ANDREW MCCARTHY: The Biden Justice Department’s Lawless Threat against American Parents.

Even as President Biden shrugged his shoulders over progressives’ harassment and intimidation of a sitting United States senator of his own party — a crime under Arizona law — Biden’s Justice Department was running roughshod over the First Amendment, threatening to investigate and prosecute parents for protesting against school boards and teachers who insist on indoctrinating children with the cultural Marxism beloved by Democrats.

On Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum in which he wailed about the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” Clearing his throat with an empty nod to the inconvenient fact that the Constitution protects “spirited debate,” Garland incorrectly — indeed, outrageously for someone of his experience as a Justice Department official and federal appellate judge — claimed that free-speech principles yield not only to “threats of violence” but also to “efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views” (at least, evidently, individuals not named Sinema or Manchin).

Garland knows this is dangerous nonsense. I personally know that he knows it. He was a high-ranking official in the Clinton Justice Department, which gave me a very hard time — though it ultimately relented — when I proposed charging a notorious terrorist with soliciting acts of violence and seditious conspiracy.

As Christopher Rufo tweets, “They went from “critical race theory doesn’t exist” to “unleash the FBI against its enemies” in less than 90 days.”

“This directive comes mere days after a leftwing organization asked Biden to categorize parents as ‘domestic terrorists’ committing ‘hate crimes,’ Ace of Spades writes. “Still no one looking into antifa’s financing, huh? Oh right — they have first amendment rights to protest that must be absolutely respected.”

Also in Ace’s post:

“How do you do, fellow parents?”

IT’S BECAUSE “FACE COVERINGS” ARE ABOUT COMPLIANCE, NOT SCIENCE: Why Are Americans Still—Still!—Wearing Cloth Masks?

More on “face coverings” here: “Masks, as Twitter wags have noted, are by now the equivalent of MAGA hats for Blue America.”

AND NOW THIS: Reduced silicon output in China is leading to increased chip production costs. “Silicon makes up around 28 percent of the Earth’s crust by weight, making it the second-most abundant material on the planet. However, the ongoing energy crunch in China has had a huge impact on the production of high-purity silicon, sending prices through the roof in the span of just two months. This further compounds the negative effects of other material and component shortages and is similarly expected to lead to higher prices for a wide variety of consumer and industrial products.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teachers Union Boss Randi Weingarten Accidentally Endorses School Choice While Rushing To Support Masking in Schools.

BETHANY MANDEL: The delusion of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s feminist harassers.

I remember when we were told that we had to elect Joe Biden as president because of the deep and undeniable misogyny of then-President Donald Trump. We were told Biden would be a breath of fresh air and bring back decency and morality to the office.

Fast forward to yesterday, when Biden was asked about Arizona’s Sen. Kyrsten Sinema being followed and taped in a public restroom by activists hounding the lawmaker for answers about their political grievances. He was asked, “Are these tactics crossing a line?” It was a golden opportunity for the president to defend the rights of women everywhere, to uphold the expectation for privacy in the most intimate spaces and to repudiate intimidation and unlawful filming. Instead, he laughed and replied, “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics but it happens to everybody. The only people they don’t happen to are people who have Secret Service standing around. It’s part of the process.”

* * * * * * * *

Leah Libresco Sargeant pointed out on Twitter why this discomforted many women, myself included: “Look, the reason people (especially women) try to hold the line on small boundaries and taboos is that once a person breaks a small, non-violent rule; you shift your expectations about whether they’re on the cusp of breaking a violent one. Don’t chase people into bathrooms.”

Exit questions: “If following a woman into a bathroom, violating her privacy and designed to intimidate her is now acceptable practice, where is the new line? Is there even one? Do norms exist anymore? This is a watershed moment and the opening of a true Pandora’s box of badness in our politics and one that won’t come without unintended consequences.”

WHAT WOULD THEY DO WITHOUT TRUMP? THIS: More Good News: SNL Tanking in the Ratings.

TO BE FAIR, IT’S A GOOD START: California Now Bans State-funded Travel to One-third of America.

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reports: Nation Cheers As Democrats Will Remain In California.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What’s the Difference Between Stoppages, Jams, and Malfunctions?

F— JOE BIDEN… AND MORE: Profane Meditations On Current Vexations.

THE EXTENT OF HAUTEUR FROM FREAKING SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS IS AN ARGUMENT FOR ABOLISHING PUBLIC SCHOOLS: Shakopee School Board Chair Reported Single Mother to Employer for Criticizing the School Board.

UH OH: Default Of Second Chinese Developer Sparks China Junk Bond Meltdown As Contagion Explodes.

If only we had a president who understood real estate and bankruptcy and diplomacy.

A WELCOME MOMENT OF LUCIDITY: Sarah Silverman Goes Off the Reservation on Iron Dome.

CHINA: Empty Buildings in China’s Provincial Cities Testify to Evergrande Debacle.

Rows of residential towers, some 26 stories high, stand unfinished in this provincial city about 350 miles west of Shanghai, their plastic tarps flapping in the wind.

Elsewhere in Lu’an, golden Pegasus statues guard an uncompleted $9 billion theme park that was supposed to be bigger than Disneyland. A planned $4 billion electric-vehicle plant, central to local leaders’ economic dreams, remains a steel frame with overgrown vegetation spilling into the road.

The structures are monuments to the once-grand ambitions of China Evergrande Group, now among the world’s most indebted property companies, and a case study in how China’s dependence on real estate as an economic engine helped feed those ambitions.

Evergrande is in trouble in part because it developed properties aggressively in places such as Lu’an, where its debt-fueled building spree came as the city’s population dwindled.

In the end, there’s nothing harder than easy money — an old lesson our own “leadership” refuses to learn.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The Hayekian theory is that the damage is done in the boom, as cheap money produces malinvestment. That malinvestment — for example in empty buildings that are never used — accounts for the damage that becomes visible later in the bust. You can see that quite clearly in China and it’s becoming apparent here, too.

Meanwhile, time to plug Russ Roberts’ brilliant Hayek/Keynes rap video. It just gets better.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Tennessee School Board Chair Reported Single Mother to Employer for Criticizing the School Board.

BUT HAS THAT STUDY BEEN REPLICATED? Study Shows Ensuring Reproducibility in Research Is Needed.

THAT’S QUITE A NUMBER: Catch-And-Release Of Illegals Up Almost 440,000% Under Biden.

The practice of catching and then releasing illegal aliens at the southern border has risen by an unbelievable 430,000 percent over last August under Joe Biden. In August of 2020, when Donald Trump was still in control, the U.S. Border Patrol caught and released ten illegals.

But what a difference a year makes. In August of this year, Biden’s U.S. Border Patrol arrested 195,000 illegals and released 43,941 of them. That is a rise of 439,410 percent!

Mark Morgan, who was Trump’s acting head of Customs and Border Protection, slammed Biden for essentially telling illegals that they won’t have any barriers to free entry.

“If you tell the migrant they’re not going to be released, they’re not going to come. If a migrant knows they will not be released into the United States awaiting their immigration process, they will not come,” he said according to the Washington Times.

And when the reverse is true: Texas braces for surge of 60,000 Haitian migrants.

AN ENCOURAGING SIGN: No One Trusts Public Health Officials — Not Even Health Care Professionals.

SCIENCE: “The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.” “The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than never-infected, vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19. . . . We continue to underestimate the importance of natural infection immunity.”

Related: BMN. Vaccinating people who have had covid-19: why doesn’t natural immunity count in the US? “The substantial number of infections, coupled with the increasing scientific evidence that natural immunity was durable, led some medical observers to ask why natural immunity didn’t seem to be factored into decisions about prioritising vaccination.”

FREE IN THE KINDLE STORE THIS WEEK: Wrath: A Hard Man Novel (The Hard Man Series).

SMALL BREAKUPS: Team measures the breakup of a single chemical bond.

AND AGAIN: Left-Wing Activists Harass Senator Sinema During Flight And At Airport.

UNEXPECTEDLY: ‘Whistleblower’ who works for Facebook previously donated to left-wing extremists, AOC.

More here: Top Democratic Operative Bill Burton Advising Facebook Whistleblower. Sources: Former Obama administration communications guru Bill Burton and his company Bryson Gillette are working the high-profile campaign.

“Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, worked for Bryson Gillette as a senior advisor until September 2020, with the Center for Humane Technology as one of her clients, according to ethics filings obtained by The Daily Wire. Bryson Gillette did not return a request for comment,” the Daily Wire adds.

GOOD QUESTION: When blood pressure needs more control, what’s better: An additional drug or more of the same?

HERE’S HOPING: Former FDA chief Gottlieb expects Delta to be last big pandemic wave in U.S.

UNDERCOVER VIDEO: Pfizer Scientists Say Natural Immunity Is Superior and Big Pharma is Suppressing Info for Money.