OPINION
How much verbal arm-twisting and jawboning can the government lawfully engage in with social media companies about removing ostensibly false and harmful content before it violates the companies’ First Amendment free-speech rights? And did a bevy of federal officials, departments, and agencies unlawfully coerce Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in 2021 and 2022 to remove conservative-leaning content critical of COVID-19 vaccines, lockdowns, mask mandates, and President Joe Biden?
Seymour Martin Lipset famously began one of his courses by proclaiming that, “a person who knows only one country knows no countries.” Lipset believed that only by looking across different societies can one understand what is either distinctive or unique about one’s own. His student, Francis Fukuyama, later noted that this sentiment was “particularly true for Americans, since the United States was such an outlier in comparison to virtually all other developed democracies.”
Last month, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) sparred with Loren AliKhan, a pending nominee for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, over her partisan application of the law. While serving as the solicitor general for Washington, D.C., she argued that religious services posed a greater risk for COVID-19 transmission than protests to defund the police.
Two law professors have an idea for how to circumvent the Supreme Court’s repeated rulings in support of the Second Amendment: use police officers to seize guns of “dangerous” people.
The Federal Reserve’s launch of FedNow, a system to centralize financial transactions, is a significant threat to individual liberty and a major leap toward a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. While the Fed denies FedNow will precede a CBDC, the public has no reason to believe them.
Last week, famed New York Times columnist David Brooks penned a widely discussed column that encouraged his culturally elite readership to consider an alternative Trump-era narrative, one in which they, not the “distrustful populists” and “less-educated classes," as he described them, are the bad guys.
Fitch Ratings' recent downgrade of United States debt one notch from AAA to AA+ is still much too sanguine. America’s debt today should be rated closer to junk than to top-notch.
Imagine if membership organizations could get the federal government to serve as their bill collector, subtracting membership costs from workers’ paychecks before they see them and sending the money directly to the organization. That special privilege actually exists for federal employees’ unions, but the Paycheck Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO), would end the practice.
When contemplating the greatest threats to American national security, an aggressive communist China or expansionist Russia properly come to mind. However, there’s another threat closer to home, one that affects millions of Americans and is already affecting our national security.
Fitch Ratings rattled timbers in the White House and elsewhere when the firm downgraded its U.S. government debt rating from AAA to AA+. While the two other rating firms, S&P and Moody’s, made no change, Fitch set the United States a notch below Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany, among others, and just above France and the United Kingdom. Some expressed surprise, even though Fitch advised in May that the rating was under review.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, many blue state politicians and special interest groups decided to go after crisis pregnancy centers.
I’m a second-generation Dunkin’ Donuts franchisee with more than four decades of experience with the brand. My family immigrated from Portugal to Boston in the 1970s and my father juggled several jobs to make ends meet, including one as a baker for Dunkin’ Donuts. My family invested in their first store in Derry, New Hampshire, in 1980. Since then, we have gone on to invest in 245 locations, employing roughly 5,000 team members.
Quality, affordable healthcare should never be considered a luxury item for working families or retirees. Unfortunately, rapidly rising costs coupled with politically driven, woke policies are effectively making basic healthcare less accessible (or outright unethical) for those who need it.
I recently saw two films back to back that both reveal how America has gone from a country of confidence, common sense, and humor to one of bitterness, academic theory, and resentment.
Cancel culture is out of control. Firing, doxxing, or just threatening a person because of what he or she has posted or “liked” on social media is the new political weapon, and there are few ways most average people can fight that kind of power.
This generation of men can’t stand by what they believe.
Rising interest rates and a shortage of lower-cost houses under the Biden administration continue to make homeownership unobtainable for many young families. Instead of working to solve actual problems like these, President Joe Biden is once again choosing to prioritize the expansive promotion of woke diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology in housing policies, as a recent proposed rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development shows.
While President Joe Biden enjoys his beautiful gas-guzzling 1967 Corvette Stingray, he wants to dictate what kind of car you get to own.
Xylazine—a tranquilizer approved as a sedative for veterinary medical use but not for any use in humans—is currently worsening the opioid crisis. Known on the street as “tranq,” xylazine has become a common additive to substances such as fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine, whether taken orally, by smoking or snorting it, or by injecting it.
The U.S. military’s failure to prepare adequately to protect the nation’s security is perhaps most evident in the military academies. Here, young cadets are supposed to be trained for a career of service to the country as officers. These once-venerable institutions, which claim to prioritize "duty," "honor," "country," and "excellence," have become vectors for leftist ideology. Today, they all too often emphasize diversity over honor, equity over excellence, and inclusion over duty.
Chevron deference, or the legal principle that the federal courts exercise deference to agency interpretations of laws and regulations, is a controversial practice that accumulates vast amounts of unconstitutional power in the federal bureaucracy. Indeed, it moves control of the government further and further away from the people.
For the second time in its history, the United States saw its AAA rating on long-term debt downgraded by a credit rating firm.
Right now, there’s bipartisan energy in the nation’s capital regarding the need to push back on the influence of the Chinese Communist Party.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has repeatedly warned the public that China poses by far the greatest espionage threat to the United States — perhaps the greatest such threat in our history given the vast scope of Beijing’s stealing American secrets of every kind, public and private.
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK) signed the "Women's Bill of Rights" on Tuesday. The executive order doesn't create special privileges for women; instead, it provides very clear, basic definitions of male and female and how they apply to state law.
Fair-minded civics curricula teach that America’s founding principles were exceptional for their time and have outlasted and extinguished slavery, racism, and other violations of our natural rights.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s decision to pick a fight with Florida’s history standards is quickly looking ill-advised. More and more, evidence is emerging that the object of Harris’s grievances is customary practice, including in the federal government she supposedly helps lead.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) signed a flurry of legislation on the evening of July 28, perhaps in the hopes that the late hour and date would stifle rigorous coverage of the new laws. One bill included in the mix was Illinois House Bill 3751, which will now allow noncitizens who are work-eligible under federal law to serve in law enforcement positions throughout the state.
Fitch Ratings, one of three major credit rating agencies, downgraded U.S. debt from AAA (the highest possible rating) to AA+ yesterday, explaining:
The Federal Trade Commission has fired the first salvo of what some expect to be numerous investigations into artificial intelligence providers. OpenAI, the company that has gained fame for its AI-powered chatbot, was, perhaps not surprisingly, the first target.
Two weeks ago, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Florida to condemn the state’s new social studies framework for “pushing propaganda on our children” that “people benefited from slavery.” The mainstream media has been buzzing about it ever since, and last week the Congressional Black Caucus asked the Departments of Education and Justice to pursue an aggressive legal strategy to attack Florida.
Conventionally, Democrats have an aversion to the idea of boiling everything that happens in K-12 education down to a simple metric that can be used to judge the efficacy of a school or its educators. Meanwhile, Republicans tend to resist the idea of any top-down, federal government-controlled metric used to determine nearly any outcome.
Former Hunter Biden business partner and longtime friend Devon Archer’s transcribed interview before the House Oversight Committee on Monday corroborated many of the recent allegations regarding the Biden family’s foreign pay-to-play business. Paramount among them was Archer’s admission that Hunter Biden was “selling the brand,” meaning access to the second most powerful man in the U.S. government on a moment’s notice. Archer reportedly confirmed that Hunter Biden put then-Vice President Joe Biden on speakerphone at least 20 times during meetings with his foreign business associates.
Speaking on CNBC on Monday, Jared Bernstein, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said that President Joe Biden’s policies help workers.
Courts moved fast to overturn Arizona’s prohibition on recording the police within eight feet. A federal judge suspended the law two months after it passed in July 2022, and then struck it down on July 21, 2023, after nobody came forward to defend it.
Earlier this week, U.S. delegates met with Taliban officials in Qatar for the first formal talks between the groups since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. U.S. officials have issued a bland statement about the meetings that fails to capture the Taliban’s long list of human rights violations, allowing the Taliban to posture as if they are on a path to obtaining recognition as a government.
The watchdog group Consumers’ Research just released a blistering report about the expansive influence of one nonprofit organization on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate rule and shareholder activism at large. But sustainable finance-focused nonprofit group Ceres is only one of a handful of interested parties unjustly taking the reins over the SEC climate rule — a regulation that will, in one way or another, affect every single business in the country.
After 99 years in business, trucking giant Yellow Corp. shut down its operations on Sunday, and its 30,000 employees will lose their jobs.
While the Biden administration’s Washington bureaucrats continue to push for heavy regulation of everything from power plants to ceiling fans, Americans on the other side of the Potomac River are poised to reap the benefits of an administrative accountability overhaul undertaken by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
A year ago, I wrote about the obvious connection between illegal immigration and homelessness in U.S. cities. Since then, encounters with inadmissible aliens at the border have remained at more than 150,000 a month, often over 200,000. Of these, perhaps half are being released into the country, either under the charade of a “removal process” under U.S. immigration law or one of President Joe Biden’s many made-up parole-a-palooza programs.
The Federal Trade Commission under Chairwoman Lina Khan is out of line and in need of new leadership. The FTC is being run by left-wing ideologues who challenge every corporate merger and want to use antitrust law to break up America’s most successful companies. The Biden administration should recognize that this government agency is treating companies as if they are presumed guilty of commerce crimes and have to prove their innocence.
Andrew Rambaut, evolutionary biologist and co-author of the highly influential essay “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which purportedly “debunked” the lab leak theory of COVID’s origin in March 2020, wrote the following to a fellow co-author a month before its release:
Imagine moving your family across the country for a new job just to be fired within weeks for something you didn’t do.
We’re at a critical juncture for trade policy.
The Left is throwing yet another temper tantrum. This time, their anger and hatred are being aimed at the Supreme Court.
The compulsion to do something in response to perceived public concerns is a syndrome endemic in the political class and, increasingly, the mass media. Lately, “Do Something Syndrome,” or DSS, has led to policies that ignore adverse consequences and grossly mischaracterize or oversell the benefits.
The Biden administration hasn’t been shy about spending money, and spending on higher education policy has been no exception. The most obvious channel for (attempted) spending was the illegal plan to cancel $10,000 to $20,000 in student debt for most borrowers that was halted by the Supreme Court. But there’s another plan in the works that’s slated to cost even more, and yet it has gone largely under the radar due to its impacts being less immediately apparent. That is, a revision to the student loan repayment system that would allow borrowers to pay back, in many cases, far less than what they’ve borrowed.
For a society to evolve and yet to be stable and tolerant, it must always be engaged in a negotiation between past and future, respecting the wisdom of the former while not snuffing out the hopes of the latter.
- Washington Examiner
