HMM: Majority agree Trump will beat Biden, 51%-43%.

Instead of asking for their preference, it asked which candidate do voters think will win regardless of their personal politics. Here, issues such as voter enthusiasm play a role. And the belief that Republicans are better for the economy, also tested in the survey, likely gave Trump a slight edge.

In his analysis, pollster Jonathan Zogby said that Trump remains very strong with his base. He is also winning middle age and older voters. And he’s crushing Biden among union workers.

Which is funny, because that was supposed to be Biden’s strength. Plus: “Importantly, Trump is in a virtual tie with Biden among women, Hispanic, and suburban voters. . . . The survey also asked which party was the bigger threat to the economy. It was close, with 51% pointing the finger at Democrats and 49% at the Republicans. But some key 2020 voting groups (Hispanics, independents) ‘thought Democrats were a bigger threat to an economic recovery,’ said the analysis.”

Prediction: All the emphasis on black issues will move some Hispanic voters who otherwise would have voted Democrat into the Trump, or at least the nonvoting, camp.

MATT TAIBBI: The American Press Is Destroying Itself: A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press.

It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!

Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically “problematic” editorial or social media decisions. . . . Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make crazy. But crazy people can still be dangerous, to themselves and others.

Plus: “Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?”

So a decade or more ago when bloggers were telling you that you couldn’t trust the press to tell the truth, we were considered paranoid and unfair. Turns out we were just ahead of the curve.

Related: Roger Simon: A New Silent Majority Is Coming. “Led by a media that is at once delusional and cynical—an eye-rolling combination—America is in the throes of a national madness.”

THE AMERICA THAT WORKS: SpaceX launches 58 Starlink satellites and 3 Planet SkySats, nails rocket landing.

OOPS:

I think that’s going to be a hard sell.

THE REVOLUTION EVENTUALLY DEVOURS ITS OWN: John Cleese Slams Removal of Fawlty Towers Episode From Streaming Site.

On Friday, BBC-owned TV network UKTV announced on Twitter that it had temporarily removed an episode of “Fawlty Towers,” “The Germans,” from its Gold download service as it contained “racial slurs.” The service said it wished to “review” the episode, and “consider our options.” It said some shows “carry warnings and others are edited.”

It is believed the “racial slurs” are contained in a scene in which the character known as the Major uses the N-word when referring to Caribbean sportsmen.

Speaking to Australian newspaper The Age, Cleese said: “The Major was an old fossil left over from decades before. We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them. If they can’t see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say?”

He slammed BBC executives for yielding to pressure from protesters. “A lot of the people in charge now at the BBC just want to hang onto their jobs,” he said. “If a few people get excited they pacify them rather than standing their ground as they would have done 30 or 40 years ago.”

Monty Python was the culmination of the British left’s satire revolution of the 1960s. As Peter Hitchens wrote in his brilliant 1998 book, The Abolition of Britain, combined, these works were a cultural sea change in England:

Beyond the Fringe, Forty Years On and TW3 created a tradition of ‘anti-establishment’ comedy which continued long after its roots were forgotten. There may still have been an ‘establishment ‘of snobbery, church, monarchy, clubland and old-school-tie links in 1961.There was no such thing ten years later, but it suited the comics and all reformers to pretend that there was and to continue to attack this mythical thing. After all, if there were no snobbery, no crusty old aristocrats and cobwebbed judges, what was the moral justification for all this change, change which benefited the reformers personally by making them rich, famous and influential?

* * * * * * *

It also made the middle class, especially the educated and well-off middle class, despise themselves and feel a sort of shame for their supposedly elitist prejudices, based upon injustice and undermined by their failure to defend the nation from its enemies in the era of appeasement. Thanks to this, in another paradox, they have often felt unable to defend things within Britain which they value and which help to keep them in existence, from the grammar schools to good manners. They are ashamed of being higher up the scale, though for most middle-class people this is more a matter of merit than birth, and nothing to be ashamed of at all.

I love the original Monty Python series and have seen every episode countless times (though I’m not as crazy about the last season, when Cleese had left the show), but it was a full-on BBC-endorsed assault on traditional English values. Funny how when your goal is fundamental transformation, sometimes what you rue what you end up with. But then, as I’ve written before, John Cleese morphed into Theodore Dalrymple so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

WHEN THE LIGHTS COME ON, THE COCKROACHES SCATTER: Liberal Dark Money Behemoth Seeks to Scrub Wikipedia Page of Free Beacon Reporting.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Penn State Liberal Arts deletes tweet that dared to say conservative ‘viewpoints are important.’

YET ANOTHER POLL INDICATING THAT A SUBSTANTIAL MAJORITY OF AMERICANS AREN’T CRAZY: 64% of Americans oppose ‘defund the police’ movement, key goals: Black Americans land differently on the issue, but not overwhelmingly so.

‘FROM BAD TO WORSE:’ Homelessness in Los Angeles Spikes 13% in One Year, 66K+ on City Streets.

HEH: Trump Establishes Manlier CHAD Camp Next To CHAZ Camp.

SO THE BURIED LEDE HERE IS THAT THE FBI IS REPORTEDLY STALKING PEOPLE OTHER THAN MEMBERS OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: After Barr Ordered FBI to “Identify Criminal Organizers,” Activists Were Intimidated at Home and at Work.

“I’ve never had any run-ins with the cops before. I’ve never been to jail and have no criminal record, so when the FBI showed up to my workplace, it scared the piss out of me,” says Katy, a 22-year-old who works for a custodial services company in Cookeville, a small college town in middle Tennessee. “I really thought I was going to lose my job. The whole experience was terrifying.”

Moved by the video of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Katy — who requested she only be identified by her first name — and a friend had created a Facebook event for a Black Lives Matter rally in Cookeville’s public square on Saturday, June 6. She soon connected with several other Cookeville locals who wanted to help with planning the event, and enthusiasm grew as word of the rally spread.

“I’ve never organized a rally before, I was just winging it,” Katy said. “I didn’t expect a lot of people to show up, but overnight 600 people had RSVP’d on Facebook.” . . .

Counter-protesters organized their own Facebook group, Protect Cookeville Against Looters, which quickly swelled to over 1,000 members. Some of the members of this group determined that Katy was the main organizer of the upcoming rally and began posting her personal information and making violent threats.

“The event for the rally had been up for about four days when we started getting death threats,” Katy said. “It was too much. I was overwhelmed.”

Katy eventually backed out of the rally — and a group of local high school students took over planning — but she had already gotten the attention of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF, a federally coordinated network of local law enforcement officers who work under the direction of the FBI to gather intelligence about terrorist threats.

On June 4, agents turned up unannounced at Katy’s work, pulling her off the job and into a large truck in the gravel parking lot to question her about her connections to the upcoming rally and to antifa — the loose anti-fascist movement recently labeled as a terrorist organization by President Donald Trump. Katy had never heard of them.

As The Intercept has previously reported, FBI agents have been questioning arrested protesters about their political beliefs, apparently at the behest of U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

Cookeville is a little over an hour from me, and I haven’t heard anything about this, which is neither here nor there, but interesting.

AND WHY DOESN’T THE MEDIA HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE?: Why Can’t Big-City Democrats Reform the Police? Accusations of police brutality have persisted in our bluest cities for decades. But when a cop does does something wrong, it gets blamed on the Republican in the White House.

SO I FINISHED JERRY POURNELLE’S MAMELUKES THE OTHER NIGHT, and it was very enjoyable. I felt it matched the standards of the earlier books in the series, and brought things to a satisfying conclusion that nonetheless left the possibility of a sequel open, just in case.

I’m now reading Taylor Anderson’s latest Destroyermen novel, and it’s holding up well, too. The series has sprawled so much that sometimes the story trees get lost in the plot forest, but he’s doing a good job here of keeping things focused on the viewpoint characters.

ROGER SIMON: A New Silent Majority Is Coming. “A new silent majority is about to emerge, one far more sophisticated than the old Nixonian version and more sophisticated too than the BLM/Antifa fellow travelers in the Democratic Party and media, They already have their harbingers, their heroes, the few swimming upstream against a tide seemingly as strong (for now anyway) as any Louisiana hurricane. . . . Not surprisingly, black conservatives lead the pack in this emerging silent majority, none more importantly than Shelby Steele, whose aptly-titled classic White Guilt does more to explain that madness around us than any work in recent memory.”

UH OH: Mackubin Owens: How Military Leaders’ Trump Criticism Can Damage Civil-Military Relations. “In the case of General Milley, he should have made his objections known to the president in private. But public attacks on an elected president by retired officers and the threat of resignation by high-ranking officers undermine trust and poison civil-military relations. Toxic civil-military relations are something no citizen should desire.”

Related: Retired generals who denounced Trump could be recalled to active duty and prosecuted, experts say.

A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Three indicted for allegedly throwing Molotov cocktails at NYPD vehicles, face life in prison.

An upstate woman and two Brooklyn lawyers were indicted Friday on federal explosives and arson charges for allegedly tossing Molotov cocktails at NYPD vehicles during George Floyd protests in New York City.

Samantha Shader, 27, of Catskill, is accused of hurling the makeshift explosive at an NYPD vehicle occupied by four police officers on early Saturday morning, May 30.

Prosecutors allege Shader bit one of the officer’s legs when she was being taken into custody.

Around the same time, Brooklyn lawyers Urooj Rahman, 31, and Colinford Mattis, 32, were accused of tossing their own Molotov cocktail at an unoccupied police vehicle in Brooklyn during a separate attack.

Throw the book at them. This was premeditated, murderous, and seditious.

OPEN THREAD: Comments are good clean living, thank you very much.

JONATHAN TURLEY IS NAMING AND SHAMING WILLIAM JACOBSON’S ATTACKERS: Cornell Professors Declare “Informed Commentary” Criticizing The Protests As Racism.

The letter is signed by a huge number of clinicians (Professors Zohra Ahmed, Sandra Babcock, Briana Beltran, Celia Bigoness, John Blume, Elizabeth Brundige, Angela Cornell, Sujata Gibson, Mark H. Jackson, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer, Cortelyou Kenney, Sital Kalantry, Ian M. Kysel, Mallory J. Livingston, Delphine Lourtau, Beth Lyon, Estelle McKee, Keir Weyble, Carlton E. Williams, and Stephen Yale-Loehr).

Not a word about academic freedom or free of speech; not a suggestion that critics of these protests could have anything other than racist motivations. It is the antipathy of the intellectual foundations for higher education. Rather than address the merits of arguments, you attack those with opposing views personally and viciously. That has become a standard approach to critics on our campuses. Unless you agree with the actions of the movement, you are per se racist. It is a mantra that is all too familiar historically: if you are not part of the resistance, you are reactionary. . . .

It is strikingly elitist. It would suggest that somehow these schools are the only important measure — or at least those schools matter the most. From anything other than an elitist (even privileged) perspective, the focus on ivy league schools exclusively is far from self-evident since most of those schools are ranked behind non-Ivy League schools in U.S. News & World Report, including Cornell which is ranked 17th among universities. Finally, it suggests that the presence of conservative (which they seem to view as synonymous with racist) scholars have no place at such schools. That last point is unfortunately the view of many faculty at top schools which are overwhelmingly if not exclusively liberal.

The professors, of course, have every right to to denounce writers for what they believe are racist elements or messaging in their writings. However, they specifically go after scholars who they believe defend “institutionalized racism and violence” and “express rage over the sporadic looting that has taken place.” That would encompass what they describe as seemingly “informed commentary” supporting institutions of a racist society. It is an all-too-familiar attack on campuses against speakers and academics. What is most striking for me is the inclusion of Professors Mark H. Jackson and Cortelyou Kenney, who teach in the Cornell First Amendment Clinic. They are in fact the Director and Associate Director of the First Amendment Clinic, which is presumably committed to the value of free speech even at private institutions. So these professors teach free speech and just signed a letter that people who question the BLM movement or denounce the looting are per se or at least presumptive racists. It is reflection of how free speech is being redefined to exclude protections with those who hold opposing views.

It’s a disgrace, and their behavior is shameful. They are undermining the place of higher education in America, and given the prevalence of this kind of behavior that’s not such a tragedy as it might be.

EVEN GLENN GREENWALD IS POINTING THIS OUT: The Abrupt, Radical Reversal in How Public Health Experts Now Speak About the Coronavirus and Mass Gatherings.

What has changed — dramatically, radically and abruptly — is the messaging from public health experts and even public officials about the virus. Beginning roughly two weeks ago, we all watched as mass stay-at-home orders and self-isolation gave way to massive street protests, where tens or hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in the U.S. and around the world, often one on top of the other, chanting, yelling and singing: a virtual laboratory for what we had spent four months hearing was exactly what one must not do in the middle of this pandemic. . . .

Examples of this are too abundant to list here (today’s SYSTEM UPDATE episode covers many of them). New Jersey’s Gov. Phil Murphy condemned anti-lockdown protests just last month, righteously announcing that public health rather than protests will guide the state’s quarantine policies; then last week, after George Floyd’s killing, Murphy praised the massive anti-police-brutality protests in his state without even attempting to reconcile that with his prior stay-at-home messaging; then, last week while he praised these protests, he extended his “public health emergency” order for 30 more days out of fear of what he called “a new outbreak of #COVID19″ — and he did all of this while maintaining his “STAY AT HOME” banner on the top of his Twitter page where he issued all of these conflicting directives. . . .

’ve been a vocal supporter of these protests from their start, including their occasional use of civil disobedience and targeted property damage. My views of the protests (as distinct from the some of the repressive debate-denying tactics that have sprouted up around them) have not changed; I remain an enthusiastic supporter on the ground that we simply cannot tolerate any longer an unaccountable, paramilitarized police force that kills with impunity, especially when aimed disproportionately at African Americans and Latinos.

But what we should not tolerate, and what the scientific community cannot permit if it is to retain its credibility, is the abuse and manipulation of health expertise for political ends. One of two things is true; either 1) these protests will lead to a significant spike in coronavirus infections and deaths, in which case public health experts should reconcile that outcome with how they could have encouraged and endorsed them; or 2) it will not lead to such a spike, in which case it will appear that the months of extreme, draconian lockdowns — which caused great suffering and deprivation around the world — were excessive, misguided and unwarranted.

One way or another, I think the credibility ship has sailed.

SPACE: Yes, there’s ice on the moon. But it’s not the 1st lunar resource we’ll use.

IT WAS TAKEN DOWN FROM PASTEBIN, SO READ IT HERE WHILE YOU CAN: UC Berkeley History Professor’s Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy.

UPDATE: It’s also here, with some context.

I’LL GIVE ‘EM A PASS ON THIS, IT’S A MISTAKE ANYONE COULD MAKE: Protesters Pull Down Joe Biden After Mistaking Him For Old Racist Statue.