TECH DISASTER:  Massive power failure in Argentina and Uruguay.

THE TWITTER MOB COLLECTS ANOTHER SCALP: GOP congressman nixed as keynote speaker for cybersecurity conference. “Black Hat hosts high profile global events that strive to ‘bring together the best minds in the industry.’ Except, apparently, pro-life cybersecurity experts. Zack Whittaker, a security editor for Tech Crunch (and CBS alum, according to his Twitter profile) posted a tweet showing [Texas GOP Rep. Bill Hurd’s] voting record calling it ‘a terrible voting record on women’s rights.’ Whittaker did, however, acknowledge that Will Hurd is one of the few lawmakers who ‘get’ cybersecurity…Something that Whittaker failed to reference, though, is the founder of Black Hat’s support for Hillary Clinton in 2016 as she ran for president. He hosted a fundraiser for her during a hacker conference in Las Vegas. She’s the acceptable kind of politician, you see. It’s just really all too much, even by 2019 standards.”

THE TRAFFIC STOP: One of the Great Abuses of Police Power in Contemporary Life. Historian Dan Albert on an Obsolete Enforcement Practice That Just Won’t Die.

Read the whole thing.

ANDREW KLAVAN: Conservatives Have To Be Fearless In The Face Of Leftist Censorship.

The corporate media — including social media — are now engaged in a full-fledged and collusive attempt to silence conservative voices in time for the 2020 election. On Sunday, just as YouTube was threatening to pull down thousands of “hateful” (i.e. conservative) videos, the New York Times printed a breathless and idiotic piece supposedly charting a YouTube viewer’s descent into right-wing radicalism.

How radical did this poor radical soul get from watching conservative videos? Well, okay, he “never bought into the far right’s most extreme views, like Holocaust denial or the need for a white ethnostate… “ But, “he began referring to himself as a ‘tradcon’ — a traditional conservative, committed to old-fashioned gender norms. He dated an evangelical Christian woman, and he fought with his liberal friends.”

The horror. The horror.

This suspiciously timed piece — clearly designed to give cover to YouTube’s censorship plan — featured a collage of faces of right-wing radicals. These included such raving hate-filled alt-right evil-doers as mild-mannered gay centrist Dave Rubin and of course Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro — whom various left-wing outlets have repeatedly identified as the one and only orthodox Jewish Nazi in all the universes!

But while branding Dave and Ben alt-right may be absurd, it’s not unintentional. It is part of a strategy. 1. Convince people that hate speech should be silenced. 2. Define hate speech as alt-right. 3. Label powerful mainstream conservatives “alt-right.” 4. Silence powerful mainstream conservatives.

5. Convince people that the late Milton Friedman(!), a Nobel Prize-winning economist, is the new Emmanuel Goldstein, the gateway drug to the alt-right, and the chief hoarder and wrecker blocking the glorious path to “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.”

JUST NBC THE CONSPIRACY MONGERING: Today Show Earns All-Time Ratio For Tweeting There’s ‘Debate’ Over Vaccines.

How bad was it? “Before it was deleted, at one point the tweet had more than 1,800 comments and just 38 likes.”

Related: Jessica Biel Says She’s ‘Not Against Vaccinations’ After Lobbying with Anti-Vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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SJW LOGIC VS. COMMON SENSE: No wonder Oberlin got socked with a huge punitive damages award for libeling a local bakery as racist after detaining students who wound up pleading guilty to shoplifting. Here’s Oberlin’s litigation position, from its court filings: “Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests. The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.” Get that? Whether the students accused of shoplifting had actually been shoplifting or not was irrelevant to whether it was fair to accuse the store of racism etc for detaining the students as shoplifters. The fault lay with the bakery owners for daring to actually stop and prosecute shoplifters!

This is the kind of b.s. that gets you A’s at Oberlin with a certain type of SJW professor, but that normal people rightly think defies common sense. But it can pay off in academia. A very prominent law professor got an Ivy League job after writing a silly book which, among other things, argued that whether the Al Sharpton-promoted Tawana Brawley hoax was true or not was besides the point, because the real issue was whether society was silencing African American girls like her who surely had something bad happen to them.

GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERSECTIONALITY: Infuriating: Who knew plastic straw bans could lead to stories like this one, except everybody?

At least in Austin, the P. Terry’s Burger Stand chain, with their colorful midcentury modern Googie-influenced buildings, has the right idea: for everyday normal people, the plastic straw dispenser is fully loaded, but there is a “paper straws available on request” sign at the cash register, for those wishing to virtue signal their eco-wokeness.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Long Road To The Student Debt Crisis.

FORTY YEARS OF DARKNESS! EARTHQUAKES, VOLCANOES! THE DEAD RISING FROM THE GRAVE! HUMAN SACRIFICE, DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER — MASS HYSTERIA! Green New Deal advocates: “Pipeline and resource development leads to man camps, human trafficking, and child-porn rings.” And these people want to govern a nation…

(Via Small Dead Animals.)

MAYOR PETE ON TAX CUTS: ‘The Reagan Neo-Liberal Era is Now Over.’ “For 90 percent of Americans, you start the clock right around the time I’m born. Income didn’t move at all — so lower to middle income, really, almost all of us…And what we’ve learned is that supply-side idea that you just cut taxes and make the rich better off and it will find its way to the rest of us is wrong and the Reagan neo-liberal era is now over,” he added.

Shades of Time magazine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stenographer Charlotte Alter’s cri de coeur in March that:

“People our age have never experienced American prosperity in our adult lives—which is why so many millennials are embracing Democratic socialism” (emphasis mine). Alter also claims that Ocasio-Cortez’s “adulthood was defined by financial crisis, debt & climate change. No wonder she and her peers are moving left.”

[As David Harsanyi responded,] The idea that millennials have toiled in uniquely grueling economic conditions exhibits a delusional and extraordinarily narrow understanding of history. Whether the majority of millennials believes this myth or not, I don’t know. I tend to doubt it. Alter is just repeating AOC’s contention. But, historically speaking, the only thing millennials have seen is relative prosperity, most of it provided by free markets and American political stability.

But does Buttigieg support AOC’s risky 70 percent income tax scheme* to pay for the Green New Deal?

* Classical reference.

VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Northam Lawyer to Host Buttigieg Fundraiser.

JACK DUNPHY: As Summer Shooting Season Commences in Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot Picks a Fight with Police.

Appearing on a local cable news show on May 30, Lightfoot made the astonishing allegation that the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing rank-and-file officers, had instructed its members to be passive when dealing with crime over the Memorial Day weekend. “But you know,” she told interviewer Ken Davis, “there were rumors floating around about — and I didn’t verify this — but rumors floating around that they were telling their officers, ‘Don’t do anything. Don’t, over Memorial Day weekend, don’t intercede. If you see some criminal activity just lay back, do nothing.’ I hope to God that wasn’t true because, man, oh man, if that happened, there’s going to be a reckoning.”

There’s going to be a reckoning, all right, Madam Mayor, it just won’t be the one you thought it would be.

As Rudy Giuliani knew, and as Lori Lightfoot does not, it takes a motivated police force to take the steps necessary to drive down the level of violence seen in Chicago. “Cops count,” as William Bratton has preached for years, but in order for them to make a difference, they have to have the expectation that if they act within the law and department policy, their superiors and their city government will back them when controversy arises. Cops in Chicago have no such expectation, and it appears unlikely Mayor Lightfoot will even try to instill one.

Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931.

WHAT THE HELL HAS BEEN GOING ON AT BOEING? Pilots reveal safety fears over Boeing’s fleet of 787 Dreamliners.

HMMMM: ‘We drowned them all’: Billboard displayed in Tehran broadcast a video of US and Israeli ships being destroyed just days before attack on Gulf vessels as experts warn of chilling similarities with 1980s ‘Tanker War.’

Meanwhile over at the Grauniad, “Jeremy Corbyn says there is ‘no credible evidence’ of Iran’s involvement.”

DISPATCHES FROM GROUND ZERO OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: With a Huge Punitive Damage Award, the Oberlin Verdict Becomes Even More Meaningful.

Second, the size of the jury award will create a legal market for litigation. There’s a relatively simple reason why campus free-speech codes proliferated well before there was a concerted legal counterattack — money. It takes money to sue universities, and First Amendment cases simply don’t yield eye-popping jury awards. It took the creation of large networks of nonprofit, pro-bono lawyers to turn the free-speech tide on campus.

Common-law torts are different. Plaintiffs can receive real compensation, and universities have deep pockets. In a radio interview yesterday, I compared the verdict to the kind of sound that causes prairie dogs to stand alert — suddenly, lawyers are paying attention:

It is true that vexatious defamation suits can be used to punish lawful speakers, but many states have erected statutory guardrails to protect defendants against frivolous litigation. In addition, the First Amendment properly provides extremely robust protection for speech directed at public figures such as politicians, celebrities, and journalists. The fact remains, however, that outrage campaigns are often built on lies, and that when adults irresponsibly or maliciously spread those lies, the law has long provided a remedy.

Critics are already decrying the “chilling effect” of the Oberlin verdict. To the extent that the verdict causes activist administrators to pause and consider the underlying veracity and merit of the public campaigns they’re asked to join, then this is one chilling effect that may well do some good.

I hope they rain fire and brimstone, to coin a phrase.

FLASHBACK: Remember InstaPundit In Your Will!

OPEN THREAD: Yes, it’s that time again.

BIDEN VOWS TO RETURN NATION TO ERA WHEN PRESS DIDN’T BOTHER REPORTING ON PRESIDENT’S SCANDALS.

Note to Snopes: This is the Babylon Bee, so it’s satire — or is it?

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO TRUMP: CNN’s Jim Acosta recalls ‘quaint’ Romney gaffes, including one that wasn’t a ‘gaffe’ at all:

For many voters on the Right (myself included), the “binders” moment served as further proof that it does not matter who the GOP submits as its presidential nominee. He can be as kind and decent as Romney, and Democrats and their allies in the press will still savage him as a retrograde monster, grinding him into dust with a relentless torrent of attacks and criticisms. And if Democrats and their supporters cannot find legitimate controversies with which to destroy the GOP nominee, they will simply concoct them from thin air, as they did with “binders full of women” and similar episodes of ginned up outrage. It makes sense, then, that Trump’s inability to feel shame, coupled with his love for fighting with journalists, appealed to the same people who watched in dismay in 2012 as their perfectly honorable candidate was torn to pieces by the White House and the press.

“Romney ran a hard-fought, respectable race,” Acosta recalls in his book, referring to the former governor as a “thoroughly decent human being” with “good manners.”*

Is that so?

Because that most certainly was not the message voters received in 2012, back when Acosta and others were busy obsessing over supposed “gaaaaaaffes” committed by the man who threatened to deny their beloved Barack Obama a second term in office.

Choose the form of your destructor, to coin an Instaphrase.

* Curious how Republicans invariably get rehabilitated by the DNC-MSM as wise elder statesmen to bash the current Republican in office, assuming that the public has forgotten the previous smears.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Terrorism-Linked CAIR Forces U.S. Army War College to Capitulate on Raymond Ibrahim’s Islam Lecture.

DAVID LIMBAUGH: Leftists Declare Fundamental Moral Questions Beyond Debate.

Or to put it another way: