EXCITEMENT: Trump drives massive turnout in primaries despite token opposition.

I’d wager some of this is a well-deserved “Screw you!” to the media and its 24/7 hostile coverage of Trump and Trump voters.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Thrills Daytona 500 Fans and Gives New Meaning to ‘Flyover Country.’ “The complaints that many Republicans still have about Trump — which I find to be beyond tedious at this point — are the very things that will most likely propel him to victory in November.”

Maybe they could complain less and enjoy it more?

EVERY LEFTIST’S GOAL: Criminalizing Dissent.

Louis Shenker, a 21-year-old junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, just wanted his MAGA hat back from the graduate student who ripped it off his head on campus. He wore the hat to a December 6, 2018 protest organized by the university’s graduate student union against Trump and local police. Video shows that when Louis, who is 5’6’’ and 140 pounds, arrived wearing the MAGA hat and holding a large sign, he was immediately surrounded by a hostile mob of older grad students cursing at him and calling him a white supremacist. A woman lunged from the mob and snatched Louis’s MAGA hat. Careful not to get caught on camera hitting Louis with their hands, they instead mobbed him like a colony of enraged penguins, using their bodies to push him from all sides, occasionally pecking at his head with their cardboard signs, and chanting in unison: “THE PEOPLE, UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED.”

“Get the f**k out of here, you shouldn’t be in an anti-racist march!” screamed the hat thief. A soft-spoken professor in the crowd warned Louis: “It’s actually dangerous for you to come by yourself like that.” As the protesters began to march and Louis tried to keep up while pleading for his hat, many of them, including several graduate student union members dressed in United Auto Workers gear, elbowed Louis into walls, lampposts, and other obstacles. “You act like a Nazi, you’re going to get treated like a Nazi,” a female protester yelled at the Jewish grandson of Holocaust victims. Louis left without his hat.

A month later, Louis was horrified to recognize the woman who stole his MAGA hat as Beth Peller, a 36-year-old grad student who would be teaching his mandatory freshman writing class.

Read the whole thing.

CHANGE: Betting Odds Soar For Bloomberg Winning Nomination; Biden’s Numbers Plunge.

UGH: American Woman Who Left Cruise Ship Tests Positive for Coronavirus. “An American woman who left a cruise ship in Cambodia last week and flew to Malaysia with more than a hundred other passengers has tested positive for the coronavirus, alarming health experts who fear that some exposed passengers who then traveled onward could become a new source for global transmission.”

CYBERSECURITY: Iranian hackers have been hacking VPN servers to plant backdoors in companies around the world. “Iranian hackers have targeted Pulse Secure, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, and Citrix VPNs to hack into large companies.”

The report comes to dispel the notion that Iranian hackers are not sophisticated, and less talented than their Russian, Chinese, or North Korean counterparts.

ClearSky says that “Iranian APT groups have developed good technical offensive capabilities and are able to exploit 1-day vulnerabilities in relatively short periods of time.”

In some instances, ClearSky says it observed Iranian groups exploiting VPN flaws within hours after the bugs been publicly disclosed.

VPNs aren’t as private or secure as their name implies.

LET THEM COMPLAIN ALL THEY LIKE, JUST SO LONG AS THEY’RE BOLSTERING THEIR DEFENSES: EU Leaders Complain About Spending More on Defense Due to Trump’s America First’ Policy.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Florida Man Friday: Fake Bernie Sanders Gets Real Dirty.

HEH: Times Square Billboard Mocks the ‘Circus’ the Democratic Party Has Become.

GOOD LORD: A 6-Year-Old Girl in Florida Was Committed to a Mental Health Facility After She Threw a Fit at School.

THE WICKER WOMAN: Woman visits toilet at vegan cafe, finds ‘satanic sex cult’ meeting.

BLUE STATE BLUES: California’s political divisions widen as Republicans, businesses want out.

BOMBSHELL: US Atty. John Durham Is investigating if Obama Admin Hid or Manipulated Evidence of Russian Meddling.

TYLER O’NEIL: New Film Shows How the War on Poverty Failed and the Real Hope for America’s ‘Forgotten’ Cities.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO GO BACK IN THE WATER: Venomous Snot Helps These Jellyfish Sting Without Their Tentacles.

SOD OFF, SWAMPY: PETA Wants You To Stop Saying The Word ‘Pet’ Because It’s ‘Offensive to Animals.’

LOCATED: ANOTHER TOTAL INTERNET TIME-SUCK. Old Book Illustration: An Online Database Lets You Download Thousands of Illustrations from the 19th & 20th Centuries.

AGAIN: Snopes Beclowns Itself with Awful ‘Confirmation’ of Hitlerian Tones in Trump Tweet.

BRYAN PRESTON: The Tech Race with China Is Getting Real. “Case in point: the 5G race with the United States. China recognizes the significant first-mover advantage that will come with being the first to operationalize this new wireless technology. The People’s Republic is still bitter over its loss in the 4G war, which brought people from being able to read articles on their phones to streaming movies. As a result, it is now doing everything it can to win the 5G race, which will mean life or death for artificial intelligence and other significant military tools of the future.”

BIDEN HAD BEEN COUNTING ON UNION SUPPORT TO HELP WIN NEVADA: Powerhouse Nevada Union Won’t Endorse a Democratic Candidate.

The union has 60,000 members in Las Vegas and Reno, more than half of whom are Latino. In 2016, 84,000 people participated in the Democratic caucus statewide, meaning that a successful effort by the union to convince its members to caucus for its chosen candidate could have a significant impact on the results of this year’s caucus.

A key issue for the union is its Culinary Health Fund, which provides benefits to more than 130,000 people including its members and their dependents. The union is fiercely protective of the program and has warned members that Medicare for All plans like the one supported by Sanders would eliminate that benefit.

They can’t say this, but also they’re probably enjoying Trump’s blue-collar boom.

COLORADO: Bill to prevent arrests on courthouse grounds advances; sets up state conflict with federal immigration law.

Senate Bill 20-083 by Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver and Rep. Leslie Herod, D-Denver purports to immunize anyone “present at a courthouse or on its environs from civil arrest,” and gives judges the authority to issue a “writ of protection” that would, among other scenarios, prohibit Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests of illegal aliens.

The bill also creates a cause of action in civil court for false imprisonment that allows damages and authorizes any person so arrested or detained to “seek a writ of habeas corpus” that requires the arresting official to appear before a judge to justify the arrest.

The state Attorney General is authorized to “bring a civil action on behalf of the people of the state” as well.

If they were working on our behalf, they wouldn’t be pushing this bill.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Media Is Complicit in Leftist Violence Against Trump Supporters. “It’s not that they aren’t being covered at all, it’s that they aren’t being covered with the fervor and repetition that, say, a story about the president saying something mean to Jim Acosta would.”

YOU DON’Y SAY: Audit finds automated license plate reader programs are a privacy nightmare.

DANIEL HENNINGER: The Incompetence Party. “The Democrats’ biggest problem isn’t Bernie Sanders. It’s that many voters doubt the party’s ability to govern anymore.”

The Iowa caucus debacle came on top of the Trump impeachment, another low-turnout event with the public. People began telling reporters that the three-year death struggle between Democrats and President Trump wasn’t their idea of Washington’s purpose.

So what, other than hunting Donald Trump, does the Democratic Party stand for?

A recurring argument of this column is that in the U.S. and Europe, the presumed efficiency of governments has been worn down by the programs and responsibilities they’ve created for themselves, some with good intentions. By now, it’s just too much.

During the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt struck a defining bargain with the public: Cede to the government expanded powers over the details of American life, and government will administer it efficiently. For the public, giving government the power to regulate and rule was supposed to be a net plus.

The bargain behind Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All, funded by new taxes on the middle class, is that it too will be a net plus. Come Election Day in November, will 50% of the electorate actually believe Democrats today could competently administer a national health-care system in the U.S.?

Mr. Sanders, who filed as a Democrat for this election, isn’t that much of an outlier. All his rivals, including the “moderates,” are proposing more additions to the already massive government labyrinth they’ve built for decades.

But in those places where the modern Democratic Party is in charge, they often govern badly or incompetently on a grand scale.

Detroit, from coast to coast.

SCHADENFREUDE: Never Trump Runs Headlong Into the Reality That Democrats Don’t Care What They Think and It’s Hilarious.