WELL, YES: Here’s One Way to Stop Cancel Culture — Stop Canceling.

Earlier today a Bloomberg reporter named Ben Penn published one of the more dishonest mainstream media attacks I’ve ever read. It was an extraordinary hit piece on a recent Trump Labor Department appointee named Leif Olson. To make a long story short, he took Facebook posts that Olson obviously intended as insults and mockery of the alt-right and then cast them as actually anti-Semitic. In doing so, he omitted a segment of the Facebook thread that made the sarcasm and mockery crystal clear. Olson’s targets were Paul Nehlen and Breitbart, not Jews.

To get a full sense of the sheer obvious bad faith of the attack on Olson, I’d urge you to read Michael Brendan Dougherty’s excellent piece on our home page.

All this would be bad enough, but it gets worse. Olson is now out of a job. After Penn’s inquiries, the Department of Labor accepted Olson’s resignation “effective immediately.” An unfair journalistic hit has now cost a capable attorney his job. It’s absurd. Cancel culture has reared its ugly head . . . again.

But wait. Why did he leave? Perhaps there are personal reasons for the resignation that aren’t apparent from any of the public reports. If that’s the case, then we should accept his decision and focus our attention on Penn’s terrible report. But if the Labor Department tossed him overboard on the basis of Penn’s report alone, well then that’s a different situation entirely. Penn has no power over the Labor Department. It could have easily stood by its man, and it would have had a legion of defenders — and not just conservatives.

But Penn is now bragging that he bagged a deregulator. I think if people get him fired in response, that’s only fair. I don’t like tit-for-tat, but it works. An eye for an eye is less likely to leave the whole world blind, than it is to make people be a lot more careful not to put out eyes.

OPEN THREAD: Make it your own.

HONG KONG MOVES FROM PROTESTS TO CIVIL UNREST AS CHINA THREATENS INTERVENTION:

Freelance correspondent Michael Yon reports that one can feel the collective political and emotional change on Hong Kong’s streets — change that may have dire consequences.

My latest Creators Syndicate column. Read the whole thing.

LEFTY GROUPS ARE ALWAYS FAKE, THAT’S WHY THEY ASSUMED THE TEA PARTY WAS ASTROTURF: Investigation: Anti- ICE “Never Again Action” Not The Spontaneous Grassroots Group It Claims To Be. “NAA is a repackaging of the same activists who organize with far-left, anti-Israel groups such as IfNotNow (INN), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and CodePink. There is every reason to believe that these obsessive anti-Israel activists have a hidden agenda: to insert themselves at the forefront of the immigration issue to hijack the movement and turn it against Israel, as has been done repeatedly since the Ferguson riots in 2014. NAA is not just astroturf, it’s a deception.”

Like I said.

OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD: Biden: We gotta ban “magazines that hold multiple bullets,” or something.

GOOD NEWS: Boy thrown from Mall of America balcony is now home.

I BLAME PREHISTORIC S.U.V.’S: Cave deposits suggest Earth experienced dramatic sea level rise 4 million years ago.

BLOOMBERG LAW’S FALSE AND MISLEADING REPORT ABOUT LEIF OLSON: From Josh Blackman at the Volokh Conspiracy. As Blackman notes, even Vox of all Websites has figured out that Leif was being sarcastic in his 2016 anti-Breitbart Facebook post, adding, “Moreover, Bloomberg’s fact-checking failed. Penn’s reporting about Leif’s legal career contains at least one falsehood…Bloomberg should retract the piece, and apologize to Olson.”

A MESSAGE FOR “THE SQUAD” ABOUT “TOXIC MASCULINITY:” “The murder of Shahd Haj Khalil and other honor killings in the Palestinian society have nothing to do with toxic masculinity–however, there is a cultural toxicity that you haven’t mentioned. . . . According to a UN Women rights report, a staggering 60%-70% of all married Palestinian women regularly experience domestic physical and physiological violence and abuse. What kind of hellhole society is this? . . . Comrade Rashida! There isn’t enough lipstick in all of Macy’s to paint virtue on this ugly pig. If you really want to help, why not work with your buddy Linda Sarsour and organize a national march dedicated to stopping honor killings in your culture and the prosecution of the perpetrators worldwide? Of course, I’m happy to volunteer to hold the banner during this event.”

ANNALS OF OIKAOPHOBIA: Neo looks at a 41-year old novelist and mother of two who claims a fear of red hats — aka “Rufuspetasumphobia” — and notes, “The trajectory is clear, and it goes like this:”

(1) People who wear MAGA hats are evil bigots.
(2) I am a sensitive person, one of the most sensitive around.
(3) MAGA hats trigger me, as they might you if you’re a kind, unbigoted, sensitive person as well.
(4) I am so very sensitive that even innocuous, non-MAGA red caps trigger me.
(5) So please don’t wear a red cap, in order to prove your own kindness, sensitivity, normalcy, and lack of bigotry.

Is Makkai sincere and is she really triggered by something as mild as a red cap at this point? Maybe. Some (not all) of the liberals I know seem to have a constant need to assert their Trump-hatred at regular intervals and inject anti-Trump remarks of various kinds into ordinary non-political conversations.

It’s a cliche to say we have become increasingly polarized in recent decades. But it’s crystal clear that we have, and that much of it has been promoted on the left as a tactic for winning elections. Fear is contagious, as well. Is the fear real, or is it fake and just a way to prove who’s the wokest of them all? I don’t know, and it hardly matters, because the poison is out there, eating away at the fabric of our society.

Since the late 1990s or so, for the identity politics-obsessed left, the will to power derives from victimhood. This can’t be a healthy way to go through life.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Woman is first to receive cornea made from ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells.

AT AMAZON, Fall Deals on Watches.

Plus, save on Wheels and Tires. Winter is coming.

ILHAN OMAR FEELS THE HEAT: I know this has been previously posted but in case you missed it, check it out. Why? Because Scott Johnson has stuck to the case and Scott and Powerline show that it is possible to eventually make jerks like Omar squirm. In Omar’s case, criminal is likely a more apt description than mere jerk. Remember, Powerline was a key player in nailing Dan Rather as a purveyor of fake news. Toujours de l’audace.

THIS IS CNN: CNN’s Jake Tapper Gets Really Upset Over It, But His Denials About James Clapper and the Steele Dossier Don’t Add Up.

QUESTION ASKED: Do progressive municipal leaders want their cities to fail?

As Robert Conquest’s third law of politics states, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”

The real question is why voters excuse decades of failure by “Progressive” municipalities. As Jay Nordlinger wrote in 2010 when the failed city of Detroit was making headlines and photo spreads thanks to its Hiroshima-like bombed out landscape, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer.”

THE BABYLON BEE DOES IT AGAIN: Walmart Discontinues Auto Part Sales To Prevent Car Accidents.

I’d love to see some folks take this a step further and protest outside a Walmart auto service entrance with signs reading CARS KILL and STOP SELLING DEATH TOOLS and the like.

BLOOMBERG “REPORTER” (FOR NOW) BEN PENN: Hey, Don’t Overlook The Fact That I Took Out an Official Pushing Deregulation. As Ace of Spades writes:

Virtually a confession that he ran this garbage as a political hit.

Lost in all of this is that Olson was part of a team of political appointees tasked with the heavy lift of drafting wage-hour regulations that are high priorities for Trump White House, business community. They’re now down one adviser.

How can you read that as anything other than saying, “You should support me, even if I lied, because I got a scalp for the left”?

And Michael Bloomberg’s namesake media empire does! Statement From Bloomberg: ‘We stand behind’ Ben Penn’s despicable smear job on Leif Olson.

“Unexpectedly,” as they used to say at Bloomberg, whenever bad economic news happened on Obama’s watch.

GO FIGURE.

HOW HOSPITALS PREPARE FOR HURRICANES.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: While Elites Gnaw on Stale Agendas, the Future Is Full of Things We’ve Yet to Imagine.

Today the political elites are in a crisis resulting from an expected future that didn’t happen. The End of History didn’t pan out; Russia and China failed to join the liberal democratic club; the EU fell apart. The global world failed to last. But Brexit and the defeat of Hillary did not spur them to listen; instead, it inspired frantic efforts to reimpose absolute control via Chinese 5G, facial recognition, Google surveillance, G7 pacts against hate speech, and the NYT witch hunt against white supremacy.

Is it any wonder they are failing? That depression is rising among youngsters and social tensions are increasing? Not only are they jamming themselves, they are suppressing the small still voice that whispers in the heart of undiscovered genius. As the political elites gnaw at the ends of their stale agendas it is hard to remember that the future is still full of hope, danger, love, opportunity and things yet undreamed of. Will we send ourselves an interocitor? Maybe. But if we’re not free to listen for the signal then the world will most certainly be stuck with a politically correct and strictly rationed turboencabulator.

Read the whole thing. While I’m also optimistic that “the future is full of things we’ve yet to imagine,” getting there will be remarkably turbulent for many in what were once mass media industries, as I write today: Rock Music Is on Life Support. Is Hollywood Next?

OOPS: Vox accidentally serves up an ‘odd endorsement of the 2nd Amendment’ in global data about privately held firearms. “Americans make up less than 5% of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45% of all the world’s privately held firearms.”

Only 45%? C’mon, America, we can do better.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. We Didn’t Humanize Markets, Markets Humanized Us.

CHARLES LIPSON ON FISA ABUSE:  What to expect.

VIDEO: Dave Chappelle on Jussie Smollett.

Not appropriate for sensitive ears or workplaces.

WALMART ENDING HANDGUN AND “SHORT-BARREL RIFLE” AMMO SALES: I confess I never thought of .223 and 5.56mm as “short-barrel rifle” ammunition, as some of those suckers are pretty long. Real winner here has to be Mosin Nagant owners. Walmart: for all your 7.62x54R ammo needs!