STILL SELLING FAST, FROM KURT SCHLICHTER: The Split (Kelly Turnbull).

PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.

Stacey Lennox: If Criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci Is a Hate Crime I Plead Guilty – And I’ll Do It Again. “Apparently, wanting border security, a strong military, and viewing China as an economic and military threat makes you anti-science and an authoritarian.”

Bryan Preston: If You Think 2021 Has Been Rough So Far, Wait Until the Democrats Wage Their Next Horrible Battle. “As ugly as things are now, from bolting a whole state to deny the democratic process to flouting their own mandates to bashing mainstream election reforms as ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ things are likely to get a whole lot uglier and worse later this year.”

Yours Truly: Science vs ‘Teh Feelz’: A Genderfluid Seesaw. “You can imagine the Left’s response to a Harvard womyn insisting that there’s such a thing as biological reality.”

WELL, HE’S RIGHT: Gov. Ron DeSantis blasts Biden, vows Florida won’t be ‘biomedical security state.’

Related: To Defeat Delta Variant, Experts Recommend Doing All The Things That Didn’t Work The First Time.

BLUE ON BLUE ON THE FRONT RANGE: Hancock not sticking his neck out for Polis this time around.

Back in March of 2020, when Covid was just getting started and we were all told that it would just be two weeks to flatten the curve, Governor Jared Polis was reluctant to impose a statewide lockdown of any kind. He preferred to let local governments get out in front on that. Denver’s Michael Hancock did just that, announcing a city-wide travel and business lockdown (although he couldn’t quite decide whether or not liquor stores constituted essential businesses). Governor Polis followed suit shortly thereafter.

This time, All-Star Game aside, Hancock isn’t playing ball.

In the face of revised CDC guidance advising even fully vaccinated people to wear masks indoors, Denver announced that it would not even issue a new mask mandate, trusting businesses and individuals to do what was best for them.

Why the change? The overall political climate surrounding the virus has changed, and the effects of that change are exacerbated by factors specific to Denver.

According to his own Department of Finance, in the Budget Kickoff briefing given to the City Council’s Finance and Governance Committee back in April, small business in the Denver metro area has been devastated, with the total number of small businesses operating down 30%, and the entry-level-friendly Leisure and Hospitality Sector down over 40%.

Read the whole thing.

SHE GETS A PASS BECAUSE REASONS: Rep. Rashida Tlaib Accused of Using ‘Anti-Semitic Dog Whistles’ During Speech (Again).

IF YOU LIKE YOUR VITAMIN D, YOU CAN KEEP YOUR VITAMIN D: While they scare you with “variants,” Congress wants to make dietary supplements prescription only. A reader emails: “Sen. Richard Durbin has been trying for years to make dietary supplements available only by a doctor’s prescription, which will have the practical effect of making them far less available and far more expensive. In the past he’s failed, so this time he’s trying to bury his ban deeply inside the gigantic “infrastructure” bill being considered by Congress. If he succeeds, many normal and beneficial dietary supplements such as high-dose vitamin D are going to become difficult or impossible for most adults in the U.S. to obtain.”

There’s a petition here.

THE ESTABLISHMENT HAD DETERMINED THAT THIS WAS NOT NEWS: Daniel Hale exposed the machinery of America’s clandestine warfare. Why did no one seem to care?

OH, PLEASE: Bezos’ Blue Origin calls Musk’s Starship ‘immensely complex & high risk’ for NASA moon missions.

There’s a lot less risk involved in never launching a single gram into orbit, too.

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: Lawyer: Capitol Cop Who Shot Ashli Babbitt ‘Ambushed’ Her on Jan. 6 Without Warning.

The officer’s name — still kept largely secret and out of the news — is Lt. Michael Byrd.

VOTERS HAVE DIFFERENT PRIORITIES THAN THE POLITICAL CLASS: Election cheating surges to top US issue, most want photo ID.

The battles over the 2020 presidential election and subsequent fight between Democrats and Republicans on reforming the system have pushed the issue to the top of those Americans are now worried about.

In the latest Rasmussen Reports survey, 90% said it is “important” to end cheating, long the bane of elections and made a national issue by former President Donald Trump and his loss to President Joe Biden in 2020.

Voters polled, however, do not believe it affected the overall 2020 election, though they are concerned about it intensely, said Rasmussen.

The pollster said that many voters believe the answer is a simple one and one that is called for in many states and GOP proposals: photo identification.

In early results shared with Secrets, 74% support the photo ID requirement, a blow to liberals fighting it. They called it a “reasonable measure” to prevent cheating.

And while the poll found doubts about the impact of cheating in 2020, it did suggest that voters believe politicians fighting the use of photo ID just want cheating to continue.

Well, that’s because they do. Voters want trustworthy, fraud-resistant voting. The political class wants to be able to do what it wants, regardless of what voters want.

AS THE SLAVE WHISPERED TO THE CONQUEROR: All glory is fleeting. New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is learning the truth of that maxim. Issues & Insights explains the real reason why his former partisans are now his aspiring political pall bearers.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: The New York Times Is An Anti-Journalism Clown Car. “The organization worked 24/7 for years to pimp the Russia collusion hoax. The “reporters” there spent the entire Trump era writing flimsy, poorly-sourced attacks on him. It was as if a slew of toddlers were writing a feelings journal in crayon.”

IT’S AS IF ALL THE “MORALITY ACTIVISTS” ARE REALLY JUST POLITICAL HACKS: Time’s Up Founder Helped Cuomo Team Smear Governor’s Accuser: Anti-sexual harassment group worked with Cuomo aides to discredit Lindsey Boylan.

A report released by the New York attorney general’s office said Roberta Kaplan, the cofounder of Time’s Up, advised the Cuomo team about an op-ed the governor wrote to discredit Lindsey Boylan, a former Cuomo adviser who accused the governor of sexual misconduct in December 2020. A top Cuomo aide said Kaplan and Time’s Up CEO Tina Tchen largely approved of the op-ed. The piece, which was never published, “denied the legitimacy of Ms. Boylan’s allegations, impugned her credibility, and attacked her claims as politically motivated,” according to the attorney general’s report.

The finding could undercut Kaplan and her organization’s claims to be champions of the #MeToo movement. Kaplan and Tchen, a former Obama White House official, cofounded Time’s Up in 2018, in the wake of allegations of sexual assault against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The allegations against Cuomo are arguably the biggest #MeToo case in the past couple years.

#MeToo was a political torpedo aimed at Trump that circled back around and blew up the Democrats, because their leadership is packed with abusers and abuser-enablers. Including the people championing #MeToo.

LAURA BASSETT FOR MSNBC: Biden calls on Andrew Cuomo to resign. He’s not the only Cuomo who needs to go. “His brother, too, should resign from covering politics or be fired. It’s extremely inappropriate and unethical for a journalist to advise and craft the statements of a politician, regardless of family relation.”

THIS IS STUPID, AND A FIRST-AMENDMENT VIOLATION: A New Florida Bill Could Criminalize Filming Cops on the Job.

FIGHT THE POWER, STICK IT TO THE MAN: They Were Accused of Wearing Blackface. Now They’re Suing Their College.

In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California last week, the team accuses Cal Lutheran administrators of misinterpreting the students’ costumes as blackface. The members and their coaches say the university, its president, and its vice president for mission and identity “allowed the softball team and their coaches to be publicly shamed and harassed, placed in fear for their safety, and to otherwise suffer lifelong injury to their mental health and reputations.” They asked for damages, but did not specify an amount.

The softball team alleges that the university manufactured “a sham racially-derogatory event” and punished the team “to deceive the public into believing that the university is active in combatting racism on campus,” the complaint says. This was all, the suit says, an attempt to distract the community from the university’s poor record of racial inequality. The team claims in the suit that the university’s accreditor was investigating Cal Lutheran “in part for its history of racial and gender equality-related failures.”

Cal Lutheran, shockingly, denies all wrongdoing. Anyway, blackface isn’t a crime. It’s not even a disqualification to serve as Governor of Virginia.

EXCLUSIVE: Austin Star Police Detective Accuses DA Jose Garza’s Office of Criminal Witness Tampering in High-Profile Case.

ICYMI: RealClearInvestigations: 1619 Project, Touted as Racial Reckoning, Ignores Democratic Party Racism.

Democrats who advanced a bill in June to remove statues of white supremacists from the U.S. Capitol ignored a central fact about those figures: All of them had been icons of their party, from Andrew Jackson’s adamantly pro-slavery vice president, John C. Calhoun, to North Carolina Gov. Charles B. Aycock, an architect of the white-supremacist campaign of 1898 that ushered in the era of Jim Crow.

At a time when governments, sports teams, schools and other bastions of American society are rushing to expunge legacies of slavery or racism, this was another instance of the Democratic Party’s failure to acknowledge that it did more than any other institution in American life to preserve the “peculiar institution” — and later enforce Jim Crow-style apartheid in the Old South.

“I think it’s absolutely fair to criticize the history of the Democrat Party when we’re literally changing the names of birds because they’re named after racists,” said Jarrett Stepman, author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” referring to a new racism-cleansing push in, yes, ornithology.

Democrats’ circumspection in the face of this trend is especially noteworthy because it comes at a time when they are criticizing Republican legislation to block the teaching of critical race theory on the ground that the GOP wants to whitewash American history. But one of the most noteworthy efforts to reframe American history in terms of race, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, virtually ignores the Democrat Party’s role in advancing and sustaining racism in the United States.

Ignores it? It’s meant to obscure it.

WELL, HE KNOWS THE PRESS WILL HELP: As Biden Fails to Convince Democrat Constituencies to Get the Vaccine, and As He Allows Hundreds of Thousands of Infected Illegal Aliens to Infect Americans, Biden Tries Shifting the Blame to Florida and Texas.

Okay, to be fair, Biden doesn’t know much beyond when his butt was wiped. But his handlers know the press will help.

FALSE URGENCY: Mask Mandate Reinstated in San Francisco—as Daily COVID Deaths Hit Zero: Mask orders have the effect of keeping the public in a perpetual state of emergency—and that might be the whole point.

WHEN SLATE CHASTENS THE PUBLIC HEALTH COMMUNITY. SLATE. When you’re not sure but can’t let on.

THE REAL STORY of the “Central Park Karen.” “Wow- that is what you call journalism.” To be fair, that’s why Bari Weiss can’t be at the NYT anymore.

LESLIE EASTMAN: The Current Pandemic Isn’t the First Caused by a Coronavirus. “The ‘Russian Flu’ is considered the last great pandemic of the 19th century; yet, today’s variants are just common cold viruses.”

AS HE OCCASIONALLY DOES, DAVID BROOKS DIMLY GRASPS THE TRUTH: HOW THE BOBOS BROKE AMERICA: The creative class was supposed to foster progressive values and economic growth. Instead we got resentment, alienation, and endless political dysfunction.

They’re just so arrogant and hatable. And this is right: “The bobos have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech.”

To be fair, Angelo Codevilla said it over a decade ago.

Plus: “I got a lot wrong about the bobos. I didn’t anticipate how aggressively we would move to assert our cultural dominance, the way we would seek to impose elite values through speech and thought codes. I underestimated the way the creative class would successfully raise barriers around itself to protect its economic privilege—not just through schooling, but through zoning regulations that keep home values high, professional-certification structures that keep doctors’ and lawyers’ incomes high while blocking competition from nurses and paralegals, and more. And I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity. Over the past five decades, the number of working-class and conservative voices in universities, the mainstream media, and other institutions of elite culture has shrunk to a sprinkling. When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing, they are going to react badly—and they have.”

Related: How David Brooks Created Donald Trump.

Brooks’ sycophancy toward Joe Biden — a variant of his pants-crease love for Obama — illustrates where his understanding stops.