THAT’S NOT FUNNY: Leaked Docs Show Prestigious DC School Poised To Crack Down on ‘Harmful’ Humor.

MEET YOUR DOMESTIC TERRORIST: Loudoun County Schools Tried To Conceal Sexual Assault Against Daughter In Bathroom, Father Says.

On June 22, Scott Smith was arrested at a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting, a meeting that was ultimately deemed an “unlawful assembly” after many attendees vocally opposed a policy on transgender students.

What people did not know is that weeks prior on May 28, Smith says, a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.

Juvenile records are sealed, but Smith’s attorney Elizabeth Lancaster told The Daily Wire that a boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio, related to an incident that day at that school.

As a result of the viral video showing his arrest, Smith became the poster child for what the National School Boards Association has since suggested could be a form of “domestic terrorism”: a white blue-collar male who showed up to harangue obscure public servants on his local school board.

Read the whole, shameful thing.

MANDATES FOR THEE BUT NOT FOR ME: Hypocrisy Much? Newsom’s Daughter Isn’t Vaccinated But Your Kids Better Be.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: The Biden-China-Oil Connection. “Instead of moving oil around, the DC-CCP pipeline transports money and influence from East to West.”

Plus:

• First thing we do, let’s fire all the nurses
• Kamala insists: The kids stay in the picture
• When everyone is a domestic terrorist, no one is

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

WILLIAM DOYLE: The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg.

During the 2020 election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn out likely Democratic voters. But this wasn’t traditional political spending. He funded a targeted, private takeover of government election operations by nominally non-partisan — but demonstrably ideological — non-profit organizations.

Analysis conducted by our team demonstrates this money significantly increased Joe Biden’s vote margin in key swing states. This unprecedented merger of public election offices with private resources and personnel is an acute threat to our republic, and should be the focus of electoral reform efforts moving forward.

The 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes.

Last week’s Facebook “whistleblower” testimony was an act designed to engineer a Facebook-friendly social media regulatory scheme to lock in Facebook’s dominance.

Zuckerberg bought himself a government and he means to use it.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: The Rebellion Against ‘Woke’ Has Begun. “Did we not include our pronouns because we are hateful and transphobic, scheming away at how to ‘oppress’ a tiny group of people we rarely encounter? No. For me, it’s because I won’t be told what to do, especially by a microcosm of our society that is backed by communist thugs calling themselves Antifa. I also don’t believe in changing society for a tiny group of people, especially people who a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins claims have a mental illness. I’d prefer we, as a country, help them get treatment, especially knowing that up to half of trans people will attempt suicide.”

GLAD TO BE UNHAPPY: Inspiration4 pilot reveals an overlooked, mind-altering problem with going to space.

Sian Proctor made history last month as one of the four passengers on the first all-civilian space mission to orbit. But in a National Geographic interview last week, Proctor revealed that her three-day trip to space was “not enough,” she would “go for longer,” and “at least 50 percent” of her dreams after coming back involve living in space.

It’s an insight into what could become a common feeling: missing space once you’re back on Earth. Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic all aim to increase access to space, which means more people than ever will get to feel this. This would stand in stark contrast to the sixties-era space race, where global superpowers sent the best of the best on a limited number of missions.

But experiences like Proctor’s could become more commonplace as visitors experience something akin to post-vacation blues.

I’d be happy to have a chance to be that sad.

THE WAR ON FIRST RESPONDERS: And Just Like That, Washington State’s Fire Marshal Will Lose Job Over Forced Covid Shot. “The marshal, Charles LeBlanc, a 33-year-veteran of the agency, says the state has granted him a medical exemption from getting the shot, but that it can’t ‘accommodate’ the exemption.”

To be fair, that makes as much sense as anything else we’ve seen in the last 18 months.

ALFRED THAYER MAHAN, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Sea Power Makes Great Powers.

The United States currently faces many of the same strategic challenges that Britain confronted just over a century ago. Much as the Balfour ministry faced strategic strain from the distant Boer War—as well as expanding domestic social instability and the rise of Germany—the United States is dealing with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, domestic civil unrest, and a rising China. Additionally, the White House Office of Management and Budget has attempted to impose on the Defense Department similar fiscal strictures to those that Balfour levied on Fisher’s Admiralty: flat to declining budgets and demands to be more efficient. As a result, the Pentagon has made the decision to cut back on its shipbuilding plans, starting construction of only eight new ships in the next year, half of them auxiliaries, while accelerating the decommissioning of seven cruisers, dropping the fleet to an estimated 294 ships. Congress has indicated that it will seek to expand these numbers, but the future is increasingly murky.

The U.S. naval strategy will produce a fleet too small to protect the United States’ global interests or win its wars.

Given that even the most capable ship can only be in one place at a time and that the world’s oceans are vast, the fleet as planned will not meet the demand for a naval presence detailed by the various four-star regional combatant commanders around the world. On average, their requests equate to approximately 130 ships at sea on any given day, nearly half of the present fleet. Today the Navy deploys, on average, fewer than 90 ships per day, creating gaps in key regions where America’s interests are not being upheld.

There’s also some excellent (and frighteningly relevant) history in this piece, if you’re interested.

BLUE CITY BLUES: Will the Last Office Worker to Leave San Francisco Please Turn Out the Lights?

“There’s nothing to do”, complain some residents of one of the most expensive cities in the world, thanks to the ongoing pandemic restrictions.

The skyscrapers are dark. Retailers are leaving. Crime is surging. The streets remain notoriously filthy.

Residents have had enough and are voting with their feet.

This one is just for our PJMedia/Townhall VIP members, so if you’ve been thinking of becoming a member, you can do so here — and don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code.

AU REVOIR? Allo, Allo, Mr. Brexit — France Is on the Line.

When the United Kingdom succeeded in effecting independence from the European Union, Brexiteers hoped that, in concert with Pitt the Younger, they could say “England has saved herself by her exertions, and will save Europe by her example.” When Pitt voiced these sentiments in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, nine years were to follow before victory at Waterloo.

Today, Britain has yet to enjoy the full promise of sovereignty regained; indeed, there have been as many setbacks for liberty as triumphs. Nevertheless, the Brexit hope remains alive in Britain. And, if what is happening in France turns out to have legs, it is not impossible to imagine France beginning to think about whether it was on the wrong side of Brexit.

France must “regain our legal sovereignty,” Mr. Barnier declares as he campaigns for president. If elected in April 2022, he proposes to halt all immigration from non-EU countries for five years. As a corollary, he would limit the reach of the European Court of Human Rights. Even Germany takes a hit, as Mr. Barnier takes aim at the Teutonic tilt within the EU.

Such campaign screeds are controversial primarily in the bien-pensant salons. Limiting immigration, though, is crosswise to EU ideals — and the Schengen agreement on borderless Europe — that Monsieur Barnier defended when he conspired against UK independence. His volte face is therefore surprising. Is he now endorsing Frexit? Sacre bleu, M. Barnier!

The French people have been trending rightward for years now, but the French government so far has been able to ignore or suppress most of the shift.

Maybe that’s changing.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Vax Nazis Gleefully Pushing People Into Unemployment. “People don’t leave careers just because they’re in the mood to make a political statement. The fact that so many healthcare professionals have misgivings about the vaccine should be enough to spark a real conversation.”

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Supply Chain Disruption Update. “Expecting these problems to be transitory? Dubai’s largest port operator says to expect supply chain problems to extend in 2023.”

AN OPEN LETTER TO PARENTS: They’re Your Kids, Not Wards of the State. Don’t Let Anyone Convince You Otherwise. “The enemies of freedom, having gotten away with sneaking subversive content into K-12 curricula for the last two decades, were emboldened by their successes. Protected by the teachers’ unions and largely flying under the radar, the radicals had no fear of exposure or retribution.”

Read the whole thing.

BUT PARENTS SPEAKING OUT AT SCHOOL BOARD MEETINGS ARE THE REAL THREAT:

Everything is going swimmingly, to coin an Insta-phrase.

ROBERT SPENCER: Afghan Refugees Were Placed in a Popular Vacation Hotel. Here’s What Happened.

DAVID P. DEAVEL: The Empire Strikes Back: DOJ Death Star Aims at Parents.

The decision of the DOJ to do anything on this matter is patently ridiculous for several reasons. First, there is no crisis (for schools) of school board-related violence. The NSBA’s letter only indicated a couple incidents where physical altercations happened and a couple of actual threats. The rest of the incidents involved mockery and claims that Critical Race Theory is being taught—claims that the NSBA terms “misinformation” on the basis of the absurd notion that CRT is only taught in graduate and law schools.

Second, we do have a different crisis in the U. S. well-suited to the attention of federal law enforcement. It is absurd that the FBI and other federal agencies should be spending their time on investigation of parents when the homicide rate increased by 30% in 2020, the highest one-year increase ever, and is predicted to be even higher this year. There is absolutely no reason that the practice of local law enforcement officials investigating local threats should be changed when the FBI has actual murders to deal with. Hey, Attorney General Garland! Have you even solved the mystery of those bombs planted at the Republican and Democratic headquarters on January 5 yet?

Going after real criminals is hard. Going after parents for expressing politically inconvenient (but constitutionally protected) opinions isn’t.

#RESIST: Amid Already ‘Catastrophic Shortages,’ Oregon Nurses Get Ready to Walk Over Forced Covid Vaccines.

Warring on first responders and medical professionals (among others) tells you everything you need to know about Democrats’ supposed concern for “the little guy.”

CHINA: China’s coal futures hit record high as floods worsen energy crisis. “Chinese coal futures rose to record levels as floods shut dozens of mines and displaced more than 100,000 people, throttling the country’s main source of the fuel for electricity and compounding a global energy crisis.”

NeverTrump Has Become NeverConservative… Or Was It All Along?

Good job, NeverTrumpers, you got rid of the Bad Orange Man — so now what?

You want to give everything to the Democrats, really?

Really.

This one is just for our PJMedia/Townhall VIP members, so if you’ve been thinking of becoming a member, you can do so here — and don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code.

TWO PROFESSORS EXPLAIN How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality.

In a particularly troubling example from the biomedical sciences, a 2015 literature review found that almost 900 peer-reviewed publications reporting studies of a supposed breast cancer cell line were in fact based on a misidentified skin cancer line. Worse still, nearly 250 of these studies were published even after the mistaken cell line was conclusively identified in 2007. Our cursory search of Google Scholar indicates that researchers are still using the skin cancer cell line in breast cancer studies published in 2021. All of these erroneous studies remain in the literature and will continue to be a source of misinformation for scientists working on breast cancer.

In 2021, climate research finds itself in a situation similar to breast cancer research in 2007. Our research (and that of several colleagues) indicates that the scenarios of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through the end of the twenty-first century are grounded in outdated portrayals of the recent past. Because climate models depend on these scenarios to project the future behavior of the climate, the outdated scenarios provide a misleading basis both for developing a scientific evidence base and for informing climate policy discussions. The continuing misuse of scenarios in climate research has become pervasive and consequential—so much so that we view it as one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the twenty-first century thus far. We need a course correction.

Nevertheless: There will soon be no more ads denying climate change on Google.

BETTER MAKE IT THROUGH TODAY: Rolling Stone Is Trying to Cancel Eric Clapton.

HIGHER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Art Institute of Chicago fires all 122 of its (unpaid and volunteer) docents because they aren’t sufficiently ‘diverse.’

The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), one of the world’s finest art museums, harbors (or rather, harbored) 122 highly skilled docents, 82 active ones and 40 “school group greeters.” All are volunteers and are all unpaid. Their job is to act as guides to the Museum’s collection of 300,000 works, which they explain to both adults and schoolchildren. I’ve seen them in action at the Museum, and they’re terrific.

Despite the lack of remuneration—they do this to be helpful and because they love art—their training to be docents is extremely rigorous. First, they have to have two training sessions per week for eighteen months, and then “five years of continual research and writing to meet the criteria of 13 museum content areas” (quote from the docents’ letter to the Director of the AIC). On top of that, there’s monthly and biweekly training on new exhibits. Then there are the tours themselves, with a docent giving up to two one-hour tours per day for 18 weeks of the year and a minimum of 24 one-hour tours with adults/families. Their average length of service: 15 years. There are other requirements listed by the Docents Council in the ChicagoNow column below (first screenshot).

Many of the volunteers—though not all—are older white women, who have the time and resources to devote so much free labor to the Museum. But the demographics of that group weren’t appealing to the AIC, and so, in late September, the AIC fired all of them, saying they’d be replaced by smaller number of hired volunteers workers who will be paid $25 an hour. That group will surely meet the envisioned diversity goals.

Read the whole thing.

This came courtesy of a reader who doesn’t use Facebook much, but decided to try and share this story — only to have sharing squashed.

THE RACISM THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME: Newsom Signs ‘Ethnic Studies’ Bill for High School Graduation Requirement—But Don’t You Dare Call It Critical Race Theory.

HMM: Capitol Police Whistleblower Claims Leadership Botched Jan. 6th And Lied to Congress About It. “Truth be told, Pelosi wants this committee to set up their third annual impeachment of Donald Trump, or at the very least ban him from running again as the Democrats are frightened that he will run again and win.”