DAVID SOLWAY: Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures: Part 1.

As many observers have noted, America is now embroiled in a de facto civil war in which the nation is being relentlessly attacked and disassembled from within, not by the conservative Right, as The New Yorker and other progressivist outlets irresponsibly lament, but by the domestic Left.

Reputable commentators like Kevin Williamson at National Review and John Podhoretz for the New York Post believe the nation is descending into chaos — and place the onus squarely on the Left. In a prescient article for PJ Media about the potential result of a political coup orchestrated by the Left under the guise of the faux Mueller investigation, Roger Simon writes: “That word sounds hyperbolic but it isn’t. We could see anything from civil war to social atrophy. Who knows if our country will survive it?” (As one commenter worries, “we are in some very real danger the next time a Democrat gets elected to the highest office” — no paranoiac hypothesis.)

It is a state of affairs that, in its insidious way, is no less critical than the bloody civil war that split the nation in the 1860s.

Read the whole thing. I’m looking forward to Part 2.

HEH: The Ben Rhodes Clip Has “Downfall” Potential.

DESTROYING A CAREER OUT OF SPITE, WITH TITLE IX: Triple Jeopardy in College Sexual Assault Case Ends an N.F.L. Career: Keith Mumphery was twice cleared of an alleged sexual assault. Then he was tried a third time, without even knowing it. And then his life collapsed.

Note that this was at Michigan State, which was simultaneously covering up hundreds of sexual assaults by its own Dr. Nassar.

FAKE NEWS: Staff Emails Undermine Congressman’s Claim of Being ‘Blocked’ From EPA Summit. “Rep. Kildee alleged in television appearances and op-ed the EPA restricted access to summit.”

Kildee’s claims, which he repeated in television appearances over the weekend and in an op-ed published in the Detroit Free Press, don’t hold up to scrutiny, according to official documents and email correspondence obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The documents show Jordan Dickinson, a senior legislative assistance handing energy and environmental issues in Kildee’s office, reached out to the EPA on Friday, May 18 about attending. Though the request came four days after the deadline to register for the summit had passed—and nearly two months to-the-day after the event was announced—the EPA told Dickinson they were “optimistic” about there being enough space to accommodate him last-minute.

In a follow-up email confirming Dickinson’s attendance, the EPA told the staffer that Wednesday’s portion of the summit was “limited to federal agency folks” and individuals representing state and territorial governments. Furthermore, the draft agenda that Dickinson was sent, along with information about the event’s logistics and security, denoted the first day of the summit was open to “all invited guests” while the second day was confined to state and federal agencies partnering with the EPA.

At no point throughout the email exchange did Dickinson indicate the congressman or other staff members were interested in attending the summit as well. In his initial email, Dickinson only clarified he wanted to attend because “we have some people in town from Michigan who are attending and also this is a top priority for my boss.”

Kildee, who has served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2013, does not serve on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce or the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the two committees with the most extensive congressional jurisdiction over the EPA.

On Tuesday, EPA Associate Administrator Troy Lyons penned a letter, obtained by the Free Beacon, to Kildee in response to his allegation. Lyons disputed the assertions that Kildee and his staff made in having “mischaracterized the events that took place” in order to score political points.

The long knives have been out for Scott Pruitt for a long time.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Diversity Policies Are Corrupting the Sciences. “Anyone who believes that the hard sciences could never capitulate to identity politics in the way the humanities and softer sciences have should not read Heather MacDonald’s report just posted at City Journal. It’s too infuriating, and the impacts could be devastating. MacDonald surveys the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and accrediting organizations such as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and finds the quota police alive and well within them.”

#METOO: The Military Still Wants a Belly Gun for the V-22 Osprey.

SCIENCE: Your Next Glass of Wine Might Be a Fake — And You’ll Love It.

The breakthrough started with baby food. In 2012, Hicks was about to become a father. He started wondering what, exactly, was in the organic, premium-priced products that he and his wife were planning to feed their newborn, so he sent samples off for laboratory analysis. “If you know Kevin,” Walker says, “you understand that that’s just totally something he would do.” When the bills—as much as $1,500 for a single sample—started to add up, Hicks created a lab of his own, which he dubbed Ellipse Analytics. He had a bigger plan. He invested several million dollars in equipment and hired a team of scientists and technicians and before long, Ellipse had enticed paying clients to commission chemical breakdowns of entire consumer categories, like protein powders and sunscreens. Walker saw the potential for wine, and he pushed Hicks to use his technology for their own business.

Like anything else, wine is a combination of chemicals. Ellipse can test for some 500 different attributes and measure the results at the parts-per-billion level. Hidden in that data, Walker realized, were the precise combinations of esters and acids and proteins and anthocyanins and other polyphenols that make a wine taste creamy or flinty, or give it aromas of blueberries or vanilla or old leather—the chemical compositions of America’s most popular wines. Walker also knew that most wine gets a boost from additives such as Mega Purple (for color), oak extract (for tannins and flavoring), and similar chemistry-set concoctions. Using cheap surplus wines readily available on the bulk market and blending in natural additives, he thought, it might be possible to make some pretty convincing copies of popular premium wines.

In 2015, Walker and Hicks started Integrated Beverage Group and set out to duplicate wines that they knew Americans already liked. They planned to do this in plain sight, naming their brand Replica and urging consumers to compare their products with well-known names that usually cost as much as double the price. It didn’t take long before they realized that, in most cases, even professional critics couldn’t distinguish their facsimiles from the originals.

Bring it on.

UNDOING WHAT WAS PRETTY CLEARLY A POLITICAL PROSECUTION: Trump to give ‘full pardon’ to Dinesh D’Souza.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Conservative prof claims he was fired over political beliefs.

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DOWN WITH COMMIE DICTATORS: Nicaraguans block roads across country, want Ortega out.

Quoth one protester: “He’s no longer a Sandinista. He’s an Ortegista.” Well, that’s how it always turns out.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: McCabe’s Secret Letter About Comey Firing and Much, Much More. “Here’s a fun fact: if Trump is being investigated for obstructing justice by firing Comey, guess who is also under some legal scrutiny? Mr. Rosenstein. He should recuse himself but he won’t because the laws only apply to certain people these days.”

CRAZY, RIGHT? USA Today: For Supreme Court’s conservatives, it’s all about the letter of the law.

SUPER SEA STALLION GETS READY TO LIFT: Somewhere in the Fifth Fleet area of operations.

CAMOUFLAGED IN SILK: China’s Belt and Road Initiative — more imperialism with Chinese Communist characteristics. My latest Creators Syndicate column.

ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Liberal PAC Urges Donors To ‘Take Out’ Republican Congressman Who Survived Being Shot Last Year.

CNN analyst Chris Cillizza deletes tweet showing Trump in crosshairs.

Related: How a Bernie Bro Nearly Committed the Biggest Political Killing In American History.

Plus, earlier:

• “Democrats should fight dirty, play dirty, beg, borrow, steal, do whatever it takes. ‘When they go low, we go high’ doesn’t work. Playing nice got us to this point with President Trump,” the New York Times tweets.
• NBC’S Rachel Maddow Show Sparked FBI Investigation Into Death Threats Against Mcconnell, Pruitt.
• Rand Paul: Recovery after attack ‘was a living hell.’
• Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
• FCC Chairman Ajit Pai canceled his appearance at CES because of death threats.
• Terry McAuliffe says he’d punch Trump: ‘You’d have to pick him up off the floor.’

FROM JOHN HINDERAKER, the latest on Tommy Robinson. ” Police officers descended on Robinson, arrested him on ‘suspicion of breaching the peace,’ and hauled him off to court. Within a matter of hours he had been imprisoned for contempt of court. Not only that, the court issued an order barring all UK press outlets from reporting on Robinson’s arrest and imprisonment. If that doesn’t bother you, your civil libertarian instincts have atrophied. Yet it appears that only conservatives are troubled by Robinson’s incarceration; the world’s establishment has closed ranks against him.”

The establishment’s single great fear is the rise of “Militant Normals.”

A GOOD START: At least 50 Taliban leaders die in HIMARS strike in Afghanistan, US says.

Lt. Col. Martin O’Donnell, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, said a weapon system known as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, which is capable of firing GPS-guided rockets, destroyed a command-and-control position that was a known meeting place for high-level Taliban leaders. He said at least 50 leaders were killed.

Additional, unspecified numbers of Taliban officials were killed in U.S. airstrikes over a recent 10-day period, the spokesman said.

If it was so well-known, why did we not hit it like this before?

CHANGE: Trump tax cuts spark more reductions in 13 states. “The Trump tax cuts, which prompted hundreds of companies to dole out $2,000 bonuses and wage hikes, have also prompted several states to proposed reduced taxes, according to a sweeping review of the nation. About a quarter of all governors have proposed tax cuts, said a new analysis of the 47 “State of the State” addresses in 47 states.”

WHEN REAGAN MET LENIN: Three decades ago an American president issued a cry for freedom at Moscow State University.

Twenty eighteen has been full of backward glances. The most frequent subject has been that singular year 1968, fulcrum and focal point of everything we sum up in that dread phrase “the ’60s.”

A less depressing prospect is on view if we travel back not 50 but 30 years, to May 31, 1988, when Ronald Reagan, in the last year of his presidency, delivered one of his most magnificent speeches. At the end of his first inaugural address, Lincoln famously spoke of the “mystic chords of memory” that, beckoning toward truths that transcend party differences, recall us to the “better angels of our nature.” Reagan did something similar in his speech before a packed auditorium of students at Moscow State University.

It was the last day of his fourth and final summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. They had first met on neutral ground, in Geneva, in 1985, and the next year in Reykjavik, Iceland. A Washington summit followed in 1987. Now Reagan had traveled to the Soviet capital. The ostensible purpose of all these meetings was to work out arms-control agreements, and the two had made significant progress. In Washington, they had signed a pact to eliminate a whole class of intermediate-range nuclear missiles. They had also laid the groundwork for the future reductions that would come with the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

But Reagan never regarded his meetings with Mr. Gorbachev as pertaining solely to arms control. Arms control was merely the pretext for a more fundamental challenge. This is the deep point of Bret Baier’s forceful new book, “Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire.” Mr. Baier traces the arduous evolution of Reagan’s diplomatic efforts with the Soviet Union, from before his famous “evil empire” speech in 1983 through that final summit in Moscow and beyond. If the theme is diplomacy, the underlying purpose is liberty.

In 1977, noting to a friend that “a lot of very complex things are very simple if you think them through,” Reagan crisply summed up his theory of the Cold War: “We win, they lose.” He never lost sight of that conviction. Nor did he waver in his understanding that weakness is an invitation to conflict. He did, however, understand that victory would belong in the end not to one nation over another, but to one political-moral idea over another. Freedom must triumph over totalitarianism.

Indeed.

LIFE AFTER AMAZON: I just ordered from Walmart.com, and it felt Amaz-ing.

“IF [THE TOMMY ROBINSON CASE] DOESN’T BOTHER YOU, YOUR CIVIL LIBERTARIAN INSTINCTS HAVE ATROPHIED”: And yet the media seem to think that only “right wingers” care. If they are right, we are doomed, doomed, doomed. Alas, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong.

SENATE SEATS CAN BE HERITABLE: Arizona governor huddles with John and Cindy McCain.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Turkish Currency Slide Poses a Political Challenge to Erdogan. “The lira’s recent drop has some voters questioning the long-dominant leader’s handling of the economy.”

Turkish households have been on the front row of the lira’s slide. Their eroding spending power is on display at gas stations, in particular, because Turkey imports most of its fossil fuel.

“I’m filling only half of my tank,” said 40-year-old Funda Sevinc, as she parked at a service station in Istanbul on Tuesday. “And we are going out less on the weekends.”

Many economists say Turkey must signal it is committed to prodding the lira, or risk being hit by an exodus of foreign investors. But the president, who survived a military coup attempt in 2016 and has a strong base of support among small businessmen and middle-income workers, says he is opposed to high interest rates because they slow down investment. Instead, Mr. Erdogan has urged Turkish people “who have euros and dollars under their pillows” to support the national currency by buying lira.

Hoarders and wreckers gotta hoard and wreck.