UH-HUH: ‘Squad’ Member Ayanna Pressley: There’s No Tension Between Freshman Dems and Pelosi, ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’

RHETORIC IS ONLY DANGEROUS WHEN IT COMES FROM THE RIGHT, BECAUSE THE LEFT IS AFRAID IT WILL INSPIRE PEOPLE ON THE RIGHT TO ACT LIKE LEFTISTS DO:

VIOLENT, HATEFUL RHETORIC: Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) to 2020 Dems: Don’t Run Away from Trump — ‘Punch Him in the Face.’

Related: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Judge approves ‘wanton and reckless misconduct’ claim against university for Title IX investigation: One definition of ‘intimate partner violence’ for him, another for her.

TAMMY BRUCE: Trump vs. AOC and ‘the squad’ – What bare-knuckle fight means for 2020.

Trump’s comments may be blunt, but they’re not “racist,” an accusation now thrown about by the Democrats as casually as saying hello. That, in fact, is the cold, hard strategy.

As Clay noted in his comments about Ocasio-Cortez accusing Pelosi of racism: “You’re getting push back so you resort to using the race card? Unbelievable.”

Unfortunately, it’s all too believable when smearing your opponents is the only card you have.

Still, after years of lies about his character and intention, USA Today reported the president’s approval rating among Republicans is now at 93 percent and the GOP’s approval rating among Americans is at 51 percent.

Trump is shoring up his base while at the same time turning Democrats against one another.

I’m not getting cocky, but this tumultuous week has nevertheless been a good week.

UPDATE: Link was missing — fixed now. Sorry!

APPARENTLY, THIS ISN’T ABOUT SHOPPING AT BROOKS BROTHERS AND WATCHING WHIT STILLMAN MOVIES: What Is Wasping? What You Need to Know About This Dangerous Form of Substance Abuse.

I COULD HAVE TOLD YOU THIS: Dropping F-Bomb Increases Pain Tolerance By A Third, Study Finds.

DOUBLE STANDARDS: VIDEO: Students say Obama immigration quote racist. . .when they think it’s from Trump.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Ilhan Omar Says Boycotting Israel Is Like Boycotting Nazi Germany. “David Steinberg is doing the heavy lifting the Pulitzer-winning, corporate, “news” industry is not. Over at Powerline, Steinberg has the receipts on Omar’s marriage to her brother. Did you know Omar isn’t really her last name? Interesting stuff, go check it out. It’s not just that Omar married her brother, which is gross, but she did it (allegedly) to commit fraud. I wonder what the consequences will be?”

NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE PRAISES SOVIET UNION FOR DIVERSITY IN LOSING SPACE RACE:

The New York Times published an article detailing “How the Soviets Won the Space Race for Equality” Tuesday, highlighting how socialism allowed people of “the humblest origins” to become successful.

The article, published under the “Past Tense” section, compared the “segregated United States” to the Soviet Union during the space race. While America put the first man on the moon, the Soviets sent the first man into space in 1961, before the U.S., and then sent “the first woman, the first Asian man, and the first black man into orbit – all years before the Americans would follow suit,” the article read.

It’s straight out of the Howell Raines school of group identity politics. As Raines’ classic Freudian slip went in 2001, a couple of years before Jayson Blair became a household name for all the wrong reasons, the Times’ hiring campaign “has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.” Similarly, the Soviets lost the space race, but their hearts were purer. (Except they most certainly weren’t.)

PRIVACY: How extensions slurped up browsing histories from 4M users. “Have your tax returns, Nest videos, and medical info been made public?”

WHAT THEY CHOOSE NOT TO COVER IS AS REVEALING AS WHAT THEY CHOOSE TO DISCUSS: Ignored by media bigs, book on Kavanaugh fight debuts No. 3 in New York Times.

The book is Mollie Hemingway & Carrie Severino’s Justice on Trial.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Labor fight roils Bernie Sanders campaign, as workers demand the $15 hourly pay the candidate has proposed for employees nationwide.

As legendary Moonbase Alpha-Beta Commander Buck Murdock likes to say, irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

DAN MARKEL UPDATE: Five Years After Dan Markel’s Murder, Journey To Justice Continues.

WHEN YOU SLAG THE U.S. SPACE PROGRAM FOR INSUFFICIENT DIVERSITY — AND YOU CAN’T EVEN GET THAT RIGHT:

Give the Soviet Union credit though — one place where it excelled was in getting good propaganda value from the New York Times. And that remains true even when it’s dead and gone.

PAUL CURRY: The Squad to Re-Elect President Trump. “Donald Trump, by injecting himself into the Democrat’s civil war and compelling the Pelosi establishment to embrace the Squad, may have just pulled off a classic Tom Sawyer move. Rather than allowing the Democrats to reign in their extreme left flank and quell the temper-tantrum-like calls for impeachment, he has gotten the left to embrace their darker demons and make the Squad the face of the party. In doing so, he has made four freshman Congresswomen the Squad to Re-elect the President.”

It might be a Grand Master-level trolling event if Trump were to send them all campaign donations in the maximum amount.

FLASHBACK: Kanye West’s Politics 101: It’s OK to support Trump, even if you’re black or famous.

DO YOU EVEN CONSTITUTION, SIS? Joy Behar on Trump: ‘Why can’t he be brought up on charges of hate speech?’

“Hate speech” is a legally meaningless term. In nonlegal contexts, it just means speech lefties hate, mostly because they hate the speaker.

FASTER, PLEASE: Number of US overdose deaths appears to be falling.

ANSWER: BECAUSE PHONY BETO-MANIA HAS BITTEN THE DUST: How Beto Made Himself into White-Privilege Guy.

In his almost certainly ill-fated pursuit of the 2020 Democratic nomination, O’Rourke is no longer on the warpath to oust the media-loathed incumbent like Ted Cruz. He’s now in a crowded field with other Democrats, many of whom are actual minorities (and one who tried her damnedest). The media no longer view him as the adorable, skateboard-riding, honorary Hispanic who would supplant a creepy religious senator from Texas, but instead a privileged white male standing in the way of some minority candidate poised deliver a symbolic rebuke to Donald Trump (and, by fiat, the no-good-very-bad racists who elected him.)

The Daily Beast writes of “The Unbearable White Privilege of Beto O’Rourke;” CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson said that Beto’s careerism “drips with white male privilege” and insisted that “O’Rourke, tall, handsome, white and male, has this latitude, to be and do anything. His privilege even allows him to turn a loss to the most despised candidate of the cycle into a launching pad for a White House run. Stacey Abrams, a Yale-trained lawyer, couldn’t do this.”

Beto, meet Robert Francis.

O’Rourke soon realized he must drag himself through that tired rubric of public self-flagellation and self-loathing expected of white progressive men who deign to challenge visible minorities for a chance at power. It has, as of this writing, been an abject disaster:

“As a white man who has had privileges that others could not depend on, or take for granted,” a fallen, emasculated Beto said on Meet the Press, clearly penitent for the accidents of his birth, “I’ve clearly had advantages over the course of my life.” And he is obliged to report that he, and the society that afforded him these ill-gotten gains, are irredeemable to at their very core. He told immigrants and refugees gathered at a campaign in Nashville that “this country was founded on white supremacy, and every single institution and structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression, even in our democracy.”

Nia-Malika Henderson was right — look at what happened to Stacey Abrams!

Heh. One way or another, it’s only a matter of time before Elizabeth Warren faces a similar reckoning.

FLASHBACK: Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren are all for state autonomy — when the GOP’s in charge.

KIRA DAVIS: The Term “People Of Color” Hijacks Black America’s Hard-Earned Legacy And I’m Sick Of It.

I’m fine if other minority groups want to lump themselves in with each other with this whole POC thing. There’s a shorthand in it all that’s valuable and I get that. I just don’t think Black Americans want or deserve to be tied to their watered-down version of “the struggle.”

Because that’s what this is – a naked attempt to hijack the unique civil rights struggles of Black America in order to hitch a ride to Victim Town. When women like Pressley are forced to lump her heritage and American experience in with those who are not “African-American/Black” she is being forced to pour water into her ancestral soup. She is forced to be brown instead of Black.

There is so much power in blackness that these women and others like them on the Left are desperate to pretend they know the struggle to siphon off even a little bit of that power.

They have no right, and I won’t participate in it.

One of my favorite things about Kira is her sunny disposition, but I think I like her when she’s angry.