN’S SAKE: Depression rates among youth in U.S. higher than ever.

SOMBREROS, QIPAOS, AND CATHOLIC COSPLAY, OH MY!

To review the misappropriation mandates so far: teenage white girls in Utah can’t wear Chinese dresses to prom. Non-Mexicans can’t wear sombreros on Cinco de Mayo. Wearing other groups’ attire as costumes is insensitive. Re-appropriating phrases deemed inappropriate is inappropriate, even if done by a member of the aggrieved minority victimized by inappropriate appropriation. History shall not be trivialized. Identity must be respected.

So it is with extreme befuddlement and bewilderment that I sifted through pages and pages of photos from this week’s Met Gala, whose theme was “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.”

* * * * * * * * *

Now, this is the point at which I might cry out indignantly: My religion is not your costume! But the Vatican actually collaborated with the Met Gala on the event, donating prized vestments, cassocks and other relics. No, I’m not offended. I’m just queasy and exhausted from trying to keep track of what we’re supposed to wear and not wear, say and not say, eat or drink and not eat or drink, and who all is allowed to dictate what to whom and when.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: All hail the rise of cat men, an antidote to toxic masculinity.

“Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.”

GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T READ A HISTORIC BOOK HERE – THIS IS A UNIVERSITY! When a U-Va. alumnus read his Bible on the steps of the Rotunda, the school called police.

TOO BAD OUR PROCUREMENT IS SUCH A MESS: The U.S. Army is Looking for Its First New Submachine Gun Since WWII.

JOHN HAWKINS: EXPLAINING WHY LIBERALS ARE SO DESPERATE TO FIND THINGS TO BE OFFENDED ABOUT. After discussing Starbucks’ management donning their hair shirts, the mass lefty freakout over Kanye West’s pro-Trump comments, and the mass lefty freakout over a prom dress, Hawkins writes:

These stories, all of which have happened recently, are just a drop in the bucket. Liberals are perpetually offended by just about everything. Why? Because liberals have decided that being offended trumps logic, fact and every other argument that anyone can make. If it were up to liberals, we would not have free speech because too many people say things that contradict liberal ideas. So, they may not be able to put you in jail for believing that you can’t change genders or that it’s not smart to send gay men who may be sexually interested in teenagers out into the woods with them overnight as scout masters, but they can use a variety of different tactics to silence you. Outrage is one of those tactics because again, according to liberals, the second someone is outraged, the debate is over and they’ve won (Of course that only applies to liberals. If conservatives are offended by something, that doesn’t count.)

Of course, liberals love to use whatever they’re outraged about today as an excuse for government action or to gin up their base, but at the most fundamental level, liberal outrage is all about shutting up everyone who doesn’t agree with liberals. That’s the ultimate form of censorship. When you’re so scared that you might offend a liberal that you censor yourself. When you don’t wear the prom dress you want to wear. When you don’t make the joke. You don’t say anything that might make a liberal angry because you don’t want to deal with formal charges or 5,000 outraged liberals on Twitter that feel justified in calling you the worst names you’ve ever heard of because their widdle feelings are hurt. You can give in to their bullying if you like, but down that road lies a new liberal vision of totalitarianism where the bad guys win not because they deserve to or because they have guns pointed at your head, but because people are too afraid to speak the truth. For your sake, for the sake of your kids and for the sake of your country, don’t let liberal outrage determine what you can and cannot say.

In a 2014 post by lefty academic Freddie deBoer, which sadly is not on the Wayback Machine but quoted here, deBoer described a method of argument he dubbed “We Are Already Decided:”

This is the form of argument, and of comedy, that takes as its presumption that all good and decent people are already agreed on the issue in question. In fact, We Are All Already Decided presumes that the offense is not just in thinking the wrong thing you think but in not realizing that We Are All Already Decided that the thing you think is deeply ridiculous. And the embedded argument, such as it is, is not on the merits of whatever issue people are disagreeing about, but on the assumed social costs of being wrong about an issue on which We Are All Already Decided. Which is great, provided everybody you need to convince cares about being part of your little koffee klatsch. If not, well….

All of this, frankly, is politically ruinous. I meet and interact with a lot of young lefties who are just stunning rhetorically weak; they feel all of their politics very intensely but can’t articulate them to anyone who doesn’t share the same vocabulary, the same set of cultural and social signifiers that are used to demonstrate you’re one of the “right sort of people.” These kids are often great, they’re smart and passionate, I agree with them on most things, but they have no ability at all to express themselves to those who are not already in their tribe. They say terms like “privilege” or “mansplain” or “tone policing” and expect the conversation to somehow just stop, that if you say the magic words, you have won that round and the world is supposed to roll over to what you want.

Does the left want more Trump? Blocking arguments and debate, deplatforming prominent conservatives and calling Trump’s everyday supporters “deplorables,” and getting the vapors over minutia such as prom dresses, is the perfect way to ensure more Trump.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING. In “Kanye West and the Question of Freedom,” Andrew Sullivan writes:

I remember a different time — and it wasn’t so long ago. A friend reminded me of this bloggy exchange Ta-Nehisi and I had in 2009, on the very subject of identity politics and its claims. We clearly disagreed, deeply. But there was a civility about it, an actual generosity of spirit, that transcended the boundaries of race and background. We both come from extremely different places, countries, life experiences, loyalties. But a conversation in the same pages was still possible, writer to writer, human to human, as part of the same American idea. It was a debate in which I think we both listened to each other, in which I changed my mind a bit, and where neither of us denied each other’s good faith or human worth.

It’s only a decade ago, but it feels like aeons now. The Atlantic was crammed with ideological opposites then, jostling together in the same office, and our engagement with each other and our readerships was a crackling and productive one. There was much more of that back then, before Twitter swallowed blogging, before identity politics became completely nonnegotiable, before we degenerated into these tribal swarms of snark and loathing. I think of it now as a distant island, appearing now and then, as the waves go up and down. The riptide of tribalism can capture us all in the end, until we drown in it.

Indeed. Flashback to September of 2008, when the Atlantic ran a cover story headlined “Why War is His Answer – Inside the Mind of John McCain” by future Obama administration stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg and employed photographer Jill Greenberg who admitted:

When The Atlantic called Jill Greenberg, a committed Democrat, to shoot a portrait of John McCain for its October cover, she rubbed her hands with glee…..

After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”

What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.

Beyond the deliberately harshly lit cover photo, Greenberg would use one of her outtakes to Photoshop lipstick, fangs, and blood dripping from McCain’s mouth with the caption “I Am a Bloodthirsty Warmonger” above the altered shot.

Concurrently, Sullivan himself was busy, as PJM alumnnist Bryan Preston wrote, hounding Sarah Palin “to prove that her son, Trig, is in fact her son. There was and is no evidence that Trig Palin is not Sarah Palin’s son, but that never deterred our Utero-5-0 investigating agent, Andrew Sullivan. He pestered her for her medical records, speculated irresponsibly that Bristol Palin is actually Trig’s mother, and generally exposed himself as an ignorant buffoon on the subjects of women, child birth, life, the universe, and everything. (Useful summary and takedown here, written by Justin Elliott.)”

As Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard noted at the time, “The Atlantic Becomes a Laughingstock,” with a prophetic warning:

I find the prospect of The Atlantic devolving into some version of Free Republic or Daily Kos to be immensely worrisome. Hopefully David Bradley will do something to put his house in order. Soon.

In retrospect, that was a nice little mile marker on the road to Trump. Too bad the Atlantic didn’t heed Last’s warning; the Daily Kos is very much what the Atlantic devolved into, as witnessed by their distaff columnists’ hissy fit over Goldberg’s hiring of Kevin Williamson.

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Trump’s chaotic style is starting to make sense.

(Classical reference in headline.)

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What’s the Best New Car That Still Offers a Manual Transmission?

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ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING:

● Shot: How Kristen Stewart, Jane Fonda, and 80 Other Women Will Protest Cannes’s Astonishing Gender Gap. “On Saturday night, on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, 82 women intend to make a dramatic statement about how difficult it is to ascend professionally in the film industry.”

—Vanity Fair, today.

● Chaser:

Less than a week after the 9/11 attacks, Eugene Volokh made a really interesting observation:

If you’d asked Queen Victoria about the threats her society faced, she’d probably have worried aloud about a breakdown in sexual and other morality. Ask a Hollywood producer the same question, and he’ll cite the threat of sex-hating moralists. Every age seems to warn itself most sternly about the risks that are least likely to do it harm.

We live in the most non-patriarchal moment in all of American history, if not all of Western history, if not all of human history. And yet so profound is the need to fight this terrible foe that, across the landscape, Donna Quixotes are constantly tilting their lances at mirages of their own imaginations.

Why? Well, partly because that is what we teach them to do. Our institutions also reward it. Having a good service record in the war against patriarchy is a real comparative advantage when it comes time to apply for college.

But also: because it’s fun. I don’t mean “fun” the way one says that riding jet skis or playing Call of Duty is fun. I mean fun in the sense that the battle imbues the protagonists with meaning and fulfillment, a sense of adventure and the pride that comes with dedicating yourself to a noble quest. A quest gives people a reason to get out of bed, to make courageous stands, and to feel indispensable to a great cause.

—“Turning Windmills into Giants,” Jonah Goldberg in his weekly G-File column, yesterday.

● Hangover: “Protesting on a red carpet is actually too perfect of a visual metaphor for our current political moment,” as spotted by Twitchy in a post titled “‘Irony alert’! Jet-set celebs ‘protest gender inequity on red carpet in Cannes.’”

CORRECTION: The Slate item featured material which had misattributed a Stewart Baker quote to Eugene Volokh.