PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.

Bryan Preston: It’s Not Your Imagination. Joe Biden Really Is Weakening the United States. “When the going gets tough, because another of his deliberate policy decisions has caused the nation and the world major problems, Biden calls a lid.”

Megan Fox: Is Someone Finally Giving Cancel Culture A Taste of Its Own Medicine? “What we want to do at Unsilenced Majority is to provide a counterbalance. And so these corporations understand that if they go woke there’s gonna be consequences from everyday Americans.” (Silence is violence, the Left keeps telling us…)

Yours Truly: Close Encounters of the Blasé Kind. “There’s another scenario for humanity’s first contact with aliens, only it might not be science fiction: Suppose alien ships were buzzing our aircraft and Navy ships over the oceans, giving us nothing more than tantalizing glimpses of their impossible (to us) flying machines? Suppose, even more fantastically, that humanity’s response was a collective yawn?”

THANKS FOR SHARING: Paltrow’s Vagina-Scented Candle Explodes, Scaring Texas Man, Impressing Neighbors.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Too Many Celebrities Actively Condone or Support Violence. “W. Kamau Bell, Michael Moore and Trevor Noah have some explaining to do.”

BREAKING: ‘An Investigation in Search of a Crime’: Trump Slams NY Criminal Probe Into Trump Org.

IT’S A SURGE: AP instructs staff not to say ‘surge’ when talking about surge of immigrants at the border.

BIDEN TO ISRAEL: DROP DEAD! Biden Praises Anti-Semitic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib: ‘Thank You for Being a Fighter.’

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Convicted Former Congressman Still Draws Estimated $1 Million Federal Lifetime Pension.

COME SEE THE ANTISEMITISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: House Democrats Vote Against Sanctioning Hamas Terrorists.

YES: Read Mitch Daniels’ Charge To Graduates: ‘The Biggest Risk Of All Is That We Stop Taking Risks.’

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: BLM Sides with Terrorists Again, But At Least This Time They’re Foreign?

Insanity Wrap needs to know: Is there a terrorist group that, on a long enough timeline, the Left won’t embrace?

Answer: No. And the timeline doesn’t have to be that long, either.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

• Celebrate Diversity Criminality!
• The most de-electrifying video you’ll see all day
• Trust the experts (even when they aren’t)

Bonus Sanity: Portlanders come out hard against defunding the police.

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

VICTORIA TAFT: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Orders a Mandate Against Mask Mandates – And It Gets Better From There. “Just to make sure liberal Travis County mask scolds don’t try any funny stuff, Abbott’s new rule says any governmental outfit requiring masks can be fined $1,000.”

FROM THE UNCOVERED MOUTHS OF BABES: This 10-year-old completely demolished his school board’s mask mandate and called all the grown ups hypocrites.

HEY, AFTER FIVE YEARS WE FINALLY FOUND THE RUSSIAN COLLUSION: Biden Says Russia Can Have a New Pipeline, but America Can’t.

DIGITAL DANEGELD: Hackers behind Colonial Pipeline attack reportedly received $90 million in bitcoin before shutting down.

STACEY LENNOX: Georgia Republican Party Is Rising to the Challenge Following 2020. “Despite the drama, or maybe because of it, the Georgia Republican grassroots appear highly motivated.”

IT’S A LONGSHOT (FOR NOW): Republicans have a new tool to fight deplatforming: common carriage laws.

The idea was laid out in detail in April, when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a concurring opinion as the court declined to hear a case on former President Trump blocking people on Twitter. The case itself was moot for procedural reasons, but Thomas took it as an opportunity to write in support of classifying social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as “common carriers,” the same classification that net neutrality rules use for telecom providers.

“There is a fair argument that some digital platforms are sufficiently akin to common carriers or places of accommodation to be regulated in this manner,” Thomas wrote in his opinion last month. In theory, common carriage would ban platforms from unfairly discriminating against speech, .

Thomas’s opinion has no legal force, but it was enough to get Republicans in Congress to pay attention. In the wake of the opinion, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) introduced the 21st Century FREE Speech Act, which combined the usual Section 230 repeal with a new effort classifying social media platforms as common carriers.

“This is more than just a messaging bill or an empty gesture,” Mike Davis from the Internet Accountability Project said in a statement soon after the bill was released last month — although any time someone has to say it’s not an empty gesture, you should probably be skeptical.

I am skeptical, but mostly because the people benefiting from deplatforming are the same people holding the reins of power in Washington.

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: Video of International Law Scholar Defending Israel Vanishes From YouTube.

NOT THE BEE: This family was kicked off a Southwest flight because their 3-year-old MIGHT remove his mask.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Kyrsten Sinema Goes Full Pro-Israel, Democrats Weep. “The real fringe of the Democratic party is my senior senator, Kyrsten Sinema. She’s not clinically insane, so she’s not in the mainstream of the party.”

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: The Hitler and Stalin Loving Socialist Whose Statue No One Will Touch.

“I was a National Socialist before Mr Hitler was born. I hope we shall emulate his great achievements in that direction,” the famous socialist writer whose statue smilingly stands in a fountain in Niagara-on-the-Lake behind the Shaw Cafe & Wine Bar wrote.

The statue is part of the local shtick which includes the Shaw literary festival.

The festival may perform Shaw’s On the Rocks, but it doesn’t include his preface to the play, where he argued that, “extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly” and holds up the Soviet Union as an ideal example where the “essential questions: ‘are you pulling your weight in the social boat? are you giving more trouble than you are worth?’” were answered by the Cheka who would “‘liquidate’ persons who could not answer them satisfactorily” to meet the “urgency of how to dispose of people who would not or could not fit themselves into the new order of things.”

While Niagara-on-the-Lake may have a statue of Shaw, the famous socialist writer kept a portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, on his wall.

The statue of George Bernard Shaw, one of many, including outside the National Gallery of Ireland (sculpted by Paolo Troubetzkoy, who fled the Communists and was harassed to death by the Nazis: two regimes that Shaw enthusiastically supported), has rarely been questioned.

Those oh-so-respected Fabian socialists had every bit as much murder in their hearts as Dzerzhinsky, Lenin, Stalin, or Hitler.

WITH CALLOUS SWIFTNESS: Biden Snatched War From the Jaws of Israel Peace Deals. Pence Explains How He Did It.

BRAVE SIR ROBIN BRAVELY TURNED AND FLED: Hunter Biden Dodges Questions About ‘The Big Guy’ and His Gun Application Form.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: We Found Joe Biden’s Secret Venmo. Here’s Why That’s A Privacy Nightmare For Everyone. “BuzzFeed News found President Joe Biden’s Venmo account after less than 10 minutes of looking for it, revealing a network of his private social connections, a national security issue for the United States.”

CHANGE? A Giuliani Wants Andrew Cuomo’s Job…

CLARICE FELDMAN: A Legal System Corrupted. “I’ve always had great respect for our legal system. It’s as good as any of which I’m aware. No, I’m not naive. I’m fully aware that every institution depends on the competence and integrity of those involved and that means sometimes decisions are rendered that are wrong — muddy thinking and sometimes corrupt judges; self-seeking prosecutors; incompetent counsel; bad and poorly written laws; false testimony by liars — all contribute now and then to unjust resolutions. But in recent years, my faith has been even more badly shaken by continued and obvious corruption all the way down the line.”

Read the whole thing.