STAY TUNED: With 62% of votes in, Decision Desk HQ has called Virginia for Youngkin. He’s leading by 10 points.

SALENA ZITO: How ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ became a swipe at Joe Biden — and national media.

LIVE: Virginia Election Results.

(Bumped.)

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? How a Nuclear Bomb Could Save Earth From a Stealthy Asteroid.

I BLAME GLOBAL WARMING: What’s Behind The Strange Drop in American Body Temperatures Over The Past 200 Years?

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Introducing the Minding the Campus Lysenko Award.

CAHOKIA: The biggest ancient city you’ve probably never heard of is in Illinois.

THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: The Absurd Twitter Suspension of Quin Hillyer.

After all, for some 20 years or more, for those of a certain broad age range, the saying “Jane, you ignorant slut” was a catchphrase, a way for people (at parties, or while watching ballgames with friends, or whatever) to laugh while feigning mutual displeasure.

Within 24 hours, Quin received a note from Twitter flagging the tweet and informing him that his account had been suspended, “for violating the Twitter rules. Specifically for: Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

So, according to Twitter, playfully tweeting out an old SNL joke to somebody who was amused now represents “hateful conduct.”

Related: We Refused to Lie About Rachel Levine’s Gender—So Twitter Locked Our Account.

COVERING THE IMPORTANT STORIES: Leave Supermodels Alone!

The other night, after I’d had a little too much of this world, I decided to bathe in cleansing waters and scour my soul by watching the new E! True Hollywood Story episode on Victoria’s Secret.  (Yes, I know. Life is sad.)

Best I can tell, this investigative blockbuster was largely derived from a New York Times story from last year, subtly headlined, “Angels in Hell: The Culture of Misogyny Inside Victoria’s Secret.”  The gory particulars of both the article and the E! documentary were enough to curl your hair, not unlike the bouncy locks of former VS model Jill Goodacre (a Victoria’s Secret OG). There were harrowing tales of handsy, lecherous  executives, and of models getting ready for Objectification Fest (the once-hallowed Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show) by eating an apple a day with no sides.  Ed Razek, the former chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret’s then parent company, L Brands, was so creepy, that he kept company with Jeffrey Epstein, the latter of whom posed as a Victoria’s Secret recruiter.  It was all genuinely awful.

But perhaps most unsettling of all, according to the ominous narration, VS didn’t show a commitment to diversity of body types  (women, you may have heard, come in all shapes and sizes!), and they continued to “market a standard of beauty that customers found male, stale, and hopelessly out of touch.” (Just imagine a woman so deluded, that she’d try to make herself attractive to a man while performing the sacred fourth-wave feminist rite of buying lingerie.)  After hearing this last bit, I sat there in stone silence for what felt like hours, but was probably just a few minutes or so, until E! aired another rerun of The Bradshaw Bunch, in which former NFL great Terry Bradshaw “still stinging from their embarrassing loss last year…..coaches the family for a repeat appearance on Celebrity Family Feud.”

I hurt for my supermodel sisters.  I asked a lot of unanswerable questions like, “Why, God, why?”  Then I asked one last question, which you’re not supposed to utter in public: “Whatever happened to skinny, beautiful models, and will they be coming back any time soon?”

Read the whole thing. As Iowahawk likes to say:

DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: NY Times on ‘backlash and bewilderment’ over the left’s wokespeak (and Times’ commenters weigh in).

As I usually do when reading the Times these days, I had a look at the comments. I was not disappointed with some of the most upvoted takes coming, I assume, from Democrats and liberals who are not on board with the woke language police. Here’s the top comment (1700 votes):

Or, “How Democrats Alienated Moderates And Lost Their Razor-Thin Majority.”

The next most upvoted comment compares “Lantinx” to colonialism:

I’m Latina and don’t like the term Latinx. Using it sounds elitist and colonist. Latino and Latina are Spanish words. Like it or not the Spanish language uses either feminine or masculine. Latinx is Americans once again saying we know better and your language is wrong. Signals more appropriation than inclusion.

Know your place, rank and file Democrats. As a former presidential candidate famously told your party’s voters, “You don’t have to fall in love — you just have to fall in line.”

HOW TO DEFEAT CANCEL CULTURE: Stop being scared of it. It’s that simple, according to Rap music artist Bryson Gray, whose “Let’s Go, Brandon” ditty hit #1 on the charts despite being censored by Instagram and YouTube.

WE CAN HOPE: As Biden Heads to Climate Talks, Supreme Court Move Could Stymie EPA Regulation.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: 9 Examples That Show Why Democrats’ Revised Spending Bill Is Still Awful.

PREFERENCE CASCADE: John Hayward gets to the heart of why Dems and media are ‘so comically furious’ — and legit terrified — about ‘Let’s Go Brandon.’

Related: NBC’s RussiaGate Hoaxer “Fusion Ken” Dilanian Calls Secret Service to Report a “Let’s Go Brandon” Meme.

MICHAEL WALSH: How the Republican Establishment Chooses to Lose.

Meant to harm gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in his race against former governor Terry McAuliffe, it involved lining up identically clad, tiki-torch carrying “conservatives” standing on guard near a Youngkin campaign bus while evoking the media-crafted “memory” of Charlottesville.

The problem was that several of the “supporters” were quickly identified as Democrat activists, whereupon the disgraced Lincoln Project, hoping that someone (in other words, the mainstream media) would still tumble for their scam, volunteered to take the fall—because, after all, even with the hated Trump defeated and gone, “our democracy” still requires saving.

And what did conservatives do about it? Did they strike back, try to embarrass McAuliffe in some way, launch strikes in New Jersey against Democrat incumbent Phil Murphy, put up a fuss about the continuing embarrassment of the Biden “presidency,” do anything to help extract the remaining hundreds of American citizen left behind in Afghanistan, protest on the floor of the House or the Senate the administration’s bruited payments of $450,000 apiece to illegal aliens who were “separated from their families” by the Trump administration, the choking off of the American energy industry while handing the begging bowl to Russia and the Saudis for help, unsnarling the chaos at West Coast ports that have disrupted the American supply chain, or—and I’m still waiting for this one—doing their best to countermand the very idea of a vaccine passport/ universal mandate advocated by Biden and the fascist Democrats?

Don’t be silly, Brandon.

A society that won’t fight back, that refuses to defend itself, is doomed, its people deserving of scorn and contempt. And yet when has the GOP establishment ever fought back? They hated Trump and did their best to sabotage him at almost every turn. (The rest of the sabotage he accomplished by himself, on the advice of Jared and Ivanka, aka Javanka, aka “the Democrats,” as they were known around the White House.) They wouldn’t kill Obamacare, they wouldn’t build the wall on the southern border, they wouldn’t even try to stop illegal immigration, they wouldn’t join the president in his trade war against China—why would they, since so many of them are in Chinese communist pockets?

Read the whole thing.

OH: Speed-Dating Jury Selection Is Over in Rittenhouse Trial as Poll Shows 2/3 of Possible Jurors Think He’s Guilty as Hell.

TOP SELLER: Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula Natural Adult Dry Dog Food, Chicken and Brown Rice 6-lb. #CommissionEarned

IT’S COME TO THIS: NASCAR sending Kyle Busch to sensitivity training for using R-word during interview.

“I mean, where was he going? What was he going to do? Spin me out? He was trying to do a Harvick is what he was trying to do. For what? For second place? For what? He wasn’t going to transfer through with that. Freaking retarded, man,” Busch said.

* * * * * * * *

Busch later tweeted, “In one of my post-race interviews I used a word I should never use and I want to apologize for it,” but the series said the language violated its conduct guidelines.

Busch was not issued a fine and will be allowed to compete at Phoenix on Sunday, Nov. 7.

Prior to the start of the 2021 season, NASCAR Truck Series driver Hailie Deegan received a similar sanction for saying during a livestreamed online simulation race, “Who’s the retard behind me?”

Somehow, I think NASCAR’s core audience will recover from being exposed to such language.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is the .30 Carbine the Most Overlooked Cartridge of All Time?

CRYPTO:

Plus: “On top of that, the article doesn’t even mention that the “currency” was based on someone else’s stolen intellectual property — a scam so common in the crypto world that it’s not even worth commenting on anymore.”

COME SEE THE ANTISEMITISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Nation of Islam Professor: Jewish Weed Is Making Black Men Gay.

HEY, TEACHER, LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE: Forget the Gender Unicorn, Genderbread Person is here to explain sexuality.