ROBERT SPENCER: ‘Islamophobia’ Professor Claims to Be Victim of ‘Islamophobic’ Attack.

OLYMPIC BOOGALOO: Breakdancing tipped for inclusion at Paris 2024 Olympics.

HEALTH? PGA’s John Daly does burger curls, drinks beer in ‘intense’ workout.

GOOD: US says Alabama woman who joined Islamic State can’t return.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says an Alabama woman who left home to join the Islamic State group in Syria is not a U.S. citizen and will not be allowed to return to the United States.

Pompeo says Hoda Muthana does not have a U.S. passport or any legal basis to enter the country.

He said on Wednesday in a statement that she “will not be admitted to the United States.”

The 24-year old who joined the Islamic State after becoming radicalized says she regrets aligning herself with the terrorist organization and wants to return to the United States with her 18-month-old son.

What a shame she was stupid enough to bring a child into a terrorist brigand-state, but she was also stupid enough to become a “citizen” of it, and ought to be treated as such.

JOHN ELLIS: To Leftists Dragging John Wayne’s Dead Body Through the Streets: Now Do Che Guevara. “You want to see an example of pure, unadulterated racism? Then look no farther than Comrade Guevara.”

But Che was so dreamy.

VIDEO: Gowdy Doesn’t Believe McCabe’s Claim That He Told ‘Gang of Eight’ About Second FBI Probe. “Rep. Jim Jordan doesn’t believe it either.“

PRIVACY: The Nest Secure has a hidden microphone, and Google didn’t tell owners for 18 months.

IS IT SAFE TO ASSUME THAT THE REMAINING HUGE MAJORITY IS OK WITH IT? Seven MPs quit Labour Party over anti-Semitism.

STACY MCCAIN: The Media ‘Think They’re Living in a Cartoon and White Men Are the Villains.’ “Over the years, the MSM has fallen for hundreds of hate crime hoaxes, reporting on them as if they were confirmed facts, rather than mere allegations. By the time the story is proven to be a hoax, the media has already moved on to the next manufactured outrage. This phenomenon has only increased since the election of President Trump. Yet people still expressed shock and surprise when it became obvious that Smollett had staged his own hate crime.”

They feel cheated. But if you just keep in mind that you can’t cheat an honest man, it all makes sense.

MICHAEL WALSH: If These Stones Could Talk. “A stunning archaeological find from the Neolithic period in Scotland helps us understand the way we were.”

WELL-HEELED: Sanders campaign reports raising $4M in less than a day.

Sanders raised the money from almost 150,000 individual donors in all 50 states, the campaign said in a press release. The average donation amounted to $27, mirroring that of the 2016 campaign.

The haul more than doubles Sen. Kamala Harris’ (D-Calif.) gains of $1.5 million in the first 24 hours after she announced her own presidential campaign.

Is it misogyny or racism which drives Sanders to practically steal donors from a woman of color?

CALIFORNIA CAN’T EVEN GET POT SALES RIGHT: California made $345 million, not predicted $1 billion, on legal cannabis in 2018.

But the black marketeers are still making out like bandits under legalization (if you can call it that), proving just how deeply dysfunctional California’s business climate is.

CYBERSECURITY: Why Russia doesn’t allow its military to use smartphones.

LUKE THOMPSON: The Congresswoman Loves the Swamp. “Her Wealthy Chief of Staff used a PAC to Pay Her Boyfriend.”

A quick tour through AOC’s campaign expenditures reveals the extent to which Brand New Congress midwifed her campaign into existence, precisely as the FAQ described above would have it. But AOC’s campaign was different from the others backed by Brand New Congress PAC, and not simply because she won. Like other candidates, AOC paid Brand New Congress LLC for strategic consulting, in her case totaling $18,880.14. Unlike in the other cases, Brand New Congress PAC turned around and paid her boyfriend as a “marketing consultant”.

Indeed, while Brand New Congress PAC’s ten largest expenditures were paid to Brand New Congress LLC for “strategic consulting,” a sum that totaled $261,165.20 over the course of the campaign, its eleventh and twelfth largest expenditures were paid to Riley Roberts [AOC’s boyfriend/partner/or perhaps even husband].

Much, much more at the link.

OH: Facebook Bans Human Rights Activist for Commemorating Christians Slaughtered by ISIS.

AT LEAST HE GOT FIRED FOR IT: Store Clerk in Kansas Curses Out MAGA Hat-Wearing 14-Year-Old.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS: The Future of the Liberal Order Is Conservative.

The order is clearly worth saving, but the question is how. Keep calm and carry on, some of its defenders argue; today’s difficulties will pass, and the order is resilient enough to survive them. Others appreciate the gravity of the crisis but insist that the best response is to vigorously reaffirm the order’s virtues and confront its external challengers. Bold Churchillian moves—sending more American troops to Syria, offering Ukraine more help to kick out pro-Russian forces—would help make the liberal international order great again. Only by doubling down on the norms and institutions that made the liberal world order so successful, they say, can that order be saved.

Such defenders of the order tend to portray the challenge as a struggle between liberal countries trying to sustain the status quo and dissatisfied authoritarians seeking to revise it. What they miss, however, is that for the past 25 years, the international order crafted by and for liberal states has itself been profoundly revisionist, aggressively exporting democracy and expanding in both depth and breadth. The scale of the current problems means that more of the same is not viable; the best response is to make the liberal order more conservative. Instead of expanding it to new places and new domains, the United States and its partners should consolidate the gains the order has reaped.

The debate over U.S. grand strategy has traditionally been portrayed as a choice between retrenchment and ambitious expansionism. Conservatism offers a third way: it is a prudent option.

I’d like to see us return to our Whiggish roots and practice more of that traditional liberty-based liberalism. The best way to “export” western values is to practice them for all to see — that “shining city on a hill” stuff works.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: The opioid epidemic keeps killing my friends.

After the funerals, the friends and family stood around looking at the ground. We assured each other that there was nothing anybody could have done for the ­deceased. It’s true, but it’s cold comfort. We play back the last moments, the last time we spoke, our last interactions. Were there signs? Maybe. Even if we knew, what could anyone do? Addiction is a sneaky disease, and addicts can get very good at hiding the fact that they are afflicted.

The range of the afflicted has expanded. My friend was a college graduate with parents who loved her. These kinds of details shouldn’t matter when we talk about people who die young, but for so long we were able to dismiss this epidemic as something that happens to other people — the ones alone, without family, without love. The last few years have exploded this misconception. The epidemic has been moving ever closer to us all.

The wave of deaths has escalated from sad to frightening in short order.

And then this:

My ethnic community is among the hard-hit. There isn’t much ­research on drug use specifically among immigrants from the former Soviet Union living in New York. But one 2012 paper noted that substance-abuse and HIV rates among immigrants from the former Soviet Union “appear to be disproportionately high” in comparison to other immigrant groups and “possibly even native populations.”

I wonder why that is.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: More McCabe book tour, WaPo lawsuit and much, much more. “I am running out of adjectives to describe McCabe. Is he brain-damaged? He believes its possible that the RUSSIANS ordered Trump to fire Comey. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

That memoir isn’t going to sell itself, Liz.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF: Socialism as a Millennial religion.

The Millennials can’t remember very much – and they don’t learn very much either. It’s easy being hot for socialism or communism when you actually have a very little idea of what it is and what it did throughout the 20th century. And the Ys have that ignorance in spades; one third of them think that George W Bush killed more people than Stalin and 42 per cent have never heard of Mao – but over 70 per cent agree with Bernie Sanders. Some research suggests that only 15 per cent actually have a correct understanding of socialism. It’s not just politics; the Millennials are the most woefully undereducated and miseducated generation in a very long time. To be fair, that’s not strictly their fault; that attaches itself again to their Boomer grandparents who have been in charge of our failing education systems during this time. Combine the modern indoctrination-cum-dumbification taking place in schools and universities with the attention span-killing impact of information technology and social media, and you have a barely literate cohort, which is simply not equipped with the necessary mental tools to learn about the real world even if they wanted to.

Any surprises that socialism is now nearly synonymous with Gen Y?

Read the whole thing. I’d just add that it’s nice having Arthur back to regular blogging.

BILL SCHER: How Does a Straight White Male Democrat Run for President? “Very carefully.“

CNN’s demographic number cruncher Ron Brownstein noted recently that the percentage of the Democratic primary electorate who are women, nonwhite voters and—“the most liberal component” of the party—college-educated white voters are all on the rise. The 2016 Democratic primary electorate was 58 percent women, 38 percent nonwhite voters and 37 percent college-educated white voters, all numbers that could be bigger in 2020, and strongly suggest a hospitable environment for candidates who embody a diverse America.

Does this mean that Democratic Party voters are so obsessed with identity politics that they are shutting straight white men out of the party? No. Who have been the top two candidates in nearly every primary poll? Not just two straight white males, but geriatric ones: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

I had no idea that Democratic primary voters were so biased against Candidates of Color and Whatnot. Perhaps the DNC should replace all that sloppy campaigning and voting with an intersectional candidate olympics and be done with it.

LITERALLY HITLER: Trump administration launches global effort to end criminalization of homosexuality.

Good news, but this is NBC, so they just can’t help themselves in the subhead: “The administration is responding in part to a reported hanging of a young gay man in Iran, Trump’s top geopolitical foe.”

Trump still hates gays, you see. He’s only doing this to thwart “his” top foe.

Pathetic.

A FINE ROMANCE WITH SOME KILLING: German ISIS bride tells how she spent her wedding night in a ‘blood-stained torture chamber’ with her new terrorist husband after fleeing life as a Hells Angel.

VIDEO: 7-Year-Old Boy Raises $5K for Trump’s Wall, Gets Branded ‘Little Hitler.’ “He was selling hot chocolate.”

If you need to make your point by calling a 7-year-old kid Hitler, you’re a terrible person no one should ever listen to.

JUST REMEMBER NOT TO GIVE THE APP ACCESS TO YOUR CAMERA OR MICROPHONE: The world’s first smart oral sex toy aims to close the orgasm gender gap.