IS THIS THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT’S BIGGEST FAILURE? President Donald Trump has been able to appoint legions of qualified conservative federal judges in great part thanks to the years of cultivation by the Federalist Society of potential candidates. Similarly, there have been lots of smart conservative economists available for key positions in the White House and Department of Treasury. There are even growing numbers of young, smart, capable conservative journalists who will be media giants in coming years.

But where are the legions of smart conservatives who know how to manage a Department of Housing and Urban Development or a Department of Health and Human Services, while implementing a genuinely conservative policy agenda? Such people are few and far between, according to Lyman Stone, writing today on The Federalist.

“Some administrations just make compromises: They fill positions with people who are mostly conservative or sort of conservative, or at least conservative enough. The result is an administration that is Republican, but not actually conservative,” Stone writes.

Speaking from my years in the executive branch during the Reagan administration and before that on Capitol Hill, I know Stone is hitting the bullseye. I believe he’s pointing out the conservative movement’s biggest failure.

Liberals and Democrats love government, know how to manage its expansion and fight the political battles to protect it. Conservatives, with few exceptions, have no idea how to deal with, much less manage on a day-to-day basis, career bureaucrats who are masters of the turf wars.

Stone has a fine suggestion:

“We need a Federalist Society for socially conservative federal workers, we need Masters of Public Administration/Masters of Public Policy programs staffed and funded with academics friendly to conservative programs, we need existing talent recruitment and internship programs to re-orient their curricula towards actually training people to take on the state, and we need conservative donors to put up the money to support these efforts.”

As Glenn says, just keep scrolling because Stone has much of immense value to say on these matters.

TIME TO STOP IGNORING SEX TRAFFICKING OF BOYS (GIRLS, TOO!): It’s a horrendous evil for anybody, male or female, to be held in captivity by sex traffickers, the modern-day form of slavery, but The Epoch Times’ Bowen Xiao reports that males “are severely neglected in an already hidden problem when it comes to resources, services, and public awareness campaigns—which focus predominantly on women.”

I can just about guarantee that reading Xiao’s reporting will break your heart, especially when you realize how traffickers abuse the U.S. foster child system.

NOW STENY HOYER AIDE LINKED TO OBAMA’S SPYGATE: Judicial Watch released documents Wednesday that show the national security advisor to the number two House Democratic leader coordinated Steele Dossier work during and after the 2016 presidential election with top Obama administration officials at the State Department.

MAFIA HIT MAN ASSESSES JOHN DEAN: The aging Watergate felon came back for an encore Monday before the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York.

The American Spectator’s George Parry, a former federal attorney, talked to an old informant, a reformed Mafia hit man, who knew Dean in federal prison. The hit man’s assessment of Dean? Nadler should hold on tight to any silver coins he has.

AOC WANTS A RAISE? ISSUES & INSIGHTS HAS A BETTER IDEA: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) thinks her current salary of $174,000 a year isn’t enough to keep her colleagues from using all those evil “dark-money loopholes.” House Democrats are considering allowing a $2,500 Cost-Of-Living Adjustment (COLA), but AOC says that’s not enough.

Now along comes the Issues & Insights crew with an absolutely brilliant proposal: AOC’s current salary is three times the Median Household Income (MHI) for her congressional district of $58,331, which clearly makes it a prime illustration of America’s yawning income gap.

So how about AOC and every other member of the House be paid whatever the MHI is for their district? Just think of the incentives that pay structure would instantly create for every representative to get serious about the growing the U.S. economy, creating new jobs and opening the doors of opportunity for everybody in their district. Why, it might even make Supply Sider Reaganauts out of them!!

NOTHING SMALL-TOWN ABOUT U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE: President Donald Trump has all but declared war on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (CoC), saying he’s a member of it but probably not for much longer. The CoC, Trump claims, “is more for the companies and the people that are members than they are for our country.”

Harsh judgement? Not at all, at least according to Sundance at The Last Refuge, who  argues that “the CoC is the lead U.S. member of the multinational ‘Big Club’, and has driven policies directly against Main Street USA for three decades.  Until now no modern U.S. president has ever been willing, or fearless enough, to take them on … ‘until now.’ And that’s just for openers. It gets better here.

STEELE HAD CLINTON LINKS BEFORE FUSION GPS: A new batch of State Department emails obtained by Judicial Watch in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation shows former British spy Christopher Steele had a key aide to Secretary of State John Kerry promoting him within the government. Kerry’s role in Spygate may be more significant than heretofore realized.

And, perhaps even more important in some respects, the emails further show that Steele was dealing with Clinton inner circle types before he was retained by Fusion GPS and paid indirectly by Hillary’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

TIC-TOC-TIC … Go here.

IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE IN DC TUESDAY OR THURSDAY: If your schedule permits and you have the inclination, I absolutely love meeting Instapundit readers (who in my experience constitute a noticeably classier bunch of folks than I am accustomed to here in The Swamp!). Check out my “Office Hours” schedule here.

UNDERCOVER VIDEO FROM CHINESE LABOR CAMP: Never-before-seen undercover video shot inside one of China’s labor camp shows inmates forced to spend long hours doing menial work at desks, with “cabbage swimming” soup their basic sustenance. Protesters of the terrible conditions are beaten badly, chained to beds, according to The Epoch Times, which has extensive sources inside China.

AFTER HOROWITZ, THE BARR DELUGE: That’s the prediction of Margot Cleveland this morning on The Federalist. She’s a 25-year veteran of the federal judiciary system, so her insights about Department of Justice procedures are particularly interesting. Should be read in conjunction with the column by the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone, highlighted here earlier today by Glenn.

IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE ABOUT D-DAY: Here.

ANOTHER LEFTY DARK MONEY FRONT GROUP EXPOSED: Ever hear of or contributed money to SalmonState? You probably thought it’s an Alaska-based environmental non-profit. It’s not, it’s a front for the New Venture Fund. Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center explains:

“Together with its three ‘sister’ nonprofits, the New Venture Fund forms a massive ‘dark money’ network housed in the D.C. headquarters of Arabella Advisors, a for-profit philanthropy consulting firm created by ex-Clinton administration staffer Eric Kessler.

“And Arabella’s empire is dark. Between 2013 and 2017, its four interlocking nonprofits brought in a staggering $1.6 billion—largely from untraceable donors and major foundations on the Left, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.”

Ludwig has much more here.

THINK MILLENNIALS ARE AMERICA’S FIRST “POST-CHRISTIAN” GENERATION? MIGHT BE TIME TO THINK AGAIN: A new joint survey by the Barna Group and Alpha USA finds non-Christian millennials are twice as likely as non-believing members of older generations to be interested in learning more about the faith and what it could mean in their life. More here on HillFaith where the graphic captures the high points.

And BTW, if you think this data is irrelevant, I am posting this item while sitting in the Longworth House Office Building cafeteria surrounded by Millennials who have a great deal of influence. They may be the most obscure power group in Washington, D.C.

Yes, only senators and representatives have a vote, but guess who writes the bills, does the research for background briefings, lays out legislative strategy options and handles a hundred other daily chores that go a looonnng way to shape what happens in Congress. What these people believe — and don’t believe — is a big deal.

IS A PERMANENT EARMARK BAN REALLY PERMANENT? That’s the worry among Porkbusters old-timers when they hear that the Senate Republican Conference approved Sen. Ben Sasse’s permanent extension of former Sem. Jim DeMint’s 2011 moratorium.

NO, VA BEACH IS NOT INDICATIVE OF A MASS SHOOTING EPIDEMIC IN U.S.: A standard trope from Democrats whenever there is a tragedy like the Virginia Beach massacre is that such mass shootings are at epidemic levels in America. And so it was Friday in the wake of the Virginia crime.

But compared to the most of the rest of the world, the U.S. has comparatively far fewer such crimes, according to data from 97 countries compiled and analyzed by Dr. John Lott, founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center (PPRC).

Lott is often harshly (and unjustly in my view) by gun control advocates, but Spencer Critchley, a former investigative journalist-turned Democratic communications guru, offered in The Epoch Times both a reasonable critique and some sound advice about appealing to gun owners for the swarm of Democrats seeking to unseat President Donald Trump in 2020.

IS GINA HASPEL THE NEXT SPYGATE DOMINO TO FALL? Did you know the current CIA Director is a loyalist to former CIA Director John Brennan? Did you know the current CIA Director was the agency’s London station chief in 2016? Did you know that put the current CIA Director at the command center of the U.S. government’s spying on the Trump campaign?

No wonder former Bush administration senior Pentagon appointee Jed Babbin — who knows those things and much more about Operation Crossfire Hurricane — says “Haspel’s longstanding loyalty to Brennan ranks her among the two or three worst personnel choices made by President Trump.”

Go here at The American Spectator and, as Glenn famously said, just keep scrolling.

BILL BUCKLEY “MEETS” AOC: The woman doing AOC is a bit exaggerated, but the WFB guy nails it. My former colleagues at the Daily Caller are clearly having too much fun.

DEMOCRATS’ EQUALITY ACT GUARANTEES ANYTHING BUT: Philosopher Nancy Pearcey looks at a particular aspect — legal protection for transgender people — of the bill that passed the House May 17 with support by all 228 Democrats and 8 Republicans. Her conclusions won’t be popular with the professional advocates who dominate the LGBT community.

“Transgender activists insist the only acceptable way to treat gender dysphoria is with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery. But is it really good practice to turn children into life-long medical patients?

“We are talking about powerful drugs that have negative side effects and surgeries that amputate healthy body parts. And in most cases, they are not necessary: Studies show that 80 to 95 percent of children come to accept their biological sex as their hormones change during puberty.”

Pearcey has much more. Read the whole thing.

SHOULD MITCH MCCONNELL BE TOASTED OR ROASTED? The Senate Majority Leader has often been an object of ridicule among conservatives, but Jonathan S. Tobin argues in The Federalist today that the Right should be thankful the Kentucky Republican is where he is at this moment in history. Hmmm. Not sure what my take is on this issue. What’s yours?

THOSE WHO ARE IGNORANT OF HISTORY, ETC. ETC.: People who follow things like curriculum development in America’s elementary and secondary schools, as well as its colleges and universities, have warned for decades about the declining quality of history courses. Sadly, that’s not an issue with much mass impact.

But John Daniel Davidson has some data that brings home in a vivid manner the results of the decline over time — far fewer Americans are visiting civil war battlefields, which means they aren’t thinking and talking about the issues that produced that conflict at the heart of the American experience.

“The danger here is not just that Civil War battlefields will eventually lie fallow for lack of visitors, but that we will unlearn the painful lessons of our past. To some extent, we’ve already started down that path,” Davidson writes. Think of the growing number of racially segregated programs and facilities on elite campuses. Trust me, nothing good will come of this trend.

ABOUT THE ANY-MEANS-ALL FALLACY OF THE LEFT: It’s a commonplace argument from advocates on the Left and in the Mainstream Media, especially among those seeking to force everybody to pay for benefits awarded to a few on the basis of group identity.

Consider Chad Felix Greene’s description in The Federalist today of a recent claim by LBGT advocates concerning a Catholic hospital refusal to perform a certain procedure:

“It is preposterous to jump from a surgeon working in a Catholic hospital refusing to perform an elective hysterectomy on a perfectly healthy female body to arguing that an emergency room worker would deny life-saving care to a transgender person in a car accident. But LGBT people and media constantly conflate the two.”

The occasion for Greene’s analysis is the Trump administration’s proposed rule recognizing sex biologically rather than the Obama administration’s previous “gender identity.” Greene’s point has application across virtually the entire social issue horizon.

CHINA WANTS WAR WITH THE U.S.? No, this is not about trade war, this is about China being “prepared to fight a protracted war” against America. The Washington Free Beacon’s Bill Gertz — who, by the way, is likely the best informed, most honest journalist writing anywhere about China — quotes a knowledgeable Chinese expert on the four-minute video placed on a state-approved video-sharing service.

“This is not a joke from the CCP because they are really embedding a kind of a message in this video to prepare to confront the U.S.,” said the expert, dissident Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.

Wengui said the video may be part of the Chinese regime’s preparation for an assault on Taiwan, a confrontation with the U.S. military in the disputed South China Sea or a new crackdown on individual freedoms in Hong Kong.

YES, IT’S MEMORIAL DAY BUT SOMETHING ELSE VIP HAPPENED (TWO DAYS SHORT OF) 100 YEARS AGO TODAY: It happened on an island off the coast of Africa and it involved a rising star among British astronomers. And it proved the accuracy of a famous equation. Salim Mansur has the story on American Thinker.

BUTTIGIEG ABOUT TO HIT TWO BIG OBSTACLES: One of those obstacles was the third president of the country and the other was the seventh. Pete Buttigieg wants to erase both of them from their status as founders of the modern Democratic Party. This could be a problem for South Bend’s absentee mayor.

He claims that’s all he’s advocating but where does it end once we start down the road of Stalinist revisionism of history? Take apart the Jefferson Memorial stone by stone? Burn Jackson’s Hermitage to the ground?

TIME TO ADMIT THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION FAILED? Great prose ought to inform and inspire. Noelle Mering’s post today in The Federalist asking “Is Sexual Autonomy Worth the Cost to Human Lives” does both. I offer some brief thoughts on it as well in “Abortion, Sex and Working on Capitol Hill” on HillFaith.