P.J. O’ROURKE: It’s time to make rich people uncomfortable again.

Being rich looked very uncomfortable. Rich people’s clothes were stiff and starchy, and they wore lots of them. Rich men were choked by tall collars and pinched by high-button shoes. Rich women were corseted to the point of kidney failure, constrained in so much crinoline and brocade that they might as well have been wearing off-the-shoulder burqas, and encumbered by bustles large enough that they couldn’t turn sideways without knocking over a footman and the parlor maid.

Now we have Jeff Bezos in a New Kids on the Block bomber jacket, Bill Gates outfitted in Mister Rogers’s sweaters and Gloria Steinem’s old aviators and cutting his own hair, Elon Musk smoking pot on a live internet show, and Richard Branson looking like the guy at the end of the bar muttering lines from “The Big Lebowski.” That’s not counting the various plutocrats caught in Us and Star magazines wearing nothing much at all.

If rich people start getting any more comfortable, police will be shooing them off park benches.

Rich people are also having fun — launching their own rocket ships, sending lewd selfies, buying private islands (Manhattan, for example). Having fun was something rich people didn’t used to do, at least not as far as we poor people could tell.

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

BABYLON BEE:  “Demanding to Know Why He Allowed President Trump to Get Elected, Dems Subpoena God.”

PAULA BOLYARD: Is the Swamp Trying to Sneak an Anti-Catholic Bigot onto the Federal Bench? Sen. Josh Hawley Has Some Questions.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: The New German Anti-Semitism.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T WORKING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: What To Expect During An Ayahuasca Ceremony.

(Via Ricochet’s GLoP podcast.)

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Democrats overruled voters to impose affirmative action. But the GOP joined them to kill ‘exit exams.’

FLASHBACK: Ana Navarro Compares Stormy Daniels’ Lawyer to the Holy Spirit.

“Lately, to me, you’re like the Holy Spirit. You are all places at all times. Right. I mean, I do — I see you all over cable news, I see — there’s a seat available if you want to be a co-host at ‘The View.’ There’s people here you can pitch. He’d be a great lady around the table” Navarro ranted.

“[Avenatti] has a bigger calling here. Being a lawyer is minimal compared to what he’s doing,” Joy Behar said.

Navarro interrupted, “The priesthood?”

Behar continued, “He’s out there saving the country.”

That was maybe not entirely accurate.

IT’S TIRED OLD MATERIAL: Award show surprise! Boos meet De Niro’s anti-Trump tirade.

JUDGE ORDERS ANTIFA ACTIVIST TO PAY $22,000 IN LEGAL FEES TO CONSERVATIVE JUDICIAL WATCH.

PRIVACY: The future of AT&T is an ad-tracking nightmare hellworld.

SO IT’S WORKING AS PLANNED: STUDY: White liberals’ sympathy for poor whites DECREASES after white privilege lessons, sympathy for blacks stays same.

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EMOLUMENTS: General George Washington and the Bank of England.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Nopes Out of Chuck & Nancy Meeting, Nadler’s Booster Seat Inside. “So Speaker of the House Pelosi talks to the press before her scheduled meeting with President Trump on infrastructure, insults him and accuses him of a “cover up” and obstructing justice and everyone gets the vapors when Trump has no interest in making deals with the Democrats.”

DANIEL GREENFIELD: America Doesn’t Have an Anti-Semitism Problem. American Politics Does.

WELL, THAT’S A TAKE: Meghan McCain Says Instead Of Working For Trump, Ben Carson Should’ve Helped People With Cancer Like My Dad.

MICHAEL BARONE: Will ‘whiteshift’ save America from ethnic strife?

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to journalism in recent years — maybe not a good idea, but if you have — you surely have noticed those stories predicting, often with a certain relish, that the United States is about to become a majority-minority country.

Such predictions, as the Obama administration Census Bureau director noted in 2015, “made demographic change look like a zero-sum game that white Americans were losing.” Such fears may have contributed to Donald Trump’s election the following year. No one wants to vote for the side that seems to be saying, “Hurry up and die.”

But are those trends so inevitable? Not necessarily, writes political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian who teaches in Britain and is of Jewish, Chinese, and Latino ancestry. His most recent book is called Whiteshift, which he defines as “the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation.”

As he points out, something like this has happened before. A hundred years ago, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants pouring into Ellis Island were considered to be of different “races” by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites.

Half a century ago, their descendants were regarded as still culturally and politically distinctive in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description of New York ethnics groups, Beyond the Melting Pot. A “balanced” ticket in those days had to include Irish, Italian, and Jewish candidates.

Today, all these groups are lumped together as “whites,” even though there are still perceptible, though muted, differences in political attitudes and perspectives between those with different ancestries.

One might go even further back in history. American political culture and institutions have their roots, as the late political scientist Samuel Huntington argued in Who Are We?, in England. In the seventeenth century, unlike almost all other European polities, England welcomed Jews and Huguenots, tolerated Catholics and Quakers, nurtured representative government, and protected individual rights.

That’s a template for an expandable polity — one that gives us and other Anglosphere nations a useful model as we experience ethnic change.

But division is better for the ethnic grifters who run one of our major parties.

WHY ARE THE MEDIA IGNORING CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION?:  We all know why, don’t we?

MAYBE EUROPE NEEDS TO TAKE AN APPROACH TO CHINA MORE LIKE TRUMP’S: Forced Tech Transfers Are on the Rise in China, European Firms Say.

FOR THE SAKE OF THE NARRATIVE, THERE NEEDED TO BE A RUSSIAN SPY. THEREFORE, SHE WAS A RUSSIAN SPY. Maria Butina: jailed for the crime of being Russian: She’s a political prisoner, caught up in the mess of the Mueller probe. “Maria Butina was not a Russian spy. She did not trade sex for influence. She had nothing to do with any clandestine espionage activity, nor did she ever hide her dealings with American political officials. In fact, she unabashedly loved America – perhaps to a fault. But she’s currently sitting in jail, and almost no one will say a word in her defense. The ordeal to which she’s been subjected is jaw-dropping for its recklessness and absurdity.”

As are so many things that have been twisted to fit a narrative shaped by hysteria, denial, and partisan opportunism. All engaged in by people who say they’re defending the “rule of law.”

WHAT I REALLY WANT IS THE AIR FORCE FLYING THINGS SO ADVANCED EVERYONE WOULD MISTAKE THEM FOR UFOs: The Pentagon finally admits it investigates UFOs.

THEY NEVER THOUGHT THEY’D BE CALLED TO ACCOUNT, SO THEY DIDN’T COVER THEIR TRACKS VERY WELL: Victor Davis Hanson: Federal Rats Are Fleeing the Sinking Collusion Ship. “So, how can we tell that the former accusers are now terrified of becoming the accused? Because suddenly the usual band of former Obama officials and Trump accusers have largely given up on their allegations that Trump was or is a Russian asset. Instead, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein are now beginning to accuse each other of wrongdoing.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Restoring The Lost Consensus.

Looking around the cultural landscape today, I conclude that we are in the midst of a sort of negative religious revival: let’s call it America’s First Great Awokening.

Evidence of our society’s wokeness—a false awakening sparked by political grievance—is all around. I’d like to begin with what the philosopher Nicholas of Cusa called the “coincidence of opposites.” Unpacking exactly what Cusa meant by that arresting phrase would take us into the thickets of metaphysical speculation. But we see pedestrian examples of that strange coincidence everywhere. Indeed, one of the great tests of our wokeness is the extent to which many things have mutated into their opposites—not awake but awoke. Inversion is a dominant principle of our social life.

Consider, to take just one example, the fate of our colleges and universities. Once upon a time, and it was not so long ago, they were institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilization. Today, most are dedicated to the repudiation of truth and the subversion of those values. In short, they are laboratories for the cultivation of wokeness. This is especially true, with only a handful of exceptions, of the most prestigious institutions. The tonier and more expensive the college, the more woke it is likely to be.

There are two central tenets of the woke philosophy. The first is feigned fragility. The second is angry intolerance. The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid, the crybully, a delicate yet venomous species that thrives chiefly in lush, pampered environments.

Read the whole thing.