IS HONG KONG’S EMBATTLED LEADER ABOUT TO QUIT? The Epoch Times’ Frank Fang says Carrie Lam offered to resign but Communist authorities in Beijing said no. Fang cites a Financial Times report that the response was: ““No one else can clean up the mess and no one else wants the job.”

ANOTHER SIGN OF SECULAR HUMANISM’S FAILURE? America is rapidly becoming more secular as scientific enlightenment and progressive education dispel religious ignorance from the past, right? Wrong.

The numbers just don’t add up to anything remotely like an emerging godless paradise on Earth, according to two accomplished data jockeys, Rodney Stark and Glenn Stanton.

They dug deeply into multiple data sources, including the General Social Survey, Gallup World Poll and Pew Research Center, and found America is becoming more, not less, religious. Ditto for most of the rest of the world where Christianity is growing extremely quickly, Hinduism and Islam less so but still increasing, while Buddhism is declining.

BETO SAYS AMERICA FOUNDED ON WHITE SUPREMACY. THIS FORMER SLAVE SAW IT DIFFERENTLY: Frederick Douglass was unmatched in his fiery denunciations of slavery, but he and Beto saw two completely different American foundings.

AND SPEAKING OF THE PC POLICE: Jaelene Hinkle is a vocal Christian, according to Fox News, so clearly she should not have been on the U.S. Women’s World Cup Soccer team, even if she did play a key role in her professional teams winning two National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) championships, in 2016 and 2018.

IF BILL CLINTON DISAPPEARS, THIS MAY BE WHY: The Epoch Times’ Jeff Carlson details the extensive links between the former president and Jeffrey Epstein. Tic-Toc-Tic-Toc …

IT’S NOT JUST POLITICS, JOURNALISM BEING SUFFOCATED BY THE PC POLICE: The same repressive forces Glenn spotlights at CNN are at work in the scientific community, too. Just ask the Discovery Institute about the response to its “Scientific Uprising” video series.

PEROT WAS A BIG TRUMP FAN: Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show Ross Perot contributed the maximum legal amount to President Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican presidential primary and in the general election against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

UPDATE: The Epoch Times has corrected its original story to say it was Perot’s son, not Perot, who made the contributions to Trump in 2016.

AI CHURCH FOUNDER DROPS GOD, RESTORES DRIVERS: Well, this was certainly unexpected – Artificial Intelligence (AI) church founder and driver-less car pioneer Anthony Levandowski has dropped God from his congregational statement of beliefs.

But he’s found a renewed faith in drivers, at least for now. And therein lies a couple of takeaways for senators, representatives and normal people working in Congress on transportation and technology issues.

HAVING WEISSMANN TESTIFY MAY BE DEMS’ BIGGEST BLUNDER: Too little attention is being paid to what happens the day after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s July 17 public testimony before the House judiciary and intelligence committees, according to Margot Cleveland. Mueller’s deputy, Andrew Weissman, and other Mueller staffers will testify behind closed doors on July 18.

“But, far from damaging Trump, Weissmann’s closed-door testimony—if handled properly—will assist Republicans in unraveling the Russia-collusion-turned-obstruction witch hunt and inflict far greater damage on the Democrats,” Cleveland writes in The Federalist.

Weissmann’s prosecutorial dirty tricks in the Enron case, which resulted in the Arthur Anderson accounting firm closing down, among much else, aren’t well-known to the public now. Neither are his contributions to Democrats or his appearance at Hillary Clinton’s election night “victory” party.

That will change, beginning the afternoon of his testimony when the flood of leaks begin, along with the predictable explosion of Trump tweets. And I can’t wait to watch Sydney Powell and Joe diGenova doing their analyses.

33 TOUGH QUESTIONS MUELLER SHOULD BE ASKED: The Epoch Times’ Jeff Carlson has broken multiple stories in the Spygate epic, so answers to these queries will shine new light in numerous important places that remain dank and dark.

Questions nine and 14, for example, probe, respectively, Mueller’s ignoring the ties between the Hillary campaign and the DNC to Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele and the Steele Dossier, and the Russian ties of Fusion GPS.

NO BETTER DAY TO BECOME AN AMERICAN: Fifty new Americans were naturalized yesterday at Mount Vernon. Such ceremonies typically have a keynote speaker and at this one the keynoter was the Center for Immigration Studies’ Mark Krikorian.

His remarks included a wonderful analogy involving Moses, Mt. Sinai and the Ten Commandments that ties today’s new Americans in spirit with those of every year since the founding.

IT’S TOO LATE TO APOLOGIZE, KING GEORGE, OLD BOY: Instapundit readers like Kaymad are the best because without them, I wouldn’t know about this outstanding video that Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman and Livingston would have made if they were writing the Declaration of Independence today.

RICO AND ANTIFA ARE MADE FOR EACH OTHER: But one won’t enjoy being introduced to the other. Attorney General William Barr, are you listening?

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICA: If you remember Red Skelton, you will appreciate his explanation of the meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance. If you don’t, well then enjoy meeting an American classic.

YOU CAN TRUST COMMUNISTS TO BE COMMUNISTS: The Chinese tested their U.S. carrier-killer missile from one of those South China Sea islands. The Washington Free Beacon’s Bill Gertz says that violates Xi Jinping’s pledge not to militarize the islands.

WHEN 2+2 DOESN’T EQUAL 4 … WE’RE SCREWED: Clifford Humphrey is a doctoral candidate at Hillsdale College in politics and this essay in The Epoch Times is as clear and concise an explanation of the necessity for objective truth, and indictment of contemporary relativism, as you are likely to read anywhere.

Remember the name, “Clifford Humphrey,” because, if this guy’s classroom teaching and academic publishing work are as good as his essay skills, he’s going to be a great teacher. And for the record, I’ve never met Humphrey (but I might now recognize him if he walked up to me on the street tomorrow, having seen his thumbnail photo on The Epoch Times).

IF GLAAD SAYS IT’S SO, IT MUST BE: Maybe calling everybody who doesn’t instantly agree bigots and homophobes wasn’t such a great strategy?

WHICH BERNIE HAS DONE MORE FOR AMERICA? Now that’s an interesting question: Has Bernie Sanders, Democratic socialist senator, or Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, done more to improve America?

“Marcus, with Arthur Blank and Ken Langone, started a company in 1978 that today has more than 2,200 stores across all 50 states and in Canada. When those men were putting long, grinding hours into their startup in the late 1970s, Sanders was “working” for the American People’s Historical Society. There he made a 30-minute documentary about Eugene Debs, the perpetual Socialist Party presidential candidate whom he called “the great American trade unionist, socialist and revolutionary,” explains Issues & Insights.

Any bets on when the Washington Post or the New York Times will pursue the same question? Me, neither.

I WAS WITH ANDY NGO WHEN HE WAS ATTACKED: The photos aren’t pretty.

R.I.P. DR. NORMAN GEISLER: Philosopher. Systematic Theologian. Christian Apologist of the first order. Born in 1932. Ph.D. in philosophy from Loyola University. Author of more than 90 books and countless articles. Passed away early this morning. His philosophy has now met its ultimate test, as all of ours’ will as well.

EVER HEAR ABOUT ‘THE LIFE OF COLEMAN SWEENEY’? There was simply no redeeming social value for this guy, until he died, that is. Then somebody discovered something about Sweeney that nobody in his small town would ever have guessed (and don’t forget, they know everything about everybody in small towns). It’s the fourth entry in the top box on today’s Daily Gouge.

EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER TOM HAYDEN: You should sit down with Bradley Birzer’s excellent survey in The Imaginative Conservative of the many reasons why the political correctness destroying the American political consensus is very much the prime legacy of Hayden and the New Left of the 1960s.

LAST REFUGE SEES ‘SPANK ME AND HOW’ AS DEBATE WINNER: Read this and you won’t have to read anything else about the first two Democratic presidential debates. And the accompanying illustration will give you a hearty chuckle or three, too.

HILLARY LAWYER CHANGES STORY ON EMAILS. IMAGINE THAT! Judicial Watch peels away another layer in the coverup. Heather Samuelson told the FBI three years ago that she first learned about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system to conduct official U.S. diplomatic business in 2014. But that’s not what she told Judicial Watch’s lawyers in a new deposition.

SECULAR PURITANS FEAR SOMEWHERE, SOMEHOW SOMEONE IS DEVOUT: Greg Weiner’s paraphrase of H.L. Mencken’s famous crack about Puritans is found in the former’s excellent essay today on Law & Liberty concerning the Supreme Court’s Bladensburg Cross decision.

Weiner offers lots of good sense, including this: “Secularists need not snuff the approach of tyranny in every expression of ‘Merry Christmas,’ and Christians need not interpret the greeting ‘Happy Holidays’ as a war on Christmas. Both need the self-confidence to believe they can flourish on their merits without a conquest of the political.”

But what if the “constitutional morality” that encouraged such prudential tolerance as Wilmoore Kendall and George Carey argued came to us via The Federalist Papers is beyond restoration?