STACEY LENNOX: How Joe Biden’s Ego and Insecurity Could Break a Deeply Divided Nation. “There is bipartisan opposition to a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and the border crisis is exhausting Americans’ patience with the immigration question. Large majorities of likely voters want secure elections and voter ID. Americans also want economic growth, not equity policies. The objections are already bubbling to the surface on critical race theory. And no taxpayer wants to go back to the pre-1996 welfare without work world, which is precisely what the child tax credit is.”

And yet we’ll be told that opposition to Biden’s policies is illegitimate.

ROGER SIMON: Time to Stand Up for the Second Amendment More than Ever.

“Rahm Emanuel, call your office.  You said it—‘Never let a serious crisis go to waste!’  And we got one, baby—two white supremacists shooting up the joint in Atlanta and Boulder. The president’s into it already.  Bye-bye assault weapons and those thousand round mags Hollywood lefties love to show off in their movies. We might even get ‘im to ban cap guns by executive order. … What? He wasn’t a white supremacist?  His name was Al-what?…  Like Al Ky-Duh? … They wiped his page off Facebook?… Why’d they do that?… Zuck must’ve had a good reason.  Anyway, what about the guy in Atlanta?  He was offing Asian girls in a massage parlor.  What’s more white supremacist than that? … Yeah, yeah, Harvard and Yale. They’re the real ani-Asian racists but… Sex addict?… Sex addict!..  Andrew Cuomo didn’t kill anybody… or did he?”

You get the idea.

That might be the beginning of a stand-up act by a conservative comic, a tryout anyway, in a provincial city, but these are the days we are living in—more insane by the minute.

It is, however, the very moment we must stand up for the Second Amendment more than ever.

Liberals (oh, how I despise that misuse of the English language) and progressives (ditto) tend to think of it as an outdated 18th Century idea mainly of value to hunters, gun collectors and firing range enthusiasts that is now risking everyone’s lives and allowing criminals free rein. (The latter is what they do, but we won’t get into that.)

Since I don’t hunt and don’t get to the range as much as I’d like, a deeper rationale is considerably more significant to me—the Framers’ desire for private citizens, free individuals, to be able to protect themselves from oppressive government power, whether that be monarchical or, in modern times, communist, fascist, oligarchic or even from the hands of those who think they are “good,” what I call “moral narcissists.”

Liberals pooh-pooh this idea, of course.  The state is great thing to them—it’s “progressive”— especially when it’s on their side.

But when I hear all this talk, as we’re hearing now, of executive orders to outlaw or even take away guns for the good of the public, I am reminded of what happened in Germany in 1938, when members of the Nazi Party were allowed to have weapons but Jews were prevented from keeping them..

Some say that prefigured the Holocaust only a few years off (others debate this—don’t they always?)  But it’s hard to say why disarming people wouldn’t make it easier to load them in railroad cars.

But closer to home, I’ve always wondered why Chicago, with some of the most stringent gun laws in the country, almost always has the most gun violence.  Their homicide rate skyrocketed in 2020 with 769 deaths. (I could give reasons, like the decline of the family, but I will let that pass for now.)

Similarly, Paris, with even more stringent gun laws, has had yet more calamitous attacks, including on the offices of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and the 2015 Bataclan Theater massacre when 130 people were killed and and a staggering 416 more injured.

Of course, those were jihadists. That never happens in the United States…. Oh, wait.

Related: Report: Colorado Mass Shooting Suspect Was Known To The FBI Prior To Assault.

START ME UP: Scientists will test the world’s first nuclear fusion reactor this summer.

MAKE THEM PAY: UIowa officials can be held personally liable for discriminating against Christian group, court rules.

THAT’S GONNA LEAVE A MARK: Candace Owens Schools Democrats for Sport – Check Out This Candidate Who Just Got His Lesson.

COLLUSION: INTERACTIVE MAP: Dozens of Chinese Communist Party funded Confucius Institutes still operate in US.

JOSH BLACKMAN TO THE SUPREME COURT: There’s no time like the present to take a Second Amendment case. Thirteen years after Heller, it’s time for the Supreme Court to settle whether the Second Amendment applies outside the home.

Well, gun rights are distasteful to the Gentry Class, and as I explain in my The Judiciary’s Class War, the Supreme Court, like the rest of the judiciary, is fundamentally a Gentry Class institution no matter who appoints its members. That’s why non-textual rights, like abortion, that are important to the Gentry Class get more solicitude than textual rights, like the right to arms, that are not.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Madness Comes for the Mathematicians.

Andrea Bertozzi is a distinguished mathematician. A professor of mathematics at UCLA and the author or co-author of over 250 publications, Bertozzi has been elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

She is also now something of a lightning rod, not because of her work on higher-order partial differential equations but because of her work on predictive policing. Bertozzi’s research seeks to “determine where crime is likely to occur in the near future.” Whether predictive policing helps to allocate scarce policing resources better, and whether the data about crime on which any mathematical model must rely reflects racial bias, is a matter of controversy. Like other controversies among academics, this one has been joined in peer-reviewed journals. But even this controversy does not explain the trouble with Bertozzi. The trouble with Bertozzi, her critics allege, is that she is a collaborator. With the cops.

Read the whole thing.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Texas rancher on border crisis: It’s time to ‘let people see what it’s really like down here.’

Some members of the media have called out the administration for denying them access to what many believe to be a crisis of its own making.

Migrants have entered his family’s property at least 20 times within the year, Saunders said, adding, “We got a real problem down here.”

The rancher, who owns a property near Laredo, noted migrants sometimes use cars to race to the border and have damaged his fence.

“It really adds up,” he told host John Roberts, noting repairs can cost up to $6,000.

“We have a property on the highway not far from the river and when [migrants are] getting chased by law enforcement, usually human smugglers, they just turn off the highway at full speed, mind you, and just go straight through the fence … [and] go ’til they can’t go anymore, then they bail out and they are running across the property,” Saunders said.

Biden is supposed to hold his first press conference today at 1:15pm Eastern.

U.S. THIRST FOR RUSSIAN OIL HITS RECORD HIGH DESPITE TOUGH TALK.

Flashback: So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

TED CRUZ STANDS UP FOR SCIENCE:

Why don’t these reporters believe in science?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Arizona’s Gov. Ducey calls Harris the ‘worst possible choice’ to fix border. “Ducey, who was in Tucson, told reporters that Harris is “the worst possible choice” for the job. He also said that Harris’ selection is evidence that Biden has trivialized the situation. He said Harris just ‘flat out’ doesn’t care.”

So everyone is saying that by giving Harris this responsibility, Biden (or whoever’s running him now) is getting Harris ready to take over the top slot. But they’re giving her a job where she’s very likely to fail, and where the administration’s policies are deeply unpopular. So an alternative theory is that someone set this up to sabotage her.

Unlikely-but-fun scenario: Biden’s actually in full possession of his faculties, but is acting out-of-it to keep his internal Democratic opposition off-kilter. Sort of a Claudian strategy. Bonus: A reboot of the Phil Hartmann Reagan sketch to this effect, only with Dana Carvey as Biden.

THAT’S FUNNY, TELL ME ANOTHER ONE. SPLC Chief of Staff: ‘The Southern Poverty Law Center Is Not Anti-Christian at All.’

TOO BUSY SURVEILLING QANON BELIEVERS TO DO ANYTHING, THOUGH: Report: Colorado Mass Shooting Suspect Was Known To The FBI Prior To Assault.

THE EXCUSE IS ALWAYS A CRISIS, AND THE CRISIS IS ALWAYS FAKE: Democrats Point to Gun Legislation as Justification for Nuking Filibuster.

BETTER QUESTION: DOES BIDEN KNOW HE’S JOE BIDEN? Does Biden Know He’s Not FDR?

Axios reports this morning that President Biden has been consulting with historians in his quest to figure out who he is — and that, right on cue, those historians have suggested that Biden is a Great Man who has been sent to completely overhaul the United States. Among the ideas with which the president’s consultants apparently agreed are that now is the time for Biden to “jam through once-in-a-lifetime historic changes to America,” that he must “go even bigger and faster than anyone expected,” and that it would be a good idea for him to “jam through what could amount to a $5 trillion overhaul of America, and vast changes to voting, immigration and inequality.”

Evidently, the Biden years are set to involve a lot of “jamming.”

Let us mince no words: This advice is deranged. FDR and LBJ, to whom the historians apparently have compared Biden, were both swept into office in landslide victories, alongside large congressional majorities — often large supermajorities — that were on board with their agenda. Joe Biden, by contrast, won the Electoral College by 45,000 votes, enjoys no majority in the Senate, and has a House majority so thin that the Democratic Party is trying to steal a House seat in Iowa that has already been certified for the GOP. As Lloyd Bentsen might have said: I’ve read about FDR, and Joe Biden, you are no FDR.

Jamming through that “$5 trillion overhaul” also greatly increases the odds that Biden will have to address the nation via television after a stock market crash, the way that he thinks FDR did in 1929:

CHINA IS ASSHOLE: Facebook says Chinese hackers used platform to hack Uyghurs abroad. “Facebook’s head of cyberespionage said it had found and removed fewer than 500 accounts that sent malicious links to Uyghurs as part of ‘an extremely targeted operation.'”

#RESISTANCE: French Police Told to Crack Down on Large Gatherings.

PLUS I.D.-FREE VOTING BY MAIL: Biden pushing amnesty to expand Democratic base: Mo Brooks.

GOODER AND HARDER: Oakland on track for record-breaking year in murders. “The police union attributes the deadly violence to a number of factors. Key being the lowest number of officers in recent years. This time last year, the city of Oakland recorded less than a dozen homicides. This city has currently experienced close to three times as many people killed.”

Flashback: How It Started: Defunding the police: Oakland, Berkeley could be test cases for Bay Area, nation.

—The San Francisco Chronicle, July 21^st, 2020.

How it’s going: Shootings in Oakland soar as cuts to Police Department take hold.

—The San Francisco Chronicle, January 31st.

ENDORSED: Raze the Department of Education. Public schools are a disaster, homeschooling is up as the K-12 Implosion continues, and the DoEd has not only not helped, it’s actively made things worse for several decades.

MEANWHILE, IN ISRAEL:

Can they replace Netanyahu and avoid disaster? He may have overstayed his welcome, but his track record — including rapprochement with the Arab World that didn’t involve surrendering — is unmatched.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Harris Takes Over Border Mess as Biden Carries Out Perfect Bloodless Coup Against Himself. “There is a palpable sense that even those who are enjoying controlling the government through him know that this gig has an extremely limited shelf life. They seem to be resigned to the fact that they’ll be exhausted by trying to keep up the pretense that Ol’ Gropes is in charge of anything. They may as well get people used to seeing Harris hold the reins. Poor Joe probably doesn’t even know that he just participated in a coup to replace him.”

NATURALLY: Texas Dem Says Mexico Gives Him More Info on Border Crisis Than Biden Admin.

To be fair, their government is more functional and less corrupt.