Author's note: The essay below was accepted on September 11 for publication by the opinion editor of Newsweek, and after some changes by the editors not reproduced here, was published on the morning of September 14, by 7:00 a.m. or a little after. Two hours later it was taken down by the editor-in-chief, Nancy Cooper, with no explanation on the publication's website.

I was told that Newsweek would like to publish it again — for keeps this time! — a week later, but only when a piece commissioned from the opposing viewpoint could appear alongside it, in a feature called "The Debate." Would the author of that piece be able to have a look at mine? There was no reason to think not, since my essay was saved on the "Wayback Machine." But would I see the counterpoint essay before publication and be able to respond with slight revisions of my own? I was given no assurance of that.

Meanwhile a lively two-hour conversation on Twitter about my essay, with readers both pro and con, had turned into a conversation about where the article had gone. Critics, some of whom now couldn't read it, assumed that the essay was bad or intolerable in some way. If I agreed to Newsweek's terms for its reappearance, this impression would be reinforced. As many conservatives know, their views must always be "balanced" and "contextualized" in conjunction with liberal views in the mainstream media — but liberals' opinions are never treated that way.

It's time to unmask the Revolution.

Michael Anton's new article "The Coming Coup?" went viral almost as soon as we posted it a week ago today. This is not simply because figures like Lara Logan, Mollie Hemingway, Newt Gingrich, Dan Bongino, and the editors of the New York Post took note. It spread because concerned citizens began sharing it throughout the nation. We could tell it was especially effective because so many in the mainstream media maintained studious radio silence.

But hyperventilating ruling-class supporters of the Biden/BLM/Antifa coalition did predictably lash out. The epitome of these reactions is an article in New York magazine's Intelligencer, by political columnist Ed Kilgore, entitled "Trump Backers Make Case for Stealing Election, Before Biden Gets the Chance."

The United Kingdom may be heading for another nationwide lockdown, Wales Health Minister Vaughan Gething has said, as the number of new coronavirus cases across the nation jumped by almost two times since late August.

Unless the country adheres to social distancing rules to "recover some ground" in the fight against Covid-19, the authorities would be forced to impose another lockdown, Gething told BBC Radio Wales.

"We have a number of weeks to be able to get to a position where we can recover some of the ground with a return to effective social distancing...or we will be forced into greater local lockdowns and the potential for another national lockdown."

Are handshakes oh so slightly unhygienic? Of course, they are. That is the point!

That is why a handshake is the greeting of equals. A sign not just of respect, but of a measure of trust, and a sign of equality that is the prerequisite to exploring mutual interest.

A handshake established the participants as equal, or as equal enough that they can engage in mutual enterprise, or conspiracy for that matter.

It is not despite its faint germ-sharing quality that a handshake rose to become *the* greeting of the modern world, but because of it.

Our ancestors understood at an innate level that someone who thinks himself too pure, or too contaminated to grasp your hand could not be trusted.

The willingness to engage in a little germ-sharing was precisely what was required to establish the other was neither too alien nor too warped to work with.

Four individuals — two in Washington, one in Oregon, and another in California — have been arrested for arson as firefighters battle dozens of blazes across the West Coast. One of the arrestees is reportedly a "regular attendee" of anti-police rallies in Seattle.

Michael Jarrod Bakkela, 41, has been accused of arson, partially sparking the massive Almeda fire, according to the Oregon State Fire Marshal's Office. Oregon Live reported that he has been arrested on "two counts of arson, 15 counts of criminal mischief and 14 counts of reckless endangerment":

The Jackson County Sheriff's Office said in a news release Friday afternoon that on Tuesday evening, a resident of Phoenix saw a person, later identified as Bakkela, lighting a fire behind their house on Quail Lane. Because there was an impending blaze, the residents who saw him set the fire had to flee their home.

(...)

Bakkela was arrested and initially lodged in the Jackson County Jail on Tuesday on a charge of possession of methamphetamine. He remains in jail on the arson and criminal mischief charges.

When a child at school tested positive for Covid, one mother did not foresee the emotional toll the incident would have on her son

The text message arrived at 9.30am last Friday: "A child in the class has tested positive for Covid-19. Please come and collect your own child immediately."

Six days into the start of term, it was the news every parent at the North London primary school had been dreading. But one of them, a mother-of-four whose son was among those sent home when his Year Four "bubble" shut down, did not foresee the emotional toll the incident would take on him.

"He had been sitting next to the infected child on Monday and Tuesday, until the school sent [the child] home coughing. My son was sobbing when he came out of school, and saying 'you're all going to die because I'm going to catch coronavirus and pass it to you and daddy, and it will all be my fault!'

A virologist who fled China after studying the early outbreak of COVID-19 has published a new report claiming the coronavirus likely came from a lab.

Doctor Li-Meng Yan, a scientist who studied some of the available data on COVID-19 has published her claims on Zenodo, an open access digital platform. She wrote that she believed COVID-19 could have been "conveniently created" within a lab setting over a period of just six months, and "SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus".

Early reports of the origin of the coronavirus, or "spillover event", were that the virus jumped from animal to human within a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan sometime in late 2019.

The head of the Police Federation warns of the "real risk" of people organising large gatherings ahead of stricter COVID-19 rules.

A teenager has been fined £10,000 after hosting 50 people at his home - as a senior police figure warned the public against having a "party weekend" before stricter coronavirus restrictions come into force.

Nottinghamshire Police said it had issued the hefty fine to a "reckless" 19-year-old man who staged the house party at his home in Lenton on Friday evening.

Forces have the power to fine people £10,000 for organising illegal gatherings of more than 30 people, with stricter rules banning groups of more than six people set to be introduced from Monday.

As of right now, a full 88 percent of critics approve of Cuties, Netflix's piece of soft-core child pornography, while only three percent of the audience agree.

That's not a typo.

Three percent.

Over the years, I've seen some wide gulfs between audience and critic at Rotten Tomatoes, but that probably takes the cake and the pie and the whole enchilada.

Keep in mind, Rotten Tomatoes has worked hard to game these scores to protect its Hollywood masters, and still it's 88 to three.

"Every one of these houses, I can tell you the people that has died," Susie Worley-Jenkins told me as she nosed her pickup down the steep ravine into her hometown. "A woman right there, she died, her dad died, her mom died. All with cancer."

Minden, West Virginia, is in a small holler — hollow, to non-Appalachians — and 40 years ago it was home to about 1,200 people. Today it's home to 250. There are around 25 homes on the main road into town, mostly low-slung or trailers, and we drove slowly so Worley-Jenkins had time to recount the dead.

"This woman here, she died of cancer. Her son's right there now, he's dying with bone cancer. And the woman there died of cancer. This guy and his wife both died with cancer; he bought this to fix it up. He was our sheriff."

Minden was born a coal town. Five decades ago, the Shaffer Equipment Company, which serviced the local coal industry, dumped its transformers into the abandoned mines above town. The machines were laced with extremely toxic industrial chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as probable human carcinogens.