ANDREW SULLIVAN: America: The Land Of Brutal Binaries.

After a while, the crudest trigger points of tribalism — your race, your religion (or lack of it), your gender, your sexual orientation — dominate the public space. As Claire Lehmann, the founding editor of the refreshingly heterodox new website Quillette has put it, “the Woke Left has a moral hierarchy with white men at the bottom. The Alt-Right has a moral hierarchy that puts white men at the top.” The looming midterms will not be about health care or executive power or constitutional norms (although all these things will be at stake). They will primarily be about which tribe you are in, and these tribes are increasingly sorted racially and by gender. The parties are currently doing all they can to maximize these tribal conflicts as a way to seek power. This isn’t liberal democracy.

Yep. This sort of thing used to be regarded as wrong by both parties, but that changed 50 years ago.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Tulane mandates new students take “Race and Inclusion” course.

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BELIEVE ALL WOMEN: Keith Ellison says his accuser fabricated domestic violence abuse story, can’t be sure others won’t ‘cook up’ allegations.

Related: Keith Ellison pounded about abuse at debate. Watch him blame accusers, say women can make things up!

He’s co-chair of the Democratic Party. They’re allegedly investigating him, but they’re slow-walking it past the election:

The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party said a month ago it would investigate after a former girlfriend accused Mr. Ellison of emotional and physical abuse, but since then the party has said nothing as the probe fades largely from view.

That’s undoubtedly by design, said Larry Jacobs, professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, who characterized the investigation as an exercise in damage control aimed at providing the party with political cover if more allegations erupt.

“I think of this not as an investigation to uncover facts and make a public release that would hurt the Democratic Party before the election,” Mr. Jacobs said. “That’s not what this is. This is closer to political insurance in case there are revelations that become a kind of October surprise for Ellison and then hurt the entire DFL ticket.”

Karen Monahan, the Sierra Club organizer who levied the abuse allegations Aug. 12, weighed in Friday by accusing state Democrats, including DFL chairman Ken Martin, of working behind the scenes to squelch support for her.

“It is not democratic for @kenmartin73 & others from the @MinnesotaDFL to call people and tell them to stop showing support for justice and truth in this case or threaten to take away contracts and resources if they show support,” she said on Twitter.

That’s different because shut up.

SHAMEFUL CIRCUS: SIREN: Senate Judiciary Committee announces Monday vote for Brett Kavanaugh; UPDATE: Sen. Grassley grants Dr. Ford another extension.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student editor who retweeted article pointing out that that ‘women don’t have penises’ is fired from university journal.

CHANGE: Iceland’s proposed ban on circumcision rattles Jews, Muslims. “It’s like they’re closing doors for Jews and Muslims, that they’re not welcome in Iceland.”

JAVELIN DUET: Marines with Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, fire two FGM-148 Javelin Missiles in a volley fire exercise. The photo was taken in Michigan. Here’s a Javelin “demonstration” in another locale: Syria.

OF COURSE SHE DID.  STANDARDS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE:  Mazie Hirono Took Money From Democrat Who Admitted to Hitting Wife.

BELIEVE ALL WOMEN: Michigan woman who lied about being raped on college campus sentenced to jail.

ROBBY SOAVE: From ‘Believe All Victims’ to ‘Who Cares If It’s True,’ the Brett Kavanaugh Accusation Has Produced Shameful Certainty.

PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF. Incorrect diagnoses responsible for 80,000 deaths per year.

WELL: Yale Study: There Are Probably Twice As Many Illegal Immigrants Living In America As Commonly Believed.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIALIZES: The Presumption of Guilt: The new liberal standard turns American due process upside down.

The last-minute accusation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is an ugly spectacle by any measure. But if there is a silver lining, it is that the episode is providing an education for Americans on the new liberal standard of legal and political due process.

As Ms. Hill and Sen. Hirono aver, the Democratic standard for sexual-assault allegations is that they should be accepted as true merely for having been made. The accuser is assumed to be telling the truth because the accuser is a woman. The burden is on Mr. Kavanaugh to prove his innocence. If he cannot do so, then he is unfit to serve on the Court.

***
This turns American justice and due process upside down. The core tenet of Anglo-American law is that the burden of proof always rests with the person making the accusation. An accuser can’t doom someone’s freedom or career merely by making a charge.

The accuser has to prove the allegation in a court of law or in some other venue where the accused can challenge the facts. Otherwise we have a Jacobin system of justice in which “J’accuse” becomes the standard and anyone can be ruined on a whim or a vendetta.

Another core tenet of due process is that an accusation isn’t any more or less credible because of the gender, race, religion or ethnicity of who makes it. A woman can lie, as the Duke lacrosse players will tell you. Ms. Hirono’s standard of credibility by gender would have appalled the civil-rights campaigners of a half century ago who marched in part against Southern courts that treated the testimony of black Americans as inherently less credible than that of whites. Yet now the liberal heirs of those marchers want to impose a double standard of credibility by gender.

A third tenet of due process is the right to cross-examine an accuser. The point is to test an accuser’s facts and credibility, which is why we have an adversarial system. The denial of cross-examination is a major reason that campus panels adjudicating sexual-assault claims have become kangaroo courts.

Well, to be fair, this “standard” will be flipped 180 degrees as soon as Democrats think it’s in their advantage to do so.

YOU WILL NEVER FIND A MORE WRETCHED HIVE OF SCUM AND VILLAINY: Accused Sexual Harassers Thrived Under NBC News Chief Andy Lack.

MICHAEL FARADAY, THE FATHER OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, WAS BORN 227 YEARS AGO TODAY: He was the son of a blacksmith and received only a basic formal education. But at the age of 14, he was lucky enough to apprentice to a kindly bookbinder and bookseller. Reading the books in his master’s shop was an eye-opening experience for him. In that way, he educated himself.

At the age of 20, Faraday impressed Britain’s then-leading scientist/inventor, Humphry Davy, who hired him as his scientific assistant. But there was a small catch: In addition to his scientific duties, Faraday was assigned to act as Davy’s valet while Davy and his wife were on an extended tour of Europe. This would have been a somewhat unusual arrangement. Scientific assistants were ordinarily well-educated and hence well-treated. But Davy’s wife was keen on keeping the low-born Faraday in his place. She saw to it that he would eat and sleep with the servants.

Still, that didn’t stop him from being one of the most consequential men of his generation—surpassing even Davy himself. Faraday’s experiments with electromagnetism and electrochemistry were groundbreaking. It was through his painstaking efforts that electricity became a practical source of energy that could fuel the new technologies that mushroomed around it.

As his fame grew, Faraday was called upon to give public lectures at which he tried his best to convey that beauty of the natural world as he saw it. “I am no poet,” his lecture notes read, “but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your mind.”

The poets of the day–like Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of The Necessity of Atheism—were sometimes atheists. Many were convinced that the natural world as it was being revealed by scientists like Faraday was inconsistent with a belief in God. But Faraday himself saw no such inconsistency. He was a devout Christian—specifically a Sandemanian. On his deathbed, he was asked, “Have you ever pondered by yourself what will be your occupation in the next world?” His last words: “I shall be with Christ, and that is enough.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The New Color Line At The University Of Texas.

Civil rights leaders once dreamed of a day when Americans would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, but today a different message is being spread at the University of Texas and other college campuses. “Diversity” means singling out certain races for special treatment.

UT’s extensive diversity bureaucracy effectively creates a separate education experience for “students of color,” with programs like the African American Male Research Initiative, the Black Student Leadership Institute, the Black Male Education Research Collection, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and the African & African Diaspora Studies Department. . . .

Higher education, integrated even in the Jim Crow south with the support of federal troops in 1963, is returning to racial separation. Some colleges have separate dorms—designated “safe spaces”—for black students. At the University of Texas–which the Supreme Court forced to desegregate in 1950, prior to Brown—colorblindness is being replaced with racial division. The mind-bending irony is that this return to the odious color line is being led by African-American students and academics in the name of diversity!

In the interest of promoting solidarity, UT offers black students a separate lounge area on campus in which to congregate, study, and socialize. The lounge, which serves as a hub for UT’s black community, is, appropriately, named after black separatist Malcolm X. UT’s Multicultural Engagement Center, a student resource office within the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, hosts a number of black-only events, including a separate graduation ceremony (dubbed Black Graduation), described as “an annual program that gives graduates the chance to commemorate and cherish all the accomplishments, memories, and challenges throughout their college years. Furthermore, it is an occasion for parents and families of graduates to meet with Black faculty and staff to gain a greater insight on the journey of their students.”

The MEC was founded in 1988 in response to the anti-apartheid movement at UT. To protest South Africa’s discriminatory racial policies, black students at UT incongruously insisted on their own center to “centralize academic, social and financial information for African American and Hispanic students.” Promoting diversity, it turns out, requires treating students differently on the basis of race and ethnicity: “The MEC continues to serve as a resource for students of color at The University of Texas at Austin as well as empowers them to be the agents of social change.”

Sigh.

ROGER KIMBALL: After Kavanaugh, A Way to Take the Spectacle Out of Confirmations.

After Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed, I hope that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his colleagues will take the opportunity to revise the way the confirmation process proceeds. Henceforth, the candidate should meet in private with senators over the course of a few weeks. Then the Judiciary Committee should vote on whether the candidate should be put forward for a vote of the Senate. Then the Senate should vote. No public hearings. “Advice and consent” does not mean “attempted public execution.” In this sense, if the public revulsion against the intended destruction of Brett Kavanaugh fails, Dianne Feinstein and the pathetic Christine Ford may have done an inadvertent public service. I am not sure that they would then deserve our thanks, though (should this reform come about) the consequences of their actions would certainly merit our gratitude.

The origin of Supreme Court confirmation hearings is in anti-semites’ opposition to the confirmation of Justice Brandeis; it’s not a glorious tradition.

AND SINCE WE ARE SPEAKING OF CRAZY:  Bob Woodward’s “Fire” is more like smoke and fractured mirrors by Amanda S. Green.

CHANGE THE LOCKS, THROW HER STUFF OFF THE BALCONY GET A RESTRAINING ORDER AND LET’S MOVE ON WITH LIFE, PEOPLE:  It’s like having an argument with your crazy girlfriend: the latest from Ford.  She is a sad, pathetic human being, who needs to just go away. Most people should get over these crazy games in elementary school.

ROBERT FRANCIS O’ROURKE (WHAT IS THIS BETO THING, PALE MAN? BOBBY, MAYBE.) SHOULD JUST TAKE CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD AND GO HOME. WE’VE HEARD QUITE ENOUGH CRAZY FROM BOTH OF THEM:  Ted Cruz Challenger Beto O’Rourke Calls Police Officers “The New Jim Crow”.

GOOD:  President Trump Weighs In.

THESE ARE THE CRAZY YEARS:  Deep State Outed by . . . The NY Times?!?!