Mid-Day Snapshot · April 24, 2024

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“From The Patriot Post (patriotpost.us)”.

THE FOUNDATION

“To render the justice of the war on our part the more conspicuous, the reluctance to commence it was followed by the earliest and strongest manifestations of a disposition to arrest its progress. The sword was scarcely out of the scabbard before the enemy was apprised of the reasonable terms on which it would be resheathed.” —James Madison (1813)

Fellow Patriots, on this day in 1800, President John Adams signed legislation establishing the Library of Congress. British troops burned the Capitol and destroyed the first library in 1812, but Congress began again with the collection of Thomas Jefferson. It is now the world’s largest library. —Mark Alexander

IN TODAY’S DIGEST

ON THE WEB

FEATURED ANALYSIS

The Clock Is Ticking for TikTok

Now that Congress has passed a possible ban, the battle moves to the next phase.

Nate Jackson

For Big Tech giants, you are the product. We in our humble shop have been saying that for years.

Big Tech and social media companies vacuum up huge troves of data on every user and sell it to other companies directly or use it to target-advertise. The vast majority of Americans, however, collectively shrug and consider relinquishing privacy and data a small price to pay for the dopamine hit that comes with using social media apps all day, every day.

Partly for this reason, TikTok, the short-form video-sharing app that is hugely popular with young people, is in the crosshairs of Congress. A bill passed by both the House (360-58) and Senate (79-18) and headed to Joe Biden’s desk today for his signature will effectively ban TikTok inside the next year if it’s not sold by its parent company.

TikTok is perhaps a unique case given the company’s connections to the ChiComs, which greatly elevates the risk for user data. Like the Democrats’ deep state cutouts in DC, those connections aren’t direct or clear. TikTok is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and is based in Los Angeles and Singapore, where China maintains a heavy presence. Its parent company is ByteDance, a Chinese company headquartered in Beijing but also incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

As for making users the product, according to The Wall Street Journal, “TikTok has repeatedly said that it has never shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government and that it would refuse any such requests.” However, that’s a deceptive semantics game.

Various Chinese laws require — not request — that companies collecting data allow the ChiComs to access that data if the ChiComs deem it necessary to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.” Additionally, most companies must allow the direct presence of Chinese Communist Party officials in the business structure.

Given that China runs a social credit score system to keep its 1.4 billion citizens under the government’s thumb, you can bet your incredibly expensive iPhone that the ChiComs within those companies deem it “necessary” to access and share that data. In fact, you don’t have to bet. A former ByteDance executive says this very thing happened in Hong Kong in 2018.

Also, as our since-retired Arnold Ahlert previously reported, “In 2019, TikTok agreed to pay a $5.7 million fine to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that the company violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and collected personal data from children — under the age of 13.”

It’s not just privacy and data. Algorithms can be and are manipulated to indoctrinate unwitting users. Democrats at Facebook and elsewhere doing that here in America is bad enough. Allowing the ChiComs to do it to young Americans via TikTok could be a much bigger problem. TikTok likely overplayed its hand in this regard by mobilizing users to oppose this ban.

According to the legislation, ByteDance has nine months and a three-month extension from the president to find a buyer for TikTok, after which it will be “unlawful for an entity to distribute, maintain or update.” Users can certainly keep it on their phones, but no one will be able to download it anew or update it if it’s already on their device. Eventually, the app will simply stop working.

Buyers must be able to afford the multibillion-dollar price tag for an app with 1.5 billion users worldwide and 170 million in America. According to USA Today, “The Chinese government would also likely block the sale of TikTok’s algorithm, which would force a buyer to rebuild a crucial component of the app.”

There is a free speech component here, of course. Does a ban violate the First Amendment? After Montana legislated a TikTok ban last year, a federal judge ruled that it does. Senator Rand Paul likewise said a congressional ban “would violate the First Amendment rights,” adding that he objects to giving “the government the power to force the sale of other companies.”

Senator Marco Rubio disagrees. “This is not a First Amendment issue,” he insisted last year. “It’s not about the content of the videos that are online. It is about the dangers to our national security that are presented by the way this company functions.”

TikTok says the law will “trample the free speech rights” of users — as if Big Tech companies would never do such a thing. The company will undoubtedly challenge the law, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see it reach the Supreme Court.

Except in the unlikely event that Congress follows Mark Alexander’s advice about requiring disclosures on data collection and use, users will remain the product. Facebook and others will continue making gobs of money by collecting user data and using it to influence and manipulate billions of people. Moreover, it’s unclear what workarounds the Chinese may already have developed for a long-awaited TikTok ban. Beyond that, what user data from Facebook or elsewhere ends up in ChiCom hands?

As for the content itself, mindless short videos will remain popular because, let’s face it, we all find them funny and entertaining. The bigger problem is that leftist-manipulated algorithms of social media will continue to influence the way millions of people think … and vote.

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Executive News Summary

Martha’s Vineyard illegals get “crime victim” visas, FTC bans noncompetes, Tennessee arms teachers, and more.

Douglas Andrews, Thomas Gallatin, & Jordan Candler

Cross-Examination

  • Martha’s Vineyard illegals get “crime victim” visas: Remember when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis masterfully dispatched two planeloads of poor migrants to tony Martha’s Vineyard, there to spook Barack Obama and his fellow super-wealthy leftists and to expose them for their rank open-border hypocrisy? We certainly do. NIMBY! they shrieked. Political pawns! they wailed. And the unwashed Venezuelan have-nots were quickly hustled away. But that wasn’t the end of it. As it turns out, some of those illegals have since been granted what are called “crime-victim visas” because, you know, the crime of ignoring our nation’s borders wasn’t the real crime. The real crime was perpetrated by that knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing Republican governor who booked their passage to Martha’s Vineyard in the first place. As National Review reports: “At least three of the 49 immigrants applied for U-visas last year, claiming to be victims of a crime. They allege DeSantis and other Florida officials tricked them into taking part in the flight operation two years ago with false promises of work and housing. The two charter flights took off from San Antonio, Texas, and made a pit stop in Florida before reaching their final destination at Martha’s Vineyard. … More determinations will likely be issued since all 49 immigrants were caught up in the same scheme.” Talk about ungrateful. These lawbreakers now have our permission to hang around without the threat of being deported while waiting for their special visas to come through. Is this a great country or what?
  • Judge dismisses riot charges against 140 border-rushing illegals: In yet another story about the breakdown of the Rule of Law under this open-borders administration, an El Paso County Court judge, the rather-less-than-honorable Ruben Morales, has dismissed 140 cases of misdemeanor rioting against the illegal immigrants who were charged for the March 21 storming of the U.S.-Mexico border (such as it is), breaking through razor wire and knocking over Texas National Guardsmen in the process. Judge Morales apparently determined that there was no probable cause for their mass arrests by Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star forces earlier this month. Said Morales, “After reviewing the affidavit … I don’t believe there is probable cause for these individuals to continue to be detained for the offense of riot participation.” Perhaps Morales never saw this clear-as-day video of the violent breach. What we have here, then, is an irresolute judiciary — a judiciary whose magistrates don’t have the guts to enforce our nation’s border laws. Or, perhaps worse, we have magistrates who are sympathetic to these illegal border crossers and are therefore actively undermining our nation’s sovereignty. On top of this unwillingness to hold lawbreakers accountable, we have a federal government telling the Texas governor that he doesn’t have the authority to protect his state’s own borders. This puts those law enforcement personnel on the border at greater risk because as word gets around that our nation is unwilling to enforce its borders or protect its Border Patrol personnel, these illegals will naturally become more and more brazen. And for this we can thank Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats.
  • FTC bans noncompetes: On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted 3-2 to ban noncompete agreements. According to Democrat FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, “It is so profoundly unfree and unfair for people to be stuck in jobs they want to leave, not because they lacked better alternatives, but because noncompetes preclude another firm from fairly competing for their labor, requiring workers instead to leave their industries or their homes to make ends.” An estimated 30 million workers are under noncompete agreements. The FTC’s new rule will go into effect in 120 days, though questions have been raised as to whether the FTC has the authority to make such a sweeping rule change. U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Suzanne Clark blasted the decision as “a blatant power grab that will undermine American businesses’ ability to remain competitive.” She further promised, “The Chamber will sue the FTC to block this unnecessary and unlawful rule and put other agencies on notice that such overreach will not go unchecked.” Republican FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson agreed with Clark on the issue of the FTC overstepping its authority. “Beginning with policy puts the cart before the horse,” he stated. “No matter how important, conspicuous, and controversial the issue, and no matter how wise the administrative solution, an administrative agency’s power to regulate must always be grounded in the valid grant of authority from Congress. Because we lacked that authority, the final rule is unlawful.” Objection to noncompetes is a bipartisan issue, as lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have introduced legislation seeking to reform them.
  • TN arms teachers: On Tuesday, Tennessee House lawmakers passed a bill that allows for teachers to carry concealed firearms in school. The bill, which passed the state Senate earlier this month, will head to Republican Governor Bill Lee for an expected signature. This law, which was introduced in response to the murderous attack on The Covenant School in Nashville last year that left six people dead, will afford greater protection to students in the Volunteer State. While Democrat lawmakers and anti-Second Amendment activists protested and nonsensically derided the law as making schools more dangerous, the opposite is the case. Under the law, any teacher or school staff member who wishes to carry a gun must first obtain an enhanced concealed carry permit, receive written authorization from school leadership and local law enforcement, complete a 40-hour training course on school policing and a 40-hour course on Peace Officer’s Standards and Training at the educator’s expense, pass a background check, and get a psychological exam from a Tennessee licensed provider. With this commonsense law, Tennessee is seeking to harden previously soft targets.
  • NPR puts “trigger warning” on Declaration of Independence: It’s not like we expected more from NPR, but still. In 2022, unbeknownst to most red-blooded patriots, the taxpayer-funded propaganda machine of the American Left placed — we kid you not — a trigger warning on our nation’s foundational document. As The Daily Fetched reports, “One example of anti-American wokeness is the ‘editor’s note’ NPR staff felt obliged to place on archived stories about its on-air reading every Independence Day of the Declaration of Independence in full, an honorable tradition apparently now consigned to the ash-heap of history.” What might the snowflakes at NPR and its dwindling listenership have found so emotionally upsetting about the Declaration of Independence? As NPR’s editor’s note from July 8, 2022, notes, “This story quotes the U.S. Declaration of Independence — a document that contains offensive language about Native Americans, including a racial slur.” Mind you, this is the same NPR that was exposed recently by a longtime editor for, among many other transgressions, refusing to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story because it would have helped the 2020 reelection campaign of President Donald Trump. So let’s interfere with a presidential election, but heaven forbid we let stand perfectly normal period language as-is.
  • Trans thuggery invisibility: For too many people, protecting the gender-bending ideology is more important than protecting kids. In Lansdale, Pennsylvania, at a middle school, a 12-year-old girl was blindsided and attacked by a 13-year-old boy who identifies as a girl. He repeatedly hit the girl in the head with a Stanley thermos. To make matters worse, the school administration had been warned by other students hours before the attack of the boy’s “hit list.” “You could’ve stopped it,” one of those students testified during a school board meeting. “It was five hours from when I told you it was going to happen. I don’t get how you couldn’t have stopped that.” But why were the students’ warnings regarding the gender-confused boy ignored? Well, as one parent surmised: “Unfortunately, what most of us believe is that decisions are being made based out of a fear of lawsuits, and not what would be an appropriate consequence to the behavior. These instances continue to occur and occur more frequently because nothing is changing.” Meanwhile, in Montgomery County, Maryland, authorities fortunately arrested a would-be school attacker, who in this case was a woman who identified as a man. She had been inspired by the gender-confused Covenant School attacker. However, local officials avoided the blatant elephant in the room that she was a “transgender”-identifying individual.
  • Disney still hasn’t learned its lesson: One might think, after such a dismal stretch in Disney’s once-proud, once-wholesome, once-family-friendly history, that executives would’ve gotten the message. But one would be wrong. As author and commentator Jon Del Arroz reports: “Disney is ramping up the grooming operations at their Walt Disney World park in Florida. In 2022, the company announced that it wouldn’t consider gender when casting for different characters in the park, which sparked backlash from responsible parents as they didn’t want Disney World to turn into a drag show for kids. According to a new report, parents’ fears have become a reality.” Alas, groomers gonna groom. As Del Arroz continues, Disney went all in on its culture war battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, “and its push of evil gender ideology onto children continues [because] nothing is more central to this war than Disney theme parks.” All we can say is what we’ve always said: Parents beware.
  • Dumb and dumber in Europe: While some European countries have made progress in the right direction by banning the medical “transitioning” of minors, others have fallen further down the hole of gender-bending nonsense. Germany has just passed a law that allows parents to identify their children as whichever gender they prefer at birth, irrespective of the child’s biological sex. Germany has effectively erased sex and made everyone “trans.” Furthermore, the law criminalizes the so-called “deadnaming” or “misgendering” of a gender-confused individual, with fines of up to $10,800. Meanwhile, in Scotland, a man who is a double rapist is serving time in prison. He was initially placed in a women’s prison after he claimed to identify as a woman. Fortunately, he was eventually moved to a men’s prison. However, this hasn’t stopped the nonsense surrounding him, as a prison guard was forced to give him a written apology for calling him “son.”

Headlines

  • Senate overwhelmingly passes aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan with big bipartisan vote (AP)
  • Biden angers Catholics with sacrilegious motion, gross comment about the Bible at Florida abortion rally (RedState)
  • Omar’s daughter decries “hypocrisy,” says anti-Israel students are “100% targeted” after suspension and arrest (Fox News)
  • Anti-Israel agitators vow to stay put until administrators meet demands (Fox News)
  • “Squad” member Summer Lee prevails in primary that drew attention to anti-Israel views (Washington Free Beacon)
  • Ex-National Enquirer exec admits tabloid fabricated story, photo on Ted Cruz’s dad during 2016 election (Daily Wire)
  • Facebook has interfered with U.S. elections 39 times since 2008 (Fox News)
  • Officials from 13 states sign letter condemning Bank of America for “de-banking” Christian organizations (Not the Bee)
  • Stacey Abrams: Attacks on DEI are attacks on “democracy,” “education,” and “our economy” (Daily Wire) | “DEI is garbage”: Pulitzer Prize winner delivers scathing takedown of woke Hollywood (Daily Wire)
  • BBC apologizes to J.K. Rowling for misleading coverage of her transgender sex offender comments (National Review)
  • Study: LGBT people are more likely to be rich coastal elites (Washington Examiner)
  • Oracle CEO announces plans to move software giant’s world headquarters to red state (Fox Business)
  • Argentina just had its first budget surplus in 16 years after gutting government bloat (Not the Bee)
  • Satire: Columbia protestors clarify they only want death to America after America is done paying their student loans (Babylon Bee)

For the Executive Summary archive, click here.

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Supreme Court Weighs Vagrancy

Is homelessness a constitutional right? The justices will soon decide.

Thomas Gallatin

Is sleeping in public anytime and anywhere a constitutional right? That’s the question the U.S. Supreme Court is considering in the case of Johnson v. Grants Pass. Put another way: Does homelessness convey special rights to sleep and live in public areas?

The case in question stems from the small city in Oregon called Grants Pass, as officials there sought to deal with homeless encampments by passing a citywide ban against sleeping in public.

Homeless advocates objected, claiming that the law was targeting people who were involuntarily homeless. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Grants Pass by effectively finding a right to homelessness within the Eighth Amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment.

With homelessness increasingly plaguing American cities, especially in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, city and state leaders have struggled to address the problem. But the Ninth Circuit’s decision only exacerbated the problem, so the Supreme Court must bring legal clarity.

The justices heard three different arguments: one in defense of homelessness and opposed to laws banning them from public areas; another arguing on behalf of local authorities and the general public’s right to establish laws against vagrancy; and the third from the Biden administration, which sought to chart out some type of middle ground.

Based upon the questioning, it appears that the justices have split along ideological lines, with the three left-wing justices seeming to side with homeless advocacy and the conservative justices favoring local authorities’ right to establish bans on homelessness.

The left-wingers — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — expressed concerns over the “biological necessity” of people needing to sleep, with Kagan arguing that “sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public” for homeless people. Sotomayor was critical of public ordinances against vagrancy that “give them no public place to sit down with a blanket or lay down with a blanket and fall asleep.” She crassly questioned: “Where are they supposed to sleep? Are they supposed to kill themselves [by] not sleeping?”

As leftists usually do, they insist that behavior is an identity. “Homelessness is a status,” insisted Kagan matter-of-factly. “It’s a status of not having a home.”

Meanwhile, from the conservative side of the bench, Justice Neil Gorsuch asked about the limit or expansion of these so-called homeless rights. He wondered whether granting the homeless a right to sleep in public also means they have a right to have fires, to cook, or to defecate in public.

Maybe the most pertinent point was raised by Chief Justice John Roberts, who challenged the left-wingers’ notion that homelessness was an identity status because it is situational. “What is the analytic approach to deciding whether something’s a status or a situation of conduct?” he asked. “You can remove the homeless status in an instant if you move to a shelter or situations otherwise change. And, of course, it can be moved the other way as well if you’re kicked out of the shelter, whatever.” Roberts observed that homelessness is no more a status than bank robbery is, as both are conduct-dependent.

Given the direction of questioning, it appears that the Supreme Court will reject the Ninth Circuit’s dubious creation of a constitutional right to homelessness. The problem is multifaceted and ultimately not fixable by government fiat. However, the role the government plays is to create and enforce laws that benefit the wider society and encourage greater individual responsibility. The law only works insofar as the majority of people abide by it and the authorities enforce it.

Homelessness has gotten out of hand because of misplaced compassion, which avoids the deeper issue of personal responsibility and instead faults society writ large. Unless people are held accountable, the problem will grow out of control, as it has in Democrat-controlled cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.

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Whatever Happened to Gavin Newsom?

It seems like only yesterday that California’s glib, hair-gelled governor was a rising star in Democrat circles.

Douglas Andrews

More than a century ago, in his timeless Devil’s Dictionary, satirist Ambrose Bierce defined the politician as “an eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared.”

This seems an almost eerie foreshadowing of Gavin Newsom, the perfectly coiffed California governor whose good looks and oleaginous essence are the envy of every used car salesman in America. But Bierce wasn’t done deriding Slippery Gavin just yet. “When he wriggles, he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice,” he added. “As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.”

Whether Newsom is still alive these days — at least in a political sense — is a matter of debate. Heck, we half expect to see his mug on the back of a milk carton. And yet it seems only yesterday that the self-important Newsom was the subject of the political world’s most poorly kept secret: that he was being positioned to swoop in and replace his party’s deeply unpopular and embarrassingly incompetent 81-year-old president, Joe Biden. Indeed, Newsom’s every public appearance was seemingly scripted, including a red-state tour and a friendly meet-up with Biden himself, just to keep up appearances, and a trip to Communist China, there to burnish his foreign policy credentials and steamroll a little kid on the basketball court.

Naturally, all this publicity vaulted Newsom to semi-stardom, at least among Democrat power-brokers, all of whom wish that decrepit Joe Biden could somehow be yanked Vaudeville-like off the presidential stage in favor of this younger, stronger, smoother pol.

Indeed, we in our humble shop have sensed the same thing — as has everyone who pays attention to politics. Nearly 20 months ago, our Mark Alexander predicted that Biden wouldn’t be the Democrats’ nominee in 2024, and he named Newsom as one possible replacement. And yet Scranton Joe shows no signs of relinquishing power — at least not voluntarily. Such is the appeal of the office, and such are the predispositions of those who are attracted to it.

As for President-in-Waiting Newsom, a funny thing happened on the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: He began to disappear before our eyes.

PJ Media’s Matt Margolis wondered last November whether Newsom’s star was fading, noting that his approval rating had hit an all-time low 44%, down 11 points from earlier in 2023, and that his disapproval rating was a remarkable 49%, which was also an all-time high. Yikes.

Earlier this week, a former Ronald Reagan speechwriter, Kenneth Khachigian, suggested that “bad governance and the phony factor” had finally caught up to Newsom. On the matter of the aforementioned state visit to China, Khachigian writes:

The staged visit exposed the governor’s most fatal political flaw — his lack of authenticity. That phony factor is one he can’t escape and was summarized in a recent exposé by the nonprofit news organization CalMatters: “Governor Newsom has long touted his baseball career, including that he played at Santa Clara University. But he was never on the roster, among other misperceptions of his accomplishments. Newsom hasn’t corrected his record.”

Embellishments like that, along with more serious ones such as traveling to Florida to claim that the Golden State is a low-tax paradise, are the type of political fumbles that have upended Mr. Newsom’s hopes for higher office. But those misadventures are peanuts compared with the damage from his governing policies, which fracture the finances and stability of California.

Ah, yes, those progressive policies. They’ll undo even the best-laid plans of a politician. But so will getting walloped on a national debate stage by the nation’s best governor, Florida Republican Ron DeSantis.

One of the nation’s shrewdest political minds, Democrat strategist James Carville, had perhaps the cruelest take on Newsom’s prospects. When he was asked by The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd to list his party’s up-and-comers, he named a handful of governors — North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, Maryland’s Wes Moore, and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro — but not Newsom. As Khachigian put it, “Newsom was never as formidable as his fan base thought.”

Gavin Newsom isn’t dead just yet. But the combination of his own policy failures and the terrier-like stubbornness of Joe (and Jill) Biden is making it increasingly likely that the one-time heir apparent will be remembered by history as the error apparent.

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Cleaning House

Rookie Speaker Mike Johnson chooses action over argument.

Jack DeVine

Let’s face it: The Republicans’ tenure as the majority party leading the U.S. House of Representatives has been a hot mess. Calling it unimpressive would be too kind.

Watching the ongoing chaos, much of it self-inflicted, reminded me of my all-time favorite Dr. Seuss book, appropriately titled If I Ran the Zoo. I read it aloud to my young sons so many times that I can still recite whole tracts verbatim:

It’s a pretty good zoo, said young Gerald McGrew — and the fellow who runs it seems proud of it too… But if I ran the zoo, I’d make a few changes. That’s JUST what I’d do!

The reality, of course, is that actually doing something generally turns out to be a lot tougher than throwing rocks at those who are doing it. The new speaker, Mike Johnson (R-LA), is the GOP’s Gerald McGrew — and he has his hands full running this zoo.

As an example, I recently received a fundraising plea from Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who’s embarking on a “RINO hunt” and needs financial support. No thanks. With both the world and our nation in turmoil, the last thing we need is for Republicans to organize a posse to find and root out other Republicans whose commitment to conservatism is supposedly insufficiently pure.

The single factor jeopardizing Republican prospects for gaining leadership in both chambers of Congress this November — an otherwise achievable goal in today’s political climate — is their demonstrable inability to lead themselves, made painfully obvious by their wheel-spinning, false starts, and reversals in selecting a House speaker.

Gaetz and his like-minded colleagues rightly strive to ensure that GOP-sponsored House legislation reflects their strongly held priorities. Yet, as elected representatives, it is their job as well to constructively support a House operation that meets the nation’s needs. Surely they must recognize that pushing legislative proposals that are doomed to go down in flames achieves absolutely nothing. That’s performance art, no more.

It’s not a pretty picture. But from the GOP’s painful ordeal, there are some positives as well:

1.) Mike Johnson has demonstrated that he’s up to the job. Clearly, he has decided that he is the speaker of the whole House, not just the speaker of the Republican representatives, and certainly not just the speaker of the Republican flame-throwing crowd.

By now, he also recognizes that it’s a thankless job. His successes in consensus-building across the aisle have earned him mountains of scorn, but evidently he is willing to take the heat, and he’s unwilling to let keeping his job take priority over doing it properly. Whether his is a short- or long-term speakership, he has earned our respect.

2.) The stopgap process employed by the new speaker to break the logjam in authorization for defense aid to Ukraine and Israel also serves as a test platform for substantial improvement in the House’s legislative process. By simultaneously putting forward several simple, clear, and concise bills, and by providing ample time to read and digest them, he made it possible for House members to cast informed up-or-down votes on each.

This is a dramatic improvement over the now-common megabills with thousands of pages of impenetrable detail — bills like the ObamaCare legislation once described by Nancy Pelosi with the words, “We have to pass it to find out what’s in it.”

3.) Perhaps most importantly, the Republicans’ adventure in attempting to manage a razor-thin (now down to one seat) majority in the House of Representatives demonstrates conclusively that fringe minorities, far left or far right, cannot carry the day for very long. The only sustainable path is finding common ground, inevitably near the center.

The reason? That’s where the country is on many issues — also split right down the middle. The House GOP leadership’s difficulty in moving forward where necessary is fundamentally the same as that facing whoever is chosen to be our next president in navigating the challenges facing our nation.

Joe Biden’s lurch to the left following his 2020 election win is a case in point. It seemed to work for a while — owning the White House and both chambers of Congress will do that — but it was never in tune with the mood or the wider interests of the nation. Democrats lost the House (albeit barely) in 2022, and the growing public disconnect with the administration’s lead in many areas is becoming glaringly apparent in opinion polling now — and could cost Biden reelection.

Perhaps years of bowing to fringe elements on both the Left and the Right has opened the door to a very fresh-thinking, practical electorate. Our public is aching for commonsense actions on obvious problems and is weary of unnecessarily partisan opposition at every turn.

Johnson insists we don’t have to choose between protecting our borders and helping our allies fend off savage attacks, and we can engage both sides of the political divide in making such decisions.

In doing so, he was rewarded by accusations of treachery, weakness, and cowardice. It may cost him his job. But I’d call it leadership.

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Capitalism Versus Racism

Swedish historian Johan Norberg explains how free markets discourage racism.

John Stossel

Capitalism and racism go together?

I hear it all the time.

“Racism is intricately linked to capitalism,” says famous Marxist Angela Davis. “It’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place.”

“Anti-racist” activist Ibram X. Kendi says, “In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.”

This is just silly.

In my new video, Swedish historian Johan Norberg explains how free markets discourage racism.

Capitalists make a profit by serving their customers. The more customers they please, the more money they might make. It hurts the bottom line to exclude any groups.

“Look around the world,” says Norberg, “The least racist societies with the fewest expressions of racist attitudes are the most capitalist countries.”

Norberg’s new book, “The Capitalist Manifesto,” highlights a Journal of Institutional Economics study that found a correlation between economic freedom and “tolerance of ethnic groups.”

“Capitalism,” he says, “Is the first economic system where you only get rich by opening up opportunities for others. It pays to be colorblind. It pays to be open to willing customers and workers who could enrich your company no matter what religion or race. … It doesn’t mean that every person will be colorblind. There will always be idiots. But in capitalism, it’s costly to be an idiot.”

He reminds us that in the Jim Crow South, businesses fought racism, because the rules denied them customers.

“It’s often forgotten that owners of buses, railways, streetcars in the American South didn’t really segregate systematically until the late 19th century,” says Norberg. “It was probably not because they were less racist than others in the South, but they were capitalists. They wanted money, they wanted clients, and they didn’t want to engage in some sort of costly and brutal policing business in segregating buses.”

Even when segregation was mandated, some streetcar companies refused to comply. For several years after Jim Crow laws passed, Black customers sat wherever they wanted.

Norberg adds, “Those owners of public transport, they fought those discriminatory laws because they imposed a terrible cost. … They tried to bypass them secretly and fight them in courts. They were often fined. Some were threatened with imprisonment.”

The streetcar company in Mobile, Alabama, only obeyed Jim Crow laws after their conductors began to get arrested and fined.

Those business owners may have been racist — I can’t know — but they fought segregation.

“We got Jim Crow laws,” says Norberg, “Because free markets weren’t willing to discriminate.”

Capitalists cared about green — not black or white.

Free markets all over the world coordinate and cooperate. Many don’t know of each other’s existence, and if they did meet, they might not get along. But they work together in search of profit.

It’s odd that socialists now call capitalism racist, when the opposite is more often true.

The Soviet Union invited African students to study science in major cities. But “Soviet citizens often treated the Africans in their midst with disdain and hostility,” New Lines Magazine describes. Russian children’s books portrayed Blacks in animalistic ways. Name-calling was common.

Today, China and Cuba claim to have “zero-tolerance” for racism, but during the Covid pandemic, authorities forcibly tested Blacks and ordered strict isolation. Landlords evicted African tenants. Businesses often refused to serve them.

In Cuba, Castro insisted he would eliminate racism. But “Racism persists,” reports France 24, saying it’s “banned by law,” but “alive on the streets … In local jargon, a white woman with a black boyfriend is … ‘holding back the race.’” Cuba’s government is still instituting programs to “combat racism.”

It’s capitalism that makes people less racist.

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

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VIDEOS

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BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

SHORT CUTS

With Friends Like These…

“We reject the policy and the practice of [Benjamin] Netanyahu. Terrible. What could be worse than what he has done in response? … He should resign.” —Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Spin Doctor

“Throughout history, protests were co-opted and made to look bad so police and public leaders would shut them down. That’s what we are seeing now at Columbia University. The Columbia protesters have made clear their demands and want their school not to be complacent in the ongoing Genocide in Gaza. Public officials and media making this about anything else are inflaming the situation and need to bring calmness and sanity back.” —Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN)

For the Record

“All the woke colleges that banned comedians because ‘speech is violence’ are camped out on the lawn chanting ‘death to Israel.’ This is the dumbest time there’s ever been to be alive.” —Jimmy Failla

“Hey remember like 5 years ago when colleges were building safe spaces full of fainting couches and trauma counselors in case a student saw somebody wearing a sombrero at a Halloween party? Good times.” —David Burge

“Whenever Democrats do muster enough courage to denounce anti-Semitism, it’s usually watered down by also including racism and all their favorite ‘phobias’ — Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ad nauseam.” —Nate Jackson

“Biden … can’t even get himself to call out Brownshirts without throwing them a bone.” —David Harsanyi

Upright

“Immediately deport all foreign students studying in the USA that support Hamas. We should also revoke federal student loans for any American student arrested for supporting Hamas.” —Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

The Punching Bag of Big Government

“It’s no wonder that men and women who put their life savings on the line to build their businesses from scratch feel they’re under assault. They are being taxed and regulated to death while too often inflation eats away their modest profits. No one in Washington is going to be ‘forgiving’ their loans when the business conditions get rough and high interest rates make it tough to get emergency loans. There is no safety net — and no ‘too big to fail’ aid package — for the heroes of our economy, who have become the punching bag of big government.” —Stephen Moore

Freudian Slip

“How many times does [Trump] have to prove we can’t be trusted?” —Joe Biden

Baghdad Bob

“Biden’s top economic priority is continuing to make more historic progress bringing costs down for people.” —Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates

The BIG Lies

“I’m going to make community college free. … It won’t cost the taxpayers.” —Joe Biden

“There are people in our country right now that are suggesting to focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a bad thing because they may not want conversations … to occur which include the issue of pay equity based on gender.” —Kamala Harris

Belly Laugh of the Day

“Representative Ocasio-Cortez of New York — you know, I learned a long time ago, listen to that lady.” —Joe Biden

Insight

“Heroes are not supermen; they are good men who embody — by the cast of destiny — the virtue of their whole people in a great hour.” —author Herman Wouk (1915-2019)

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TODAY’S MEME

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For more of today’s memes, visit the Memesters Union.

TODAY’S CARTOON

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For more of today’s cartoons, visit the Cartoons archive.

“From The Patriot Post (patriotpost.us)”.

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