Libertarian: Joe’s COVID-Protest Double Standard
The White House’s “everyone has the right to peacefully protest” line on the demonstrations in China unrest has one problem, notes Reason’s Christian Britschgi: “Recent revelations show that closer to home, the administration actively encouraged a civil liberties-violating crackdown on Canadian protests against vaccine mandates.” Early this year, “the Biden administration urged the Canadian government to use whatever means it had to reopen border crossings barricaded by the so-called ‘Freedom convoy’ and get a handle on the protests.” Indeed, “the pressure campaign included a call between [President] Biden and [Canadian PM Justin] Trudeau,” who a few days later invoked the Emergencies Act to cut off the protesters’ funds and “ban even peaceful, non-disruptive public demonstrations.”
Campus watch: Biden’s Pro-Rich Debt Freeze
President Biden’s moves on student debt have “indeed proved transformative — by making a bad system worse,” quip Bloomberg’s editors. With his bid to unilaterally forgive loans stalled, he’s “resorted to a fallback: extending a freeze on all federal student-loan payments.” This “moratorium has already deprived the government of $155 billion;” the extension “will cost taxpayers tens of billions more,” though it “amounts to a subsidy for the affluent at the expense of Americans without a college degree.” Team Biden “could’ve avoided this mess by ignoring progressive advocates and instead working with Congress to fix the existing student-loan system” by (for example) limiting what “students can borrow for graduate school” and ensuring institutions are “held accountable for saddling graduates with . . . debt they’ll never repay.”
Space beat: Make Return to the Moon Worth It
NASA’s latest Space Launch System has faced valid criticism: “It is too expensive and too complex” and not a “sustainable rocket for sending people back to the moon,” laments Mark Whittington at The Hill. Still, the massive rocket has successfully “sent an uncrewed Orion space capsule around the moon” as part of the Artemis 1 mission. The three-part Artemis program “will send a crew of four around the moon” and before the decade is over, “people will be living and working on the moon.” But to maintain congressional support amid criticisms of the rocket system’s long-term sustainability, NASA should “explore cheaper, more commercial alternatives to getting astronauts to the moon and back.” And NASA needs to “convince the people who pay for its budget that returning to the moon is worth the cost.”
Foreign desk: Putting China on Trial
Some Hong Kong dissidents arrested on trumped-up national-security charges “have pleaded guilty” to secure lighter sentences, but not businessman Jimmy Lai, 73, who is “insisting on his innocence” though he “doesn’t have a prayer of winning,” marvels The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. “Jimmy is making what may be his last stand for truth” — and helping to “expose what has become of the rule of law, once Hong Kong’s most precious asset.” Other jailed dissidents, too, are “forcing their jailers to own the lie.” Lai “is showing that a man can live as a free person, even in a Chinese prison, as long as he refuses to lie. Hong Kong’s Communist-backed authorities have yet to realize that he’s no longer really on trial. They are.”
Tech watch: Apple vs. Free Speech
Twitter CEO Elon Musk “is asking questions about Apple’s censorship practices to his more than 119 million followers” after the company “suspended most of its advertising on Twitter” and “threatened to suspend Twitter from its app store” while citing no reason, writes Tristan Justice at The Federalist. Apple also just limited use of “AirDrop” only for Chinese users, blocking a way protesters there safely communicated; indeed, the company “routinely compromises privacy and security practices to appease communist leaders.” “By picking an apparent fight with fellow tech giant Twitter, whose new CEO has pledged to restore some kind of an open forum on the internet, Apple is showing its censorship regime to be even more brazen.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board