NO, IT DIDN’T START WITH TRUMP: Fight Club: Rivalries in the White House form Truman to Trump. While reading Tevi Troy’s excellent history of infighting at the White House, I found myself thinking of John Bolton, the new media darling now that he has turned on Trump. Troy describes how Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, alienated Harold Stassen and other foreign-policy colleagues with his unremitting arrogance: 

According to Stassen, “My best summary of Dulles is that he always knew he was absolutely right. Further, he knew that anyone who disagreed with him was, of logical necessity, always wrong. And finally, he could not understand how anyone could dare question the fact that he was always right.” It wasn’t just Stassen who had a problem with the priggish Dulles, though. As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once said, “I’m not sure I want to go to heaven. I’m afraid I might meet John Foster Dulles there.” Some U.S. allies had misgivings about Dulles as well. Harold Wilson, a British member of Parliament and future prime minister, once mocked Dulles’s propensity to try to be everywhere all the time: “I heard they are inventing an airplane that can fly without Dulles! They hope soon to get it into production.” Winston Churchill himself once famously mocked Dulles via declension: “Dull, Duller, Dulles.”

Read the whole thing.

AN L.A. COP SURVEYS THE DAMAGE: Demoralizing the Police. As cops become objects of derision and scorn, violent crime soars in American cities.

THE ESSENCE OF ENVIRONMENTALISM: False Gods for Lost Souls. In the Wall Street Journal, I review Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, a new book from a refreshingly sane environmentalist, Michael Shellenberger. He sees nuclear power as the cleanest and safest source of energy — and the only practical way to drastically curtail carbon emissions. So why do greens oppose it? He details the financial benefits that Jerry Brown’s family and green groups have reaped by opposing nuclear power.

“Every major climate activist group in America,” he writes, including the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, “has been seeking to close nuclear plants around the United States while taking money from or investing in natural gas companies, renewable energy companies, and their investors who stand to make billions if nuclear plants are closed and replaced by natural gas.”

Shellenberger’s debunking of green myths will be familiar to readers of Ronald Bailey’s The End of Doom and Gregg Easterbrook’s It’s Better Than It Looks, but maybe it will be more convincing to devout greens because of his own record as an activist. He understands the irrational appeal of the movement.

 “I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago,” he writes. “I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment.”

For him and so many others, environmentalism offered emotional relief and spiritual satisfaction, giving them a sense of purpose and transcendence. It has become a substitute religion for those who have abandoned traditional faiths, as he explains in his concluding chapter, “False Gods for Lost Souls.” Its priests have been warning for half a century that humanity is about to be punished for its sins against nature, and no matter how often the doomsday forecasts fail, the faithful still thrill to each new one.

“The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating,” he writes. “It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.”

Someone should give the book to Greta Thunberg and the journalists working so hard to publicize her inanities. It might even cheer them up.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE: Will the Real Justice Gorsuch Please Stand Up? “Gorsuch’s contorted analysis of the act’s text is sophistry that any freshman English teacher would flunk—and that Jefferson would contemptuously dismiss as squeezing out a meaning against the text, with a whiff of bad faith.”

WHO’S NOT AFRAID OF BLM?: On the College and Silence: A Letter from Hillsdale College. Yes, there is one college president who still has a spine.

MORE NUKES, PLEASE: Dangers of Nuclear Energy “Much Less Than Previously Thought.” The regulations strangling the nuclear-power industry are based on deceptive and fatally flawed (and even fraudulent) studies that vastly overestimated the effects of small levels of nuclear radiation. If greens really wanted to reduce carbon emissions, they’d be out marching for new regs and new nukes.

CHILD ABUSE: Open the Schools. Keeping kids out of classrooms indefinitely will do them considerable harm.

ANTIFA’S UTOPIA: The State of CHAZ. Christopher Rufo details the violence, robbery, and blatant racism in Seattle’s new nation, which accords political rights and power according to a “reverse hierarchy of oppression.”

At one evening event, an indigenous-rights activist with a purple bandana wrapped around his face announced a campaign for immediate small-scale reparations: “I want you to give $10 to one African-American person from this autonomous zone,” he said to a large crowd gathered on a baseball field. “White people, I see you. I see every one of you, and I remember your faces. You find that African-American person and you give them $10.”

Andrew Gleeson has another report on CHAZ, including the full text of the mayor’s inane observations on the “block party” in Seattle’s “summer of love.”

REWRITING THE RACIST NARRATIVE: Stories and Data. For every story of a black person killed by the police, there’s a story of at least one white person. “If the challenge for the Left is to accept that the real problem with the police is not racism, the challenge for the Right is to accept that there are real problems with the police.”

CRISIS FATIGUE: Years of Rage. It’s been three and a half years of more or less continual protests — good for the left-wing media, terrible for the country.

CRITIQUING THE RACE HUSTLERS: A History Professor’s Anonymous Letter to His Woke Colleagues at Berkeley.  He identifies himself as African-American but says that he must remain anonymous because his career would otherwise be doomed by his heretical thoughts on racism, George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter. Read the whole thing.

AND WHY DOESN’T THE MEDIA HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE?: Why Can’t Big-City Democrats Reform the Police? Accusations of police brutality have persisted in our bluest cities for decades. But when a cop does does something wrong, it gets blamed on the Republican in the White House.

#RENAMEYALE: As Glenn noted this morning, Yale University needs to change its name, given Elihu Yale’s association with the slave trade. Fortunately, there’s an excellent alternative who played a more pivotal role in the school’s early history and had better scholarly credentials.  He was one of the first American-born students to get a PhD in Europe and went on to become a prominent colonial clergyman, politician and author. It was he who put the college on a secure footing by bringing in donations from Elihu Yale, a merchant, and prominent intellectuals like Isaac Newton and the Irish writer Richard Steele.

His name was Jeremiah Dummer, perfectly fitting for what my alma mater has become: Dummer University.

GLENN LOURY: Racism Is An Empty Thesis. An African-American professor says that blacks hold their fate in their own hands. And that America is experiencing a “collective hysteria” about racial relationships.

IT WAS NEVER REALLY ABOUT SAVING BLACK LIVES: False Prophets. If you really want to help black America, don’t look to Black Lives Matter. Those promoting the defund-the-police idea either live in low-crime areas, can afford private security, or are radically misinformed about the nature of crime in the United States.

FOR DRUGS AND MOST OTHER PRODUCTS: “Buy American” Isn’t Always Best. Onshoring all drug manufacturing would make us less resilient — and no, 80 percent of our drugs don’t come from China.

INCONVENIENT NUMBERS: Repudiate the Anti-Police Narrative. In testimony to Congress, Heather Mac Donald presents the facts on police and race — including the statistics that the Washington Post has retroactively altered to fit the current narrative.

“PEACEFUL” PROTESTS CONTINUE: Anarchy in Seattle. Antifa-affiliated activists seize control of a city neighborhood and declare an “autonomous zone.” A member of the Seattle City Council calls it a “victory” against “the militarized police force of the political establishment and the capitalist state.”

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Why We Need the Police. People in high-crime neighborhoods want more officers, not fewer. The manufactured anti-cop outrage in New York City comes despite a dramatic reduction in shootings by officers, to the lowest level since records have been kept. But of course the activists — and their flacks in the media — can’t be bothered with such  inconvenient facts.

OUR NEW ORACLES: They Blinded Us With “Science.” Throughout the pandemic, political leaders have consistently relied on questionable expert guidance—and ducked responsibility for their own choices. They’ve imposed disastrous policies by surrendering power to public-health officials who only pretend to be unbiased, and who lack the knowledge or perspective to make wise decisions.

A LONELY VOICE OF SANITY IN ACADEMIA: I Must Object. A rebuttal from Glenn Loury, the Brown University economist, to his university’s letter on racism in the United States: “The roster of Brown’s ‘leaders’ who signed this manifesto in lockstep remind me of a Soviet Politburo making some party-line declaration.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Gospel According to Peter Thiel. Wherever there’s a major shift in the American landscape, one can usually find Silicon Valley’s iconoclastic investor.

JOURNALISTS LIED, PEOPLE DIED: Race, Riots and the Cops. The facts about police shootings and racism — and the deadly consequences of the media’s disinformation campaign.

SOUTHERN SANITY ON COVID: Let the Sun Shine In. Florida and Tennessee have proven that a measured, evidence-based response to reopening works. Kentucky is another story, despite the media’s attempt to cover for a Democratic governor.

(Bumped, by Glenn).

SELECTIVE MERCY: No Clean Slate for Karens! Progressives demand a second chance for perpetrators of violent crimes, but they consider one unwoke comment to be unforgivable.