CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: The Virginia Democrats’ Warring Factions: Scandals reveal a party beset by infighting and whispers of conspiracies.

VIRGINIA CLOWNSHOW UPDATE: Republican delegate plans committee hearing where Fairfax accusers can testify.

A Republican lawmaker said Friday that he plans to hold a committee hearing to allow two women who have made sexual assault allegations against Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax to appear before a General Assembly panel and tell their stories.

From the floor of the House of Delegates, Del. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle, said he will schedule a meeting of the House Courts of Justice Committee at a later date and allow Vanessa Tyson, Meredith Watson and Fairfax to speak.

“This will give all parties a chance to be heard,” Bell said.

Just as the press had managed to sweep this story out of the news.

JIM TREACHER EXPLORES THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: No, You Shouldn’t Punch People.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Making Sense of Hyperbaric Chambers.

WHY SOME PEOPLE CHEER WHEN JOURNALISTS GET LAID OFF: Jussie Smollett’s alleged hoax got more media attention than my son, who was shot and killed in Chicago.

THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Sepsis Is a Common Cause of Hospital Deaths.

SPACE: Virgin Galactic Reaches Space Again, Flies Test Passenger for 1st Time.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE, PART DEUX: Democrat Party Press Office — New York Times Branch — Airbrushes Jussie Smollett Off Front Page Of Today’s Paper.

As Jim Treacher has said:

Earlier: Democratic Virginia Scandals Evaporate from ABC, CBS, NBC.

‘YOU’RE THE CLIMATE DENIERS.’ BEN SHAPIRO BEATS THE LEFT AT THEIR OWN RIDICULOUS CLIMATE CHANGE GAME IN EPIC THREAD:

Heh. As I wrote at the beginning of the year paraphrasing George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, “Mr. President, if we were to immediately launch an all out and coordinated nuclear attack on all their coalmines and oil fields, we’d stand a damn good chance of catching ’em with their pants down!” The terrifying thing is that I was linking at the time to a lefty who apparently thought that was a damn good idea.

SELF-DEFENSE: Why You Should Carry A Big Gun As Your Everyday Carry.

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CRYPTO ALWAYS FAILS: Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked.

BENCHMADE’S GETTING A LOT OF SECOND AMENDMENT HEAT, but the story’s a bit more complicated. My advice to Benchmade, though, is to move out of Oregon. Tennessee is nice!

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Weight-loss surgery could benefit sex life, study says. Well, being able to find your genitals has to be a good start.

IS THIS ONE OF THOSE INCONVENIENT TRUTHS I KEEP HEARING ABOUT? So an IRS employee was charged in leaking private info to Michael Avenatti. But check out the demotion: now Avenatti is described by CNN as “just” an attorney. They seem to be forgetting something:

“Avenatti, a ubiquitous presence on cable television for the last two months, has appeared on CNN 65 times and MSNBC 43 times between March 7 and May 10.”

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Democratic Virginia Scandals Evaporate from ABC, CBS, NBC.

Flashback: “Jim Geraghty of NRO estimated that in 2006, the Washington Post ran ‘approximately 100 articles, op-eds, [and] editorials’ spotlighting Republican George Allen’s moronic ‘macaca’ gaffe involving his botched effort at calling out a mohawk-wearing video tagger hired by his opponent, Democrat Jim Webb, to stalk the Allen campaign,” and then repeated the same playbook (this time unsuccessfully) three years later when Republican Bob McDonnell ran for the governship of Virginia.

As for the Virginia Democrats’ current racism and #metoo-related scandals being tossed down the memory hole, just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

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LISTICLE: 6 Classic Songs That Seem Really Inappropriate (and Kind of Creepy) Today.

“China Girl,” which is explicitly antiracist, does not belong on this list.

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Nike’s self-lacing sneakers turn into bricks after faulty firmware update.

I remain unimpressed with the “Internet of Things.”

MOTHBALL FLEET TO STAY MOTHBALLED: The U.S. Navy Won’t Bring Back Mothballed Ships to Boost the Fleet.

Navy officials have concluded it would be too expensive to bring them back and they would offer too few capabilities to make them worthwhile.

According to Military.com, Vice Admiral Tom Moore said the service had taken a look at decommissioned vessels and concluded it just wasn’t worth it. Not only are the ships old, some have been cannibalized to keep existing ships still in the fleet running. The Navy says the current fleet of 288 ships is too small for the service’s global responsibilities and is looking to boost the fleet to 355 ships by the 2030s.

Moore told the press the Navy looked at every ship on the “inactive” list, particularly retired Oliver Hazard Perry-class guided missile frigates. The Perry class was a small multipurpose warship capable of anti-submarine warfare, and self-defense against anti-air threats. Each could carry up to two Seahawk helicopters. The Perrys could operate independently but could also travel as part of a carrier battle group, adding anti-submarine capability. . . .

A look at the three mothball fleets in Google Maps reveals why the Navy won’t bring these ships back. There is so much rust on some of them it is visible from space. In order to bring back these ships to active duty, the Navy would have to spruce them up, add modern communications and electronics, and ensure they are safe to put to sea in. That could end up costing tens of millions per ship. To make matters worse the Perry-class frigates lost their missile launchers in the 2000s as they became obsolete. Unless the ships were renovated with new launchers, boosting their refurbishment cost, the largest weapon on the ship would be the 76-millimeter rapid fire gun.

Well, the Navy would rather have new ships anyway.

CONRAD BLACK: The Greatest Constitutional Crisis Since The Civil War.

The most immense and dangerous public scandal in American history is finally cracking open like a ripe pomegranate. The broad swath of the Trump-hating media that has participated in what has amounted to an unconstitutional attempt to overthrow the government are reduced to reporting the events and revelations of the scandal in which they have been complicit, in a po-faced ho-hum manner to impart to the misinformed public that this is as routine as stock market fluctuations or the burning of an American flag in Tehran.

There should be a price and it should be sufficient to deter repetitions.

QUESTIONS ASKED AND ANSWERED: “Chicago police say today that Jussie Smollett concocted the hate hoax because he wanted to get a higher salary from the producers of his TV show Empire:”

Eddie T. Johnson, the visibly angry Chicago police superintendent, said Mr. Smollett had taken advantage of the pain and anger of racism, draining resources that could have been used to investigate other crimes for which people were actually suffering.

“I just wish that the families of gun violence in this city got this much attention,” he said at a news conference in Chicago.

The superintendent seemed particularly upset by the fact that Mr. Smollett, he said, had arranged a fake assault that featured a noose hung around his neck. The police say the staged assault was carried out by two brothers to whom the actor had paid $3,500.

“Why would anyone — especially an African-American man — use the symbolism of a noose to make false accusations?” he asked. “How could someone look at the hatred and suffering associated with that symbol and see an opportunity to manipulate that symbol to further his own public profile?

Chicago’s police superintendent isn’t the only person appearing to be vexed by Smollet’s apparent action. As Kyle Smith writes, “‘Why Would Jussie Smollett Do This?’ They Cried:”

[CNN’s Brian] Stelter chimed in again: “This is about why he might — and, so far, we don’t know. But why he might have made this up. It just boggles the mind.”

It boggles the mind! One struggles in vain to think of another profession in which someone could evince or affect as much incompetence as Stelter and Co. and expect to remain employed.

* * * * * * * *

Stelter was a toddler when a black teen named Tawana Brawley made up a story about six white men raping her, smearing her with feces, scrawling “KKK” and “n****r” on her torso with charcoal, and leaving her in a trash bag. He has lived nearly his entire life in the era of hate-crime hoaxes. He surely remembers the Duke-lacrosse gang-rape hoax of 2006, the University of Virginia gang-rape hoax of 2014, the incident just after Trump’s election when a woman on the New York City subway claimed drunken white men had ripped off her hijab. There are lots of other examples. Hey, do you remember as far back as January, when an Indian man tried to portray himself as the victim of a hateful mob of Trump-backing teenage goons? George Will once wrote of campuses, “When they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” When the media can be relied upon to credit hysterics and axe-grinders the way campus administrators do, America effectively becomes a vast campus.

The reasons for Smollett’s hoax didn’t boggle anyone’s mind, assuming that the mind in question was functioning above the level of someone who eats a bowl of lead-paint chips for breakfast. In America, victimhood is currency. It is easily converted into actual currency, and if Smollett had gotten away with his hoax, he had every reason to expect that his vastly increased celebrity would have led to the salary bump Chicago police said he wanted from his show Empire.

As Roger Kimball writes, “The less hate there is in the Untied States, the more hate crimes must be manufactured in order to keep the Fraternal Order of Victims afloat.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Identity-Politics Left Now Despises Bernie Sanders — Suddenly, his political radicalism is eclipsed entirely by his whiteness and maleness.