A SCORECARD FOR TONIGHT: Which Way Will It Go? An expert’s guide to the battleground states — and which polls are most trustworthy — from Jeffrey Anderson, the former director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

HINT: THIS CANDIDATE GREW UP IN A MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY: Who’s the Fascist?  The presidential candidates’ records contradict the media narrative. My latest in City Journal.

JOHN STOSSEL: Activists Profiting Off Panic Are Wrong. The World Is Getting Better. Some optimism — and outrage at profiteering activists — in this Reason article and video, which draws from my City Journal article, “The March of Dimes Syndrome.”

OUT: THE ENLIGHTENMENT.  In: The Endarkenment. Martin Gurri has a name for our age.

The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning and lost sight of all paths to a happier future. It’s the triumph of wish over facts, the infantilization of top echelons of the social pyramid—of hyper-credentialed, globally mobile people, wielders of power and wealth and media, who, on a routine basis, confuse their self-important imaginings with the world itself. It’s the widespread descent of everyone else, now deprived of teachers, preachers, and role models, into a cognitive underclass, prone to the most bizarre theories about how things work.

The Endarkenment is experienced collectively as the disintegration of institutions, a traumatic fracturing of social life, and the seemingly ceaseless perpetuation of political conflict. But it is also experienced at the personal level in the form of heightened anxiety, depression, drug addiction, “deaths of despair,” and a loss of interest in family and procreation—even in sex.

Read the whole thing.

TEVI TROY: The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry. An excellent chronicle from the best-selling historian on the White House’s long-running battles against entrepreneurs from John D. Rockefeller to Elon Musk.

JOHN STOSSEL: The Crisis Industry: How Activists Profit from Panic.  An entertaining video exposing the charlatans doing well by doing bad: promoting fake scares about racism, hate crimes, homophobia, vaping, and environmental doom. Stossel and I discuss my City Journal article about activists desperately switching to new causes, “The March of Dimes Syndrome,” and my book with Roy Baumeister, The Power of Bad.

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE: Prosecute Criminal Protesters. Criminal anti-Israel demonstrators often go unpunished, even as other groups face severe sanctions.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Girling the Boy Scouts. Progressives notch another victory in their war on American institutions.

JULY WAS BAD ENOUGH: Watch Out for August! Think July was historic? Tevi Troy looks back on previous summers and concludes: Beware the eighth month.

KAY HYMOWITZ: The New Girl Disorder. Why are young women so prominent in anti-Israel protests?

UPDATE: Link was bad before; should be working now.

THE BOSS FROM HELL: VP Kamala Harris Had 92-Percent Staff Turnover During Her First Three Years. Only four of the initial 47 staffers stuck it out until March of 2024, according to the auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

JAMES MEIGS: How the Secret Service Failed. What disaster science tells us about the Trump assassination attempt.

POWER CORRUPTS: “I Represent Science.” Anthony Fauci’s autobiography unwittingly reveals his transformation from an open-minded scientist to an imperious, unaccountable public-health bureaucrat. As James Meigs concludes in his review of Fauci’s memoir: “No federal official should have so much power, with so little accountability, for so long.”

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: A Compromised Secret Service. The agency has sacrificed its basic mission on the altar of DEI.

TEVI TROY: Another Chapter in a Grim History. The long chronicle of presidential assassinations and attempted assassinations reveals certain commonalities and one overarching lesson.

NOT WHAT THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE VOTING FOR: Moving Backward in the Land of Lincoln. Illinois’ progressive government fails minority communities.

THE MEDIA’S QUANDARY: What Do You Do with a Failed Coup? Biden’s refusal to succumb to the media’s demands for his ouster reminds Dave Seminara of  failed coups against African leaders that he monitored during his career at the State Department.

Of course, being the president of a democratic country, Biden doesn’t have all the tools these authoritarian leaders have at their disposal. He can’t singlehandedly rig elections, shut down independent media, imprison enemies, and terrorize the populace like a proper dictator. And yet, repression wasn’t the key factor that enabled these dictators to survive coup attempts and cling to power. Each was able to retain the loyalty of people who mattered—rank and file soldiers, party leaders, tribal elders, and so on. Biden has sagely done much the same during his five decades in politics. The media has deserted him, but key Democrats and Democratic constituencies (unions, the Congressional Black Caucus) have not.

When I was the State Department’s desk officer for Chad, French diplomats made many overtures to Idriss Deby, offering significant incentives and soft-landing sinecures to try to convince him to retire. He wasn’t interested, largely because he enjoyed being in power. President Biden is the same. He thinks Trump is beatable (and he is) and doesn’t want to be a one-term president. In the same way that Third World tyrants disregard public opinion, Biden brushes off polls showing that close to 80 percent of the country thinks that he’s too old to be president. That’s not what our polls say, Jack.

Unless something changes — like a whistleblower leaking evidence of a Parkinson’s diagnosis — journalists will need to adapt.

The media thought that they could take Biden down, but it’s becoming clear that he’s not stepping down just because armies of polyamorous, Brooklyn-dwelling sub-editors have soured on him. The question now is: In the wake of their failed coup attempt, how will the media go back to shilling for Biden? It seems like an impossible pivot, but somehow I’m confident that the same lying, dog-faced pony soldiers who told us the president was as sharp as a tack will return to business as usual. That is to say, after a brief hiatus, they will go back to promoting the perceived interests of the Democratic Party, hoping that voters forget all the mean things they said about Joe Biden during the brief, heady days when it looked like the coup was on.

Read the whole thing.

I’VE READ ALL 480 PAGES SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO: Fauci’s Master Class in Deception. Some excerpts of my book review in the Wall Street Journal:

At the end of his memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” Anthony Fauci laments: “We are living in an era in which information that is patently untrue gets repeated enough times that it becomes part of our everyday dialogue and starts to sound true.” He’s right about that, and he has inadvertently produced a 480-page master class in how to get away with it.

The memoir chronicles Dr. Fauci’s rise in Washington from an obscure researcher to his fame during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he became, as he writes, a “hero to the millions of Americans who saw me as a physician bravely standing up for science, truth, and rational decision-making.” This image bore no relation to reality, given the evidence that the lockdowns and school closures accomplished little or nothing while causing unprecedented social and economic damage.

So how did Dr. Fauci spin it into a personal triumph? The memoir chronicles the development of his techniques. He tells how, after becoming director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984, one of his first “crucial lessons” was “how important it was to cultivate relationships with people who are in a position to make things happen.” These people included politicians in the White House and the Capitol, activists demanding bigger budgets, and, especially, journalists eager for stories that would terrify their audiences.

In the memoir, Fauci proudly details the budget increases he received as a result of the false alarms he helped spread: the AIDS “heterosexual breakout,” the bioterrorism attack on America supposedly imminent after 9/11, the doomsday pandemics of bird flu and swine that never arrived.

He went on seeking more funding to prepare for a future catastrophic flu pandemic, a threat he considered so dire that it justified “generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” as he argued in a 2011 article in the Washington Post.

In retrospect, given the mounting evidence that Covid-19 was created by just that sort of gain-of-function research in China, does Dr. Fauci have any second thoughts about advocating such a risky endeavor? None worth mentioning in this memoir. In dismissing the “smear campaign” to link him to a lab-created virus, he ignores the obvious possibility that the Wuhan virologists exploited knowledge acquired in the lab’s previous bat-virus research funded by his agency.

Nor does he regret his pandemic guidance, despite the vast collateral damage of lockdowns and the evidence that nations and U.S. states that shunned Dr. Fauci’s advice fared as well or better than the ones that locked down. Sweden experienced one of the lowest rates of excess mortality in Europe while keeping businesses and schools open and urging its citizens not to wear masks. Nowhere in Dr. Fauci’s memoir is there a mention of Sweden or other such counter-evidence.

The glaring omissions confirm the criticisms of Dr. Fauci in Dr. Scott Atlas’s pandemic memoir, A Plague Upon Our House. 

At the White House Coronavirus Task Force meetings, Dr. Atlas recounts, Dr. Fauci never presented scientific evidence in favor of his policies, refused to respond to the contrary evidence that Dr. Atlas presented, and never considered the collateral damage from the policies.

In fall 2020 there was ample evidence that schools could reopen safely, but Dr. Fauci kept offering reasons to keep them closed. When Dr. Atlas argued that Americans were irrationally frightened, he writes, Dr. Fauci replied: “They need to be more afraid.” Dr. Fauci’s determination to panic the public astounded Dr. Atlas, but it’s understandable after reading “On Call.” For Anthony Fauci, fearmongering was always an excellent career move.

And never mind at what cost to everyone else.

STEVEN MALANGA: Covid Politics ’24. Joe Biden’s effort to use pandemic failures as a weapon against Donald Trump risks reminding voters of how much they dislike the president’s own policies. Yes, Trump made mistakes, but Biden did far worse — and actually gave Fauci a promotion.

NOTHING GOOD, IF YOU’RE A DEMOCRAT: Now What? Thursday’s disastrous debate performance raises the prospect of Democrats replacing Joe Biden.

WHY LIBERTARIANS SHOULD VOTE FOR TRUMP: Fear Not Lesser Evil.  Daniel Klein and Zachary Yost explain why some of their fellow libertarians are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

JAMES PIERESON: The Nobel Laureates Strike Out. In a letter released just in time for the presidential debate, a group of prize-winning economists speak up for President Biden’s economic policies—the same policies these same economists predicted would ease inflation and spur growth when they endorsed Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in 2021.

How did it all work out? The expert economists were badly mistaken on inflation. They said that Biden’s spending packages would “ease inflationary pressures,” but everyone understands today that those same policies stoked inflation. When they signed their 2021 letter, the consumer price index stood at 273; since then, it has surged by at least 15 percent, to its recent level of 313. This is called “being wrong.”

Interest rates have also surged since then, much to the detriment of prospective homebuyers and those planning large expenditures for autos, home appliances, and school and college tuitions. The interest rate on 30-year mortgages has more than doubled since the 2021 letter, from 2.8 percent to above 7 percent today. The prime lending rate, used by banks for most loans, swelled from 3.2 percent in 2021 to 8.5 percent today. The economists would do well to ponder their performance as forecasters.

We have no evidence to suggest that Biden’s spending packages promoted economic growth. Real GDP surged in 2021 to 5.8 percent, mostly a bounce-back from pandemic era lockdowns, but it has declined and levelled off since then, to 1.9 percent in 2022 and 2.5 percent in 2023. In a recent forecast, the Conference Board projects that growth in 2024 is likely to slow to less than 1 percent (year over year). Contrary to what our Nobel laurates would have us believe, it is more likely that Biden’s policies have caused inflation and rising interest rates that have retarded economic growth.

Read the whole thing.

THE LONG MARCH THROUGH INSTITUTIONS: Wikipedia’s Neutrality: Myth or Reality? According to a new study, the online encyclopedia disfavors right-wing public figures.

OF THE UNELECTED BUREAUCRACY THAT HAS SEIZED POWER: Fauci Was Just a Symptom. Jeffrey H. Anderson takes a rigorous look at Fauci’s record, from AIDS through COVID, and the repeated unsubstantiated (or outright false) claims by him and the public establishment about the Covid mRNA vaccines and drugs like AZT, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and remdesivir. He notes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while routinely dismissed as a “vaccine denier” by the mainstream press, has often been spot on with this criticisms of Fauci and the establishment, especially when it comes to their authoritarianism.

The crux of the problem with our public health establishment is the consolidation and centralization of power and money. Such power and money is often placed in the hands of people like Fauci who are either incredibly incompetent or (as Kennedy thinks) appallingly corrupt. The only genuine solution would seem to be to break up the monopoly. Whether it is public health research or “climate change” research, a tiny group of career federal employees should not be allowed to control the purse strings, agenda, and messaging for a nation of 330 million people. Perhaps the solution, at least in the public health vein, is to split the NIH’s $50 billion annual budget among the states on the basis of population, with no federal strings attached.

Whatever the remedy, however, America needs to free its scientists from adherence to bureaucratic groupthink and once again encourage intellectual inquisitiveness and genuine scientific discovery. Such uncorrupted scientific inquiry is essentially incompatible with having almost all scientific funding be funneled through a small cabal of self-interested bureaucrats. It is this arrangement, coupled with the willingness of elected officials to defer to him, that made Fauci so powerful and permitted him to do so much damage.

As uniquely unscrupulous, power-mongering, and slithering as Fauci is, he is more the symptom than the disease—the effect rather than the cause of an overbearing and largely unchecked administrative state. So long as Congress and executive-branch leaders continue to allow the likes of Fauci to wield unconscionable levels of power on the basis of position rather than merit—in a way that is almost entirely detached from voters—American science, and republican government, will continue to suffer.

Read the whole thing.

BUT IT’S VERY INCONVENIENT FOR ACTIVIST GRIFTERS: Minority Success Is Possible. Data on legal immigrants’ economic performance make clear that blacks can succeed in America.