THE MORE YOU KNOW: Reporter Discovers That Background Checks Work When Denied A Firearms Purchase At Walmart.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Real Reason Elites Behave Hypocritically On Climate Change Is Because They Want To.

Some people chalk up such hypocrisy to ignorance. “They turn up with unnecessary entourages in helicopters or fast cars and then preach about saving the world,” complained an insider. “They just don’t seem to be aware that they’re the ones burning huge amounts of fossil fuels.”

But it’s inconceivable that the celebrities don’t know they are behaving hypocritically. It’s common knowledge that flying by jet results in significant carbon emissions. If it weren’t, then Harry and Meghan wouldn’t have triggered such an intense reaction.

Indeed, they implicitly acknowledged their hypocrisy. Elton John bought carbon offsets to supposedly cancel out Harry and Meghan’s emissions, while a spokesperson for Thunberg acknowledged, “It would have been less greenhouse gas emissions if we had not made this departure.”

A simpler explanation for the hypocrisy of celebrities who moralize about climate change is that it is a way of flaunting their special status.

Hypocrisy is the ultimate power move. It is a way of demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules from the ones adhered to by common people. Hypocrisy demonstrates how unaccountable one is to conventional morality.

Such displays work because, unlike wealth, status is inherently subjective. The more of it you are perceived to have, the more of it you actually have.

To be sure, the Duke, the Duchess, and Thunberg didn’t consciously decide to flaunt their status. But neither did Harry and Meghan pledge to never fly private again nor did Thunberg cancel her trip.

And it is a mistake to imagine that human behavior is mostly conscious. Much of human behavior is unconscious and driven by an innate urge for power, of which status is one (highly-social) form.

This also dovetails with James Delingpole’s “Drawbridge Effect:” “You’ve made your money. Now the very last thing you want is for all those trashy middle class people below you to have a fair shot at getting as rich as you are. That’s why you want to make energy more expensive by opposing Keystone XL; why you’re all for environmental land sequestration (because you already own your exclusive country property); and Agenda 21 – which will make all Americans poorer, but you not so much, because you’ve enough cash to cushion you from the higher taxes and regulation with which the greenies want to hamstring the economy.”

IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Stardust found in Antarctic snow, scientists say.

MASCOTS OF THE ANOINTED: Why is Jessica Yaniv still on Twitter and not in jail?

(Classical reference in headline.)

I’M GLAD TO SEE PRESIDENT TRUMP SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE SHAMEFUL HATRED AND BIGOTRY THAT INFEST TODAY’S NEWS MEDIA: White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham ‘Disgusted’ by Antisemitism from New York Times Editor.

HE WHO IS WITHOUT ZINN: Review of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story By Wilfred M. McClay.

There have always been rancorous debates among historians, and schools of history are often tinctured by dogma. But our current predicament is, to some degree, unprecedented. What we might call the pathological view of the United States—American history as a chronicle of injustice, oppression, inequality, violence, and little else—is firmly established in the academy and insulated against institutional dissent by the custom of tenure and the folkways of academic publishing. To make matters worse, one of the seminal texts of contemporary doctrine—Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States (1980)—is also one of the few academic bestsellers of our time.

So McClay has his work cut out for him. Does he succeed? Well, he begins at the beginning—the archaeological evidence of our aboriginal inhabitants—and like most American histories, McClay’s tends to pass a little quickly over the first century-and-a-half of European settlement. But this is a minor complaint. His description of America on the eve of revolution is perceptive and succinct, and capacious as well. The reader never doubts the author’s perspective on the colonists’ revolt, or British government in America, but he tells the story with illuminating clarity and, above all, fair-mindedness. The answer to ignorance is not indoctrination but knowledge.

This virtue in the writing of history is not necessarily self-evident. The American Revolution, like any such episode, was a complicated matter, reaching back in history and forward in effect; and both sides—one is tempted to say all sides—were benighted and heroic, generous and arbitrary, products of their various places and time. George Washington was not without his flaws, and the Loyalists were not without their reasons. McClay sets all this out in crisp detail, balancing his judgment in conjunction with the evidence, flattering his readers to draw their own conclusions.

Read the whole thing, and then, as Glenn quipped this morning regarding a related book, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America., “Send a copy to the folks at the New York Times.”

SECOND WORLD PROBLEMS: China Has A Great MMA Fighter. Problem: The Communist Government Hates Him.

TO WHAT END? SERIOUSLY, TO WHAT END? Radio host, former Illinois U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh says he’s weighing bid to challenge President Donald Trump for 2020 GOP nomination.

HATE CRIMES:  The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights just voted to adopt a mammoth report on hate crimes that liberally cites the Southern Poverty Law Center.  I voted against it for several reasons.  One of those reasons is that the federal hates crimes statute, which purports, in part, to be an exercise of Congress’s authority to ban slavery, is unconstitutional, as explained here.

CALIFORNIA’S WAR ON CARS: Add a congestion “crisis” to the list of other California crises, but the state government hasn’t been building roads and simply wants to punish us for getting around.

This is how government works, and how California’s government works the most. They provide crummy public services. Instead of fixing the problems of their own making, officials spend their time punishing us for relying on private alternatives. California lawmakers couldn’t fix the congestion situation even if that were their goal. Worse yet, they use their own failings to justify their real goal: getting us out of our cars and into their lousy transit systems. They won’t succeed, but they have an infinite capacity to make us miserable in the process.

Read the whole thing.

DON’T GET COCKY: GOP Smashes Another Fundraising Record in July.

UH HUH: Facebook Bans ‘Women For Trump’ Ads.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why You Need To Be Planking On Your Side.

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals – Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Products.

Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

FOR THE RECORD: ‘I AM NOT SUICIDAL,’ Says Man Who Exposed Hillary’s Ties to Google.

THIS HEADLINE CONTAINS ONE ADJECTIVE TOO MANY: Rising Warren faces uphill climb with black voters.

YOU’RE MORE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR KIDS THAN EVER, BUT WITH LESS AUTHORITY OVER THEM THAN EVER: States are finding ways for teens to get HPV shots without parental consent.

THEY’LL DO ONE ON MATT LAUER NEXT, RIGHT? RIGHT? Lionsgate Drops ‘Bombshell’ Trailer: Margot Robbie, Charlize Theron & Nicole Kidman Take On Roger Ailes.

FLASHBACK: Remembering Frankie Housley, Heroine and Stewardess.

GOOD: U.S. Clears Sale of F-16 Jets to Taiwan. “Export valued at $8 billion and is first major warplane deal since 1990s.”

These are top-of-the-line Block 70 models, the most-capable version of the F-16 currently available, and a huge step up from the aging F-16A/B Block 20 planes Taiwan currently flies.

SOUTH CHINA SEA: Has Beijing Given Up Fortifying Its Illegal Islands?

More than a century before France built the ill-fated Maginot Line, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly was presented with a similar fortification plan, and his response (perhaps apocryphal) was, “What are you trying to defend me against, smugglers?” American General George S. Patton is on the record saying, “Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity.” More broadly, from the SWAT team preparing to bring in a criminal holed up in a bank, to a bunker-buster bomb crippling the best-engineered underground fortress, if there’s one thing governments know how to do, it’s how to bring overwhelming force down on a known location.

That’s been my line of thinking while most everyone else has been fretting about China’s unprecedented fortification of the South China Sea (SCS) — and now it seems that even Beijing has caught on to their error.

Read the whole thing, if you don’t mind me saying so myself.

THE JOYS OF BUYING YOUR OWN FIGHTER JET. A colleague of mine looked into buying a surplus Mig-17 but basically concluded that despite the low purchase price it would be a money pit.

NOT SO FAST! NYT Sr. Staff Editor Thomas Wright-Piersanti deletes anti-Semitic and racist tweets after being outed (we got ’em!).

More here: ‘Crappy Jew Year’: New York Times Editor’s Antisemitism, Racism Exposed.

Between Wright-Piersanti and Sarah Jeong’s racism, no wonder the Times recently embarked on its “1619 Project” — it’s pure projectionism. Or as Andrew Sullivan, astonishingly enough, wrote last year, “I don’t think the New York Times should fire [Jeong] — in part because they largely share her views on race, gender, and oppression. Their entire hiring and editorial process is based on them.”