THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Biden Appoints Holocaust Museum Board Member From Org That Accused Israel of Apartheid.

DEAL OF THE DAY: AeroGarden Sprout with Gourmet Herbs Seed Pod Kit. #CommissionEarned

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Archeologists Uncover Target Store Ruins From Sodom And Gomorrah.

COOL, I GUESS THEY CAN SECRETLY BAPTIZE STUDENTS WITHOUT TELLING THEIR PARENTS: Baptist college trains pastors for second vocation as teacher.

I mean, that’s how it works now, right?

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: New York Times critic says ‘The Little Mermaid’ is missing joy, fun, and … kink.

LOL, “LEFTIST STUDENTS” ARE COMPLAINING. THAT’S WHAT THEY DO. Leftist students blast FSU president for thanking DeSantis. “The incident is the latest failed attempt made by progressive FSU students to pressure administrators into publicly opposing the governor’s conservative agenda.”

OUT ON A LIMB: Anti-Covid Policies Were a Disaster.

WELL, THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU ELECT A LOSER: White House Report Card: Biden losing on 2024, debt, public opinion.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Target Store Bomb Threats Sent By Angry Pro-Pride Left-Winger!

WHAT AMERICA NEEDS IS A FEW GOOD FEDERAL BUDGET EXPERTS:  Just in case a decent President is elected, conservatives need a detailed plan already in place to defund the left.  Maybe I should write it this way for emphasis:  FOR PETE’S SAKE WE NEED TO DEFUND THE LEFT.  We can’t wait till the election is over.  By then it’s too late to get the job done.  Too much taxpayer money is going to identity politics projects through colleges and universities and through “community action” nonprofits of various sorts.  It needs to stop.  (At least it looks like Ohio is on the right track.)

REEFER MADNESS: Marijuana linked to mental health risks in young adults, growing evidence shows: New research, involving millions of people worldwide over decades, adds to worries that heavy use of high-potency cannabis could exacerbate the mental health crisis in the U.S.

I was repeatedly informed by all the best people that any concerns of this sort were the product of 1930s propaganda, and probably racist.

TEXAS HOUSE IMPEACHES REPUBLICAN STATE AG KEN PAXTON:

The Texas house of representatives voted on Saturday to impeach state attorney general Ken Paxton, temporarily removing him from office days after a Republican-led investigative committee voted unanimously to recommend his impeachment for several alleged abuses of office. He now faces a trial in the state senate.

The Texas house voted 121–23 to impeach the Republican attorney general after the committee filed 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton.

Texas has previously had only two impeachments under the constitution of 1876, including a governor and a district judge.

As a result of Paxton’s impeachment, “by lumping all of Paxton’s sins together to pursue this course, [House Speaker Dade Phelan is] creating a divisive primary issue for every single Republican member. Their desire to dodge the Senate’s conservative priorities is real — but is it worth it to impeach a popular conservative with well-heeled backers? If they vote for impeachment, the conservative base will come after them, and those same west Texans will fund their primary challengers. If he’s overplayed his hand, Phelan may end up losing his speakership due to the resentment over forcing such a vote on his fellow Republicans.”

TELLING DAVID FRENCH TO CALM DOWN: No, Ron DeSantis Won’t Destroy Conservatism: David French is wrong to portray the Florida governor as a threat to the movement.

It is with those thoughts in mind that I turn to our old friend David French’s New York Times column the morning after Ron DeSantis’s presidential announcement, which greets the emergence at last of a viable Republican alternative to Donald Trump by claiming that DeSantis could “end conservatism as we have known it.” This is not just unwarranted catastrophism married to impractical utopianism; it is also a misreading of what American conservatism is as well as a betrayal of the principled conservative argument against Trump.

It’s selling out to the enemy’s house organ, actually. More:

David begins by defining “fusionism” as “an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians” augmented, during the Cold War, by “the additional commitment to a strong national defense.” That’s really an incomplete vision of modern American conservatism. We can argue over whether fusionism is actually intellectually coherent, but its ambition was to argue that older conservative ideas about tradition, virtue, and social order were not just consistent with liberty, but were better able to flourish in a society that respected not only civil liberty but also economic liberty.

The core of the theory is that the man left alone in his private space beyond the government’s reach — on his own property, in his own community and associations, free to keep the fruits of his own labors — was better able to freely pursue virtue. In this vision, a government’s job is to preserve order, so that this wide private space could prosper free of private as well as governmental intrusion. The essentially Lockean aspect of that theory was neatly summarized by DeSantis himself in his 2011 book Dreams from Our Founding Fathers. . . .

David argues that “fusionists such as me read the Declaration of Independence and reaffirm that governments are instituted for the purpose of securing our ‘unalienable rights.’ Thus, the protection of liberty is an indispensable aspect of American government.” Which, again, is true enough, but it is also too narrow in neglecting the importance of order, property, and virtue to conservative thinking. The first two are crucial preconditions for defending liberty; the third is its ultimate purpose.

Moreover, as Washington and Adams emphasized, and as Reagan warned in his farewell address, liberty and self-government themselves will die if the people cease to be virtuous, and if they are not adequately educated in an informed patriotism that transmits to the next generation the very ideals that we draw from the Declaration and the Founders. Nobody in America today has done more to fight for a pride of place in American education for precisely that sort of schooling than Ron DeSantis.

And no one has done less for conservatism than David French, and his fellow gang of Democrat-adhering, Lincoln-Project-accepting NeverTrump “conservatives.” If they had done their jobs, Trump wouldn’t have been necessary.

Plus:

a major factor in the rise of Trump was a widespread belief by Republican voters that the party didn’t act as if it believed its own ideology, so it was worth choosing a leader who would (it was hoped) focus on results rather than Reaganite rhetoric. It will take time and effort to rebuild the voters’ trust that voting for Republican politicians actually gets you the implementation of Republican ideology. You know who has been wildly successful thus far at enacting the things he says he stands for? Ron DeSantis.

Two, even through the Trump era, the core Republican ideology has remained more continuous from 1854 to the present than its critics allow. That ideology is built around free labor, individual responsibility, public order, American nationalism, and civic virtue. Again, David makes no real effort to argue that DeSantis’s platform and record deviate significantly from that tradition.

I’m reminded of one of Kurt Schlichter’s novels, where a collaborating Bill Kristol is still planning “conservative” cruises in an America that has become, literally, a People’s Republic.

MCCARTHY GETS DEBT-CEILING DEAL — WITH WORK REQUIREMENTS: “Biden and Chuck Schumer lost this weeks ago, and now they just caved. It would not surprise me if the Democrats knew this was coming all along, and they merely waited for a holiday weekend to give them enough cover to pull the trigger.”

THIS ISN’T A SIDE-EFFECT OF GREEN POLICY, IT’S THE GOAL: WSJ: Your Coming Summer of Blackouts.

Texas last summer narrowly averted a power outage by leaning on businesses to curtail operations. The state has since added enough solar to power about 200,000 homes. But demand has grown by even more, and the sun doesn’t shine at night. NERC forecasts a 19% probability of a grid emergency at 8 p.m. Do Texans feel lucky?

One new variable this summer is the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently finalized Good Neighbor Plan, which requires fossil-fuel power plants in 22 states to reduce NOx emissions. NERC predicts power plants will comply by limiting hours of operation but warns they may need regulatory waivers in the event of a power crunch.

The EPA claimed the rule wouldn’t jeopardize grid reliability, but then why would power plants need waivers to prevent blackouts? The Fifth Circuit of Court of Appeals this month stayed the rule in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. But it continues to be a wild card in determining whether the lights stay on in the Midwest and West.

Another growing concern is glitchy solar plant inverters, which convert DC to AC power. These have caused solar plants in California and Texas to experience concurrent outages when there has been a problem somewhere else on the grid. Solar plants have “exhibited systemic performance issues,” NERC recently warned. . . .

One state that hasn’t learned from California’s green-energy folly is New York. A new state regulation will force 627 megawatts of gas and oil “peaker” plants—which can rapidly ramp up to provide power in a pinch—to shut down this year. That’s enough to power 470,000 homes. This year’s state budget requires the New York Power Authority to retire all peaker plants by 2030. New York plans to compensate by building more offshore wind farms, but they face permitting challenges and don’t provide reliable power.

The NERC report is an alarm about the Biden Administration and states moving full-speed ahead on the green-energy transition. Maybe when the power does go out, they will stop hitting snooze.

Again, this isn’t a surprise to them. They just don’t care.

OPEN THREAD: You waited for it, and here it is.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s mysterious space plane released an unidentified ‘object’ in orbit, US intelligence reveals.

WE SHOULD BE PRODUCING RESISTANT STRAINS, AND BETTER FUNGICIDES: Fungal Infections Could Obliterate Our Food Supply, Scientists Warn. “Humans have invited this crisis in other ways, too, the researchers write, like establishing vast monocultures of genetically similar crops, which are especially susceptible to fungal outbreaks.”

Monocultures are a problem in all sorts of settings.

SHORTCUTS MAKE LONG DELAYS: A Lawyer’s Filing “Is Replete with Citations to Non-Existent Cases”—Thanks, ChatGPT? “The lawyer’s colleague, who drafted the filing, says he relied on ChatGPT to draft the filing and provide the text of the cases, and neglected to check them.”

HISTORY OF THE AMERICANS: Sidebar: “The Soldier’s Faith,” a Memorial Day Speech.

On May 30 – Memorial Day — 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Harvard man and then a justice on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, delivered an address to the graduating class of 1895 in Cambridge. The speech, known as “The Soldier’s Faith,” is in and of itself fascinating substantively and also for its indirect effects. Regarding those, Theodore Roosevelt, another Harvard man, read the speech some seven years later and determined to appoint Holmes to the Supreme Court on account of it.

Beyond that, the speech is incredibly prescient, in certain respects, and eloquent, even poetic, on the question of personal courage and purpose to a degree that will seem alien to most Americans today, at least those of us who have never served.

I’m not at all convinced that Holmes took the right lessons from his service, but read (and listen to) the whole thing.

JULIETTE OCHIENG: Instinct: “I screw, therefore I am.”

I SAW ONE OF THESE IN THE WILD FOR THE FIRST TIME THE OTHER DAY: 2023 Lexus RX500h F Sport Performance First Test: This sporty hybrid SUV brings enjoyment to daily driving.

I had its predecessor, the RX450h — though not the “F Sport” version — and liked it a lot.

READER FAVORITE: DEWALT 20V Max Cordless Drill. #CommissionEarned

OUT: FLORIDA MAN. IN: MAINE WOMAN. Maine woman takes raccoon into Petco for nail trim, possibly exposing people to rabies. The reaction seems a bit overwrought, since there’s no actual reason to think the animal was rabid.

COVID IS OVER (CONT’D): COVID hospitalizations reach new record low nationwide, CDC says.