DEAL OF THE DAY: Hoover Commercial Lightweight Backpack Vacuum Cleaner. #CommissionEarned

BIG BROTHER REALLY IS WATCHING YOU: Age Verification Providers Say Don’t Worry About California Design Code; You’ll Just Have To Scan Your Face For Every Website You Visit. “If you thought cookie pop-ups were an annoying nuisance, just wait until you have to scan your face for some third party to ‘verify your age’ after California’s new design code becomes law.”

INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE WILL BE GENERAL: Meal Ticket No More: The ‘Gold Standard’ Private Pensions Exposed Now as High-Wire Busts.

RON DESANTIS SENDS TWO PLANES OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS TO MARTHA’S VINEYARD:

Martha’s Vineyard is famously known as a playground of rich progressives, including former President Barack Obama, who bought a multimillion-dollar house there in 2019.

DeSantis, a Republican, proposed Delaware or Martha’s Vineyard as a destination for such migrants, but his office explained at the time that they could also be sent “to other ‘progressive’ states whose governors endorse blatant violations of federal immigration law.”

“It is not the responsibility of Floridians to subsidize aliens to reside in our state unlawfully; we did not consent to Biden’s open-borders agenda,” the governor’s office said at the time.

In November, DeSantis said dozens of migrant flights landed in Florida at the behest of the Biden administration, and he threatened at that time to send them to Delaware on buses.

Found via Rod Dreher, who tweets, “Based.”

Analysis: Absolutely True.

Related: Immigration Issue Stirs Heartfelt Response on Martha’s Vineyard:

“These warrant articles have always been about community policing and community safety and supporting local law enforcement,” said Irene Bright-Dumm, a spokesman for We Stand Together. “I think this morning we had a really productive dialogue to reiterate all of that. And I think we are lucky enough to live in a place where our police understand the value of community policing.” It was unclear exactly what the joint statement will say, although Aquinnah police chief Randhi Belain told the Gazette that the same statement would be read at each town meeting and help create a unified message. West Tisbury selectman Richard Knabel, who has been attending We Stand Together’s weekly meetings at the charter school, said Monday that the warrant article aims only to affirm current practices and send a message of support to the immigrant community. “It’s basically a slap on the back to the police force, saying, ‘Hey, we basically like what you are doing, keep doing it,’” he said.

One effect of the article has been to help clarify the relationship between ICE and Island police departments in terms of enforcing federal immigration law. As in other communities, information about people who are jailed at the Edgartown house of correction is automatically sent to ICE. If bail is later posted, it could trigger a so-called detainer notice from ICE, requesting that the county continue to hold the person for up to 48 hours. But Mr. Ogden said that doesn’t happen very often, and when it does, the county refuses.

“Primarily, we take our orders from the commonwealth,” he said. “In our facility, we have a standing order that states that any request for voluntary action from ICE, we will not uphold.” He added that all police on the Island have the same mandate and that Island police officers do not make arrests based on immigration status. “Someone would not come here just based on ICE, but because they broke the law,” he said.

Some communities in the state, including Barnstable and Bristol counties, have special agreements with the federal government, known as 287(g) programs, that allow them to carry out ICE activities on their own. But Mr. Ogden said that would place a heavy burden on Island police departments, since they would need to cover the additional costs. Mr. Knabel said Island chiefs had no interest in forming that type of agreement on the Vineyard.

But recent federal efforts surrounding illegal immigration, including President Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order aimed at strengthening federal immigration procedures and punishing sanctuary cities, have created a climate of uncertainty on Martha’s Vineyard and among its large Brazilian community.

—The Vineyard Gazette, April 6th, 2017.

Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.

The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.

It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.

Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.

Why, it’s as if: Democrats Discover Only The Federal Government Can Solve The Border Crisis.

More: Good Morning America reports that around 9,000 migrants have ‘flooded’ Washington this summer.

PROTECTING DEMOCRATS IS HALF THEIR JOB: RealClearInvestigations:. Unpacking the Apparent Trump-Hillary Double Standard, in Which the FBI Helped Obstruct Its Own Investigation.

Hurting Republicans is the other half.

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

Matt Margolis: Democrats Thrive on Election Uncertainty, but You Are a ‘Threat to Democracy.’ “Ultimately, the only way to restore faith in our elections is by implementing commonsense election integrity policies. The problem is that one party in Washington opposes those policies.”

Rick Moran: It’s Back to the Drawing Board for Putin and the Russian Military. “These latest setbacks in Kharkiv are worse than originally thought. It appears the retreat from Izyum — the most important base and staging area in Donbas — has blown up the entire eastern front.”

Yours Truly: SPOILER: Biden Wants the Railroad Strike. “Really, when it comes to their goals, means, and even tone, Biden’s is a European, hard-Left Labour government. Any Briton who lived through the ’70s would find the this administration instantly recognizable.”

ROGER SIMON: The Ivy League Is Dying—And That’s a Good Thing.

“Jeopardy” for a dollar fifty. … Why were we not surprised that Brian Stelter and Bill de Blasio (né Warren Wilhelm Jr.) ended up on the Harvard faculty?

Because there’s nothing surprising about it.

I know. That was too easy for a “Jeopardy” question.

Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League have been morphing into Institutions of Higher Indoctrination from Institutions of Higher Education for years now, sometimes at the behest of the Chinese communists and sometimes, incredibly, on their recognizance.

If you weren’t sufficiently brainwashed K through 12, you would be at an Ivy college—and then some. You would be trained to parrot the approved ideology all across the country and the world, through the media and, yet more insidiously, at colleges more lowly on the academic food chain, should you so choose.

So why not ex-CNN bloviator Stelter, who spent the better part of an hour a day for two years shamelessly lying to the American public about nonexistent Trump–Russia collusion, or the former mayor of New York who helped turn America’s greatest city into the crime-ridden garbage heap it is now and is nowhere near repairing?

They are simply the obvious next steps into what can only be described as deliberate anti-intellectual inanity, plus brainwashing by the university (masquerading as the ne plus ultra of thought, of course).

“Fight Fiercely Harvard!” as Tom Lehrer used to sing in a mock football fight song. “Demonstrate to them our will.” However, that will—a university devoted to even-handed intellectual inquiry for the public good—no longer exists. The truth has an inconvenient way of interfering with propaganda.

The Ivy League schools that once did so much to help build our country along with others conventionally highly ranked by U.S. News and World Report are now doing their best to undermine its principles and destroy it.

So why is this a good thing?

Because when they do something so stupid, and almost ludicrously anti-intellectual, as to hire the likes of Stelter and de Blasio, they expose the nature of who they really are, what their institutions have become.

More people, including reluctant alumni, have to face reality. Many aren’t giving as much—and they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t give at all, yet “alma mater” continues to exert a significant pull on the emotions and values of many. They work hard to make it that way.

In our house, we know this well, since my wife is a graduate of Princeton and I’m a graduate of Dartmouth and Yale. We are bombarded with alumni newsletters, magazines, and so forth. All are now written, clone-like, in the same contemporary left-wing politically correct style. That makes them seen oddly unsophisticated and, again, almost deliberately anti-intellectual, as if created by “woke” robots.

They immediately fill our waste baskets, just as we no longer donate to the schools’ alumni funds—not that the latter matters. Most of these institutions are so rich that you have no influence unless you are prepared to donate in the millions.

But we have more power than we think. Not just alumni, all parents do. It could be put succinctly: Are you so stupid you would send your children to be educated by Stelter for 75 grand a year? (Dorothy Parker could have written a great limerick about that. )

If nobody goes, eventually these warped institutions will have to change, at least to some degree, or disappear. There are a lot of wonderful things we could do with the buildings. I know it’s a dream, but dreams do happen once in a while—with effort.

To realize this, encourage your children to get their educations locally. Don’t dream of Harvard or Yale, go to the University of Florida or Tennessee. It’s a lot cheaper and you will see them more often.

One of our friends who is quite wealthy, and a graduate of Ivy League schools, plans to send her kids to Tennessee. It’s Tennessee’s job to stay desirable to people like that, instead of letting insecure faculty and administrators try to turn it into a third-rate version of Penn.

FROM PAM UPHOFF:  Friends and Family.

#CommissionEarned

Lady Olympiada Vinogradov’s Grandfather has died . . . and now she’s going off to some tier four mining World with her mother and stepfather. Ought to be a great adventure! And far away from people who might notice she has dangerously strong Mentalist talents that could get her chipped.

But before she goes, she needs to rescue her friends. But taking them along with her to an unpopulated wilderness full of dangerous animals, to a base totally dependent on imported food and fuel might not be a good thing as the Three Part Alliance slides closer to collapse . . .

But with friends and family, what could possibly go wrong . . .

THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY WE WERE PROMISED:  The new in-space repair and refueling industries that are about to revolutionize space exploration.

AND PROBABLY CIVIL SOCIETY:  A Railroad Strike Will Break Our Supply Chain.

DISNEY EXECUTIVES BLAME IT ON COVID (AND PEOPLE SAY DISNEY’S CREATIVITY IS PLAYED OUT):  ‘Torture’: Disney World guests gripe of broken-down rides, filth as prices soar.

ABSOLUTELY: Don’t Tolerate People Who Hate You.

Also, not a red cent (for the blue) and support the right.

WHEN HAS AN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST EVER LIED TO US?  Gas stoves linked to asthma in children, adult cancers, scientist warns.

… okay, but have they done it in the last two minutes? Okay, the last minute? Second?

MORE PLEASE:  Pushback: Teacher files class-action lawsuit against Texas A&M for favoring non-Asian minorities in hiring.

ABOLISH THE FBI, SALT THE EARTH, FIRE EVERYONE AT THE DOJ, AND WHIP THEM TILL THE BLOOD RUNS FREELY:  Durham limps on.

After that fire every single bureaucrat whose job is not doing something authorized by the US Constitution. I don’t know who they work for, but it’s not us. Let their masters pay them.

COULROVERSE IS CLASSIER: Dispatches from the coulroverse (=clown universe), USA edition.

… but it’s still clown world.

NOTE HE’S NOT UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR ANYTHING:  Mike Lindell, My Pillow Guy, Stopped By FBI, Phone Taken.

This is a clear 4th amendment violation. He should fire his lawyer and buy a copy of the pocket constitution.

THE LEFT WANTS TO DISMANTLE LAWFUL LIFE. I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY THINK COMES NEXT:  Scream That Triggered the Illinois Governor.

WELL, YES:  Kelisa Wing, Defense Department’s Racist Equity Officer.

HE’S NEVER SEEN A BAD IDEA HE DIDN’T LOVE:  Video Surfaces Showing Charlie Christ Supporting Vaccine Passports.

THIS IS LITERALLY A CALL FOR MAZIE HIRONO TO SHUT HER IGNORANT MOUTH:  Sen. Mazie Hirono: This is ‘Literally a Call to Arms’ to Fight the Pro-Life Movement.

OH, CANADA!  Nanny News: Swords, knives, etc. can’t be shipped to Canada now.

Castreau is afraid of sharp objects….

WELL, OF COURSE:  Election Interference: DOJ/FBI Carpet-Bombed Subpoenas An Attempt To Freeze Political Opposition In Runup To Midterms.

They don’t realize they’re just ratcheting up the anger.

HOT! HOT! HOT!:  Here’s the legal argument for why the new Biden transgender bathroom, locker room, shower proposals (and the Obama Era guidance on the same issue) are contrary to law.  This 4-page comment was submitted by Pete Kirsanow and me to the U.S. Department of Education in response to its Title IX proposals.  It’s just a sketch of the argument … almost more a logic puzzle than anything else.  If the issue ever reaches litigation, it will need to be fleshed out.  But I think it’s definitely worth a read.  (Note that Justice Gorsuch’s quirky opinion in the the Bostock case helps rather than hurts our analysis.)

OPEN THREAD: Make it count.