TOXIC FEMINISM: How a Feminist Prophet Became an Apostate—An Interview with Dr Phyllis Chesler.

JON CALDERA: Colorado cities like Longmont and Boulder are venturing into ill-advised monopolistic ventures.

As technology and competition are turning once invincible natural monopolies into dinosaurs, we’re watching local governments create monopolies that almost certainly will be disrupted by technology.

So, of course, Boulder is trying to build its own electric power empire because they can do it better than Xcel, don’t ya know, they’re Boulder. But if technology will disrupt Xcel in the future, it will certainly disrupt Boulder’s government-owned monopoly too.

But here’s the big difference — like AT&T, when Xcel takes a hit, their stockholders lose. When a government-owned monopoly takes a hit, taxpayers lose. (Um, social justice warriors, where are you on this injustice?)

The new craze of city-owned broadband service is nothing more than switching financial risk from private stockholders, who willingly take the risk, to taxpayers.

But just think of the increased opportunities for graft and corruption.

WALTER SHAPIRO: The Polling Industry Is in Crisis: Everyone knows the numbers are as unreliable as ever, and yet the political press still hypes every little rise and fall.

ANDREW BREITBART’S EEEEVIL PLAN FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST CONTINUES TO BEAR FRUIT: Looking for anti-vaccine conspiracy theories? You can find them on HuffPost.

(Classical reference in headline.)

FLASHBACK: How an industry helps Chinese students cheat their way into and through U.S. colleges. “The University of Iowa suspects at least 30 Chinese students of having used ringers to take their exams. The case offers a look inside a thriving underground economy of cheating services aimed at the hundreds of thousands of Chinese kids applying to and attending foreign colleges.”

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: Texas To Send 1,000 National Guardsmen To Border To Address Illegal Alien Surge.

SOUNDS LIKE TIME FOR A TAX CUT: Ten Months Into the Fiscal Year, Tennessee’s Revenues Exceed Estimates by $556.7 Million.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, BILLION-DOLLAR-SLUSH-FUNDS EDITION: California State University hid a $1.5 billion surplus while raising tuition. Where is the accountability?

Here we go again: Another scandal involving a state-funded entity hoarding a secret stockpile of money. This time, an investigation by California State Auditor Elaine Howle discovered $1.5 billion in surplus funds hidden in outside accounts controlled by the California State University system.

Yes, that’s billion with a “b.” While CSU was squirreling away this massive fortune, it was simultaneously raising tuition costs for students and begging the California State Legislature for more money.

“CSU put the money, which primarily came from student tuition, in outside accounts rather than in the state Treasury,” according to a story by The Sacramento Bee’s Sawsan Morrar.

We’ve seen this story before. In 2017, Howle’s office busted the University of California Chancellor’s Office for hiding a $175 million slush fund from public view – while also hiking tuition on students.

People should do jail time for this mishandling of funds. The Sacramento Bee asks: “How many more times will we learn of secretive massive funds, hidden from view by so-called public servants who apparently consider themselves above the rules?”

The answer is, as long as there’s no penalty for doing so.

THE RED DECADE, REDUX: Journalist Eugene Lyons’s chronicle of the 1930s Left remains startlingly relevant today.

It may be that the best book that will ever be written about today’s progressive mind-set was published in 1941. That in The Red Decade author Eugene Lyons was, in fact, describing the Communist-dominated American Left of the Depression-wracked 1930s and 1940s makes his observations even more meaningful, for it is sobering to be confronted with how little has been gained by hard experience. The celebration of feelings over reason? The certainty of moral virtue? The disdain for tradition and the revising of history for ideological ends? The embrace of the latest definition of correct thought? Lyons was one of the most gifted reporters of his time, and among the bravest, and his story of the spell cast by Stalinist-tinged social-justice activism over that day’s purported best and brightest—literary titans, Hollywood celebrities, leading academics, religious leaders, media heavies—would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t so eerily familiar.

Indeed, looking backward from a time when, according to surveys, more millennials would rather live under socialism than capitalism, it’s apparent that Lyons was documenting not just a historical moment but also a species of historical illiteracy as unchanging as it is poisonous, its utopianism able to flourish only at the expense of independent thought. On a range of issues, alternative views were defined as not merely mistaken but morally reprehensible; and among the elites who dominated the cultural sphere, deviants from approved opinion were subject to special abuse. Of course, having lived and worked in Soviet Russia, Lyons made distinctions about relative abuses of power. Under Stalinism, dissidents were liquidated, or vanished into the gulag; the American Left could only liquidate careers and disappear reputations.

* * * * * * * *

In one sense, the book could hardly have appeared at a more propitious moment. As Lyons wrote in his introduction, it was originally to go to press on June 22, 1941—the very day that Hitler stabbed his ally Stalin in the back by invading the Soviet Union, thereby necessitating a wholesale revision of the CPUSA’s line on the European war. Already that line had drastically changed once, only two years earlier, instantly moving from die-hard anti-Nazism to adamantly antiwar, when Stalin shocked the world by signing his infamous nonaggression pact with Hitler; as a result, thousands of anguished party members had quit, and multitudes of fellow travelers quietly slipped away. But the hard core had rationalized, casting Stalin as a master statesman who had done what he had to in defense of the world’s lone socialist republic, and now they rationalized again. As Lyons observes with bemused contempt, though on that same June 22, the Communist front American Peace Mobilization had been in the midst of a “peace vigil” at the White House, for this “disciplined, obedient and fanatically self-righteous army,” the “ ‘plutocrat’ war was magically transmuted into a people’s war for freedom and justice.” The new demand was that America immediately get into the fight!

The British left’s (also Stalin-approved) 180-degree pivot at this moment was of course the origin of Orwell’s “Oceania has always been/has never been at war with Eastasia” leitmotif in 1984. Read the whole thing.

ALL THE DEMOCRATS HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE CRAZY, AND THEY COULDN’T EVEN MANAGE THAT: Democratic presidential candidates are scaring off Never Trumpers. “Instead of creeping or trotting liberalism, the Democratic candidates for president are virtually all running on galloping liberalism bent on fundamentally and permanently changing the basic structure of the American system of democratic capitalism. That raises the stakes on ousting Trump tremendously.”

Better to play it safe, and keep Trump, the cautious center-right incumbent.

BAD ACID, AND PEOPLE SLIDING IN THE MUD? SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT. Democratic debates ‘the largest gathering of liberals since Woodstock.’

STICK TO YOUR KNITTING: Popular Knitting Platform Ravelry Bans All Trump Support: ‘Undeniably Support for White Supremacy.’

GARRETT WARD SHELDON: What Made American Academia Great (and How It Was Destroyed).

JOHANNES GUTENBERG:  On this day in 1400 (or thereabouts), arguably the most consequential man of the millennium was born.  Or at least the city of his birth, Mainz, so declared in the 1890s. The city needed an official day to celebrate (and so do I).  June 24 was chosen. Don’t argue.