ALL THAT BUILDUP AND THEN THIS: Laurel Hubbard, first transgender Olympian, out of weightlifting competition early.

HEARTBREAKING: Olympic Swimmer Miserable While Winning Five Golds.

THE PROVINCETOWN REPORT is actually good news.

GOT WOKE, WENT BROKE: US Women’s Soccer Team Smoked By Canada; Megan Rapinoe Mocked.

AND EVEN THEY DON’T REALLY THINK IT WAS AN “INSURRECTION,” THEY JUST FIND IT USEFUL TO PRETEND: Morning Consult Poll: Pelosi’s Jan 6th Panel “is largely preaching to its own choir.” “It’s almost like the more ridiculous and ludicrous the Democrats get, the more Americans tune out.”

NO RUSH, I’LL FIGURE IT OUT YESTERDAY: Google’s time crystal discovery is so big, we can’t fully comprehend it.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Mexico’s Turn: The Border Mess Is About to Get Much Worse.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: After Seven Months, 40 Percent of New York City Educators Aren’t Vaccinated. “[D]espite the media’s preferred narrative, a significant portion of the remaining unvaccinated are not Trump-voting, MAGA-cap-wearing Republicans but Democrats, independents, or apolitical types. I could not have found a more powerful illustrative set of statistics than the jaw-dropping percentages of New York City employees who are not vaccinated.”

ONE FOR THE ROAD: Gas Station Liability Lunacy. “New Mexico Court Rules Gas Stations Liable for Selling Fuel to Drunk Drivers.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The ‘expert’ who says thermostats should stay at 82 in summer must have been born in a barn.

HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): California May Require Public Colleges to Provide Free… Men’s Menstrual Products?

ROGER SIMON: Maskless in Nashville: Two Parties Attend Tennessee GOP Dinner.

The essence of the problem, in Tennessee and across the country, is that there are still two Republican parties that haven’t fully reconciled. Call them the old guard and the MAGA people. You could also call it Bush v. Trump.

The old guard think the MAGA people are just a bit too rowdy—we might also say indecorous or perhaps uneducated—although they need Trump’s army in order to win.

Meaning no disrespect—I admire the man—Lamar Alexander exemplifies that old guard and did the other night, calling for a middle of the road approach to everything that may have been justifiable a while back, but ran its course some time ago. Times have changed—bigly, as someone said.

You don’t fight Pelosi, Schiff, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, the mainstream media gang, the Marxist professorate, Hollywood (need I go on?) via “business as usual.” They are about as interested in “business as usual” as most of us are in stomach cancer.

You hear talk in the grass roots these days that Republicans should adopt a little Alinsky of their own—not straight on ends-justify-the-means criminal Alinsky, but at least some of his willingness to fight and keep fighting until only one of us is standing.

Allowing them to win, even a little bit, is the direct road to Soviet America.

Robert Conquest—the historian of Stalinism and one of my personal heroes—explained the danger of the middle-of-the-road approach when he wrote years ago in the second of his Three Laws of Politics:

“Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”

History has borne him out.

Lastly, while I am in the mood of recommending terrific articles by others, have a look at “It’s the Liberalism, Stupid” by Liel Leibovitz over at Tablet.

Related: How to win the culture war.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS NOT MERELY PINING FOR THE FJORDS: Nine Of The 10 Worst Cities For First-Time Home Buyers Are In California.

SCIENCE! Harvard diversity guru rips colleague for claiming sex differences are a real thing.

ROGER KIMBALL: The Rule of Law Hostage to ‘Enemy Action.’

I have always admired the admonitory wisdom that Auric Goldfinger imparted to James Bond early in Ian Fleming’s novel named for the gold-loving villain: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

I have thought often of that sage advisory in recent months as so many once-trustworthy institutions of American life seem to have been weaponized against the people they were meant to serve.

This is, alas, a huge topic, and today I will only scratch the surface

* * * * * * * *

During the Trump years, why was it that the awesome power of the state was routinely brought to bear against anyone in the president’s orbit while people in the Justice Department and various intelligence services could lie, leak, and even alter critical evidence with essentially no consequences?

Why is it that the Biden DOJ “declines to prosecute” five people arrested as Chinese spies while it continues its policy of harassing, arresting, and incarcerating people who were milling about the Capitol on Jan. 6?

Why is it that the Biden DOJ has declined to investigate the scandal of blue-state nursing home deaths in the wake of the COVID hysteria?

“The Department of Justice will not pursue investigations into New York, Pennsylvania, or Michigan nursing home policies,” The Washington Examiner reported, “that resulted in thousands of residential COVID-19 deaths.”

It wasn’t just that the policy of stashing COVID patients in nursing homes was a deadly mistake, there was also a massive coverup.

In New York, for example, an aide to Governor Cuomo admitted in a leaked Zoom video that the Cuomo administration “purposely undercounted nursing home deaths to avoid a federal investigation.”

Don’t try this if you are Republican governor.

Now that Trump is out of office, the Biden administration, staffed with Obama retreads, is back to doing what Obama perfected, viewing American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head: History Will Condemn Bigots Using Coronavirus to Persecute Trump Supporters.

MATT MARGOLIS: The Biggest Indication Yet That Trump is Running in 2024. “We met with some of our Cabinet members tonight. […] We’re looking at what does come next. I’m not authorized to speak on behalf of the president. But, I can tell you this: We wouldn’t be meeting tonight if we weren’t making plans to move forward in a real way, with President Trump at the head of that ticket.”

START WITH DEMOCRATS: Prof supports accosting public figures.

HMM: Congress Likely to Pass $550 Billion Infrastructure Bill That Threatens to ‘Kill’ Crypto Industry.

To pay for $28 billion of the total, the bill includes a provision to expand the definition of a broker for tax purposes to cover “any person who (for consideration) is responsible for and regularly provides and services effectuating transfers of digital assets.”

In practice, this means that crypto miners, validators on proof-of-stake networks, and possibly even those active in decentralized finance markets (think liquidators or governance-token holders) will have to meet IRS reporting requirements and file 1099 forms. These forms include customer data such as name, address, and tax identification number (which, in the case of self-employed individuals, can be a social security number).

The ostensible reason for the provision is to ensure people pay taxes on their crypto earnings—legislators reckon that it can lead to $28 billion more in payments—but it ratchets up financial surveillance to ensure such a result.

Jake Chervinsky, general counsel at DeFi lending protocol Compound, tweeted, “It’s literally impossible for non-custodial actors like miners to get the information they need to do Form 1099s. In practice, this could mean a de facto ban on mining in the USA.”

I think that’s what it’s actually about.

ICYMI: No, Karen, we’re not masking again: A winning GOP message for 2022 & beyond.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: The Trump 2024 Democrat Destruction Machine Readies for Battle. “All of this is more than likely causing quite a bit of flop sweat at the Democratic National Committee though. On his quietest days, Trump gives them headaches. More than six months after they set up Biden in the Oval Office, they still act like Trump’s there goading them. They can’t quit him and their continued torture is a never-ending delight to watch.”

JUST A REMINDER: I get paid based on ad revenue now, so if you wouldn’t mind whitelisting InstaPundit if you run an ad blocker that would be great. Or some people hit the PayPal donation button, which is also great.

“NEVER UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S ABILITY TO F*** THINGS UP: America’s Acceptance Of Nord Stream 2 Will Redefine Europe.

In practical terms, the U.S.-German summit decision on Nord Stream 2 means that Washington will not sanction the $11 billion pipeline project, allowing it to be completed, despite staunch opposition to it from a number of NATO allies, especially those that were former Soviet colonies now facing a revisionist Russian state. It affirms in no uncertain terms that the Biden administration sees Germany as the unequivocal leader of the European Union and Europe more broadly, and that it counts on Berlin’s help with shaping a larger European consensus on China. (That assumption is not likely to come true, considering that the PRC is now Germany’s largest trading partner and that Germany’s business community remains determined to stay fully engaged in the Asian market.) And most importantly, the decision will have a wide-ranging impact on internal alignments within Europe, for Nord Stream 2, notwithstanding Berlin’s insistence from its inception that it was strictly an “economic project,” has always carried with it transformative geostrategic implications.

The project’s completion will further strengthen Berlin’s position as the dominant player in Europe (especially because since Brexit, Europe’s second-largest economy is no longer part of the EU.) Germany will become the principal distribution center for Russian gas across Europe, at a time when the EU’s push for “green energy” will eventually force the closure of coal-fired power plants in Central Europe, increasing those countries’ dependence on German (Russian) gas and, hence, indirectly, Russia.

Biden sold out our friends in “New Europe” to a Russo-German economic hegemony.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Weekly Biden Report Card: Inflation up, vaccination goal still unreached, approval rating struggles.