Just Stop Oil gets a taste of their own medicine. Counter activists tie rape alarms to balloons and let them go in a Just Stop Oil meeting. pic.twitter.com/GbyI8CPj09
For years, Xi Jinping has browbeaten China’s big private-sector companies as he increased Communist Party control of the economy, all while codifying the primacy of national-security. Now it seems he’s surprised at the result.
With private-sector investment contracting in spite of the post-pandemic reopening, foreign capital inflows declining and more than one-in-five people aged 16 to 24 struggling to find a job, China’s leader and his lieutenants have launched a massive messaging campaign.
The message? We didn’t really mean it.
In recent weeks, there’s been a raft of party and government statements and pledges and meetings with executives (foreign and domestic) to assure them that China is open for business. Analysts at China consultancy Trivium observed on Thursday, “Beijing has devoted more attention to supporting private businesses this year than at any time we can remember since the founding of the People’s Republic.”
As Ronald Reagan liked to say, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
Even 10 years ago, journalists would be too embarrassed to say the US Govt has a role to play in censoring the internet to "tamp down" on "falsehoods."
Because online censorship is now so central to the liberal establishment, they don't realize how twisted it is to say this: https://t.co/EZNRB7reaq
NBC reports that Kamala Harris intends to visit Florida today to criticize its new school curriculum:
In remarks Thursday, Harris blasted efforts in some states to ban books and “push forward revisionist history.”
“Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” she said at a convention for the traditionally Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta Inc. “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”
This is a brazen lie. It’s an astonishing lie. It’s an evil lie. It is so untrue — so deliberately and cynically misleading — that, in a sensible political culture, Harris would be obligated to issue an apology. Instead, NBC confirms that she will repeat the lie today during a speech in Jacksonville.
I have been trying to work out how best to illustrate the sheer scale of Harris’s falsehood, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to achieve it is to list in one place all the relevant parts of the course about which she is complaining. So, below, I have copied and pasted every single reference to slavery, slaves, abolitionism, civil rights, and African Americans that is in the document. For those interested, the full curriculum (along with the curriculum for the teaching of the Holocaust) is here.
Exit quote: “The list is extremely long. That’s because, pace Harris, there’s a lot in there.”
We have often discussed the embrace of censorship by the left and many Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden. However, the most distressing aspect of this trend has been the support of many in the media. That erosion of support for free speech was on display this week in a tweet from a New York Times’ reporter. Sheryl Gay Stolberg said that this week’s effort by Democrats to censor Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “raised thorny questions” about whether misinformation is protected speech. The statement shows a breathtaking lack of understanding of the First Amendment as well as a lack of fealty for free speech values. There are no “thorny questions” over the censorship of this speech, because misinformation is unquestionably protected under the First Amendment.
The most recent controversy arose after Democratic members responded to a hearing on censorship by trying to censor Kennedy. Not only did members object to his being able to discuss his censorship on social media, but Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz (who has led previous attacks on witnesses on censorship) sought to move the hearing into executive session so that the public could not hear what he had to say.
What followed were unrelenting attacks on Kennedy who was repeatedly asked questions by Wasserman Schultz and others but then denied the ability to respond. As in the past, Democratic members asked insulting questions and then reclaimed their time to prevent the witness from defending himself.
Democratic members made clear that they supported barring people from social media and even congressional hearings for opposing views on Covid. One member told Fox News “I am not afraid of anything that he would say, I just do not want to hear him.”
After watching this abusive treatment, the only “thorny question” for Stolberg was whether Kennedy’s speech and misinformation in general has any protection under the First Amendment.
Misinformation is generally defined as information that is false, but the person who is disseminating it believes that it is true. In other words, others believe that a speaker is mistaken. Yet, Stolberg believes that such mistaken beliefs may fall outside of the First Amendment. Of course, this leads to the Zen-like question of whether the mistaken belief that the First Amendment does not protect mistaken beliefs is itself protected. But down that road lies either enlightenment or madness.
Note that Stolberg was not discussing whether social media companies can legally censor speech. While that is a denial of free speech, these companies often note that they are not covered by the First Amendment as private entities. (In reality, that is not accurate since they can be agents of the government, which I previously discussed in my testimony in the first of these censorship hearings).
Stolberg was discussing whether misinformation in general is protected under the First Amendment.
What makes the statement chilling is that it is part of a growing chorus from the left suggesting that hate speech and now disinformation may be exceptions under the First Amendment. Indeed, when I testified before this same committee,
I was taken aback by the opening statement of the committee’s ranking Democrat, Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I.). Besides opposing an investigation into the role of the FBI and other agencies in such censorship, Plaskett declared that “I hope that [all members] recognize that there is speech that is not constitutionally protected,” and then referenced hate speech as an example.
Hate speech is indeed a scourge in our nation, but it is also protected under our Constitution. Yet many politicians and pundits are using this false constitutional claim to defend potentially unconstitutional actions by the government.
Recently, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who is a lawyer, said that “if you espouse hate … you’re not protected under the First Amendment.” Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean declared the identical position: “Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.”
Even some dictionaries now espouse this false premise, defining “hate speech” as “Speech not protected by the First Amendment, because it is intended to foster hatred against individuals or groups based on race, religion, gender, sexual preference, place of national origin, or other improper classification.”
Now the New York Times is posing the question of whether misinformation is protected. It is. When false information is used to steal money, it is called fraud. Speech can also be the basis of other crimes like conspiracy. However, simply stating something that others view as misleading or wrong is protected under the First Amendment.
The First Amendment does not distinguish between types of speech, clearly stating: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
It does not say “good speech” or “factually correct speech.” It says speech. Accordingly, the Supreme Court has declared that even lying about military honors is protected. The Supreme Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act. In United States v. Alvarez, the Court held 6-3 that it is unconstitutional to criminalize lies — in that case involving “stolen valor” claims.
Likewise, spewing hate-filled lies is protected. In Snyder v. Phelps, also in 2011, the Court said the hateful protests of Westboro Baptist Church were protected.
Yet, at the New York Times, the most “thorny issue” was not the effort of Democrats to censor a witness at a censorship hearing, but whether his speech has any protection under the First Amendment.
Ironically, the government could have raised this “thorny issue” when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, claiming that it was just “misinformation” that was harmful to the public. While that was a prior restraint case, would the government have had a stronger case if it argued that the Times was publishing information that it thought was true but was misleading or false?
What about the disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation spread by the New York Times in the last few years on issues like Covid-19. For years, scientists faced censorship for even raising the lab theory as a possible explanation for the virus. Their reputations and careers were shredded by a media flash mob. The Washington Post declared this a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times’ Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was calling any mention of the lab theory “racist.” Are Mandavilli’s writings unprotected?
Yet, it is not a thorny issue when a Democratic member admits that she sought to prevent Kennedy from speaking publicly because “I just do not want to hear him.”
What is so troubling is how the “legacy media” has jettisoned the most noble aspects of its legacy and has become that enabler of censors.
SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY: Fox News whistleblowers expose company’s support for far-left charities. “While on its face, this appears to be little more than an attempt at corporate beneficence, the company is willing to match donations to the Satanic Temple, the Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood (and local Planned Parenthood branches), and the Southern Poverty Law Center – radical leftist groups antipathetic to conservatives and the values they hold most dear.”
(Tom Cooper via Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)
Hello and welcome back to the week with me.
→ Good economic vibes: ’Merica’s got problems, sure, but a major recession isn’t one of them. Our beloved vampire squids at Goldman Sachs released a report putting the chance at recession at 20 percent with the bank’s chief economist, Jan Hatzius, saying: “The probability of a U.S. recession has fallen further as both recent data and ongoing fundamentals point to rapid—and mostly painless—disinflation from here.” We’ll take it! Although as usual, my libertarians over at Reason have something contrarian to say about this with the headline: “ ‘Bidenomics,’ Like All Industrial Policy, Sucks.” I’m sure they’re right. But all I know is that I personally feel good about my index funds right now.
In other financial news: if you live in a city, your downtown was just saved by a woman named Taylor Swift. Here’s what the Philadelphia Federal Reserve says:
Despite the slowing recovery in tourism in the region overall, one contact highlighted that May was the strongest month for hotel revenue in Philadelphia since the onset of the pandemic, in large part due to an influx of guests for the Taylor Swift concerts in the city.
Thank you, Swifties. It is on your delicate shoulders, along with several overstuffed purses, that our nation’s economy rests; your shrill cries are the sound of our financial freedom. Libertarians, don’t even try to come at TayTay.
→ DeSantis staff slims down: Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign shed a handful of staffers this week. His charming wife, Casey, has been deployed to shore up supporter energy. The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis has a send-up of the campaign: “The Florida governor isn’t Trump plus competence; he’s Trump minus jokes.” He’s also Trump but legitimately right-wing, like that time he signed a six-week abortion bill. And his weird hyper-online-trad campaign is not comforting to your average suburban mom who is, sure, not thrilled with school board leftists, but also doesn’t want her son’s gamer buddies running the White House. As for Pence: in the most recent quarter, he raised only $1.2 million, and there’s an open question about whether he can even qualify for the debates with such low support. Which brings us back to:
I see you Vivek! Go get ’em!
→ Funny how Jews don’t catch Covid: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has some thoughts. One is that China and the U.S. are working on making diseases that target only certain ethnicities. Second is that Covid doesn’t seem to impact Jewish and Chinese people as much. But no, no, he’s not putting those statements together! He’s just pointing things out. Here are his words: “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He added: “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not.”
There is a video of RFK saying this and the best part is that sitting to his right is New York Post reporter Jon Levine, friend of TGIF and member of the Ashkenazi people, and you can watch it slowly dawn on Jon what exactly RFK is implying. Over at the New York Daily News, a onetime RFK supporter / current Ashkenazi who was at the dinner also wrote it up.
Here’s RFK pushing back: “The @nypost story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the Covid-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews.”
What you heard him suggest is not what he suggested, not at all. In fact, people who hear it that way tend to be or know Ashkenazi Jews, which is odd, don’t you think?
Meanwhile, Kerry Kennedy condemned her brother’s comments.
→ Trump indicted again, again, again. I’ve lost count: I genuinely can’t keep up. Trump has apparently received another letter from the special counsel indicating that he will be indicted again. Part of the graduation requirement for Yale Law is indicting Trump. Before George Soros and his son agree to fund your campaign for progressive prosecutor, you have to promise that the only crimes you will prosecute are Trump’s. CNN has bravely announced that now, in the year 2023, with this third indictment, Trump’s previously unblemished legacy is truly, finally, and irrevocably stained.
→ The IRS only makes bad people pay taxes: Two IRS whistleblowers testified on Wednesday about how they were blocked from investigating Hunter Biden’s financial crimes—in particular any crimes that may have implicated other members of the Biden family.
Joseph Ziegler, a 13-year veteran of the IRS and a gay Democrat, revealed himself to be Whistleblower #2, saying he saw “corrosion of ethical standards and the abuse of power that threaten our nation.” He said that prosecutors “did not follow the ordinary process, slow-walked the investigation, and put in place unnecessary approvals and roadblocks from effectively and efficiently investigating the case.”
Just imagine for a moment if this were a Trump financial crimes scandal. Just imagine the rending of garments and the seven-figure book deals these IRS workers would get. All I want is a world where both sides get those book deals. Or even—and I know this is reckless—no book deals. Just everyone paying taxes, and IRS workers remaining nameless and faceless.
Also, now that we know the IRS is run by petty partisans, I’m sorry to say that every TGIF commenter is getting audited this year.
Rhode Island state senator was ordered to pay restitution after he keyed a SUV with an anti-Biden sticker and then lied to police. While the sentence is fairly standard, it seems a tad light in this particular case. Sen. Joshua Miller lied to police and holds a position of public trust. The expungement of the crime is particularly unfortunate given the role of a leading politician in politically motivated property destruction.
Miller was also ordered to make a donation to the local food bank. Ordering defendants to support unrelated charities adds another controversial element, though it is also now quite common. Judges routinely order payments not to the treasury or a victim fund but charities of the court’s choice.
Yet, it is the overall sentence that is concerning given Miller’s conduct not only during the incident but after it.
After keying the car, Miller was found out by police, who confronted him at his home. He then made a series of false statements. While he later expressed shame and suggested that he only acted in the moment, he offered a calculated and false account long after the incident.
Miller, 69, told The Boston Globe, “in a blink of an eye, I exhibited a lack of self-control that has impacted my reputation.” But it was more than a blink. Long after the incident, Miller made up a story of how he was being stalked by gun owners for his anti-gun policies and thought this was one of his stalkers.
He explained that he keyed the car “because he was daring me to, basically.”
The victim neither knew Miller nor recognized him. Nevertheless, Miller claimed that he thought he was a “gun nut” who was stalking him. He told the officers to talk to their superior, Col. Michael Winquist, who was aware of his stalking complaints. That proved to be untrue as well.
Nevertheless, Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, a top Rhode Island Democrat, defended Miller to Fox News and said it was just one unfortunate moment. He neglected to address how Miller lied to the officers long after the property destruction.
Miller pleaded no contest to the two charges and was ordered to pay $2,850 in restitution to the vehicle owner and to donate $250 to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. If he does not commit any more crimes for the next year, the case will be expunged from his record.
After the collapse of Miller’s false account, what was left was something all too familiar today: a sense of license to destroy property as an act of rage. Because he found the anti-Biden sticker triggering and upsetting, Miller sought to punish the. man for having opposing views. To Miller, having an anti-Biden sticker was “daring” him to take action. It is the license of the age of rage.
If you read the documents up at Public like a novel, and follow the chorus-like Slack exchanges between the four key scientists as a drama with a beginning, middle, and end, it’s hard to miss the brutal lesson. Four people whose job was to divine truth through scientific analysis were waylaid by social and political considerations that you can see attacking each of the characters with ferocity, even in their little digital haven of a private chat. With everything on the line, and millions of lives at stake, they were not only unable in the end to say what they really thought, but as my partner Walter Kirn points out, they joined up with a mechanism that worked to suppress and stamp out the very thoughts they themselves first had.
The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What’s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.
As these documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation. Once people see an institutional malfunction on this scale, it’s like walking in on a cheating spouse, they can’t unsee it. That’s what these scientists were risking when they played around with a lie this big: everything.
Yes, the massive irresponsibility of those who regard themselves as the Responsible Class has been downright criminal. Luckily for them, their class also controls the legal system.
Your metabolism responds to regular exercise by decreasing the number of calories you burn when you’re not exercising. That’s according to the constrained total energy expenditure hypothesis that spurred the current debate.
Researchers recently tested the hypothesis by measuring the nonexercise calorie burn of 29 obese adults over a nearly 24-hour period, both before and after a six-month exercise program.
They found that the calories they burned when they weren’t working out did decrease after months of regular exercise – but only in those who were prescribed the higher of two different exercise doses.
Every single one of the eight Democrats running for mayor vowed to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, solidifying the Big Apple’s often infamous status as a “sanctuary city.”
* * * * * * * *
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the son of legal Taiwanese immigrants, said, “I appreciate anyone who comes to this country or New York City for a better life.”
And Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said migrants were his neighbors growing up in Queens.
“My mother worked two jobs to provide for the six of us and we had a group of undocumented residents that lived in our community,” Adams said.
The other candidates — city comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama housing secretary Shaun Donovan and nonprofit leader Dianne Morales — also voiced their support for the Big Apple as a sanctuary city.
New York City will distribute flyers at the U.S.-Mexico border telling newly arrived migrants to “consider another city” and limit shelter stays for adult asylum seekers to 60 days as the city’s Democratic mayor says it is straining to house them.
In an announcement on Wednesday, the office of Mayor Eric Adams said the flyers would seek to “combat misinformation at the border” and that the city would help migrants find other housing and “take the next step in their journey.”
New York City says that it has provided services to 90,000 migrants since last spring and that nearly 55,000 remain in its care. Thousands of those migrants arrived on buses sent by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican who has tried to shift the burden of receiving them to Democratic strongholds.
New York is bound by a decades-old consent decree in a class-action lawsuit to provide shelter for those without homes. As more migrants have arrived, Adams has tried a range of approaches to housing them, from tents to relocating them to other parts of the state.
—Reuters, today.
Mayor Adams' office is actively discouraging asylum-seekers from coming to New York City – releasing these flyers today. pic.twitter.com/xegNfGeacf
The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
HOW MANY PEOPLE DIE FROM SNAKEBITES? “Here’s a statistic that might surprise you: Around 1 in 270 people in India die from snakebites by the age of 70. In total, around 50,000 to 60,000 people in India die from snakebites each year. In Australia, which is home to the most-venomous snakes in the world, that number is 2. Just two. . . . Snakebites have a treatment: antivenom. But it might surprise you to learn that antivenom still comes from a method that hasn’t changed much in over a hundred years.”
TOO MUCH SOCIALISM IN THE POSTWAR ERA: Britain is a developing country: We aren’t leading the world: we’re trying to catch up. “As exciting as AI and other frontier technologies are, pinning the country’s hopes on them misunderstands how far behind the US we are across the board.1 The US isn’t rich just because it has a big tech sector: every single US state is richer per person than the UK, even places like Mississippi and West Virginia without big tech or advanced manufacturing sectors.”
Every successful system accumulates parasites. The West has been successful enough that its parasite load is now dangerously high. Britain has had the longest run of success in the West.
We have often discussed the embrace of censorship by the left and many Democratic politicians, including President Joe Biden. However, the most distressing aspect of this trend has been the support of many in the media. That erosion of support for free speech was on display this week in a tweet from a New York Times’ reporter. Sheryl Gay Stolberg said that this week’s effort by Democrats to censor Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “raised thorny questions” about whether misinformation is protected speech. The statement shows a breathtaking lack of understanding of the First Amendment as well as a lack of fealty for free speech values. There are no “thorny questions” over the censorship of this speech, because misinformation is unquestionably protected under the First Amendment.
Rhode Island state senator was ordered to pay restitution after he keyed a SUV with an anti-Biden sticker and then lied to police. While the sentence is fairly standard, it seems a tad light in this particular case. Sen. Joshua Miller lied to police and holds a position of public trust. The expungement of the crime is particularly unfortunate given the role of a leading politician in politically motivated property destruction.
