MOLON LABE: Woman Confronts Beto On Gun Confiscation Plan, ‘Hell No You’re Not.’

MANAGEMENT BY MEDIA HYSTERIA: Walmart to halt sales of e-cigarettes.

LEFTISTS ARE STILL TRYING TO COPE WITH THE LOSS OF THEIR ACCUSTOMED IMPUNITY: White Liberals Lecture Candace Owens On White Supremacy. She Leaves Them In Tatters.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Study: Two weeks of no exercise enough to damage fit people’s bodies.

NOT IN FRONT OF THE SERVANTS: Long live Downton Abbey.

Americans forbid themselves titles and hierarchy in their present lives, but they indulge their inner lives by dreaming of forbidden past lives. The presidency is weak magic compared to the hard stuff; an ex-president totters away to a golf cart and book tour, but Meghan Markle will always be a duchess. Providing it’s kept in its proper place, this undemocratic recidivism is, as a masochistic carpenter might say, a harmless vice.

The proper place for the contemplation of these matters is PBS on a Sunday night. The unspoken secret at the heart of liberal media is that PBS exists for only two purposes, neither of them to do with the news. One is making children’s programs with a cryptically soft-left moral. The other is buying in ‘Masterpiece’ costume dramas, packed with reactionary, sexist and discriminatory content that makes Laura Linney’s nostrils flare when she introduces it. The first of these import hits was Upstairs, Downstairs, a saga of masters and servants in the early 20th century. The most recent is Downton Abbey which, being a saga of masters and servants in the early 20th century, is Upstairs, Downstairs reincarnated.

The milking of the Downton phenomenon has now produced a movie.

Which seems to have the winning formula, at least for this weekend: Box Office: Genteel Downton Abbey Takes Brad Pitt’s Ad Astra And Stallone’s Rambo, Gives Studio Highest Debut Ever.

HMM: Trump Whistleblower Drama Puts Biden In The Hot Seat Over Ukraine.

Related: Peter Schweizer says Hunter Biden worked in Ukraine despite lacking credentials: ‘What is he being paid for?’ Oh, I have an idea.

Flashback: Inside the shady private equity firm run by Kerry and Biden’s kids.

UPDATE: Also:

SHOT: ‘What About China?’ Is A Bad Response To The Climate Crisis.

CHASER: China Emits More Carbon Dioxide Than The U.S. and EU Combined.

BURIED LEDE: THE HILL COMMITS JOURNALISM. The Hill’s Saagar Enjeti Torches Dubious NYT Reporters Behind Kavanaugh Hit Piece.

THAT’S NICE, BUT WHERE’S MINE? I WANT ONE LIKE GEORGE JETSON HAD. Why the U.S. Air Force Is Looking Into Its Own ‘Flying Cars.’

IT’S COME TO THIS: Trader Joe’s removes pictures of circus elephants from packaging after PETA complaint.

T-BONED: Next one out? Cory Booker memo warns he may not be in 2020 race ‘much longer.’

WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS, TO THE MALAISE THAT NEVER ENDS: Jimmy Carter Wishes He Had Donald Trump’s Legendary Stamina.

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Buffoonpalooza Edition.

PROFILES IN COURAGE: Alleged Army Vets Yell at Dan Crenshaw, Post Video to Internet.

TITLE IX UPDATE: Fake Claims of Rape Due to Trauma Under Scrutiny.

The big news in campus sexual misconduct hearings is that believers in trauma-informed adjudications are on the defensive. What that verbal mouthful means is that apparent weaknesses in a complainant’s case—inarticulateness, contradictions, lying, or being too “frozen’’ or fearful of testifying—must not be automatically taken as evidence that sexual trauma has occurred.

In recent years, the one-sided nature of “trauma-informed” training has formed a noticeable trend in the flood of lawsuits filed by accused students. In a lawsuit against Penn, the court cited the university’s trauma-informed training as a key reason why the complaint survived a motion to dismiss. During the Brown university bench trial, the decisive vote in the adjudication panel testified that she ignored exculpatory text messages because of the training she had received. Ole Miss’ trauma-informed training suggested that an accuser lying could be seen as a sign of the accused student’s guilt. And at Johnson & Wales, the university was so disinclined to make public the contents of its training that it refused a request by the accused student’s lawyer to see it before the hearing.

Amidst this legal backdrop came Emily Yoffe’s blockbuster article in the Atlantic. Published on September 2017, the piece reviewed the dubious science behind the trauma-informed training used at many schools. Yoffe’s conclusion: “The result is not only a system in which some men are wrongly accused and wrongly punished. It is a system vulnerable to substantial backlash. University professors and administrators should understand this. And they, of all people, should identify and call out junk science.”

A few weeks ago, in a remarkable statement, ATIXA, the Association of Title IX Administrators, an organization that generally defended the Obama administration’s accuser-friendly approach to Title IX adjudications, added to these concerns. In a seven-page statement, the organization acknowledged that “Emily Yoffe did not win many friends for her critical piece on the topic in The Atlantic in 2017, but ATIXA believes her points needed to be made.”

The ATIXA statement expressed support for the principle of investigators understanding trauma but worried that a one-sided approach permeates too many campus adjudications: “To assert that trauma cannot be faked is as flagrantly false a claim as asserting that trauma is proof of assault. Individuals can fake sleep disorders, nightmares, heightened arousal, trust issues, triggering, and more.”

Yep.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND FAHRENHEIT 451: Rod Dreher on Trashing Unwoke Books.

[Melissa] Barnett has apparently removed the tweet, which featured a photo of trash bins filled with books. This also means the Paul Gorski tweet to which she responded has been removed. Gorski, a Social Justice Warrior pedagogue appears to have deleted his Twitter account. His tweet saying that the literary canon “is white supremacy” prompted the affirmative tweet from Barnett. — RD]

This woman is the head of “English Language Arts” for the public schools in Washington Township, NJ. That’s right: the head of the English department for public schools in this town celebrates throwing books into the Dumpster. She’s a self-described “servant leader,” and apparently a Christian. Who throws unwoke books into the Dumpster so all the geniuses in her school (and they’re all geniuses) won’t be tainted by what’s in the pages…I got sucked into Mrs. Barnett’s Twitter feed, and read everything she posted this year. It’s a fascinating look into the mind of one high school English teacher. There is little evidence that she actually loves literature, but lots and lots of evidence that she loves education, and educational theory. In Mrs. Barnett’s school system, they’re all about “equity” in learning. They created a position for a guy, one Steve Gregor, to oversee the implementation of equity there — read all about it.

Here’s the tweet that Barnett deleted:

As Ray Bradbury wrote in the introduction to the 50th anniversary of Fahrenheit 451, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”

IF YOU AGREE, YOU’RE A MISOGYNIST. IF YOU DISAGREE, YOU’RE AN ISLAMOPHOBE. ‘Islam is RIGHT About Women’ flyers spark concern in Winchester.

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MASS HOCUS-POCUS IN THE MIDDLE EAST? There are new reports from devout Muslims living in the most repressive and intolerant corners of Islam of appearances of Jesus. These aren’t from people in “backwater fundamentalist, snake-handling freak shows,” either. And people are converting to Christianity, even when the penalty for doing so is death, according to Reuters, NPR, NBC, etc.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Environmental apocalypse predictions have failed for half a century.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Kavanaugh and the Crisis of Legitimacy: Why the Supreme Court justice became a symbol of polarization.

Democrats are not dissuaded by the fact that Kavanaugh and the Court unite the conservative movement and Republican Party like no other figure and issue. What counts to them is the Democratic base, not the Republican one. Anger, outrage, and animosity whip up voters, boost enthusiasm, and drive people to the polls.

Nor does it matter to the activist left if the source of the allegation did not speak to the Times; if the alleged victim does not recall the incident; if the Times accompanied its story with a weird and gross tweet that it later deleted; if everyone involved in the publication of the essay turned on each other in an orgy of blame-shifting and buck-passing; if one of the authors resorted to sharing Vox articles on social media to rationalize her behavior. The goal is neither objectivity nor factuality. It is de-legitimization.

All of the Kavanaugh coverage for the last year has been intended to undermine his confirmation and subsequent rulings and lay the predicate for structural reform of the U.S. judiciary if the Democrats win the presidency and Senate. The disastrous rollout of this latest smear has had the ironic effect of highlighting the weakness of the original charges against him.

Of course, the party that has relied heavily on rule by judiciary is still shooting itself in the foot if it delegitimizes the Supreme Court.

TOO MANY TIMES TO REMEMBER: Canada’s Justin Trudeau cannot say how often he wore blackface.

CHANGE: A Crackdown on Islam Is Spreading Across China.

The directive, titled “Reinforcing and Improving Islam Work in the New Situation,” has not been made public. It was issued by the State Council, China’s cabinet, in April of last year and classified as confidential for 20 years.

The directive warns against the “Arabization” of Islamic places, fashions and rituals in China, singling out the influence of Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites, as a cause for concern.

It prohibits the use of the Islamic financial system. It bars mosques or other private Islamic organizations from organizing kindergartens or after-school programs, and it forbids Arabic-language schools to teach religion or send students abroad to study.

The most visible aspect of the crackdown has been the targeting of mosques built with domes, minarets and other architectural details characteristic of Central Asia or the Arabic world.

Taken in isolation, some of these measures seem limited. Others seem capricious: some mosques with Arabic features have been left untouched, while others nearby have been altered or shut down.

But on a national scale, the trend is clear. Mr. Cui, the poet, calls it the harshest campaign against faith since the end of the Cultural Revolution, when so-called Red Guards unleashed by Mao Zedong destroyed mosques across the country.

The Chinese favor multiculturalism in their adversaries, not at home.