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Michelle Goldberg on the rebirth of the Comstock Act: Anthony Comstock, the mutton-chopped anti-vice crusader for whom the Comstock Act is named, is back from the dead. Comstock died in 1915, and the Comstock Act, the notorious anti-obscenity law used to indict the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, ban books by D.H. Lawrence and arrest people by the thousands, turned 150 last month. Had this anniversary fallen five or 10 years ago, it barely would have been worth noting, except perhaps to marvel at how far we’d come from an era when a fanatical censor like Comstock wielded national political power. “The Comstock Act represented, in its day, the pinnacle of Victorian prudery, the high-water mark of a strict and rigid formal code,” wrote the law professors Joanna Grossman and Lawrence Friedman. Until very recently, it seemed a relic. Yet suddenly, the prurient sanctimony that George Bernard Shaw called “Comstockery” is running rampant in America. As if inspired by Comstock’s horror of “literary poison” and “evil reading,” states are outdoing one another in draconian censorship.

Less than 24 hours after a jury found an Army sergeant guilty of shooting and killing a protester, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he would pardon the convicted killer as soon as a request “hits my desk” This is what he did: The killer posted on Facebook that he might “kill a few people on my way to work,” got in his car, ran a red light, drove directly into a Black Lives Matter protest, and shot and killed a protester because he felt “threatened.” Both parties were openly carrying, as is legal in Texas. So when this racist consciously drove into the protest he was confronted by a man with a gun and he shot him, just as he clearly planned to do. Perry’s defense team argued that he acted in self-defense, but prosecutors contended that Perry instigated what happened. They highlighted a series of social media posts and Facebook messages in which Perry made statements that they said indicated his state of mind, such as he might “kill a few people on my way to work.

Can you believe it? The January 6th “choir” made a bunch of money and a grifter has stolen it. Or, at least that’s what they say…

These people … House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has teased to television audiences over the past month that four different people have appeared before committee investigators to provide information regarding his inquiry into whether President Biden and members of his family were involved in an influence-peddling scheme. On Fox News in March, Comer said he had even met with some of the “four individuals” personally, and in an interview with Breitbart News this week, he characterized the four individuals as “whistleblowers.” But Comer’s media tour has confounded his Democratic counterparts on the committee. After inquiring with Comer’s staff about the reported new witnesses, they were assured that Comer’s statements “in fact referred only to two individuals” and “no new witness information … had actually been provided,” according to a letter sent by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (Md.), to Comer on Thursday and obtained by The Washington Post.

He has excellent judgment… Former President Donald J. Trump recently told aides to hire Laura Loomer, a far-right and anti-Muslim activist with a history of expressing bigoted views, for a campaign role, according to four people familiar with the plans. Mr. Trump met with Ms. Loomer recently and directed advisers to give her a role in support of his candidacy, two of the people familiar with the move said. On Tuesday, after Mr. Trump’s arraignment in Manhattan, Ms. Loomer attended the former president’s speech at Mar-a-Lago, his resort and residence in Palm Beach, Fla. Some of Mr. Trump’s aides were said to have concerns that such a hire would cause a backlash, given her history of inflammatory statements and her embrace of the Republican Party’s fringes. That proved to be correct: The New York Times’s report on the potential hire ignited a firestorm among some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal conservative supporters, and by late Friday, a high-ranking campaign official said Ms. Loomer was no longer going to be hired. Reached by phone on Friday morning, Ms.

Mandrake, have you ever hear of Central Bank Digital Currency? That CRT-killin’ Mouse-foe, Florida Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke, decided he was not fringy enough to appeal to the QAnon-fueled, pedophile-fightin’, MAGA primary voter. He’s rooted out another Deep State enemy with which to scare the bejeezus out of them. It got lost in the Trump indictment fallout this week until the other day. Catherine Rampell noticed it, though: In a speech this past weekend in Pennsylvania, DeSantis suggested that the real reason to fear the Fed is that central bankers are “colluding” with other (unnamed, presumably evil) communist-style elites to block your ability to buy gasoline and guns. “They want the Fed to control a digital dollar,” he said. “Guess what’ll happen? They’re going to try to impose an ESG agenda through that. You go and use too much gas, they’re going to stop it. They’re not going to honor the transaction because you’ve already bought more than what they think. You wanna go buy a rifle, they’re going to say no, you have too many, too many of those, you can’t do it.

Notice a trend? Not that Real MAGAs™ vote their pocketbooks, but if they did Simon Rosenberg would provide, you know, facts: “With Democrats Things Get Better.” (BTW: Elon’s platform continues to decay. Twitter changes have disabled Thread Reader’s functioning. Who knows for how long?) Remind your MAGA relatives.

Wait. What??? When Republican megadonor Harlan Crow isn’t lavishing Justice Clarence Thomas with free trips on his private plane and yacht (in possible violation of Supreme Court ethics rules), he lives a quiet life in Dallas among his historical collections. These collections include Hitler artifacts—two of his paintings of European cityscapes, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, and assorted Nazi memorabilia—plus a garden full of statues of the 20th century’s worst despots. Crow, the billionaire heir to a real estate fortune, has said that he’s filled his property with these mementoes because he hates communism and fascism. Nonetheless, his collections caused an uproar back in 2015 when Marco Rubio attended a fundraiser at Crow’s house on the eve of Yom Kippur. Rubio’s critics thought the timing was inappropriate given, you know, the Hitler stuff.  “I still can’t get over the collection of Nazi memorabilia,” says one person who attended an event at Crow’s home a few years ago and asked to remain anonymous.