REPUBLICANS POUNCE! Could a School-Board Fight Over Critical Race Theory Help Turn Virginia Red? “Republicans are hoping to turn that discord into political capital.”

LEARNING THE LESSONS OF 2020: Supply chain diversification can help cities avoid food shocks. “Cities fundamentally depend on other regions for the provision of food and other basic resources.”

ENDORSED: GOP Should Embrace Being the ‘Barstool Sports’ Party.

AT HELEN’S PAGE: From L. Douglas Garrett, Remember When: a work of fiction (Remember The Trade). You can read it free on Kindle unlimited.

BRAIN FOOD: Keto diet may help brain tumor patients recover, study finds.

THIS BODES POORLY FOR CAYMAN: Cayman dive business setting up shop in Turks and Caicos.

Next month, the bulk of the remaining staff and crew of Cayman’s Reef Divers will load up four boats and make the 520 nautical mile, 34-hour ocean crossing to set up shop in Turks and Caicos.

After 16 months without any overseas guests in Cayman, eight staff will join the “Reef Divers armada”, refuelling from portable totes, as they travel to a new outpost.

“We have to go where the tourists are,” said Michael Tibbetts, owner of the business, which is expanding its horizons beyond the Cayman Islands as a survival strategy amid the ongoing impact of COVID-19 and the border closure.

The tourists aren’t on Cayman because the Caymanian government refuses to reopen, and shows no sign of doing so anytime soon.

NOTHING SAYS ‘HIP’ LIKE SUCKLING ON THE FEDERAL TEAT: Taxpayer Funded “Hipster Parties” Cost $5 Million – Quit Smoking, Get Cash.

WHITE HOUSE DEFENDS DOOR-TO-DOOR VACCINATION PUSH AMID BACKLASH. Unexpectedly.

Update: Yikes, sorry about just posting a bare link, don’t know what happened!

PUTTING PEOPLE WHO HATE OUR HISTORY IN CHARGE OF IT IS NATIONAL SUICIDE: The National Archives Provides a Chilling Taste of the Institutionalized Woke-ism Infecting America. “In order to counter supposed ‘institutional racism’ at the National Archives, NARA would institutionalize a new bureaucracy at all levels of the organization, staffing the agency with activists dedicated to a leftist agenda.”

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Capitol Hill Cowards: Reporters Were the Real Victims of the January 6 Riots.

Plus:

• The best parody video you’ll see all week
• Good guy with a gun… in California?
• It’s the return (exit, actually) of Creepy Porn Lawyer

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

HE’S TOO KIND: Reimagining Austin Police: Absolute Fucking Lunacy. “The document is filled top-to-bottom with wokespeak codswallop, but a whole lot of it boils to a single word: GIMME! Over and over again, the RPS task force, staffed from leftwing activists groups, demands that taxpayer money be taken away from the police and funneled directly into their pockets.”

“GAY GROUP: ‘WE’LL CONVERT YOUR CHILDREN.'” As sung by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. The song is satirical, or at least full of double entendres, so I hesitated to post this since I don’t want to be unfair. But this year it’s been really hard not to see the overwhelming, crushing cultural messages from the woke movement (most definitely including government and corporations) as a ridiculous end-zone dance meant not to convince but to demoralize. (And aiming it so blatantly at peoples’ kids?) Politics always involves some of this, but while I don’t think it will ultimately succeed, I have real concerns that the sheer scale of this propaganda effort is incompatible with liberal democracy.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): These are The Crazy Years, and somewhere the Rev. Nehemiah Scudder reads this story and smiles.

DEEP STATE: There’s a New Twist in Tucker Carlson’s NSA Spying Claims. “The NSA leaked the contents of my email to journalists in an effort to discredit me. I know because I got a call from one of them saying, ‘Oh, this is what your email was about.’”

STILL THE SAME SWAMP CREATURES: Bloomberg News reporting yesterday that Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul made stock trades in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, just a week before the House Judiciary Committee advanced six bipartisan antitrust bills. The trade netted him a $4.8 million gain, and it’s risen to $5.3 million since then as the shares have jumped. What a lucky guy!

The laughable part is that Nancy (she’ll always be Granny Winebox to me), who presents herself as a strong, intelligent, worldly woman said through a spokesperson that:

“The speaker has no involvement or prior knowledge of these transactions,” her spokesman Drew Hammill said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.”

Don’t you love it when the most powerful woman in the world says “I don’t know nuthin'”?

AT HELEN’S PAGE: Mark Trapp’s book A Destiny of Undying Greatness: Kiffin Rockwell and the Boys Who Remembered Lafayette.

JOE CONCHA: Jen Psaki: Professional gaslighter on defunding the police.

Here’s how bad things are: In New York, murders are up nearly 50 percent compared to this point in (pre-pandemic) 2019. In Atlanta, the murder rate is up 60 percent from last year. Chicago has recorded more than 1,900 shootings, a 53 percent increase over 2019. In Portland, murders are up 800 percent. Seattle is seeing its highest homicide rate in 26 years.

And over the holiday weekend, at least 150 people were shot and killed during more than 400 shootings across this country.

Those are just a few examples. But all have a common thread: These cities are all run by Democratic mayors.

This recent New York Times headline sums up the overall situation: “With Homicides Rising, Cities Brace for a Violent Summer; Homicide rates in large cities were up more than 30 percent on average last year, and up another 24 percent for the beginning of this year, according to criminologists.”

As for keeping cops on the beat, someone should ask Psaki why police retirements are up 45 percent, while resignations are up 18 percent this year nationwide.

Someone should ask, but it isn’t like she has to face actual reporters each day.

AS A FAMOUS MAN SAID, GET IN THEIR FACE. PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: ‘P is for Protest!’ How Utah parents are rallying against critical race theory in public schools.

BRYAN PRESTON: Revisionist History Now: How Will the Future See ‘Defund the Police’? “The white elites — Mayor Bill de Blasio, Mayor Steve Adler, Mayor Jenny Durkan, and the like — who defunded the police voted to do something that systemically hurt people of color.”

WORSE YET FOR HIM, MAYBE THEY DO: Georgetown prof admits to being critical race theorist, says parents just don’t ‘understand’ CRT.

Related: “We aren’t trying to prevent schools from teaching about racism. We are trying to prevent schools from engaging in it.”

CRISIS BY DESIGN: When Stores Close Due To Rising Crime, Urban Blight Is Back — And It Will Get Worse.

Early Monday evening, at least nine men and women smashed cases and stripped shelves in San Francisco’s high-end Neiman Marcus store, fleeing with a fortune in designer handbags. The brazenness is out of control, is goaded on by the normalization of masks, and is directly enabled by district attorneys and other politicians.

The Golden City is joined by nearby Sacramento and Los Angeles, where retail crime has spiked, but across the country as district attorneys from Massachusetts to Missouri to Texas have declared they won’t defend citizens from theft, the story has gone much the same.

While it’s insane that crime is so severe and law enforcement so nonexistent in a prosperous city that businesses must close their doors early or shut them entirely, there’s more in store. Far more ominous than a sign of how bad things have gotten, darkened windows and shuttered doors reveal just how much worse things are going to get.

Spoiler: Lots worse.

But do read the whole thing anyway.

THAT’S MORE THAN I EXPECTED THESE DAYS, BUT FEWER THAN I’D HOPE: 55% SAY LETTING BUREAUCRATS ESTABLISH RULES IS MAJOR THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. That’s also considerably more than see the January 6 Lego Insurrection as a threat to democracy.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Suing Big Tech Fascists Is the Entertainment We Need. “This suit seems to be about a lot more than just Trump. It addresses the problems we have all been facing, especially since last year. A lot of us in conservative media have been dinged for questioning narratives about the pandemic or the election. Most of the time we’re proven right but the damage has already been done. That damage is has a dollar value, and it’s money that can never be recovered.”

THIS SEEMS LIKE A DUMB IDEA: Tennessee to pay for visitors’ airfare to promote tourism; governor gets backlash over source of funds. “Tennessee on Me, as the campaign is called, plans to provide 10,000 airfare vouchers — worth $250 each — toward Tennessee-bound flights on American, Delta or Southwest Airlines. Those wishing to take advantage of the deal must also book a two-night stay at a participating hotel in one of four cities, including Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis or Nashville.”

This is effectively a transfer of money from rural taxpayers to out-of-staters and big cities. Why is that a good idea? Especially because most businesses in my city, at least, can’t get enough staff to handle the business volume they already have. Am I missing something here?

NEWS FOR HONG KONGERS: Lithuania wants you, will help you move.

A DUBIOUS EXPEDIENCY: HOW RACE PREFERENCES DAMAGE HIGHER EDUCATION:  Here’s my interview with First Things’ Mark Bauerlein.