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From the right: TikTok Still a US Security Risk
“Almost everybody in the U.S. government agrees that TikTok represents a serious national security risk” . . . except President Trump, gripes National Review’s Jim Geraghty. The Trump-approved deal to sell the app lets Chinese company ByteDance keep just a 20% stake, but Matt Pottinger & Craig Singleton of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies warn the deal “hand-waves away the national security concerns that drove the ban in the first place,” since “ownership changes mean nothing if an app’s source code or decision-making process traces back to Beijing.” Ex-National Security Council staffer Liza Tobin points out the deal seems to “preserve Chinese control over the algorithm.” Geraghty fumes: “A deal that glosses over or only partially addresses the national security concerns is exactly what right-of-center policy analysts wanted to avoid.”
From the left: Defamation Suits & Free Speech
“The idea that it’s somehow anti-speech to use courts to address a falsehood is dead wrong,” argues Matt Taibbi at The Free Press. Tech writer Eoin Higgins’ book implies that “fellow reporter Glenn Greenwald and myself” are “puppets controlled by Big Tech overlords such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks.” “So I sued Higgins”; his public complaints “set off a wave of jeers from” online leftists claiming “my legal challenge clashes with my avowed commitment to freedom of speech.” No! When a false claim meets the threshold for defamation, “it’s vital to call it out and prevent rigorous speech and opinion from being overshadowed by malicious lies.” “In a free country, making a case to a judge,” not censorship, “is the right way to confront malicious speech.”
Economist: Shifting Costs Isn’t Affordability
Incoming Virginia Gov, Abigail Spanberger won “through a singular focus on the state’s high cost of living,” observes City Journal’s Judge Glock, but her plan “amounts to a series of expensive mandates that will drive costs higher.” Her proposals are all about “driving up expenses for one group of consumers in order to benefit another group deemed more deserving”; they don’t improve general “affordability.” Most of her plans “force average citizens to subsidize other groups”; others “use government funds to subsidize consumers in general.” Real drivers of higher costs include “a lax Federal Reserve in Washington, more intensive regulations, rising taxes, and mounting debt”; Spanberger’s plans suggest how “how progressives elsewhere” will pretend “to tackle affordability problems.”
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Foreign desk: Mexico Is No Friend to America
Mexico under President “Claudia Sheinbaum has sought good relations” with President Trump, yet her ruling Morena party “is issuing strident denunciations of Mr. Trump’s actions” in Venezuela, fumes Joshua Treviño in The Wall Street Journal. It’s no aberration: Morena “is a friend to the Western Hemisphere’s autocracies and a false friend of liberal democracies, including the US.” The Mexican regime is “an active friend to the narco autocracies that America now faces across the region.” With the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement “due for renewal this year,” Team Trump “needn’t accept the Mexican government’s hypocrisy any longer.” The Morena party has made “its choice”; “whether to continue granting Mexico the benefits of American trade and forbearance is our choice.”
Republican: Democrats in Free Fall
“The midterm elections are just 10 months away — and Democrats seem just as clueless as always,” snarks USA Today’s Ingrid Jacques. Opposing Trump on everything shows they’re “without a plan of their own.” “Hypocrites,” too, as not long ago “many top Democrats criticized Trump for not taking strong enough action against Maduro” yet since “Trump has taken decisive action, Democratic politicians seem to have forgotten how horrible they once thought Maduro was.” Their collapsing credibility is seen in “record-low approval ratings” that “keep falling.” Per a December Quinnipiac poll, just 42% of Dems “approve of their own party,” while GOP “voters give their members a much higher approval rating: 77%.” This “spells bad news for Democrats hoping to take back control of Congress.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board