ROGER KIMBALL: History’s Hard Lessons and America’s New Resolve.

Years back, Teacher’s Scotch ran a clever ad campaign on city buses. “In life, experience is the great teacher,” the ads read, “in Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.” Perhaps the second assertion is true; I’ll find out one of these days. But the first is certainly not true. Eisenhower hoped it might be, but here in London, anti-Semitism is alive and well, despite what Laplace once described as expériences nombreuses et funestes.

Of course, anti-Semitism is alive and well in the United States, too. But I suspect there is this difference. In the United States, virulent anti-Semitism is largely an elite phenomenon. It thrives in the Petri dishes of swank colleges and universities and a handful of cities. That’s where you see the Palestinian flags and shouts of “globalize the intifada.” (It is also, I am happy to say, where the Trump administration’s battle against anti-Semitism has enjoyed its most conspicuous victories.)

It’s my sense that in the U.K., the phenomenon is more general. “Why is that?” I asked an English friend. “Because the invasion of Britain by Muslims has proceeded much further here than in the U.S.” That was when Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints came up.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Britain: ‘Shut Up,’ the Government Explained.

An elite team of police officers is to monitor social media for anti-migrant sentiment amid fears of summer riots.

Detectives will be drawn from forces across the country to take part in a new investigations unit that will flag up early signs of potential civil unrest.

The division, assembled by the Home Office, will aim to “maximise social media intelligence” gathering after police forces were criticised over their response to last year’s riots.

It comes amid growing concern that Britain is facing another summer of disorder, as protests outside asylum hotels spread.

On Saturday, crowds gathered in towns and cities including Norwich, Leeds and Bournemouth to demand action, with more protests planned for Sunday.

The Conservative Party’s shadow home secretary has criticized the formation of this “elite” team of eavesdroppers, as well he might, but until the Tories renounce their own Online Safety Act and their approach to online discourse during the pandemic, their credibility in this area is . . .  limited. The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK can be attributed to a number of causes, but the Tories’ attitude to free speech was one of them.

Pass the Juche on the left-hand side:

JOSH HAMMER: Grading the Second Trump Presidency, Six Months In.

Over the course of four years’ banishment to America’s political wilderness while subjected to both a would-be assassin’s bullets and the humiliating and unprecedented spectacle of criminal prosecution by his political opponents, Donald Trump seems to have intuited a key life lesson: Time is of the essence. Carpe diem, seize the day. And so it has been. Like a thoroughbred bursting out of the Kentucky Derby starting gate, the second Trump administration has been racing full speed ahead ever since Trump was inaugurated once again as president of the United States. If the Derby is the “fastest two minutes in sports,” then this has surely been the fastest six months in modern presidential history.

Awareness of life’s ticking clock is important for any elected official, but it is particularly important for Trump. During his first term in office, much of Trump’s agenda was derailed or sidetracked by forces beyond his direct control: an unexpected John McCain thumbs-down on the Obamacare repeal vote, “nationwide injunction”-happy lower-court judges, subversive administrative state actors, a bogus special counsel probe on Russian election interference, the COVID-19 pandemic, extraordinary Big Tech censorship and more. Based on these experiences and sobered from those long interregnum years, Trump adjusted his game plan this time around. And it shows.

Here, then, is a six-month Trump administration report card.

Faster, please:

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE:

GUESS I WON’T BE WATCHING IT:

OPEN THREAD: Do it on the weekend/and it’ll beeee allll right.

READER BOOK PLUG: Reader Jamie Wilson sends a link to 1775 by Keith Korman. “It’s a relatively gritty little novel focused on the events in Boston around Paul Revere’s ride and the Shot Heard ‘Round the World. It seems particularly apropos in our leadup to the sesquicentennial. And Adam Bellow was kind enough to write a marketing blurb for it, which is included on both our back cover and in the Amazon description.”

THEY SHOW YOU WHAT THEY REALLY CARE ABOUT:

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And it’s not prepubescent English girls being raped by foreigners.

SO MANY OF OUR INSTITUTIONS CARE MORE ABOUT DIVERSITY THAN ABOUT DOING THEIR ACTUAL JOBS: Leading Medical Journals Care More About DEI Than Major Diseases. “These findings reflect a broader leftward shift in medical research—one that has contributed to the scientific establishment’s erosion of rigor and objectivity. This shift threatens the foundations of the profession, the integrity of research, and the quality of medical education.”

Related: You had one job, CDC.

WHEN THE MADNESS HAS PASSED:

THE NEW LOYALTY OATHS: Diversity Statements and the First Amendment. “Policies that merely serve to reinforce political orthodoxies on college campuses are constitutionally unjustifiable. Taking such principles seriously casts a substantial constitutional shadow over the practice of using diversity statements to exclude from state university faculties individuals with disfavored beliefs and opinions about matters of political and social controversy.”