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?

DID BROOKINGS BIRTH TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME? The Epoch Times’ Jeff Carlson has found something crassly partisan and almost wholly unexpected at the Brookings Institution, one of the most establishmentarian institutions of the Washington Establishment.

CALIFORNIA, HERE BE MONSTERS: J. Frank Bullitt, writing on Issues & Insights, catalogues the once-Golden State’s current and growing woes as driving factors in the creation of what Victor Davis Hanson calls “America’s first Third-World state.”

HOPE HICKS DESTROYED RUSSIA COLLUSION HOAX, AGAIN: Congressional Democrats who thought former Trump 2016 campaign and White House insider would somehow revive the Russia collusion narrative got bumpkus, according to Margot Cleveland, writing this morning in the Washington Free Beacon.

Among much else, Cleveland reports “Hick’s responses during last week’s hearing also provided fresh insight into Trump’s behind-the-scenes response to news of Russian interference. Hicks noted that the campaign only ‘became aware that the Russian government was attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections’ when the story hit the press. The president’s former confidant added that any conversations she was privy to during the campaign concerning Russia interference in the election mirrored what Trump said publicly.”

Cleveland also helpfully provides in a separate piece the eight most VIP takeaways from the Hicks testimony and cross-examination.

ROSIAK EXPOSES ANOTHER HILL COMPUTER OUTRAGE: The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Luke Rosiak busted Pakistani computer rogue Imran Awan in 2017, and now he’s peeling back the layers of deception, deceit and denial in yet another Hill IT scandal.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) is a former CIA agent and freshman congressman, who hired Samantha DeForst-Davis, accomplice to convicted felon Jackson Cosko, the former Senate IT aide behind what federal prosecutors called “the largest data theft in Senate history.”

“Spanberger’s spokesman Connor Joseph did not respond to a request to explain whether the congresswoman’s office called anyone in the Senate to get a job reference and why her central Virginia constituents should trust that her office safeguards their personal data,” Rosiak reports today.

“Capitol Police spokeswoman Eva Malecki did not respond to a request to explain why it did not alert Spanberger that the House’s newest pending hire was a suspect in an ongoing criminal investigation. Spanberger is a member of the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee, which deals with information of interest to America’s adversaries,” Rosiak writes.

If you haven’t already got it, be sure and get your hands on a copy of Rosiak’s “Obstruction of Justice,” his detailed account of how he broke open the Awan outrage. Just click on the Shop Amazon button above.

HONG KONG SEA PARTS; MOSES UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: World attention has been garnered by those massive protests in Hong Kong of an extradition bill that would result in residents accused of crimes being shipped to mainland China for trial.

A major factor in the protests is Christianity, thanks to both Catholic and Protestant groups, so much so that, as HillFaith points out, even the New York Times has noticed. Be advised, Beijing: The world is watching. And a lot of us remember this. And this. Berlin Fang remembers because he was there.

WHAT IF TRUMP ACTUALLY CAN DEPORT A MILLION OR MORE ILLEGALS? The president’s immigration critics instantly condemned as impossible his vow to deport “millions” of illegal aliens starting next week. But a close look at the data suggests Trump can put a huge dent in their ranks.

OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB HUMA WEAVED: Huma Abedin, the former Hillary Clinton Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of State and close personal aide during the 2016 presidential campaign, said during a 2016 deposition that she first learned of her boss’ home-brew unsecured email system by “reading in some news articles about a year, a year-and-a-half ago, when it was—it was being publicly discussed.”

But now along comes another former Clinton aide, Justin Cooper, who previously worked for President Bill Clinton and for the Clinton Foundation, claiming he worked with Abedin to set up Hillary’s private email account in 2009.

Somebody appears to be indulging in a particularly blatant misrepresentation of fact, which could be viewed as perjury or obstruction or … But, as Judicial Watch chief Tom Fitton points out this morning in The Epoch Times, Attorney General William Barr has to take the lead in seeing that justice is done.

IS THIS HOW TO BEAT BIG TECH? Rich Logis at The American Thinker sees a way the Conservative Media Industrial Complex (CMIC) can defeat Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the lefty Silicon Valley giants.  What do you think?

UAW LOST CHATTANOOGA VW PLANT VOTE, AGAIN: It kind of got lost in news, but on Friday night VW workers at the German auto giant’s Chattanooga, Tenn., plant again voted against forming a UAW-affiliated union.

As LaborPains noted, the margin of victory for the anti-union forces was slightly smaller this time than in 2014, but the defeat was still a loss and came after the UAW spent who knows how much on its campaign:

“Regardless of whether you were pro- or anti-UAW, local news reports made clear it was impossible to miss the union’s message in Chattanooga. The union’s lavish spending on television, radio, digital and even gas station advertisements ensured that workers were well-educated on what they were voting for (or against) this week. A pro-union reporter even suggested that the city was “mobilized” in favor of the UAW.”

HEY, BERNIE, WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO WON’T JOIN THE COMMUNE? Or, as the scribes of Issues & Insights put it in a thought-provoking editorial: “The big question that never gets addressed regarding these and other ‘explanations’ of socialism is: Why do the self-identified ‘democratic socialists’ feel it’s OK to force those who’d rather be free into their collective?”