HMM:

THINK OF THEM AS LEFTIST OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: I was an Irish student at the YAF conference – the entire Irish media lied about it.

Related: The Irish media’s despicable smearing of Killian Foley Walsh.

THE PROVOCATIONS OF CAMILLE PAGLIA: The maverick critic and scholar has championed great art, defended free speech, and offered groundbreaking analysis of popular culture.

A professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has taught since 1984, Paglia became an intellectual celebrity after the 1990 publication of Sexual Personae, her first book, which carries the subtitle Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Melding history and psychology with art and literature and laced with references to popular culture, the book delivered a one-two punch to academe. A feminist critical of the modern women’s movement, Paglia insisted on the greatness of Western civilization, though it was already unfashionable to do so. And she asserted that its greatness resulted from a creative but violent tension between male and female—between the Apollonian male principle of order (civilization) and the Dionysian female principle of chaos (nature). Two of the book’s most quoted lines are “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts” and “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.” Reading Sexual Personae, one reviewer wrote, was “a bit like being mugged.”

Now, nearly 30 years later, Paglia has once again found herself in the middle of the culture wars. Taking aim at the #MeToo movement, she told an interviewer that it is “ridiculous that any university ever tolerated a complaint of a girl coming in six months or a year after an event. If a real rape was committed, go frigging report it to the police.” In April, students at her university, upset by such statements, tried to de-platform Paglia, a lesbian who identifies as transgender. When they failed to get her scheduled lecture, “Ambiguous Images: Sexual Duality and Sexual Multiplicity in Western Art,” canceled or moved off campus, they organized a protest during the talk—and someone pulled the fire alarm. Later, the protesters urged the university to replace Paglia with a “queer person of color.”

Fortunately, the university’s president, David Yager, did what many of his peers at other schools roiled by such protests have failed to do: issued a statement defending freedom of expression. “Artists over the centuries,” Yager wrote in an e-mail to campus, “have suffered censorship, and even persecution, for the expression of their beliefs through their work. My answer is simple: Not now, not at UArts.” Paglia was delighted. An outspoken defender of free speech, she is horrified by the rise of censorship in academia—and was especially aghast, given her own history, at Yale’s attempt to police students’ Halloween costumes in 2015.

In her latest book, an essay collection called Provocations, she states that she’d like to be remembered as a “dissident writer who defended free thought and free speech.” But Provocations is not just a polemic against political correctness. The career retrospective, which includes writings from the last 25 years, covers subjects like gender, education, popular culture, and art. It showcases Paglia’s sweeping scholarship and puckish irreverence for PC pieties. “To questioning young people drawn to the siren song of hormones and surgery,” she writes, “I say: Stay fluid! Stay free!”

Read the whole thing.

IF PUSH COMES TO SHOVE, WE’LL FEEL LESS BAD ABOUT BLOWING THEM UP: Russia develops unmanned T-72s Main Battle Tanks.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “The notion that the world might not be real may seem like madness but it is a serious proposition at least in academic circles.”

SEND A COPY TO THE FOLKS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America.

Along with Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World.

JON CALDERA: I want to give away one of my guns to a first timer.

I’ll say it for the millionth time — politics is the lagging indicator of culture. And the anti-gun left knows how to influence culture through government-run education, Hollywood and the media.

There was a time when schools had shooting clubs. Now they are not just gun-free zones, but political tools for gun control. Just ask my high-school-aged daughter after being bullied to tears for her pro-gun stance.

We could be just a generation away from losing our guns.
…
I have an idea and I hope you will follow my lead. I want to see it turn into a movement.

If you weren’t raised with guns, getting into your first gun can be very intimidating. We need to make it easy and enjoyable. We gunnies all know that one friend, co-worker or family member that should be a gun owner, but yet isn’t.

Let’s give, yes give, that person one of our guns. Let’s help them learn to shoot it properly. Help them go through the process I went through.

I love this idea.

CHANGE: ‘We will continue to represent men at their best’: Gillette’s backflip after ‘toxic masculinity’ backlash.

Advertising is increasingly the battleground of the culture wars, with big brands like Target, Nike and Starbucks copping backlash, and praise, for taking sides in divisive social and political issues like race, gender and sexuality.

But by alienating roughly 50 per cent of potential customers, many brands end up taking a hit to their bottom line — “Get woke, go broke.”

Hey, where have I heard that before?

WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND THAT SNOPES IS JUST A DEMOCRATIC PARTY MESSAGE-CONTROL TOOL, IT ALL MAKES SENSE: A ‘Fact Checker’ Declares War On Satire: When we make fun of liberals, Snopes pretends to take us seriously and labels our jokes ‘false.’

If your job is to make people laugh, what do you do when your brand of humor is classified as dangerous?

I run the Babylon Bee, a satirical website, and we’ve had to face that question a lot lately. The “fact checkers” at Snopes.com—once a reliable source for distinguishing reality from urban legends—have been smearing the Bee as “fake news.” They don’t seem to have a problem when we make fun of Trump-worship, conservatives, fundamentalism and megachurches. But when we target Democrats and the left, suddenly we’re branded liars.

The most recent controversy began when Snopes published a thorough “debunking” of our satirical take on Georgia state Rep. Erica Thomas ’s false claim that a white man in a supermarket told her to “go back to where you came from.” Our humorous headline: “Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-fil-A Employee Told Her to Go Back to Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said ‘My Pleasure.’ ”

Snopes knew this was a joke but questioned our “brand” of satire. The website called us “junk news” and a “ruse.” It accused us of intentionally “muddying the details” of a current event to “fool” people. . . .

This ugly dispute has demonstrated the danger of assigning authority to supposedly unbiased fact-checkers. They have the power to slap a joke they don’t like with a “false” rating and defame the authors as purveyors of lies and fakery. Last year Facebook threatened to forbid us to collect money from ads, and even to boot us entirely, after Snopes “fact checked” a piece of ours headlined “CNN Purchases Industrial Washing Machine to Spin the News.”

The Left understands and employs the power of mockery. And it wants to keep that power to itself.

“AS USUAL IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM, WHERE THE TIMES LEADS, ITS ACOLYTES AROUND THE COUNTRY WILL FOLLOW:”

CART ON A HOT TIN ROOF: All Fired Up: Walmart Sues Tesla.

No, Walmart was not using fleets of pricey electric vehicles to get 56-cents-a-pound bananas to budget-conscious shoppers; rather, the chain had outfitted a slew of its stores with rooftop solar panels assembled and managed by Tesla subsidiary SolarCity.

Now Walmart’s feeling burned. Literally.

Following rooftop blazes at at least seven stores and a recent investigation, the shopping giant filed a lawsuit against Tesla on Tuesday, alleging the company “engaged in widespread, systemic negligence and had failed to abide by prudent industry practices in installing, operating, and maintaining its solar systems.”

Walmart’s relationship with SolarCity goes back a number of years; a trio of earlier fires in 2012, 2016, and 2017 were brushed off as random flukes. Then the fires began occurring with greater frequency.

That’s not good.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Jay Inslee ends his Democratic presidential bid.

JOHN KASS: Robert Mueller crushed their dreams, so Democrats pivot to race.

They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.

And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.

Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.

With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.

Meanwhile, the New York Times embarks on an ambitious new series, the 1619 Project — marking the 400th anniversary of the first slave ships to our shores.

The newspaper said it hopes “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

NYT editor Dean Baquet, a former colleague of mine at the Chicago Tribune, a thoughtful man now with his newsroom in turmoil, expressed the pivot in a different way.

In terms of Mueller.

In a transcript of a newsroom meeting with his liberal staff that made its way to Slate, Baquet said this:

“The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened,” Baquet said. “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy s—, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”

So the Times pivoted.

The story of slavery in America is compelling and worthy of such attention. But reducing the whole of America to the sin of slavery and racism that America has tried so hard to reject — by shedding blood in the Civil War, by passing the Civil Rights Act, by twice electing Barack Obama to the White House — is absurd. But revealing.

They are awful people who don’t care what damage they do, so long as they regain power — or at least manage to feel superior to their countrymen.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: More Private Colleges Cut Tuition As Discount Rate Hits All-Time High Of 52%.

If only there had been some sort of warning.

UH-HUH: Facebook Pulls Trump Campaign Ads Over Alleged Policy Violations.

UNFAIR — IT WAS ONLY EVER MEANT TO HOLD MEN ACCOUNTABLE: Katy Perry has a #MeToo problem, and she’s the one who’s in trouble.

DEIRDRE MCCLOSKEY: Slavery Did Not Make America Rich. “Slavery made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally, including at last the descendants of the slaves.”

AND AN UNEXPECTED AND HEARTENING PERSONAL BOOST:  Monsters Among Us.

AS LONG AS THEY DON’T MAKE US USE WAFFLE STRAWS:  Better for the Planet?

IT’S A VIRUS. AND WE CAN’T ALLOW IT TO KILL US:  Howard Zinn’s Anti-American Propaganda Takes Over The Smithsonian.

IF IT’S NOT THE ROMAN THING, WHERE YOU WILL EVERYTHING TO THE EMPEROR WHO ORDERED YOU TO COMMIT SUICIDE; AND IN THE PUBLIC READING THE WILL REVEALS ALL THE CRIMES AND TRANSGRESSIONS OF THE EMPEROR, I’M GOING TO BE DISAPPOINTED:  Epstein’s will.

AND SPEAKING OF IGNORING THE LESSONS OF HISTORY:  Europe Considers The Nazi Idea Of Requiring Jewish Businesses To Identify Themselves On Labels.

GIVEN HOW MANY VOTES THE DEMOCRATS HARVEST FROM DEMENTED PATIENTS, HE’S THE IDEAL CANDIDATE:  Biden Botches Assassination Dates of MLK and RFK.