WHY ARE ECO-PROTESTORS TRYING TO STOP A BICYCLE RACE? Tour de France fans take justice into their own hands and tackle militant eco-protesters before dragging them off the road to stop them blocking the race.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What are “Battleship” colors on cars? “These are the super-dull colors that you’ve seen on cars and trucks in the last couple of years. These are ‘impossibly dull’ versions of blue, gray, and tan…When did this start and why?”

JUST NBC THE MORAL EQUIVALENCE: Chuck Todd Lets Al Gore Compare ‘Climate Deniers’ to Police Officers in Uvalde.

JAMES MAY VISITS THE FERRARI FACTORY AND TEST DRIVES A FERRARI ROMA: A clip from May’s new Our Man in Italy series on Amazon Prime Video.

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Can Pickleball Save America?

KINSLEY GAFFE: State Dept. official slammed for saying he prefers high gas prices.

A US State Department official is under fire after declaring he prefers the country’s historically high gas prices because it leads to less carbon-dioxide emissions.

Alan Eyre, a self-described government “bureaucrat” according to his Twitter profile, was slammed online after he responded to President Biden’s tweet touting that Americans will spend $30 less on average per month on gas after prices have fallen since gas reached “peak prices” earlier this year.

“I prefer high gas prices = less driving, less CO2,” Eyre said in a Tweet Friday.

Republican congressional candidate Ron Bassilian ripped into Eyre, calling him a “ghoul” and arguing that gas prices are “inelastic” to American drivers.

“Perhaps, but I don’t think it is inelastic and I remember in the 1970s the oil embargo led to a massive increase in renewables,” Eyre replied and added the hashtag #BeKind.

Eyre’s comment comes days after Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg requested Congress subsidize electric vehicle purchases as millions of Americans struggle to fill up their gas-powered cars.

Related: Let them pump gas: Elitist environmentalists have contempt for working class.

NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY KEEPS SHRINKING: Twitter to Ban Use of ‘Groomers’ After Pressure From Liberal Outrage Mongers.

GREAT MOMENTS IN TIMING:

Shot: 18-year-old who had a toy gun fatally shot by corrections officer, NYC police say.

An off-duty New York City corrections officer has been charged with murder in the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old man — an incident where a toy gun used in a TikTok trend may have played a role in his death.

Officers responded around 1:35 a.m. Thursday to a call about a shooting in the area of Grand Concourse and East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. They found Raymond Chaluisant unconscious with a gunshot wound to his face, New York City police said.

He was taken to Saint Barnabas Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

It was determined that he was shot on the southeast corner of the Cross Bronx Expressway and Morris Avenue, about a half mile from where he was found, and one shell casing was discovered at the site, police said.

The corrections officer, Dion Middleton, 45, was arrested on charges of murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon in connection with the shooting, police said.

—NBC News, Friday.

Chaser:

Related: What we know about gel blaster toy guns and TikTok’s new Orbeez Challenge.

OUT ON A LIMB: Could masks be making us sick? “That’s the suggestion in a Japanese study, published this week in Nature’s Scientific Report’s journal, which looked at bacterial and fungal growth on face masks worn during the pandemic. The results may put you off your tea.”

QUESTION ASKED: How widespread is sexual abuse of students by teachers? “Since 2016, this reporter has logged some 265 arrests of North Carolina educators and staff members. A recent FOX News report said it had found 181 arrests of teachers accused of sex crimes with students just in the first half of 2022. A report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice and published in 2017 that drew from a former USDOE report found that an estimated 10% of K–12 students will experience sexual misconduct by a school employee by the time they graduate from high school and that a single offender can have up to 73 victims.”

Related: Twitter Censors ‘Groomer’ Term After Left-Wing Pressure Campaign.

THE MEDIA’S VAPING ALARMISM HAD LETHAL CONSEQUENCES, NEW STUDY FINDS.

THE BILLIONAIRE FAMILY PUSHING SYNTHETIC SEX IDENTITIES (SSI):

I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

SUSPECTED LEE ZELDIN ATTACKER DAVID JAKUBONIS ARRESTED ON FEDERAL ASSAULT CHARGE.

US RECORDS FIRST TWO CHILD MONKEYPOX CASES: CALIFORNIA TODDLER AND AN INFANT IN D.C. WERE LIKELY INFECTED BY ‘HOUSEHOLD CONTACTS’ AND BOTH HAD CONTACT WITH GAY OR BISEXUAL MEN, CDC CHIEF SAYS.

As Ian Miles Cheong tweets, “Are we allowed to ask any questions?”

Related: UN health agency chief declares monkeypox a global emergency.

WHY IS THE LONDON DAILY MAIL IS MAKING TRUMP ’24 SOUND AWESOME? Trump would ‘fire tens of thousands of civil servants’ and ‘gut the government’ to sort his agenda if he runs and wins in 2024.

But why didn’t Trump do this after winning in 2016?

THE BULWARK IS STILL CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY: The Constitution Is a Mass Delusion.

PAUL CARON: U.S. Inequality Is Much Less When You Measure Spending Power (Including Government Transfer Payments) As Well As Income And Wealth.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME: Jan. 6 Followed Years of Political Violence. The Committee Should Investigate Leftist Violence, Too.

There is an enduring infamy to Jan. 6, and rightfully so. Yet, the madness of the mob is not unique to Trump and his “Stop the Steal” adherents.

Trump’s “coup in search of a legal theory,” as Chairman Bennie Thompson called it on Thursday night’s session of the January 6 Committee hearings, is unique in its scope, but not in its assault on American democracy.

There has been a trajectory of modern mob formation over the course of the Trump years that the January 6th Select Committee would do well to explore in further hearings.

Civil unrest may have culminated on Jan. 6, but it started much earlier. And the potential for its continued activation has been with us ever since. If those on the January 6 Select Committee fail to take a deep dive into mob events leading up to Jan. 6, they will be missing half the story.

Fortunately, it can be found on Twitter. And what you learn when you cover these protests is that neither the Right nor the Left has a monopoly on political violence.

Why would Democrats want to investigate how much violence and destruction their supporters have caused at their own show trials? It’s simply a 21^st century extension of the Watergate hearings, where no word of the previous presidents’ crimes were allowed:

The Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities was created on February 7, 1973, following the convictions of the Watergate burglars. The vote was 77-0, since twenty-three GOP senators abstained rather than join in the political witch hunt. Their abstentions followed party-line votes, giving Democrats a voting majority and limiting the committee’s investigation to the 1972 presidential election instead of chancing any second look at those from ’60, ’64, and ’68, in which Nixon and Barry Goldwater were on the receiving end of campaign improprieties. The 1976 Church Committee hearings included testimony indicating that Nixon’s campaign was bugged in 1960 and again in 1968 and that the FBI had forwarded derogatory information on Goldwater’s staff to the Lyndon B. Johnson White House.

Related: Report: There Have Been 76 Attacks on Churches and Pregnancy Centers, Not One Attacker Has Been Sent to Prison.

UPDATE: Summer rerun ratings are down: J6 witch hunt ratings dropped 21%.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Bondage Fantasy Edition.

THIS AMERICAN CITIZEN IMPRISONED OVERSEAS DESERVES JUST AS MUCH ATTENTION AS BRITTNEY GRINER.

GLENN GREENWALD ON TUCKER CARLSON, CHELSEA MANNING, RUSSIA, AND BIG TECH: New video from Reason TV:

GOT WOKE, WENT BROKE: ‘Cancel culture’ backfires as donors pull cash from Edinburgh University.

The University of Edinburgh has seen its donations slump by almost £2 million after it “cancelled” the philosopher David Hume over his slavery links.

The institution said that 24 donations and 12 legacies had been “cancelled, amended or withdrawn” in response to the September 2020 renaming of a prominent campus building dedicated to its former student, one of the leading figures of the Scottish enlightenment.

While he argued against the institution of slavery, Hume was condemned by student activists largely for a footnote in a 1758 essay in which he said he was “apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites”.

The David Hume Tower was rechristened 40 George Square with the university claiming that while Hume’s opinions were “not uncommon” when he wrote them more than 250 years ago, they “rightly cause distress today”.

While it refused to say how much money had been withdrawn by donors directly due to the renaming row, overall donations to the university fell from £23.2 million in 2020-21, to £21.3 million the following year.

A small number of those to cancel donations also cited the treatment of the academic Neil Thin, who was investigated and later acquitted after wrongly being accused by students of expressing racist and other “problematic” views.

Dr Thin, a senior lecturer, was a vocal critic of the campaign to rename the tower.

Pam Gosul, the Scottish Tory spokesman for higher education, said: “The reduction in donations will offer university bosses the chance to reflect on decisions they have taken.”

And not just at Edinburgh University.

INSIDE THE WOKE MELTDOWN AT ONE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ORGANIZATION: Women Against Abuse discouraged black domestic abuse victims from calling the police. Yes, you read that right.

It was just two months after the death of George Floyd that one of the largest domestic violence nonprofits in the United States, Women Against Abuse, brought in several diversity consultants to conduct a racial-equity audit. The goal of the audit, Women Against Abuse told staffers, was to become “a fully inclusive, multicultural, and antiracist institution.”

By November 2020, the organization, which is ostensibly devoted to “serving all survivors,” was offering to pay “BIPOC” employees more than their white counterparts and discouraging black abuse victims from calling the police. Its employees were also at war with each other, bickering over whether Jews are a persecuted minority group and whether there is such a thing as a non-racist white person.

Those events prompted Nicole Levitt, an attorney with the group’s legal center, to file a discrimination complaint against her employer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that it “berated, humiliated, and subjected” her to “mandatory thought reform efforts.”

“Women Against Abuse used to be liberal,” Levitt told the Washington Free Beacon. “Now it’s illiberal.”

This story is based on Levitt’s discrimination complaint, Women Against Abuse’s response to it, and materials from the equity audit that Levitt shared with the Free Beacon. It reveals how the leading domestic violence nonprofit in Philadelphia descended into dogmatism and infighting, obsessing over identity as domestic homicides in the city reached an all-time high of 43 in 2021—more than double the previous year.

That obsession manifested in avant garde policies that led the group far astray from its core mission. The policies weren’t just the product of employee activism, but of outside consultants—including Ragina Arrington, now the chief executive officer of the Clinton Foundation’s Global Initiative University, who since July 2020 has been helping Women Against Abuse conduct its equity audit.

Arrington began this work as a senior officer at Philanthropy Unbound, one of two diversity consultancies retained by Women Against Abuse in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The consultants soon injected race into every crevice of the organization, transforming it from the inside out.

Leftwing nonprofits across the country have undergone similar transformations. From the Sierra Club to the Guttmacher Institute to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Intercept’s Ryan Grim reported last month, progressive advocacy groups have “effectively ceased to function,” as their outward-facing missions fall prey to internal tumult.

Flashback: Who needs a right-wing plot when progressives are busy eating themselves alive.

THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Twitter Censors ‘Groomer’ Term After Left-Wing Pressure Campaign.

Okay, groomers.

“WEATHER ‘TOO HOT’ FOR SOLAR PANELS: Blistering Temperatures In Britain Cause Solar Panels To Stop Working.