From the right: Kirsten Gillibrand’s Latest Flip-Flop

Yet again, observes Becket Adams at the Washington Examiner, New York’s Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has proven that the only consistent thing about her “is that she is consistent about nothing.” Her latest about-face: She didn’t really mean it when she jumped on board the left’s “Abolish ICE” bandwagon. She now says the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency should simply be given “a new name and a new directive.” In other words, a makeover. Yet back in June, asked about Democratic calls to abolish ICE entirely, she replied: “Well, I agree with it,” suggesting we should “get rid of it, start over, reimagine it.” In July, she declared flatly, “I think we should get rid of ICE.” When, asks Adams, “will the media stop being so unfair” to poor Gillibrand?

Security desk: Mnuchin’s ‘Resistance’ to US Iran Policy

The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reports that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is “resisting” President Trump’s maximum-pressure strategy on Iran by neglecting to give him a document he requested several weeks ago. Mnuchin opposes Trump’s move to again ban Iran from SWIFT, the international system that clears trans-border financial transactions. So he’s been “slow-rolling the decision-making process to delay final consideration by the president” by failing to produce an options memo — “which prevents Trump from making a decision.” And while reimposing the ban may not work as a pressure tactic, it would “hamper Iran’s ability to finance the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and their other regional proxies.” Mnuchin can make his arguments on the issue, says Rogin, but it’s the president’s decision.

Political scribe: The Vindication of Mitch McConnell

If the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings taught us anything, it’s that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “had a point when it came to Merrick Garland,” suggests The Week’s James Antle. It “annoys liberals no end” that Garland never got so much as a hearing. Yet even if he had, Republicans “almost certainly would not have voted to confirm him.” The Kavanaugh nomination just proves “that these hearings are a charade in which no one’s votes are actually in play.” Indeed, it’s “quite obvious” that “senators demanding documents from Kavanaugh’s past have all made up their minds” and are simply “vamping for the cameras.” Maybe Garland “deserved better” — but “this would have done nothing to change the outcome.” So let’s thank McConnell “for sparing us the stagecraft and just shooting down the nomination from the get-go.”

Foreign desk: Exposing China’s Concentration Camps

Something terrible is happening in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost region, though the details “are murky,” says Tanner Greer at Foreign Policy. The Communist Party has built a “vast system of surveillance and terror” to control its 12 million Uighur and Kazakh Muslim citizens. And “from the party’s perspective, the further away the global spotlight is from its activities the better.” Resurrecting Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a “network of political education camps” has been built to “hold and ‘re-educate’ Uighurs who are too attached to their mother culture.” Between 600,000 and 1.2 million Uighurs — one out of 12 — are being held in these camps. And the goal “is not, as China claims, purely to destroy terrorists but to destroy minority religion and identity altogether.”

Culture critic: Online Left Embraces Conspiracy Theories

The #Resistance increasingly is embracing the kind of out-there thinking once reserved for the average Infowars acolyte, suggests Katrina Gulliver at National Review. Case in point: last week’s social-media uproar when Brett Kavanaugh’s former clerk was seen making the OK sign, which was interpreted as a furtive “White Power” gesture. Never mind that this supposed symbolism actually is a hoax, invented last year by 4Chan, a “virtual frat house of anarchists and trolls,” and now thoroughly debunked. Yet we keep seeing such accusations over and over. New Yorker writer Talia Lavin was forced to resign after mistaking a legless vet’s unit tattoo for a Nazi Iron Cross. Once “it was the far right that obsessed over such symbols.” Now it’s the left that believes “shadowy forces really run the country and the observant can spot their signs.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann