WHAT IS A PLACE WHERE PEOPLE ARE HELD AWAITING COURT APPEARANCES: Let’s Stop Lying to Ourselves and Call Them Jails.

THE PENNY DROPS FOR MAUREEN DOWD? Ed Driscoll summarized earlier the NYT Op-Ed piece from Maureen Dowd, titled “Scaling Wokeback Mountain.” I couldn’t help but notice this rather telling paragraph:

“The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.”

Conservatives and Libertarians and even a few still-sensible Democrats have been saying this for years, that substituting reason and logic with a self-appointed high moral ground is a form of “shut-upism” a way of avoiding solutions (other than your own) by demonizing (and subsequently deplatforming) the opposition.  A few, a very few, have begun to realize that Podesta and Hillary’s polarization game (“Deplorables!”) has contaminated — and possibly rendered toothless — Democratic politics for years to come. It was only a matter of time until they began to use this tactic on each other.

Maybe Maureen Dowd has looked around and asked what happened to the Mensheviks. And perhaps she’s inching closer to being red-pilled.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Massage Therapy for Tired Feet (and Plantar Fasciitis!).

WHO COUNTS AS A JOURNALIST, ANYWAY?

Part of the problem is that many of us are still clinging to a mindset in which the ‘journalist’ is hailed as an ideal without prejudice or bias. I still feel somewhat beholden to maintaining a degree of this; though I’m not a full-time journalist and my penchant for political snark is readily available on Twitter, because I write regularly for this outlet and it touches upon the realm of politics, I have chosen to not make any donations to political candidates in this election cycle. (My bank account thanks me.) But recently my friend Drew Curtis, founder of humorous news aggregator Fark.com (which famously popularized the ‘Florida man’ headline), reminded me that our conception of allegedly unbiased news is a myopic one. American newspapers of yore weren’t published in the name of a free press; they were propaganda arms of major political parties. The idea of an unbiased, agenda-free press is one with few roots deeper than the mass media of the mid-20th century.

It was a necessary fiction during the days of the first radio, and later TV networks of the first half of the 20th century, and into the 1970s, when most American cities were served by three TV networks and at most, two newspapers, each getting the bulk of their content from a couple of wire services. But that world hasn’t existed for decades, far less so today.

SALENA ZITO: Why America’s tariff-hit farmers still support Trump.

FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM—A REVIEW.

[Author Aaron Bastani] claims that “communism” has never existed, because “communism” is defined as a post-scarcity economy, in which people no longer need to work for a living. Public ownership of the means of production is not enough; on its own, that is just socialism, not communism. This is, of course, technically correct, but it is a technicality just the same. Bastani knows as well as anyone that we sometimes informally describe systems (the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea) as “communist” when the technically correct term would be “socialist.” But linguistic pedantry does not save his case.

Bastani’s argument is not that we should wait for another 100 years or so until the technology is sufficiently advanced, and then move straight from capitalism to communism. He wants the transition to start today—or, better still, yesterday—and he envisages a long transition period, during which our economy would no longer be capitalist, but not yet communist either.

There is a word for this: socialism. Like almost every other communist before him, Bastani wants to reach communism via socialism. Thus, the fact that socialism has already been tried more than two dozen times, and failed every time without exception, should be somewhat relevant to this book. But on that issue, Bastani has next to nothing to say. Like most socialist manifestoes, FALC ultimately boils down to “next time will be different, because I say so.”

As blogger Moe Lane once wrote, “Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally.” Read the whole thing.

CALIFORNIA: HERE BE MONSTERS.

● Sacramento County Says It’s Illegal to Work on Your Own Car in Your Own Garage.

—Jalopnik, July 3rd.

● “In a bizarre stunt Friday, an elf-costumed real estate developer threw money at residents of a homeless camp in California in an effort to entice them to leave.”

—Fox News, yesterday.

● How California’s Housing Crisis Could Hit Seniors Hard.

—The New York Times, Tuesday.

The latter two links are “the housing price of liberalism” in action, as Thomas Sowell would say.

(Via Small Dead Animals; classical reference in headline.)

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Rahm Emanuel calls AOC’s chief of staff “a snot-nosed punk,” according to Maureen Dowd in a column titled “Scaling Wokeback Mountain:”

And then there’s the real instigator, Saikat Chakrabarti, A.O.C.’s 33-year-old chief of staff, who co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, both of which recruited progressives — including A.O.C. — to run against moderates in Democratic primaries. The former Silicon Valley Bernie Bro assumed he could apply Facebook’s mantra, “Move fast and break things,” to one of the oldest institutions in the country.

But Congress is not a place where you achieve radical progress — certainly not in divided government. It’s a place where you work at it and work at it and don’t get everything you want.

The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.

Chakrabarti sent shock waves through the Democratic caucus when he posted a tweet about the border bill comparing moderate and Blue Dog Democrats — some of whom are black — to Southern segregationists in the ’40s.

Rahm Emanuel told me Chakrabarti is “a snot-nosed punk” who has no idea about the battle scars Pelosi bears from the liberal fights she has led.

“What votes did you get?” Emanuel said, rhetorically challenging A.O.C.’s chief of staff. “You should only be so lucky to learn from somebody like Nancy who has shown incredible courage and who has twice returned the Democratic Party to power.

Talk about projection — Chakrabarti simply doesn’t want to let an (imaginary) crisis go to waste to transform the entire American economy.

FINALLY! Anglo-Saxons deserve reparations for the Norman Conquest: The effect on indigenous English society was enduring devastation.

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ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: League of Conservation Voters withdraws from climate forum after ‘offensive’ Buttigieg op-ed in New Republic.

The Hill’s scare quotes around “offensive” aren’t really needed here, when Ace of Spades writes, “Even I’m offended.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) Comes Within Inches Of Calling the Congressional Black Caucus Oreos. “Quite a day at the DailyKos Nutroots Nation conference.”

CULTURE OF VIOLENCE: New York Legislator Who Told Republican Staffer To Kill Herself Endorses Kamala Harris.

HEH: Wife of Man Who Started Midlife Crisis Band Wishes He’d Just Had an Affair. No, this is not about Joe and Mika.

DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: The Totalitarian ‘They.’

As Rod Dreher writes, “every once in a while a piece of journalism will appear that seems custom-made for this blog. In the case of New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo’s latest bit, in which he calls for the abolition of gendered language. Mind you, Manoo is not a columnist for the Oberlin student daily, but the most influential newspaper in the world. He says he’s a normal suburban dad, and doesn’t mind if you call him “he.” However:

But “he” is not what you should call me. If we lived in a just, rational, inclusive universe — one in which we were not all so irredeemably obsessed by the particulars of the parts dangling between our fellow humans’ legs, nor the ridiculous expectations signified by those parts about how we should act and speak and dress and feel — there would be no requirement for you to have to assume my gender just to refer to me in the common tongue.

Right. We’re the ones who are “irredeemably obsessed” with genitalia, not the progressives who can’t stop talking about it.

* * * * * * * *

Damon Linker has a great piece about how out-in-left-field-over-the-wall-into-the-bleachers-and-halfway-to-Albuquerque liberals have become on gender in just two shakes of RuPaul’s tail. Linker points out that Manjoo is not going out on any kind of limb here. This kind of gender radicalism is now part of everyday discourse in pop culture, advertising, media discourse, and in the catechisms generated by corporate HR departments. Here’s the most interesting part:

The first thing to be said about these convictions is that, apart from a miniscule number of transgender activists and postmodern theorists and scholars, no one would have affirmed any of them as recently as four years ago. There is almost no chance at all that the Farhad Manjoo of 2009 sat around pondering and lamenting the oppressiveness of his peers referring to “him” as “he.” That’s because (as far as I know) Manjoo is a man, with XY chromosomes, male reproductive organs, and typically male hormone levels, and a mere decade ago referring to such a person as “he” was considered to be merely descriptive of a rather mundane aspect of reality. His freedom was not infringed, or implicated, in any way by this convention. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to think or feel otherwise. Freedom was something else and about other things.

The emergence and spread of the contrary idea — that “gender is a ubiquitous prison of the mind” — can be traced to a precise point in time: the six months following the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right. Almost immediately after that decision was handed down, progressive activists took up the cause of championing transgender rights as the next front in the culture war — and here we are, just four short years later, born free but everywhere in chains.

Read the whole thing, and then check out Neo on “Language and politics: getting used to the newest Newspeak.”

It’s here that I would add the usual “All the Democrats have to do is not be crazy, and they can’t even do that” Insta-rejoinder. But what if they do win next year? They’re going to want to start implementing the material they’re previewing right now, and give it to voters good and hard, and Mencken would say. Après Trump, le déluge.

KATIE COURIC AND GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS DINED WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN AFTER HE WAS BRANDED A SEX OFFENDER. Forbes ran an article he or his staffers ghost-wrote. As the New York Times reports, “Jeffrey Epstein Was a Sex Offender. The Powerful Welcomed Him Anyway.”

A strange thing happened when Jeffrey Epstein came back to New York City after being branded a sex offender: His reputation appeared to rise.

In 2010, the year after he got out of a Florida prison, Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos dined at his Manhattan mansion with a British royal. The next year, Mr. Epstein was photographed at a “billionaire’s dinner” attended by tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. A page popped up on Harvard University’s website lauding his accomplishments, and superlative-filled news releases described his lofty ambitions as he dedicated $10 million to charitable causes.

Powerful female friends served as social guarantors: Peggy Siegal, a gatekeeper for A-list events, included him in movie screenings, and Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, a champion of women’s health, maintained a friendship that some felt gave him credibility. Mr. Epstein put up a website showing Stephen Hawking and other luminaries at a science gathering he had organized.

* * * * * * * *

Some of the respect Mr. Epstein, 66, drew on was manufactured, the accomplishments recycled. The gathering with Dr. Hawking had taken place back in 2006. The positive online notices appeared to have been paid for by Mr. Epstein: A writer employed by his foundation churned out the news releases, and Drew Hendricks, the supposed author of a Forbes story calling Mr. Epstein “one of the largest backers of cutting edge science,” conceded in an interview that he was given $600 to post the pre-written article under his own name. (Forbes removed the piece after The New York Times published its article.)

The middle of the sentence that followed must have been difficult for the Timespeople to write: “Though some institutions and prominent people, including Donald J. Trump, said they shunned him, Mr. Epstein’s tactics largely worked.”

DAVID THOMPSON: Escape Is Forbidden.

REMINDER: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised Renewables Make Energy Expensive Since That’s Always Been The Greens’ Goal.

Related: AOC chief of staff confirms: Green New Deal was not really about the climate. “In a report by the Washington Post, Saikat Chakrabarti revealed that ‘it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all … we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.'”

They’re watermelons: Green on the outside, red on the inside.

GREEN NEW DEAL SNEAK PREVIEW: De Blasio Dithers about Leaving Iowa Campaign Trail as Blackout Shuts Down Parts of NYC.

Meanwhile on Twitter: New Yorkers appreciated Bill de Blasio’s real-time updates from Iowa on the massive power outage in Manhattan. (Just kidding!)

OPEN THREAD: Where better to spend your Saturday night?

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: After Being Sworn In, AOC Repeated Lie About Children Drinking Out of Toilets at Border Hearing.

Don’t think of it as lying, think of it as merely postmodern performance art in action.

DISPATCHES FROM FUN CITY: Extensive blackout reported across Midtown and Upper West Side of Manhattan. “The outage came 42 years to the day after the giant 1977 blackout, in which power was lost to most of the city.”

Question: If your (Democrat-run) city has a blackout, does that count towards the next Earth Hour?