MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Even the left is now flagging the gross bias at America’s universities.

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX eyes tower catch for next Starship after auspicious end to 13th flight.

UGH: Drug-Resistant Bacteria May Be Jumping Between Pets And Humans, Scientists Warn.

I DON’T TRUST ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS: One Common Sweetener May Increase Stroke Risk by Damaging The Brain’s Protective Barrier.

THOSE THINGS HAVE MOSTLY BEEN OVERSOLD, I THINK, BUT OKAY: THC-CBD Treatment Dramatically Reduces Agitation in Dementia Trial.

FLASHBACK: Jane Austen’s Fight Club.

THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION: The Benadryl Challenge Isn’t Going Away — Here’s How Public Health Officials Are Trying To Stop This Deadly Viral Trend.

GOOD: Trump Asks Supreme Court to Allow Order Restricting Mail Voting: The Trump administration asks justices to intervene after an appeals court blocked key parts of a mail-in voting executive order.

OUT: MUSCLE CAR. IN: MUSCLE TRUCK: 2026 Roush Nitemare First Test: The 705-HP Ford F-150 That Drives Like a Muscle Car.

“COMMON SENSE GUN CONTROL” MEANS HITTING YOUR TARGET: Sorry, Gun-Grabbers, We’ve All Seen Where Those ‘Common Sense’ Proposals Lead.

SPACE: A Spacecraft Skimmed 2,800 Miles From Mars, And Captured This Breathtaking, Trippy Timelapse.

UNWANTED IMMIGRANTS ARE A GLOBAL PHENOMENON: African snails overrun cardamom fields in India’s Kerala, spreading through Bison VALLEY.

I TAKE IT: I Took Creatine Every Day for 90 Days — Here’s What Actually Happened.

MEH, DENTISTS NEVER SCARED ME: 73% of Americans fear the dentist — a periodontist said it’s hurting them in ways most don’t expect.

STATE SECESSION:

33 counties in Illinois have already voted to separate themselves from Illinois

7 more counties just approved to add the referendum onto the ballot

JB Pritzker and Brandon Johnson are total failures!

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 26, 2026

See my paper from a decade ago on the growth of state secession movements, including Illinois’.

SALLY QUINN and the Establishment Blues. “Ms. Quinn’s column epitomizes that sense of Washington’s permanent power brokers that they are somehow, in their world of power elites, deserving of their place and have a right to be running the rest of the country and telling everybody else what to do. Whether the rest of the country likes it or not. . . . Make no mistake. The real source of Ms. Quinn’s resentment and Establishment blues is nothing more or less than one example of the resentment of Washington insiders at the arrival in the capital of America’s outlanders.”

DOG BITES MAN: Left-wing activist turns out to be professor.

APPARENTLY STILL THINKING IT’S 2020: Mount Holyoke mandates DEI training, ‘anti-racist plans’ for official student group recognition.

“A VAN DROVE INTO A CROWD.” The BBC’s Passive Voice. Technically, that’s actually active voice, but I take the point. But a more accurate passive voice would be “A van was driven into a crowd by a Muslim immigrant with a long history of crime, who probably should have been executed, or at least imprisoned for a long time, before this point.”

SIR ISAAC NEWTON SMILES: Joel Kotkin: Scientists who believe in God are challenging the expert atheist establishment. Or Werner Heisenberg, who (allegedly) said, “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

As I’ve suggested before, all you have to do to sell creation science to intellectuals is call it simulation theory.

I NEVER WANTED TO BE A DEAN: Law School Dean Tenure Shrinks to 2.8 Years Due to Financial Constraints and Strained Relationships With University Administration.

It’s not a great job. I was recruited to apply for a deanship a few years ago. I had always said I didn’t want it, but it was a school where I had quite a few friends, and it looked attractive. I did some deep introspection and concluded that I didn’t want to be a dean even in an attractive setting. As it turns out, I dodged a bullet, since I would have come in just in time for Covid and Black Lives Matter, but I wouldn’t have been happy regardless.

DON SURBER: Journalism 2026: Any time President Trump gives a speech, it must be described as rambling. And/or “dark.”

LEFTIST WHITE WOMEN ARE A DEADLY DANGER TO CIVILIZATION:

She has been programmed to blame only straight, White men for everything, so she follows her programming like a robot

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2026

ICYMI: RAND PAUL RELEASES DOCUMENTS ON INTERCEPTED COVID RESEARCH MATERIALS:

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has released another batch of documents related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The latest records show that U.S. officials intercepted undeclared biological materials tied to a U.S.–China coronavirus research network as early as 2018, likely in an attempt to avoid international tensions and regulatory scrutiny, Paul said.

The documents, which include a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report, primarily focus on a network centered around University of Minnesota virologist Fang Li.

The released documents also include pages from “Tony’s Diary:”

Privately, in his diaries, Doctor Fauci admitted he no longer believed the wet market was the origin of covid. A week later, he convenes a call with 12 scientists, and only two of them think it's definitely animal spillover.

Publicly, he comes out against lab leak and presses… https://t.co/OUc88vmIqv

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) July 26, 2026

As Jim Geraghty writes, “For the entirety of 2020 and long after, the ‘it started in a wet market’ view was the respectable one. Believing that somebody at the Wuhan Institute of Virology hadn’t been careful one day and had gotten accidentally infected with a virus that had gained a function or two during its time in the lab made you a crazy conspiracy theorist. In fact, the lab leak theory was evidence of your racism. And now — in July 2026! — we learn that Fauci himself had dismissed the wet market as a potential source at the end of January 2020.”

Then there’s an incredible juxtaposition by Fauci of new deaths and new WaPo profiles:

Fauci's diary entry for May 21, 2020 is one of the most grotesque documents you will ever read. It opens with the mounting Covid death toll and people dying across the country, then abruptly pivots into an extended exercise in self-congratulation about his newfound fame. How was… pic.twitter.com/IMpCWerfTR

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) July 25, 2026

Alyssa Farah, now an employee of ABC News, makes an appearance in “Tony’s Diary:”

Apparently while working at the White House, Alyssa was moonlighting as guest booker for CNN: pic.twitter.com/XHjq1inCXz

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 26, 2026

(Originally posted yesterday, by Ed, but too important to risk losing it in the weekend.)