YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Hoaxers Falsely Accuse Pete Buttigieg of Sexual Assault.

I have a lot of problems with Pete Buttigieg’s policies, and I don’t like the way he’s scapegoating Mike Pence. I’m not all that impressed with Buttigieg, and I don’t plan to vote for him, no matter how many times I’m called a homophobe by Dems who are obsessed with identity politics.

Also, falsely accusing Buttigieg or anybody else of committing sexual assault is wrong in every way imaginable. Jacob Wohl is a dimwitted amateur who seems to think he’s the next Roger Stone, a gleeful trickster sowing chaos in his wake. But I don’t think even Stone ever did anything this stupid, underhanded, and outright criminal. If he did, he’s much better at covering his tracks than this kid.

Alas though, this is not a drill: Buttigieg makes the seemingly obligatory trek for all Democratic presidential candidates to New York to seek Al Sharpton’s blessings. As Iowahawk tweets, “I will defend Pete Buttigieg against the likes of Conspiracy Garbage Boy, but WTF is he doing kissing the ring of this vile antisemite con man?”

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s Blackouts Go Beyond Electricity.

Official data is partial, sometimes unreliable and always late. Consider the size of Venezuela’s economic black hole. The central government last published fiscal balances in 2013, and consolidated public sector accounts, including those of the state oil company PDVSA, in 2011, according to Francisco Rodriguez, of Torino Capital, LLC. The country’s latest filing of a general economic assessment, a contractual requirement under Article IV of the International Monetary Fund: 2004.

Inflation? Venezuela hasn’t released an official number since December 2015, and ever since it’s been monetary roulette. The price of a cup of coffee is up by six figures since last April, according to Bloomberg’s café con leche index, while Torino Capital reckoned a cornmeal arepa pastry cost 300,000 percent more by the end of 2018. The opposition-controlled National Assembly is less circumspect, putting overall inflation last year at 1.7 million percent. They have nothing on the IMF, which recently pegged consumer prices rising at 10 million percent.

Keeping track of crime is another actuarial adventure. The Venezuelan Observatory of Public Safety, a government oversight body, offers no graphics or statistical tally for criminal violence, just a single paragraph on its webpage describing homicide as “reproachable behavior.” And good luck finding comprehensive crime stats on the Interior, Justice and Peace Ministry’s forensic division website.

Whatever or whoever replaces the Chavista regime, they’ll have an impossible time trying to fill in the blanks. Which for Maduro and his cronies, is probably a feature not a bug.

JAMES LILEKS: How do we get rid of Facebook? 

Put it another way: how did it come to pass that the erection of these manufactured “communities” was performed by individuals who seem to lack the most elemental human skills, and prefer to deal with others through the prism of technology?

Are we going to put up with this forever?

Read the whole thing.

BECAUSE FAIRNESS OR SOMETHING: Trans ‘Woman’ Demolishes World Records; Olympian Decries ‘Pointless, Unfair Playing Field.’

QUESTIONS ASKED: Who Is a Liberal? What Is Liberalism Today?

Maybe we should attempt to reclaim the term and label liberal for ourselves? That’s the recommendation of Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University, in a recent offering for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute entitled “Ten Reasons You Shouldn’t Call Leftists ‘Liberal’“. Here are a few of his ten very good reasons:

REASON #1

The two ancient meanings run deep in Western civilization. Calling leftists “liberal” evokes generosity and the blessings of the liberal arts and sciences. To call leftists “liberal” is to extol their character and purpose. It was not for nothing that, between 1880 and 1940, collectivists arrogated “liberal” for themselves. . .

According to Fred Siegel in his 2014 book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, in America, the disastrous administration of Woodrow Wilson caused “Progressives” to rebrand with a huge stolen base:

Liberals were those Progressives who had renamed themselves so as to repudiate Wilson. “The word liberalism,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1919, “was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918.” The new liberalism was a decisive cultural break with Wilson and Progressivism. While the Progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics, liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom at home and abroad.

And it has been ever thus.

Reclaiming the L-word would be great — and imagine the fun if the right ever reclaims the phrase “trickle-down economics…”

Related: The Enemies of Free Enterprise Stole Its’ Label: ‘Liberalism.’  Harvard Economist Joseph Schumpeter’s Famous Quote: ‘since about 1900 and especially since about 1930: as a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of the system of free enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.’

FEDERALISM, HOW DOES IT WORK? Kamala Harris Wants to Ban Right-to-Work Laws.

NEO: Why the international NY Times didn’t think twice about printing that anti-Semitic cartoon.

When the international version of the NY Times decided to publish an anti-Semitic cartoon by the Portuguese cartoonist Antonio Moreira Antunes, it was just following a long-established European post-WWII tradition. Antunes has been in the anti-Semitic image business for decades, and won an award in 1983 for his appropriation of a Warsaw ghetto photo, changing the victim of Nazis into a Palestinian victim of Israeli Jews. For this, Antunes received the top prize at the 20th International Salon of Cartoons in Montreal.

Note that word “international.” The international community, of which western Europe is a big part, has not only been exhibiting this sort of anti-Semitism for a long while (even post-WWII, I mean) but rewarding it.

As Mark Steyn once wrote, “The old joke — that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz — gets truer every week.”

Related: Ace of Spades notes that “You can tell the New York Times was totally sincere in apologizing for the first Jew-baiting cartoon because they ran a similar one within 48 hours. It’s a calculated insult — it’s designed to let you know their apology was obligatory, but Jews are still Oppressors and will continue getting the Oppressor treatment.”

BRIAR PATCH: Impeachment Could Be a Trap — for Democrats.

What if President Trump actually wants Democrats to try to impeach him?

OK, so that isn’t likely. Nobody would wish to go through the embarrassment of impeachment in the House of Representatives and the public spectacle of a follow-up trial in the Senate.

Still, the fact that the idea would even seem plausible illustrates the risks Democrats are running in considering a move toward impeachment. The backfire potential is large. It’s telling that the Democrats who lived through the last impeachment—and remember how that movie ended—are the least eager to move down that path now.

Everything about Mr. Trump’s history—before and since assuming the presidency—suggests he likes a clearly identifiable enemy, and he likes a fight. He is the famously self-proclaimed counter-puncher, defining himself by those with whom he is battling and distinguishing himself by the way he conducts the battle. In an impeachment fight, he could do exactly that.

Plus: “The broader, underlying risk for Democrats if they pursue impeachment: What if average voters just don’t care as much about the Russian interference/Mueller investigation saga as do Democratic party activists and the political intelligentsia in Washington? What if they think the fight is just too damaging to the country?”

It has been damaging to the country, and Democrats have been the instigators since Day One.

PREPARE TO BE HONORED: Boston Hack DA Rachael Rollins would be ‘honored’ to face arrest over ICE resistance.

Related: Joe Battenfeld: ICE-suing DAs flirting dangerously with the wrong side of the law. It’s all fun and games until Trump invokes the Insurrection Act.

LIVE UPDATES: Juan Guaidó Launches Military Coup in Venezuela Against Socialist Maduro.

I’m not sure “coup” is the right word here.

IT’S NOT THE CRIME, IT’S THE COVERUP: Portland State University president destroys emails sought in public records requests.

LEFTIST MISOGYNY: Can a woman beat Trump? Some Democrats wonder if it’s worth the risk.

SEDITION: FBI Investigating Antifa For Plotting To Buy Guns From Cartel For ‘Armed Rebellion.’ Follow the money.

Plus:

Antifa is known for using violent means, including in protests against peaceful conservative speakers, free speech advocates and even journalists. The well-documented instances of violence include a protester repeatedly punching a man in the face, throwing water bottles and launching fireworks at police officers and starting fires on a college campus with Molotov cocktails. The Daily Caller News Foundation’s reporting led to the arrest of an Antifa leader who stands accused of accosting and assaulting two Marines in Philadelphia.

Former Vice President Joe Biden launched his campaign for president by praising the group. He referred to a group of protesters who gathered in Charlottesville, VA, and violently confronted white nationalists “a courageous group of Americans.”

Antifa is just lefty muscle. Follow the money.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Cancel Culture Comes for Counterculture Comics. Today it’s creators, not cops, who want to banish R. Crumb, onetime king of the comics underground:

The American culture that R. Crumb and his contemporaries grew up in restricted the ways people could talk about sex, violence, race, and class. The first wave of underground comix artists reacted with metaphorical explosive violence, especially once they realized nothing was stopping them but the constraints of their own minds. That freedom, in all its messiness and ugliness, upset and unnerved and offended many. It also inspired massive amounts of interesting, strange, life-enhancing art, not just in the comics world but in such offshoots of Crumb’s aesthetic as National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons.

The attitudes Crumb satirized were real and, he thought, deserving of ridicule via crazed exaggeration. His feelings of hostility toward women are, as he has insisted in his comics and in interviews, true to him (and, he is certain, to many other men). What is to be gained by pretending they’re not? Crumb was honest about being the sort of resentful nebbish who in his pre-fame days saw women as controlling something he desperately wanted and couldn’t have—what would now be called a corrosive “incel” mentality, after the men who self-identify as involuntarily celibate.

In a 1991 interview with The Comics Journal, Crumb said art should be judged not on ideological purity but on whether it is “interesting or boring…honest and truthful and real…saying what’s really on [the artists’] minds.…If it’s really in there it ought to come out on paper.” At the same time, he reflected, “I don’t know, maybe we’re all just dragging society down. Maybe we should all be locked up.”

The paradox of liberal tolerance remains: Neither the transgressors nor the offended have a right to force the other side to just shut up about what its members think, feel, or imagine. The two are intimately linked in a mutually frustrating tango. The offended want certain expressions to go away or be universally recognized as unacceptable, and the transgressors want a social space to express themselves without feeling driven from society.

Read the whole thing. I’m so old, I can remember when the left celebrated the 1970s for all of its radical changes to society. Eventually though, all of its pop culture will be airbrushed out of existence, as left’s overculture goes full-on Mao.

NOT A BAD PROBLEM TO HAVE: The Fastest-Growing U.S. City Is Scrambling to Survive the Shale Boom.

WHEN FASCISM ARRIVES, IT CALLS ITSELF ANTI-FASCISM: A Canadian professor suggested that students who advocate for free speech on campus should lose their jobs and get harassed out of restaurants.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Feds Arrest Muslim Convert, Stop Terror Attack. “Mark Domingo, an infantryman who served a combat stint in Afghanistan, was arrested Friday after visiting a park in Long Beach where authorities said he planned to plant home-made explosive devices made with nail-filled pressure cookers in advance of a Nazi rally scheduled Sunday.”

THE “TRUMP BUMP” CONTINUES TO SAVE LEGAL EDUCATION: Class Of 2018 Notches Highest Legal Employment Rate In A Decade.

Related: Reflections On A Few Categories Of Employment Outcomes Over The Last Five Years.

COLORADO: Governor Polis thinks voters were wrong, resurrects ridiculously high tobacco tax. “He wants another shot, and he and his colleagues waited until 7 business days before the end of the legislative session to introduce a bill to set up another vote. Never mind giving legislators on all sides of the issue time to consider the options, give proposals a public airing, hear from expert witnesses on both sides, and consult with their constituents.”

Votes will be held until voters produce the desired result.

IT’S WEIRD HOW THAT SEEMS SUPER TRUE WHEN YOU’RE ON THE INTERNET, AND MUCH LESS SO WHEN YOU’RE NOT: Georgetown University poll: Nation at edge ‘of civil war,’ but voters reject compromise.

Voters are pointing fingers at social media, TV news, and politicians for the breakdown in everyday civility in the country, but instead of compromise, they want their leaders to double down and champion their interests first, according to a ground-breaking survey from Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.

While partisan voters fear that the nation is at the edge of civil war and wish for common ground, they really want their side to stand firm and win, said the school’s first Battleground Civility Poll, conducted by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and the Republican Tarrance Group.

Hmm. What do you think?

GOOD QUESTION: Angelo Codevilla: Why Are Clapper and Brennan Not In Jail? “The clearest of all the laws concerning U.S. intelligence is Section 798, 18 U.S. Code—widely known in the Intelligence Community as ‘the Comint Statute,’ or ‘the 10 and 10.’ Unlike other laws, this is a ‘simple liability’ law. Motivation, context, identity, matter not at all. You violate it, you are guilty and are punished accordingly.”

But: “Brennan and Clapper continue as living proof that the United States has a dual system of justice. The example of their impunity speaks louder than any speech, and reassures their leftist successors in the intelligence agencies that their channel to the Times and Post is as safe as ever.”

YES: Among the far-left, Islamists, and violent white supremacists, anti-Israel antisemitism is the common theme.