TIM SCOTT: The Republican Party’s Joyful Warrior.

Over the course of a day I spent with the senator — on Capitol Hill and in Anacostia, a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. — a picture of Scott as a vocal, visionary leader came into focus. He’s the man of the hour, though he might not know it.

If he does know, he certainly won’t admit it. This spring, he and his best friend in Washington, congressman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), co-authored a memoir on bipartisanship, Unified: How Our Unlikely Friendship Gives Us Hope for a Divided Country. One section of Gowdy’s acknowledgements is addressed to Scott’s mother, Frances:

This book was supposed to be about your son Tim and your family. It was supposed to be about your hard work, your faith, and your determination that your children would turn out as well as they did. But you raised a son too modest to write a book about himself. Maybe one day we can convince him to do that.

When I mention this snippet to Scott, he chuckles ruefully and shakes his head, as if to say, “I didn’t want him to write that, either.” Truth is, Scott never intended to take up the self-glorifying business of politics. He wanted to be a minister.

Still, even after the doors of ministry were closed to him, Scott wasn’t sure that national politics would be an option. “I had never been to Washington before I got elected to Congress,” he tells me. “I am a reluctant warrior, though I am a joyful warrior. I am thankful that it worked out the way that it has.”

Scott keeps a remarkably low profile for a Senator, but I wonder how much longer that will last.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Fish for flour? Barter is the new currency in collapsing Venezuela.

Julio Blanco, a 34-year-old motorcycle driver in Caracas, said he now allows trusted clients to make payments by bank transfer because there is simply not enough cash available.

“I prefer food as payment,” said Blanco, while waiting for customers at the poor west end of Caracas. “I do services for food in order to survive.”

In the hillside Caracas slum of La Vega, home to 124,000 people, Alfredo Silva offers a haircut for 1 million bolivars, about 30 cents at the black market exchange rate.

He accepts transfers or food but sometimes takes clients to a nearby butcher shop and asks them to buy him something worth the same as the haircut.

In Rio Chico, Marvin Guaramato arrives at the lagoon driving a car loaded with boxes of oil, pasta and corn flour, which is used to make a Venezuelan grilled pancake known as arepas.

The fishermen scramble to swap their catch in a brief and confused frenzy. One of them, Reinaldo Armas, was satisfied to have picked up products for family members in his village.

Still, sometimes he doesn’t manage to exchange his catch for anything, he says.

“Some days, I spend five hours without swapping anything and I have to take all that fish home,” he said.

Socialism — in his case literally — stinks.

TOM KNIGHTON: The Left Steps Up Its Infatuation With the Political ‘Wisdom’ of Kids. “On guns and immigration, the Left comically turns to children for answers.”

D. C. MCALLISTER: On the Eve of Independence Day, Students Are Giving the Finger to the United States.

NO. Evangeline Lilly Wants All-Female Avengers Lineup.

I’d ask what part of “Get woke, go broke” these people don’t understand, but it’s always the second part.

AMERICA IS GREAT AGAIN: Light beer becoming less popular as drinking habits continue to change in the U.S.

ROGER KIMBALL: As Trump Builds, the Resistance Shouts ‘Destroy!’

That doesn’t sound like a winning message.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Further Protests as Venezuela Begins Running Out of Water.

“Locals have been protesting since 3 am due to lack of water on the Charallave-Ocumare highway, and are now requesting the presence of the media,” wrote onlooker Rocely Romero in Twitter.

The last major water shortage in Venezuela was in February 2016, when authorities announced a weekend “maintenance” session designed to maintain sufficient water levels during a period of drought. An estimated three million in Caracas consequently went without water, where the average temperature at that time of year is 68F.

The lack of clean water is the latest in a string mass shortages experienced in Venezuela under the rule of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.

That the world’s most oil-rich nation has to import crude oil, and that a semi-tropical country can run out of water, should tell you everything you need to know about socialism.

DAVID HARSANYI: Hey, Democrats, The System Doesn’t Need To Be ’Fixed’ Every Time You Lose An Election. “Maybe it’s your agenda that’s broken.”

The real anxiety driving liberals is the reality of President Trump getting another Supreme Court justice, the kind of nominee any conservative president would likely have picked. This person will presumably help constrain progressive policies because many of those policies rely on coercion and unconstitutional intrusions into personal freedom. Maybe it’s not the system that’s broken, but rather rather the Left’s agenda.

The arrogance of the age — maybe every age — is that intellectuals believe, by default, that they’re smarter, more moral, and more evolved than those who came before them. We often hear the Left gripe about the antiquated nature of the Constitution. It was Klein, after all, who once claimed that the Constitution was confusing document because it is old.

We can disagree about the usefulness of Enlightenment ideas. But when Klein contends that the “chaotic, ugly realpolitik that followed Justice Antonin Scalia’s death” necessitates a “fix,” he is being transparently partisan. Nothing is more chaotic than altering the rules every time you experience a political defeat.

Cruel, but fair.

POT CONTROL: More evidence of the Fascist impulse from California.

BLUE CITY BLUES: SF’s appalling street life repels residents — now it’s driven away a convention.

“It’s the first time that we have had an out-and-out cancellation over the issue, and this is a group that has been coming here every three or four years since the 1980s,” said Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of S.F. Travel, the city’s convention bureau.

D’Alessandro declined to name the medical association, saying the bureau still hopes to bring the group back in the future.

As a rule, major conventions book their visits at least five years in advance. So when D’Alessandro and members of the hospitality industry hadn’t heard from the doctors about re-upping, they flew to the organization’s Chicago headquarters for a face-to-face meeting with its executive board.

And with good reason: The group’s annual five-day trade show draws 15,000 attendees and pumps about $40 million into the local economy.

“They said that they are committed to this year and to 2023, but nothing in between or nothing thereafter,” D’Alessandro said. “After that, they told us they are planning to go elsewhere — I believe it’s Los Angeles.”

Holding a medical convention in a city littered with needles and human excrement just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

THE NEW RULES: Video shows a woman confronting EPA administrator Scott Pruitt in a Washington, DC restaurant.

They continue to behave as though their new rules will never apply to them, but that simply isn’t so.

HMM: White House Says ‘Great Momentum’ on North Korea as Intel Reports Indicate Problems. “‘I made a deal with him. I shook hands with him. I really believe he means it,’ Trump said, adding it’s ‘possible’ things don’t work out.”

LOYALTY FOR SALE: Venezuela promotes 16,900 ‘loyal’ military personnel.

With inflation at 40,000% or so and foreign reserves rapidly shrinking, how long will they stay bought?

DISPATCHES FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY: Trump Country, it turns out, is more tolerant than the left.

Since President Trump’s election, journalists, political scientists and others from across the United States and around the world have visited our little southern Ohio town, population 6,600, to study the natives. Naturally, patronizing local eateries at breakfast or lunchtime is usually part of their itinerary.

Some have told me later that, during their interviews, they went out of their way to identify themselves as liberals who have little use for our president. To their credit, they wanted to be honest about who they were and what they were doing. They were sometimes treated with a degree of skepticism, but without fail, they say that people were polite and willing to talk to them — not to mention serve them breakfast or lunch.

We contrast this, of course, with the recent episodes involving Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, both of whom were essentially evicted from restaurants — Nielsen heckled away by customers, Sanders asked by the restaurant owner to leave — for the crime of Trump association, similar to a misdemeanor but quickly approaching felony status.

Nielsen was targeted by a liberal mob mentality that is no longer confined to college campus reactions to conservative speakers. The Sanders case is at least as disturbing, both for the precedent it sets as well as much of the media’s rather sympathetic portrayal of the restaurant owner who “stood by her principles.”

Read the whole thing, even though none of it comes as a surprise to anyone outside America’s parochial and mistrustful Blue enclaves.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Democratic Socialists of America Leaders Say ‘Communism Is Good.’

The “democratic” part of “democratic socialism” was never anything more than a ruse to fool the masses, to be disposed of once enough power was seized.

“I WAS DEVASTATED”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets.

He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new software, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he had come to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he started in 2009 to protect human rights across the digital landscape. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to a fast-approaching future. Sometime this November, he estimates, half the world’s population—close to 4 billion people—will be connected online, sharing everything from résumés to political views to DNA information. As billions more come online, they will feed trillions of additional bits of information into the Web, making it more powerful, more valuable, and potentially more dangerous than ever.

The idea is simple: re-decentralize the Web. Working with a small team of developers, he spends most of his time now on Solid, a platform designed to give individuals, rather than corporations, control of their own data. “There are people working in the lab trying to imagine how the Web could be different. How society on the Web could look different. What could happen if we give people privacy and we give people control of their data,” Berners-Lee told me. “We are building a whole eco-system.”

For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web.

Fascinating. I can’t wait for the big reveal.

TURNAROUND? Tesla Sets New Model 3 Target of 6,000 a Week. “The new target suggests the car maker expects no slowdown in its production pace after reaching its long-delayed goal of making 5,000 Model 3s per week.”

Impressive numbers:

The Silicon Valley auto maker on Monday also reaffirmed that it expects to have positive cash flow and post a profit in the third and fourth quarters. Keeping up the 5,000-a-week production pace—which was a long-delayed accomplishment—is key to Tesla meeting its cash-flow forecast.

Tesla on Monday reported how many cars it made in the final week of the second quarter: 5,031 Model 3 sedans, as well as 1,913 Model S sedans and Model X sport-utility vehicles.

The electric-vehicle maker has spent the past year struggling to meet production goals for the Model 3, twice missing the 5,000-a-week target for what is considered Tesla’s first mass-market offering. The most recent end-of-quarter goal put the company under intense scrutiny and raised questions about whether Chief Executive Elon Musk, while inspiring fans and exciting investors, could actually execute on the company’s plans.

Workers had already been celebrating their accomplishment Sunday, and Mr. Musk sent them a memo confirming the production goal had been reached.

“I think we just became a real car company,” Mr. Musk wrote in his celebratory memo.

Tesla has been in a race with the traditional automakers (and more than a few impatient Model 3 depositors) to transition from a boutique maker of luxury cars into a mass-production powerhouse — all before the old firms caught up on batteries or before the money ran out.

This week is a huge milestone.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: SCOTUS, Immigration and Much, Much More.

OH, THAT MURDEROUS GANG OF ILLEGALS: MS-13 is ‘taking over the school,’ one teen warned before she was killed.

The old minivan appeared near the school on a Tuesday morning, its Illinois plates the only thing out of place in the blue-collar suburbs of central Long Island. But as backpack-toting teenagers passed by on their way to Brentwood High, the van’s doors suddenly swung open.

Out sprang members of the violent street gang MS-13, armed with baseball bats.

They attacked three 16-year-old students they suspected of being rivals before driving off. When police spotted the van in the same neighborhood the following afternoon and surrounded it at gunpoint, the MS-13 members were in the midst of trying to abduct a fourth.

“We were going to take him somewhere private and beat him to death,” said Miguel Rivera, 20, according to a Suffolk County indictment.

The Dec. 6 arrests of Rivera and four others thwarted what police say would have been the sixth murder of a Brentwood High School student by MS-13 in less than two years.

Read the whole thing — even though it comes from the Washington Post, which had previously assured me that publicly worrying about MS-13 was a racist dog whistle.

HUH: Nevada Traffic Deaths Plunge 10% Following Marijuana Legalization.

Correlation is not causation of course, but this report would seem to counter at least one anti-legalization worry.

BLUE ON BLUE: Starbucks Urged to Pay for Police Training, Change Hiring Practices.

The report was released Monday by Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Heather McGhee, distinguished senior fellow of the think tank Demos.

The pair came on as advisers to Starbucks after an incident in April when a store manager in Philadelphia called the police after two black men who hadn’t purchased anything didn’t leave the store when asked.

Ms. Ifill and Ms. McGhee urged Starbucks to revamp how it hires, trains and promotes staff, including evaluating managers on goals around “cultural competency and management of diverse teams.”

“Bluntly, some managers and even corporate leadership may not have a future with the company under the new standards,” they wrote.

“Cultural competency” sounds like HR’s revenge for all the awful things everybody else says behind their backs.

MAYBE THIS WILL TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: College student sues woman for $6million claiming her false rape accusation at a frat party has destroyed his life.

Catherine Reddington, 22, has claimed repeatedly via social media that Alex Goldman raped her following a party in April last year at Syracuse University’s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity in upstate New York.

She informed police and the university of the rape accusations in the days after the party and has taken to social media several times in the past month to reveal the details of her alleged assault.

Goldman, also 22, was expelled from Syracuse University after the claims surfaced and more recently was fired from his summer internship with an engineering firm when his accuser informed them of the allegations.

He was never arrested or charged over the incident.

‘During the early hours of April 23, 2017 I was raped and sodomized. I woke up in Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity in Alex Goldman’s bed confused, bloody, bruised, with ripped clothing and splinter,’ Reddington wrote on Facebook on June 4.

‘Alex Goldman is a rapist.’

A police investigation into the allegations found no evidence that Reddington had been raped or even had a sexual encounter with Goldman that night.

The investigation, which involved a medical exam and rape kit within 26 hours of the alleged incident, found Reddington had no internal cuts or abrasions in her vagina and that there was no traces of Goldman’s DNA.

Six million dollars would be nice, but where does Goldman go to get his reputation back?

GOOD ADVICE. Israel To US: Don’t Sell F-35s To Turkey. “Until the roll-out ceremony of the first Turkish F-35 last week, many in the Israeli defense establishment were sure that Washington would stop the sale. Now that it’s unclear if the US will act, official Israeli sources are speaking out: ‘Turkey is a member of NATO on paper only, and now cooperates with countries that are against the U.S., not only in words. This delivery is something that Israel cannot understand’.”

Me either.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Stanford U. Teaches ‘Male Privilege’ With Its ‘Men and Masculinities Project.’ “We acknowledge that male identity is a social privilege, and the aim for this project is to provide the education and support needed to better the actions of the male community rather than marginalize others.”

We can’t have men feeling good about themselves when their are so many “aggrieved” people who prefer misery for themselves and others.