NICE: Trump donates 3rd-quarter salary to help fight opioid crisis.

TRUMP’S PROGRESSIVE ALLIES: “[T]here is a whole group of key voters, particularly in critical states, who are more than willing to ditch Trump as long as that doesn’t mean giving liberals the power to completely mess with their lives in a radical way. Seeing a major college football game almost destroyed because of this kind of liberal nonsense and overt hypocrisy is the exact type of story which makes those voters very nervous about handing everything over to a bunch of lunatics. As I have said many times before, Trump’s political rocket-ship is fueled by the extremely negative reaction Middle America has to political correctness. What the kids at Yale did was just add a bit more gas to his tank (which is ironic given their protest of fossil fuels).”

It gets “Progressively” crazier from there — read the whole thing.

AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR: ‘Guardian Angels’ Still Defending Against Insider Attacks in Afghanistan.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: George Washington University Prof: Thanksgiving centered around ‘myth,’ should be ‘Day of Mourning.’

Flashback: George Washington University Drops U.S. History Requirement — for History Majors!

Presumably, given the New York Times’ ongoing “1619 Project,” which seeks to cast the birth of America in Original Sin, it’s only a matter of time before George Washington University changes its name.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: As Warren Fades, Is it Down to Bernie vs. Biden?

Pity the poor progressive Democrat trying to choose a candidate in this primary season.

Marianne Williamson speaks their language, but they know in their hearts that she’ll never be president. Andrew Yang wants a massive new welfare program, and that’s always good, but Yang can’t even get respect from MSNBC, much a majority of delegates. Kamala Harris is mean to criminals and other living things, so she’s out. Tulsi Gabbard is mean to Hillary Clinton (PBUH), so she’s out, too. There are a bunch of white guys from red states that progressives have barely even heard of, and clearly aren’t to be trusted. There are three really rich white guys — well, one of them is black, but he worked for a hedge fund — or four if you include Joe Biden and his newfound millions. But progressives haven’t really been comfortable with a white guy since Clinton, who was born a poor black child or something.

Much more at the link.

SPENGLER: A National Nightmare: Andrew McCarthy Exposes the Plot Against the President. “McCarthy believes that the spooks went after Trump to protect their cozy post-World War II order. I think the reasons go much deeper: Trump threatened to turn over the rock and expose the creepy-crawlies underneath to the harsh light of day. A strict accounting of the intelligence community’s actions over the past two decades would leave heads rolling and pensions canceled. The peasants were marching on Dr Frankenstein’s castle, and their leader had to be put down.”

Read the whole thing.

THE PEOPLE’S GOVERNMENT WILL LISTEN TO ANYTHING BUT THE PEOPLE’S VOICE: China issues stern response to landslide victory of Hong Kong pro-democracy forces.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that no matter how the situation in Hong Kong changes, the semiautonomous region is part of China.

“Any attempt to disrupt Hong Kong and damage [its] stability and prosperity will not succeed,” he told reporters in Japan, where he was attending a G-20 foreign ministers meeting.

I think that’s actually the message Hong Kong voters sent to Beijing.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Nonwhites are the only high school students whose support for First Amendment has fallen: survey.

WELL, BYE: Musicians plan to remove their music from Amazon to protest its ties with ICE.

THIS IS BAD NEWS FOR THOSE SEEKING TO REWRITE THE FIRST AMENDMENT: A new annual Index of Religious Freedom from the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty finds massive, bipartisan support for an America in which the right to believe or not believe is protected in public and private.

Three-fourths, or 74 percent, of the respondents support religious freedom “when that practice takes place at work.” In fact, 63 percent of the respondents “supported the freedom to practice religion in daily life and at work, even when it creates an imposition or inconvenience for others.”

In other words, evangelical bakers and florists who wish only to support traditional marriage are entirely within their constitutional rights to suggest to homosexual couples planning weddings to seek cakes and floral arrangements at other establishments.

The index results demonstrate just how out of touch with most Americans are those like the Freedom From Religion Foundation who are trying to redefine the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom as applying only to the private realm.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Even Harvard Is Not Immune. “The university has new revenue streams. Officials are in the process of restructuring the endowment-management company. And an American culture of greater skepticism toward higher education means that universities may bear the brunt of any downturn on many fronts.”

To their credit, a lot of their planning looks like stuff I recommended.

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Ana Navarro’s Mouth-Food In, Racism Out. “One of the worst people to have emerged as a media personality based solely on hatred for President Trump is Ana Navarro. She’s my least favorite, actually. Her biggest accomplishments are hitching her star to three super-loser presidential bids (John McCain, Jon Huntsman, and Jeb Bush), and putting down her sandwich long enough to audition for an on-air gig.”

Ouch.

WADING ASHORE IN INDIA: The caption stresses that this exercise –Exercise Tiger TRIUMPH–is a training exercise in humanitarian assistance disaster relief operations. Yes, that’s right. U.S. Marines and Indian Army soldiers disembarking and wading ashore at Kakinada Beach, India– “a joint and combined Indian and U.S. force.” Well, this joint and combined India-U.S. force is well armed, because you never know what to expect when conducting humanitarian assistance. I’m certain that’s how the boys in Beijing will interpret this photo. Photo taken November 19, 2019.

AT LEAST HE’S USING HIS OWN MONEY: Elizabeth Warren blasts Michael Bloomberg, says he’s trying to ‘buy a nomination.’

Someone trying to win an election on their own dime is bad. But trying to buy votes with promises of free stuff paid for with new taxes after the election is just business as usual.

SALENA ZITO AND BRAD TODD: The Great Revolt enters a new phase: How the populist uprising of 2016 will reverberate in 2020.

In a country increasingly engaged in national politics and divided, the next 12 months may feel like 12 years. Voters in both trenches are eager to vote, convinced not only of victory but also of vindication. The shocking result in 2016 wasn’t a black swan, an irregular election deviating from normalcy, but instead the indicator of the realignment we describe in The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition, now available in a new a paperback edition in time for the 2020 election season.

The story of America’s evolving political topography is one of tectonic plates, slowly grinding against each other until a break notably alters the landscape with seismic consequences — a sudden lurch long in development. The election of President Trump cemented a realignment of the two political parties rooted in cultural and economic change years in the making. Although he has been the epicenter of all politics since his announcement of candidacy in 2015, Trump is the product of this realignment more than its cause, a fact that becomes clear as you travel the back roads to the places that made him the most unlikely president of our era.

Thirty-year-old dairy farmer Ben Klinkner doesn’t consider himself a member of either political part. “I am a Christian conservative,” he says matter-of-factly.

Sitting at conference table at the Westby Co-op Credit Union, the sixth-generation family farmer has a master’s degree in meat science, Klinkner explains when he left to attend college at the University of Wisconsin River Falls and then North Dakota State University in Fargo for his master’s he vowed he was never going to milk another cow again.

“And I’ve been doing just that every day for the past six years.”

“I chose my life because, not for the money obviously, but because I get to see my family every day. That’s what it’s about. I got to see my parents every day growing up. And my kids get to see that too,” said Klinkner, the father of three with another one on the way.

On Trump, Klinkner is pragmatic, “I am very happy with his policies, I just wish he’d put that Twitter down,” he said of the president’s unorthodox style of communicating. This cuts against the national media’s narrative that farmers will dump the president because of the trade uncertainty.

And yes, Klinkner will vote for him again.

Read the whole thing. But Trump would be crazy to “put Twitter down” in this media environment.

FRIEND OF THE WORKINGMAN: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Gets Entire Solar Co. Workforce Fired After Telling Them to Unionize.

NO EASY MARK: Female bodybuilder, 82, clobbers intruder.

VERY HAPPY NOT TO BE: Flying this Thanksgiving? Expect record crowds at airports.

BLACKS, TOO. Millions of Latinos Will Vote For Trump. Ruben Navarette isn’t happy about it, but he can face facts: “Trump is likely to do better than expected with Latino voters.”

SKYNET SMILES AT THIS CREEPY VIDEO: Mass. State Police Tested Out Boston Dynamics’ Spot The Robot Dog. Civil Liberties Advocates Want To Know More.

HMM: Top U.S. General: It’s ‘Very Possible’ Iran Will Attack Again.

McKenzie shed new light on the threat, saying he is particularly concerned about the possibility of a strike involving large numbers of drones and missiles—much like the Aramco attack, which used dozens of Iran-manufactured cruise missiles and drones to devastate Saudi oil infrastructure.

U.S. officials are particularly concerned about the threat to critical desalination plants in the Gulf, said a senior U.S. military official in the region. An attack on these facilities, which could threaten the region’s primary source of drinking water and potentially cause a humanitarian crisis, would be a “gamechanger,” the official said.

McKenzie cautioned that Tehran’s actions are unpredictable. “I wouldn’t discount anything from Iran,” McKenzie said. “When a nation behaves that irresponsibly, you have to be very cautious when you evaluate what they might do in the future.”

The Mullahs have to know that an attack of that kind would almost certainly be met with a regime-ending response, but as they get more desperate, who knows.

SO I’M READING Kurt Schlichter’s Collapse, and liking it very much. It’s a real page-turner. I liked the cameo appearance by Bill Kristol and his boat, too.