AM I WRONG TO SUSPECT THAT KAMALA HARRIS’S CAMPAIGN IS BEHIND THIS? South Bend’s Black Voters Revolt Against Pete Buttigieg, Threaten to Derail His 2020 Campaign.

GODSPEED: Falcon Heavy rocket set to attempt SpaceX’s “most difficult launch ever.”

First of all, this is the first time the Air Force has flown payloads on a Falcon Heavy rocket. And while this mission will not be carrying anything critical to national security—such as large satellites valued at $1 billion or more used for observation, communication, or other purposes to advance the national interest—Air Force officials will be watching closely.

The US military is in the middle of determining which providers among SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, and Northrop Grumman will win lucrative launch contracts from 2022 to 2026. The Air Force is only expected to pick two winners, and SpaceX has said its Falcon Heavy rocket can meet all nine of the Air Force’s “reference orbits,” which means sending heavy payloads to some exotic orbits that require a lot of energy to reach.

The unique profile of Monday night’s mission will help demonstrate that the Falcon Heavy rocket’s second stage does indeed have the capability to reach all of these orbits. After the rocket launches and its second stage separates, it will perform four separate upper-stage engine burns, and then, almost like a school bus, drop off satellites at three different locations. These maneuvers will require precise performance by the upper stage over the course of six hours.

It all begins in just a few hours.

BAN THE CRIMETHINKING CROCHETERS! Ravelry, a crocheting-oriented social network, silences Trump supporters as “white supremacists.”

ELECTORAL INTERFERENCE: Project Veritas Reveals Google’s ‘Fairness’ Efforts to Prevent 2016 From Happening Again.

Remember, any time leftists lose, it means the system is “broken” and there’s a lot of “unfairness.”

RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Some Guy Named Joe is Running for President: Dem Field Complete.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED, DAMMIT: We Tried to Publish a Replication of a Science Paper in Science. The Journal Refused. “Our research suggests that the theory that conservatives and liberals respond differently to threats isn’t actually true.”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Iran Is Not a Problem We Should Solve, But It Is a Situation We Can Manage. “It’s safe to say then that when it comes to core interests, that for Iran, née Persia, not much has changed since the Persian Emperor Darius the Great began his campaign to subdue mainland Greece in 492 BC, and won’t change much in the future.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTIONAL OLYMPICS: San Fran Homeless Advocates Go to War with Gay Sushi Restaurant Over a Rock Where a Sleeping Vagrant Should Be. “Best I can tell from that, both gay pride and homelessness have been given top-of-the-chart status on the hierarchy of identity politics, and now they’re battling it out like King Kong vs. Godzilla.”

DECOUPLING: US may require companies make 5G equipment outside of China. “It wouldn’t be enough to use hardware from non-Chinese companies.”

THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE PRESIDENT, OPEN RACISM WOULD BE THE ORDER OF THE DAY. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Black SUNY prof: ‘Seeing poor white people makes me happy.’

Nicholas Powers writes in Race Baitr (the article has since been deleted, apparently) that “white people begging us for food feels like justice. It feels like Afro-Futurism after America falls. It feels like a Black Nationalist wet dream. It has the feels I rarely feel, a hunger for historical vengeance satisfied so well I rub my belly.”

I think this is called “diversity and inclusion.”

JON GABRIEL: Horrors! USDA moved a few bureaucrats out of D.C. to improve service. As Jon writes, “Ignore the protests from bureaucrats. More federal agencies would be smart to move their operations away from Washington.”

CRACKDOWN: Venezuela Detains Six Military, Police Officials, Family Members, Activists.

“Family members,” now known as “hostages.”

THE TRUMP ADMINSTIRATION HAS DONE THE RIGHT THING BY PUTTING LOCAL SCHOOL DISTRICTS BACK IN CHARGE OF THEIR DISCIPLINE POLICY:  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that New York City is going to do the right thing.

THERE’S A PHOTO/VIDEO, AND HE LOOKS EXACTLY AS YOU’D EXPECT: WATCH: Smug vandal rips out pro-life crosses, compares pro-lifers to flat-Earthers.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

Plus, Shop Amazon – Top Rated Products.

Plus, shop Kindle Deals of the Day.

ELECTION INTERFERENCE: Project Veritas: Insider Blows Whistle & Exec Reveals Google Plan to Prevent “Trump situation” in 2020 on Hidden Cam.

Plus: “Insider: Google Violates ‘letter of the law’ and ‘spirit of the law’ on Section 230.”

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Immigration Raid Canceled After Rogue Leak. “When are these leakers going to be hunted down and punished? Anyone who is leaking information from the White House needs to be discovered and punished severely. It’s dangerous to have unelected bureaucrats deciding to influence policy by trying to embarrass the administration. It’s Trump’s fault that he hasn’t smoked out these activists and fired them or put them in an office with nothing other than a crossword puzzle and a pencil. You can’t fire these dirt bags because of the ridiculous union “job protection” rules but you can add civil service reform to the top of the list of issues Trump should have addressed on day one.”

SO BEFORE I WENT TO CAYMAN, I bought a Nikon W300 underwater camera. It’s a point-and-shoot, but it’s a fancy point-and-shoot and most importantly, it’s waterproof to 100 feet. I took it along on almost every dive, and it worked fine — the viewfinder even shows you your depth, with a warning orange bar when you get deeper than 75 feet. It never leaked, and the quality of pics was pretty good.

It’s a decent out-of-water camera too, and it’s shockproof — which really means shock-resistant, but it’s tougher than most other cameras. (Bumped).

UPDATE: Some earlier underwater photos here.

CORN, POPPED: A civil war is coming for the Democratic Party — and it won’t be pretty.

For starters, is the Democratic Party a party of the rich or a party of the little guy? For many years, they’ve been the party of the rich playing a good game of pretending to be for the little guy.

And the Democratic establishment does it in insidious ways that are too clever by half: They are for the marginalized guy or gal in the race, gender, and sexuality issues because, hey, that doesn’t hurt their and their affluent constituents’ pocketbook much.

But in the economic issues that matter, they often sock it to the average Democratic working-class voter: in the global trade deals that’ve offshored jobs and have decimated the American manufacturing base; in their looking the other way as illegal immigrants depress the wages of working-class Americans, and more.

But as long as they talk and talk and talk some more — about abortion and transgender rights and racism (not that these aren’t relevant issues), they can have their cake and eat it too.

But all this worked until 2016, but can’t be pulled off anymore. The Democratic establishment wing is still either clueless or stubborn, but they want good ol’ Joe Biden to come to the rescue and Make Oligarchic America Great Again.

But the restive Sanders, Warren, and Ocasio Cortez wing of the party won’t let them.

As I was saying…

I’M TIRED OF HEARING ABOUT THE RISE, IT’S TIME TO START WORKING ON THE FALL: Joel Kotkin: The rise of the intolerant left.

In the past, the right, notably the segment affiliated with religious belief, was closely associated with censorship and control of thought. Today, enforced orthodoxy derives primarily from the left, emboldened by near total control of the media, university curricula and cultural products.

Remarkably, a recent study by the Atlantic found that “the most politically intolerant Americans” tend be white, highly educated urban progressives. . . .

Long ago, religious zealots embraced feudal ideals, but increasingly it’s the ultra-secular progressives who reprise the role of Medieval Inquisitors.

This move toward leftist orthodoxy is not unprecedented. McCarthyism in the 1950s may have been cruelly inquisitional, but not nearly as totalitarian as Stalinism. Unfortunately, it is largely on the left that we find the authoritarian demand for unanimity on virtually all issues.

At the heart of intolerance lies with the notion of “absolute truth.” Traditionally, Western liberalism embraced the ideal of healthy debate and interchange about values and objectives. Liberals and conservatives alike took empiricism and rationality seriously.

Today these ideals are being undermined by a fevered rush to reject empiricism and complexity. “There’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right,” suggests the left’s super-star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .

This emphasis on intent and “morality” reflects a more Medieval attitude than that of a reasoned politics that grows from facts and evidence.

These people talk about morality, but they’re not actually moral. Plus:

Free speech’s future prospects are not made brighter by an internet controlled by a handful of tech oligarchs. Nearly two-thirds of readers now get their news through Facebook and Google; as those tech companies systematically destroy the economics of the news business, their dominance will only grow, particularly among the young.

Based largely in the Bay Area — a hotbed of progressive sentiment — these firms use algorithms to suppress anything they find mildly disturbing. This has already resulted in the mass de-platforming of largely conservative voices on outlets such as Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter.

The power over information wielded by the oligarchs, the shaping of the next generation by the progressive professoriate and cultural clerisy represent a clear danger to the future of free thought. It will take a concerted effort by people of good will, both left and right, to demand a return to appreciation of the great thinkers of the past and humankind’s beautiful diversity of thought. We can’t let our cultural legacy be squelched by today’s inquisitors.

Time to break them up.

HOPE HICKS DESTROYED RUSSIA COLLUSION HOAX, AGAIN: Congressional Democrats who thought former Trump 2016 campaign and White House insider would somehow revive the Russia collusion narrative got bumpkus, according to Margot Cleveland, writing this morning in the Washington Free Beacon.

Among much else, Cleveland reports “Hick’s responses during last week’s hearing also provided fresh insight into Trump’s behind-the-scenes response to news of Russian interference. Hicks noted that the campaign only ‘became aware that the Russian government was attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections’ when the story hit the press. The president’s former confidant added that any conversations she was privy to during the campaign concerning Russia interference in the election mirrored what Trump said publicly.”

Cleveland also helpfully provides in a separate piece the eight most VIP takeaways from the Hicks testimony and cross-examination.

TURKEY: In Setback for Erdogan, Opposition Candidate Wins Istanbul Mayor Seat.

An opposition candidate has won a repeat ballot for Istanbul mayor Sunday, ending President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s quarter-century grip on the megalopolis and exposing troubles at his long-dominant ruling party.

The opposition party’s candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, beat a rival from Mr. Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, 54% to 45%, according to a tally of 99% of votes cast released by Turkish state news agency Anadolu.

“It’s a new beginning,” Mr. Imamoglu said in a victory speech.

The AKP candidate, Binali Yildirim, conceded defeat. “I congratulate him and wish him success,” he said in a brief televised address.

Mr. Imamoglu had defeated the AKP candidate in the initial March municipal ballot, but electoral authorities had voided the results after Mr. Erdogan complained of fraud and called for a do-over.

Sunday’s defeat, adding to the loss of the capital, Ankara, in the March elections, is a stinging setback for Mr. Erdogan, who led numerous rallies in support of his AKP protégé ahead of the repeat election.

What’s a guy got to do to steal an election these days?