We can remember when the left used to accuse conservatives of being prudish censors. Now it’s the left that appears determined to censor speech it doesn’t like. And they appear to have three incredibly powerful allies in their quest: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
The CEO’s of those tech giants — Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Susan Wojcicki — routinely describe their services as neutral platforms, fiercely committed to openness and free expression.
“Twitter stands for freedom of expression,” Dorsey once declared. Twitter’s general manager in the U.K. once called it “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”
YouTube parent Google claims that “the flow of ideas and open access to information on the web helps communities grow and nations prosper.”
Zuckerberg told a Senate hearing on Tuesday that Facebook is “a platform for all ideas.” Continue reading
By David French • National Review
Conservatives who enter progressive domains like the academy or elite media are quite familiar with the idea of tolerance. Such institutions place an enormous amount of emphasis on it, in fact, so much so that they reserve the right to be intolerant to preserve the tolerant ethos of the community, sometimes explicitly. In one of my favorite First Amendment cases, I sued a university that declared in no uncertain terms, “Acts of intolerance will not be tolerated.”
Yes, it used those exact words. Think for a moment — isn’t every act of enforcement a new violation that requires a new act of enforcement, triggering another violation? Ah, never mind. We know what the university wanted, a catch-all provision it could use to expel, punish, and silence anyone who ran afoul of the prevailing campus orthodoxy.
But I don’t want to focus on intolerance. Let’s talk about tolerance, instead. Earlier this week I read an old post by “Scott Alexander,” a pseudonymous psychiatrist who writes at the blog Slate Star Codex. Called “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup,” it blows up the notion that the kind of inclusion the Left claims it values bears any relationship at all to true tolerance. Continue reading
by Ben Domenech • The Federalist
The firing of Kevin Williamson from The Atlantic on the day he was set to give an opening Q&A in their offices was sadly unsurprising given the pattern of these types of hires. It is an incident that will be referred to largely as a “media story”, meaning that Williamson is not a figure so prominent nor The Atlantic a brand so ubiquitous as to graduate this to a national story, in the way that the situations of Brendan Eich at Mozilla or James Damore at Google became national cable news stories. But they really are the same story, a story about the times that we live in and the changing nature of America. They tell a story about what happens when a talented individual has deeply held beliefs those in his profession find unacceptable.
This story is a predictable continuation of the left’s ownership not just of media but indeed of all institutions. It is depressing. It is predictable. And it is where we are as a country now. It is not confined to the realm of ideas. Eich, Damore, Williamson and others are subject to blacklists and HR reports and firing in every arena of industry and culture. If you have wrongthink, you will not be allowed for long to make your living within any space the left has determined they own – first the academy, then the media, then corporate America, and now the public square. You will bake the cake, you will use the proper pronoun, and you will never say that what Planned Parenthood does is murder for hire, and should be punished as such under the law.
Imagine what the few lonely voices that inhabit a position at a prominent publication or network to the right of Hillary Clinton on social issues if their hiring was taking place right now. Imagine what Ross Douthat would be going through if the Times hired him today (recall he was at The Atlantic before that). Continue reading
By Mona Charen • National Review
When 450 students arrived at Anacostia High School in the District of Columbia’s southeast neighborhood on April 4, they found that few of the sinks or toilets were functioning and the cafeteria was flooded. They were advised by the Department of General Services to use the facilities at a middle school two blocks away until repairs could be completed.
Exasperated teachers organized an impromptu, hour-long walkout to protest, which is why this particular dysfunction made the news. A casual reader might note the plumbing fiasco and chalk it up to neglect of poor students and poor neighborhoods. That is the interpretation urged by D.C. Council member Trayon White, Sr. who attended the walkout and declared that, “The students and teachers need support from the leaders of the city because of the constant neglect happening at Anacostia.”
But it’s far from so simple. The District of Columbia has one of the worst-performing public-school systems in the country. It is also one of the most generously funded. Anacostia High School itself received a $63 million renovation in 2013. According to the Department of General Services website, the project included “Full modernization and renovation of the existing high school using an adaptive re-use approach. Continue reading
We keep hearing about how short-term health plans are “junk insurance.” Really? Compared to ObamaCare’s high-deductible HMOs, or Medicaid’s long and often deadly waits?
A new study finds that at least 21,900 people on Medicaid have died waiting for treatment in states that expanded Medicaid eligibility under ObamaCare.
The reason, the Foundation for Government Accountability report says, is that ObamaCare opened Medicaid up to millions of able-bodied non-poor adults. That created a surge in demand for scarce Medicaid resources, forcing the poor to wait longer for services.
An insurance plan that you can’t use? That’s junk insurance. Continue reading
By Rich Logis • The Federalist
Remember the famous garden scene in “The Godfather,” when Marlon Brando’s character, Don Vito Corleone, warns his son, Michael, played by Al Pacino, that someone close to the family will arrange a meeting where Michael will be assassinated?
The real-life political equivalent of that landmark cinematic moment is playing out before our very eyes, with the Republican National Committee and congressional Republicans. On the omnibus, on the Second Amendment, on border safety—almost every issue—the GOP continues to betray the family. Who is the family? The American people, that’s who.
In fairness, yes, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation, the president’s constitutionally bona fide federal judges, and tax reform were big wins in the last year. But we didn’t elect the biggest GOP majority in the modern era to take baby steps, did we? We colored the map red (even though guaranteed red states no longer exist) to take giant leaps, especially after eight years of mostly impotent GOP opposition to President Obama. And let’s be honest: 90 percent of the reason our map was red was because of President Trump. Continue reading
By Jibran Khan • National Review
Numerous jurisdictions are suing energy companies. Not for fraud or white-collar crime, but for the effects of climate change.
Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York, recently added his city to the list — and also started to divest the city’s pension funds from fossil-fuel companies. But the phenomenon is primarily a California-centric one. In an address at SXSW earlier this month, even Arnold Schwarzenegger joined the fray.
Presumably, this will soon be a cause célèbre. But it is unlikely to succeed, and lawsuits are a poor way to address the environmental harms of energy production anyhow.
As David Bookbinder at the Niskanen Center notes, while all of the complaints are grounded in the energy companies’ alleged accountability for rising sea levels, they fall into two essential categories. Continue reading
Some Republicans were complaining that they didn’t know what was in the massive $1.3 trillion “omnibus” spending bill they voted on this week. But it’s what’s not in the bill that’s the most troubling.
Republicans used to love to trot around copies of ObamaCare, pointing out how its massive size — around 2,300 pages — was a sign of runaway government.
The spending bill Congress just approved is nearly as big, weighing in at 2,232 pages. And, like ObamaCare, no one who voted on it had read the bill before casting their ballots.
Then there’s the amount of money we’re talking about. That $1.3 trillion is what will be spent in just the next six months. And that represents just a fraction of what the government will spend, since it doesn’t include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare or welfare. Continue reading
By Jonathan S Tobin • National Review
The question was a reasonable one, but the answer was not. When the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe program asked why President Trump had congratulated Russian president Vladimir Putin on being reelected, former CIA director John Brennan pulled no punches. In answering the leading question that implied Trump may be afraid of Putin, Brennan said, “The Russians may have something on him personally.” The Russians, he said, “have had long experience of Mr. Trump, and may have things they could expose.”
Coming from just another foe of Trump — which Brennan, an Obama loyalist, certainly is — the assertion could be dismissed as just a partisan cheap shot. But coming as it did from a career intelligence officer who served for four years as the head of the American intelligence establishment, this had to be more than a baseless conjecture.
Except it wasn’t.
By the end of the day, Brennan admitted his wild charge was not based on any actual information or intelligence revealed to him during the course of his duties but just a willingness to assume the worst about Trump. In a written response to questions from the New York Times, he said, “I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they could use as blackmail.” Continue reading
By Julie Kelly • The Federalist
The gun control lobby is borrowing the playbook from one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in history: anthropogenic global warming.
From engaging celebrity activists to bullying private industry to portraying opponents as murderers, the well-funded and highly-orchestrated gun control lobby is copying the same approach that has been successfully deployed by the international climate change movement to sell the dubious claim that humans are causing global warming.
Indoctrination and Exploitation of Children
Textbooks are filled with bogus scientific “studies” about global warming and dire warnings about its consequences. Schools commemorate environmental holidays like Earth Day, so they can push climate dogma. Continue reading
by Brent Scher • Washington Free Beacon
Hillary Clinton’s private passage to India is costing American taxpayers at least $22,000, according to publicly disclosed federal contract information.
Clinton attracted media attention during her trip for saying during a speech last weekend that she lost the 2016 election because much of the United States is “backwards” and filled with people who don’t like “black people getting rights” or “women getting jobs.” Clinton is promoting her latest book in India and is joined on the trip by friends such as longtime aide Huma Abedin. She is also spending time visiting tourist sites.
Clinton is in India as a private citizen. But as a former First Lady she is given U.S. Secret Service protection for life, and the State Department awarded two contracts worth $16,143 and $6,301 for her security detail’s travel and lodging on the trip. Continue reading
Facebook faces what some are calling an “existential crisis” over revelations that its user data fell into the hands of the Trump campaign. Whether or not the attacks on the social media giant are justified, the fact is that the Obama campaign used Facebook (FB) data in the same way in 2012. But the reaction from the pundits and press back then was, shall we say, somewhat different.
According to various news accounts, a professor at Cambridge University built a Facebook app around 2014 that involved a personality quiz. About 270,000 users of the app agreed to share some of their Facebook information, as well as data from people on their friends list. As a result, tens of millions ended up part of this data-mining operation.
Consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which paid for the research, later worked with the Trump campaign to help them target advertising campaigns on Facebook, using the data they’d gathered on users. Continue reading
By • Frontiers of Freedom
Dear Hungarians,
I write this Open Letter, because I care about the future of Hungary as an integral part of the Western World. Moreover, as an American citizen, I am troubled by Viktor Orban’s criminal domestic and ruinous foreign policies.
The graveyards of history are littered with the skeletons of politicians who promised their peoples national greatness, if the latter only follow them blindly. In the overwhelming number of cases, such journeys into the darkness of the elusive utopia brought untold sufferings upon the peoples, before necessarily ending in irreversible national catastrophes.
The over thousand years history of Hungary is full of such national catastrophes. Listing them all will take several volumes. Here, it is suffice to state that most of them were the results of bad policy decisions, which were based on arrogant ignorance or sheer idiocy. Yet, throughout the centuries, Hungarians have wallowed in their misery and have steadfastly blamed everybody but themselves, while happily indulging in their favorite political pastime of continuously falsifying history.
The latest monthly Treasury report on taxes and spending shows that gross tax receipts in February were $1.4 billion higher than the year before. Weren’t the Republican tax cuts supposed to explode the deficit?
According to the report, the government took in $238.2 billion in taxes in February. The year before, tax revenues were $236.8 billion.
For fiscal year 2018, which started last October, taxes are up $50.5 billion compared with the same months last year, and are at a record high level for this five-month span.
The report does show that net receipts were lower in February compared with last year, but the main reason is that individual income tax refunds jumped $13.3 billion, while corporate tax refunds went up $4 billion, neither of which is the result of the tax cuts that took effect in January.
Even so, net receipts are up by $29.6 billion for the current fiscal year — a 2.4% increase — compared with the same period last year. That’s also a record high. (See nearby chart.)
Does this mean tax cuts are “paying for themselves”?
Not exactly. Income taxes collected in February were down $2.5 billion from last year — reflecting the new withholding tables. Corporate income tax collections, however, were essentially flat.
But remember, income taxes are hardly the only source of revenue for the federal government. And a faster-growing economy means more money pouring in from these other sources.
Payroll taxes, for example, are dependent on the number of people working and their wages. In February, the economy added 313,000 jobs, unemployment levels are now at or near record lows, and wages are climbing.
As a result, payroll taxes brought in $1.5 billion more in February than they did last year, and are up $11.4 billion this fiscal year. Federal excise taxes and customs duties are up $3.8 billion and $1 billion, respectively, this fiscal year.
What these numbers do show is that all the hand-wringing about the impact of the tax cuts on federal deficits was based on wildly exaggerated estimates of revenue losses, which failed to take into account the fact that a faster growing economy would offset at least of the lost revenue. That’s a point we’ve made repeatedly in this space.
In contrast, tax hikes almost always bring in less revenue than expected, because they dampen economic growth.
Democrats once understood this truism. It was JFK, after all, who said in 1962 “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low — and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.”
Today’s Democrats, in contrast, uniformly opposed the Trump tax plan, and are now pushing to repeal most of it so they can spend an additional $1 trillion on government make-work infrastructure projects.
Their plan has no chance of being enacted, but at least voters will have a clear choice this November.
By Joseph A. Wulfsohn • The Federalist
In recent years, especially since Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Internet giants like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have started policing things they find offensive or deem “fake news.” However, they often reprimand individuals whose politics lean one way and leave unscathed others whose politics lean another way.
While this is common knowledge among conservatives, the most recent examples of such a double standard are truly glaring. Conservative commentator and comedian Steven Crowder uploaded a video onto his YouTube channel that showed his intern crashing an LGBT panel on gender fluidity at SXSW, where he went undercover as a man who identified as a computer. YouTube removed the video. And Twitter suspended Crowder’s account.
According to screenshots, this was Twitter’s reasoning behind what was initially a 12-hour suspension: “Violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.” Continue reading
