WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Piers Morgan: Today’s Liberals Are ‘Unbearable.’

And nobody knows “unbearable” like Piers Morgan.

WHAT WOULD COTTON MATHER DO? Six of America’s 10 most “post-Christian cities” are in New England, once the “City on a Hill” of the Puritans, and all 10 are in deep blue states, according to The Barna Group’s latest annual survey results for the top 100.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, seven of the 10 least post-Christian are in the states of the old Confederacy or border states that were culturally attached to the South. All of those, of course, are today either mostly or deeply red.

OH: Jail guards threatening former Epstein cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione.

THIS THEORETICAL PHYSICIST SAYS ‘MULTIVERSE’ IS RELIGION: Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder doesn’t beat around the bush: “Believing in the multiverse is logically equivalent to believing in god, therefore it’s religion, not science.” She isn’t denying the possibility of multiverses, only that much of the advocacy for the concept isn’t based on actual science.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Ivy League school urges ‘resistance’ to ‘mean and small-minded’ Trump’s ‘moronic’ policies.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

Plus, Save on Top Rated Products.

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

And, shop the Kindle Deals of the Day.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Triggers the Israel Haters. “He is at his absolute best when he is saying things that other Republicans won’t say, even though they desperately need to be said.”

Yes.

PAGING ILHAN AND RASHIDA: Palestinian police vow crackdown on LGBTQ events in West Bank.

Related: “That’s a Scandal”: New York Times Columnist Calls Out Media For Burying Neo-Nazi Sponsors of Omar, Tlaib.

BACK AND TO THE LEFT. BACK AND TO THE LEFT. Victor Davis Hanson: Progressive Democratic Candidates Renounce Former Centrist Views.

SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Set your thermostat to 78 degrees or higher in the summer, federal agency recommends.

OVER AT THE VICTORY GIRLS, they’re blogging about my The Education Apocalypse.

BYRON YORK: What We Need To Know From The Horowitz Report.

There will be much to learn in Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s upcoming report on the Trump-Russia investigation, but most of it will likely boil down to just two questions. One, how much did the Obama Justice Department spy on the Trump campaign? And two, was it justified?

Many Democrats would immediately protest the word “spying.” But the public already knows the FBI secured a warrant to wiretap low-level Trump adviser Carter Page a few months after Page left the campaign. The public also knows the FBI used informant Stefan Halper to gather information on other Trump campaign figures. And the public knows the FBI sent an undercover agent who went by the alias “Azra Turk” to London to tease information out of another low-level Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos.

Was that all? Were there more? Horowitz should give definitive answers.

And what did the spying involve? In such intelligence work, wiretaps are recorded; transcripts are made. The same can be true for person-to-person conversations between FBI informants and Trump campaign figures. In May, Trey Gowdy, the former Republican congressman who read deeply into Trump-Russia materials when he was in the House, strongly implied that the FBI had transcripts of informant communications.

“If the bureau is going to send an informant in, the informant is going to be wired,” Gowdy told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo. “And if the bureau is monitoring telephone calls, there’s going to be a transcript of that.”

“Where are the transcripts, if any exist,” Gowdy continued, “between the informants and the telephone calls to George Papadopoulos?”

The “if any exist” was Gowdy’s way of casting his statements as a hypothetical, but there was no doubt he was speaking from the knowledge he gained as a congressional investigator. . . .

Here is why Republicans are skeptical. Special counsel Robert Mueller had access to the results of the FBI’s spying, and Mueller could not establish that there was any conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. After a two-year investigation with full law enforcement powers, Mueller never alleged that any American took part in any such conspiracy or coordination.

So Republicans know the end result of the investigation, but they don’t know how it began. Yes, they know the official story of the start of what the FBI called Crossfire Hurricane — that it began with a foreign intelligence service (Australia) telling U.S. officials that Papadopoulos appeared to have foreknowledge of a Russian plan to release damaging information about Hillary Clinton. But they don’t think it’s the whole story.

That’s where Horowitz comes in.

Stay tuned.

CHANGE: GOP sets another 2020 money record, 1,900% increase in online fundraising. “Of special note, said the party, the Republican National Committee has $46.6 million in the bank and no debt. . . . Officials said that much of the money is being used to build out the party’s organizations in 16-20 states seen as key to President Trump’s reelection.”

Related: Poll: 63% expect Trump reelection, up from 43%.

But see: New polls show that Trump should be afraid. Very afraid.

WE’RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND WE’RE HERE TO HELP: $700K for an apartment? The cost to solve the homeless crisis is soaring in Los Angeles. “Projected per-unit cost of apartments for homeless ($700K) is greater than the county’s median sales price for a home ($618K).”

THIS. IS. CNN. New witness claims he saw Don Lemon sexually assault man in Hamptons.

In accusation of assault against CNN host Don Lemon in the Hamptons last summer has been corroborated by a second man.

Lemon was accused by Dustin Hice, who worked as a bartender at the time, of grabbing his own genitals and making sexually explicit comments to him. Hice filed suit against Lemon last week seeking unspecified damages resulting from the encounter.

“He put his hands down his pants, inside his board shorts, grabbed his [genitals],” George Gounelas, Hice’s former boss who claims to have seen the whole encounter, told Fox News on Thursday. “[Lemon] then came out with two fingers and, like, clipped Dustin’s nose up and down with two fingers asking, ‘Do you like p—y or d–k?’”

A confusing question, since Lemon’s one of each.

COLLUSION: Former Google Chair’s Data Firm on Payroll of Top Dem Presidential Campaigns.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: ‘Failed state’: Venezuelan displacement and starvation multiply. “Less than a decade after major strides addressed malnourishment, Caracas now faces massive refugee and hunger crises.”

THE GHOST OF JOHN C. CALHOUN HAUNTS TODAY’S AMERICAN LEFT: The irony of the New York Times’ 1619 Project is that it embraces the critique of the American Founding espoused by the leading defender of Southern slavery, Sen. John C. Calhoun.

As Victor Davis Hanson has written, that’s also true of the left’s see-no-evil view of illegal immigration:

The apparent principle of sanctuary cities is akin to roulette. The odds suggest that most illegal aliens detained by officials are not career felons and thus supposedly need not be turned over to ICE for deportation. On the chance that some of their 10,000 released criminals will go on to commit further crimes in the manner of Juan Lopez-Sanchez, officials then shrug that the public outcry will be episodic and quickly die down, or will at least not pose political problems as great as would come from deporting aliens.

Yet the idea of a sanctuary city is Confederate to the core, reminiscent of antebellum Southern states picking and choosing which federal statutes they would abide by or reject. Even before the Civil War, the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33 pitted South Carolina against a fellow southerner, President Andrew Jackson, as the state declared that federal tariff laws were not applicable within its confines. Jackson understood the threat to the union, and promised to send in federal troops before South Carolina backed down.

Why are coastal Democrats partying like it’s 1859?

A NEW LOW FOR SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-RI): “Senator Whitehouse is violating basic legal ethics in threatening the Supreme Court while engaging in the unauthorized practice of law.”

Plus: “Sen. Whitehouse gained national notoriety during the confirmation hearings for Justice Kavanaugh when he used his time to grill the judge over a fart joke in his high school year book.”

HMM: U.K. Government ‘Extremely Concerned’ by Reports of China Detaining Hong Kong Consulate Employee.

PLUS: Crew Describe Climate of Fear at Cathay After Hong Kong Sackings.

Cathay, founded by an American and an Australian during British rule in 1946, was caught in the middle of the crisis 11 days ago, when China demanded it suspend staff involved in the protest movement.

The firm agreed, firing two pilots, but has since been plunged into turmoil after CEO Rupert Hogg was replaced last week.

Another pilot, Jeremy Tam, who is also a pro-democracy lawmaker, said on Tuesday that he and others had quit the airline as the internal political pressure was intolerable.

“That (China’s aviation regulator) has reached into Hong Kong and directly pressured a local airline is undoubtedly ‘white terror’,” he wrote on his Facebook page, using a popular Hong Kong expression used to describe anonymous acts that create a climate of fear.

“There have been resignations from frontline staff to the company’s CEO because of this political trial.”

The airline confirmed Tam was no longer an employee and said it could not comment on internal staff matters. China’s aviation regulator has not responded to Reuters’ requests for comment.

It looks like Beijing is trying to make examples of a few, trying to scare the rest of Hong Kong back into line. But the protests — already more than four months old — are probably too big for that.

Beijing can’t cave to Hong Kong without risking increased dissent on the mainland, but can’t pull off another blacked-out Tiananmen massacre because a few million smartphones would record the carnage.

It’s a helluva fix they’re in, and it couldn’t be happening to a nicer bunch of thugs.

KEITH WHITTINGTON: The Partisan Split On Higher Ed. “A new Pew survey reveals that the partisan split that became visible a couple of years ago in public perceptions of American higher education has continued. In the long term, this cannot be good for American colleges and universities.”

Flashback: ‘Tolerant’ educators exile Trump voters from campus. “One of the more amusing bits of fallout from last week’s election has been the safe-space response of many colleges and universities to the election of the ‘wrong’ candidate. But on closer examination, this response isn’t really amusing. In fact, it’s downright mean. . . . But when you treat an election in which the ‘wrong’ candidate wins as a traumatic event on a par with the 9/11 attacks, calling for counseling and safe spaces, you’re implicitly saying that everyone who supported that ‘wrong’ candidate is, well, unsafe. Despite the talk about diversity and inclusion, this is really sending the signal that people who supported Trump — and Trump is leading the state of Michigan, so there are probably quite a few on campus — aren’t really included in acceptable campus culture. It’s not promoting diversity; it’s enforcing uniformity. It’s not promoting inclusion; it’s practicing exclusion. And though it pretends to be about nurturing, it’s actually about being mean to those who don’t fall in the nurtured class.”

People have noticed.

USA TODAY: Guns are a huge part of American society; taking them away won’t help.

ILHAN OMAR: U.S. Should Reevaluate Aid to Israel After Netanyahu Denied Her and Tlaib Entry.

Pretty sure she’d cut them off regardless.