THE DARK NIGHT OF FASCISM IS ALWAYS DESCENDING UPON THE UNITED STATES, AND YET LANDS ONLY IN EUROPE:

Shot: Hillary: Circumstances of Trump’s America ‘more dangerous’ than Hitler’s Germany (VIDEO).

—Campus Reform, Wednesday.

Chaser: Did German anti-Semitism ever really go away? Jewish teenager who was menaced by racists flees the country — 80 years after his grandfather did the same to escape Nazis.

—The London Daily Mail, yesterday.

(Classical reference in headline.)

ELUSIVE VIRTUES: Read the whole damn thing.

Why do some parts of the world seem to defy efforts to achieve any degree of unity and peace? Not just for years or decades but for generations and as long as anyone can remember. The worst of these nations (like Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia) seem to actively avoid peace, prosperity and unity and finding solutions for their problems seems futile. But when you step back and take a closer look you find that all these countries have lots in common, aside from being “failed states.”

The answer? It’s KO, not a TKO.

I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN LEFTISTS DISAPPROVED OF WHITESPLAINING: Beto Tells Black Leaders They Need Protection ‘From their Own Country.’

OPEN THREAD: Yes, these open thread posts were scheduled before I left.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Media’s NXIVM Case Coverage — There’s No Such Thing as ‘Brainwashing.‘

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: Father’s Day Updated To ‘Toxic Masculinity Awareness Day.’

Note to Snopes: This is a headline from the Babylon Bee, so it’s satire — or is it?

ARE DISNEY AND NBCUNIVERSAL RISKING THE ALIENATION OF CONSERVATIVE TOURISTS?

As a former cast member at the Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park, the fact that Disney in particular is joining in the boycott is very disappointing, and CEO Bob Iger has put himself in an impossible position by saying it would be “very difficult to do business in Georgia,” mentioning that a lot of people who work for the company don’t like it.

It’s possible that he’s talking about the mainly left-wing executives at the company, including Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn. If that’s the case, so be it. But with all due respect to Iger (and I have a lot of it as a Disney shareholder and a longtime fan), he might want to think about alienating conservatives by caving into pressure from his Hollywood peers. It could be very bad for, not only the movie studio, but the theme parks as well with new themed areas based on the Star Wars franchise opening at Disneyland and Disney World this summer.

Visit Disneyland and Disneyworld while you can — there’s a good chance areas such as Liberty Square and Main Street USA will be radically transformed and/or airbrushed into oblivion in the coming decades.

Related: Walt Disney: American Dreamer (Video).

IN THE NEAR FUTURE, YOU COULD BE SEATED IN AN AIRPLANE’S WINGS. Why not? This is the 21st century you know, and the CAD/CAM mockup of a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines passenger flying wing atop this Week article looks pretty sharp.

Related: Fast days on the Concorde: Rock stars, wine & the ‘11-mile-high club.’

Like manned moon landings, it’s frustrating to think of supersonic passenger flight as something that only occurred in the past. Faster, please.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Snowflakes Triggered by Calorie Count Exam Question.

The un-PC exam question:

“There are 84 calories in 100g of banana. There are 87 calories in 100g of yogurt. Priti has 60g of banana and 150g of yogurt for breakfast. Work out the total number of calories in this breakfast”.

The correct answer is, “I’m triggered.”

At Oberlin, that’s the correct answer to every question on an exam.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

HOW CORY BOOKER’S DOT COM GET RICH QUICK SCHEME COST HIM 2020:

Cory Booker is polling at 2% in New Hampshire. Even in South Carolina, what ought to be his strongest state, his numbers dropped, cut in half, to 4%. His RCP average is equally miserable.

His fundraising lags behind all of the major candidates. And even one of the minor ones.

Waywire may help explain why.

Back in the day, Booker boasted of how easy it was to raise $1.75 million for Waywire because of the “power of the idea”. The idea however, like so much of digital publishing, was silly. The aspiring politician tapped into resources he would have needed now in the hopes of getting very rich.

Instead, he miscalculated. Badly.

Since then, the former darling of Silicon Valley has reinvented himself as an unconvincing critic of the industry. But every Booker reinvention is equally unconvincing. And nobody buys it anymore.

Tear into it like “Spartacus” unsealing some already cleared for release old Brett Kavanaugh documents, and read the whole thing.

EMBARRASSING LIBERALS: After making them superstars, the Gray Lady finally notices the fables of Naomi Wolf and Jared Diamond.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What is Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome?

The Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome is a disease common among Americans that is caused by arrogance, egotism and nonchalance. Carriers show a penchant for obliviously overlooking the obvious while delighting themselves at the cost of others. Delirious OTS sufferers refuse to acknowledge their malady and will argue that it is their God given right as an American to travel freely about the world with little or no conscience or consequence. OTS people frequently hide behind their Bill of Rights and Constitution. Unfortunately, there is no cure for OTS nor is there any way to ease it’s symptoms. It is a disease which, no matter how much hard data and facts are introduced into the OTS sufferer, will not ease unless said sufferer finds a compass of morality and humanity.

See also: The New Republic’s useful idiot tour. Why not take a trip to Raúl Castro’s Cuba?

‘To live in Havana’, Graham Greene once wrote, ‘was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor belt.’ To work as Cockburn does, as an underfed Grub Street hack, is to work in an industry that turns out pointless emails on a conveyor belt.

Every now and then though a real diamond rolls out of the coal chute. On Friday The New Republic invited its readers on a Caribbean jaunt – to Raúl Castro’s Cuba. Under the heading ‘Discover Cuba and Support the Cuban People’ the email read:

‘While Trump petulantly restricts travel to Cuba, The New Republic invites you to discover the culture, society and politics of the island, and most of all bolster the people of Cuba when they need it most.’

The people of Cuba – or at least the military caudillo and his thugs who keep people of Cuba garrisoned – have, incidentally, been busy ‘bolstering‘ the Maduro government in Venezuela.

And then afterwards, why not take the New York Times’ trip to Iran, to see the handiwork firsthand, of the mullahs?

Americans in Iran are generally regarded with a degree of skepticism, but not for the reason you might think. Iranians want to know what you’re doing in Iran, not because they suspect you of plotting a coup, but because they know American passport holders could spend their vacations anywhere else on earth (give or take a few tin-pot communist police states), and feel sorry for you. They are almost always friendly and eager to tell you there are no hard feelings. “Ninety percent of Iranians love America,” is a widely cited statistic, though it’s not clear if this is based on actual data. Eventually, this becomes rather eerie, as if everyone is reading off the same approved script.

Nazri, a student studying computer animation, offered the boldest riff on the “We love America” line, leaning in close to whisper “and Israel,” though I am not convinced this is a 90-10 issue. Moments later, a mullah in a black turban strolled by and leered in our direction. “Very dangerous,” Nazri said after he passed. “I f—king hate them.” Also, can I get him a job in California? Not everyone is so gracious toward Americans. A few (say 10 percent) of the locals, mostly older men, simply said, “Okay,” and sauntered away after I told them my nationality.

Talking to locals seems to always paint a slightly different picture of the country than the one we received from our guides on the bus. One day I stumbled upon a coffee shop run by Armenian Christians. The barista disagreed with Cyrus’s assessment that religious minorities were valued members of Iranian society, and could practice their faith openly without harassment. “No, it’s not good,” he told me. “If I could, I’d leave.”

Why is exactly what Otto Warmbier thought, when he discovered, the hard way, the limits of Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: D.C. Circuit: Black Law Professor Ostensibly Denied Tenure For Lack Of Scholarship May Sue D.C. Law School.

NO BIG DEAL, JUST A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE REFUSING TO SAY THE GOVERNMENT SHOULDN’T TAKE OVER MAJOR INDUSTRIES: “‘Fox News Sunday’ host Chris Wallace asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about a quote of his from the 1970s in which he says he favors public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries. Naturally, he obfuscated and refused to say he is against such a takeover.”

Given that as candidates, Obama in 2008 and Hillary in 2016 both gleefully discussed putting coal mines and their employees out of business — and received no pushback whatsoever from the DNC-MSM – “Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism,” as Kevin Williamson aptly described Sanders’ worldview in 2015, isn’t too far removed. It’s long been the stuff of Salon.com fantasies and more recently, AOC’s “Green Nude Eel,” of course.

X DAY: This is not a “what if” story’; Tokyo braces for the earthquake of a century.

CHRONIC CONFLICT IN THE GLOBAL WORLD: RIGHT AT YOUR DOORSTEP OR ON YOUR COMPUTER. “Fears that the Gulf of Oman will be the new Gulf of Tonkin are unlikely to come true.  It is much more probable that Iran’s decades long low-intensity war with the US will continue as usual.  Iran killed 600+ US troops during OIF, a fact downplayed by the previous administrations. But if that fact didn’t drive Trump to go openly kinetic, a few more attacks on third country tankers are unlikely to.”

GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERSECTIONALITY: “Queerness is incompatible with capitalism.”

Historically, it’s always been infinitely more incompatible with totalitarian socialism (and/or vice-versa), but forget it, he’s rolling.

JOYOUS NEWS FROM THE NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL: “The historic Notre Dame cathedral will see its first Mass celebrated since almost being destroyed in a fire on April 15th of this year…The Mass will be celebrated by the Archbishop of Paris for a small group of twenty people or so, all of whom will be required to wear hard hats while in the damaged church.”

Photos here: Priests in hard hats hold first mass in Notre Dame Cathedral two months after devastating fire.

AT AMAZON, deals in Collectibles & Fine Art.

JOEL KOTKIN ASKS: What is social justice?

The deepest blue cities — San Francisco, New York, San Jose, Los Angeles and Boston — may be ruled by social justice activists but, according to Pew research, suffer the largest gaps between the bottom and top quintiles. Long-standing minority communities like Albina in Portland are disappearing as 10,000 of the 38,000 residents have been pushed out of the historic African-American section. San Francisco’s African-American black population is roughly half that of the 1970s, constituting less than 5 percent of the city’s population. More than half of the Bay Area’s lower-income communities, notes a recent UC Berkeley study, are in danger of mass displacement.

A direct result of climate policies, high energy prices place enormous burdens on California’s working-class families, particularly in the less temperate interior. These policies also discourage growth of manufacturing and other blue-collar industries that long incubated opportunities for working people. As the state’s manufacturing sector has stagnated last year while industrial jobs expanded 14 percent in neighboring Arizona, 5 percent in Nevada and by 3 percent in arch-rival Texas.

Regulations in California have also slowed construction growth, and left employment considerably below the industry’s 2007 numbers. Residential sales have dropped statewide, and California’s rate of new housing permits has fallen behind the national average, making construction workers’ economic prospects even dimmer.

The diminishing prospects in these blue collar industries, as well as high housing costs, may do much to explain why so many minorities, and immigrants, are increasingly migrating away from multi-culturally correct regions like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco for less regulated, far less woke places like Phoenix, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Atlanta and Las Vegas.

Billionaire GOP contributors and libertarian-types like the Koch Brothers really need to get going on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon idea.

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF YOUTH: Andrew Ferguson on the “Tyranny of the 70-Somethings — The Democratic Party’s gerontocracy is holding back the political causes it claims to want to advance.”

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Former Democrat turned conservative gay rights activist slams Pride, sues LGBT Center.

According to a complaint filed Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court and exclusively obtained by The Post, the LGBT Center in Greenwich Village discriminated against Straka by canceling his 250-person WalkAway event “LGBT TownHall” in March, days before it was scheduled to take place.

The event was to feature Straka and a panel of two gay men and a transgender woman talking about why they left the Democratic Party.

“I’m considered a traitor. [The community] wanted to silence me, they wanted to roll over me and make me disappear,” said Straka, who is seeking $20 million in damages.

Read the whole thing.

(Classical reference in headline.)