CHINA'S DRACONIAN new national security law for Hong Kong took effect on July 1. The arrests began at once.

Police in riot gear swarmed the Causeway Bay shopping district, firing pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets into a crowd of Hong Kong residents protesting the legislation. They deployed water cannons to disperse the marchers and drown out their chants. At least 370 people were arrested, including a 15-year-old girl. Under the new law, anyone convicted of "acts of secession, subversion of state power, terrorist activities, and collusion with foreign or external forces" — i.e., of openly dissenting from China's totalitarian control — faces a potential maximum sentence of life in prison.

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THE SUPREME COURT ruled unanimously this week that presidential electors can be compelled to back their states' popular vote winner in the Electoral College — and that states can punish "faithless electors" who refuse to do so. The justices' decision means that the 2020 presidential election will be decided the way American presidential elections are always decided. Democratic elections will take place within each state; then those states will vote for president via the Electoral College.

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THE GALLUP POLL has been measuring public opinion on the subject of immigration since 1965, regularly asking respondents whether the flow of immigrants to the United States should "be kept at its present level, increased, or decreased." Over the years the numbers have fluctuated greatly, but one finding has never changed: The percentage wanting less immigration always exceeded the percentage wanting more immigration.

Until this month.

On July 1, Gallup reported that for the first time, by a ratio of 34 percent to 28 percent, the share of Americans who favor more immigration surpassed that of those who want immigration reduced. (Another 36 percent support keeping immigration at its current level.)

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UNTIL RECENTLY it would never have occurred to me that Donald Trump and Ted Kennedy had anything in common, at least not when it came to politics. That changed this month, when Trump was asked in a pair of interviews what he would do with a second term as president, and both times delivered a cringe-inducingly incoherent non-answer. It evoked memories of Kennedy's bewildered, disjointed reply to CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd when he was asked, in the fall of 1979, why he wanted to be president — a reply that signaled his candidacy was doomed before it even started.

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THE RACIAL JACOBINS haven't eased up in their post-George Floyd ferocity; if anything they are growing more indiscriminate in their determination to enforce political conformity and to punish anything they regard as thoughtcrime. Their targets haven't been limited to statues of American heroes, editors of prominent newspapers, or professors at leading universities. The toll of those who have been defamed, fired, or otherwise "cancelled" now includes an alarming number of people who have no power or public platform, who are not celebrities, and who in many cases did nothing wrong.

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