"This summer, I've had the chance to spend a few weeks on the road, exploring the vast, forgotten America west of the Acela corridor and east of Hollywood. In June, I drove from Brooklyn to Arkansas and back, and just last week coursed through the whole continent, landing at a beach bar in Venice Beach. One thing I noticed everywhere I went, in the bars and restaurants I haunted along the way, was a level of racial harmony that belies the notion of our nation as a hotbed of racism.

"The people I met along the way, and there were a lot of them, were white, black, brown, Asian, and Native American, and they weren't self-segregated within the establishments I found. Much the opposite: they were mixing, mingling, laughing, and drinking together without even a hint of racial tension.

"So how could this be in a nation that is purportedly teeming with racial strife? Was I to believe my lying eyes and the convivial conversations I witnessed and engaged in? Or was I to believe that somewhere underneath all of this good-spirited community life lies a bedrock of inescapable racism?

"What becomes clear very quickly is that for Americans who do not choose to center their sense of self on their demographic identities, a whole host of other interests and qualities animate their social behavior. Whether they were college football fans in a Barstow hotel bar, truckers sitting out front of a Greenville, Illinois, motel smoking and sharing beer and tales from the road, or more upscale denizens of a fancy Tulsa wine bar sniffing and swishing a new rose, nobody seemed to care much about skin color."

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"I have no idea what CNN will have to declare as the value for Donald Trump's campaign disclosure report, but it will have to be in the millions. Last night, the network put all the Democrats on a stage to let a group of hippies, eccentrics, and others ask questions about the climate and environment. ...

"The whole thing shows what Democrats would do if left to their own devices -- destroy the U.S., the energy sector, and the economy. ...

"No sane person could see either the Democrats or their questioners last night and think letting them take control of the government is in the best interest of this country.

"CNN did a wonderful job exposing these people and getting them on the record in a way that will undoubtedly help the President in 2020."

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"The so-called assault rifles that make up a large part of the dealers' inventories -- because they are the most popular sporting firearms in the United States, owned by millions and millions of Americans -- are used in crime so rarely that the FBI doesn't even bother keeping statistics on them. Yes, they are sometimes used in the theatrical public shootings that sometimes command our national attention -- which is what these acts of theater are intended to do -- but those acts constitute a vanishingly small portion of violent crime in the United States. All 'long guns' together -- all rifles, shotguns, etc. -- account for about 3 percent of murder weapons. For perspective: People who are beaten to death with the bare hands of their assailants are about double that percentage of all murder victims.

"What's missing is ordinary, unglamorous, labor-intensive law-enforcement and public-health work -- i.e., the one thing no one employed by government will seriously contemplate and no politician answering to government workers and their unions will seriously consider. Instead: We complain about 'straw buyers' but rarely prosecute them; some federal prosecutors refuse as a matter of publicly stated policy to take a straw-buyer case unless it is part of a larger (sexier) organized-crime investigation. Chicago manages to convict fewer than one in five of those arrested on weapons charges. A New York Times investigation found that about 90 percent of the killers identified in New York murder cases had prior criminal histories, often histories of violent crime. (About 70 percent of New York's homicide victims also had prior criminal arrests.) On and on it goes: Ordinary crime and ordinary criminals, ordinary bureaucratic failure, and the occasional act of armed histrionics to keep the headlines churning. ...

"The failings of our prosecutorial, probation, parole, and mental-health systems are fundamental and in some cases catastrophic. In spite of that, the U.S. homicide rate today is about what it was in the Eisenhower years. There is not very much cause for panic, and there is not very much cause for a panicked crackdown on the legal sale of firearms through firearms dealers. But demagogues benefit from panic."

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"[T]here is no doubt that Comey's leak of sensitive law enforcement material was far more serious, and far more consequential, than his leak of classified information. That was the inspector general's focus when he wrote that 'by not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees -- and the many thousands more former FBI employees -- who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information.' Comey's rationale -- that he was compelled to leak sensitive law enforcement information because he loved his country and loved the FBI -- was not sufficient, the inspector general said. 'Comey's closest advisers used the words "surprised," "stunned," "shocked," and "disappointment" to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done,' the report noted.

"Surprised, stunned, shocked. Comey's FBI colleagues did not utter those words because they heard Comey had been exonerated. They uttered them when they heard the full extent of what Comey did, and that included leaking classified information."

"If you want to know why so many Americans believe there's a 'deep state' working against their interests, look no further than men like Comey. We have growing evidence that senior officials in the FBI and CIA acted as partisan opponents of the duly elected president, abetting and inciting partisan investigations.

"Americans will continue to lose trust in institutions, if leaders keep misappropriating power for political purposes. Comey claimed he leaked his memos because they were of 'incredible importance to the Nation, as a whole,' which is what everyone who has ever pursued arbitrary and capricious power says to rationalize their abuse."

"Thousands of would-be illegal immigrants are being returned to await asylum hearings in Mexico as part of a program the Trump administration has credited with curbing the recent wave of family migration at the southwestern border.

"The Migrant Protection Protocols - more colloquially known as the 'Remain in Mexico' policy - are regulations issued by former secretary of homeland security Kirstjen Nielsen in December 2018. Under the MPP, a subset of individuals who claim to be seeking asylum after being apprehended at the border now must await the results of their immigration court hearings in Mexico, rather than being detained - or, more often, released on their own recognizance - in the United States. ...

"How effective have the MPP regulations actually been? New data released Monday by the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) show that the program has taken off in recent months. Nearly 12,000 people were returned to Mexico in July, compared with about 5,000 in May, and just 15 at the start of the year. ...

"Notably, the 'Remain in Mexico' policy does not work by stopping individuals before they enter at the southwestern border, only returning them back once they cross. This means that to the extent the policy is effective, the MPP reduces immigration by deterring would-be crossers, who may not attempt to enter because they know they are less likely to be able to stay in the country."

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"The New York Times, an organization devoted to gathering and publishing information, doesn't want others to gather or publish information inconvenient to it.

"A group of Trump-supporting operatives has been finding and archiving old social media postings of Times employees and other journalists for use in the ongoing brawl between the president and the press.

"There's no indication that this is dumpster-diving rather than an effort to scour readily available sources for stupid, embarrassing or offensive things that journalists have said publicly under their own power. ...

"It isn't clear what makes this different from what happens in our public life . . . every . . . single . . . day. Head-hunting based on past offenses, real and imagined, is the norm, indeed one of the Left's favored forms of ideological combat. ...

"The hounding of conservatives isn't considered beyond the pale; it's considered sport. Much of the Left would be rendered practically mute if it weren't braying for people to be fired."

"For a party invested so heavily in marketing government as the solution to every problem, the Democrats have been strangely reluctant to take advantage of opportunities to build trust in the institutions of government. But since Democrats won control of the House, government oversight has virtually gone into hibernation.

"Instead of prosecuting waste, fraud and abuse within the world's largest bureaucracy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has transformed congressional oversight from a government watchdog to the opposition research arm of the Democrat National Committee. It happened fast.

"As I explain in my upcoming book, 'Power Grab,' one of Pelosi's first moves when the she took the gavel was to rename the Oversight & Government Reform Committee to just the Oversight & Reform Committee. She literally took the government out of government reform. Suddenly the imperative to root out government waste, fraud and abuse was lost in the political goal to root out a sitting president and any business that supports his agenda.

"The new focus of the oversight role is twofold: to provide political advantage for the 2020 election cycle and to expand oversight reach deep into the private sector."

"Joe Biden has a major problem. Even among voters who support him, there is a complete lack of enthusiasm. People like him and everyone knows his name. Good old Joe has been around Washington forever and by virtue of that, people appear to trust him more than say a Kamala Harris or a Corey Booker. But try as he might, he cannot seem to energize his base.

"Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, recently told the New York Times, 'I did not meet one Biden voter who was in any way, shape or form excited about voting for Biden.'

"Murray added that, 'They feel that they have to vote for Joe Biden as the centrist candidate, to keep somebody from the left who they feel is unelectable from getting the nomination.'"

"Federal arrests of non-citizens has increased exponentially over the past two decades, and account for the majority of all federal arrests, data released by the Justice Department revealed.

"Non-citizens made up 64% of all federal arrests in 2018 despite making up 7% of the U.S. population, according to Justice Department data released Thursday and reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. Between 1998 and 2018, federal arrests of non-citizens grew by 234%, while federal arrests of U.S. citizens climbed 10%."

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